by Tim Jeal
Only later, when in answer to a request from Tom, Catherine had sat down at the piano and played and sang, did Helen recognise her true feelings. There was Catherine in her cream-coloured silk dress, her silvery hair dressed in ringlets and her face gleaming in the candle-light with the smooth peach-like bloom only given to women in their twenties, playing and singing so delightfully with her clear small voice, while she, Helen, sat watching her and remembering a time when she too had looked like a figure from an untouched world of innocence and hope. For a while Helen could not believe that she might be jealous and yet the young man’s attentiveness to Catherine disquieted her. She had pretended to herself to be above joining in while Tom and Catherine had talked about ‘the condition of the people’, but in reality she suspected that they had not cared whether she participated or not. And now, while Catherine sang, she felt excluded once more. Strickland had asked for her opinion from time to time and had addressed remarks to her, but from politeness, she had felt, rather than inclination.
The fondness both of them evidently felt for Magnus formed a bond between them, which she could not share. Yet exclusion for that reason did not hurt her. Jealousy of their youth? Not even that precisely. The idea that here were two people who possessed a freedom which she had felt obliged to throw away was what hurt her most. Catherine might still marry a man her own age and love him – truly love him, not just feel lukewarm affection. And Strickland, for all the financial hazards of his work, could leave the house when he had finished and be free to go where he chose, behave as he wished and need care nothing for what others thought of the company he kept or the things he did. And yet Catherine envied her the petty mastery of running the house, and Strickland deferred because of her patronage and position. As soon as Catherine ended her song, Helen rose and told them she was tired. Then she rang for the groom of the chambers to show Strickland to his room.
On reaching the bedroom, Helen sent away the maid waiting patiently to undress her, and sat down by the open window. The lamp was smoking a little but instead of ringing to get it fixed, she took off the chimney and globe herself and turned down the wick. She could hear a faint rustling of branches and the whirr of insects. A large moth, its eyes glowing red in the lamp-light, bumped against the window and fluttered past her into the room. In the distance the lake shone like a long silver mirror, and the moon cast a soft unbroken light over the fields beyond.
She shut her eyes and tried to recapture the certainty she had felt two months before. A week after James’s departure she would not have been troubled by so small a matter as exclusion by an insignificant artist and an inexperienced girl. She thought of James and the responsibilities he had shouldered and wondered what he was doing at that moment. Ten days before, the Russians, as he had said they would, had crossed the River Pruth. Now he was in Vienna with Lord Stratford attending a conference of the ambassadors of the Great Powers. Should any woman engaged to be married to such a man feel distressed by trivial incidents? She stared out angrily into the night and then put her head in her hands. In truth it was not eminence, and the vicarious pleasure of hearing of great events from those participating in them, that she wanted. Sir James had spoken of wanting openness and understanding between them; and yet when she thought of their conversations, all she most vividly recalled was his remoteness and his assumption that politics and international affairs would be beyond her; that smile of weary slightly contemptuous wisdom when she had questioned about what he had said. With her he would prefer to sketch and chat about matters of no importance, or be read to, or reminisce about the distant past, separating her from his real life and present cares, and so cutting her off from the most essential part of him. He had written from Constantinople before leaving for Vienna, and although a Russian army was already marching towards Turkey’s northern frontier, most of his letter had been taken up with a humorous description of an audience with the Sultan, and that great man’s distress to discover that Sir James Crawford did not smoke – not even finest Latakia tobacco in a gold and amber pipe provided by his Sublime Majesty, and lit with glowing charcoal by a kneeling slave.
And when he came home, he would want to forget the stresses and disappointments of his work, so not even then would she be able to share his thoughts. She remembered Harry speaking of a friend who had surprised him by marrying late in life. ‘Nobody knows why he’s bothered; he’s been married already for years – to his habits.’ And would matters be so different for her? She had thought often enough what she might gain from marrying him, but had rarely considered what he really wanted from her. No more than a soothing and ornamental presence to grace his occasional leisure hours? If he were with her, ten minutes of conversation might allay her fears, but there was no means of knowing when he might return. Nor could she go to him so soon after Harry’s death, without exposing him to embarrassment and gossip. She thought of writing to him about her doubts, but to express them, however phrased, would imply a wounding lack of faith.
She sat a few minutes more by the window, gazing up at the multitude of stars, their radiance softened by the brightness of the moon; in the air the savour of moist earth and falling dew. She was tempted to walk in the garden, but a sudden shiver dissuaded her. Instead she rang for her maid to undress her and get her ready for bed.
25
After Lady Goodchild’s brooding silences of the evening before, Tom Strickland viewed her first sitting with apprehension. Ever since her capricious volte-face over commissioning him on his first visit to Hanley Park, he had been confused by her many contradictions. In view of her bereavement he had never expected any appreciation of his ride to tell her about Goodchild’s fate and yet, even before the funeral, she had sent a servant to search him out and to deliver a letter of warm thanks. It seemed incomprehensible to him that a woman capable of thinking of such a thing when so deeply involved in other far more pressing matters, should now be ready to marry a man who, by Magnus’s account, was obsessed with the austere demands of duty to the exclusion of all human needs.
Helen was to sit for him in the ante-room leading from the hall into the Tapestry Room and Red Drawing Room – the two principal reception rooms on the west side of the house. Tom had chosen this less grandiose room because it was ideally lit, having windows facing both north and west. He had decided to paint two or three oil sketches before starting on the final portrait. For these preliminary works he would not bother with a canvas on an easel, but intended to paint sitting on an artist’s ‘donkey’, using a sized but unprimed millboard with a prepared palette fastened onto the corner with a clip. Before coming down to the room he had ground and mixed his colours and set them out on the palette from white, through reds, browns, blues and greens to black. While waiting for Helen he looked round the room identifying pictures and furniture. The Grecian mantelpiece of dark green and white marble he was confident was by Westmacott. Tom had once had to tint and colour a manufacturer’s catalogue of mantelpiece designs. The medallions in the decorative plaster ceiling he supposed were Angelica Kauffmann or her husband Antonio Zucchi. Two portraits by Raeburn and one by Romney posed no difficulty, but the Phillippe Mercier group of the 4th Baron’s children, he would not have known without the information on the frame. He was glad not to be working in the Red Drawing Room where the Magdalene by Titian and Rembrandt’s Head of a Jew would have inhibited him. He had been amazed that Helen had not pointed out these masterpieces and had made no comment upon them until he had examined them. The Rembrandt he had been horrified to see ‘skied’ over a door. He was looking at one of a pair of ivory chairs, when Helen came in.
‘They were made for Clive or Warren Hastings. But then you can be sure the owners of any kind of Indian work will tell you that story. One might suppose they were furniture dealers.’
Tom did not reply, but gazed at her with a beating heart. The lights shining in her hair, smoothed flat from a central parting and gleaming almost like perfectly matching bands of burnished copper – could he do justi
ce to that? Or the glowing whiteness of her shoulders? Or the complicated richness of the different shades of blue in her shot silk evening dress? At least he would not have to attempt the incredible detail in the lace trimmings of her skirt. Sir James had asked for a Kit Cat, or head and shoulders, and not a full-length. Here was a subject which Gainsborough or Lawrence might have attempted with confidence, but for him, Thomas James Strickland, the task would be of a different order. He was astonished that he had not envisaged, till the moment she had appeared, the full implications of the work ahead. He had thought, until he saw her now in these clothes, that he would be content to follow the pattern of Winterhalter or Sant and paint her with an expression of conventional aristocratic pride and invulnerability; but the contrast between the grandeur of her appearance and the dissatisfied uncertain look in her eyes, made him determined to try to do more than this; to paint a portrait that would be a revelation rather than a façade. That he might lack the interpretative insight for such a portrayal, scared him even more than his technique being found inadequate to achieve a convincing representation of the subtleties of her hair and the changing sheen of her silk dress. If he had learnt little about composition, except Reynolds’s rigidly precise dicta on the balance of light and dark, he had at least left the Academy Schools with an excellent technical capacity for painting detail, hard and tedious though he might find its execution.
Helen had sat down in the needlework chair placed in position by Tom and shook out the looped flounces of her skirt.
‘It is very hard of you to insist on evening dress at this hour, Mr Strickland. Surely you could have managed it in the way of artists who paint military men – painting the man on one day, and placing the horse under him on another, sparing the rider’s time and the horse’s back.’
‘I could have draped the clothes on a lay figure, your ladyship, but since you wished to be painted in a décolleté dress, I had to see your neck and shoulders.’
‘Are women’s shoulders so very different?’ she asked innocently.
‘As different as their eyes and noses,’ he murmured, blushing slightly under her amused gaze.
‘Shall I look at you, Mr Strickland, or somewhere else?’
Having decided against a full-face, Tom asked her to look slightly to his right out of the lower part of the window behind him. He wanted an inward looking, almost self-absorbed, expression and thought this would be best achieved by giving her nothing precise to focus upon. Then having satisfied himself that her hands and arms were right, he began drawing a rapid outline with charcoal, and occasionally dusting his board with a few light flicks of a cloth. Later he would start to work with his prepared palette, rubbing in the darks with umbers and browns, and then painting on the general lights in masses, accentuating certain features with pure white before softening the effect with blanched reds and lakes. His usual practice in these preliminary sketches was to let the ground of the unprimed board show through to serve as half-tints. He had been working for ten minutes when she turned to him.
‘I suppose I may not talk?’
‘If you wish, of course….’
‘I understand; it would spoil the pose. Perhaps you could talk to me? Staring for hours through this window will make me look like a mournful tragedienne, unless there is some diversion.’
‘Your thoughts?’ he countered.
‘I think I should prefer yours unless it will hinder you. You have never told me how you became an artist.’
At first Tom was irritated to have to divide his attention, but as time passed he realised that her reactions to what he said, told him far more about her face than he would have learned had it been constantly in repose. During the next half-hour before she rested, he explained to her at intervals how his father, in spite of his humble position in a Fire Insurance Office, had paid to send him to a gruesome private school in Wands worth: an academy not unlike the one to which Dickens had sent the hapless Paul Dombey. Tom knew what scorn Helen would have for such an institution, where the sons of gentlemen were many times outnumbered by those of prosperous tradesmen. But strangely although at first he felt embarrassed in that elegantly respledant room to mention such an ungentlemanly education and pedigree, he came to feel a certain exultation in doing so openly and without apology. He described the meat pie served every Friday and christened, after a tooth had been found in it, Resurrection or Dead Man’s pie; he told her about the floggings meted out for failure to conjugate Greek verbs, and about the sadism of the dancing master, whose trousers had been so starched and stiff that as he walked his legs looked like a pair of shears. He went on to tell her how he had run away, intending to walk to Portsmouth and go to sea. Besides his jacket, waistcoat, trousers and shoes, he had possessed as working capital a half-crown, a watch and a pocket-knife. These good things had provided him with food and shelter for two days, and after that, hunger had driven him to beg at lodge gates and cottage doors. When his shoes had worn through he had stuffed them with grass; but three nights spent sleeping under hedges in cold wet weather had finally made him turn back. Returning to school a week later, barely able to walk, he had expected a flogging, but to his surprise had been given a slice of seed cake and a glass of wine, while his father was summoned. His flight being considered unforgivable, he had been expelled more in sorrow than in anger, and since his drawings were thought to show some talent, he had been placed by his father in a lithographic office, and a year later was apprenticed to an engraver. His employer there was sufficiently impressed by his architectural drawings to run a series of them, and one day these had been seen by an elderly Academician, who had come to check on the progress of an engraving of one of his own pictures. In this way Tom had been recommended to apply to the Royal Academy Schools, where eventually he had been taken on as a probationer and then as a full student.
While he had been speaking Tom had seen precisely the expression he wished to catch: her lips just parted in a smile almost on the point of dissolution, her deep brown eyes already resuming an introspective sadness, an expression quite unlike the unguarded lapse of a feigned society smile. When Helen had listened to the details of his story she had smiled in sympathy with his experience, rather than in superior amusement at his background. A look compassionate rather than remote.
During her first rest Helen came up to Tom, a slight frown wrinkling her forehead. He expected her to ask to see what he had done. But instead she said:
‘You have made a great impression on Miss Crawford.’
Tom looked up abruptly and put down the brush he had been cleaning. He could feel his cheeks colouring.
‘How so, your ladyship?’ he asked quietly.
‘You are not an unattractive man, Mr Strickland; and, as you may be aware, Miss Crawford has recently led a retiring life.’
The easy and relaxed feeling of unity, which Tom had started to experience with Helen while he had been painting, vanished. Perhaps even when he had seen the smile he had thought so beautiful, she had been thinking of making this implied criticism. He felt a sudden spurt of anger.
‘If you consider that my behaviour towards Miss Crawford was anything other….’
‘On the contrary; I meant no criticism – only a woman’s intuition that Miss Crawford may make of your natural friendliness more than you intend to convey.’
‘I am not aware that anything I said last evening could be open to any such misinterpretation. I have not so much forgotten the engraver’s shop to suppose a baronet’s daughter would welcome anything other than formal conversation from me.’
Helen walked to the open window and looked out. Without turning she said:
‘Nothing I said deserved this bitterness.
‘Your ladyship must nevertheless understand it. Magnus is not ashamed to live in the same house with me, and yet because his sister speaks warmly to me I must be reminded that my inferior breeding makes such friendliness dangerous. In this house, madam, where even the meanest plate and bowl remind me of my position, I ne
ed no further telling.’
‘I am not responsible for the world’s injustices, Mr Strickland,’ Helen replied sharply. ‘I merely wished to save you from the sort of humiliation which you evidently feel I have already subjected you to. You must have realised the girl finds you attractive. While she is in my house I am responsible for her.’
‘You may be assured that I will treat her with as much coolness as I can make consistent with courtesy.’ He picked up another brush and went on with his cleaning. She came and sat down close to him in one of the ivory chairs.
‘Tell me, why are you so angry?’ she asked gently.
‘I hope your ladyship will forget any rudeness I may have been guilty of.’
‘An honest answer will absolve you.’
He looked at her and their eyes met; Tom felt a slight tightening in his chest, but his face remained impassive.
