Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  Never, it seemed to Charles, had he so much wished to prove anybody wrong. He smiled at Catherine and shook his head.

  ‘Suppose she intended to clean it and took it with her to the other room. She sees something else needs doing, does it and then forgets the candlestick and leaves it there.’

  ‘But she hid it from me as she passed,’ cried Catherine, unable to hide her incredulity that he should doubt her.

  ‘You’re sure she hid it?’

  ‘As sure as I am of my own name.’

  ‘Perhaps she thought you might draw a false conclusion from her forgetfulness – the very conclusion you have drawn.’

  ‘She would only have thought that if she had her own reasons for suspecting them.’

  ‘Another maid could have put it there without her knowledge,’ replied Charles, as outwardly unruffled as ever.

  ‘She was very reluctant to tell me where she found it; if any other maid had moved it, she would have found out and sent her to me. I know she would have asked the other servants.’

  Charles stretched out his legs and undid his waistcoat buttons. He was sweating unpleasantly.

  ‘I can’t see,’ he said, ‘why the girl should want to go to such trouble to shield her mistress. It seems far more likely that, seeing your distress, she would not wish to involve herself further by questioning other servants.’

  Catherine got up abruptly and stared down at him angrily.

  ‘You are deliberately refusing to acknowledge the obvious explanation. Why not go through every unlikely possibility? God moves mountains, why not a candlestick? Or perhaps I put it there.’

  Charles held out his hands in a gesture of submission. He felt numb and sick at heart.

  ‘Father’s in love with her and frankly he won’t believe any wrong of her on the basis of what you’ve told me.’ He caught his sister’s eye and went on earnestly: ‘Suppose I tell him my fears and he asks Helen to explain them. Will she confess and beg to be forgiven?’ He smiled grimly and shook his head. ‘Over the years I have written her a number of letters – some, to put it mildly, were less than discreet. She would not find it hard to cast doubt on my motives.’

  ‘But if the evidence were conclusive?’

  Charles looked at her searchingly.

  ‘You suggest a private inquiry agent?’

  Catherine blushed and looked down at her lap.

  ‘Is there no more delicate way?’

  ‘Somebody must watch them if you want to discover more.’

  ‘It would be too heartless to send father the man’s statement. We should tell him first, and if he doubts us, produce the statement as a last resort.’ Her ill-concealed excitement nauseated Charles and convinced him that George had been right. Did she have any idea of the suffering this would bring her father?

  ‘Matters are not quite so simple,’ he said condescendingly. ‘Her ladyship might claim the evidence was bought and perjured.’

  ‘How could she support such an accusation?’

  ‘My letters – your resentment of being driven out of your home. She might even tell father that you had cast eyes on Strickland.’

  ‘Father would never be deceived by such a lie.’ Her flaming cheeks and trembling voice fanned Charles’s anger.

  ‘Have no fear, Catherine, it will never come to that.’

  ‘We cannot do nothing, Charles.’

  Charles got up and collected his hat and cane.

  ‘When I know more, I shall acquaint Lady Goodchild with this knowledge. I think she will prove faithful afterwards; I daresay she will also treat you with consideration.’

  ‘You will let them marry?’ she asked in astonishment.

  Charles looked at her coldly and began doing up his waistcoat buttons.

  ‘I neither intend to break my father’s heart, nor to make him hate me as the instrument of his misery.’

  ‘He might thank you for saving him from an old man’s folly.’

  ‘I think he might consider that we had destroyed his chance to marry a young woman in order to protect our prospects; any children they have will need providing for. I am sure Lady Goodchild would use this argument to explain our behaviour. Added to the others, she could mount a creditable attack.’

  He walked to the door but she laid a hand on his arm.

  ‘But will you end their liaison? Love is not killed by threats.’

  ‘You may depend upon me to find a way, unless,’ he added, with a tight-lipped smile, ‘you would prefer to do so yourself.’

  ‘You will not hurt him?’

  ‘I will do what I must.’

  Catherine still stood blocking his way to the door; her face frightened, all vindictiveness gone.

  ‘Can you not tell me what you intend to do?’

  ‘How can I before knowing everything?’

  ‘Could Magnus talk to him?’

  Charles edged past her and opened the door.

  ‘My dear sister, Magnus hates our father more than the devil himself. He may even have put Strickland up to it.’

  She called after him in the hall but he did not turn, hurrying out into the sunlight and hailing the first hansom that he saw. He had not meant to attack Magnus, but her changing attitude to Strickland had snapped his patience. At the same time he had felt pangs of his old longing for Helen and disgust with himself for feeling them at such a time; before, he had not imagined her in Strickland’s arms; but when he had seen the tenderness in his sister’s eyes, as she had asked him not to hurt the artist, he had pictured Helen with the same look in her eyes, and had felt not hatred but desire. Charles banged on the roof and shouted up to the driver to take him to his club; he would not go to Madame Negretti’s after all; twenty pounds paid in advance, but now he would not go there for two hundred, no, not for two thousand pounds.

  30

  On a fine August morning Magnus finished his breakfast in the coffee shop opposite Tom’s studio and walked to the barber’s where he was shaved each day. But in spite of the sunshine, and the fact that a regular engagement with the Morning Chronicle had recently ended his financial problems, Magnus felt far from carefree as the barber began his preparations.

  Having been so entirely at ease with Tom during their first months together in Charlotte Street, Magnus had been profoundly shocked to notice a distinct change in his friend after his return from Hanley Park. Where there had once been understanding and openness between them, Magnus now experienced few moments unaffected by an inexplicable tension. In the past week Tom had never asked questions about Magnus’s work, as he had always used to do, nor had he said anything about his own painting. In fact he had spent most of his time away from the studio, and during what few hours he did pass there, he was moody and withdrawn.

  Recalling Tom’s former light-heartedness and the frequent visits of his friends, Magnus assumed that he had unwittingly offended him. But when he had asked whether this was so, Tom had angrily denied that anything had changed. Magnus would certainly have left if treated in this way by anybody else, but Tom was entirely different. His laughter made Magnus feel less downcast when he was depressed, his praise of an article made him think better of it, and his wide-ranging enthusiasms and interest in many kinds of people, whom Magnus would previously have dismissed out of hand, had literally changed the way he viewed the world. For the first time in his life, Magnus had felt entirely free of his father’s influence and power – until the eastern crisis.

  The final rejection of the Vienna plan by the Russians, and his father’s probable part in this disaster, horrified Magnus. Yet when he had tried to talk to Tom about the dangers of his father’s and Lord Stratford’s consistent advocacy of a threatening naval policy, he had changed the subject with a finality that had made it impossible for Magnus to reintroduce it. The little fighting which Magnus had witnessed in Ceylon had been quite enough to convince him of the unimaginable catastrophe a European war would be. It seemed inconceivable to Magnus that his country could go to war to protect the intere
sts of the Sultan of Turkey, the corruption of whose government would make the most hardened borough-monger in Britain blush to contemplate; and yet respectable tradesmen and evangelical, spinsters were already reading with evident approval pronouncements of Britain’s sacred duty to safeguard the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and seemed to see no inconsistency in supporting a Mohammedan nation against a Christian one in a struggle where British interests would be at best marginally concerned. The argument was even current that because Britain would lose rather than gain by a war with Russia, the defence of Turkey would be a heroically disinterested act.

  Yet Tom remained apparently indifferent while Magnus waged his losing battle to keep the Morning Chronicle in the anti-war camp and, remembering his friend’s incredulity that justice had been defeated at Rigton Bridge, Magnus was cut to the heart not to have his support in this new and infinitely more important struggle.

  On returning to the house after his shave, Magnus was not surprised to find that Tom had already gone out. He had come down to the studio and was about to sit down when he saw Lydia, Tom’s most regular mistress, step out from behind the screen by the model’s daïs.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked, coming up to him without the civility of any other greeting. Whenever Lydia was angry, Magnus was chilled by the ugly transformation of her usual pert Dresden china prettiness.

  ‘Out somewhere,’ he replied briskly, ignoring the way she sucked in her cheeks and looked at him with angry disbelief. From his earliest days in Charlotte Street, Magnus had sensed Lydia’s resentment of his influence over Tom, and knew that had she seen any way of getting rid of him she would not have hesitated to use it. At least it was some comfort to know that she too was just as bemused by Tom’s recent behaviour as he was.

  ‘He was to meet me at Brandon’s yesterday. I waited an hour. I daresay you know nothing about where he was then?’

  ‘Why not ask him?’ he replied gently.

  ‘If I’m fortunate enough to see him I will.’

  Lydia was wearing a tight frogged hussar-style jacket edged with fur which matched the trimmings of the insolent little bandeau round her tilted chignon. Normally the impudence of such an outfit perfectly suited her elfish expressions and sly smiles; but with pouting lips and a petulant frown her military jacket reduced her anger to a caricature of martial belligerence. She brought down the tip of her parasol with a bang on the floor.

  ‘Be so good as to tell him that I will not be treated in this way.’ She turned and walked to the door, but before reaching it, turned abruptly with a suddenly tragic face. ‘He makes me so unhappy. Surely he speaks about me sometimes. I’m sure he tells you what he really feels for me.’

  ‘He’s talked about nothing recently.’ Her wheedling tone irritated Magnus less than her assumption that Tom still confided in him. Months before, he had grown accustomed to Lydia’s mannerisms and vanity. Possibly had he been the principal singer at the Olympic, applauded to the echo each evening by a pit and gallery glistening with gold chains, eye-glasses and silk hats, he too might have formed the deluded view that his antics away from the theatre and the strange world of Opéra Bouffe would command the same rapturous attention. Less than a year ago, Lydia had been performing in the chorus of Sam Collins’s music hall in Islington for a far less affluent audience, and just before that in Caldwell’s Dancing Rooms in a Soho back-street. To earn more she had worked as a model at evening sessions in the studios of the Society of Artists, and it had been there that she had met Tom. Since then she had so captivated a fashionable barrister that he had set her up in a St John’s Wood villa with a carriage and a weekly allowance, visiting her on two afternoons a week and an occasional night when his wife was out of town. Lydia would never have jeopardised her career by becoming the paid mistress of a man who was not ‘happily married’. Although not quite twenty-two she was saving with exemplary thrift and hoped in a year or two to buy the villa from her barrister. As Magnus had reluctantly come to accept, there was more to Lydia than met the eye. After a longish silence she walked away from him through the clearly defined shafts of sunshine and sat down on the edge of the daïs.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so much against me,’ she said with a wistful little smile.

  ‘I’m not. How can I tell you what I don’t know?’

  ‘You’re a cold fish, Magnus,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Is it just me, or all women?’

  Magnus folded his paper and got up.

  ‘I don’t like women who conceal calculation with coyness, and think that no man will think them innocent unless they pretend to be trivial.’

  ‘Is that how you see me?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  She stared at him angrily.

  ‘Unless he tells me what’s wrong, I’ll find out for myself. Then you’ll see how coy I am. Tell him that.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  She flounced to the door and turned.

  ‘Nobody’s going to walk out on me without a word. You wouldn’t take it either if you’d ever been mashed on a girl; but the Thames’ll run dry I daresay before you get spooney over anyone.’

  When she had gone, Magnus picked up his newspaper, but then threw it down again. Lydia had an uncanny knack of exposing his weaknesses. Her petulant irritation with Tom for his remoteness from her had touched Magnus on a raw nerve. Was his own nagging disappointment and sense of betrayal any less selfishly possessive? His memory of Lydia’s disgruntled and self-pitying questions made him squirm. Could Tom view his questions in the same light? If he did, the time had come to leave. But go where, when there was nobody else for whom he cared a jot? To no other person had he ever been able to be truthful about the loneliness and fears of involvement which had dogged him since his mother’s death; with nobody, besides Tom, feel a simple ease and contentment in doing the most mundane things – sitting reading or working in different parts of the same room, walking together, talking trivia. Never had he shared his thoughts more fully.

  Remembering Lydia’s suspicious and unhappy face, Magnus saw in a moment of absolute clarity that, if Tom had fallen seriously in love with somebody, there would be no room left for anybody else. The sudden force of his feeling of loss and jealousy shocked and disgusted him; not because he had ever thought the world’s prurient divisions between love and friendship in any way applicable to him, but because the full measure of his dependence had at last struck home, a terror that he could no longer face the future on his own. Was this the thing that he had come to? Clutching at other explanations, he blamed his feelings on the uncertainty caused by Tom’s secrecy, telling himself that he was not jealous at all; only angry at being excluded and deceived. Recalling vividly that the first impulse of his brother officers in Ceylon on falling in love had been to describe the experience in tasteless detail and at tedious length, Magnus found it still harder to understand why Tom could not tell him something, however veiled. The only possible reason he could think of for his friend’s silence, was that he had fallen in love with Catherine while at Hanley Park. It was certainly strange that she should be in London just when Tom was so often absent from the studio.

  Magnus thought of asking his sister, but decided on the more straightforward course of a direct question to Tom; regardless of what he might answer, Magnus allowed himself to hope that his truthfulness would help banish the humiliating resentment and pain caused by his ostracism. If it did not do so, he had no idea what he could do.

  *

  Having gone out to avoid Magnus, Tom was disappointed to find him still in on his return. It had been all very well for Helen to make him swear not to tell him anything – she did not have to live with him; and after their earlier honesty, Tom found lying no easy matter. On many occasions he had felt desperate enough to break his promise of secrecy. From his point of view it might be no bad thing if Magnus did warn his father. Helen had made it quite clear that their affair would end with her marriage; so why not let Sir James find out? Because she might reject him at once
for betraying her? Because Magnus would most likely be furiously angry and yet do nothing? Tom hated himself for causing Magnus unhappiness, but could not help his behaviour.

  He had expected Helen’s visit to London to be a time of constant happiness, but had been cruelly disillusioned. Since she would not allow him to come to her house in Belgravia, because of the servants, and he could not take her to his studio because of Magnus, they had been forced to meet at a small hotel in Marylebone. Tom hated the furtiveness of going there; he hated the room they used, with its red curtains, heavy gasolier and large cheval-glass, its stained carpet and flowered wallpaper; and he hated Helen’s insistence on paying for it. She treated the plans and subterfuges as an exciting game, but he had never stopped resenting them.

  She would have her coachman take her to a shop, an exhibition hall or gallery, and leave her there; then later, she would engage a hansom to take her on to the hotel. She had discouraged Tom from writing to her, and decided at each meeting when the next should be. All her caution brought home to Tom her determination never to sacrifice either wealth or position for love; by co-operating with her he felt himself the engineer of his own ultimate destruction. But he had rarely argued or shown his resentment, even when Helen had written a note changing the time of an assignation too late for him to cancel a previously arranged appointment with Lydia. He knew that Lydia suspected him, and was afraid of what she might do if slighted. His position with Lydia was further weakened by his having borrowed money from her; most of this debt was still outstanding.

  Again and again Tom had tried to persuade Helen to spend an entire day and night with him, but she had refused because of difficulties with servants. At any house where she might be expected to accept an invitation, she would naturally have to take her lady’s maid. Could she not trust the girl with a secret? Tom had asked. No, even the most trustworthy girl had a best friend whom she would tell, and this best friend would have another best friend and so it would go on. While he for most of their meetings was haunted by the rapidly approaching moment of parting, she seemed able to live entirely in the present. Once he had lost his temper and called her heartless and more concerned with her reputation than with him; he had threatened to break their next appointment, but next day had suffered such an agony of fear that she herself would fail to come, that he had broken her commandment against letters and had sent a note of apology with the local butcher’s boy. During all this time Tom was unable to work at anything except a grotesque parody of Shakespearean narrative painting: Bottom in the role of Pyramus, kissing a blatantly masculine Flute attempting the role of Thisbe. Tom knew he would never sell it, but continued merely to avoid having to talk to Magnus.