by Tim Jeal
53
Early one April morning, six months after the fall of Sebastopol, Helen Crawford walked down through the dewy meadows golden with celandine towards the lake, and watched the high wispy cirrus clouds reflected in the smooth water. Among the reeds, coots and moorhens were nesting; a yellow butterfly fluttered past. Spring, she thought, yes spring; and how strange to be still in the midst of such purposive and abundant life when I feel that I am already over, my words habit, my thoughts, everything now mere habit. How strange to feel tired and at the same time scared of a life of absolute certainty unruffled by the hot chase of experience. And yet when I accepted James was that not what I wanted? Peace, and an easy passage through the years without pain or passion. Was that really what I felt in the beech woods before Tom came, before the war?
She had left the house to escape the frenzy of the wedding preparations; the frequent arrival of the carter’s waggon with boxes and packages, the comings and goings of the dressmakers fussing over the bridesmaids’ dresses. Had their white satin boots arrived? Would there be enough old point-lace for this dress? Were the ostrich feathers for the bride’s going-away hat not a little yellow? The size and magnificence of Catherine’s trousseau almost suggested that some new law had been enacted forbidding ladies to buy any clothes after they married. Helen had seen enough cambric and Valenciennes peignoirs to last several women a lifetime. Passing Catherine’s door earlier that morning she had glimpsed a floor strewn with bonnet-boxes, trunks and packing cases. On the table had been mother-of-pearl glove boxes, inlaid caskets, embroidered pin-cushions and a boudoir ink-stand in lapis-lazuli. On the sofa: a heap of silk, moire, muslin and cashmere receiving the attention of the French milliner summoned from London. Catherine had wanted to be married from Leaholme Hall, but, shortly before the outbreak of war, Sir James had let it on a four-year lease.
In the midst of this wedding finery, Helen had been choked to see Catherine in a simple morning gown which she had often worn during her first summer at Hanley Park. Later in the day the men from Gunter and from Fortnum would be arriving bringing with them the usual monuments of crystallised sugar decked with silver foliage and orange blossom. Helen’s own kitchen staff had already been driven half mad by the army of invaders; but in two days it would all be over, and Catherine, Miss Crawford no longer, would be departing for Dover and a continental honeymoon, her trunks all neatly labelled: Mrs George Braithwaite. Looking across the water at the green copper dome of the mausoleum, Helen thought of her own marriage to Harry Grandison when she had been a girl of not quite twenty.
Leaving the lake she made for the woods. Birch and sycamore were in leaf, some elms and chestnut too, but the beeches which Sir James had been so eager to sketch two springs ago, had not yet unfurled their pale green-yellow leaves. In the distance she heard the dull thump of an axe and imagined the white sappy chips of a young ash flying to the ground. A thrush was singing very close to her but it was still too early for the cuckoo’s mocking notes she had heard so clearly on the day Sir James had proposed. Walking among the delicate white wind flowers, she recalled James’s predictions of a distant war. The sameness of the woods and so great a human change. Tom and Magnus dead, her son a boy no longer, serving in the Caribbean. Catherine marrying.
Time and again during the first weeks after her husband’s return, Helen had heard him reproach himself for having failed to find the time to talk to Magnus on the voyage back from Genichesk. For days on end he had seemed to think of nothing else; often reliving the harrowing circumstances of their last brief meeting. Trying to comfort him, she had never reached him in his private world of grief. And then he had been gone once more. First to attend the exploratory sessions at Vienna and after that the Paris Peace Conference – his head filled with the Bessarabian frontier, the neutralisation of the Danube’s mouth and the limitation of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Even now he was away in London at the Admiralty, preoccupied with his new obsession, perusing plans for ironclads and turret-ships; his only passion: to see a new navy building before his retirement, so formidable that no nation on earth would dare during his lifetime menace any part of the Empire by sea. Then blind folly and forgetfulness alone would have the power to persuade the country’s rulers to involve her in another land war with a European nation.
And yet Helen knew that even if he had remained quietly by her side, she would still have felt no closeness. In time perhaps, as the memory of Tom’s death faded, and she forgot the misery she had suffered during Charles’s long convalescence at Hanley Park, she would feel differently. Now, his sea days over, Charles had gone to Pembroke Dockyard as captain superintendent; and with Catherine’s departure for her new home more links with the past would be severed.
In a very few months, Helen herself expected to be making the journey south to take up residence at Admiralty House, Portsmouth, where Sir James would be appointed port admiral at the next vacancy. By the time he retired, Hanley Park would be Humphrey’s, and Leaholme Hall, Sir James had hinted, would be made over to Charles. After Portsmouth Helen tried to imagine a house in Clarence Parade, Southsea, or in the Hampshire countryside within easy reach of her husband’s beloved Solent, on whose grey waters he would watch through his declining years the death of old navies and the birth of strange new ships beginning their voyages into the future – without us, she thought; for we, like the sailing ships of yesterday, are now becalmed and will never beat past the point we sought to reach or make the landfall we desired. Already the tide was ebbing fast. The youthfullness of the woods’ springtime haunted her. She could not bear it.
On the way back to the house she was surprised to think of Tom without pain – his youth embalmed by death, her vision of him unchanged and unchanging; time cheated at last. Age would find other faces on which to exercise his mocking artistry, her own among them; but Tom would always be as he had been that summer before her marriage.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Tim Jeal, 1976
Preface to the 2013 Edition © Tim Jeal, 2013
The right of Tim Jeal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30394–6
