Until the Colours Fade (51 page)

‘That did not excuse … I had a right to see you knowing it was for the last time.’

She met his gaze easily, as if unaware of the burning reproach in his eyes. A trace of mockery in her voice as she said:

‘And you have claimed that right … today. I trust you are
satisfied
.’

‘If there is satisfaction in learning how easily you forgot….’

‘Forgot?’ she said sharply. ‘How could I forget? You mean, did I suffer continually? You wanted to hear that I am still sad and discontented. You brought me here to gratify your vanity, to hear me say that losing you I lost hope and happiness, shutting the door on life; the angel chained to a satyr pining for youth and beauty.’ She stared at him defiantly challenging him to deny the
truth of her accusation, glorying in his silence. ‘The opposite is true. You are quite ignorant of the natural dignity of men used to the obedience of others, but I, who have lived among such men and am proud to be married to one, count myself privileged. I enjoy my husband’s strength and his position and will not stoop to the hypocrisy of denying it.’

He saw a frightening light of triumph in her eyes and felt his powers of resistance ebbing like blood, felt that another
onslaught
would annihilate him utterly; yet something stubborn in him could not give way.

‘And would that natural dignity,’ he asked, ‘survive the knowledge that your ladyship had given herself to a man as mean and insignificant as myself?’

‘By threatening me, Mr Strickland, you stigmatise yourself as I never did. Should not a proud little upstart’s adoration please a worthless sensual woman’s vanity and pass an idle hour?
Sentimental
shop-girls
give
themselves. Perhaps you gave yourself, but I did not. So do not threaten to punish me for your innocent self-deception.’

‘You risked everything,’ he cried, moving towards her.

‘I enjoyed the excitement, as men like to risk their fortunes at “hazard.” He stood motionless, staring with wide eyes as if hoping by the concentration of his gaze to burn out the image before him. ‘You see how much better it would have been never to have seen each other again?’ He heard the sudden change of tone, the softness of her voice; a softness that was almost tender, and stifled a swelling groan. He had survived her hostility, but this final hint of kindness, recalling everything her harshness had blotted out, everything he had wished for and dared to imagine possible again, broke him, and he turned away clutching his face, feeling hot tears wetting his palms. He did not see the light die from her face and her lips tremble as she moved towards the door.

Among the jasmines and geraniums in the hall she paused breathing deeply, agonised at what she had done, yet still sure that her only safety had lain in killing his love, in making herself despicable to him. A few steps from the door and the hussars would see her and after that no going back; but still she
hesitated
, consumed with grief and shame; she had feared the
encounter,
but how horrifyingly easy it had been; and worst of all, even while tortured by doing such forced injustice to her motives, she had felt a wild exultation in her capacity for so absolute a denial of her true feelings, even believing that she was hurting
him not for her future security but only for his peace of mind, only to help him forget her as unworthy of his regard; and his
resistance
had sharpened her resolution and pride in her control until she had gone far further than she had ever intended,
oblivious
to his pain until his final surrender. On a peg by the door hung some coats, a wide-awake hat and a leather pistol holster. A cold splinter of fear pierced her heart; that he might kill himself had not occurred to her before; yet he had come from England to engineer this meeting, had probably spent more money than he possessed in doing so, had dreamed of what they would say – and she had treated him thus. It was horrible. Yet to go back, to risk undoing what had been so painful to achieve…. From the dark hall she could see the coachman and the groom smoking on the grass under the trees across the road. An araba pulled by two oxen lumbered past; a woman carrying a child; the sun was
shining.
She longed to be gone, and yet – and yet had not the power to go. A moment later she sensed him behind her and heard his dry faltering whisper:

‘Did you ever love me?’

She nodded dumbly, her eyes misting, filling slowly, but never leaving his pale tear-stained face. Burning with shame, she saw the transformation of his eyes and the flame of joy set there by that slight pitiful inclination of her head.

‘Yes, yes, I did, truly I did,’ she repeated fervently; and
yielding
to the melting of her heart, held out her hands, but he did not move to take them. For a moment of pain she was close to explaining that she had kept silent at Barford only for his sake, that she had begged Charles on her knees to allow a last hour with her lover, but then she saw his slow gentle smile and knew that she had no need.

This confirmation had been all he sought. He looked at her in perfect stillness for perhaps a minute before walking back into the room. Choked by scalding tears she moved after him,
agonised
that she had dared speak of dignity, but then she stopped and bowed her head. Everything had been said; she was already
forgiven
. His going had also been a request to her. Longing to remain, she wiped her eyes, and, with an outward composure, maintained she knew not how, walked out into the sunlit road. The coachman got up from the grass and stretched, then ambled across to the brougham.

‘Get on,’ she shouted, to the man’s amazement, and again, as the groom scrambled to secure the steps, ‘Get on.’

A perfect winter morning with scarcely a breath of wind, and across the Bosphorus, on the further shore, the hospitals at
Scutari,
transformed by the sun to shining oblongs of blanched ivory; high in the crystal sky: a frieze of wispy clouds like
decorations
on a Chinese screen. Sitting with Milroy and Padmore in the stern of the commissioners’ launch, Tom was keenly aware of the visual beauty around him, but it evoked nothing in him – unreal because outside and independent of his misery.

In two days he would be sailing for the Crimea and, in what time remained, had decided to visit Scutari – something he had been previously unwilling to do: afraid of what he would see, and ashamed to be thought a callous experience seeker, prepared to stare at those for whom he could do nothing. Now in his confused and untypically introspective state, he hoped to find in the greater suffering of others, a personal cure: an end to his sense of helpless captivity within a timeless moment. He repeated to
himself
that the fixed point of despair, which fate had led him to, had been no ending, but an accident of time, a single milestone on a longer road. If, in the constant back-flow of change, even great disasters could not claim the name of tragedy as a lasting
appellation
– then how much less could an individual instance of disappointed love? Whatever the intensity with which desire sought to embalm experience, time would soon enough deny those wishful efforts. Yet in his heart, Tom recognised the
deception
in such thoughts of universal transience.

He had lost what he most wanted; that fact remained –
now
, today, tomorrow, and, as he feared, always; and if peace of mind could come only with the certainty that there was nothing else ahead except time’s slow erosion, then he would rather suffer than accept that nothingness.

*

Tom had heard so much from Sutherland and Milroy about
conditions
at Scutari, that the reality did not distress him as acutely as he had supposed it would. Pus-filled bowls, saturated and
verminous
floor-boards, too rotten in places to be scrubbed, and condensation-streaming walls, shocked and sickened him, as did the thick sweet smell of putrefaction, but far greater was the
shock of seeing the scores of men with dysentery, apathetic and indifferent, dying, apparently without a struggle and, according to Padmore, without pain: doomed by the absence of proper food. But in wards filled entirely with wounded there was more active suffering, but also much more hope, even in cases where recovery seemed impossible. When Padmore, who had acted as Tom’s guide, prepared to leave him in a ward, Tom made as if to follow, but was prevented.

‘Stay and talk to them. They like to see a sympathetic face.’

‘But what could I say?’ he asked, feeling not only deep
sympathy
and respect for the sufferers, but also a dread of offending them by saying too much or too little.

‘Ask them how they got their wounds, where they’re from. Ask things and listen. It won’t bother them who you are or why you’re here.’

Unconvinced by this, Tom watched Padmore go with
mounting
dread. On the mattress nearest him a man was breathing raspingly through cracked parched lips, one arm thrown back in a way that showed agonising pain; his leaden eyes staring
upwards
into space. The room was some fifty yards long, and near the far end a man was sitting up, propped against the wall,
reading
a description of the Alma from an old ‘weekly’. His voice was strong and clear and those around him were listening attentively. When he had finished, the paper was handed round and a
conversation
started, which made Tom wince with embarrassment.

‘Them as writes the words ha’e bin ter war right enough. More than cans’t say for the painters.’

The speaker, a powerful red-faced man with massive
shoulders,
and the remains of his right thigh resting on a stained stump-pillow, tossed the paper to his neighbour, who looked at it for a moment, his sallow face wrinkling with mirth.

‘They think our horses bin fit for nowt but brewers’ drays …’

‘Drays?’ cut in a third. ‘Ours weren’t fit ter pull a barrow.’

‘See here,’ went on the soldier with the paper, stabbing at it with his thumb: ‘There’s not a smite o’ smoke; a battle wi’out smoke… Lot o’ tom-foolery, isn’t it?’

‘What can y’expect?’ asked the man with the amputated leg. ‘Damned painters niver come nigher the Rooshans than Brighton beach.’

Surreptitiously Tom got out his small sketch pad and with a soft pencil hastily drew a caricature artist, such as
Punch
delighted in: a foppish young man with a comic opera pointed beard, floppy broad-brimmed hat, and palette in hand standing
languidly on a beach beside his easel, peering out to sea through a telescope – on his canvas: a half-finished cart-horse pulling a gun. It was a rapid but fluent piece of drawing: the work of three or four minutes. Tom looked at it thoughtfully and added a
passing
steam-tug belching smoke and a small boy gazing critically at the artist’s work. Underneath Tom wrote:

Insolent
Boy:
‘Where’s the smoke, mister?’

Offended
Artist:
‘Smoke? There’s none I can see.’

In case some of the men could not read, Tom walked over to the soldier who had been reading the paper aloud, and handed him the cartoon, waiting in acute suspense while he examined the drawing. Then the man laughed loudly and reading out the words for the others handed it round. A young soldier with a cropped and bandaged head beckoned Tom over to him, after he had examined the sketch with dark shrewd eyes.

‘Can ye make my picture?’ he asked.

‘Your portrait?’

The man nodded.

During the next two hours Tom made some twenty quick sketches of men, and time and again was brought close to tears by the gratitude shown for such rough and ready work. He asked the sort of questions that Padmore had suggested, and with most who were well enough to talk, found that he had no need to say much himself. Once, three corpses sewn-up in blankets were carried past from the dead house on their way to burial, but this
evidently
commonplace occurrence hardly caused a break in the conversation. When supper was ladled out from a vast copper, Tom saw that the meat was doled out solely by weight, so that some men got helpings almost entirely of bone and gristle. Those who did better, sometimes gave bits to others less fortunate. Men with scorbutic gums, unable to chew or swallow, sucked their meat to extract the juice, and what they spat out was eaten
eagerly
by those with healthy mouths. If he were fighting for survival, Tom did not suppose he would be any more fastidious. The thought that most of these maimed men, so resolutely clinging to life, would return home to a life of appalling poverty with little or no hope of improvement, made him burn with anger. Before leaving, he made some sketches of the general scene in the ward, and resolved to do more work of this sort for
publication,
and also more portraits for men to send home to their families.

When Tom returned to Myserri’s that evening, his personal unhappiness, which constant work and involvement had kept at bay during the day, returned with undiminished force. The
sights he had seen, far from consoling him, or reducing by
comparison
the significance of his own distress, had merely deepened his depression, making him wonder how he could ever have been naïve enough to suppose that evidence of suffering on such a wide scale could reduce the impact of individual pain. It was true, Padmore had said on their way back, that orderlies could cope best when dealing cursorily with hundreds; but, when charged with responsibility for a few desperately sick men for days at a time, the personal involvement in these individual cases moved them far more deeply and broke their spirits more quickly than work which had daily seen them walking past miles of accumulated pain and misery. In that way, Tom had passed an afternoon with a mere handful, in twenty yards of a single ward, and had been affected, like the orderlies, by the fate of men with names and faces.

*

Although life in the officers’ wards at Scutari was far removed from the stinking hell in which the men were obliged to live, George Braithwaite had found much to complain of: especially when the pain in his arm had ceased to absorb the greater part of his attention. He had formed a mess with ten other officers, but much of the food, which they had paid their orderlies lavish sums to bring over from Stamboul, was pilfered en route, and what they finally ate was often half-cooked or burnt. So far all his efforts to obtain a mosquito net to keep the flies off his face had proved unavailing, as had his attempts to get new sheets and
bedding;
but compared with his loneliness these were minor
irritants
. True, his father wrote frequently and had despatched numerous comforts: potted meats, books, a dozen cases of claret, cigars and some stone hot-water bottles – none of which had yet arrived; but the expectation of these good things did not
compensate
George for a more fundamental privation.

The favourite activity of most of his brother officers was
writing
to and receiving letters from wives or fiancées – a pleasure denied to George and one the lack of which continually brought to mind his painful failure with Catherine. Immediately after his arrival at Scutari, when too weak to write himself, George had dictated letters to be sent to Magnus and Charles telling them what had happened to him, in the hope that they would mention his present situation, when next writing to their sister, and that this in turn might lead Catherine herself to send a note of
commiseration,
thus making it possible for him to reply. A correspondence
started, he might even succeed in convincing her of the change circumstances had wrought in him.

When thinking about Catherine, George was haunted by a
recurrent
fear. Remembering the scene he had interrupted in the Statue Gallery at Hanley Park, he did not care to reflect on the fact that Catherine, alone in that vast house, would have ample opportunity to arrange further meetings with Strickland. In fact on one of the few occasions when he had seen Charles Crawford before Inkerman, George had expressed astonishment that Catherine was not staying with her step-mother at the Embassy in Constantinople; suggesting that, since so many eligible young officers dined with Lord Stratford, on their way out to the war or returning home, Catherine was being denied an excellent
matrimonial
opportunity. Charles had not argued but had observed drily that given a certain personal antipathy between the two women, such an arrangement would be inappropriate. George had then asked Charles whether he was happy that Catherine had so much freedom. To his amazement when he had gone on lightly to allude to his former suspicions of Strickland, Crawford had become furiously angry, dismissing the idea with abusive contempt. So distressed had George been, that until receiving a letter of condolence from Charles, he had feared his friendly
relations
with Crawford to be at an end.

As soon as George had been strong enough to walk unassisted, he had taken to visiting men from his regiment in different parts of the Barrack Hospital, offering to try to secure extra comforts and in several cases writing to his father asking him to employ wounded men on his estate.

On a bitter morning in the first week in December, George was returning to his own ward after such a visit, considerably upset that a corporal from his company, for whom he had brought a game pie and a port wine jelly, had died during the previous night. Walking through the neighbouring ward, George had passed a group of men examining something; on moving closer George saw that they were admiring a drawing: an admirably executed sketch of one of them. Surprised to find such talent among common soldiers, he asked the artist’s name, and was
disappointed
to hear that he had been a civilian. No longer feeling the same interest in the sketch, George nevertheless felt obliged to show some enthusiasm when it was held up for his scrutiny. Glancing at it, a mild curiosity led him to look at the signature, and, with a sudden shiver of shock, he made out the name:
Thomas
Strickland.

That evening, feeling guilty that he had misjudged Strickland, and greatly relieved that his suspicions had evidently been
mistaken,
George wrote to Charles Crawford, describing the extent of his recovery and relaying general news about the state of affairs in the hospital. In a postscript he apologised for having linked Catherine’s name with Strickland’s. If she had been seeing the man, she could not be doing so any more, since the artist was at present staying in Constantinople.