Until the Colours Fade Read Online Free PDF Page B

any redeeming qualities to offset her natural coldness and arrogance – unless a mordantly scathing sense of humour could be said to be a redeeming quality. George had made it clear to Tom that, although his father’s recommendation to Lord Goodchild would be enough to persuade his lordship to commission a portrait, the final decision would still lie with her ladyship. If she took it into her head to find Tom commonplace or tiresome, there would be no commission, and a lady, who had been known to throw boot-jacks at her lady’s maid and to grind a miniature of her mother-in-law under her heel in front of numerous spectators, was not somebody who could be relied upon to be charitable.
    Because his future hopes so much depended upon this commission , Tom was naturally depressed by this description, and his despondency was the greater for having allowed himself to imagine aristocratic generosity to rival Lady Holland’s championing of the young Watts; but he had by no means abandoned hope of success. His best frock coat might be shabby and his flowing necktie conceal a shirt with similar shortcomings, but he had had ample proof in the past of being attractive to women. While the thought of any close relationship with Lady Goodchild did not enter his mind, he was comforted to know that his mistress, one of the leading singers in London’s music halls, cared a great deal more for him than he did for her, and this in spite of propositions from numerous affluent and eminent men.
    While many young men strained to appear mature men of the world – often in consequence merely seeming bored and vapid – Tom did not try to emulate anybody. Being shy by nature, any attempts to seem nonchalant and loftily self-confident would in any case have been hopeless. In fact his unaffected enthusiasm and unfeigned reticence usually achieved better results. Since he rarely liked people who pretended to great refinement, he tried to avoid similar excesses of gentility; but his desire to please did sometimes lead him to be too zealously polite, and a lot of his hesitance stemmed from the basic conflict between this eagerness to please and an equally strong inclination to be honest. This ambiguity, although he did not know it, gave his modest and deferential manner a disconcertingly ironic edge, especially when he occasionally slipped an entirely candid remark into an otherwise blandly tactful conversation. Nor could he from time to time help laughing when he had been listening with greatseriousness to a lengthy monologue which he secretly viewed as anything but serious. After such behaviour he was usually far more embarrassed and confused than the affronted person.
    But laughter was very far from his mind as he approached the broad steps under the portico, having left his vehicle in the stables. He had never met anybody of Lord Goodchild’s rank and was not unaware of the fact that he had been asked to call in the morning, a time usually reserved for tradesmen – friends and acquaintances generally calling in the afternoon. Under the tall Corinthian columns it was some consolation to him to imagine that many of the aristocrats, whose scrap books Turner and Landseer had deigned to draw in, would have thought it the artist’s privilege rather than their own.
    As Tom reached the top step and saw a liveried footman with powdered hair and white stockings open the glass-panelled door, he vowed not to allow his pride to make him defensive, and prayed that neither the grandeur of the house nor his desperate eagerness to get the commission would overawe him into behaving with a servility which would later make him ashamed.
    *
    Lord Goodchild stormed out of his steward’s office and stalked across the wide domed rotunda, his top-boots echoing on the marble floor. In his right hand was a wad of letters and papers, and on his face a fixed angry frown. Dressed in hunting pink with a massive ivory handled whip in his left hand, Henry Audley Fitzwarine