Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  ‘I am afraid, Miss,’ Mrs Leyland began, rather louder than was necessary, as if gathering determination, ‘that we have not been introduced.’

  Maud eyed her coolly. And when exactly, she wanted to ask, would the two of us ever have been bloody well introduced?

  ‘You know who I am though, I believe. I have something for your – for your master.’ She slid an object from her sleeve and held it out, dangling from a fine chain: an almond-shaped locket, solid gold, its cover etched deftly with a curling vine of ivy. ‘This belongs to Mrs Whistler, your master’s mother. An heirloom, she told us. Irreplaceable. It was left at Speke Hall when she came to visit, a number of years ago now. You would have been only a child. My own daughters were children.’ Mrs Leyland looked away. ‘We’ve often talked of returning it, but the opportunity has never presented itself.’

  Maud didn’t move. This all sounded rather unlikely. ‘Mrs Whistler went up to Liverpool?’

  Mrs Leyland ignored her. ‘I feel very strongly that it should go back to the family. I cannot possibly give it to your master in person, not with everything that has occurred. Nor could I use a servant and have my husband find out, as he always seems to do. I am sorry for imposing upon you in this way, truly I am – for following you up here from Chelsea as we have done. It is strange, I know. But I could think of no other course.’ She shook the locket very slightly, impatiently almost, as if it were a little bell for the summoning of service. ‘Please take it, Miss. It would bring such comfort to my mind.’

  As Maud reached out, Mrs Leyland slipped her other hand around the younger woman’s wrist; she gripped it hard, harder than you’d have thought she could, and drew them a few inches closer together.

  ‘It is the only way, also,’ she added, speaking rapidly, her voice half as loud yet about ten times as fierce, ‘that I could convey a warning to him. They are meeting. My husband and the allies of Mr Ruskin. Mr Burne-Jones, the painter. Mr Taylor of The Times. Ahead of this trial, this ridiculous libel action. In the dining room, no less, before those peacocks. Some kind of scheme is being put together, of this I am certain. Something to finish him off. Do you understand me? He must desist. He must withdraw from it, withdraw from it all. Depart for France, or America even. He must leave it well alone. A trial is what they want.’

  Mrs Leyland released Maud as abruptly as she’d taken hold of her. She stepped back, corrected her hat and started towards her son, who was still standing as lookout.

  ‘It is done,’ she told him.

  Freddie offered his arm and they left the alley. Maud waited a few seconds, steadying herself; then she went after them, stopping on the pavement to scour the crowds and the traffic. There they were, across the street, climbing into a hired carriage. You almost had to admire it. Mrs Leyland had staged a two-fold deceit, enabling her to slip through a double layer of scrutiny. For the servants at Prince’s Gate, the butler or anyone else, it had been a simple shopping trip, taken in the company of her son, with his parcels acting as corroboration. For the son, meanwhile – who had broken with Jimmy so obediently – it was a final act of severance, a last trinket returned, with the outcast artist uninvolved.

  Maud looked at the locket, the gold flushed with the colour of her palm. She opened it up. The tiny chamber within was empty: no lock of hair, no beloved face scissored from a photograph. This was the cost Mrs Leyland was prepared to pay to deliver her message – which Maud did not then pause to ponder at any length as she had realised with a great giddying rush of exhilaration that nestled right there in her hand was the answer to the day’s dilemma.

  A minute later she was walking into a pawn shop, tucked away in a lane off Great Russell Street. Goods were clustered along its shelves, toys and musical instruments and a travelling library’s worth of books. What wall space remained was filled entirely with hack paintings, popular prints and the stuffed heads of various animals, labels hanging from their antlers and fangs. The broker sat behind his counter, display cases to his left and right, scratching his chin with the obligatory air of world-weariness.

  ‘Italian,’ Maud said brightly, as she presented the locket. ‘Over two hundred years old. Been in the family for generations.’

  Life with Jimmy, and indeed her own rather precarious childhood, had left Maud well versed in the games of the pawn shop. The broker’s sigh, slightly over-heavy, and the deliberate unconcern with which the gem glass was removed from his eye, told her that this piece was worth serious coin; as one would expect, quite frankly, coming from the Leyland household. He could sense the hurry, however, beneath her play of high spirits, and offered only two pounds. It didn’t matter. She had the bloody money. There was no time for an omnibus or a cab – at this point in the afternoon the fastest way over was to walk. Maud stowed the banknotes, readied her elbows and pushed out into London.

  It took ten minutes to battle through the tangled alleys to St Martin’s Lane, and a further five to follow its crooked course down to Trafalgar Square. After that it was a straight dash westwards, into the districts of the easeful rich. Muddled ochres, faded blacks and crumbling reds were replaced by the greys of well-tended stone. The multifarious crowds thinned and the air grew clearer, less malodorous – and hushed, it seemed, by a kind of communal decorum. Hem in hand, Maud puffed along Pall Mall, past the elegant façades of clubs and learned institutions, disregarding the looks cast in her direction. At the Tudor palace she stopped to catch her breath. St James’s lay to the right, running uphill into Piccadilly; and there was the Albemarle, standing tall and grand in a long line of similar structures. She squinted up at the terrace where Jimmy would be working and wondered what exactly she might say – with her dusty dress and jacket, her disordered hair, her fourth best hat – to convince them to let her inside. As she approached the entrance, however, she spotted him across the street, propped against a lamp post as he smoked an idle cigarette; so over she went, through the traffic, beaming with the jubilation of a runner reaching the finish line.

  ‘Got it,’ she panted as she arrived at his side, nearly colliding with him. ‘I’ve – I’ve bloody well got it.’

  ‘Why, Maudie,’ he said, not quite looking back at her. His voice sounded odd – a hollowed-out attempt at levity. ‘You came.’

  ‘Course I did. I’ve got the money. And you’ll never—’

  ‘You’re a good girl, really you are. But it’s too late. The worst has occurred.’

  Maud’s face fell. ‘You mean you lost the job? The devils didn’t pay you?’

  ‘What? No. No, I didn’t lose—’ Jimmy hesitated. ‘Well, I suppose that rather depends how you look at it. Old Tommy Bowles from Vanity Fair arrived at the Albemarle to find Mr Whistler being badgered by a waiter for the sake of twelve shillings, which he clearly did not have. The impression, I fear, was of ignoble poverty. Of want, of failure. Their man of the day was made to look very much like a man of yesterday instead.’

  ‘He paid you though, this Tommy Bowles?’

  ‘Well yes, he paid, naturally he did. The plate was wonderful. That was beyond argument. And he could see that I had a bill to settle. I daresay he found the whole situation rather entertaining. A tale was played out, my girl, there for a seasoned journalist merely to observe. News of Whistler’s destitution will no doubt be spreading about town as we speak. It will be the talk of dinner tables for weeks to come.’

  Maud, still recovering her breath, felt the ache of admonishment. ‘I tried to get here, Jimmy. I did the best I could.’

  Jimmy stood upright, grinding out his cigarette beneath the toe of a fine black boot. ‘It wasn’t Owl, by any chance,’ he asked, ‘who provided you with the money?’

  ‘I didn’t know where he’d be. I thought—’

  ‘I wrote to him on Thursday, you know, specifically to prevent this from coming about. Thursday. I asked him to stop at the hotel before Bowles’s arrival. When I have etchings to be sold, or when he has some plan for my paintings, the fellow is ever-present. But when I need bail
ing out, Maudie, when it is a matter of actual goddamned necessity, he’s a mirage. A man made of mist. A door one knocks on without reply.’

  This made Maud think of Southampton Row. ‘I did call on Rosa. Nobody was home.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have had anything anyway,’ Jimmy snorted. ‘Why, she works less than I do.’ His anger was guttering already; he looked downcast, in fact. ‘Who was it, then? Little Theo Watts? Eldon?’

  Maud remembered Mrs Leyland’s grip. The things she’d said. He must desist. What good would it do, telling Jimmy of this now? He’d pretend to be unsurprised. Unworried. Then he’d become agitated, chewing at his fingernails; and then enraged, shouting and strutting, vowing this and that, plotting all kinds of foolery. And he absolutely would not do what his rich friend had urged. No, passing on Mrs Leyland’s message would surely make everything worse. It was best left for another time.

  ‘Eldon,’ she told him. ‘Caught him at the Grosvenor. He’d mentioned to me that he was going again.’

  This appeared to satisfy. Promptly losing interest in the Albemarle and the humiliation he’d suffered, Jimmy declared himself to be ravenously hungry. A late luncheon was proposed. Maud knew very well that this would be paid for with the locket money, two pounds that could be more usefully spent elsewhere. She lamented her appearance, in the hope of putting him off. The point was taken, but only so he could bear it in mind while selecting a venue.

  ‘I believe we shall head to Frascati’s. They know me there, and will think nothing of a little disarray. You’ve been before, of course.’

  Maud hadn’t. At first Jimmy didn’t believe her, then he declared that she was in for an exquisite treat which would rescue the day completely. The wines there were merely serviceable, it was true, but one went for the bouillabaisse, which really had no rival in London. He set his topper at the preferred angle, planted the end of the bamboo cane on the pavement before him, and raised his arm to hail a hansom.

  Frascati’s was on Oxford Street, a distance only of a few hundred yards, but Jimmy Whistler would never walk if he had the means to do otherwise. Maud resigned herself to the luncheon, being too tired – peculiarly, overwhelmingly tired – to resist. It was the heat, she guessed, coupled with the afternoon’s several shocks and exertions. En route, through the stop-starts of the afternoon traffic, he asked about the Grosvenor, where she’d supposedly met with Eldon. How had it seemed? How had people been reacting to his paintings?

  Maud’s answers were the same as always: the canvases looked brilliantly bold, she told him, and were causing much astonishment and incomprehension. These lines were surely becoming stale through repetition. Her delivery was also rather less than lively. Jimmy didn’t seem to notice, though, nodding through her recitation before informing her once again that the controversy over his Black and Gold was still devilishly sharp one year on; that John Ruskin’s calumny was still the talk of artistic society; that the much-delayed trial, which would certainly be scheduled within the next week, would still serve as a monumental reckoning.

  ‘We’ll thrash them, Maudie,’ he concluded, as Frascati’s appeared outside the window. ‘Every last one.’

  With that he swaggered across a strip of sunlit pavement and into the deep shade beneath the restaurant’s awning, immediately striking up a conversation with the uniformed fellow on the door. Maud followed. A warm welcome was being extended and the plate-glass door eased open, revealing a lavish interior of marble and gold leaf. She caught an unexpected glimpse of her reflection – the grubby, rather ordinary dress, the scuffed boots, the faintly dazed expression – and wished she’d put up more of a fight. She didn’t even have an appetite; the hunger that had gnawed at her on Southampton Row had vanished entirely.

  It was too late now. They made to go in, stepping towards the threshold – and the atmosphere of the place flooded out, engulfing Maud in the odours of fine cuisine. The salty tang of fish. A great brew of herbs and vinegars. The cloying richness of melted butter. That unpleasant pressure from earlier returned; it grew acute, a good deal more acute, its reason suddenly obvious and inevitable and approaching at a full bloody gallop. She turned back to the street. Jimmy was directly in her path. She moved left and he was left; she moved right and there he was there as well; so she abandoned ceremony and hefted him aside, weaving out into the dazzling sunshine and the horrible, unavoidable realisation of what was about to occur. Halfway across the pavement her balance failed, and she barely succeeded in stumbling to the kerb before she vomited.

  A minute passed. Maud, on her knees, gazed blankly at the soupy splash below, already drying upon the dung-caked cobblestones. A tear dripped from the end of her nose. Sourness was rising inside her once more, a boiling knot of it, almost jamming her throat. As she tried to breathe, to manage this second discharge, she realised that Jimmy was at her side. He was standing with his hands in his pockets and the bamboo cane under his arm, concern vying with embarrassment, grimacing a little at the familiarity of it all.

  ‘Bon Dieu,’ he muttered. ‘Not again.’

  *

  August 1878

  The original notion was for a dinner split neatly down the middle. Two courses in Lindsey Row, with the appropriate toasts and valedictions; a gentle procession along the stretch of the Thames Jimmy thought of as his own, past Battersea Bridge and onto Chelsea Reach; and then two more on Tite Street, in the singular glory of the White House. Mrs Cossins, however, greeted it with disbelief.

  ‘How in blasted buggery,’ she protested, ‘am I to cook a dinner for twelve—’

  ‘Fourteen, dear woman. The final tally, I believe, is fourteen.’

  ‘—in two different houses, two different kitchens, half a bloody mile apart? I mean to say, sir, I could do it, if you’re absolutely set on such a thing, but the result would surely be a disappointment. Lukewarm. Indigestible. It’s up to you, I suppose.’

  The banquet itself was therefore sited at the new residence, with Lindsey Row made the venue of the guests’ reception only. Drinks were served, the best champagne, acquired by Jimmy from a vintner off Sloane Square – a man ignorant, crucially, of his impressive customer’s precise financial circumstances. A few platters were left in the dining room, upon which were little bits of bread and pastry, with foodstuffs and sauce arranged artfully atop them. This was a French notion, Maud was told, going back to the previous century. Canopies, Jimmy seemed to call them. When she offered them around by this name, however – care for a canopy, Mr Irving? – there was laughter; Jimmy embraced her where she stood, tray in hand, and told her she was perfect.

  Maud hardly cared. She couldn’t bear even to look at the wretched things herself; anything she ate came straight back out again. Her stomach was wholly empty, her body dragging a half-second behind her brain. It was like a weird, lucid drunkenness; she was both there and not there, drifting through the hours like a balloon. They could laugh all they damn well liked.

  Once everyone had arrived, the party set about making a last circuit of the house. They raised their glasses in each room, saluting the activities that had been pursued there, artistic and otherwise. Jimmy grew quite sentimental.

  ‘I have lived here,’ he reflected, ‘longer than I have lived anywhere else. It is rather sad to think that soon I will be here no more.’

  ‘The relinquishment of one’s burrow,’ Owl concurred, ‘does bring on a particular melancholy.’

  Maud had watched the men come with their van and carthorses, labour away for the better part of a day, and then drive a towering, tottering load off along the embankment. As she walked around now, though, she was surprised by how much of the furniture was still there, including several of what she’d taken to be Jimmy’s finest pieces. A couple more – a large sideboard from the dining room, and that great lacquered bed in which her present predicament had most probably come about – had been sold to the new tenant, she understood, or taken for restoration under Owl’s supervision.

  The studio, similarly, contained
a couple of dozen paintings. Three full-lengths were up on easels, put out by Jimmy that afternoon. In pride of place was the portrait of Rosa Corder. She was shown in profile, her pale skin forming a crisp, glowing line against the black velvet backdrop: it was a pose of grace, style and a certain authority. Jimmy had scraped off the paint and restarted many times, adjusting every aspect, but was finally close to completion. On either side of this canvas were a couple from that first fateful show at the Grosvenor: the actor Henry Irving in the character of a Spanish King, and one of Maud in her old fur jacket. The Arrangement in Brown. Jimmy had deliberately chosen paintings of people who were present, and the rest of the party was soon urging them to strike the poses of their pictures, to allow for a comparison. Mr Irving relented almost immediately. A tall, handsome man with a plain enthusiasm for display, he adopted a lofty regal attitude and recited a few of his lines – pretending not to hear Owl’s loud suggestion that he consider making an offer for the work.

  Rosa went next, swivelling to the side, lifting her chin and placing a hand on her hip. My friend, thought Maud sardonically. She’d found herself smarting – not entirely reasonably, she knew – at Rosa’s failure to be home that afternoon. It had taken on the aspect of a profound disappointment. They hadn’t spoken so far, beyond a quick greeting. She resolved to be chilly.

  Like Maud, Rosa was wearing a summer gown of muslin and lace rather than the darker, heavier clothes Jimmy had painted them in, and she was holding a champagne glass rather than one of her wide-brimmed hats, but otherwise you had to admit it was a pretty decent imitation. She couldn’t stay still for long, though, being too aware of the attention, too ready to laugh, dispelling the elegance completely.

  ‘You see the trouble I caused,’ she said with a guilty grin. ‘Poor Jimmy. It must have been very tiresome.’

  Maud was last, her ill temper overtaken very slightly by a desire to show how it was done. The pose was of a type Jimmy had favoured a few years previously, rather like that of the Frances Leyland portrait. She linked her hands behind her back, turned and started to step away; then stopped and looked over her shoulder, towards the rest of the party but not actually at them, emptying her features of thought or feeling, as Jimmy insisted upon when he worked from her. It was simple really, tedious more than anything. As a minute ran by, however, and she did not move, an admiring murmur gathered among Jimmy’s guests.