Maud didn’t comment, thinking of Mr Levy’s talk of demonstrable worth; in the days afterwards, though, Jimmy did seem to set about this object with absolute commitment, spending more and more time out in the city – although where, and with whom, and paid for with what, she was unable to discover. And then, in the middle of December, the tract appeared, bearing the simple title Art & Art Critics. A humble-looking thing it was, with a plain brown-paper cover – a pamphlet of fifteen pages or so, printed by the Ways at a generously reduced rate. The contents, however, were anything but humble.
Maud made an earnest attempt to read it, honestly she did, yet could only wade her way through the first third before setting it aside in dazed apprehension. Art & Art Critics was pungent, positively vicious, heedless both of reason and clear English – being made up of rambling, never-ending sentences that often lost their way altogether. Much of it was to do with Jimmy’s favoured notion of painters being the only proper judges of painting, but this was taken off in some decidedly irregular directions. The reviews, collected in the usual fashion, were united in their scorn. Vulgar, they said, unintelligible, utterly inconclusive and likely, in the end, to produce more support for Ruskin. Jimmy had no difficulty dismissing them. Indeed, he delighted in their censure. What would they know, after all? Why, they were the very blasted critics he was denouncing! Would the condemned man rejoice in the executioner’s footstep?
Maud kept quiet. Jimmy could be relied upon to assume that her silence held agreement and support. Not for the first time, though, she found herself feeling a sliver of sympathy for his detractors.
*
Despite everything, the entertainments continued. Now they took the form of breakfasts exclusively, with the fare necessarily modest: Jimmy’s buckwheat cakes served with molasses and coffee, and a selection of Mrs Cossins’ pickles and savoury jams. The host, however, was always at his most amiable and entertaining. The debt Maud had known in her childhood, loaded upon them by her father’s determined bond with the bottle, had been a shameful thing, to be hidden away as much as possible. Jimmy’s attitude was rather different. He wore his difficulties with a certain pride, as if they were merely the burden of righteousness, to be borne with a shrug and a wry line, and animated readings from Art & Art Critics. These his guests applauded, declaring that the pamphlet was perfectly devastating in its anger, its truthfulness and its glittering wit.
Maud’s presence was not required. This suited her perfectly well; she was becoming convinced that a good many of these supposed allies were laughing at Jimmy as much as with him. She would draw, if she could find the energy, or read the art papers, or just head to their mattress, which was laid out on the floorboards as the lacquered bed from Lindsey Row had yet to appear. There she would doze uncomfortably for a while, then resurface after the guests were gone, in search of food and somewhere warm to sit.
It was after one of these breakfasts, quite by accident, that Maud discovered Jimmy’s plan. An unexpectedly lengthy nap had carried her some way past nightfall. Her descent into the dark hall was particularly awkward; she was reduced to bumping down the ladder-like stairs on her behind. Her head was throbbing, her toes and fingertips frozen. Voices were issuing from the dining room. Surely they can’t still be going, she thought, peering in through the half-open door. She kept a careful distance, for there were certain individuals in Jimmy’s circle who were unable – for all their artistic sensibilities – to hide their discomfort with her condition and having their host’s way of life brought before them so inescapably. These were not breakfast people, though. They were clad in shades of brown, not glossy jet and silver grey. They exuded no sense of wealth or confidence. They were ordinary.
A woman and her child, in winter coats and scarves, were standing over by the fireplace, past a table littered with the debris of a breakfast. The woman was heavy-set, closing in on forty, with something Irish about her; she had the look of a shopkeeper, Maud thought, a grocer perhaps. Had she come in person to ask that a bill be settled? A couple of them had tried that. The child was a short, skinny boy of eight or so, wearing a russet cap – with a pair of very blue eyes and a certain cast to his brow that was immediately familiar.
‘You do not need to worry,’ Jimmy was saying; he was seated at the table, out of sight. ‘Tell Mr Singleton that your funds are secure. I am aware of my duty, dear Jo. I am taking steps to fulfil it.’
Maud drew closer. This was his first Madame: Jo Hiffernan, the face in so many of his early paintings, all now fifteen years old or more. And that boy at her side was Jimmy’s son. Little Charlie. The child was seldom mentioned and never discussed. Maud had gleaned that Jo and Charlie were not related – they were, she saw now, quite plainly not related – but that the boy had become her ward at some stage; that there was an arrangement in place, with payments made and occasional visits from the venerated father.
‘I heard of your trial,’ Jo replied – Irish was right. ‘They says you was finished off, Jim. Laughed out of the place.’
‘Come now,’ said Jimmy. ‘That is hardly an accurate—’
‘Mr Singleton is a good man. He will feed us and keep us housed. But I cannot ask him to buy my clothes. To buy new boots for Charlie.’
Jimmy came into view, reaching among the plates and dishes upon the disordered table to retrieve a sheet of thick, creamy paper. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a mezzotint of my painting of Thomas Carlyle. There are hundreds of them. Hot off the press, as they say.’
Jo Hiffernan considered it without much interest. Charlie craned his neck to look, but the page was already being taken back.
‘They’re shifting, Jo,’ Jimmy said, aiming for reassurance, ‘and will soon be shifting more. I have recently conceived of a great scheme, with the help of my associate here. I shall be returning to Paris, directly after Christmas. I have a particular friend there now, you know. A dealer named Lucas – a Yankee, but that can’t be helped. He tells me they are all desperate for my work. Even for reproductions, like the Carlyle here.’
Maud shivered a little. She knew nothing of this. They’d talked of visiting Paris, of course, many times – those old pipe dreams of which Jimmy was such a master. She thought of the journey involved. There would be a steamer, a proper ship, from Limehouse or somewhere; a Channel crossing; a train over a fair stretch of France. She held her belly. Could it really be done? Was this not the worst possible moment for such an expedition?
Jo Hiffernan was unimpressed. There was a hardness in her, Maud saw; this was someone who knew Jimmy Whistler too well, and had tired of him a good while ago. Information on this woman, her predecessor, was difficult to come by. Few of Jimmy’s friends had even met her, as they’d fallen in with him after she’d left, at the start of the decade. It was as if he’d replaced his entire circle.
‘Sounds like an adventure,’ said Jo shortly, pulling on her gloves. ‘A prime bit of fun. Will you be stopping by the Folies-Bergère, I wonder, with Edgar and the rest of them? Like we used to?’
Jimmy was shaking his head. ‘There won’t be time for anything like that. Work, Jo, and work alone. I shall hawk my wares with Lucas, and then I shall avail myself of la ville lumière. Take some views, you know, on paper and plate. They’ll be sure to find buyers. And then there’ll be cash aplenty. No further cause for concern. You really mustn’t heed what you see in the papers.’ There was a change in his voice, a note of forced levity. ‘Perhaps, after my return from France, you and I shall go on one of our jaunts, hey Charlie?’
The boy was struck mute by his father’s attention. Turning the colour of ripe raspberries, he angled himself towards Jo Hiffernan’s ample flank as if he wished it could swallow him entire. Jo wouldn’t help, though; she took him by the shoulders and rotated him mercilessly until he was facing the room again.
‘I hear,’ Jimmy continued, ‘that there’s a fine show coming to Earls Court – an American show, a circus of a kind.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘What’s the fellow’s name … some kind
of animal …’
‘Buffalo Bill,’ said someone else, from a far corner – a man with a light but unmistakable accent.
‘Yes, that’s it. Buffalo Bill. What a handle, eh? He’s a war hero, I’m told. A killer of redskins. The genuine article.’
The notion appeared to scare the child more than anything. Maud was coming forward now, into the doorway, looking along the room, to confirm that this other person was indeed the Owl; and yes, there he was, feet up on the dining table with his fine boots crossed at the ankle, back among them after a month of inexplicable absence, reading Art & Art Critics by the light of a candle. Seeming to reach the end of a section, he tossed the pamphlet aside and addressed the boy.
‘D’you not care for soldiers, young Charlie?’ he asked. ‘Tell me, what is it that you want to be when you grow up?’
Charlie’s head was bowed, with his hands deep in his coat pockets. ‘When I grow up,’ he said, in a voice that was less timid than might have been expected, ‘I want to be like my father.’
‘My dear boy,’ Owl replied, ‘you surely can’t do both.’
Jimmy laughed despite himself, shooting the Owl an admiring yet reproachful glance, while poor Charlie blinked in total confusion, his blush acquiring a still more fiery hue.
In a matter-of-fact tone, Jo Hiffernan said, ‘Jim, there’s a girl out in the passage. Eavesdropping, from the looks of it.’
What could Maud do but join them in the dining room? The other woman took her in, the size of her, with something like distaste flickering across her face. No one spoke, not a murmur. And then Jo was leaving – gathering in her ward, pushing him out to the corridor, as if removing him from an unwholesome place. Maud was obliged to retreat into the narrow passage to let them by. Through they went, the boy fixing his blue eyes on Maud as he passed; Jimmy followed close behind, repeating his reassurances; and the three of them – the father, the former mistress and the son – headed to the front door.
In the dining room, Owl had gone back to Art & Art Critics and was chuckling as he read – rather ambiguously, Maud thought.
‘Dearest Maud,’ he said, turning a page, ‘do permit me to observe how extremely well you are looking. It rather suits you, you know. Is that polite to say? Rosie will be most pleased to hear that you continue to bloom in such a thoroughly splendid fashion. She’s missed you terribly this past month.’
Maud gripped the back of a chair for support. ‘Is she still with her brother?’
There was a hesitation, as if Owl was rifling through his memory. ‘Yes, I believe she is. Dreadful business. A nervous affliction, they say, quite beyond medical understanding.’
Half a dozen sheets of paper were spread over an empty part of the tablecloth. Topmost was the mezzotint of the Carlyle that Jimmy had just shown to Jo Hiffernan. Even by candlelight, it was clear enough to Maud that it held only the faintest echo of the painting. It looked plain, in short, dull and rather flat. It angered her.
‘Where the devil have you been, Owl? You were needed. We needed your help.’
‘What can I say?’ The Portuguese raised his hands in surrender. ‘A crew of navvies, dear girl, is presently engaged in knocking down my house. I have had a lifetime’s wares to relocate, into venues wholly insufficient for the purpose. But gold is due. That is certain. The case was won, as I believe you heard. I shall be in a position to assist very soon.’
Maud began to ask when exactly this would be, but Jimmy came back in, full of apologies for Jo’s surliness – and what was obviously an unintended overlap between Madames past and present.
‘A fine woman,’ he concluded, ‘very fine. But she can be rather flinty.’
‘Flinty,’ said Owl, ‘is most definitely the word.’
There was familiarity here, as if Owl had met Jo already, or known her long in the past. Maud wondered how this could be. She had a sense, also, that Jimmy had just handed over money. The pain in her head seemed to constrict; it became so piercingly intense that she nearly swore. She pulled out the chair she was holding on to and sat down heavily.
‘Paris,’ she said.
Jimmy and Owl exchanged a look.
‘Ah yes,’ replied Jimmy. ‘I’d been hoping to talk with you about that.’
Something in his tone, its forced lightness, told Maud that she’d been mistaken. He was going to Paris alone. Humiliation bit into her, sharp and sudden. It had been ridiculous of her to have thought otherwise. She’d be nothing but a liability in her present state. She tried to be reasonable, to react with a cool, understanding nod. It didn’t quite come off. He was going without her. It would be his first trip abroad since she’d arrived in his studio, since their union, and he was going without her.
Jimmy was at her side now, crouching down to comfort and explain. ‘It is strategic,’ he said, ‘purely strategic. Owl is ready to plug the gap with Nightingale, but it may be a week or two still. In which time that rogue Levy might return – take advantage, you know, with the instinctual slyness of his kind. But Reeve tells me that the wretched fellow cannot take possession in my absence. The law prohibits it. So I shall vamoose the ranch. A few weeks should do the trick.’
This did actually seem sensible. Maud gazed down at her stomach, at the way her gown stretched over it, distorting the two-tone floral print. She brushed away the tears that stood in her eyes. ‘What – what will I do while you’re over there, then?’ she asked. ‘I can hardly stay here on my own.’
The reply came straight away. Rooms were to be taken in a small hotel in King’s Cross – a reputable place, known to Owl, using cash made from the Carlyle prints – where she could be snug and safe as the year burned down to its end.
‘Your sister Edith,’ Jimmy said. ‘Or your aunt. There will be space for one of them. In case the, ah, time should arrive.’
Proper thought had been given to this; Jimmy had troubled to learn Edie’s name, for heaven’s sake. It was to happen. The rooms had probably been booked already. In case the time should arrive. Maud could hear herself answering them, consenting to what they proposed, and being given a few further particulars of how it was to work – none of which she could later recall, as she was sinking once more into thoughts of the coming birth. The loneliness of it, in the end. The danger. It was like being tipped over backwards into a soot heap, among the staining, choking smuts. It was like drowning in black ashes.
The men had moved on. Owl was speaking of his admiration for Art & Art Critics, for the demolishing power of Jimmy’s prose. He opened the pamphlet, located a particular passage and began to read aloud. Maud couldn’t listen. She weaved out of the room, and was sobbing before she’d closed the privy door behind her, sobbing so hard and so harshly it felt more like retching. She sat huddled in there for perhaps quarter of an hour, waiting for it to run its course. Then she wiped her face on her shawl and lifted the latch. The corridor outside was icy cold and quiet; the dining room was empty. She listened to the house around her, to the floors above and below. Had something been called out – an announcement made as they’d headed for the door? She couldn’t be certain. But Jimmy and Owl were gone.
*
Sharp’s Hotel stood off Pentonville Road, a few streets away from King’s Cross station. It seemed to Maud a very Owlish sort of establishment. Although not grand, the interior was smart, with a distinct dash of fashion. The staff were smooth in their manner and rather knowing, being ready to accept even the blatantly counterfeit respectability offered by Matthew Eldon, who’d been saddled with the task of installing her there, Jimmy being too busy with his arrangements for Paris. Before an understanding manager, he fumbled his way through the story with which Owl had supplied him. She was the wife of his brother, a captain in the 7th Light Dragoons, departed recently for Africa. There was no family in London, and she was too far advanced to travel any distance, so a comfortable berth was required for the last fortnight or so of her confinement. A midwife had been located nearby, in Camden Town; the woman could be there in an hour, Eld
on claimed, ready to take charge and transport the mother-to-be back to her house. This was all accepted at once, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. Payment was made, up until the end of January; thanks were offered, convincingly sincere, for the service of Maud’s phantom husband; and then Eldon withdrew, saying regretfully that he had an appointment elsewhere in town. Left alone in the room – a good one, it had to be said, at the front of the first floor – it was hard not to feel that she’d been deposited. Shifted unceremoniously out of the way.
As might have been guessed, Edie found the whole situation both perplexing and somewhat unsavoury. She herself was markedly averse to chance or irregularity; at the age of seventeen, she’d married a man twelve years her senior on account of his steady profession, and was a mother to two boys by the time she was twenty. Previously, she’d been content for the facts of Maud’s life in Chelsea to retain a certain obscurity, but the trial had changed this. Mr Whistler was in the papers, and not just the art papers either; her sister’s American was now a famous man. Edie could not help being impressed, in a way, which caused her no little irritation. She loved Maud, though, and managed to keep her lip buttoned. Although unwilling to leave her family overnight, she visited most days, sitting for hours with needlework or a novel while Maud sighed and lolled and scratched, attempting with enormous difficulty to apply her mind to anything at all.
Art, she found, was best. There was a definite satisfaction to it at first – amid the sleeplessness, the constipation, the ever-mounting discomfort of that final month when you were really just longing for release – both in the drawings themselves and Edie’s surprise at her aptitude. Which wasn’t to say that her sister liked them, exactly; indeed, she looked over these modest watercolours – winter flowers mostly, sent up from the hotel desk – with much the same incomprehension as she viewed the rest of Maud’s existence.
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