Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  Jim leaned against the table, inserting the eyeglass to get a better look at Owl’s face. ‘My things would be sold. My house.’

  This was neither confirmed nor denied, but the Portuguese’s enthusiasm increased yet further. ‘The first claims would be ours. Mine and Eldon’s. Reeve’s. We would ensure that your work would be kept safe. That it was borne off to a sanctuary somewhere, held in trust for you – or used, perhaps, to generate the means for your recovery. This room – by Jove, this room is packed with treasure. I’m amazed, quite frankly, that the bailiff isn’t more interested in it. We could claim these canvases here, don’t you see, for low sums, and then sell them on for their true worth. Why, we could get hold of the lot, Eldon, between the two of us.’ Owl crossed the studio to where The Three Girls was propped, the pale bodies and pink flowers lit up by the sunlight. ‘Immortal artworks such as this one here should not fall into the hands of paint-grinders, or poulterers, or pastry-makers. It would be nothing short of a crime! This here is the answer, Jimmy. I feel it.’

  ‘If I were to declare—’ Jim found that he couldn’t use the words. ‘If I were to follow the course you suggest, would it not be the case that—’

  Owl stopped him. ‘I must say,’ he declared, a gloved hand raised, ‘that this room is really quite … outrageously cold. I take it there is no coal, or fuel of any kind? Very well. That is to be expected. It feels damp as well, don’t you think? I thought this on the stairs also. That devil Nightingale has much to answer for, in all honesty.’

  ‘Owl—’

  ‘I propose a relocation, gentlemen, so we can discuss this further over a spot of luncheon. A cab to Piccadilly, to a French place I know – and then perhaps a wander over to the Strand, to call on Anderson Reeve.’

  Shock still rang through Jim, humming in his toes and tightening his breath; even so, he couldn’t help smiling a little at this suggestion. ‘And how precisely,’ he asked, ‘would we pay for this repast?’

  Owl took out his cigarette case; he’d reined in his eagerness a fraction, but continued to radiate an irrepressible good cheer. ‘There’s coin, as I said. More than enough. Come now – you aren’t beaten, are you Jimmy? Shave that chin. Have John brush you a jacket. To hell with the man downstairs.’ He split the case open and offered it around. ‘We three are men of the town, are we not? Let us go to her.’

  *

  February 1879

  So a sad farewell was bade to the silent Mr Sumner – oh yes, handkerchiefs out and no mistake – and a modest sack of gold supplied by the Fine Art Society. Thus assisted, Jim issued invitations to a fresh round of Sunday breakfasts, with an eye upon consolidation: upon reminding his allies in artistic society who they were, and what they would provide should the call come. He was now required to manage the culinary preparations himself, Mrs Cossins having jumped ship just before Christmas, being unable to survive on IOUs rather than wages, and well aware, despite the gin, of her own professional worth.

  These, Jim perceived, were the last days. Yet another chapter was drawing ineluctably to a close, and this pro­­­position of Owl’s, this bankruptcy, was fast becoming inevitable. The sole remaining option. Everything he owned would be gone. The wardrobe that clothed him, the walls that he’d had built around him, the green-tiled roof, set at such an exquisite and original slope, that sheltered him from the incessant English rain. It couldn’t be helped. A gentleman, he knew, could only meet such a fate in one way. He must revel in it.

  An afternoon was spent roaming the streets of Chelsea, in search of a photographer he’d not yet used and had therefore incurred no debt with. Eventually one was found, and a pair of portraits taken, back to back. The first captured Whistler as he wished his friends to see him: a three-quarter view, seated with a hand up to his chin, wearing a deliberate, roguish smile.

  ‘The eye must glint,’ he instructed the fellow, ‘as if with mischievous purpose.’

  The second, however, showed Whistler as he was to his enemies: standing straight, hand on hip, glaring directly into the camera as if confronting it.

  ‘Terror must be the result,’ he said as he struck his pose. ‘They must look upon it and know exactly what they deserve.’

  Examples of each were displayed upon the mantelpiece in the White House dining room. They caused some rather gratifying consternation among his guests.

  ‘Are you asking us to choose, Mr Whistler,’ they enquired, ‘which version we would have?’

  He laughed along with them, and gave no definitive answer; but he was, most emphatically. There was an element of threat, almost, in these two photographs – a message that was pretty damned difficult to misinterpret. A couple of people asked who he’d been thinking of when standing for the enemy photograph – to whom it was truly addressed. He didn’t trouble to reply. They all knew the answer.

  It was impossible, Jim felt, to consider his situation, the way such a scattered crowd of creditors had moved in on him, and not detect a guiding intelligence. They had been rallied together. Bribed, or perhaps even bought out. This person, this orchestrator, would have to be a man of stature, or at least the sort of stature that would impress and intimidate a little fellow in his shop. He’d have millions to hand. A towering townhouse and a country pile. A fleet of vessels, say, bearing his name.

  Could anything be more goddamned provoking? Frederick Leyland had surely found a way, a year and a half on, to wield his horsewhip. During the last week of January, stewing in embittered solitude, Jim became convinced that action was now the only honourable course. John lingered on in the White House’s lower reaches, through a kind of animal loyalty Jim supposed; he’d demonstrated an aptitude for spying several times in the past, so Jim had him follow the shipbroker around for a spell. If he had some hard facts concerning Leyland’s women, Jim thought, there might well be a way to expose the philandering swine for what he was. To bring about his disgrace and his eternal banishment from polite society.

  Results came quickly, with John naming a restaurant in Mayfair that Leyland frequented (and had invested in, it was suspected, in return for absolute discretion) to ply a particularly favoured female, a Mrs Caldecott, with lobsters and champagne. Jim knew immediately what he should do. There would be a confrontation outside this establishment, before a smart crowd of onlookers, where a rapier remark about Leyland’s choice of companion – about this shadow army he’d assembled, these ranks of painted ladies, and the demands he made of them – would slice away the villain’s respectable visage once and for all. As tended to be the way with Jim’s imaginings, this would be followed by a scuffle – instigated by the foe, naturally – which the righteous artist would win without any special exertion: a left hook, an uppercut, a boxing of ears, rounded off with a boot to that bony behind as the humiliated Leyland retreated, bloody and breathless, to his carriage.

  This vision remained unrealised. Experiencing something confusingly like reservation, Jim did not march up to Mayfair. Instead, he brooded in his lonely home, trying to find consolation in what he’d told Godwin after the trial, out before the Courts of Justice. There’ll be a better way of doing it.

  Any further reflection on this matter, however, was prevented by a pair of reappearances. First, wholly without warning, came the bailiff. There was another writ of execution – something to do with unpaid rates, one he’d quite forgotten. But the result was the same. A man was placed in his hall, to check his pockets and watch his movements. He was obliged to rush about town, engaging in befuddling, futile arguments with solicitors and the Sheriff’s officers, and to fire off endless urgent notes to poor Reeve. It was all a most senseless waste of his time.

  And then, two days later, Maud was brought back by her sister. The sight from the studio window was enough to startle Jim from his ruminations and bring him to the door. She was pale beyond belief. Barely able to plant her own steps. As they descended from their four-wheeler and came across Tite Street, the sister kept a scowl fixed upon him – which grew yet more ferocious
when she spotted the man, a weathered specimen named Donaldson, lurking in the shadows behind.

  Maud couldn’t speak, not really; she shivered in Jim’s embrace. The sister took her up to bed at once, returning a while afterwards with a couple of questions to ask. Had Jim received her letter, informing him of his daughter’s – his second daughter’s birth? And if so, why had he made no response?

  What could Jim say to this? He was aware of no such letter, but that wasn’t to say that none had arrived. It would have got swept up with everything else. Lost in the drift of writs.

  ‘The child was … well, I take it?’

  Edith – was that correct? – set her lips in a cold line. ‘Maud, her name is. That’s what her mother chose. She’s small and a little quiet, but the doctor was satisfied. His bill is on its way to you. The birth took nearly a whole day. Some complication. A lot of pain. The chloroform, in the end, left her quite insensible.’ She took a steadying breath. ‘It was easier. The fostering, I mean, the moment of parting. Easier than – than last time.’

  The sister blinked dazedly, miserably, made vulnerable for a second by her exhaustion; then she looked around the silver grey parlour and seemed to remember who she was talking to. The remainder of her conversation was clipped and practical, little more than a list of Maud’s requirements. She took her leave reluctantly, though, walking rather slowly to the door and casting a last worried look towards the staircase.

  Jim sent straight away for Willie, having no confidence at all in the quacks of Kentish Town.

  ‘There was injury,’ said Dr Whistler, after he’d made his examination. ‘Nothing too concerning, I think, but she’s very weak. She needs to heal.’

  Rest was prescribed, and peace, and beef tea; and having got past Mr Donaldson unmolested on account of his profession, Willie slipped Jim a couple of pound notes to defray their expenses.

  It jarred the soul. Maud’s robustness was her great gift, forming an uncommon partnership with her grace and artistic sensibilities. It had honestly never occurred to Jim that giving birth might lay her so low. The first time had been difficult, certainly, but nothing like this. Confined to their room, she slept and she wept; and she bled still, rather heavily he thought. He had Willie back, and the sister, but neither could tell him anything. He became steadily more concerned. Could bereavement seriously be on the cards here? The loss of Maud Franklin. The loss of his Madame. That really would be too much.

  But no, thank God, this very darkest of thoughts actually seemed to push the girl in the opposite direction. One dull afternoon in the middle of the month, Jim discovered her sitting up in bed. He approached and she gripped his hand, her eyes open wide and uncommonly bright, and asked him in a faint, hoarse voice what the devil was going on with that man down there in the hall.

  ‘Is he from Levy? Has that wretch done as he threatened, and served his writ? I thought he couldn’t do anything while you weren’t here. That’s what you said.’

  Damned near beaming with relief, Jim lowered himself beside her, reflecting that the truth could be an enormous and unwieldy thing; if it was mishandled, or dropped in the delivery, it could do grave damage. Maud was unwell. He had to be careful.

  ‘No, dear girl, this is something else. Hughes is the company name. They arrived mere hours after my return from France. But you mustn’t worry, not for an instant. There is a plan afoot. It is bold, I warn you, and it may sound alarming at first, but it is a truly great scheme. A way of shaking off the enemy’s snares once and for all, and bounding off together into the woods.’

  Maud waited. Jim looked into her face, so drained of health and colour; at the dark crescents pressed beneath her eyes.

  ‘Bankruptcy,’ he said, much as Owl had done to him.

  She released his hand, fell back onto the pillow and pulled the blankets over her head.

  ‘It isn’t how you think,’ Jim said to the heaped bedclothes. ‘Listen, Maudie, it works like this. The declaration is made, the estate valued and claims entered against it. My friends conjure up debts, as large as they can make them, the largest being first in line. And then they claim our possessions – don’t you see? – for us to retrieve afterwards. Every last thing. Every painting and print. Every stick of furniture. No further proceedings can begin. The enemy is frustrated. Caught in a stalemate. And a year from now we will wonder what all the fuss was over.’

  From within the bed, Maud made a peculiar sound, midway between a gasp and a snarl. She threw the sheets off her, down almost to her waist, lying still for a moment with her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘All right then.’

  February 1879

  The worst of it was her memory. It was worse than the headaches; worse than the confounded treachery of her limbs, so weak and prone to collapse; worse even than the unthinkable state of her lower regions, where everything was so desperately, excruciatingly sore that simply passing water felt like she was settling herself against a strip of red-hot iron. No, the worst thing, the really distressing thing, was that she had no recollection of the birth, or of her child. Or at least nothing she could trust.

  Edie had brought her into the midwife’s house, through to a downstairs chamber used for birthing. There had been a bed with no board at the end. Lamps had been lit, the fire stoked and water brought. She’d been in pain by then – that great staggering pain that scooped all thought from your head and set you bawling with everything you’d got. Her hat had rolled away across the floorboards. Her boots had been removed, then her stockings and her gown. The midwife’s hands had charted the dimensions of her – of the baby inside her and the position in which it lay. Some time later a man had arrived, bespectacled and fat, a doctor she was told, and the drug had been administered. It had been measured in tiny drips – grains, the doctor had called them – but the dose had been generous. There had been a smell a little like pears, but far sweeter and stronger than any pear could ever be.

  And after this the pieces became smudged together, their sequence quite lost. There was Edie’s wax-white face, the jaw clenched so tightly Maud had feared for her teeth. The fierce redness of blood. The tug of the doctor’s blade, like a bramble snagging on your coat. And the child. Maud had for so long now been accustomed to finding Ione in her dreams – Ione newborn, black curls caked to her scalp, letting out a scratchy mewl – that she truly could not tell if the images in her mind were of the new baby or of her first. Her efforts to examine them, to test them somehow, only deepened her uncertainty.

  Clear sensations, rooted properly in a time and a place, began to return about two days afterwards. Fully clothed and feverish, she was sitting in a hansom beside her sister, feeling a sharp, agonising twist for each individual cobblestone they traversed. She gripped the leather handle and pressed her forehead against the glass, concentrating very hard upon not screaming aloud. Edie explained that the child was already gone, away with the same family. They were going to register the birth, like they’d done the first time. As Maud had insisted they do.

  ‘You must be on the certificate. That’s what you said. So you can claim her later, if you wish it.’

  So Maud gathered herself as best she could and answered the necessary questions. Her perception, however, was still lagging: when the registrar asked her daughter’s name, she gave her own instead. She’d been thinking of Alexandra, should the child prove to be a girl, but didn’t try to correct the error. Indeed, she promptly added Jimmy’s surname, and his middle name also, to hear how it sounded – and then her own surname too, for good measure. Maud McNeill Whistler Franklin. It only just fitted on the page.

  The registrar took down the father’s name, and that he was an artist by profession; the mother’s name; and then, after a pause, he asked the location of the birth.

  ‘What about me?’ said Maud. ‘What of my profession?’

  The fellow eyed her inscrutably; he indicated the boxes printed on the certificate with the brass nib of his pen. ‘There is no place
for it, madam.’

  ‘Artist.’ Maud jabbed at the sheet with her finger, beneath her name. ‘Put that I am an artist as well.’

  Before long she was home again, at the decaying, beleaguered White House. It was dark; it was so dark all the time and it was freezing bloody cold. Spring was on its way, that’s what people kept saying, but it felt to Maud like the seasons were actually slipping backwards. Like spring was withering into winter. Dr Whistler left more chloral for her, with strict instructions about what to take and when. Despite this strictness, it turned out to be almost as liberal as the measure she’d been given in Camden Town. It slowed her to a crawl, to a condition of near imbecility; but the pain was so great otherwise, and the direction of her thoughts so disquieting, that she could not bear to put it aside.

  On the bad days, which at first were plentiful, it was difficult not to resent Jimmy – to loathe him, even – when he rushed in to tell her the details of his latest wheeze, or some triumph he’d brought about up in the studio. He’d already moved to another bedroom, telling her that he needed uninterrupted rest, what with all that was happening. Simple meals he could manage, but changing sheets and linen was beyond him. With the departure of Mrs Cossins, Edie had to be summoned from Kentish Town for the most basic ministrations. Maud caught herself thinking, as she looked around and saw anew how every­thing seemed to be coming apart – well, why not them too? What was stopping it, in all honesty? The house was to be sold. Bills of sale had been pasted over those plain white flanks. It was ending. Why not end Jimmy and Maud as well? She’d left her last home, walking down from Kentish Town at the age of seventeen to become an artists’ model. She’d left with nothing but a carpet bag and a few coppers and she’d been perfectly fine. Couldn’t she be fine again?