Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  The dinner she got there was unexpectedly good: two slices of rare beef; just-cooked beans that squeaked against the teeth, swimming in a sharp, oily sauce; a glass of rich red wine poured from an earthenware jug. Sitting by a window, she looked through the English art papers that Mr Lucas had bought for her in the Gare de l’Est. While in Paris, she’d been on the lookout for detailed news of the White House sale, now nearly a month in the past – the dispersal of effects, the sale of the building itself, its owner’s flight overseas – but it had barely been noted, with a few lines at most. There had certainly been no mention of huge painted cartoons. She could find nothing in these issues either. It seemed increasingly likely to her that Jimmy’s scheme to shame Leyland, of which he’d been so very proud, had been foiled somehow.

  Maud paid and gathered up the art papers, dropping them into a bin on her way out. She made the next train with time to spare. They departed, and were quickly clear of the city. Outside now was darkness, broken only by the occasional patch of gaslight, illuminating a road crossing, a wayside tavern or the passing platform of a provincial station. It was quiet enough, her carriage being almost empty and a fair distance back from the engine, so she put her bag behind her boots, undid a couple of her corset’s lower hooks and went to sleep.

  She woke suddenly, her head knocking against the window frame. It was night still. The carriage was moving noisily beneath her, clattering from one set of rails to another – crossing the intersection, she saw, as they approached a large station. She turned to discover a man, rather fat and fast asleep, sitting directly across from her. They’d been two strangers together, six feet apart and dead to the world. This gave her an odd feeling. The sign for Modane slid by the window: her next change. Relieved, she rose from her seat and reached for her bag, patting the top to find the handle, taking care not to knock knees with the fellow slumbering opposite.

  It was only the middle of autumn, yet Modane was freezing, the snow piled so deep and packed so solid it was as if the station had been dug out from under it. The change was quick, but the train into Italy proved disconcertingly popular. Parties were hastily claiming compartments for themselves – lowering blinds, making beds across seats. Maud had to settle for a coupé at the rear of a carriage, where it was cramped and rather cold. Giving up on sleep, she pulled her coat more tightly around her and concentrated on the view.

  They were in the mountains now. The massive forms were just becoming visible in the deep blue of early dawn: the ridges and dizzying peaks, the black forests, the glowing veins of snow. Maud knew that she should be stirred, that she should reach for a sketchbook, or at the very least try to fix things firmly in her mind – the elements of a picture – as Jimmy would do. She felt more diminished, however, than inspired. Staring up at something that staggeringly huge seemed only to reflect her own unimportance. Her total nothingness.

  The Alps had been top of Edie’s list of great things, ahead of anything she could think of in Venice. A strange dance had been done when Maud had called round to say goodbye. Beforehand, she’d vowed that she would be both detached and decisive, that she would not on any account allow her sister to make her feel guilty, or bereft, or anything else. This was being done for money, to improve a circumstance that had grown truly dire. It was what was required. She’d had fifteen pounds with her, in fact, taken from Jimmy’s advance, to leave for the foster family – enough to see them through to the new year if necessary.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be away that long?’ Edie had asked. ‘I thought it was only to be for a month at most.’

  And then there had been tears, great heaving sobs; for the fact of it was that Maud and Jimmy would have to remain in Venice until his commission was complete, and there was absolutely no way of knowing how long this might take. He had etched plates in two hours, it was true. But he’d also fussed over them for weeks on end. Maud hadn’t wanted to go to Italy any more. She hadn’t even wanted to go back to Chelsea.

  ‘Just sight of them,’ she’d said. ‘Just for a minute. Surely that would be all right?’

  Edie had refused, though, as she always did, stating that it would make everything more difficult and add to Maud’s troubles; and then she had actually set about talking up the trip, in an attempt to repair her sister’s resolve. The list of great things had been rolled off, with visible effort. The majestic mountains. Gondolas. Carnival masks. Maud had been told that she would be able to rest, and recover her health at last; that Jimmy would work, to begin rebuilding his fortunes; and that perhaps, when they returned, the situation could be different.

  By Turin, Maud was heartily tired of solitude. She went out into the blinding morning sunshine, shivering her way along the side of the train. The carriages seemed every bit as full as they’d been in Modane. Putting down her bag, stamping her boots upon the icy platform, she looked off at the city’s dense mosaic of terracotta roofs; at the horizon beyond, a jagged white line of mountaintops, unreal in its perfection; at the flawless sky overhead, only a shade more blue than black. She wanted to laugh aloud. What the devil, she thought, am I doing here?

  English was being spoken somewhere on the train, among the Italian and French. Following it, Maud discovered a little family, a mother and her two adolescent sons, with a compartment to themselves. The mother – simply dressed, even-featured, capable-seeming – agreed to let her join them, introducing herself as Mrs Holt and her sons as Duncan and Richard. The boys fell quiet, both being old enough to be rendered mute and red-eared by the arrival of a young woman. Noting the intricate beaded pattern at the hem of this stranger’s skirt and her tiny, fashionable hat, Mrs Holt was keen to establish her respectability. She was a widow, she said, journeying out with her boys to winter in Milan with her brother, who was a successful trader in cured meats.

  ‘Italian hams,’ she informed Maud, ‘are quite without equal.’

  Nestled in a warm corner, the chill beginning to leave her body, Maud suddenly felt quite exhausted – ready to nap and nothing else. The woman’s expectant expression served as a prompt, however. She pinched the ring through her glove, rotating it on her finger.

  ‘Mrs Whistler,’ she said. ‘I am heading down to join my husband in Venice.’

  Mrs Holt didn’t seem to recognise the name. ‘To travel such a distance alone,’ she said, acting as if impressed. ‘Why, I don’t believe I could do it. Although I must say that these two ruffians here are more burden than boon, the majority of the time. Do you have any children, Mrs Whistler?’

  The steam whistle sounded up ahead. Maud stayed quiet for a few seconds, wondering if there was some kind of challenge concealed within this question; if an assumption had been made. She considered embellishing her fraudulent propriety – the daughters left with relatives, perhaps, to be collected before the year was out, when their father’s work was done – but it was more than her weary mind could manage. She looked out at the platform, just starting to move away now, and shook her head.

  ‘I do not.’

  December 1879

  Maud came in from the staircase and shut the door behind her, brushing powdery snow from her sleeves. Under her arm was a package wrapped in paper and string, a couple of letters collected from the Café Florian, and a loaf of bread shaped like a little torpedo. Jim watched her from their bed, on the far side of the dingy two-room apartment. Still too poorly to do very much, he’d passed the morning in dismal contemplation of the equipment and materials he’d brought with him from London. There were copperplates and etching tools, barely touched; pastels and chalks, which had seen only a few days’ use since his arrival nearly three months before; and the brushes, a dozen or so of his best, the heads as neat and dry as on the day they’d been bought.

  The last of these, right then, seemed particularly vexing. Venice was a place for Nocturnes. Jim had known it from his first evening in the city – when a winding lane, no wider than the span of his arms, had brought him to a stretch of moonlit water, looking out towards the dome of a
distant church, almost lost in the mists of the lagoon. There was no money, though, for the necessary paints, and the quantities of linseed oil that Nocturnes required. Neither was there any blasted space – no room for a table, nor for the pacing and lunging that attended on such work.

  And of course there was the cold. This Jim had failed to anticipate. One had an idea of Venice that stood quite apart from the season, derived from Canaletto, the lithographs of Lessore, and old Turner, he supposed: sun-bleached squares and shady canals, gondolas drifting in the still warmth. That the city also existed in winter, and was subject fully to its debilitating hardships, came as a most unwelcome surprise. It was a bitter one as well, worse than Chelsea by a considerable extent – colder even, he reckoned, than those he’d known in St Petersburg as a boy. It was a climate in which clothing served as no protection, and fire struggled against the chilling dampness that rose up from the water.

  Money, however, accepted no excuses. The past few years had taught him that, at least. Huish’s advance allowed only for starvation rations, and the meanest accommodation on the Rio di San Barnaba, but the president of the esteemed Fine Arts Society had known that the man before him had to take whatever was offered. There was only enough to last until Christmas, realistically speaking; any longer and they’d be subsisting on cat’s meat and cheese parings. So he’d prepared his plates, readied his tools and forced himself out into it.

  Yet at first – well, for weeks – this watery city had confounded him. It was like a knot of beauty: an entanglement of views pulled so damned tight that it simply could not be untied. The necessary immersion would not come, due to the nagging worry that there might be better just around the next corner. And then, when one did finally stop – sit on a ledge or step, pull the plate from one’s pocket and slide the needle from its cork – both copper and steel would be like ice; rather colder than ice in fact, and painful to the touch. Fingers shook and grew numb in moments. The whole exercise had rapidly acquired the complexion of farce.

  Inevitably, Jim had fallen ill, brought low by the most burdensome and tenacious of colds. Maud, still not yet entirely well herself, had become concerned and fetched in a troupe of local medics. During the course of their examinations, a number of bystanders had become involved – the landlord, the neighbours, a delivery boy with a parcel for upstairs – everybody providing opinions and arguing with the doctors while the invalid had sniffled somewhere between them, quite forgotten.

  For there was a contrast, Jim had soon discovered, between the silence of the city, with its shadowy alleys and spectral reflections, and the great noisiness of its populace. He found the language wanting in refinement and a degree of exactness; and the religion, dear God, the religion was accompanied by a clamour of bells protracted enough to rouse the dead. One Sunday, devilishly early, he’d been driven downstairs in nightshirt and coat to remonstrate at the church door. A group of deacons had emerged to fend him off, and they’d rowed for ten full minutes beneath a blackened painting of St Barnaba healing the sick.

  In short, Jim had come to be dogged by a sense of the opéra comique, as if he was wandering unwittingly from one ridiculous scene to the next. His life appeared to have become some kind of allegory, an absurd and very cautionary tale.

  Maud moved out of sight – to the dresser? To look out of a window? Jim craned his neck, asking in a hoarse and plaintive voice if she would be so kind as to pass the letters. She came through, impassively handed him two envelopes, then walked back. He could tell from the handwriting that they were from Way and Nellie, his brother Willie’s charming wife, who was proving to be more inclined to correspondence than her husband. His hands were shaking a little at the thought of the news they might contain. This was the other great impediment: a really quite dreadful and unexpected homesickness. The painter of London, of its bridges and lovely fogs, had been uprooted, transported many hundreds of miles from his rightful province; removed from the clubs, the galleries and the theatres; from the hansoms, the fine French cuisine and the luxury – from all that he enjoyed and deserved. At times he wanted to paw the ground, like a racehorse kept from its race.

  His people too, his boon companions – he missed every man-jack of them. In the depths of his illness, he’d fanned out his unused paintbrushes on the bed and named each one for his absent friends. There was Theo for block shapes, and Alan for details; Archie for certain highlights, like the spread of fireworks; Matthew, the very largest, for great sweeps of sky and water – for those Whistler fogs. And the trickiest, a brush with a triangular head and lush deep bristles, purchased for him by Maud from a colourman in Soho – which he’d found versatile, suited to all manner of tasks – he’d called Carlos.

  The letters were torn open and devoured in seconds. Jim slumped back, the pages falling limp in his hands. They were dear people, Way and Nellie, and they meant well, but their correspondence seldom failed to disappoint. Jim was writing more than he had in his entire life – and receiving nothing, it felt like, in return. They dashed off a couple of pages, a few vague mentions of this or that, allusions and inferences rather than complete tales. No meat. No spice. He had never felt more away from things. From everything in the world that was important.

  The state of the show, of course, was a matter of constant speculation. The White House had been sold, that much he’d discovered, to a dull dog on The Times named Quilter; which was enough, in large part, to chase the crows off his carcass. But the fate of his work, the paintings he’d been obliged to leave in the studio – and those he’d left there very much by design – remained tormentingly unknown. A further sale was scheduled for the new year, at Sotheby’s, of drawings, canvases and so forth. But much more than that nobody seemed able to tell him.

  Owl, as always, was the real mystery. He’d disappeared in the weeks prior to Jim’s departure, another of those unexplained absences, not even showing himself in the last wild days when Jim and Eldon had careened around the empty White House. They’d scrawled aphorisms above the doors, sung rude songs at the studio piano, composed mordant missives to lawyers, accountants, receivers, and to every enemy on the books. Yet throughout, no matter how much liquor was consumed, both had been looking over their shoulders, half-expecting one of those famous, nonchalant entrances – and feeling a touch let down when it had failed to arrive.

  All Jim had were rumours. A new life by the sea, somewhere down in Kent. Tours of the Continent, of Belgium and the Netherlands, in search of the usual opportunities. Rather more perturbing hints of meddling at the Fine Art Society – suggesting to the fellows there that their great etcher was neglecting his commission to perform other work. Jim had written to the Portuguese at some length, scolding him gently for his misinformation, and urging him to come out to Venice himself, where there were many chances indeed for Owlish enterprise. This elicited nothing. The letter might as well have been posted into the lagoon.

  The lack struck him now, in his gloom and dissatisfaction. He looked to the paintbrushes, standing in an old vase atop the mantelpiece – to Carlos, the versatile brush with the triangular head. ‘Owl, mon vieux,’ he said. ‘I have left you the show. Do be so kind as to tell me how it goes.’

  Maud was listening – looking through from the other room. ‘Perhaps he’s avoiding you.’

  Jim sighed. Maud had been down on the Owl for some time, since long before their departure from England. The cause of it he’d been unable to discover. ‘He is my friend,’ he told her. ‘You do not realise, I think, what he has done for us.’

  Coming closer, Maud leaned against the doorframe. She considered him for a moment, crossing her arms. She seemed unimpressed.

  It sometimes struck Jim as perfectly incredible, given the extent of his reversals, that he still had this excellent young woman at his side. Her compassion astonished him. Her love gratified him. He was helpless before her, really. Affinity: yes, that was the word. Being here, alone in a land absolutely foreign to them both, had allowed them to rediscover their af
finity. As he’d languished, coughing and sneezing and so on, she’d resumed her artworks, those flowers of hers – positively radiant in the colouring, if still a little naive in the forms. He’d provided her with guidance and correction, and they’d been master and pupil once more. In return she’d cared for him, and had him go out, when he felt well enough, on expeditions: walks on the Lido, to marvel at the sunsets; or to acres of Tintoretto, hidden away in remote chapels, that had left him positively stammering with ecstasy.

  And yet how, in total honesty, could one not grow weary with the constant company of another? Of being isolated with them – required to live with them in poverty, and in exile? It would be impossible. There was a simplicity to her, an ordinariness almost, that had come to infuriate him. Her remarks, at times, as they strolled through the city’s sewer-smelling labyrinths, had made him damned near bite his knuckles in annoyance.

  ‘So pretty here,’ she’d say, ‘isn’t it, Jimmy?’

  Signs could be detected as well of a melancholy cast to Maud’s mind, worsened by the malaise that had lingered in her since the second birth. She was writing even more letters than Jim, to sisters and aunts – and to children, he’d begun to suspect. To daughters. Matters quite dealt with, as far as he was concerned. On her ring-finger, too, was that cheap bit of pewter bought for the purposes of her journey down from Paris – but she’d yet to remove it, even after he’d made a couple of rather pointed comments. He’d heard her on the stairs, in the alleys and the markets, introducing herself as Mrs Whistler. She’d done this back in London, it was true, with tradesmen and moral types, but only on occasion and where strictly necessary. Here it seemed her adopted name. Jim was not known for his perceptiveness when it came to the thoughts and feelings of others, yet he could detect a slightly fraught quality to his Madame, as she kept them both going through those desperate, frozen months – the faintest sense of strain.