Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  Today, though, she was taking no nonsense. ‘There’s word at Florian’s,’ she said, ‘of some English passing through.’

  Jim tilted back his head, pressing the letters over his face. ‘Who could it possibly be, this far out of season? A disgraced actress? An eloping earl?’

  ‘The Leylands,’ Maud replied. ‘Quite the party, it is. The father. Fanny and her husband.’ She looked at the floor, fiddling with the buttons of her well-worn coat. ‘They say she’s already with child. Due in the next few months. And the rest of the children too. Bound for Trieste, then away on a tour.’

  Jim lifted off the letters and looked up. The last he’d heard of this family, Mrs Leyland had left, just as she’d said she would in the Lyceum, and requested a separation. ‘When?’ he asked.

  Maud didn’t know, but it made no difference; in less than a minute Jim was clattering down the stone staircase, a soft felt hat on his head, passing the bamboo cane from hand to hand as he pulled on his coat. He rushed onto the Rio di San Barnaba in amongst a sparse early evening crowd, heading left – no, right – no, it was left – towards the nearest footbridge. He’d not been out much on his own, in truth, and had stuck mostly to the Dorsoduro. As a consequence he had only the vaguest idea how to locate the railway station.

  Maud was at his elbow. ‘What are you doing? What d’you think—’

  ‘I shall be there to greet him, Maudie!’ he cried, jabbing his cane into the air. ‘I shall be waiting at the goddamned gate! Our dear friend Leyland must be congratulated on his – ha! – his new-found freedom. On his liberation from the marriage bond that he regarded with such con­­tempt.’

  Years before, one Christmas at Speke, they’d talked – the family and James Whistler, then their cher ami – of embarking on a tour of Europe, of the places they could visit together. And here the fiend was, having dispensed with the trouble­some painter and driven out the blameless wife, embarking upon it without them. It seemed at that moment like an insult. Yet another inexcusable affront. The notion came to him, there in the grey Venetian twilight, of a duel. Why the blazes not? Such a thing could happen here in a way it could not in London: a fight with pistols, or swords, or some other instrument of death. Or at the very least there could be a good solid punch-up in a square somewhere. A dunking in one of those marble fountains. A whipping – yes, a whipping! Give Leyland a dose of his own medicine. It was the stuff of which legends were made, quite frankly. A bit of poetic goddamned justice.

  ‘Jimmy,’ Maud said, tugging at his coat. ‘We don’t have the first idea when the train gets in. Which train it is, even. Are you just going to wait in the cold all evening? How long—’

  He shook her off, plunging down a canal-side path, over the hump-back of another little bridge; then he paused at a junction, beneath a gas jet, and screwed in the eyeglass as he realised he had no idea at all where he was.

  ‘I can’t miss him,’ he said, starting off to the right. ‘Don’t you see, Maud? I simply can’t.’

  The street widened, becoming a small campo with a white statue in the centre, some saint or other, besides which five or six men in heavy winter coats were smoking pipes around a brazier. Halfway across, Jim got a sense that this was in fact leading them in the wrong direction – that it went off to the north-west, towards the main loop of the Grand Canal. He circled the statue to find himself facing Maud, panting up behind him, obviously close to her limit.

  ‘This is useless,’ she gasped. ‘God save me, Jimmy, but I – I honestly don’t understand what it is you hope to do.’

  Jim glared up at the darkening, colourless sky. A crescent moon was shining behind a thin sheet of cloud. Droplets of ice were clustering in his moustache, he noticed, and at the corners of his mouth. There was a fierce tickle at the base of his throat – a cough building.

  ‘How the devil,’ he croaked, ‘did you imagine I would respond?’ He flexed his fingers around the end of his cane. ‘Hang it all, Maud, why in thunder did you tell me this?’

  Maud approached, her breath misting around them. She took his arm, his shoulder, gathering him in. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back. It’s bloody freezing out here.’

  This was evasion, of course; something in her manner, usually so guileless, brought Jim quite abruptly to the verge of an overwhelming insight.

  ‘But then,’ he said, ‘why is Leyland in Italy at all? A tour will take weeks, surely. Months. He’s on the damned committee. He made a special point of joining it, didn’t he, so he could get at my paintings – The Three Girls, and others as well no doubt. But if he’s out here he’ll miss the sale. The one at Sotheby’s.’ He looked again at the frozen moon; at the saint, his marble head bowed, his arms outstretched. ‘Why in heaven’s name would he miss the sale?’

  Maud pulled in her shawl, trembling against his side, saying nothing. And there it was. She wanted him to ask these questions. This was the reason she’d told him.

  *

  With the advent of the new year, Jim’s cold finally retreated. Away went the extract of malt and the throat pastes; back came that old sense of wanting to show them, to show them all. The best revenge, so the saying went, was living well. Jim could not completely agree: he’d always felt that the best revenge lay in some form of exquisite public humiliation, or a good thrashing. Nevertheless, he still found plenty to like in the thought of victory, of artistic triumph and soaring prices – in buying back everything that had been taken from him. As he was too poor for oil, and the city too chilly for copper, he decided to pick up his pastels instead, venturing outside with a drawing board and a few sheets of coarse brown paper.

  And all at once, it seemed, the secret places of Dorsoduro were revealed: alleys, courts and bridges; decayed marble-clad palaces and passageways of ancient brick; the wide, sweeping skies. They came to him quickly, three or four studies a week, in flaming reds, dusky blues and oranges, and those cool, soapy whites that only pastel could supply. And they were good. He was sure of it. He felt again the bellows’ roar of pride; his soul leapt high and wild. Whistler was restored.

  Maud saw it too, bless her heart. She laughed when he showed her the first ones, a gleeful little hoot, and declared them the most wondrous things; then she squeezed him tight and planted kisses on his jaw, his neck, his earlobe.

  ‘They’ll sell, you know,’ he said into her hair. ‘I really don’t see how they can help it.’

  Along with Jim’s self-regard returned his sociability – initially centred at first, rather to his bemusement, upon the American Consulate. The consul and his wife, having discovered him at work one day and learned who he was – having known who he was, actually, and been most pleased to make his acquaintance – took to inviting him to gatherings in their splendid dwelling at San Maurizio. From this, other invitations inevitably sprang, at palaces up and down the Grand Canal. Jim was unused to spending time with Americans, beside his brother and mother and a couple of others, and the directness of their manners required some adjustment on his part. At times, he could not quite escape the sense of being under examination – of being before a board of inspection perched alertly upon a sixteenth-century sofa, attempting to get the measure of a character rather resistant, it had to be admitted, to easy definition.

  Thankfully, not all the people encountered in these American palaces were of a diplomatic cast. As the winter eased, writers and composers and even artists began to stroll onto the scene. These young men, it transpired, had all heard of James McNeill Whistler as well; they were rather in awe of him, in fact. He soon discovered that they needed very little convincing to lend him money, and were glad to provide artistic materials gratis – meaning oils at last for Matthew, Alan and the rest of them. Several were regular visitors to the watery city also, and knew where fun was to be had. Venice slowly took on a rather different aspect.

  Details from London, however, remained unforthcoming. The whole show had collapsed into shadow. Jim decided to be philosophical about this. There was little left to b
e lost in England, in truth, and everything to be gained in Italy. And of course now he knew the reason for it; for one question led inevitably to another and the natural conclusion was reached – or confessed to, it felt like, somewhere deep within him. A number of weeks still had to pass before he was able to speak of it. He was at the Rio di San Barnaba, out on the narrow balcony with Maud. It was late; he’d just returned from a reception at the consulate. He wasn’t sure if he’d woken her or if she’d been awake already, but she’d put on her coat to join him for a cigarette.

  ‘I mean, it’s obvious,’ he said.

  Maud pursed her lips to exhale and looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Leyland has someone there. To watch his interests. Leaving him at liberty to tour the Continent.’

  Maud stayed quiet. She smoked, shivering slightly as she stared up at the stars.

  ‘He has lawyers, of course,’ Jim continued. ‘Lawyers by the dozen. But that isn’t it. My fellows would see them off one way or another. It was shown in the Court of Exchequer, was it not, what a lawyer knows about art. No. Maud, I – it—’ He stopped. ‘It must be treachery. And there is really only one culprit.’

  There was a short silence. Maud bent down to grind out her cigarette in a broken saucer, then leaned against the wrought iron balustrade.

  ‘I suppose we shouldn’t blame him. What’s the use? The Owl is a creature of coin – drawn irresistibly to its deepest reserve.’ Jim pulled at his moustache. ‘The duplicity, though, Maudie. It is deuced hard to take. That he stood at my side and spun me his stratagems, whilst trafficking all the while with the enemy. With Leyland, for God’s sake. The things he told me and had me do – to think that in reality—’ He glanced at Maud. She’d been waiting for him to make this deduction, he saw. She’d been waiting for some time. ‘Great heavens, you knew,’ he said. ‘What did you know?’

  Maud shrugged. ‘Nothing really. A feeling.’

  Jim sensed omission here, but was too damned blue, frankly, to go after the full story. He had begged this person for their aid. He had been so grateful when they had seemed to offer it. With Owl he’d been at his most vulnerable – and yet the fellow had been sniggering to himself, more than likely, as he’d extended that helping hand.

  Very well: now he was angry. This was firmer, more familiar ground. He strode back inside, emerging a moment later with that triangular-headed brush. He felt its weight, studying the long, supple stem and the bright metal band at the base of the bristles. Then, gripping the rounded end, he bent it way back over his shoulder and sent Carlos spinning down into the canal.

  March 1880

  Mr Bacher was a tall man – good-looking and sandy-haired and very full, Maud thought. Walking by his side, she felt like an invalid once more, frail and sallow, worn down by the winter and sliding back slowly into the ailments of the previous year. She found herself leaning in on him, allowing herself to be guided, firming up her hold upon his arm. He came to Venice every spring, he told her, usually staying until what he called the Fall, and was entirely comfortable with the place – Maud couldn’t quite think of it as a city – in a way that she knew she never would be. She’d realised the other day that she hadn’t seen a horse, hadn’t smelled manure or heard the clip-clop of hooves, in nearly six months. There was something uncanny, also, in those chipped, floating palaces, striped with pink and white; the stone saints with missing fingers, gazing down lovingly from their alcoves; the shadowy little churches, their plaster crumbling, inside which you’d come across a gigantic painting by Titian or one of those other swells. It was like a dream at times, and not necessarily a pleasant one. It set the mind going in all manner of unexpected directions.

  Venice was cold that day, as usual, and overcast; it was also busy, busier than Maud had yet seen. Vegetables by the crate-load, chickens in cages and countless other things were being unloaded from boats, with much shouting and gesticulation. Mr Bacher navigated it easily, while asking her endless questions about Jimmy. He was only slightly older than Maud, from the city of Boston he said, and an artist and etcher, set up in a large, ramshackle house on the Riva San Biagio with half a dozen of his countrymen. All of them were perfectly fascinated by the artistic celebrity – the American artistic celebrity – that they’d discovered in their midst. As they went on, she began to suspect that Mr Bacher had offered his assistance – with an errand to a stationer’s and a couple of other shops – merely so that he could subject her to some uninterrupted quizzing.

  ‘Why, then, did more men not come forward to take the stand? He’s popular, isn’t he, in London – with the great painters there?’

  Maud stepped around a confused goat. She didn’t answer.

  ‘He’s told me that a number of his friends disappointed him. But why on earth would they do that? Surely it would have been an honour – for such a noble cause—’

  ‘He received a lot of poor advice,’ Maud said. ‘There were people he thought loyal who have proved themselves otherwise. The whole thing was – it needn’t—’ She gave up. ‘Honestly, Mr Bacher—’

  ‘Otto,’ he murmured, ‘please.’

  ‘Otto. It was a peculiar time. A most peculiar time.’

  ‘He showed us the damages at Florian’s last night. That single farthing, on the cord around his neck. There was much ominous talk about how he wasn’t finished with them – with Ruskin and his crowd. What d’you think he intends to do upon his return?’

  Good Lord, Mr Bacher, Maud wanted to say, he doesn’t know; he doesn’t have the foggiest bloody idea! She was tempted, also, to reveal that the coin on the cord was merely the latest of several Jimmy had claimed were the Ruskin farthing. Shortly after her arrival, in fact, she’d watched him flick one defiantly from the Rialto, into the waters of the Grand Canal.

  Instead she said, ‘Another pamphlet, I’d imagine. Perhaps some kind of public address. He’s been talking about that a fair bit.’

  ‘My dear Mrs Whistler,’ laughed Bacher, ‘he’s been dashed well doing it, every night this week. Why, they nearly ejected him from the Orientale, he was making so much fuss!’ With that he embarked upon an affectionate imitation: crowing, unmistakably pompous, but self-mocking as well. ‘The Masterpiece, mes amis, should appear to the painter like a flower. It has no reason to explain its presence. It has no mission to fulfil.’

  Maud tried to smile, wondering why it was that people always thought she’d want to hear their impersonations of Jimmy. It was true, though, that this tendency of his to pontificate – to deliver his rules and edicts, of which there seemed to be so very many – was becoming more marked. A fresh and willing audience had been stumbled upon, its knowledge of the trial and everything afterwards limited to a handful of brief newspaper reports, which meant he could remould the legend in any way that suited him. Furthermore, this group from the Riva San Biagio was especially keen to laud a countryman who’d raised the standard for art, for the practitioners of art, in one of the great nations of Europe.

  ‘Nothing in the least bit great about it,’ Jimmy had declared once, in Maud’s hearing. ‘It is the land only of damned ignorance. Of coal-smoke and parsimony.’

  For along with his passion for lecturing, a new stridency had appeared in Jimmy’s sense of himself as an American. It was something he’d made very little of previously, back in Chelsea, beyond his buckwheat cakes, Edgar Allan Poe and the occasional mint julep. His accent, around his young artists at least, grew noticeably riper, shedding some of its careful imprecision. And in a really rather dizzying turnaround from his initial homesickness, he now bowed to none in his monumental scorn for England and the English – for the Academy and the Grosvenor both; for Queen Victoria, the foundlings in the boot-black factory and every godforsaken soul in between. It was difficult for Maud not to resent it; to be concerned by it for a whole host of reasons. Even Jimmy realised this.

  ‘I don’t mean you, Maudie, of course,’ he’d told her a couple of days earlier, ‘when I say these things. You stand apart. Yo
u and one or two others.’

  ‘You talk as if you’d never go back.’

  He’d laughed. ‘Oh no, my girl, I shall certainly go back. There are scores to be settled, are there not? Heavens, you know more of this than anyone.’

  ‘When, then?’ she’d asked. ‘Just so I know.’

  And here he’d grown vague, and talked for a while about the work he still had to do: more pastels, Nocturnes in oil. ‘We must empty the treasure chest, mustn’t we, before we haul anchor and sail away?’

  It was baffling. Maud had thought that once Jimmy had realised the truth about Owl he’d be looking to return home as soon as possible, to set everything straight. Cause a bit of fuss, as he so liked to do. But this just did not seem to be the case.

  ‘What about Mr Huish? The Fine Art Society? Aren’t they expecting their plates?’

  ‘The Fine Art Society,’ he’d snorted, ‘has us living out here on pennies. They can wait.’

  Thwarted, Maud had fallen quiet for a moment, chewing on a fingernail. Then she’d decided simply to come out with it. ‘What about the others – those you trusted with the show? Don’t you wish to—’

  ‘They can wait.’

  The stationer’s shop was as busy as the canals. It had a long marble-topped counter, rather like a tavern bar, with goods arrayed behind. Maud was known there. She stood out, she supposed – even more so today, with Mr Bacher beside her. The one clerk who spoke capable English took her order: material for correspondence, pens, ink and paper, much in demand on the Rio di San Barnaba.

  As Maud was going through her lire, trying to hide from Mr Bacher how precisely she had to count out the lire, the clerk was called away, a few yards down the counter, to attend to another English-speaking customer. She glanced over. A clean-shaven man in a dark suit and a short hat was addressing the fellow in the loud, excessively clear voice used habitually by the English with foreigners. Mourning paper was under discussion: four different options, with various widths to the black border, and weights to the paper itself – and on one, the most lavish, sad little putti perched in each corner. The clean-shaven man turned, his voice lowering, to consult with someone standing a step or two behind him: a woman, dressed in black, with a black hat and veil. The style of both was Italian, albeit modestly so, and they looked new. She came forward – she was young, Maud saw, and very slim – to consider the paper laid out on the counter, lifting the veil from her face.