Mrs Whistler

Jimmy had fished his tobacco pouch from his pocket, along with a couple of papers. He rolled them both a cigarette, passing hers over. Maud accepted it, knowing that she could no sooner smoke the damned thing than eat it whole. He put a match to his own and a new aroma filled that tiny, rocking box. Maud liked to smoke, always had, since she was ten years old. Now, though, the smell of it made her think of bitumen and burnt hair, of blood blackening on a butcher’s floor, of something poisonous and revolting. The cab slowed, approaching a corner. Her fingers closed around the door handle and she was out, clinging to a lamp post like it was a ship’s mast in a storm, swinging around and sliding down, coughing up a rope of treacly, yellow-green bile in the rough direction of the gutter.

It went on for a while, until her convulsions produced only a ghastly croaking sound. Jimmy was close by, perhaps two feet away. Oblivious to the rain, he was sitting on the high kerb, his leather bag beside him, finishing off his cigarette. Behind him was a parade of fine shops, their lamps alight. Traffic was rolling past, all hooves and horse legs and spinning spokes. Their cab was nowhere to be seen.

‘Could it have been an oyster?’ he mused. ‘Or that trout, maybe, that we had the Wednesday before last? River fish, Maudie, should never be trusted. One simply does not know what they’ve been swimming through. Why, if I were—’

‘There’s a child,’ Maud said.

She released the lamp post and leaned against it, trying to straighten her hat. Her gown was wet through across the shoulders; a cold drip weaved inside her corset, running down to the small of her back. It had been obvious. A sickness that can’t be shaken. Constant, deadening fatigue. The horrible intensity of smells. And the courses, the blasted courses, late now by more than a week. For nearly four years Maud had managed to avoid even the slightest scare. She knew when the lapse had occurred, though – she knew at once. It had been on the morning Jimmy had finished the shutters. She’d come over to Prince’s Gate, having not seen him for five straight days; and those peacocks, those extraordinary, mystical creatures, had been there to greet her, seeming to have blinked into existence at the snap of Jimmy’s gold-smeared fingers. He’d been up all night and was quite wild with exultation, proclaiming his deep delight that it was her – his Madame, his muse, his sacred partner – who’d been the first to stand before them. She was there, he’d said, in the peacocks – could she not see it? The raw elegance in those necks, in those trailing tails? It was hers.

They’d moved closer, arms entwining, talking excitedly of how pleased the Leylands would be when they took up residence there, and the great advancement it would surely bring. She’d glanced at him admiringly; he’d caught her eye and held it, in a kind of dare; and it had happened, right there on the floorboards, amid the pots and brushes and screwed-up bits of paper.

Jimmy was quiet for a minute. Then he flicked his cigarette end into a drain and began to speak about Charlie, his six-year-old son, who was lodged somewhere near Hyde Park in an arrangement that was satisfactory for everyone. This didn’t bring much reassurance, however, either to Maud or Jimmy himself. He stopped mid-sentence, pinching the bridge of his nose, thinking no doubt of the money – the thickening wad of bills on the hall dresser; the back rent due on their damp little house; the deal he’d just made with Leyland, and the different terms that might have been reached.

‘We’ll find an answer,’ he said at last. ‘We will.’

Maud drew in a shivering breath. She knew what was required of her. The babe would arrive, and the babe would go – to a foster family elsewhere in London most probably. Jimmy wouldn’t have children under his roof. He’d made that plain from the beginning: inimical to art, he’d said. And dear God, Maud didn’t want it either! She was a model, for goodness sake – training to be an artist herself, with Jimmy’s tutelage and encouragement. This could wreck it all. She pressed a palm against her forehead. How could she have been so careless? So bloody stupid?

‘Edie will help,’ she muttered. ‘She knows people, I think, back in Kentish Town.’

Saying her sister’s name prompted a series of sudden thoughts, each one weightier and more unwelcome than the last. Sooner or later, she was going to have to visit Edie and submit to a barrage of I-told-you-so’s. Her slender body, starved with such discipline, would swell up to a grotesque size. Jimmy would have to find another model, a girl who might well be better and end up replacing her for good. And she was going to have to give birth. Lord above. All that blood and pain and madness. She gulped, and gasped; and she leaned over sharply to be sick again.

October 1876

Swooping in through the door of the Knightsbridge telegraph office, Jim snatched up a form and a pencil from the counter and settled himself ill-temperedly in a corner. For a second or two he took in the hushed, assiduous atmosphere, the smell of ink and electrical wire, the tap-tapping of the machines. Then he inserted the eyeglass and began to write.

Have received your cheque at last.

He hesitated. This really didn’t do justice to the indignities of the weekend. Scratching together enough coin for basic sustenance had taxed his ingenuity – and he’d give much, much indeed, to forget the disdainful gratification on the landlord’s boiled-beef face as another two days’ grace had been begged of him.

Pounds I notice.

The pencil, gripped very fiercely, now popped out from between Jim’s fingertips, disappearing onto the floor. He bit back an exclamation. This was no good. Already he’d used nearly a third of the available space. A telegram might be immediate, but there was insufficient room for his anger to unfurl its wings. He needed to write an old-fashioned letter, signed with the Whistler butterfly – copied and numbered, as had become his habit in this particular correspondence. Publication, both the threat and the reality, was a weapon he was perfectly prepared to wield. Why the devil not? Let the vindictive philistine be hoist by his own petard. He had a supply of pens and paper at Prince’s Gate. The notion of composing a damning missive under its recipient’s own roof had a compelling audacity to it; so Jim tore the telegraph form in half, then quarters, then eighths, returned the eyeglass to his breast pocket and strode back onto the Brompton Road.

He quickly became aware that someone in the telegraph office had followed him out. This fellow had fallen in a few feet behind, but was now drawing level, leaning in to peer beneath the brim of Jim’s hat. He was tall, substantially built and clad in pale grey.

‘Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Whistler, my dear chap.’

Jim didn’t slow down. He recognised this voice: the foreign accent, slight but distinct, married rather curiously to a very English turn of phrase. ‘The Owl,’ he said.

‘How—’ The man weaved around a street-sweeper filling a sack with dead leaves. ‘How are you keeping, Jimmy?’

Looking sideways, Jim saw a long, reddish-brown moustache, a bright enamelled tiepin, and that decoration on his lapel, the folded strip of scarlet ribbon, said to be an honour of some kind from his native land. He knew this man well, or had done: Owl, the resourceful Anglo-Portuguese, an unequalled repository of art knowledge, on familiar terms with everyone. They hadn’t spoken, however, in at least five years; Owl remained close to a number of people Jim no longer saw. Whether this was by drift or rift he could scarcely remember.

‘You still Rossetti’s man, Owl?’

‘That,’ answered Owl, assuming a regretful air, ‘is a complicated question. Gabriel is a blessedly complicated cove. I may as well tell you, however, that it is coming to an end. I fear he and I have done all that we can do. I know that you two have long ceased your intimacy, Jimmy, but I fear for his health. He barely sleeps these days. Why, only the other week Watts arrived at dawn to find him up a tree in his nightshirt. Out on the Walk, this was – practically dangling over the bloody river. He claimed to be counting off the stars. Luckily I was on hand as well. Ended up luring the poor devil down with a beaker of brandy.’

This was Owl, Jim recalled, to the absolute degree. Some men wrote, some painted, some founded factories, or drew up legislation, or commanded troops in battle. The Owl talked. He had a tale for every situation, an endless roll of gossip and indiscretion – things that he really shouldn’t be repeating but was anyway, with every detail vividly and enthusiastically imparted.

‘Frederick Leyland, they say, is half mad with worry,’ Owl went on. ‘Watts tells me that he makes a special point of coming round whenever he’s in town – to spend time, you know, and discuss how he will arrange Gabriel’s canvases in his new London pile. I’ve heard talk of commissions as well. For the future. Something large.’ He paused. ‘Are you still engaged on the decoration there? Is that what brings you to this neck of the woods?’

Jim came close to smiling here – not an especially subtle fellow, this Owl – but his amusement was hindered by unease. So Rossetti got Leyland’s respect. Rossetti got shows of concern and allowances made, and further work promised to him. And for what? Certainly nothing as glorious as that dining room. Not by a very long distance. Jim’s unease grew into resentment. It was quite preoccupying. His eyes glazed over; he clicked his thumbnail against one of the ridges in his bamboo cane. He had to force his mind back to Owl’s enquiry.

‘Barely,’ he replied. ‘Today might well see the last of it.’ After which, he thought, I shall be gone. I shall flee that blasted place like it was Bluebeard’s oubliette. ‘I’ve other things to be doing. My contribution to the Grosvenor Gallery, for instance.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Owl. ‘Sir Coutts Lindsay’s exhibition. I’d heard that he’d approached you.’ An eagerness had crept into him, of the sort that preceded the asking of a favour. ‘I’d like very much to see the room, Jimmy, if I may. Since we are so close to it. Just for a few minutes, as you apply the finishing touches. What d’you say? Can it be done?’

The two men had arrived at the corner of Prince’s Gate; ahead were the Botanical Gardens, the glass roof glittering through a screen of denuded branches. Jim considered the Owl – his languid, humorous eyes, his squarish forehead and rounded chin, the high shine of his expensive-looking top-boots. This was a cavalier, a dandy of the slickest stripe, but his keenness was disarming. That morning, the prospect of showing the peacocks to someone who might value them had a definite appeal. Jim nodded in the direction of Leyland’s house.

Although perhaps a foregone conclusion, Owl’s opinion of the dining room was expressed with his usual flair. ‘Transporting,’ he declared, after two reverential circuits. ‘A chamber utterly apart from the rest of the world, far beyond its troubles and interruptions. It is like – it is like being at the pinnacle of a lofty tower. Or in a gilded car slung beneath a balloon, floating a mile above London.’

How could Jim, propped against the sideboard, not grin at this? ‘Yes, well,’ he said, prodding at an empty varnish tin with his cane, ‘I’m afraid that the patron may disagree.’

‘Leyland? What else can you expect, though, from such a creature? The fellow is callousness made flesh. A shark, old man, of the Great White variety.’

‘Why Owl,’ Jim observed, ‘you appear to know the gentleman.’

‘It is impossible, my dear Jimmy, to work on Gabriel Rossetti’s behalf and avoid him. There’s a fascination between them. A kinship, if you like, despite the obvious differences.’ Owl turned back to the room. ‘We’ve done a deal or two of our own as well, over the years. That Rembrandt head, do you remember?’

Jim did. Rembrandt, in his view, had been a rather optimistic attribution.

‘You can take a cur,’ Owl continued, ‘from the alleys of Liverpool. You can give it an ocean-spanning armada of iron-clad vessels. You can wash its hide, and dress it in mountebank frills and silver shoe buckles. And it is still, under it all, a cur. You can see it in Leyland’s eyes, very clearly. The way he looks at you as if he’d gladly bite off your damned hand. Did you know that his mother ran a pie-shop, back in his home city? Down on the quay?’

Owl spoke incautiously, without so much as a glance out towards the hall, apparently indifferent to the fact that he was standing in Leyland’s house; that anybody could be listening in, as far as they knew, even the cur himself. It was a display, Jim realised this, staged for his benefit, but there could be no denying the nerve involved.

‘I’d heard,’ he said.

‘And yet you were caught out by his reaction to your room?’ Owl faced him again. ‘Forgive me, Jimmy, but this is no enlightened prince. This is Frederick Richards Leyland. The most hated man in Liverpool. This is the modern British businessman, in all his bone-headed viciousness.’

‘I have received a schooling, this past week,’ Jim admitted, ‘in business wisdom – as Leyland understands it.’

‘He has paid you what he owes, though, hasn’t he?’

And then, almost to Jim’s surprise, he was telling the Owl everything. He abandoned his remote, stoical stance – profoundly uncharacteristic as it was – and provided a full account of his travails, assuming the same confidence, the same disregard for discretion, as his companion, relishing every disclosure and the sympathy with which it was received. The climax, the peak of indignation, was reserved for the events of that same morning.

‘So I set aside my material needs – which are grave, I don’t mind saying – and hatch a deal that is wholly to his advantage. He tells me to name my price, Owl, so I do, and when this is deemed unacceptable I agree to take only half of the rightful sum – rewarding him, in essence, for his philistinism. He makes me wait for it, of course. Three rather trying days. Yet finally it arrives. Bon Dieu! The trumpets sound – the angels sing. I tear open the envelope.’

Owl was listening intently.

‘It was pounds. Pounds, Owl! We have moved from the guinea of tradition, of honour – with which he has always paid me in the past – to the base sovereign, the payment of tradesmen. My fee was shorn of its shillings, and left fifty quid lighter as a result. I swear I nearly threw the thing on the fire.’

There was some truth to this. At the breakfast table, Jim had waved the offending cheque aloft, holding forth about how it was a vulgar insult and warranted immediate destruction. After a minute, Maud had risen from her chair and come to his side, to offer consolation he’d thought; but instead she’d plucked the crumpled rectangle of paper from his grasp, smoothed it against her thigh and tucked it into her sleeve for safekeeping.

Owl understood, however, in a way that dear Maud simply could not. ‘It’s the best the brute can do,’ he said. ‘The one stone he has left to throw. I pity him, almost.’ He gestured towards the room. ‘This, though – this alone remains the fact. All else is mere anecdote. Our friend Leyland has earned himself much the same place in history as the dullard who paid Correggio in pennies.’

Jim liked this. ‘Indeed.’

‘So in sum,’ said Owl, producing a cigarette case and offering one to Jim, ‘your patron works you like a slave. Looks upon your works with no more feeling than a beast of the field. Pays you like a joiner, or a greengrocer, or the man who brings him those frilled shirts of his, and less than half the proper amount.’ He struck a match and held it out. ‘Jimmy old man, I’d say this room was half yours, half yours at least. To do with as you damn well please. Remove the shutters, these wondrous peacocks, and sell them elsewhere. Enhance the design, if you see fit.’