Mrs Whistler

The smallest crack ran through Rosa’s self-possession. She’d plainly thought they would discuss Jimmy – the importance of loyalty or something. Not this. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘your daughter.’

‘I chose the name. Ione Edith Whistler. On my own. While I was – just after. I had to tell it to Jimmy. He hadn’t—’

Maud was going to say that he hadn’t asked what the name might be, that she’d given him three days to do it and he hadn’t, so she’d snapped and simply told him, shouted it at him in fact; but recounting this, trying to untangle it all for the first time, proved too much. She slumped forward onto the table, pressing her cheek hard against the marble. A slick of liquid – tears or wine, she couldn’t tell which – made her head slip an inch to the left.

‘I thought I could just leave her. I thought it wouldn’t matter. I—’

Rosa eased her back upright, wiped her face with the cuff of her silver-grey jacket, and proposed that they take some air – walk down to Piccadilly, perhaps. Maud was signalling her assent when the men came back into view on the other side of the room. They were speaking loudly in French to the head waiter, talking over each another with much gesticulation. Maud followed their approach with a prickle of resentment.

Jimmy noticed at once that something was wrong. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘An excess of cheer?’

‘She’s tired,’ Rosa told him, ‘that’s all. A little weak still.’

Sliding his wiry frame onto the seat beside her, Jimmy plucked Maud’s hand from her lap and squeezed it between his. ‘Is everything well, Maudie?’ he asked, gently as you like. ‘What’s the difficulty here?’

Maud reclaimed her hand. ‘Nothing,’ she sniffed. ‘Honest.’

July 1877

Lord’s Cricket Ground, Jim swiftly decided, was a charmless spot on which to pass a fine summer’s afternoon. It was little more than a broad, dull lawn, a few streets away from Regent’s Park, hemmed in by depressing terraces and withered nursery gardens. There was something, perhaps, in the contrast between the luminescence of the sportsmen’s white costumes and the smooth green carpet upon which they played, but brief observation of the game itself – much milling about, punctuated by sudden thwacks and shouts, and frantic, inexplicable rearrangements – demonstrated to Jim that he would never understand or care for cricket, even if he lived to be a hundred years old.

He was there, of course, for a very particular reason, wholly unrelated to sport. By the day’s end he was determined that Whistler would be reinstated as the cher ami of the Leyland family. He would be the confidante of the wife, of the children, and of the husband too. Once again there would be dinner invitations, and visits to the opera, and trips up to Speke Hall, the Leyland country pile. And he would be allowed access to his Peacock Room, for the first time in half a year. He would be able to make a full and proper photographic record of what he’d done there, and expunge this corrosive suggestion of imposture once and for all.

The first encounter, nearly a month earlier, had genuinely been one of chance. Mrs Leyland had been seen across a drawing room, in a dress of powder blue, listening with the slightly pained attentiveness of a polite person enduring a tedious conversation; yet looking, it had to be said, tremendously well nonetheless. Indeed, the intelligence in her face, its beautiful tenderness, had made Jim’s breath catch very slightly in his throat. There had been a certain caution in him as they’d spoken. The saga of the Peacock Room was still much discussed in society. Many, he understood, were inclined to view him as a vulgar, self-promoting vandal, a foreigner with no understanding of honour or manners, who had traduced his patron’s trust; reacted with petulance to a generous fee; disregarded and then deliberately contradicted Leyland’s wishes, slathering valuable antique leather in bucket-loads of blue paint. And of course – perhaps most seriously of all for these blasted English – it was claimed that he’d made a gentleman’s home into an exhibition hall, with press nights, newspaper reviews and an unending procession of visitors. It had seemed entirely possible that Mrs Leyland might want nothing whatsoever to do with him.

But no. The connection forged during the painting of her portrait had survived. Her smile had been dry, faintly teasing; it held a memory of jokes, subtly shared, at the expense of those around them.

‘Should I strive for rapprochement, madam?’ he’d asked. ‘Is there hope?’

‘It will be hard,’ she’d replied, ‘most certainly. You know what Frederick is like. But there is always hope, Mr Whistler.’

A fortnight later they’d taken a drive in the Leyland carriage. It had been extremely pleasant, with much gossip and laughter, like old times almost – but only Mrs Leyland had been there. Jim had the sense that the rest of them might be avoiding him, or even unaware that the meeting was taking place. As he’d left, however, she’d mentioned this fixture at Lord’s: two Cambridge colleges, one of them her son Freddie’s, meeting during the summer recess to play for the relief of a pauper school in Maida Vale. The whole family would be present, she’d added. He’d understood her at once.

In the days afterwards, Jim had convinced himself that it was in fact a very natural progression towards the restoration of goodwill, somehow both rapid and agreeably unhurried; and when the envelope had arrived bearing the orderly, sloping hand of Frederick Leyland, his immediate thought had been that the wife had spoken with the husband. That she’d brought him round. That their rift was to be mended and the philistine tamed right there and then. That the value of the Peacock Room had been recognised even, and the Leyland commissions might conceivably resume.

The letter inside had been short, a dozen lines or so – headed with a ‘Sir’, finished off with a ‘yours truly’, both clear signals of war – and it had stopped Jim like a clock. The two of them, Leyland had written, were publicly known to be in a state of absolute and enduring opposition. In riding out with his wife, Jim had taken advantage of the weakness of a woman – yes, those really were his words – and had placed her in what he termed a false position before the world. Any further contact had been prohibited.

For a week Jim had stewed, occupied by Maud’s return from her confinement, and nagged by a most unwelcome sense of having been outmanoeuvred – of the Peacock Room being gone for good. Then, while out at the Café Royal the previous evening, he’d consulted with the Owl, whom he’d been keeping apprised of the situation. As usual, the Portuguese had been able to see in an instant that which eluded less nimble minds. His advice had been unequivocal.

‘Why, my dear chap, you must attend the cricket ground. Mrs Leyland is a tactician. One would have to be, with a husband like that. She has engineered a final opportunity for you to say your piece. The perfect opportunity, I might say. No, no, Jimmy – you must attend. You must go before him. It is the only way.’

So there Jim was, clad in white cotton duck and a straw boater, ready to patrol. His plan was to remain at a distance for a while, assessing the Leylands’ mood and selecting the optimum moment for his approach – perhaps just after Freddie had scored a wicket or whatever they were called. There would be a great cheer; he would stroll up, applauding with hands raised, calling out ‘bravo!’, and as one the family would turn towards him. Mrs Leyland would beam and beckon for him to approach. Her husband would be rather less pleased; Jim was confident that his wife would have worked on him a little, though, upbraiding him for that outrageous letter and laying out the situation in a manner so reasonable and objective that even the British businessman would heed it. He’d be flushed, furthermore, with his son’s sporting success – the son who’d always held Jim in such amity and regard. The fellow would have to give Jim a chance. A decent hearing, out there on wholly neutral ground. Yes, Owl was right. It really was ideal.

But a problem soon arose. This confounded game took up an unreasonable amount of room, two or three acres by Jim’s estimation, obliging the spectators – of whom there were a good number, a few hundred at least – to cluster thickly around the edges. It made the careful scouting he had in mind completely impossible. He was in amongst them from the start, these wealthy families and crowds of well-to-do youths, stuck beneath a shifting lily pond of parasols, unable to see more than a few yards in any direction. He might stumble across the Leylands entirely by accident – the timing of their reunion, and the climate of his reception, determined only by the whim of the gods.

Fortune, however, was on Jim’s side. Halfway around the cricket ground’s circumference, between caps and boaters and a variety of summer hats, he spotted the Leyland girls, perched atop a mustard yellow landau to get a better view of the proceedings. There was Florence, looking characteristically truculent; she would have seen the Amber and Black, he supposed, on the wall of the Grosvenor. Some appeasement would be required there – an explanation, somewhat disingenuous, of the artistic necessity of the change. Fanny, the eldest, was next to her, in a cream gown with a dark stripe. A woman of twenty now, she was out in society, being touted around for the purposes of marriage. And on the end, closest to him, was Elinor – Baby, they all called her – the youngest, but along with the others looking noticeably older to Jim’s eye – about fifteen, he guessed. She had been his most devoted companion of the three, always making him gifts of flowers and hopeless scraps of needlework, and he had applied himself to her portrait with special dedication. The child had been taken in blue, like Gainsborough’s boy, with a result almost equal to his painting of her mother.

The sisters had arranged themselves upon the open-topped carriage in a charmingly jejune attempt at elegance. Their attention was very much on the game and their elder brother’s performance in it – and rather pointedly not upon the gaggle of students who stood nearby, talking loudly and larking about, doing all they could to draw the young ladies’ notice. Jim smiled, recognising both roles; and then Baby – whose display was a touch less committed than that of Florence or Fanny – noticed him standing there. Her indifferent expression screwed up into an antagonistic little pout.

It was a spear, quite frankly, driven into Jim’s heart – yet another wound to an organ pretty much riddled with perforations already. He wanted to appeal to her somehow, to launch into an old jest perhaps, or recite a favourite rhyme. The girl was nudging her sisters, though, alerting them; and Florence was shuddering, yes, actually shuddering at the thought. Neither would so much as turn in his direction. Very well. So this would be difficult. It was foolish, really, to have thought otherwise. Jim carried on towards the landau, inserting the eyeglass. His cheery hail went unacknowledged.

Mrs Leyland was at the carriage’s near end, standing alone between its back wheels. Her fine, fashionable clothes – a light grey gown trimmed with delicate ruffles, tied behind with a bow of cerise satin – contrasted with her apprehensive bearing and the hard lines beneath her eyes. But she at least was pleased to see Jim, noticing his arrival with a sudden, unguarded smile. Relief, he thought.

‘Well, how about this,’ he declared, looking around him and wondering where Leyland was – watching at the front maybe, at the border of the pitch? Perhaps a well-timed approach was still feasible. ‘All these years in London, in England, and never once did I dare to imagine the, ah – the sheer glory of this game.’

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ she said.

‘My dear Mrs Leyland, how on earth could I not?’ Jim glanced up at the girls; they continued to ignore him, to ignore them both, acting as if completely absorbed in the match. He lowered his voice. ‘Did you happen to hear that your husband wrote me the most astonishing letter, after our excursion the other day?’

Mrs Leyland maintained her smile; her eyes spoke of something else altogether. ‘He informed me of it,’ she said. ‘And took no little pleasure in the revelation.’

‘Such a heinous misunderstanding. I confess that it left me bewildered.’

‘I told him it was nothing,’ she said. ‘A ride in a carriage only. That it wasn’t defiance or deliberate rudeness or whatever else. But he wouldn’t heed me. He never does. He scarcely credits me with the mental capacity to walk down the stairs.’

‘He’s turned the children against me, I think.’

‘Of course he has, Mr Whistler. That is how it’s done. That is how you are cast out. Why, he’s managing to do the same to me, even as he leaves me with them all to go about his business. These pressing appointments that he has. He creeps off the instant we arrive in London, you know, then reappears back in Liverpool a week later as if this was a perfectly respectable way for a husband and father to behave.’

There was applause; Jim joined in, despite having no idea who he clapped or why. He could only think that Leyland was not there. The family had plainly come to Lord’s without him. Was this a last-minute alteration? It didn’t seem so. Mrs Leyland appeared to have invited him along knowing that her husband, the man with whom he needed so keenly to speak, would not be present.

The cricketers were walking off, heading into a low pavilion at the head of the ground. From conversations around them, Jim gathered that play had stopped for luncheon. The crowd broke apart, drifting in its different directions. Mrs Leyland opened a parasol and took his arm. She led him away from the landau at some speed, towards the long rectangle of paler grass in the centre of the pitch.

‘One of his women,’ she said, when they were a distance from her daughters, ‘came to our house. Can you believe it, Mr Whistler? To our house, up to the very door. With an – with an infant. His infant. After money, unsurprisingly.’

Mrs Leyland’s grip had become ferociously tight; Jim winced a little, both at the pressure of her fingers and the obvious extent of her distress. What, though, could he reasonably be expected to do? The thought occurred – ignoble, yes, but impossible to help – that if his strongest ally in this family was really in serious danger of exclusion herself, then the Peacock Room was truly lost.

‘You’ve known all along, haven’t you? His infidelities. The women he keeps around town.’

Jim gave a slight shrug, avoiding her gaze. He had a plain sense of escalation, of something growing far beyond him into regions that were really quite unknown, where wit and style and nerve would not even begin to address the problems at hand. He felt a desperate need for a cigarette.

‘Naturally you have. Dear God. I know the way you men talk to one another. The great licence you allow yourselves.’

She was right, worse luck: Leyland had shared a fair deal about his women, usually late at night at his club or in some restaurant or other. This talk hadn’t taken the form of confession or anything like that, or even of boastfulness. It had been closer to a dare – as if Leyland, aware of the familiarity that existed between the painter and his wife, had been challenging Jim to make an objection. Needless to say, Jim had not. They were men of the world, the pair of them, and this particular millionaire had seemed then to contain a deep vein of future commissions.

‘I am bound, my dear Mrs Leyland, by many ties. It is not my place to—’ Jim hesitated. ‘Know only that I value your friendship. More than I can tell you. If there is anything I can do, anything at all, to be of assistance, you must tell—’

He stopped again, as it occurred to him now that this could actually be why she’d encouraged his efforts to repair their connection. The marriage, ailing for years, was entering its final collapse. She needed an accessory. A berth, perhaps. A route out of the Leyland fortress that enclosed her so completely. The current of this whole episode, as he’d conceived it, had been him rejoining the family, via Frances Leyland – not her leaving it via him.

How did this reversal make Jim feel? Well, flattered certainly. Also consternated, as he had not the least idea how he would manage this, whatever it might turn out to be, in practical terms. It would add immeasurably to his own roster of trouble, in every conceivable area. And alarmed. Yes, most definitely alarmed. It was one thing to clash with a man in the field of art, where your own rectitude, your superiority in both taste and sophistication, could be taken for granted. But this, assisting in the end of his marriage – the removal, quite possibly, of his wife – was something else entirely. Suddenly he wondered whether Leyland already had suspicions. Whether this lay behind the extraordinary venom of that letter. The weakness of a woman. A false position before the world.

Jim’s offer was never finished. Reaching the centre of the ground – where three sticks were wedged into the turf, serving some obscure sporting function – they came to a halt and simply stood together in the sunshine, arms linked still, both struck mute by the enormity of what had been touched upon, and the panicked flailing of their thoughts. Jim looked back towards the landau. The Leyland girls had alighted from it and were talking with one of the cricketers – an especially tall fellow with a slope-shouldered, vaguely diffident stance and longish auburn curls spilling from beneath his cap. It was Freddie. Even at a distance, Jim could see clearly what was happening. The poor lad was being press-ganged into an unwelcome task. It wasn’t hard to guess what it might be. Soon afterwards, he started in their direction.

Mrs Leyland released Jim’s arm and began talking loudly about the garden at Prince’s Gate, and how much the new plantings were suffering in the heat, until Freddie arrived before them. Over the years, Jim had gone to some pains to cultivate a friendship with the younger Frederick Leyland, developing a tone both worldly and avuncular. The boy was every last inch his mother’s son – the same doe eyes, the same hint of vulnerability. Without a word to Jim, he trotted out some transparent nonsense about Baby having a headache, which apparently necessitated an immediate return to Kensington. He’d be all right, he added; one of the chaps would be sure to offer him a lift at the end of the match. Mrs Leyland met Jim’s eye very briefly and started to walk back. Jim made to follow – rubbing his forearm to restore the circulation – and found Freddie, sweet, loyal Freddie, deliberately blocking his path.

‘Now see here, Jimmy,’ he said. He paused to lick his lower lip; he crossed his arms and then uncrossed them again. ‘Jimmy, we can’t have this. We just can’t.’

Jim affected ignorance – blamelessness. ‘Have what, my dear fellow?’

‘Jimmy.’ Freddie sounded almost pleading now. ‘I can’t go against the governor. You must see that. Don’t force matters further. Please.’

‘I meant,’ said Jim, ‘to drop you a line about us going on a jaunt into town. I mentioned it to Godwin and he said – you’ll like this, I think – he said that—’

Freddie was shaking his head. ‘I can’t. Not now.’ He girded himself, like a man about to swallow something unpleasant. ‘Listen to me. You must not approach my mother again. In any fashion. And you must not write to her either. I – I really don’t think I can be any more clear about it than that.’

Jim looked into his pink face, so blessedly young; at the battle underway there, the reluctance and the resolution. ‘Surely not,’ he murmured. ‘Come now, Freddie. Surely not.’

The boy would say no more. He turned away and went after his mother – standing guard over her effectively, until she was in that landau with his sisters, the horses had been brought back up and they were departing the cricket ground. Despite all that had transpired – the pails of Prussian blue and the duelling peacocks, the roadside confrontations, the assorted barbs and slights – it was only now, as he watched the Leyland women being driven off into the dusty city, and Freddie cast one last look over at him before rejoining his fellows, that Jim fully understood the irreversible nature of this situation. He was shut out forever. An enemy.

Lindsey Row felt cool and dark after the sun-blasted cricket ground, and the sweltering box of the cab. Maud was suffering still from the dinner with Owl and Miss Corder. The aim had been to lift the girl out of the dumps in which she’d been mired since her return, and in this it had appeared to succeed – until her disintegration in the later stages, at any rate. Jim had all but carried her back to their bed; and the mumbled, accusatory questions she’d slung his way had indicated plainly enough that this particular difficulty was far from finished with.

Now her brown eyes followed him from a parlour armchair. ‘Where’ve you been?’

Jim sat opposite, dropping his boater to the floor. His clothes were stiff with dust and dried sweat. He had an overbearing sense of mental obstruction – of a great many things trying to fit through the same small aperture at the exact same instant.

‘Cricket,’ he said. ‘A match at Lord’s.’

‘You don’t care about cricket, Jimmy.’ Maud’s face was pale but attentive. She was a clever soul, his Madame. She knew that something was up.

‘There was a plan,’ Jim told her, ‘for the betterment of our position. But it came to naught. It may have been – well, it may have been something of a misstep.’

This wasn’t enough. ‘Rosa Corder,’ she said, ‘talks of conflict.’

‘Yes, well, conflict may be coming.’ Jim tried to rally. ‘But we’ll prevail, my girl. Things will improve. There are several other strategies under consideration. The Owl, you know, is a most resourceful and well-connected fellow.’

And then for some reason he began to tell her about lithography, and the Portuguese’s proposal that he make a series of lithographic Nocturnes – coloured prints of the river and its bridges, made ingeniously by sketching with crayon upon tablets of damp stone – which would surely amount to a stream of gold so steady and plentiful it might as well be coming in through a pipe. As he went on, he got a disconcerting sense of how he must appear to her. There will be a taxing period, certain friends had warned him, after a woman surrenders a child. It cannot be avoided. No matter what she has promised, no matter the arrangements that have been reached, no matter how unified and durable the two of you were before, there will be distress. Lingering distress. Resentment.

Maud rose while he was talking and went to leave the room. He reached for her as she passed but she was walking too quickly, brushing against his outstretched fingers.

‘Why will nobody,’ she said, ‘ever tell me what’s bloody happening?’

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