Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  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 ma
n 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?’

  July 1877

  Maud was turning at the end of the banister, on her way to the dining room for breakfast, when she met John coming back from the front door. He presented her with a small bundle of letters, along with July’s Art Journal. It amused him, when Jimmy was out of earshot, to act as if there was a kind of collusion between them, as if they were on the same level, Whistler servants together. She did her best to ignore it.

  ‘There you go, Miss,’ he said with a wink. ‘Bumper crop today. Pass it on, would you?’

  Jimmy was dressed, smoking, the eyeglass in, his plate and cutlery pushed aside to make room for a sketchbook – in which he was setting out a pattern, similar to the overlapping feathers of the Peacock Room, but with butterflies woven into it as well. He stopped at once and without a word or glance applied himself to the post, sorting through the sheaf deftly and slightly secretively, like a card sharp assessing a hand. Maud sat across from him and reached for the blue-and-white coffee pot. As she poured, past the steaming arc of coffee, she noticed that he’d opened up one of the letters and was reading it with absolute attention; the colour of his face was changing, growing deeper, and his posture altering also, as if to accommodate a physical discomfort.

  The cup was overflowing, the surface of the coffee level with the brim, a sheen of dark liquid spilling across the pagodas and cranes that decorated its side. Maud put down the pot and looked at the letter more closely. It was one sheet only. There was no black border, at least – no one had died – although Jimmy’s manner as he read on suggested that the news was equally terrible. She wanted to ask what it contained, what was so very wrong, but knew that it was always best to wait. Gingerly picking up her cup, she was about to sip away the surplus when he leapt to his feet with such abrupt force that he knocked over his chair. She started, splashing hot coffee over her wrist and onto the tablecloth. He was out of the room already, collecting his hat and cane from the hall stand. The front door opened and closed, then opened and closed again. She heard his boots running back; he rushed to the dining table, to the letter, which he’d left on his sketchbook. Grabbing a pencil, he scrawled something upon it, in the top corner.

  ‘Jimmy,’ she said, rising from her chair.

  ‘I’m going into town,’ he told her. ‘I have to talk to Anderson Reeve. Take this downstairs, would you? To the studio. Put it with the others.’

  ‘The others? Jimmy, what in blazes—?’

  ‘There’s a box on the sill of the garden window.’ He was heading back to the hall. ‘I’ve been too supine again, my girl. Too goddamned supine!’

  The door slammed, with finality this time. Maud saw him through the window, surging down the path and out along the pavement. She stood for a few seconds, coffee dripping from her fingertips, allowing the atmosphere to settle; then she reached over for the letter.

  It was from Frederick Leyland, from his house in Liverpool, and a colder, more savage letter would be difficult to imagine. Jimmy had been seen walking with Mrs Leyland, apparently, at Lord’s Cricket Ground – where he told Maud he’d been the week before. This was a final straw for her husband. He stated that Jimmy was incapable of gentlemanly conduct, and that if he found him in Mrs Leyland’s company again he would give him a public horsewhipping. Maud covered her mouth; she almost laughed aloud. A horsewhipping. It was like a scene from a play, a melodrama, or a novel set long in the past. That someone would actually threaten to do it then, in London in 1877, seemed absurd. There could be no mistaking the letter’s sincerity, though. Leyland was serious.

  Maud’s next thought was for Jimmy, and what he’d stormed off to do. Would he be so foolish as to confront Leyland – to test the fellow’s resolve? Of course he would. Should she give chase, then – catch him on the threshold, urge him to step away? No, that would never work; and besides, he had too much of a head start. She read the letter again. This was the new trouble with Leyland that he would not admit to her, and it had nothing to do with artworks or that blasted room. It was about the man’s wife.

  Above Leyland’s address, in the top corner, was the number fourteen. This was what Jimmy had returned to the dining room to write. Maud recalled his instruction: put it with the others. She went down to the studio. Jimmy was bad with letters. Usually he had no system of arrangement or preservation, piling them on mantelpieces, on sideboards, on the floor, to be gathered up like so much litter and thrown away. But there it was: a small wooden box, plain in design, containing letters from Leyland, drafts of Jimmy’s
replies and a couple of telegrams, numbered from one to thirteen. These papers told the whole sorry story, from the dispute over the dining room to this current chapter: the attack and counter-attack of two very different voices. Jimmy’s flippancy was startling, as were his efforts to divide up this family, to draw distinctions between the husband and the wife; whereas his adversary remained scrupulously formal, his language rigid and brittle – cracking as the quarrel worsened to reveal a real viciousness beneath.

  Maud returned the letters to the box; she pressed down on the lid as if trying to hold them in. The house around her was quiet. She looked up, out into the garden. John was sitting by the gate, smoking a small pipe, idling in the absence of his master. Behind her, she realised, across the studio, the portrait of Frances Leyland had been put on an easel – returned from the cellar, if it had ever been there. The subject was turned away from the viewer, her hands clasped at the base of her back. She was part Japanese maiden, part medieval princess, the diaphanous, pinkish fabric of her gown heaping upon the chequered matting like a train. Jimmy had taken her in profile, head angled to the left, her rich brown hair – a similar tone to Maud’s own – wound up loosely on her head. It appeared the pose of a moment, but Maud remembered very well the dreadful ache you’d get in your neck after six straight hours of standing like that. She’d never really seen Mrs Leyland in person. There’d been that time at Prince’s Gate, when Jimmy was finishing off his mural; but she’d been in shadow then, merely a lady sweeping into a hallway. Here she looked rather melancholy, gazing at the pale blossoms dotted beside her as if lost in reflection and regret.

  It was a fine work, rightly considered one of Jimmy’s best. Maud had seen it before, of course, dozens of times. Now, though, she did find herself wondering why the painting was still in his possession, as it was surely finished and should be with the family – with the husband who’d ordered and paid for it many years previously. They were friends, Jimmy and Mrs Leyland. This she knew. There was a long-standing friendship with the whole family that was several years older than his connection with her. But had she been missing something here, something really rather obvious? Was it there in the portrait – in the sympathetic, faintly adoring way that Mrs Leyland had been painted? Was Jimmy actually in love with this woman?