Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  Maud unwrapped the flannel on the topmost plate. The copper was still a deep, fiery orange and very clear, reflecting the underside of her nose and the slight bloat that lingered around her chin. Upon it, etched in lines of extraordinary delicacy and precision, was a rickety row of weatherboarded warehouses; the harsh pattern of masts and rigging; a gnarled sailor, perched in the foreground, looking on with a clay pipe jutting from his mouth. In the corner she noticed a small signature – just ‘Whistler’, written simply, very different to the elaborate butterflies with which his canvases were now marked – and beside it a date: 1859. She placed her fingertip against it, pressing until she felt her skin sink into the tiny, scratched numerals. She’d been but two years old.

  Now, under Owl’s direction, their labours began. Rosa and Maud readied the room: clearing space, sweeping the floorboards and constructing a work surface from two crates and an unhinged door. Jimmy sat in a corner and checked the plates – a slow task indeed, for poring over these early works caused him to sink into a kind of reverie – while Owl himself went out for supplies. He returned an hour later with a ream of heavy paper and a dozen cakes of ink, and also engine grease, various tools and pads of wire wool. Then he removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and set to work on the press. By early afternoon the machine had been thoroughly cleaned and returned to full operation. Owl demonstrated the action. The wheel spun slowly, almost carried by its own weight; the roller rotated and the flat panel slid through beneath. All in one polished movement.

  Next, the Portuguese vanished into the lower floors of the house; and when he came back up Mrs Cossins was with him, somehow drafted in to help. Indeed, they were joking together as they climbed the stairs, the cook letting out a hoarse gurgling sound that could only be laughter. Maud was impressed. In the years she’d lived at Lindsey Row with Jimmy, the old woman had shown no interest or affection towards anyone save John the valet, to whom they thought she might be related; and certainly never to Maud herself, being of the openly stated opinion that the master’s Madame had used deceit and wantonness to leapfrog life’s rightful order. Yet here they were, Mrs Cossins’ sheep-like face arranged into a smile so broad and genuine that the broken veins on her cheeks could almost be taken for a girlish blush. Owl was complimenting her compote de pigeons, saying that he had never tasted its equal – that she could surely depart this shabby abode and set her sights on the best addresses in the city. Jimmy made an indignant exclamation. There was more laughter.

  Owl and the cook were carrying basins of water and lengths of cloth, which were then placed atop the door-table. After receiving a couple more compliments, Mrs Cossins withdrew. The Portuguese promptly set about running a length of twine above their heads, from the top corner of a window frame to a stretch of picture-rail above the door, and then arranged the four of them into a workshop. Maud and Rosa were charged with dampening the paper in the basins and hanging up the prints when they were done; Owl was to grind up the ink cakes, mixing the resulting powder into liquid, while Jimmy applied it to the plates, painting it on with the greatest care and expertise; and they were all to take turns on the wheel.

  This part Maud loved. The easing in; the peak of effort, of force; the sense in your palms, your wrists and arms, of impression, of the metal rectangle being forced into the paper, of the ink taking and the image being forever marked upon it; and then the easing off again, the bed of the press gliding out the other side – and the new proof being peeled off the plate and held up to the light. There was wastage, Jimmy being rather out of practice and the rest of them rank novices, but by the day’s fading the line above them was like a length of bunting, filled with sheets from one end to the other. Maud counted them off, with no little pride: sixteen proofs of a saleable quality.

  Dinner that night was especially fine, with an entrée – they noted – of compote de pigeons and bottles from a fresh stock of wine, Jimmy having discovered a new merchant prepared to offer him credit and ordered in with his standard abandon. Maud had devised an approach, after her experience at the Café Royal. She would take a single glass and eat a third of each dish, and a third only. It was extremely hard, though, not to drink at the same pace as the others, which meant that her allotted glass was gone long before the first course arrived, and was refilled by Owl without consultation. The compote, also, was so good that she’d put more than half of it away before she realised; so she thought to the devil with it and ate the rest. Tomorrow, she told herself sternly, smiling over at Jimmy. Tomorrow you eat nothing at all.

  The conversation returned repeatedly to the prints. Their little party was aglow with a sense of shared achievement – of having found the solution, or part of one at least.

  ‘Why, we could do this every week,’ said Owl. ‘Twice a week, if you find it necessary. By Jove, my dearest friends, we might as well be printing out pound notes. And it’s just the beginning. The print is your future, Jimmy Whistler. I see it driving you onwards, as coal propels the great locomotives. You will race across countries, old man. Entire continents.’

  ‘I only have so many plates, Owl, you know.’ Jimmy demurred. ‘It isn’t a medium to which I’ve devoted much time in recent years.’

  ‘He means reproductions,’ said Rosa. ‘Copies of your paintings. You’ve never engraved your works, Jimmy, have you?’

  ‘Copied myself, you mean? Good heavens, dear woman, I simply could not. No, I am not one of those reproducing artists. A chicken can only lay the same egg once.’

  ‘Have you thought, then, of having another do it? Charles has many talented friends in this field.’

  ‘I know men,’ Owl qualified, ‘who know men, if you follow me. You own the copyright on your works, don’t you? I can certainly see some of your paintings, the Carlyle for instance, finding an enthusiastic market. Or that portrait of your mother you showed a few years ago at the Royal Academy.’

  Jimmy moved in his chair, mildly discomforted. Maud recalled that this particular painting had disappeared from view on the day of Owl’s initial inspection. She hadn’t seen it since, in fact. He ventured that a portrait of his mother was surely of limited interest to the wider world. Absolutely not, replied Owl. It was a masterpiece, startling in its originality and beauty; the forms, the tones, would translate so well; the process would be speedy indeed, and the rewards enormous. Jimmy remained unconvinced. He repeated the chicken remark.

  Owl switched subjects, encouraging Rosa to talk about Newmarket, where apparently she used to have a studio, making decent money painting portraits of horses and jockeys for the local stable-owners. The mood had altered, though; the laughter was less free, the wine slightly sour. A crucial change had occurred, a tiny weight added to one side of the scale that had thrown off the balance completely.

  After dinner they went back upstairs. Maud led the way into the dark printing room, carrying a candle. It felt like a discovery. The windows were still open, the line of etchings shivering in a faint draught. The candle’s light made the sheets seem very thin, almost transparent, and the inked images upon them so absolutely, indelibly black that they appeared momentarily to have separated from the paper and to hang suspended in the air. Maud ran her eye along the line, over the quays, the heavy harbour posts, the rows of barges and tall ships, marvelling anew at their clarity – the forms as strong, she thought, and as true in their arrangement, as photographs.

  Owl and Rosa stepped around her and started taking down the proofs. The Portuguese had a folder that Maud hadn’t noticed before. The prints were laid inside, then Owl wrote in his little notebook, inventory entries she supposed, and took them all over to Jimmy for inscription with the butterfly ‘W’.

  ‘And there we are,’ said Owl, when the last was done. ‘The 1877 impression of Mr Whistler’s renowned Thames series. Twelve signed etchings. There’s a man on Pall Mall, a most respectable dealer in prints named Graves, who will damn near tear off the arm that offers him these. Two quid a proof isn’t unreasonable, I don’t believe. I�
�ll go to him first thing tomorrow – return to you with the tin, Jimmy, before the day is out.’

  Lord Almighty, thought Maud, that’s twenty-four pounds. Twenty-four pounds in a single afternoon. This would shoot down a half dozen of their outstanding bills straight away. Ward off any future calls from the bailiffs. Perhaps even enable the recovery of her mother’s earrings. She turned to Jimmy, starting to laugh. He was smiling too, sort of, leaning wearily against the doorframe with an arm bent up behind his head. She could see the doubt in him – a suggestion that he felt compromised somehow. That in his sense of his progress through life and art, he’d just taken a small but ignoble step backwards.

  Owl and Rosa left soon after. There were embraces again, and kisses, and promises of better times ahead; and then they set off at a brisk pace towards the centre of town. Jimmy was suddenly exhausted, unable to string two words together or observe his usually comprehensive ablutions. He merely removed his trousers, necktie and collar, and collapsed into bed. He was snoring inside a minute.

  Maud undressed, standing her corset in the corner, and washed herself; then she lay down beside him in her shift and looked up at the bed’s black oval canopy. A barge bell rang out on the river. Her breath slowed; her skin cooled. Do you know, she thought, I might just go straight to sleep. I might be spared my usual stretch of fretting and regret. Yes – there it was, that soft slide, that untethering of the thoughts; a greater ease, indeed, than she’d known since her return.

  Then it came, like a switch rapped smartly across the thighs. She stared up again at the black canopy. They’d printed off sixteen, she was sure of it. Owl had said twelve. That’s what he wrote in that little book of his: twelve signed etchings.

  But they’d printed off sixteen.

  *

  Jimmy had already gone when Maud awoke – off to continue preparations for the suit, she assumed, as had become his habit. She headed out into their small garden, to savour what would surely prove one of the year’s last warm days. A strand of ivy, the leaves dark and heavy, curled across the back wall. She considered it for a minute, then went into the studio for chalk and paper. The next few hours were spent sitting on an upturned bucket, buried in the slow summoning of a study. The result was not good, not by any means; she kept it only for reference, stowed away where no one would see it. But it was something. She was drawing once more.

  It was well into the evening when Jimmy came home, released into the house like an over-excited terrier, skittering through the hallways and across the landings, yapping out her name over and over. ‘Something really quite marvellous has been done,’ he declared. ‘Something magical. I can – I can scarcely believe it. I almost have to damn well pinch myself. Come, we must – you must – you must fetch your hat. You must see it, right this minute. You absolutely must.’

  As she was marched up onto Cheyne Walk, pulling a shawl around herself, Maud mentioned the missing prints. Jimmy was dismissive; it was plain that for him the activities of yesterday were already in the distant past.

  ‘An error,’ he said. ‘It’s easily done with prints, God knows.’

  ‘There were sixteen, Jimmy. Why would Owl say twelve? How many did you sign?’

  ‘For pity’s sake, Maudie, it really doesn’t matter. If he did take them for himself, as you seem to think, then it is hardly unjust, is it? We can’t expect him to toil away for nothing. One might even call it his compensation. The Owl, you know, is a fellow of rare ability – of singular ability. We need him to keep the show rolling onwards.’

  Maud couldn’t quite bring herself to agree. It was distracting, though, to be outside with Jimmy, walking alone by the Thames at nightfall. They used to do this a good deal in their early days. Together they would take in the settling mists, the lights of the factories and mills across the water, the clapboard hump of Battersea Bridge. He would stop, spying Nocturnes, drawing himself up and gazing out, committing scenes to memory for the following morning’s labour. She’d stand close to him, feeling what she’d supposed must be devotion; that she had in some important way found her place. These were among her keenest and most precious memories.

  It had to be admitted that this particular excursion was rather less leisurely. They were moving fast in the direction of town, Jimmy working his bamboo cane against the pavement like a boatman’s pole, as if to provide further acceleration. No more was said about the prints or the Owl. Maud wondered where they could be going – what could be causing this excitement. The houses of the friends who would receive her were all further to the west, or up in Holland Park. Any gallery or dealer’s shop would be closed. And they couldn’t be heading out to the theatre or a restaurant, as Jimmy would have insisted that they both dress for it, and hailed a cab to take them there. Her one remaining guess was that it must be a new subject. A new view, found out somewhere on the dusky river.

  Halfway along Chelsea Reach, however, Jimmy led them across the road, out of the light of the embankment’s orderly lamps and into the gathering darkness. They entered a side street, stopping after a few yards. Maud looked around. It was incomplete, this street, half built; the houses that did stand there seemed handsome enough, but were largely unoccupied, and a lot of it was empty space. There was a gap next to them, in fact, behind a tall fence of black boards, upon which had been pasted an official-looking notice.

  A deep breath and Jimmy was off. This was Tite Street, he began, a regrettable name but there you were; and right here at its riverside end was where his new house – their new house – was going to be built. Lindsey Row, he’d decided, was no longer satisfactory. Some really splendid designs had been put together by Godwin, who’d leased the plot from the Metropolitan Board of Works and found a suitable builder, a Mr Nightingale from Pimlico. The whole thing would be up within a year. The bamboo cane danced about in the damp air, sketching out windows and doorways, angles of elevation and the huge space at the top of the structure that was to be reserved for the studio – twice, three times as large as the one at Lindsey Row and flooded, always, with light.

  Maud gazed into the empty gloom above the fence, trying to picture the house that might stand there. ‘Heavens, Jimmy,’ she said, ‘it’ll be big.’

  And at this her thoughts acquired a momentum that she was unable to halt or influence. Ione was now four months old. Sitting up, most probably. There would be more rooms here. More space. Enough, surely, for a child to inhabit one corner while her artist father inhabited another. Things could be arranged – doors, corridors, staircases – so that he’d scarcely know she was there.

  The cane was lowered. Jimmy turned towards her. There was no gas on Tite Street yet, its lamp posts standing dark; his face was little more than an outline. This notion of hers seemed to float between them, like a heart-warming scene from an illustrated magazine – and even as she contemplated it, and felt the sweet ache of it, she knew for dead certain that it could never be. Jimmy was an artist, the increasingly notorious butterfly, and she was his Madame, his hostess, his model. Family was not a part of this at all. He began to describe how the house was to be the setting for the next great stage of Whistler: an artistic structure, with art at its very foundations, made for painting and entertainments, which would soon become a site of pilgrimage for would-be patrons. On he went, predicting this and anticip­ating that: it was all so enthusiastically evoked, so absolute in its cancelling of Maud’s own unspoken vision, that it started to annoy her.

  ‘Jimmy,’ she interrupted, after a while, ‘how much is it going to cost? We can’t pay the bloody butcher. How in blazes are we to pay for a house?’

  ‘Damages from the Ruskin suit,’ he answered smartly, ‘will fund it. And a new wave of custom, attracted by the victory, my public vindication, will support a wonderful life within it. And there’s the Owl’s ventures, of course – the prints, lithography and so forth, that will cover our expenses until the trial is heard and the house brought into being. Glory awaits, my girl, truly it does. Can you not see it?’

/>   Maud remembered what Rosa had said, on the day Jimmy had announced the suit against Ruskin: the better his position, the better everything will be. This studio house had to be a part of that. It would mark a definite advancement, just as he claimed: a new and higher platform upon which other things could be built. But what, precisely, and when? Rosa had also said that she should be patient. There on Tite Street, though, before that empty plot, her patience felt limited indeed.

  Jimmy lit a cigarette. The flare of the match revealed him briefly, standing there in a dark suit and topper with the black fence behind. Cane resting against his shoulder, he was completely assured, craftily handsome, his eye glinting at the thought of his coming triumph. He shook out the match and drew closer, snaking an arm around Maud’s waist.

  ‘Let’s go out for supper,’ he said. ‘To celebrate. I have the tin right here. How about that place you like up by Wellington Square? They keep a decent Moselle, as I recall.’

  The cigarette was passed to her, the end slightly damp from his lips. She let it hang in her mouth unsmoked, sliding her own arm around him, attempting to quell her irritation and her doubt. What else, really, could she do? This was Jimmy Whistler. A little faith was required.

  Part Two

  Arrangement in Grey and Black

  Winter 1877

  Whistler was on the town. It was happening, finally, as it was supposed to – a steady accumulation of good things. His name was mentioned in every conversation. His endeavours were reported in every newspaper. He went out as much as any mortal man could manage, five nights in the week usually. He dined in Mayfair mansions, Holland Park follies, the smart bachelor flats of Piccadilly and elsewhere; he attended acts of plays, a movement of the odd opera and music parties in parks and pavilions; he haunted restaur­ants, taverns and clubs of every stripe, scheming with friends and castigating foes. All of this honed his rhetoric to a most satisfying level. You could sell tickets, he told himself. You could speak in a hall somewhere and they’d surely pay to hear it.