A flunkey over by the bench stood up and intoned Jim’s name. Parry, he realised, had finished. He was being called into the witness box. Carefully unhurried, he eased himself to his feet, sauntered along the pew and through a low gate; and then he was up there, before the court. Art was in the dock. He’d tested this phrase out on Reeve, in the cab on the way over – which had prompted the lawyer to explain that actually there was no dock, that this was the Court of Exchequer – that no one was on trial, properly speaking.
‘Oh, but they are, mon vieux,’ Jim had replied. ‘That they most certainly are.’
Parry sat, ceding the floor to Petheram. Jim straightened his jacket, feeling a strange distance both from himself and the proceedings – this long-awaited moment he now occupied. As the junior guided them through the background of the case, asking about his exhibition history in England, the first show at the Grosvenor and what he had shown there, and the dramatic decline in his sales since, a real and surprising effort was required to frame his replies. His eye kept wandering off into the gloomy vault behind, members of the audience seeming to volunteer themselves for his notice. Old so-and-so’s made it here, he’d think – and great heavens, look who’s sitting just behind him …
A few minutes in he spotted dear Maud, lodged right at the back, her cheeks flushed scarlet. Even from across the chamber, through all the hats and ribbons, he could see how large she was getting. She was six months gone now by his estimation, reaching the point where movement was becoming difficult, along with much else – including their coupling, for which he’d felt an unexpected enthusiasm in the past week. An act of mounting had been necessary, in effect, not unpleasant in its deviation from the standard method, but rather lacking in dignity for them both. Why, only the night before—
‘Will you tell us,’ said Petheram, ‘the meaning of the word “Nocturne” as applied to your pictures?’ He’d realised Jim’s distraction, bless him, his voice acquiring the slightest edge.
Jim inserted his eyeglass and set himself firmly in the present, feeling his pulse throb against his starched collar. He focused on the barrister – the black of his robes against the red-brown panelling behind; the pale, pinkish triangle of his face, crowned by the tight chalky curls of his wig. This was all rehearsed, naturally, the lines practised over and over with the legal fellows, with Maud, with Eldon and Alan Cole, and he delivered the expected answer, neatly wrapped and tied up with string. In a measured voice, he explained that the word ‘Nocturne’ was employed to indicate an artistic interest alone – to divest the picture of any outside anecdotal interest. A Nocturne was an arrangement of line, form and colour, and that was all. The same applied to his use of the term ‘arrangement’.
‘There is no suggestion,’ he concluded, ‘of an actual link with music. Very often have I been misunderstood on this fact.’
The courtroom fell to murmuring. Jim leaned lightly against the front of the box, his right arm laid along the top, tapping the wood with his forefinger. This was good. Exactly right. Corrective. He found he was relishing the prospect of the next question – of supplying another succinct and brilliant response. Petheram, however, was turning to the judge, who was looking on with a vaguely benign expression that could have held deep understanding or its opposite. There was a nod; and then the junior was sitting back down again, shuffling his papers, reading a note that had been passed to him by Reeve. One of the others was standing, one of the blasted enemy – their chief, in fact, Sir John Holker, the Attorney General of England. This was an impressive title, but the fellow struck him right then as a plebeian of the most gormless variety: eyes half shut and peering, a nub of ruddy chin receding into a baggy neck, the mutton chops fluffing out like those of a confounded farm-hand. Sleepy Jack, Jim’s people called him. It seemed a sound fit indeed.
No. This was the game. Jim just managed to contain his impatience. Amidst all the advice he’d received, all the schooling, some words of Owl’s stood out.
‘It’s not about you and him, Jimmy. It’s about the jury. Their cove will be trying to skew you from the outset. To present you as he wishes you to be seen. This you really mustn’t forget.’
Jim now gave the jury a good stare, and by Jove he could not pick out a single deuced thing about them. They were civilians, twelve damnably ordinary men, quite distinct from the wealthy artistic types in the public pews – property owners from Kensington and Chelsea, he’d been told, but unexceptional in every way.
Sleepy Jack began. The pace and shape of their dialogue was very different, right from the outset: light-hearted, the questions deceptively straightforward. Laughter came to meet Jim’s every utterance – to meet Holker’s every utterance, for God’s sake, the feeblest scraps of lawyerly wit eliciting veritable gales of mirth. It became rather unsettling. Jim thought he could detect apprehension there, as if a good number of the audience could perceive the path he was being led along – the destination that this Sleepy Jack had in mind.
It was an obvious one, in truth, predicted by Parry and Petheram almost in its entirety. With monstrous, plodding tediousness, the Attorney General established that Jim’s paintings had unusual titles and were widely considered to be eccentric, like their creator; that they were stood out to dry in the garden, something he appeared to think highly odd; that the Nocturne in Black and Gold – the firework painting that had so infuriated Mr Ruskin, and brought about this trial – was a finished piece, on sale for two hundred guineas, which the artist deemed to be a fair price. His tone, at times, sailed uncomfortably close to insolence. Jim had been warned of this as well.
‘Provocation,’ Parry had said, ‘is often a barrister’s goal. A fit of temper on the plaintiff’s part, an admonition from the judge perhaps, can easily be turned to the benefit of the defence.’
Jim, therefore, remained completely cool: slightly distant, elegantly baffled by Sleepy Jack’s deliberate bumpkin blunderings. Before very long they arrived at the question of work: the equation of hours toiled in relation to pennies earned that so entranced the simple-minded. There was a satisfaction in old Jack now. He believed that he could see the mechanism of his little trap enclosing poor Whistler, its jaws clamping shut around the artistic ankle.
‘Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold?’ he asked. ‘How soon did you knock it off?’
Knock it off? The laughter of the audience acquired a note of disbelief. Setting a hand on his hip, Jim paused for a second or two, as if thrown by Holker’s vulgarity. ‘I beg your pardon?’
The Attorney General was unapologetic. ‘How long do you take,’ he said more slowly, ‘to knock off one of your pictures?’
So be it. Jim stroked his moustache; he looked up at the courtroom ceiling. ‘Oh, I “knock one off” in a couple of days, possibly – one day to do the work and another to finish it.’
Sleepy Jack’s satisfaction grew into triumph. He turned towards the jury, swapping his blockheaded glibness for indignation. ‘You ask two hundred guineas for the labour of just two days?’
And there it was: the enemy laid wide open. Jim wanted to laugh – to hop up onto the edge of the witness box and crow like a cockerel. He did no such thing, of course. Instructing himself not to rush – not to speak too quickly, or seem too eager – he faced the public pews. The air was taut with attention. He drew in a breath. Adjusted the eyeglass, firming its place in the socket.
‘No,’ he replied, offhandedly almost, ‘I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.’
The applause – dear Lord, the applause was like a great thundering deluge of rain, immediate and wildly enthusiastic. It awoke the judge to startling effect; he began banging away with his hammer, frowning most imperiously, threatening to clear the court if those present insisted upon turning it into a common theatre. The claps subsided and the cross-examination resumed, but Sleepy Jack was on the back foot now, his sureness visibly diminished – and in the minutes that followed Jim worked the blackguard to his will.
Was Mr Whistler aware, Jack enquired, that the critics were against him? This invited a particularly honed reply concerning the absolute goddamned redundancy of critics – men who produce this commentary, this supposedly informed opinion, upon a science that they do not practise themselves. Would Jack respect the legal views of a man who was not a lawyer? Who had never studied law? Of course he wouldn’t. The principle was the same.
‘I hold that none but an artist can be a competent critic,’ Jim told them all. ‘None but an artist.’
Holker had no counter to this. He opted instead for a side-step, wheeling out the one great weapon the enemy believed he had left: the direct examination of Jim’s paintings. Parry was up at once, dear fellow, trying to prevent it – and to resurrect the notion of the jury processing across the road to the Westminster Palace Hotel and the exhibition therein – but to no avail. At first, it went as expected. The canvases – or the Nocturnes, at any rate – were carried in by stewards evidently more used to exhibits of a sturdier nature: manhandled was the word. One was mounted on the bench upside down; another, on its passage through the room, was knocked rather hard against a gentleman’s head, to the vocal amusement of those nearby. Jim had no option but to maintain his pose, looking on from the box with dry resignation and a certain detached horror. There was no escape from this. He was pinned in place, awaiting their worst efforts.
Once more, the approach was banal to a degree both reassuring and dispiriting. The Blue and Silver was examined first – the one that included a portion of Battersea Bridge. In the darkness of the court the painting was reduced to a mere shadow of itself. It was impossible, frankly, to form any estimation of it; there was barely enough light to identify the damned thing. The judge weighed in now, still rather too awake after the earlier commotion, peering at the canvas propped beside his chair with an innocence every bit as bad as Sleepy Jack’s clumsy malice.
‘And which part of the picture,’ he enquired mildly, ‘is the bridge?’
Through the laughter, Jim attempted to explain that the work was not intended as a portrait of Battersea Bridge, but rather as a moonlit scene; that its subject, properly speaking, was colour. The balance and harmony of colour.
‘As to what the picture represents,’ he said, ‘that depends upon who looks at it. To some it may represent all that I intended. To others it may represent nothing.’
Again, the line was spoken with deliberate coolness, exactly as rehearsed; this time, though, the courtroom’s response was muted by puzzlement. Jim found that this pleased him rather more than their applause.
Sleepy Jack was right there, of course, lumbering onwards, pressing what he imagined to be his advantage. Away he sniped, attempting to steer Jim through every part of the composition, pointing at it rather too closely with his thick forefinger. What is this part here – a fire escape, perhaps? A telescope? Are those supposed to be people, up on the bridge? The poor fellow’s flippancy was marked now by a streak of genuine umbrage, as if something he felt should be fixed in place, readily comprehensible, had been allowed to drift free – a sacred equation crossed out and cast aside.
‘They are,’ Jim told him, ‘just what you like.’
*
Maud was in a small room at the White House’s rear, the intended purpose of which Jim had quite forgotten. She seemed to have selected it on the basis of size, having pulled an armchair right up to the grate and the two pebble-like coals that glowed within. Swaddled in a heavy shawl, she was working a pencil against a notebook by the light of a solitary candle – drawing something, it seemed. She set it aside upon seeing him, smiling wearily and beckoning him in for a kiss. Her mouth was dry; her grip upon the back of his head a touch harder than was necessary.
Jim wanted to know everything. He’d been praised throughout the afternoon and evening – in the courtroom, after he’d left the witness box; in Reeve’s office, once the day’s business was concluded; in the dining room of the solicitor’s club, where the Whistler team had taken their supper – and he felt a keen need to be praised again now, upon his return to hearth and home. Maud’s account was neat, emphatic, almost as if she’d been practising it. He’d been brilliant, running rings around the opposition. Their witnesses – Mr Moore, Mr Rossetti and the other fellow – had provided staunch support, the work of true friends. Ruskin’s bullying brute of a barrister had been made to look properly foolish. It was so close to what Jim wanted to hear that for a second he was almost suspicious. Her expression was sincere, however. Proud.
‘Sleepy Jack couldn’t get a thing to stick, could he?’ he reflected, propping himself against the mantelpiece. ‘Not a deuced thing. Is Mr Whistler a serious painter? He is. These are serious and original artworks. Are they worth what he asks for them, even the Black and Gold? They are, every penny. Especially the goddamned Black and Gold.’ Despite his tiredness, the fiery hum of it all started to come back, and he heard his voice quicken as he rolled a cigarette. ‘I hesitate to say it, Maudie, lest some mischievous spirit decides to fox everything, but my feeling is that we may be set for victory. It is Reeve’s feeling as well, and the barristers’. Everyone is confident that tomorrow will go our way.’
Maud was relieved, plainly; she sat back in her chair, pulling her shawl around her. ‘Fingers crossed,’ she said.
‘How did it appear from where you were? The place, the people? Frightfully busy, wasn’t it? I could see you, you know, when I was up in the box. Your shiny red face, away there at the back.’
This prompted a contraction of the brow, then a slight pout of annoyance. ‘It was devilish warm in there, Jimmy. And this … this is like having a hot-water bottle strapped around your middle.’
Jim lit the cigarette and considered the size of her. Inwardly, he cursed the timing once more; but when, in the life of Whistler, would be an opportune moment for such a mishap? Another babe to be fostered. Another set of associated expenses. Another few months with Maud miserable and moping, of limited use as a model. She would surely miss the second as she missed the first. Did he ever think of this child already born, the girl? Every once in a while, perhaps, as he thought of his son, little Charlie: his absent flesh, out there in the world, following whatever path it would. But he couldn’t feel guilt, or responsibility, or anything like that. Whistler was an artist, not a father. He was not given to paternal things.
‘No one saw you, did they?’ he asked. ‘Dinner guests and so forth, I mean – gentlemen you’ve met?’
‘I did as we agreed. Arrived just as it was starting. Left as soon as it was over. Rosa and Eldon were with me.’
Rosa Corder. ‘I don’t suppose that there was any sign of the Owl?’
Two days before the start of the trial, in the absence of other candidates, it had been decided that Charles Augustus Howell – an art dealer, after all, of some prominence, with no formal connection to Jim – could be useful on the stand. He had, of course, eluded every attempt to locate him. Jim’s hope had been that he might present himself at court, ready to testify. The trial was an all-hands-on-deck occasion – perhaps the ultimate example of such a thing. Surely Owl would see this. That court, those few hundred beings, was supposed to represent the better part of Jim’s entire acquaintance: everyone he knew, or at least everyone who was on his side. Over the course of the proceedings, he’d compiled a mental list of who was there and who wasn’t; and the Owl, his friend and cherished co-conspirator, had been foremost among the latter.
‘He’s busy with his own case, I think,’ said Maud. ‘The railway company.’
Jim was well aware of this, but it was difficult indeed for him to accept that there could be a greater priority than the battle against Ruskin – which was, properly speaking, a battle against incompetent criticism at large. Against the forces of ignorance and injustice. Their mutual foes. He smoked, and sighed; then frowned at the red-brick tiles around the fireplace, noticing that Mr goddamned Nightingale hadn’t set them quite straight on the left edge.
Maud stood
with a groan and a short, squeaking fart. She lifted up her candle, causing their shadows to leap and dip as she moved it to the mantelpiece. Jim felt her hand on his shoulder – the heat of her palm, and the shiver in it. He smelled sweat, and gas, and strong tea.
‘You beat them back today, Jimmy. Without his help. You saw them off.’
‘Owl’s the fellow, though,’ he murmured. ‘Should the fires lick once more, you know, at the curtains of the show. Should anything go amiss.’
‘It won’t. You’ll go in there tomorrow and you’ll beat them again.’
‘Tomorrow is their turn. The witnesses for the enemy.’
‘Your men are ready, though, aren’t they? They know what to say?’
Jim looked at her. She was doing her best, her jaw set and her eye firm, but he could see this for what it was. She was supplying his need, as she always did. Doubt took hold, like a cramp; it began to tighten. She drew him in for an embrace, all but wrapping him up in her shawl, nuzzling cat-like against his shoulder; and there it was, jutting into his midriff. It always surprised him how far the bulge came to protrude. How very hard it was. Did he recoil, without thinking, by the slightest amount? She stepped back the next moment, at any rate, and shot him an unreadable glance as she took the cigarette from his hand. After a single puff, she flicked the end among the coals, then turned towards the doorway and the dark passage beyond.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’m done in.’
26 November 1878
The corridor was broad and long, vaulted in a grand, churchy sort of way, and filled with a well-heeled crowd, waiting to be summoned back into the courtroom. The lanterns overhead had been lit while they’d been out; there was an odour of cigar smoke and perfume, laced faintly with sweat. Maud recognised a number of the people there from the dinner table at the White House, from the theatre and elsewhere; she stuck to the arrangement, though, hanging back in an alcove, hidden from general view. Rosa stood beside her, dressed in a tricorn hat bound around with crimson gauze and a black, close-cut coat, its sleeves embroidered with butterflies – in solidarity, she’d said. She turned, enclosing Maud’s hands in hers. Her gloves were a smart and spotless black; Maud’s a kind of mottled cocoa, worn to a shine along the knuckles.
Mrs Whistler Page 19
