‘I was ready, you know,’ he said, dashing the cigarette and match to the pavement. ‘Ready to throw it all at him, right there in front of everyone. The bastards, of which he’s sired enough to fill a blasted poor-school. The kept women in their apartments, across the goddamned city. The tales from the brothels of his – his proclivities.’
‘And yet you did not,’ said Godwin approvingly. ‘You held back. That was wise, James, truly. It was the behaviour of a gentleman. That sort of thing helps no one.’
Jimmy glared at him; and then at the façade of the Royal Courts of Justice, rising up dimly beside them. ‘I held back, Godwin,’ he retorted, ‘because there’ll surely be a better way of doing it.’
*
The knocks roused Maud at once, giving a fearful part of her a hard prod. She was leaving the bedroom, wrapping herself in a shawl, before she knew properly what was going on. The light was weak, grey, untouched by warmth; it couldn’t have been much more than eight o’clock. There was another series of knocks, the same as the first: four of them, evenly placed, imbued with the granite determination of authority. She met Jimmy on the stairs, descending from the studio, nearly running into him in fact; he was wide-eyed and wild-haired, in his outdoor coat to ward off the cold, his fingertips black with ink. When she’d left him shortly before midnight he’d been plotting a tract, and had plainly been working through the night in order to get something down.
A celebration had been the plan, back at the White House: glasses raised, speeches made, plates of Mrs Cossins’ rillettes passed around. Many of the crucial people, however, had either failed to come at all – in the case of the barristers and witnesses – or had departed before they were more than three bottles in. After a couple of hours it had been just Jimmy, Maud, Eldon and Anderson Reeve. They’d done their best with it, but it was impossible to avoid a sense of impending disaster – of a bone china teacup dropped towards a tiled floor, still intact and perfect as it fell through the air, yet with its destruction rushing up fast.
Reeve had treated them to a thorough post-mortem, unsparing in its use of lawyerly jargon, with much on the bungling of the judge – who, although obviously sympathetic to their side, had utterly confused the jury with his muddle-headed summation, and had read out the Ruskin review several times more than was necessary.
‘Drunk, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the solicitor had concluded. ‘Half the blighters always are.’
Jimmy, meanwhile, had fallen into the clutches of a weird mania. Expecting the Owl and Rosa, and both baffled and hurt by their non-appearance, he’d assumed an Owlish zeal of his own. His talk was of the way back – of how to replace the thousand-pound brick that had crumbled from their wall. An exhibition, a one-man show, with a charge on the door, featuring his most famous works. A touring lecture, replete with his best lines. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime. Art should be independent of all claptrap. Taken perhaps to the halls and theatres of America, where he would play the returning hero. The conquering hero. The first true genius of American art. Why the devil not? First of all, though, there would be a special publication. To keep the boilers stoked, as it were. It would be the last word on the goddamned trial; and a canny piece of pre-emption, as one could be sure that Ruskin would belch out some more of his drivel within the month. Or sooner, even – for much as he might find fault with the speed of Whistler’s production, in truth his own was equally goddamned rapid!
The knocks sounded again, patient and inescapable. They entered the hall; as Jimmy reached for the latch, Maud had a split-second premonition of trouble.
‘Jim—’
Too late. The door opened to reveal a pair of callers, clad in smart but rather cheap-looking coats. One wore a topper, the other something shorter and rounder. Both were lean and tall, with worn-in faces, and what Maud could only think of as a readiness about them. She felt an urge to grip hold of Jimmy’s arm; to pull him back through the narrow corridors, out of the rear door and over the yard, off into Chelsea.
‘What ho, Mr Levy,’ said Jimmy cordially. ‘You are out very deuced early this morning, I must say. Collecting, are you, for the Church Benevolent Society?’
So they were known; one of them, at least. Maud relaxed a fraction. She tried to smile.
‘Good day to you, Mr Whistler,’ the topper replied, with the disinterested air of one going about his duty. Then he cleared his throat for a recitation. ‘We are here on behalf of Mr Benjamin Ebenezer Nightingale, master builder of Black Horse Lane, who holds against you a debt of six hundred and fifty-five pounds, thirteen shillings and—’
‘I was just about to contact you,’ Jimmy interrupted. He ran a hand through his hair, fiddling with the white lock, his easy manner slipping. ‘Or rather have my lawyer contact Mr Nightingale’s. I was quite literally on the verge of it, you know. There’s a scheme afoot, gentlemen. A friend who will assist us.’
Maud’s alarm had risen again – a blacker, more sickly feeling this time. These men were bailiffs. Of course they were. Six hundred and fifty-five pounds. It was an astoundingly – a revoltingly hefty sum. She forced herself to think it through. She had a pretty decent handle on Jimmy’s affairs. Benjamin Nightingale. The alterations to the façade; to the elevation. This had been under control. Jimmy had sorted this out. He’d assured her that he’d sorted it out.
The topper – Mr Levy – was unimpressed. His features remained absolutely neutral, but his eyes were a dead well of weariness and cynicism. He heard this many times daily: the miraculous solution, the last-minute reprieve that would allow him simply to tip his hat and return empty-handed to his office. He knew its worth.
‘A writ was served you, Mr Whistler,’ he said, ‘at the Arts Club on Hanover Square, on the thirtieth of September of this year. Nothing of any consequence has happened since. More letters is all. The stalling actions of solicitors. And so the County Court of Middlesex has empowered me to collect money or goods in payment of debts.’
Jimmy’s laugh stretched rather too high at the end. ‘Excuse me, my dear Levy – goods to the total of six hundred and fifty quid?’ He made a show of peering past them, out onto Tite Street. ‘Did you bring a furniture van, perchance? A pair of drays?’
Mr Levy’s answer had the slightest trace of satisfaction to it – that of a functionary given the chance to exercise his power. ‘I am authorised,’ he said, ‘in the absence of any substantial amount of money or goods, to serve a further writ. A Writ of Execution.’ The bailiff studied them both for a second, expecting incomprehension. Maud knew very well what this meant, however, and began to speak – only for Levy to talk over her, his voice hardening as he delivered his explanation. ‘This permits the Sheriff’s office to take possession of your property. Mr Sumner here would live beneath your roof.’
The other man stood to one side, gazing out towards the river. He touched the brim of his small, round hat without looking their way. Maud noticed that a burlap sack, a quarter full with clothes it looked like, was slung over his shoulder.
‘His task would be to compile an inventory. To watch what comes here, Mr Whistler, and what goes. To ensure that everything remains in a stable condition, regarding assets and the like, while yourself and your legal gentlemen make your terms with Mr Nightingale. You will be charged a shilling a day for his expenses.’
Abandoning humour, Jimmy began to tell Mr Levy the tale of Charles Augustus Howell versus the Metropolitan District Railway, and those fabled mountains of tin. This, Maud realised, was the scheme he’d just mentioned: Owl guaranteeing his massive debt to Nightingale, paying off parts of it perhaps, from the thousands he was sure to be awarded. Yet the Portuguese hadn’t shown up at the trial. Nor had he come to see them afterwards. It seemed a flimsy thing indeed upon which to pin their survival.
For a second, the sense of emergency locked her in place; then she was puffing her way up to their bedroom, heat bristling across her breastbone, to scrabble breathlessly through the cardboard boxes lined on the floor, the chest of drawers, and a
long the cluttered mantelpiece. This yielded four pounds and seven shillings: everything they had, that was, every last bit of money she’d managed to squirrel away, including one of the pounds from the pawning of Mrs Leyland’s locket, which she’d kept back carefully from Jimmy and hidden beneath her shifts. She peered into the carton, once a container for fancy pastries, where she was presently storing her jewellery. Nothing in there was of any real value, sentimental or otherwise – paste, half of it. After poking around with a forefinger, she plucked out a silverish necklace, a couple of copper bracelets and a single earring that might possibly be pearl.
Mr Levy looked at it all like she’d given him a handful of sea-shells. ‘Ain’t there nothing else?’
‘There are paintings,’ Jimmy told him. ‘I can let you have a full-length oil sketch of the actor Henry Irving, shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in—’
The bailiff was shaking his head. ‘I need objects of demonstrable worth, Mr Whistler.’ He slipped Maud’s offering into a pocket and stepped across the pavement, tilting his head to consider the White House itself. ‘Queer sort of place, this,’ he said. ‘But it’s large, I suppose. The bills will go up. You’d have Mr Sumner within, sir, and advertisements for sale without. I apologise, sincerely I do, but that’s how it would be.’
‘Come, Mr Levy,’ Jimmy protested, ‘surely it won’t reach—’
‘I know you, Mr Whistler,’ Levy continued, ‘and I know where you are. So I will accept this advance on your payment, small though it is. But I have to say, if your Mr Howell really is ready to assist you in this matter, he must do it soon.’
With that the bailiffs left. Maud and Jimmy stood in the hall, waiting until they could be sure Levy and Sumner were out of earshot; then Jimmy moved in for an embrace, his expression one of unadulterated relief. Maud dodged it. She glowered at him. She struck his shoulder as sharply as she could.
‘What the devil was that?’ she demanded. ‘Did you know? Did you know they were coming?’
Jimmy was wincing, rubbing where he’d been hit, but he seemed to accept her assault as deserved – to enjoy it a little, even. Which was absolutely infuriating.
‘I – Reeve – the trial, Maudie – it was, you must admit, a distraction of a really quite monumental nature …’
He retreated to the drawing room, fending off another blow, taking refuge behind an armchair. Maud was caught up in the old rage; the child kicked, a foot nudging the inside of her forearm as if spurring her on. She ran her eyes murderously over the shelves of blue-and-white.
‘Stop,’ said Jimmy – rather more nervously, as he guessed her intentions. ‘Please stop. I understand, really I do. But he will be back.’
This did actually succeed in giving Maud pause. She turned, addressing him with naked, despairing contempt. ‘He’ll be back, Jimmy, before you bloody know it. And he will take our home. Do you understand that? He’ll have it sold off. We’ll have nowhere. Nothing.’
‘Owl,’ Jimmy replied. ‘Not Levy, Maud. Owl. He’ll be here within the week. I’m sure of it.’ He moved out from behind the chair and took a half-cautious step towards her, with arms slightly extended and hands open – a soothing gesture, as if to calm a restless horse. ‘We’ll shake this, I promise.’
*
December 1878
Rather to Maud’s surprise, over the following weeks it emerged that Mr Whistler’s libel suit had been brought purely as a matter of principle. The plaintiff made it known around town that he had not given a single thought either to compensation or costs, being uninterested in money. His only concern had been to protect his status as an artist, and the sanctity of his art. To fight the battle, as he came to put it, between the brush and the pen.
There was a rush of notices in the press – sketches and editorials, a handful of rather unflattering cartoons. And Jimmy pored over it all. Journals were scattered across every room of the White House. Several were French or German; one or two had even been sent over from America. Maud herself had felt compelled to leaf through some of them.
‘A pyrrhic victory, this fellow says it was. What’s that mean, Jimmy?’
‘Hard won, my girl. He means it was hard won.’
It was essential, Jimmy explained, for him to know everything that was being said, so that his riposte, the tract he was so busy preparing, would be completely watertight. So that it would be invincible. He could be heard up in the studio, declaiming and remonstrating, strutting about like an actor in the throes of some great heroic role. His brushes, meanwhile, remained quite dry, and his etching needles shut up in their cases.
Evidence did actually appear of wider support, enough that Jimmy briefly considered going back to court – only to be warned against this by Anderson Reeve with emphatic firmness. Still, letters came in their dozens, applauding his performance in the witness box, attacking the judge, barristers and jury for their woeful ignorance, and lamenting the unfairness of the verdict and the rebuke it seemed to contain. Importantly, a few also included cash – in one case a cheque for twenty-five guineas, which Jimmy bore about the house for a triumphant couple of minutes, before hiding it away lest Mr Levy should happen to poke his head around the door.
For this was another result of the trial’s notoriety – the opposite side, Maud supposed, of the same tiny little coin. Creditors hummed in like wasps on jam, acting on every variety of Whistler debt: those accrued more recently, since the move from Lindsey Row; the long-standing ones of daunting size; and a miscellany of others, both ancient and forgotten, involving cheeses long since digested, boots already worn out, and the small black piano that now sat up in a corner of the studio which Jimmy was in the habit of forgetting he even owned. They managed to laugh at it, with the first three or four at least, but it was hard to sustain your levity in the face of writs from the County Court. The meaning of it all was becoming increasingly clear. These people knew a listing vessel when they saw one, and wanted to carry off what they could before she was claimed by the waves.
Things grew quite horribly tense. Every knock at the door, every shadow passing across one of the front windows, brought Maud to her feet – by this stage a not inconsiderable endeavour. The house around her seemed to acquire a new flimsiness, as if the walls were made from paper, like those in Jimmy’s prints from Japan. It was ever easier to imagine it all simply being broken up and borne away.
Contrary to Jimmy’s prediction, the Owl, their purported saviour, failed to reappear. Nobody had seen him from what Maud could gather. He was absent from all his known haunts, missing without trace or clue, as if he’d walked from whatever club or saleroom he’d happened to be in and jumped into the river. Maud received a short letter from Rosa, saying she was obliged to leave town for a while to nurse an invalid brother who lived out at Bray, who Maud couldn’t recall her ever mentioning before. Rosa urged courage and fortitude, repeated her rather hollow claim of victory, and gave no explanation for her abrupt, wordless departure from the court corridor.
Jimmy’s bewilderment at all this was every bit as great as Maud’s – especially when it was reported that Owl had won his case against the railway company. The Portuguese should now be rich, his coffers bursting, and in a position to free them comprehensively from their quandary. Yet he did not appear. With his friends, Jimmy kept up an act of dry composure, but in truth he was growing desperately frustrated. And despite all those who’d crossed or disappointed him, the great range of people against whom he might rail when in public, his private ire would return unfailingly to the same point.
One evening, the noise issuing from the studio grew even louder than usual, loud enough for Maud to haul herself up there to investigate. The Leyland portraits were set against the far wall, the husband and wife side by side, brought out for the first time since the move to the White House. Wearing an overcoat and a thick woollen scarf knitted for him by his mother, Jimmy was bent in front of Mrs Leyland’s portrait, cleaning the wide golden frame with a rag. Maud staggered to the old chaise longue
in the corner. He didn’t seem to notice her. After minute he stopped cleaning and stood back. A single oil lamp had been placed on the stained floorboards before Leyland’s portrait. The shipbroker – shown in ruffed shirt and buckles, a hand placed on his hip – was made sinister and a touch cadaverous by the lamp’s low, grubby light.
‘The word,’ Jimmy said, ‘is that there has never been such a distance between them. That a fracture may well be on the cards. Indeed, I’d wager that these two canvases here stand rather closer to one another than their models ever will again.’
There was grievance in his voice. Maud glanced around for that broad-ended knife. ‘You aren’t going to scrape them, are you?’
‘Oh no, my girl,’ he replied, malice creeping into him now. ‘Not at all. No, I’m going to send them over to Prince’s Gate. As soon as I can find coin for the haulage. It is only right and proper that the fellow receives what he has paid for, wouldn’t you agree? The happy couple. Their blissful union. Immortalised in art.’
So that was it. He was going to use the portraits to needle Leyland, to taunt him with this spectre of his dead marriage. More inventive, Maud supposed, than destruction – although equally unlikely to bring them anything but further trouble. ‘Jimmy—’
‘The portraits are his. The money – as he himself likes to point out, with his customary charm – was paid years ago. It is the only honourable course.’
Maud peered off into the long, chilly room. Just visible was the large Japanese-style painting, away in a corner, its delicate greys and pinks lost in shadow – her younger, naked self hidden behind another half-finished portrait.
‘What of The Three Girls, then? Isn’t that his as well?’
Jimmy went back to his cleaning. ‘That one the rogue can do without.’
‘But won’t he—’
‘He will have his portraits. And good heavens, let us not forget that he has the blasted Peacock Room, at a bargain price. He can damn well do without it. These paintings in here are our assets, Maud. They are our salvation. I shall talk them up all over town. I shall get the dealers primed and ready. The guineas, very soon, will be gushing in. You’ll see.’
Mrs Whistler Page 21
