Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  Rosa saw it. ‘Maud, much as it pains me, I don’t think …’

  ‘No. No, I’m well. Come on.’

  Gradually, torturously, the main thoroughfare drew closer – the flow of hansoms, the omnibuses with their advertising placards, the endless people. Rosa was not as steady a support as might have been wished for, due to the unusually high heels on her boots, but the pair of them found a pattern of sorts. Maud began to divide up the remaining distance in her mind, into separate lengths of street and lane, having a half-formed notion that this would make it more manageable. Above, sparrows bickered atop a lamp post; she smelled smoke, blackly acrid, from a brazier across the road; and something seemed to fall from her, dropping away among her skirts. Warm liquid soaked the inside of her thighs and the back of her left knee, spreading swiftly through the stocking. There was a splattering sound. Maud halted, skidding a little, her grip on Rosa’s arm tightening so much that she cried out. Together they looked down. The pavement was wet beneath her, one of her boots splashed to a shine.

  Edie ran up, asking if she was all right, if she could hold on. She began calling for a cab, waving, moving to the kerb. Maud stood stock still, hands on her haunches now – staring at the wet pavement, listening to the dripping, trying to recall how it went last time and how long she might have. She made herself concentrate upon her body, upon the child – upon what was beginning to happen. That first slow squeeze.

  A Hackney carriage was convinced to stop. Edie rushed back towards her, urging her to go over to it, to climb in – saying that they had to get to Camden, to the midwife.

  ‘Rosa,’ said Maud.

  ‘She’s not coming. She’s gone.’

  Maud gazed around her in confusion and then glimpsed a strip of turquoise, some distance along the street already. She couldn’t make out very much more through her watering eyes. Was Rosa turning as she strode away? Was she waving them off?

  Nothing could be done. Maud shuffled through the mud to the cab, keeping her feet half a yard apart, her saturated petticoats swinging heavily beneath her dress. She made it to the door – to the carriage’s three cast-iron steps. The taste of Rosa’s brandy was still in her mouth. She found herself thinking of earlier, of the heated words they’d exchanged before it had been poured – and realising with fast gathering force that something was amiss. Now that Rosa was gone, she could see it; she could feel it, like a burr in a glove. She blinked, rooted to the spot, unable to lift her boot.

  ‘The locket,’ she said.

  Edie gave the midwife’s address to the driver. She opened the door and pointed to the lowest step, as if Maud required direction; then she noticed the expression on her sister’s face. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  Maud looked back at her. ‘I never told her about the locket.’

  Part Three

  The Gold Scab

  January 1879

  ‘The shore forms a white curve,’ said Jim, ‘from midway down the right side to the lower left corner. Water and sky are the same shade of pearl grey, with just the slightest soupçon of blue.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘The boats – those lighters there, dragged up onto the ice, and those barges with their masts – are darker, rather like wet slate; while that fog bank to the rear adds a haze of ochre, quite smothering the buildings within it. Their lights are merely dim squares, so dim that they are barely there at all.’

  Eldon was nodding; he clapped his gloved hands together. ‘You have it, old man,’ he said from behind his scarf. ‘You have it exactly.’

  It was a while past midnight. They’d waited until the gas had gone out along the Chelsea Embankment, and something of the old calm had returned. Jim had then set about working to his method: locating the Nocturne and impressing it completely upon his mind. Eldon, there for company, was not one to complain, but he’d begun to fidget as the minutes became an hour and his extremities were numbed by the cold. Jim himself was reluctant to leave. It had been two years at least since he’d last done this. He had a fear that his memory, his burdened consciousness, could not hold another image, another arrangement of tones; that it was simply full, and once he turned his back the scene before him would be lost forever. He went, though. One had to have a little faith.

  ‘Where’s this for again, Jimmy?’ Eldon asked as they crossed the entrance to the Albert Bridge, their boots crunching through frosty mud. ‘Scotland, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A fellow in Edinburgh,’ Jim replied – thinking of that barge on the right: the angle of the boom against the mast, the bunched canvas of the sail. ‘A dealer. He attended the trial. Felt the injustice of it all. Tells me he’ll be able to sell any Nocturne I send him, for fifty guineas or more. I’d have done him fireworks, naturellement – a summer scene, another Black and Gold. But time is of the essence.’ The White House appeared ahead, like a distant cliff sliding from the mist. ‘This is only the start. These picture dealers are always prowling around here, you know. All I need do is work, dear Eldon, and the gold will appear.’

  As he made this claim, Jim felt the uneasy undertow that so often runs beneath wishful thinking, dragging at one’s confidence even as one speaks. There was work, that much was true – etchings, this lone canvas promised to a man four hundred miles away – but it was a minute fraction of what was required. A cup of water tossed into a burning barn.

  Eldon enquired no further, perfectly happy to believe him, and asked instead about the fortunes of Art & Art Critics. Jim revealed with considerable satisfaction that his pamphlet had reached no less than its seventh edition.

  ‘It goes like smoke, mon cher. It disappears in its hundreds from the booksellers’ shelves.’ He hesitated. ‘Which isn’t to say that there’s been any blasted money. Costs of production, you understand. A venture in publicity, that damnable word, and naught else.’

  Eldon was nodding again, his shoulders hunched and his hands buried in the pockets of his coat. They approached the front door. Jim reached for his key; the metal was so cold he could feel it through his glove.

  ‘Any word yet from the Madame?’

  An unsurprising question. They all loved Maud, of course they did, and were understandably concerned for her. Eldon was especially devoted, Jim had noticed – like a loyal bodyguard, albeit one of little practical use.

  ‘She’s as well as one can expect. Boredom is the enemy more than anything else. Her family are tending to her – and they are not, I believe it’s fair to say, friends to art …’

  ‘She writes to you, then?’

  ‘Via Lucas. You know, my chum on the rue de l’Arc de Triomphe. And I write back by the same path. Spin my Parisian fictions. Nothing too specific.’

  Was that disapproval on Matthew Eldon’s mild, meaty face? A crease of censure between those blond eyebrows? ‘And she suspects nothing,’ he said. ‘She thinks you are in France?’

  ‘It had to be done. Had to be. Don’t you dare try to prompt guilt, Eldon – not over a ruse as innocent as this. Tell me, have you ever tried to apply yourself to anything whilst sharing your abode with an expectant woman? It is impossible. Absolutely impossible. This I learned most memorably the first time around. And now, well – every last hour is precious, n’est-ce pas?’

  As if to reinforce this point, the front door was opened to reveal Mr Sumner from Levy and Company. He’d moved a dining chair to the hall and sat there quite awake – waiting in the dark. As Jim and Eldon entered, he struck a match, touching it to a candle set in a holder at his feet. The effect was rather sinister.

  ‘Hell’s bells, Sumner,’ said Jim, ‘you are a strange beast. Will you pass the night down here, I wonder? A room was made up for you, you know, on the first floor.’

  Sumner did not speak; he had the air of a man tired of speaking. He gestured for Jim to approach and went through his pockets. There wasn’t anything of worth or interest within, Jim always made sure of that. Nightingale’s writ of execution had been served a week before, and now there was a human filter set over his household, a net that wo
uld both catch any gold coming in and prevent any valuables from leaving.

  The house was cold and cheerless, kept dark as a matter of financial necessity. Jim soon retired to bed; then awoke with the watery dawn, donned three shirts and a stained smock and went directly to the studio. Eldon was there already, sitting at the piano in scarf and gloves. The lid was up; he played the occasional idle chord, smoking a cigarette – coasting, as he tended to do, on the verge of complete vacancy. He’d plainly been there all night. Jim presumed that a bottle had been involved.

  The canvas, prepared the afternoon before, had been covered with a light grey ground and set flat on the table to prevent the paint from running. By the light of a low winter sun, just coming in through the ice-sheened windows, Jim mixed the paint until its tone matched his recollection. He thinned it out with syrupy glugs of linseed oil, making it quite liquid – the sauce, he used to call it. The basics were laid in, using long, steady strokes of a broad brush; appraised with a hand on the chin; judged inadequate and wiped off. This was done again, and a third time. The morning advanced. Eldon slipped from the piano stool to the floor below, where he dozed gently. The fourth attempt was right, or at least not completely wrong: the shift in the surface of the water, the smoky coalescence of the fog, were perhaps just about acceptable. Jim left it, stalking around the chilly room. He peered down into the street, over towards the embankment, and smoked a couple of thin cigarettes. Then he returned to work.

  Another bead of ivory black was stirred into the sauce and one of the narrower brushes selected, so that a start could be made on the barges. The hulls were rendered in ghostly silhouette; the dark lines of the masts traced across the river mist. This looked so well, so close to his intention, that Jim almost didn’t trust it. Straightening up with a wince, he dropped the brush into a soft-soap jar. He removed the eyeglass and wiped it on his sleeve; and jumped to discover Owl standing immediately before him, only a couple of yards away, in top hat and grey overcoat, grey gloves and cane – coming yet closer, craning his neck, regarding the morning’s labour with great interest. For a large man who certainly knew how to underline his entrances when it suited him, the Owl was also capable of a really quite unnerving stealth. Why he would choose to employ it now was anyone’s guess.

  ‘That impertinent brute on the door,’ he murmured, ‘insisted upon damned well searching me before he’d allow me in. Is that legal?’

  ‘So I am told,’ Jim replied, masking his surprise. ‘It is his work, Owl, you see.’

  Owl had already moved on. ‘A Nocturne, eh? Damn good idea. Would you have me place it for you? There’s a dealer over in Marylebone who could get a healthy sum indeed for a new Whistler oil.’

  This was annoying. Jim had been hoping to prevent Owl from learning about this picture, and his connection with that dealer in Edinburgh. There was a suspicion growing in him that the Portuguese required dependency, in an odd sort of way; that if the fellow learned he was enjoying any success whatsoever he’d simply disappear again, this time for good, taking his funds and his pledge of help with the litigious Mr Nightingale along with him.

  ‘It isn’t finished,’ he said. ‘Mon vieux, it’s barely begun.’

  Owl accepted this with an incline of his leonine head, and instead reported that he had a sum of money for Jim, ready cash, that he’d managed to keep hidden from that blundering cur of Mr Levy’s. How much exactly, and for what – a Carlyle proof? One of the drawings Jim vaguely remembered letting him have? An ornament, a Japanese print? – was not specified. There was nothing unusual in this. Owl liked their affairs to remain as obscure as possible; for Jim’s own protection, he claimed, as what he himself did not know couldn’t possibly be uncovered by the enemy.

  From beneath his arm, Owl now produced the morning’s post. It was composed entirely of bills: Jim could identify them now from the envelopes alone. He’d begun sending them on to Reeve unopened, in the hope that he’d be able to sink them in a sea of lawyerly obfuscation. They were trifling, for the most part, matters of a few pounds only. This did not lessen the terror they provoked, however, so damned thick and unrelenting was the swarm.

  ‘I’ve had a couple of letters,’ he said, laying the bills beside the new Nocturne, ‘from a Mr Morse. You recall him, I’m sure – the fellow who took over Lindsey Row. He has a query about that Chinese cabinet he bought from me. Says it appears to be missing its top section, and asks if anyone at our end might know of its whereabouts.’

  ‘In for repair,’ Owl replied. ‘Morse knows this, the fool. Now – I have news regarding Nightingale. The legal types have had their powwow and the first payment is to be made. It should all be confirmed by the week’s end. I’m afraid that the cockney Argus downstairs will have to find somewhere else to hang that sad little hat of his.’

  And just like that Jim’s weary irritability lifted away. He looked out at the last of the morning, and the intense blue of the January sky. The largest debt was to be cleared. The man evicted. His freedom restored.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is good news indeed.’

  ‘Furthermore,’ Owl continued, ‘I’ve been talking to a pal of mine at the Fine Art Society. Marcus Huish, the managing director. I believe you two are acquainted.’

  Jim’s spirits dipped somewhat. ‘Huish,’ he pronounced, ‘is one of the enemy. Hang it all, Owl, he arranged that damned fund for Ruskin, after the trial, to pay the old vulture’s costs. He and his cronies are among my—’

  ‘Huish is no partisan,’ Owl said. ‘This you must understand, Jimmy. He did that thing for Ruskin, true – and now he seeks to do something for you as well. A new impression of the Thames set is what he proposes, to be displayed and sold on their premises. And the Society also wishes to buy the plates – which I need not tell you means serious tin. Things can be arranged, I believe, so that no payments are made until Levy’s man is well and truly out.’

  Jim considered the studio: the assembled artworks, held hostage to the bailiff; the scuffed furniture; the leak beneath one of the windows, staining the paintwork. ‘The Fine Art Society,’ he said.

  ‘I understand it is difficult,’ Owl continued, ‘but there is real admiration over there, Jimmy, for your genius as an etcher. No one better alive today, they say. Certainly not in London. Possibilities galore, old man, if you only demonstrate an ounce of willing. Copper will be turned into gold.’

  Jim said nothing. Owl was patient; he took off his hat and turned to survey the canvases.

  Up here for the past few weeks, alone mostly, Jim had thought much about his life – where it was, what had been done with it and what looked likely to happen from now on. And by heaven it was difficult at times to feel very good about it at all. Forty-four years old at his last birthday, two years more than his own father had managed, and running out of clothes, of food, with no money even for coal or candles. His work was valued by some, yes, but reviled and ridiculed by many more. Behind the swagger, the defiance, had always been a conviction that one day, at some point in the future, he would come through – that his work would silence the critics, or convert them even, and his unswerving adherence to his own sense of art would find its reward. Now, though, as the trial’s din faded away, he couldn’t be rid of a creeping sense that this might not actually be the case. He could fail. Be ruined beyond repair. He saw it very clearly.

  ‘Kindly inform Mr Huish – inform him—’ Jim’s attempt at hauteur grated on his own ear. He sighed, looking over hopelessly at the mortgaged piano and the still slumbering Eldon beneath it. ‘I must accept. I have no choice. You see this place, Owl. You see the – the straits I’m in. We are so very close to the end, mon vieux. You know it. To dissolution.’

  Owl was regarding him with deep sympathy. ‘I understand, Jimmy. God knows I do. I’ve stared down the barrel of it myself, on far too many occasions. And I will do everything possible to save you from these dreadful bothers. The key, my friend, the bloody key is management. There is a way to keep the Sheriff’s men from yo
ur house. To safeguard what is important. To preserve the best of yourself, come what may.’ There was a pause, expertly weighted – the kind that comes before a revelation. ‘Bankruptcy.’

  Jim didn’t move or breathe. He could feel himself staring; his eyeballs ached. Speech, for the moment, was beyond him.

  Owl was not at all discouraged by this response. He seemed almost to relish it. ‘I am just about to pay two hundred pounds,’ he said, ‘to induce old Nightingale to flap away, and am pledged to provide his people with two hundred and fifty more. So that’s four fifty you’ll owe me – and a damned good start.’ He turned towards the piano. ‘El-don!’ he shouted, stamping his boot on the floor. ‘Eldon you sot, rouse yourself.’

  Eldon woke; he looked around in confusion. ‘I seem,’ he mumbled, ‘to have been asleep …’

  ‘How much,’ Owl asked, ‘does Jimmy owe you?’

  ‘Owe me? I don’t – he doesn’t—’ Eldon lifted himself up onto the piano stool. ‘Why Owl, not a bean.’

  Owl was shaking his head. ‘I think you’ll find, old chap, that it’s a cool hundred at the very least. And you’re expecting repayment in the near future.’

  Jim recovered enough to speak. ‘Owl, you fiend, what are you on about?’

  ‘Here’s how it is. Bankruptcy is declared, using old Reeve, at the London court. You get him to submit a sizeable bill of his own as well. Appoint an amenable fellow as the receiver. And all these petty demands will cease. No one can take any further proceedings against a declared bankrupt. The claims on the estate will be sorted and ranked, and those of your friends – being the most substantial – will be at the head of the queue. We’ll be in control, don’t you see? The others, these rodents who have gnawed at you so long, will have to make do with the crumbs. This is what the law dictates.’