‘What d’you mean?’ asked Jim. ‘What authority?’
‘I mean the money, sir. His millions. The lawyers – that receiver too. Defected, the lot of them. To Leyland.’
This was Jim’s suspicion, gleaned from his correspondence. The fortress had been overrun; the guards, upon the outer walls at any rate, had turned their goddamned coats. It had been an overwhelming action, impossible to resist, and one there had seemed little point him returning to England to witness.
‘What of the cartoons? What became of them? Did he see them, at least?’
Way nodded, but the details Jim craved – Leyland’s anger, his powerlessness and humiliation – did not follow. ‘He sued to keep them out of the first sale – the public one, at the White House. The matter was decided so quickly that by the time I heard of it everything was already settled in his favour. The two smaller works, the lobsters and the boat, disappeared not long afterwards. All sorts of things were going by that stage. Indeed, sir, it was only by shifting the large one to your brother’s that I prevented it from going too. It made it to Sotheby’s – didn’t I tell you this?’
‘I understand that there was a lot called The Creditor, but—’
‘That was it.’ Way’s voice was quick with shame. ‘That was the one. I don’t know who gave it that title. A man called Dowdeswell bought it. Printseller on Chancery Lane. I’m sure that he’d consider selling it back, Mr Whistler, should this be required.’
Jim looked at his cigarette; he’d quite lost the taste for it. The Gold Scab had been created with a very specific purpose: to mortify Leyland, mortify him publicly and remind the villain exactly who he had affronted. Who he had cheated. How grave the wound was, and how unhealed. And yet it had been swept aside. Slipped out into the world with barely a murmur. There was a sense of a failed joke: a bucket of water balanced above a door that had fallen the wrong way, or a chair with a loosened leg that no one had sat upon. The cartoon had been made to fail. Why on earth would he want it back?
He couldn’t face explaining this to Way. Keeping up a show of unconcern, he asked after The Three Girls. This drew a single deep nod from the father, and a series of shallower but no less emphatic nods from the son.
‘Oh yes, Leyland was certainly hunting for that. Before he went abroad, that is. Yes, he was after that one especially.’
‘Mentioned it many times. Said it was his, he did. That he’d paid for it.’
‘There was an arrangement,’ Jim said, ‘with Mr Howell regarding that picture. We’d agreed that he was to shield it from Leyland. Transport it from the White House. Save it from the sale.’
Way Senior set down his port glass. ‘It was nowhere to be found, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s for sure.’
Jim was almost amused. ‘Are you telling me – my dear Way, are you honestly telling me that the Owl was true to his word?’
The Ways exchanged a lengthy look. The son seemed to be urging the father to stick to an earlier resolution – to say something it had been agreed that they had to say. Although reluctant, the father accepted it. He turned back to Jim, but couldn’t look at him directly, choosing instead to study the silver salt cellar, sliding it an inch across the tabletop with his forefinger.
‘Mr Whistler,’ he said, ‘I believe we need to talk about your Mr Howell.’
*
It took Owl just a week to track Jim down. The reunion occurred on Regent Street, some fifty yards from the two-room workshop that had been rented for him by the Fine Art Society. He was with the younger Way, whom he’d been granted as an assistant, walking back from supper at the Café Royal. An evening’s labour lay ahead; for inevitably, that which had looked wholly perfect in Venice seemed a good deal less so when unpacked, cleaned of sawdust and viewed in the hard light of London. Jim was now engaged in an intensive round of alterations and rebitings, ahead of printing out a completely fresh set of proofs.
Owl’s approach was direct: he stepped before them, into a stripe of gaslight, and boomed out their names in robust salutation. The Portuguese was as spruce as ever, with checked trousers, a watch-chain and new kid gloves, and that crimson ribbon, that obscure decoration, pinned to a spotless grey overcoat. He was a sleeker beast than formerly, and somewhat thicker in the mid-section; his plots and manipulations were clearly paying off.
Jim felt a plunging sensation – a bristling of hairs, a quickening of the blood – but managed to limit his immediate response to asking young Way to go on ahead to light the fire and perhaps apply some grease to the press. The lad obeyed, giving Owl a glance that suggested he’d like nothing more than to plant a boot against those checked trousers and send the fellow careening into the gutter.
Owl didn’t notice. ‘It warms my heart,’ he declared, ‘to think that Jimmy Whistler is at work on something entirely new. A set of Venetian etchings! Lord above, I cannot wait to study them.’ He hesitated, allowing for an invitation to come up and see what was underway. None came. ‘There’s word about town, among the dealers and so forth, that there are pastels as well. Is this so?’
Jim leaned back on a heel. After Venice, after all the Italian and French, and the various burrs and brogues of his American friends, that Portuguese accent rang slightly hollow. The Owl was even sounding false. His attitude, too, was mystifying. He must, he simply must have realised that there would be difficulty here. Did he really not know that his victim, his dupe, was onto him? He gave no sign of it, though, seeming unperturbed that his greeting had not been returned. That nothing, in fact, had been said to him at all.
‘I mean, if this is true, it is a genius move. Pastels, by God! A perfect fit for you, old man. All the finest qualities of your art: the looseness, the sureness, the colours. And each one unique. I smell coin, my friend, and a tidy bit of it.’
On he ran, with that old fluency, about how very long Jim had been away; it was November already, did he realise? How this absence might be played to his advantage. How all artistic London was wondering what had become of their pugnacious butterfly. How the time was right for a renaissance – for the show to begin anew.
After a couple of minutes Jim could take no more. He rapped the end of his cane smartly against the pavement. ‘What is it that you want, Owl? What brings you here, precisely?’
Owl’s brow lifted. ‘Merely the concern of a friend,’ he replied. ‘Of an ally in your bothers, who rejoices to see you rising out of them.’
Jim regarded him sceptically.
The Portuguese saw that he must make an offering. ‘I have it,’ he said simply. ‘I did as I promised, Jimmy. I saved the large canvas for you – The Three Girls. Maud and the others, there in the altogether.’
This was news, at least. Jim asked him where it was.
‘Over at Rosie’s. I say, though, old man, you’ll never believe the wheeze that got the thing out. It was mere hours before the sale. Certain parties were poised, if you follow me, and means of egress closing fast. The yard of the White House was filled with—’
‘Come then,’ said Jim, turning towards Piccadilly. ‘Let’s be off.’
A hansom was taken. Many of their most diverting chats and serious conferences had occurred within those neat little vehicles. This time, however, Jim held his tongue and let Owl talk for them both. The Portuguese spoke for a while about mutual acquaintances, and all that Jim had missed, trying to trap him in conversation. He said nothing, looking out at the darkening city, refusing the cigarette case that was held open between them; so Owl moved on to a subject he knew his companion could not ignore.
‘I expect you’ll have heard about Leyland. He’s finished, they say. His heart shattered. Even his famed rapacity in business is said to have tailed off almost completely. The sad tidings did reach you, didn’t they, over in Italy? Of Fanny?’
Nellie had reported the death in one of her letters, early in the summer. It had quite confounded Jim for a while. He’d thought of the happy child he’d once known, with whom he’d played on the lawns at Speke, whose po
rtrait he’d painted – and who’d drifted away, and grown, and hardened against him so lamentably. His final sight of her had been in the corridor of the Lyceum Theatre, when he’d last seen them all, parading awkwardly with her fiancé. And now, less than a year afterwards, she was in her grave. It seemed absurd, and so pointless – like something left cruelly unfinished, for which they were all owed a damned good explanation. Maud had known already. Jim could only guess how – gossip among the English in Venice, perhaps – but she’d still wept when they’d spoken of it. She’d been ill again by then, confined to bed for much of the time, and crying at all sorts of things.
‘Have you seen Mrs Leyland? Written to her?’
No territory was forbidden here, plainly. Jim shook his head.
‘Word at first was that she’d found a house in St James’s. That there was an agreement giving her five thousand a year.’ Owl struck a match and smoked; he picked a shred of tobacco from his lip. ‘More recent reports have her back in Liverpool, though. Living in lodgings, making no show of any kind. You know that he refused her permission to attend their daughter’s funeral?’
This Jim hadn’t heard. His grip tightened around his cane; he shifted on the hansom’s upholstery.
Owl noted his discomfort, with the slightest satisfaction at having broken through at last. ‘The essential character of the man, I think, was revealed in that proscription. His villainy shines out, even in his own darkest moments. It cannot do otherwise.’
The journey was a short one, thankfully, half a mile at most. Jim climbed from the hansom, leaving Owl to pay, and peered down the gloomy channel of Southampton Row. A fog was settling, slowly filling the long, straight street, snuffing out its lights one by one. Owl threw away his cigarette and fished the key for number 93 from his pocket. Jim followed him inside, waiting while he lit an oil lamp that had been left by the door. Having called there several times before, usually while trying to locate the Owl, he thought he knew what to expect. But the lamp flared to reveal a barren hallway. All the clutter was gone, along with the rugs and the pictures on the walls and most of the furniture. It was as if it had just been vacated.
Owl pointed to the front room. Jim went through, thinking of Frances Leyland, of her suffering, wherever she was; he imagined vaguely what he might do, whilst knowing full well that the honest answer was nothing.
The sputtering lamp found The Three Girls before anything else. It stood diagonally across the room, barely fitting within it. After many months of prints and pastels, of paintings no more than a few feet square, the thing was staggering – you staggered in there, quite literally, as you tried to take it in. That he had painted this giant caused Jim some brief amazement. Once he was accustomed to the basic fact of it, however, its appearance rather dismayed him. The harmony of the colours had been thrown off. There was a sickly hue to the nudes – a deadness to the paper screens behind. Was it dirt, he wondered as he inserted the eyeglass, some amalgam of grease and dust gathered during its escape from the White House and subsequent storage? Or merely the yellowing effect of Owl’s lamp? He glanced around the shabby little studio. As with the hallway, it was denuded, stripped almost bare – a dismal scene indeed.
Owl was talking again about the campaign he’d waged to secure the painting. A clever switch had been performed, apparently, using a small rough copy that Jim had made in the months before his departure for Italy. The original was then removed from its stretchers and rolled up tight inside a length of drainpipe, so that it could be smuggled from the premises with the help of a roofer Owl had bribed for this purpose. It had been a nerve-racking affair, the Portuguese claimed, requiring all his skill, and undertaken in constant fear of discovery and arrest – for he would have been criminally liable, a thief bound for gaol. The whole business had cost him nearly a week of sleep.
‘I swear that I have not taken such pains to retrieve another’s work,’ he said, ‘since my time with Gabriel. Have I ever told you, Jimmy, what I did for him?’
While Jim continued his examination of The Three Girls, Owl spun out a tale that was outlandish even by his standards. He told how Gabriel Rossetti, half-mad with grief and remorse, had insisted upon burying a ream of his verses with a departed lover – Elizabeth Siddal, the suicide, already dead by the time Jim had moved through the Cheyne Walk set back in the 1860s. As the years had passed, though, and so much of his talent was planed away by chloral and brandy, Rossetti had come to regret this gesture most keenly. So it was, after much probing of his conscience, that he’d charged Owl with exhumation: with both the necessary paperwork and the process itself, in the depths of night, while the venerated painter-poet had cowered tearfully at home.
‘Strange to relate,’ Owl said, ‘that although she’d been in the earth for several years, and was thus corrupted to a more or less complete degree, she retained an otherworldly beauty. Her hair, old man, that red hair – it had kept growing. It overflowed from the coffin, shining there in the candlelight. Upon returning to Gabriel, I told him—’
‘Owl,’ Jim interrupted. ‘You must surely understand what has happened. I have a blasted brain in my head, you know. I have talked with Way and received a full account. He has been watching you. He has observed the obvious collusion between yourself and Leyland.’
Owl’s face remained quite bland, revealing nothing. He twisted a corner of his moustache. ‘Collusion,’ he sighed, after a pause. ‘Such an unsatisfactory word. If you would merely—’
‘He told me about my cartoons. How you worked with Leyland to keep them out of sight. How you allowed him to carry off great bundles of studies, and that copy of this painting here. All of which he has since been selling on at devilishly low prices, to do his best to depress the market for my productions.’ Jim was growing vehement, properly so; although well seasoned in enmity, blatant treason was new to him. ‘He told me how you attempted to claim the Mother from Graves the printseller. To settle two hundred and fifty pounds of your debt in that way, in the place of money from the sale of the house. You, who said the paintings in pawn were safe! Who knew my particular attachment to that work! It looks black, Owl. It looks damned black.’
The Portuguese wouldn’t go down without a swing or two of his own. ‘But then, Jimmy, then the Mother would have been mine. Don’t you see? I could have handed the thing straight back to you. If old Way hadn’t poked his beak in – if the damned receiver hadn’t been alerted to it – that painting would be standing in here tonight, next to this one.’
Jim wouldn’t hear it. ‘Way also spoke of mounting suspicions that your debt – the money you’d provided me with, to ward off Nightingale – hadn’t in fact been yours at all. That the vast fortune paid by the Metropolitan District Railway had gone to another person altogether, who’d turned out to be the true owner of that house of yours. That the cash you fronted came from a rather different source.’ He adjusted the eyeglass, as if to focus his glare. ‘A Liverpudlian source.’
‘Jimmy—’
‘It makes me re-evaluate your labours. The chaos and fire that has consumed the show. Everything that you’ve made sure I’ve lost track of. Have I been played for a fool, I wonder? Has my dearest friend – my truest ally, so I believed – been milking me all the while? Is this, when one casts an eye over his career, actually his game? His own particular art?’
Owl placed the oil lamp on the floor between them, lending the studio an eerie, cave-like ambience. He put his hands in the pockets of his checked trousers. Beneath a front of enjoyment, of affection for Jimmy Whistler and the tripe he could be made to swallow, was now a definite unease.
‘Old man,’ he said, ‘you are a great and dear friend. And, by God, a bloody genius of art. This is why I so exerted myself to obtain this painting here, to keep it from the fellow you imagine me so bonded to. And once we’ve agreed our terms, I’ll return it to you with a gladdened spirit – an unburdened heart. I still think it one of your best. A five-hundred-guinea picture. And as you’re riding so high aft
er Venice, no doubt the sum will climb yet further. Why, together we could—’
‘You wish,’ said Jim, ‘to make terms.’
The Portuguese tilted back his hat. ‘Well, the picture is in my possession. I went to pains. And it was removed – it could be easily claimed – in my capacity as debtor and a member of the Committee of Inspection, from the property of an absent bankrupt.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I mean, it will be reasonable, Jimmy, you don’t have to worry about that! An exchange of some kind, I was thinking. Proofs from Venice, for instance, would be most excellent – those you’re printing with young Way. Perhaps one of each, say, from the first Fine Art Society set? And the pastels. I hear there are sixty, so … four of those?’
There it was, laid open at last: an appraisal for the sake of personal gain. It had always been there, Jim saw, wound around their connection like a climbing vine. He looked to The Three Girls, his studio companion of so many years – his masterwork, he’d thought once. The colour effects might be impaired, but that composition was still quite perfect: the placing of the parasol and the spray of cherry blossom, the slender bodies arranged like notes on a sheet of music, with such a gentle rhythm to their forms. And there was Maud, of course, positioned to the left. So fresh then, so innocent. Before their trials had begun.
Owl was still talking away, about how he’d be able to sell on whatever they agreed to for great sums, boosting those Whistler prices no end. Calmly, Jim studied his bamboo cane. They were crude these canes, carried principally for the sake of distinctiveness, the hollow stems sawed into lengths in a workshop somewhere, and that was that. Their ends, accordingly, could be rather sharp; he’d scratched the leather of several pairs of boots with them, along with innumerable tiles and varnished floorboards. He tested the present one with his thumb. Yes, that would do it. If one raised the thing above one’s head so, with one’s hands set about two feet apart, and plunged it in so, spear-like, with all one’s strength, it should – yes, it had punctured the canvas, poked clean through, making a hole the size of a sixpence close to the centre of the parasol, as if it were some form of target. He shifted his grip, reversing the position of his hands – feeling like a goddamned whaler, there in that Holborn sitting room, straddling a longboat in the open ocean, working his harpoon into the flank of a leviathan.
Mrs Whistler Page 33
