Mrs Whistler
Page 35
Dabbing her eyes on her coat cuff, Maud dragged on the cigarette and gazed into the park: at the mist beginning to creep above the waters of the lake; at the trees and shrubs sinking into shadow. There were few people about now. Before long she noticed a woman standing alone beneath a tall elm, off towards Rotten Row. The face couldn’t be seen, but that hat – an impractically large smear of lavender, bright against the surrounding greyness – left no doubt as to whose head it sat upon.
Maud dropped the cigarette and started towards her. She’d thought that if she ever saw Rosa Corder again – at the Grosvenor, say, or one of the colour shops about town – her reaction would be an angry one: a glare, a couple of words about betrayal, and that would be all. And there was anger now, oh yes – what was she doing there, exactly? Was she following Maud around? Why in heaven would she be doing that? But mingled in with it was something peculiarly like relief – dear Lord, like happiness. For Rosa was the one person who knew everything. The one person who might understand.
As she walked, Maud was also queasily aware that right then Jimmy was attending a concert organised by some grand society lady, during which he would certainly take the chance to reprise the performance he’d given at the luncheon; and again later on, when he’d been invited to Lord So-and-So’s for dinner. By the time he was finished, the Owl’s well would be permanently poisoned. There’d be scarcely a person left in London who’d do business with him. It was deserved, of course, in the strictest, harshest sense. A wrong had been done. A great lie told. And yet at the same time Jimmy’s vengeance would leave a father and husband with no way at all to make his living. It would deprive a penniless female artist of her protector. Maud realised that Rosa could well have followed her to the park to ask for clemency. To beg for her assistance. She didn’t know quite what she’d say to that.
When she was about thirty yards away, however, crossing an avenue, the figure suddenly stepped back, swinging a bag of some kind onto her shoulder and heading off in the direction of Brompton Road. Despite her promises to Edie, Maud was still weak; reaching the elm under which Rosa had been standing, she slowed and began to cough. Something pale was poking from the trunk – a sheet of paper, tucked into a cleft in the bark. Left for her. A note, she thought at first, pulling it out. A plea for help.
The paper bore a sketch, made from that same spot. Fluently drawn, rather more detailed than Jimmy’s tended to be, and far surpassing anything Maud herself could ever hope to do, it showed a woman, in fashionable clothes and a touch too thin, strolling hand in hand with a young girl in a bonnet: Maud and Ione, over at the Serpentine, as they’d been barely half an hour earlier. It was a moment of awkward beauty. They were sharing a shy look, smiling just a little, angled towards one another. The mother was leaning down, as if she was listening.
A tear patted against the paper. Maud shook it off. She wiped her face, staring hard into the gloom, at the shapes of the trees around her and the yellow seam of gaslight that ran along the street beyond. But Rosa Corder was gone.
Author’s Note
After Whistler’s death in 1903, the American art critic Elizabeth Pennell and her etcher husband Joseph set about writing the first complete biography of the artist. They’d known Whistler since the late 1880s and had spoken with him at length about his life and work. Interviews were conducted with as many of his surviving friends and associates as they could find. The intention was to set down the definitive history of James McNeill Whistler and establish him once and for all as a great genius of American art.
But certain details proved elusive. As always, there was a question mark over Charles Augustus Howell, who’d died in suitably mysterious circumstances in 1890. The Pennells knew that he’d been embedded in Whistler’s affairs during the desperate years prior to Venice, and had been extracting a measure of profit for himself, yet could ascertain very little beyond that. They were struck, however, by the admiring affection with which Whistler still talked of the Owl, more than two decades after their rupture. He was, the artist told them, ‘the wonderful man, the genius […] splendidly flamboyant, the real hero of the Picaresque novel, forced by modern conditions into other adventures, and along other roads.’
The Pennells were also convinced that something was missing from the saga of The Peacock Room – something involving Whistler and Frances Leyland. Frederick Leyland had died in 1892, suffering a heart attack in the carriage of an underground train. The seventy-year-old Frances agreed to talk to Elizabeth, but dismissed any suggestion of impropriety; the rumours of an affair, she maintained, of an elopement, were absurd. The Peacock Room itself remained unchanged in the dining room of 49 Prince’s Gate until 1904. The next owner of the house, Blanche Watney, thought it ‘hideous’ and at one point considered having it torn out and destroyed. Fortunately, the American industrialist Charles Lang Freer intervened, offering to buy the room from Watney for eight times the amount Whistler had been paid, before having it dismantled and shipped to his home in Detroit (it’s now in the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.). Freer’s price, appropriately enough, was named in guineas.
Maud Franklin refused to meet with the Pennells at all. She’d separated from Whistler in 1888 and moved to France, marrying a wealthy American named John Little. By the time Elizabeth tracked her down she was a widow, living in some style near Cannes; it was noted that a ‘motor’ stood outside her country house. When Elizabeth rang the bell, however, her subject’s erstwhile Madame would not even come to the door. She tried calling again the next day, with the same result: a maidservant making apologies, saying that her mistress wasn’t at home. Reluctantly, the biographer departed, convinced that she was being watched from behind the blinds of an upstairs window. Shortly afterwards Maud wrote to the Pennells, explaining simply that she did not like to speak of the past. Everything she knew of those days would die with her. As the Pennells themselves put it, with barely contained frustration: ‘Maud could tell the whole story, but she will not.’
It was in this absence that Mrs Whistler first began to take shape. Maud’s experience is a striking gap in a history that is elsewhere immensely detailed, albeit filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. My manipulations are largely those of focus, various minor spats and skirmishes having been omitted or consigned to the edges of the narrative. It should be pointed out, though, that Whistler’s long-suffering lawyer was in fact named James Anderson Rose, a change decided upon to preserve the distinctiveness of Rosa Corder. The fate of The Three Girls, also, has never been discovered – although a picture fragment later came up for sale at Dowdeswell’s Gallery that showed a young woman in a near-transparent shift and a red headscarf crouching beside a potted cherry blossom (now on display in the Courtauld Institute of Art). She bears a close resemblance to a figure in the rough, smaller copy of The Three Girls that Whistler made before he left for Venice (now in the Tate Gallery collection), and looks very much as if she might have been cut from the remains of a larger composition.
Numerous books were consulted during the writing of this one. Particularly useful were Linda Merrill’s authoritative accounts of both The Peacock Room and the Whistler-Ruskin Trial; a fascinating if rather forgiving study of the Owl by Helen Rossetti Angeli entitled Pre-Raphaelite Twilight; and the excellent online archive of Whistler’s correspondence assembled by the University of Glasgow, from which many of this novel’s best lines were lifted.
Heartfelt thanks are due to everyone who has worked with me on this book, at its different stages: Euan Thorneycroft and all at A M Heath; Suzie Dooré, Charlotte Cray, Ann Bissell, Dom Forbes, Katie Espiner, Cassie Browne, Ore Agbaje-Williams, Jane Robertson and the team at HarperCollins. I am also indebted to Jacqueline Riding, Hallie Rubenhold, Ros Wynne-Jones, Nikita Lalwani, Myles Jackman, my mother Christine Plampin and my ever-supportive family and friends. And Sarah and Kester, of course, who put up with a lot.
About the Author
Copyright © Karolina Webb
&n
bsp; Matthew Plampin was born in 1975 and lives in London. He completed a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art and now lectures on nineteenth-century art and architecture. He is the author of four previous novels, The Street Philosopher, The Devil’s Acre, Illumination and Will & Tom.
Also by Matthew Plampin
The Street Philosopher
The Devil’s Acre
Illumination
Will & Tom
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