Mrs Whistler

October 1876

Swooping in through the door of the Knightsbridge telegraph office, Jim snatched up a form and a pencil from the counter and settled himself ill-temperedly in a corner. For a second or two he took in the hushed, assiduous atmosphere, the smell of ink and electrical wire, the tap-tapping of the machines. Then he inserted the eyeglass and began to write.

Have received your cheque at last.

He hesitated. This really didn’t do justice to the indignities of the weekend. Scratching together enough coin for basic sustenance had taxed his ingenuity – and he’d give much, much indeed, to forget the disdainful gratification on the landlord’s boiled-beef face as another two days’ grace had been begged of him.

Pounds I notice.

The pencil, gripped very fiercely, now popped out from between Jim’s fingertips, disappearing onto the floor. He bit back an exclamation. This was no good. Already he’d used nearly a third of the available space. A telegram might be immediate, but there was insufficient room for his anger to unfurl its wings. He needed to write an old-fashioned letter, signed with the Whistler butterfly – copied and numbered, as had become his habit in this particular correspondence. Publication, both the threat and the reality, was a weapon he was perfectly prepared to wield. Why the devil not? Let the vindictive philistine be hoist by his own petard. He had a supply of pens and paper at Prince’s Gate. The notion of composing a damning missive under its recipient’s own roof had a compelling audacity to it; so Jim tore the telegraph form in half, then quarters, then eighths, returned the eyeglass to his breast pocket and strode back onto the Brompton Road.

He quickly became aware that someone in the telegraph office had followed him out. This fellow had fallen in a few feet behind, but was now drawing level, leaning in to peer beneath the brim of Jim’s hat. He was tall, substantially built and clad in pale grey.

‘Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Whistler, my dear chap.’

Jim didn’t slow down. He recognised this voice: the foreign accent, slight but distinct, married rather curiously to a very English turn of phrase. ‘The Owl,’ he said.

‘How—’ The man weaved around a street-sweeper filling a sack with dead leaves. ‘How are you keeping, Jimmy?’

Looking sideways, Jim saw a long, reddish-brown moustache, a bright enamelled tiepin, and that decoration on his lapel, the folded strip of scarlet ribbon, said to be an honour of some kind from his native land. He knew this man well, or had done: Owl, the resourceful Anglo-Portuguese, an unequalled repository of art knowledge, on familiar terms with everyone. They hadn’t spoken, however, in at least five years; Owl remained close to a number of people Jim no longer saw. Whether this was by drift or rift he could scarcely remember.

‘You still Rossetti’s man, Owl?’

‘That,’ answered Owl, assuming a regretful air, ‘is a complicated question. Gabriel is a blessedly complicated cove. I may as well tell you, however, that it is coming to an end. I fear he and I have done all that we can do. I know that you two have long ceased your intimacy, Jimmy, but I fear for his health. He barely sleeps these days. Why, only the other week Watts arrived at dawn to find him up a tree in his nightshirt. Out on the Walk, this was – practically dangling over the bloody river. He claimed to be counting off the stars. Luckily I was on hand as well. Ended up luring the poor devil down with a beaker of brandy.’

This was Owl, Jim recalled, to the absolute degree. Some men wrote, some painted, some founded factories, or drew up legislation, or commanded troops in battle. The Owl talked. He had a tale for every situation, an endless roll of gossip and indiscretion – things that he really shouldn’t be repeating but was anyway, with every detail vividly and enthusiastically imparted.

‘Frederick Leyland, they say, is half mad with worry,’ Owl went on. ‘Watts tells me that he makes a special point of coming round whenever he’s in town – to spend time, you know, and discuss how he will arrange Gabriel’s canvases in his new London pile. I’ve heard talk of commissions as well. For the future. Something large.’ He paused. ‘Are you still engaged on the decoration there? Is that what brings you to this neck of the woods?’

Jim came close to smiling here – not an especially subtle fellow, this Owl – but his amusement was hindered by unease. So Rossetti got Leyland’s respect. Rossetti got shows of concern and allowances made, and further work promised to him. And for what? Certainly nothing as glorious as that dining room. Not by a very long distance. Jim’s unease grew into resentment. It was quite preoccupying. His eyes glazed over; he clicked his thumbnail against one of the ridges in his bamboo cane. He had to force his mind back to Owl’s enquiry.

‘Barely,’ he replied. ‘Today might well see the last of it.’ After which, he thought, I shall be gone. I shall flee that blasted place like it was Bluebeard’s oubliette. ‘I’ve other things to be doing. My contribution to the Grosvenor Gallery, for instance.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Owl. ‘Sir Coutts Lindsay’s exhibition. I’d heard that he’d approached you.’ An eagerness had crept into him, of the sort that preceded the asking of a favour. ‘I’d like very much to see the room, Jimmy, if I may. Since we are so close to it. Just for a few minutes, as you apply the finishing touches. What d’you say? Can it be done?’

The two men had arrived at the corner of Prince’s Gate; ahead were the Botanical Gardens, the glass roof glittering through a screen of denuded branches. Jim considered the Owl – his languid, humorous eyes, his squarish forehead and rounded chin, the high shine of his expensive-looking top-boots. This was a cavalier, a dandy of the slickest stripe, but his keenness was disarming. That morning, the prospect of showing the peacocks to someone who might value them had a definite appeal. Jim nodded in the direction of Leyland’s house.

Although perhaps a foregone conclusion, Owl’s opinion of the dining room was expressed with his usual flair. ‘Transporting,’ he declared, after two reverential circuits. ‘A chamber utterly apart from the rest of the world, far beyond its troubles and interruptions. It is like – it is like being at the pinnacle of a lofty tower. Or in a gilded car slung beneath a balloon, floating a mile above London.’

How could Jim, propped against the sideboard, not grin at this? ‘Yes, well,’ he said, prodding at an empty varnish tin with his cane, ‘I’m afraid that the patron may disagree.’

‘Leyland? What else can you expect, though, from such a creature? The fellow is callousness made flesh. A shark, old man, of the Great White variety.’

‘Why Owl,’ Jim observed, ‘you appear to know the gentleman.’

‘It is impossible, my dear Jimmy, to work on Gabriel Rossetti’s behalf and avoid him. There’s a fascination between them. A kinship, if you like, despite the obvious differences.’ Owl turned back to the room. ‘We’ve done a deal or two of our own as well, over the years. That Rembrandt head, do you remember?’

Jim did. Rembrandt, in his view, had been a rather optimistic attribution.

‘You can take a cur,’ Owl continued, ‘from the alleys of Liverpool. You can give it an ocean-spanning armada of iron-clad vessels. You can wash its hide, and dress it in mountebank frills and silver shoe buckles. And it is still, under it all, a cur. You can see it in Leyland’s eyes, very clearly. The way he looks at you as if he’d gladly bite off your damned hand. Did you know that his mother ran a pie-shop, back in his home city? Down on the quay?’

Owl spoke incautiously, without so much as a glance out towards the hall, apparently indifferent to the fact that he was standing in Leyland’s house; that anybody could be listening in, as far as they knew, even the cur himself. It was a display, Jim realised this, staged for his benefit, but there could be no denying the nerve involved.

‘I’d heard,’ he said.

‘And yet you were caught out by his reaction to your room?’ Owl faced him again. ‘Forgive me, Jimmy, but this is no enlightened prince. This is Frederick Richards Leyland. The most hated man in Liverpool. This is the modern British businessman, in all his bone-headed viciousness.’

‘I have received a schooling, this past week,’ Jim admitted, ‘in business wisdom – as Leyland understands it.’

‘He has paid you what he owes, though, hasn’t he?’

And then, almost to Jim’s surprise, he was telling the Owl everything. He abandoned his remote, stoical stance – profoundly uncharacteristic as it was – and provided a full account of his travails, assuming the same confidence, the same disregard for discretion, as his companion, relishing every disclosure and the sympathy with which it was received. The climax, the peak of indignation, was reserved for the events of that same morning.

‘So I set aside my material needs – which are grave, I don’t mind saying – and hatch a deal that is wholly to his advantage. He tells me to name my price, Owl, so I do, and when this is deemed unacceptable I agree to take only half of the rightful sum – rewarding him, in essence, for his philistinism. He makes me wait for it, of course. Three rather trying days. Yet finally it arrives. Bon Dieu! The trumpets sound – the angels sing. I tear open the envelope.’

Owl was listening intently.

‘It was pounds. Pounds, Owl! We have moved from the guinea of tradition, of honour – with which he has always paid me in the past – to the base sovereign, the payment of tradesmen. My fee was shorn of its shillings, and left fifty quid lighter as a result. I swear I nearly threw the thing on the fire.’

There was some truth to this. At the breakfast table, Jim had waved the offending cheque aloft, holding forth about how it was a vulgar insult and warranted immediate destruction. After a minute, Maud had risen from her chair and come to his side, to offer consolation he’d thought; but instead she’d plucked the crumpled rectangle of paper from his grasp, smoothed it against her thigh and tucked it into her sleeve for safekeeping.

Owl understood, however, in a way that dear Maud simply could not. ‘It’s the best the brute can do,’ he said. ‘The one stone he has left to throw. I pity him, almost.’ He gestured towards the room. ‘This, though – this alone remains the fact. All else is mere anecdote. Our friend Leyland has earned himself much the same place in history as the dullard who paid Correggio in pennies.’

Jim liked this. ‘Indeed.’

‘So in sum,’ said Owl, producing a cigarette case and offering one to Jim, ‘your patron works you like a slave. Looks upon your works with no more feeling than a beast of the field. Pays you like a joiner, or a greengrocer, or the man who brings him those frilled shirts of his, and less than half the proper amount.’ He struck a match and held it out. ‘Jimmy old man, I’d say this room was half yours, half yours at least. To do with as you damn well please. Remove the shutters, these wondrous peacocks, and sell them elsewhere. Enhance the design, if you see fit.’

‘Enhance?’ Jim, sensing criticism, was suddenly alert. ‘What d’you mean?’

Owl lit his own cigarette, untroubled by the sharpness of Jim’s tone. ‘The shutters are magisterial,’ he said. ‘It’s the only word. Hiroshige has been eclipsed. And the patterns, these feather motifs – again, exceptional, beyond fault. This, however, this leather …’ He pointed to the panels that stretched behind the shelves and spanned the empty space above the sideboard and fireplace. ‘You’ve made an attempt, I see that. But it doesn’t go. The flowers look Dutch, for God’s sake.’

He was right. Jim knew it at once. There was a challenge here too, plain as day. You have been supine, Owl was saying. Supplicatory. Is this really how an artist should behave?

‘They are antique,’ Jim said. ‘Several hundred years old, I’m told.’

Owl shrugged. He puffed on his cigarette. ‘It doesn’t go.’

*

December 1876

The front door opened, admitting a current of wintry wind; it nosed through the papers scattered across the dining-room floor, lifting the large mural cartoon like the airing of a bedsheet. Jim scowled atop his stepladder. Young Walter Greaves, dispatched on an errand an hour or so earlier, had been instructed most firmly not to use the main entrance. He was shouting out something to this effect when Maud hushed him. She’d been sitting in a corner, wearing her coat, reading one of the art papers; but now she was up, already on her way outside, making for the French doors behind the central set of shutters. He glanced down at her. Several months had now passed, yet he could detect no outward sign of her condition. Her face retained its striking angularity; her figure was as lissom as ever. A small part of him continued to hope that it was a false alarm.

‘Jimmy,’ she said. ‘That isn’t Walt.’

Jim cocked his head to listen. From the hall came not the assistant’s hob-nailed thuds but the sigh of fine fabric, dragging in folds across the bare stone. Maud left, closing the shutters silently behind her. Jim climbed from the stepladder and crept to the doorway. Mrs Leyland and Florence, the middle daughter, were standing in the unlit hall, little more than dark shapes against the marble. Dressed for travel, they were looking around them in a faintly expectant fashion. A male servant came in and summoned the caretaker from his downstairs parlour. There was a brief exchange, then all eyes turned towards the dining room. Jim pulled back; he considered quickly how he should be found.

The room, thankfully, was brilliant. It had been enriched past hope or prediction by Jim’s greatest change: the painting of those awkward leather panels with a deep, obliterating shade of Prussian blue. This had been a mighty feat indeed, demanding every last ounce of his strength and his vision. His hands and forearms were still stained a little, having a greenish, cadaverous hue; numerous aches hampered the movement of his shoulders, his elbows, his wrists. But none of this mattered. His satisfaction with the result was difficult to overstate. In certain sections – and particularly now, under gaslight – the effect was so smooth and intense that it quite confounded the notion of surface, the gilded shelves seeming to float before a field of pure colour. The whole thing was transformative. Entering the dining room changed your mood, the very feel of your skin.

And then there was the mural. Emblazoned across the southern wall – upon which Leyland had once talked of hanging one of Jim’s own canvases – this was the feature with which he was most pleased of all. He chose a spot beneath it and darted over, arranging himself next to the sideboard.

The two fine Leyland ladies stood speechless, blinking as people do when brought forward suddenly into the light. They looked remarkably similar at first: the compact luxury of their clothes, the corseted uniformity of their figures, the handsome solemnity of their faces. Leyland, however, was in the daughter as well – those dark, baleful eyes, that regrettably broad forehead – and seemed even to taint her aesthetic responses; for as her mother’s initial shock was replaced by a kind of incredulous regard, her own expression grew rather more negative.

‘It is every bit as bad,’ she announced, ‘as it sounded in that wretched newspaper. Father will be furious. He will be furious.’

Commendably direct, Jim thought. He’d never seen this in Florence before: how old was she, eighteen? It was hard to keep track. Over the past five or six years he’d painted nearly every member of this family, starting with Ma and Pa and working down from there. Florence’s portrait was the least complete of his Leyland pantheon, now stacked out of sight in a corner of the studio. She’d been a difficult subject, querulous and impatient and impossible to impress; and although wholly at leisure she’d granted him only four sittings, of a couple of hours each. Not at all how Jim liked to work. Luckily Maud had been on hand to stand in her place, just as she had done for the mother and elder sister – wearing the three different gowns, occupying the three different poses, with her usual ease.

‘My only wish, Miss Leyland,’ he said calmly, ‘was to give yourself and your family the most beautiful room that has ever been.’

‘Did you obtain my father’s permission for this? For any of it?’

‘I cannot apologise for inspiration, Miss, and the paths down which—’

‘What of the leather? Did you pause, even, before turning it all blue?’

Flippancy here became irresistible. ‘I did wonder for a moment if it would take the paint,’ Jim answered. ‘But it did, as you can see. Admirably.’

Florence’s right hand tightened its grip upon her left. ‘Mr Whistler, that leather was salvaged from a ship wrecked with the Spanish Armada. It cost my father a great deal.’

‘And it did not harmonise with the rest. There is really nothing more I can tell you, Miss Leyland. The colours, the patterns – they could not be made to work.’

This didn’t satisfy Florence, not in the least, but she would argue no further. She informed her mother that she was going to look around upstairs, then strode back through the doorway, calling tartly for a lamp. Mrs Leyland, walking the length of the room, made no reply. Jim sensed that the day’s journey had taken its toll upon family concord.

‘My husband is in London,’ she said, once Florence was out of earshot, ‘and will be arriving soon. He left us at the station. Apparently there was a call he had to make.’

‘I see.’

‘We are not staying here. Frederick has booked a suite at the Alexandra.’

‘My dear Mrs Leyland,’ said Jim, ‘I should hope you aren’t. Why, most of the furniture is still in crates.’

‘He has had a piano assembled, though, I assume?’

‘Bien sûr. The poor instrument is beaten to its knees each time he crosses the threshold.’

Mrs Leyland’s laugh was a shade too loud. ‘As I believe we have observed before, Mr Whistler,’ she said, ‘he plays just as he goes about everything else.’

Unlike her daughter, Frances Leyland had sat willingly for her portrait. She’d given her time generously – had been reluctant to leave, in fact, even as the day grew dim. It hadn’t taken much to prompt an unburdening. Perched on the studio chaise longue, wearing the loose flesh-pink gown in which Jim was painting her, she’d told him of the indifference and sullen silences, the dozens of petty abuses and betrayals – of a marriage warping into something intolerable. Jim had listened with sympathy and close interest, undeniably flattered by this sudden intimacy – yet also savouring the clandestine thrill of access to another man’s most private affairs. Naturally, he’d promised to tell no one, pledging himself to a bond of secrecy. An alliance had thus been forged, and was further strengthened as Mrs Leyland’s portrait had advanced almost to completion. Leyland had been unconcerned by this friendship, seeming to trust Jim as much as he trusted anyone. He had no inkling, needless to say, of its confidential depths.

Smiling still, Mrs Leyland laid a gloved hand upon her collarbone and looked around again at the absorbing richness of the blue, at the yards of lustrous feather-patterning, at the resplendent birds. ‘It is not at all how I expected. It is like walking inside a jewel box. A Japanese cabinet.’

‘My intention precisely,’ said Jim. ‘A Japanese cabinet. I am so glad, Mrs Leyland, that you at least can appreciate what I have done. Although, who knows – perhaps dear Florence is mistaken. Perhaps your husband will as well.’

The lady laughed again, at the improbability of this Jim supposed. The sound was caustic, and also strangely helpless. He was considering whether to express regret at how things had gone, or provide his justification, or simply to laugh himself, when he noticed that she was taking her first proper look at the mural behind him.

The two new peacocks faced each other across the expanse of painted leather, the gilt in which they’d been depicted built up to a low relief. Their bodies were tense, their heads in hard profile; for despite their grace, and the sweeps of ornate plumage that framed them, these creatures were locked in confrontation.