Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin
pretty unmistakable – shown from the side, leaning gently towards the centre of the scene. It had been a hellish pose to hold, even by Jimmy’s standards. You couldn’t tell, though; the figure had a grace to it, and a sleekness, that now seemed frankly incredible. Yet her earlier discomfort did not return. As their guests looked at this painting, she felt only a sickly excitement at the sums that might be proposing themselves to Owl.
‘It’s Leyland’s,’ Jimmy replied. ‘As I suspect you are aware.’
‘And he still wants it?’
‘You know his views on receiving that which he has paid for. How very dogged he can be.’
‘But you don’t think simply to send it to him?’
‘My dear Owl, it is unfinished. Can you not see that? It certainly isn’t ready to be subjected to any form of general inspection. The same goes for the rest of Leyland’s works I still have here. All those blasted portraits, for instance.’
Owl looked about him. ‘And where might they be?’
Commissioned back when Jimmy had been counted among the family’s most intimate friends, the Leyland portraits had provided Maud with her ticket through his door. He usually kept the one of the wife out for show, being rather proud of it, she suspected; but today, along with the rest of them, it was nowhere to be seen.
‘Work upon all Leyland faces has halted, for the time being,’ Jimmy said, ‘and an alternative berth found for the canvases. Being as they are so big, you understand. There just isn’t room.’ He grew subtly mischievous, and gave a sigh of mock-regret. ‘The truth of it, mon vieux, is that having our British businessman in here, all long-limbed and morose – befrilled, you know, with sunken eye, lurking off in the shadows – was proving far too dire a distraction, so I bundled him into the cellar. The painted version, that is. Not the original.’
The Owl and Miss Corder laughed. Jimmy’s forgotten cigarette was almost burned out, the ember scorching Maud’s knuckles; she dropped it with a wince into a grubby saucer. When she’d left for Edie’s back in early May, the Leyland matter had been all but dead. The Peacock Room had been finished with at long last. But she knew their tone. Behind these jokes lay something new.
‘What’s happened?’
The studio door opened to admit John, bearing a tray with his standard air of mild irritability. Upon it was a plate of Jimmy’s American buckwheat cakes, a half-empty bottle of white wine and four smudged glasses. After setting the tray on the edge of the painting table, John stood back and looked to his master, expecting the usual complaint or additional instruction.
‘Jimmy,’ Maud said. ‘What’s happened? What’ve you done?’
Jimmy went to the wine bottle and picked it up. He sighed again, this time at her persistence. ‘Nothing, Maudie. I swear.’
*
Maud went upstairs barely a minute after the Owl and Miss Corder had taken their leave. She disrobed and dropped into bed, burrowing gratefully amid the cool sheets, and was filled with the sense, oddly welcome, of laying herself beneath the earth; of dragging the turf over her pounding head, never to rise again. For several days she stayed there, weighted down by exhaustion and a feeling she came slowly to recognise as loneliness. Her body and her mind had been refashioned to receive a child. To care for a child. And it was not there.
The moment of parting was played out a thousand times, the memories pored over and picked through in the hope that some new detail or sensation might be uncovered. Maud had been sitting in a scuffed, high-backed armchair, a mainstay of Edie’s parlour. Ione had been dozing in her lap; her own eyelids had started to flutter as well. She’d heard the front door, and lowered voices in the hall, but hadn’t thought anything of it. Edie had come in and bade her stand. Then she’d leaned forward, lifting away the child as if relieving Maud of an encumbrance.
‘Pass her here,’ she’d said.
‘It’s all right,’ Maud had replied, slightly perplexed, in a tone of good-humoured protest, ‘I can manage. Why, she’s light as a—’
Her sister had already been turning away, though, going back to the door, thinking it best just to get it done – to tear off the bandage with a sudden, unexpected stroke. It was only when the front door closed again, in fact, that Maud had fully appreciated what was taking place. She’d known that the foster mother was due, of course she had, but had assumed this would be after teatime. Later on. The next morning. She’d thought of pursuit. A few groggy, wandering steps had shown her that this was futile. So she went instead to the window, hoping to catch sight of them – to call out and have them stop for a proper farewell. The parlour was to the rear of Edie’s small terraced house. All that she’d been able to see was a bare yard. Ione was gone. Her awareness of this had seemed to gather at the top of her chest, pressing in on her until she’d been unable to breathe; until her collarbone had felt like it was about to crack in two. She’d made a sound, a kind of anguished yelp, and dropped back into the armchair. Alone.
With Maud’s grief came yet more anger – directed at herself, for her feebleness and her idiocy, but also pretty squarely at Jimmy. He kept his distance, sleeping on the studio chaise longue, no doubt thinking this considerate; and was preoccupied, as always, with his own business. Mrs Cossins, the cook at Lindsey Row, brought up her food and dealt rather grudgingly with her laundry. Once a day, twice at most, Jimmy would appear to ask how she was faring. His bed was huge and heavy, with a frame of dark lacquered wood; buried within it, she would glare out at him, refusing to speak. The words built up, acquiring a terrible pressure, as if they were soon going to explode from her and force a proper confrontation. How can you care so bloody little? she’d demand. How can you want things to be this way?
The feeling passed. Besides, she already knew full well what he would say. This was part of it, part of the risk they took. He was finding money, somehow, for the fostering – no mean feat. And he had welcomed her back into his household. It was wrong of her, really, to want anything more. The burden was hers. She understood that now. She had to become used to it; to cease to notice it, even. There in that dark bed, with a bead of blood drying stickily against her thigh, this seemed entirely beyond her.
Late one evening, Maud stirred to find Jimmy’s younger brother pulling a chair across the rug and settling himself at her side. William Whistler was a doctor of some renown, with a practice in Mayfair, a new wife named Nellie, and a smart house on Wimpole Street. He was a regular guest at Lindsey Row and familiar with the arrangements there, which he’d always appeared to accept without censure –although Maud had never been to the smart house or met the new wife. She sat up, self-conscious and a touch startled, unsure of what to say; then he began to ask a series of matter-of-fact questions about her well-being, and she saw that this was a house call, most probably undertaken at Jimmy’s request. Burlier and balder than his brother, with an accent less complicated by other influences, Willie was every inch the respectable professional – rather anonymous in a way, as easy to overlook as Jimmy was not. This was a screen, Maud had discovered, drawn before a life of real incident, of fearsome incident, in relation to which his present prosperity stood as a well-deserved reward. While Jimmy had been establishing himself in London, and making his first attempts to have a painting shown at the Royal Academy, Willie had been at war. He’d seen war at its most ferocious and bloody. There was a photograph of him, younger and leaner, in an embroidered officer’s coat, serving as a military surgeon in the army of General Lee. Jimmy’s pride in this could not be overstated. He remained an unrepentant champion of the Confederate cause – to such an extent in fact that Maud had learned to avoid the subject – and derived a fierce excitement from imagining what his brother had endured.
‘Boys, they were,’ he’d say, ‘mere boys, conscripted from farm and city alike. Brought into those hospital tents by the dozen, injured in ways one can barely conceive – shredded, Maudie, by the Union’s shot and shell. And expiring faster than they could be put in the ground.’
Willie himself never so much as hinted at any of this. You could scour his bland, plump face for as long as you liked and find