Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin
was very aware also that the predicted change in their fortunes had failed to arrive. The undertaking was proving a disappointment, for Jimmy at least. He’d been insistent, however, so eventually Maud had agreed. She’d told herself that this was the life she had chosen; that if she was to be Whistler’s Madame, she had to keep abreast with Whistler’s affairs. Only after they’d left the house – her garments kept loose in certain areas and discreetly reinforced in others – had Jimmy revealed that he wouldn’t actually be going to the gallery. Miss Corder, who’d called the week before, was to accompany her instead. He had something important to attend to, he’d said, and would meet them later at the Café Royal, an old haunt of theirs. This disclosure had been carefully timed. A hansom had already pulled up; she’d been climbing inside. It had been too late to turn back.
Miss Corder had been standing ready at the Grosvenor’s entrance. She’d kissed Maud on the cheek and told her how extremely well she was looking, then paid for their tickets with a ten-shilling note. Maud had followed her up the broad marble staircase, trying to accept her fate and muster some enthusiasm. Now, though, she’d reached her limit. She was tired out and sore. She was cross with everything. She was heading off to bed.
Her companion stayed close, blocking her path. Miss Corder’s face was as unaccountable as the rest of her – really rather plain in a way, with its prominent nose and heavy, slightly protuberant lips; yet something was there, cleverness perhaps, or nerve, that lent it an odd appeal. A beauty, even. Her eyes, lilac in the sunlight, held a query; then they flitted away, back to the gallery, and her brow knitted with displeasure.
‘These people here don’t understand,’ she said, the volume of her voice unaltered. ‘They don’t look at the paintings for themselves. They have been drinking from a tainted source, you see, imbibing foolishness and conceited ignorance, and it has clouded their vision. Clouded it quite fatally.’
Those nearby were staring openly now, umbrage adding to their curiosity, as was surely Miss Corder’s intention. Four years with Jimmy had schooled Maud thoroughly in this variety of anger: the kind that insisted upon making a public display and clashing hard with that which had provoked it. Something here made her pause, however. Early the previous morning, the day after Willie’s visit, she’d been woken by the sound of Jimmy shouting, really shouting, down in the studio. He’d been alone, as far as she’d been able to tell. The words ‘impudence’ and ‘imposture’ had kept recurring. Sensing that an explanation might be at hand, she asked Miss Corder what she meant.
The lilac eyes widened. ‘You don’t know. Of course you don’t. He can’t bear to tell you of it, most probably. Your Jimmy has been maligned, Miss Franklin. Attacked in the crudest manner.’
She turned, moving her face out of the sun, and pointed a green-gloved finger at a nearby canvas. It was one of the larger Nocturnes, a couple of years old now – the Gold and Black, did he call it? – showing fireworks launching and falling over the river. A rack of livid white-orange hissed in the darkness, while banks of black smoke rolled off to the left and right, laid against the blue night like the silhouette of a mighty forest, and red-gold sparks drifted above in long, scattered trails. The handling was loose, even for Jimmy – the darks smeared on, blocked in; the lights barely more than raw dabs of colour.
‘A notice has been published,’ Miss Corder announced, ‘and much circulated, in the art press and beyond. A famous critic, keen for attention it would seem, has penned something far beneath him, beneath any right-thinking person – an assault, essentially, intended to blind his readers to this painting’s obvious virtues. Fortunately, Charles has been on hand to offer Jimmy advice. If he hadn’t, I scarcely dare to imagine what might—’
She stopped talking, distracted by a trio of young gentlemen, about their age – smart types, city fellows – who were grinning by her shoulder.
‘Custard,’ said one, indicating a falling rocket.
‘Gulls’ droppings,’ offered another.
‘Who was the critic?’ Maud asked.
‘Ruskin,’ said Miss Corder shortly. ‘And you can see right here what his authority has licensed. Stupidity Miss Franklin, has been allowed free rein.’
With that she swivelled another quarter-circuit and launched herself into battle, informing the young gentlemen that they were plainly insensible to art, hopeless cases indeed, embarrassing themselves further with every utterance; that they might as well take their tweed and their watch-chains and their primped whiskers and go back to their desks, in whatever godforsaken office they scratched out their existences.
Ruskin. Maud knew the name, of course; it had an association of stature, of the kind you might see spelt out on book spines in austere, golden letters, or heard being dropped into conversation as a display of knowledge. She hadn’t read any of it herself, but gaining the fellow’s ill opinion was surely a serious reversal. She wanted to ask what had been written, but Miss Corder was caught up entirely in her skirmish.
Thrown at first by her vehemence, the young gentlemen had rallied, rather pleased to have any form of attention from such a woman. They declared that the Nocturne was plainly the work of a drunkard, a staggering sot, and not very much work at that. Pictures of this type, one of them continued, might well appeal to ladies of a – they exchanged glances, starting to laugh – bohemian persuasion, but to the wider population they were nothing but a joke, an act of imposture, as Mr What’s-his-name had asserted.
Imposture, thought Maud. There it was.
Miss Corder listened, nodding as if some deep suspicion was being confirmed, the orchid bobbing atop her vast hat. Then she gestured contemptuously at the opposite side of the gallery, towards a spread of large paintings with a good deal more people gathered before them. All by the same hand, they had the look, from a distance, of stained glass.
‘That is more to your taste, I suppose – old Ned Jones?’ she demanded. ‘That is excellence, is it, all that laboriousness, all that misspent labour? Is that English art? Is that honestly what we deserve?’
Maud studied these paintings more closely. The colours had a delicate glow, as if the pictures were lit from behind; the forms were flawlessly arranged and drawn. She could see a row of beautiful angels bearing large crystal balls. Half a dozen women kneeling by a lake, gazing at their own reflections as if entranced. St George in his armour. Every one of them had virtually the same face – both the men and the women, and the ones who were neither men nor women. Their expressions held only the merest hints of thought or feeling. The effect was mildly unnerving. When considered next to the work of this Mr Jones, it could well be true that Jimmy’s pictures would not seem pure and peaceful, but crude. Lacking somehow. This notion came to Maud unbidden and it startled her with its disloyalty. She made to look back towards the Whistler display, for reassurance; and instead spotted attendants in livery, closing in on them from opposite sides, censorious glares on their faces.
Miss Corder was growing yet more impassioned and voluble about the various deficiencies she’d observed in the other artworks of the Grosvenor display. Maud was wondering whether she should interrupt, to point out the attendants perhaps, when her companion withdrew abruptly from this somewhat one-sided debate, casting not so much as a parting glance at her chortling adversaries.
‘Come Miss Franklin,’ she said, starting towards the curtained entrance, and the wide stairway beyond. ‘I believe we’re due at the Café Royal.’
*
Outside, the heat was starting to lift, a breeze snapping the shop awnings taut in their frames. Miss Corder walked along New Bond Street with a pronounced, leisurely sway, her hips swinging out a couple of inches with each footstep, unperturbed by either the clash in the gallery or the manner of their exit.
‘Ned Jones,’ she said. ‘Good God. Or Burne-Jones, as we must call him now. Charles knows the fellow. Used to know him. Even back then his style was said to be ponderous and overworked. All those hard lines, all that intricacy. And for such a wretchedly insipid result. But I suppose I should hope that the popularity of his pictures grows yet further. The blasted things