Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin
Wonder had wiped everything else from Mrs Leyland’s features. ‘What is—?’
Jim stepped leftwards to improve her view. ‘It is entitled The Rich Peacock and the Poor Peacock.’
‘They are fighting.’
‘The rich peacock would fight, yes. Certainly he would. See the angle of his wing, how he points with it so haughtily – how he puffs up that great tail of his. How his beak opens to squawk his commands and the eye flashes a murderous red.’ Jim glanced up: the eye-bead, twisted that same morning from the band of one of Maud’s more flamboyant hats, was pleasingly ruby-like. ‘In contrast, the poor peacock meets this unwarranted aggression with firmness, but also with a noble resignation. With pride of a different type – a deserved pride. He steps back, Mrs Leyland. He will not fight.’ He paused again, regarding this bird’s as yet empty socket. ‘That eye will be green. The green of peace and reason. Once a suitable stone has been located.’
‘Are those – are those coins? Around the rich one’s feet – in its feathers?’
‘Shillings, madam,’ Jim stated. ‘They are shillings. Shorn, one might speculate, from guineas, leaving but neutered pounds behind. That the rich bird denies, in its meanness, despite the fact that they literally spill from it. That they are nothing to it.’
Mrs Leyland continued to stare at the painting, the reference lost on her. This was a detail her husband had omitted to share. Hardly surprising.
‘You may note that these shillings are rendered in silver, as are various other details.’ Jim pointed with his mahlstick. ‘See the throat of the rich bird, for instance, and the fronds that frill along it so very modishly. And the poor bird – upon his head there …’
Whereas the rich peacock sported a golden comb, the poor one had a single plume of whitish silver, jutting out like a unicorn’s horn – a forelock of Whistlerian prominence. What the image lacked in nuance, Jim felt, it compensated for in sheer poetic exquisiteness. Every time Leyland used the dining room, every time he threw a napkin over his frill and subjected a table of guests to his leaden conversation, he would see it. Everyone would see it. The mere fact of its existence made him want to seize hold of Mrs Leyland and waltz out into the hall.
‘Some may claim to detect meaning in this scene,’ Jim continued, ‘an allegory, one might say. On this I could not possibly—’
‘Mr Whistler.’ Mrs Leyland’s eyes were still fixed on the mural. The joke did not delight her – far from it. ‘Mr Whistler, do you realise what you have done?’
July 1877
The force of Maud’s anger caught her unawares. At first, lost for words, she went stamping from room to room, taking it out on the house – on Jimmy’s precise and oh-so-original decorations. She knocked pictures askew and kicked up rugs, she heaved wickerwork armchairs out of their places, she shoved down a Japanese screen. He followed behind, correcting what he could, making vague attempts at placation, as if even then the greater part of his mind was elsewhere. After a few minutes of this they reached the drawing room.
Maud turned abruptly to face him. ‘How could it have got so bad? Why d’you open the bloody door to them? Don’t you know anything?’
Jimmy didn’t answer. He’d lit a cigarette and was leaning back on his right foot, stroking his moustache thoughtfully, angling himself towards the two tall windows. This was a familiar ploy of his when he wished to stage a retreat. The artist is unexpectedly inspired, said the pose. Shhh! Don’t disturb!
Maud wasn’t having it, though, not today. There was a new piece of porcelain by the divan, a squat, blue-and-white vase, shaped like an oversized onion and patterned with oriental flowers. She went over to it and hooked a toe under one side. The thing was easily unseated, but rather heavier than she’d anticipated; too late she realised that it was half filled with water. It rolled away in a wobbling semicircle onto the rectangle of yellow matting laid in the middle of the room, disgorging its contents in irregular spurts. A white lily appeared, coasting off towards the skirting board, and then a pair of plump, back-flipping goldfish.
This got Jimmy’s attention at least. The artistic pose was dropped. Maud stood by, flushed with annoyance and the faintest touch of guilt, as he rushed across the room, righted the vase and attempted to save the fish. The cigarette fell from his lips and hissed out in the spillage; his eyeglass swung at the end of its cord, flashing in the dusty sunlight. He was not, in truth, very well suited to tasks such as this. The fish were sluggish enough but he could only catch hold of one of them; the other squirmed off beneath the divan, beyond his capacity for rescue.
‘You shouldn’t,’ Maud told him. ‘Keep them in a china bowl, I mean. Down in the dark. How would you like it?’
Jimmy shook water from his fingers. ‘Maudie,’ he said, ‘you’ve missed so much.’
Maud crossed her arms; she looked around for something else to upset. This hardly needed saying. Six weeks earlier, as she’d taken her leave, he’d been claiming that victory was imminent – the Grosvenor had opened to fanfares and he was poised to recover, in a single swoop, every last penny of their missing fortunes. And yet he’d greeted her today not with news of guineas, of sales and fresh commissions, but of bailiffs. The very word knotted her insides. Jimmy, though, had said it matter-of-factly. There was no secretiveness in him; no particular shame either. Two men, he’d reported, had called early yesterday morning, appointed by the Sheriff of Middlesex. He couldn’t recall who’d sent them; there were papers in the hall. Although perfectly polite, and better bred than one might imagine, they’d departed only after he’d produced ten pounds in cash, a broken pocket watch and some opal earrings that had belonged to Maud’s mother.
‘You said we’d be set right. You bloody promised it, Jimmy. You said we’d be able to talk things through. Don’t you remember? Move the child a bit closer. Find a woman in Battersea, or – or—’
The anger sputtered; Maud’s thoughts were straying in an unwelcome direction. The absence. The coldness in the crook of her arm. The sense of something very close at hand, something vitally and profoundly hers, that wasn’t being seen to. She’d been forewarned; she’d considered herself prepared. And it had beaten her to the floor. Five more days she’d remained at Edie’s after the foster mother had left – until her milk had ebbed almost to nothing, and the worst of the bleeding had seemed to be over. We’ll get you all cried out, Edie had said. Maud knew now, there in the drawing room at Lindsey Row, that five days hadn’t been nearly long enough. Jimmy would be sympathetic, of course he would. But only up to a point. They had an agreement – and with bailiffs at the door, any chance of amending it was gone.
‘We will be set right,’ Jimmy said, rising to his feet. ‘You’ll see, Maudie. I’ll buy you those earrings back.’
He misses it, Maud thought. He misses it by a bloody mile. Immediately her anger was restored to its full, scalding strength. She found that she was glaring at his hair, so carefully oiled and arranged; she saw herself grasping that single white lock and ripping it out at the root. The urge was resisted, just about. Instead she began telling him exactly what he was, drawing on a reserve of the ripest London slurs; and even after all the years he’d lived in the city, and the many battles they’d fought, a couple of these left him wrinkling his nose in bafflement.
The list ran on. Jimmy weathered it with the air of a man marking time, swivelling very slowly on his heel – then coming to a halt as he spied something outside. The drawing room was on the first floor, providing a broad view of the slow, brown Thames and the road that ran along its bank. Suddenly deaf to Maud’s invective, he went over to the right-hand window, dragged up the sash and leant out a few inches further than was safe, shouting a name with undisguised relief.