Maud rose while he was talking and went to leave the room. He reached for her as she passed but she was walking too quickly, brushing against his outstretched fingers.
‘Why will nobody,’ she said, ‘ever tell me what’s bloody happening?’
July 1877
Maud was turning at the end of the banister, on her way to the dining room for breakfast, when she met John coming back from the front door. He presented her with a small bundle of letters, along with July’s Art Journal. It amused him, when Jimmy was out of earshot, to act as if there was a kind of collusion between them, as if they were on the same level, Whistler servants together. She did her best to ignore it.
‘There you go, Miss,’ he said with a wink. ‘Bumper crop today. Pass it on, would you?’
Jimmy was dressed, smoking, the eyeglass in, his plate and cutlery pushed aside to make room for a sketchbook – in which he was setting out a pattern, similar to the overlapping feathers of the Peacock Room, but with butterflies woven into it as well. He stopped at once and without a word or glance applied himself to the post, sorting through the sheaf deftly and slightly secretively, like a card sharp assessing a hand. Maud sat across from him and reached for the blue-and-white coffee pot. As she poured, past the steaming arc of coffee, she noticed that he’d opened up one of the letters and was reading it with absolute attention; the colour of his face was changing, growing deeper, and his posture altering also, as if to accommodate a physical discomfort.
The cup was overflowing, the surface of the coffee level with the brim, a sheen of dark liquid spilling across the pagodas and cranes that decorated its side. Maud put down the pot and looked at the letter more closely. It was one sheet only. There was no black border, at least – no one had died – although Jimmy’s manner as he read on suggested that the news was equally terrible. She wanted to ask what it contained, what was so very wrong, but knew that it was always best to wait. Gingerly picking up her cup, she was about to sip away the surplus when he leapt to his feet with such abrupt force that he knocked over his chair. She started, splashing hot coffee over her wrist and onto the tablecloth. He was out of the room already, collecting his hat and cane from the hall stand. The front door opened and closed, then opened and closed again. She heard his boots running back; he rushed to the dining table, to the letter, which he’d left on his sketchbook. Grabbing a pencil, he scrawled something upon it, in the top corner.
‘Jimmy,’ she said, rising from her chair.
‘I’m going into town,’ he told her. ‘I have to talk to Anderson Reeve. Take this downstairs, would you? To the studio. Put it with the others.’
‘The others? Jimmy, what in blazes—?’
‘There’s a box on the sill of the garden window.’ He was heading back to the hall. ‘I’ve been too supine again, my girl. Too goddamned supine!’
The door slammed, with finality this time. Maud saw him through the window, surging down the path and out along the pavement. She stood for a few seconds, coffee dripping from her fingertips, allowing the atmosphere to settle; then she reached over for the letter.
It was from Frederick Leyland, from his house in Liverpool, and a colder, more savage letter would be difficult to imagine. Jimmy had been seen walking with Mrs Leyland, apparently, at Lord’s Cricket Ground – where he told Maud he’d been the week before. This was a final straw for her husband. He stated that Jimmy was incapable of gentlemanly conduct, and that if he found him in Mrs Leyland’s company again he would give him a public horsewhipping. Maud covered her mouth; she almost laughed aloud. A horsewhipping. It was like a scene from a play, a melodrama, or a novel set long in the past. That someone would actually threaten to do it then, in London in 1877, seemed absurd. There could be no mistaking the letter’s sincerity, though. Leyland was serious.
Maud’s next thought was for Jimmy, and what he’d stormed off to do. Would he be so foolish as to confront Leyland – to test the fellow’s resolve? Of course he would. Should she give chase, then – catch him on the threshold, urge him to step away? No, that would never work; and besides, he had too much of a head start. She read the letter again. This was the new trouble with Leyland that he would not admit to her, and it had nothing to do with artworks or that blasted room. It was about the man’s wife.
Above Leyland’s address, in the top corner, was the number fourteen. This was what Jimmy had returned to the dining room to write. Maud recalled his instruction: put it with the others. She went down to the studio. Jimmy was bad with letters. Usually he had no system of arrangement or preservation, piling them on mantelpieces, on sideboards, on the floor, to be gathered up like so much litter and thrown away. But there it was: a small wooden box, plain in design, containing letters from Leyland, drafts of Jimmy’s replies and a couple of telegrams, numbered from one to thirteen. These papers told the whole sorry story, from the dispute over the dining room to this current chapter: the attack and counter-attack of two very different voices. Jimmy’s flippancy was startling, as were his efforts to divide up this family, to draw distinctions between the husband and the wife; whereas his adversary remained scrupulously formal, his language rigid and brittle – cracking as the quarrel worsened to reveal a real viciousness beneath.
Maud returned the letters to the box; she pressed down on the lid as if trying to hold them in. The house around her was quiet. She looked up, out into the garden. John was sitting by the gate, smoking a small pipe, idling in the absence of his master. Behind her, she realised, across the studio, the portrait of Frances Leyland had been put on an easel – returned from the cellar, if it had ever been there. The subject was turned away from the viewer, her hands clasped at the base of her back. She was part Japanese maiden, part medieval princess, the diaphanous, pinkish fabric of her gown heaping upon the chequered matting like a train. Jimmy had taken her in profile, head angled to the left, her rich brown hair – a similar tone to Maud’s own – wound up loosely on her head. It appeared the pose of a moment, but Maud remembered very well the dreadful ache you’d get in your neck after six straight hours of standing like that. She’d never really seen Mrs Leyland in person. There’d been that time at Prince’s Gate, when Jimmy was finishing off his mural; but she’d been in shadow then, merely a lady sweeping into a hallway. Here she looked rather melancholy, gazing at the pale blossoms dotted beside her as if lost in reflection and regret.
It was a fine work, rightly considered one of Jimmy’s best. Maud had seen it before, of course, dozens of times. Now, though, she did find herself wondering why the painting was still in his possession, as it was surely finished and should be with the family – with the husband who’d ordered and paid for it many years previously. They were friends, Jimmy and Mrs Leyland. This she knew. There was a long-standing friendship with the whole family that was several years older than his connection with her. But had she been missing something here, something really rather obvious? Was it there in the portrait – in the sympathetic, faintly adoring way that Mrs Leyland had been painted? Was Jimmy actually in love with this woman?
The jealousy was devilishly sharp, a hot blade against the skin; but even as Maud flinched, a part of her was qualifying, setting out the broader view, warning herself against over-reaction. What could she expect here at Lindsey Row, in the end? What could she ever really be to Jimmy Whistler? No promises had been made, as Edie so liked to remind her. There was little feeling that they were building towards anything, towards any kind of change. She’d just sent their child for fostering, for heaven’s sake, so that their circumstances could stay the same. Their child. That