Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin
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a side street, moving around the back of a carriage, out of earshot. While Maud bent to gather up her hem, Miss Corder was just letting hers trail where it would, dragging through the summer dust. They were drawing stares – being unaccompanied and rather conspicuous – none too pleasant, some of them. The attention fell upon Miss Corder like sea spray on the prow of a gunboat.
‘I understand why you wished to leave so soon,’ she said, when Maud caught up. ‘To be honest, Miss Franklin, I can only stomach brief visits myself. The Grosvenor is a worthy venture, all things considered. It provides a place of exhibition to the occasional true talent, like your Jimmy. But I cannot help thinking it corrupt. They do it by invitation, you know, rather than merit. Amateurs, friends of Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, shown alongside proper artists. It is a game, a game for the rich.’ Her lip twitched. ‘But works are shifting nonetheless. They are going for hundreds of pounds, if Charles is to be believed. I am beginning to think that I should have tried to get something of my own in there.’
There was a pause. Maud looked at a bolt of burnt-orange silk arranged in a draper’s window. ‘You’re an artist,’ she said.
‘More than that,’ replied Miss Corder, lifting her chin. ‘I am a professional, Miss Franklin. I make my living at it. But I am also a woman. And my father was a lighterman, down at Rotherhithe. And so I am kept always at the margins. Versatility is demanded of me, if I am to survive – a versatility that I’ll bet Mr Millais or Mr Leighton, or Lady Butler even, would struggle to summon.’ She stopped, checking the fervour that was returning to her voice. ‘But of course you know all this. You are an artist yourself. Charles says that Jimmy rates you highly – that he had you at work on the Peacock Room, in fact, repainting flowers. Before he brought the scheme to its final form.’
‘Before he covered them all up, you mean. Painted the whole thing blue.’
Maud was embarrassed, and faintly annoyed; Jimmy knew she didn’t like him telling people about her attempts at art – boasting about them, as he couldn’t help but do, despite having obliterated her painstaking labour at Prince’s Gate with barely a second’s hesitation. She’d protested about this, just once, trying to sound as if she was joking.
‘I had to Maudie,’ he’d answered simply. ‘It didn’t go.’
‘That was necessary,’ Miss Corder told her. ‘A sacrifice, you might say. Charles tells me that Jimmy regards you as a pupil as much as a model. That he’ll have your pictures selling before the decade is out.’
Maud felt herself colouring. She stared down at her boots. ‘I don’t know about that. I’ve barely begun.’
‘The best models,’ Miss Corder continued, ‘often have a painter in them as well. I have always thought this. It refines your sense of what’s needed. Of what it is to stand on the other side of the easel. And I must say that you are in the very best place. Jimmy Whistler is the finest teacher – the finest protector that you could ask for.’
It was rare indeed for Maud’s situation to be met with such approval. Edie, so careful in her respectability, didn’t even like to think of it. The other models she knew regarded it simply as a deft manoeuvre, a tidy bit of luck. How could she help feeling a flicker of affinity now with Miss Rosa Corder? Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to talk of art with a professional woman painter. Someone unmarried and young, and without social advantage. Someone who seemed interested in her, furthermore, and who could surely offer guidance when she felt able to work again. Questions began to occur also about Miss Corder and the way she lived. The pictures she’d painted, where they’d been shown and to whom they’d sold. Her own protector, the Owl.
Miss Corder was talking herself, though, expanding upon her admiration for Jimmy and of her sense of the war that had begun, between the forces of artistic righteousness and a broad, determined coalition of enemies. It was being fought on the walls of the Grosvenor Gallery apparently, and in numerous other places besides, with this Ruskin review being merely the latest offensive launched against them. Maud thought of that strange moment down in the studio – the suggestion that there was fresh trouble with the Leylands. It had slipped her mind until she’d stood before the Harmony in Amber and Black. They started down a lane and the wind picked up, overturning a metal pail and sending it rolling noisily across the pavement. Miss Corder paused; Maud saw her chance.
‘What of the Leylands? What’s going on there?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Miss Corder replied, without much interest. ‘You mustn’t worry. A couple of accidental meetings between Jimmy and the wife, at the houses of mutual friends. The husband wasn’t best pleased. He still considers Jimmy and himself to be at odds, it seems.’
Not a word had passed between Jimmy and Frederick Leyland since the previous winter. The shipbroker had responded to his reworked dining room – to the Prussian blue walls, and the mural, with its spilled silver shillings and puffed-up, befrilled peacock – only with silence. They had been left to wonder, a very deliberate form of torture. The decorative scheme remained intact – that much they knew. But no more.
Maud had other questions, a long list of them; Miss Corder was back on the Grosvenor, though, and the dismal quality of so much of its display, a topic that sustained her without interruption until they reached Regent Street. It was packed solid, traffic inching and creaking around the dust-hazed Quadrant. Miss Corder weaved along the busy pavement, leading Maud beneath the red and white striped canopy that shivered above the entrance of the Café Royal. Jimmy’s preferred table was off to the side, next to one of the broad front windows, providing a commanding view of both the restaurant and the street. It was large, able to accommodate double their number, in case any notable passers-by were waved over to join them. Jimmy was at the head, listing things on his fingers; Owl sat to the right, nodding in understanding as he reached for his glass. The two women went in. A smart, portly waiter was there at once, asking their business in a heavy French accent.
‘We have come to meet our husbands,’ Miss Corder told him. ‘They are over there, by that window.’
‘Husbands,’ the waiter repeated. He took their hats, though, standing aside to admit them. Maud saw Miss Corder’s orchid smear pollen across his black silk waistcoat.
Both men rose at their approach. Jimmy’s eyeglass dropped out; Owl set down his drink. There were kisses and embraces. Miss Corder sat on the seat opposite the Owl, with her back to the window. Maud joined her gratefully, nearly groaning aloud in relief, kneading her aching knees beneath the table. She’d walked further that afternoon than she had in the previous month.
The Café Royal was decorated in the Parisian style, with tall mirrors in ornate, gilded frames, tabletops of veined marble and a black-and-white tiled floor. It was about a quarter full, perhaps slightly less; waiters roamed about the empty tables, polishing cutlery in the pre-supper lull. At that moment it seemed to Maud a haven of airy comfort and tranquillity. She smiled at Owl, at Miss Corder, and they smiled back at her; and there was a tiny flash of strangeness. The scene was that of four friends, four dear friends, settling in for a celebration. Yet she barely knew this pair. She’d met them only once before. Jimmy had mentioned that he and Owl had been on decent terms a few years previously, prior to her arrival at Lindsey Row, and had recently renewed their association. But this hardly justified all the confidences he appeared to be piling on the fellow.
The flash faded. A flute was placed in front of her and filled with sparkling wine. The day’s exertions had left her utterly parched. It was nothing short of beautiful, that glass: tall and delicate, frosted with moisture, the wine golden in the light of the declining sun. She picked it up, chimed the rim against Miss Corder’s, and Owl’s, and Jimmy’s, and drank deep – almost half the contents in one gulp.
‘And now, Maudie,’ said Jimmy, ‘you must tell, in precise detail, sparing me nothing,’ – here he screwed the eyeglass back in, and fixed the blue eye behind upon her with semi-comical intensity – ‘What. You. Thought.’
Maud had been furnishing Jimmy Whistler with opinions for a while now. For one who courted disfavour, who made out that he revelled in it, he could be acutely, damnably