Matthew Plampin - Mrs Whistler

‘Now see here, Jimmy,’ he said. He paused to lick his lower lip; he crossed his arms and then uncrossed them again. ‘Jimmy, we can’t have this. We just can’t.’

Jim affected ignorance – blamelessness. ‘Have what, my dear fellow?’

‘Jimmy.’ Freddie sounded almost pleading now. ‘I can’t go against the governor. You must see that. Don’t force matters further. Please.’

‘I meant,’ said Jim, ‘to drop you a line about us going on a jaunt into town. I mentioned it to Godwin and he said – you’ll like this, I think – he said that—’

Freddie was shaking his head. ‘I can’t. Not now.’ He girded himself, like a man about to swallow something unpleasant. ‘Listen to me. You must not approach my mother again. In any fashion. And you must not write to her either. I – I really don’t think I can be any more clear about it than that.’

Jim looked into his pink face, so blessedly young; at the battle underway there, the reluctance and the resolution. ‘Surely not,’ he murmured. ‘Come now, Freddie. Surely not.’

The boy would say no more. He turned away and went after his mother – standing guard over her effectively, until she was in that landau with his sisters, the horses had been brought back up and they were departing the cricket ground. Despite all that had transpired – the pails of Prussian blue and the duelling peacocks, the roadside confrontations, the assorted barbs and slights – it was only now, as he watched the Leyland women being driven off into the dusty city, and Freddie cast one last look over at him before rejoining his fellows, that Jim fully understood the irreversible nature of this situation. He was shut out forever. An enemy.

Lindsey Row felt cool and dark after the sun-blasted cricket ground, and the sweltering box of the cab. Maud was suffering still from the dinner with Owl and Miss Corder. The aim had been to lift the girl out of the dumps in which she’d been mired since her return, and in this it had appeared to succeed – until her disintegration in the later stages, at any rate. Jim had all but carried her back to their bed; and the mumbled, accusatory questions she’d slung his way had indicated plainly enough that this particular difficulty was far from finished with.

Now her brown eyes followed him from a parlour armchair. ‘Where’ve you been?’

Jim sat opposite, dropping his boater to the floor. His clothes were stiff with dust and dried sweat. He had an overbearing sense of mental obstruction – of a great many things trying to fit through the same small aperture at the exact same instant.

‘Cricket,’ he said. ‘A match at Lord’s.’

‘You don’t care about cricket , Jimmy.’ Maud’s face was pale but attentive. She was a clever soul, his Madame . She knew that something was up.

‘There was a plan,’ Jim told her, ‘for the betterment of our position. But it came to naught. It may have been – well, it may have been something of a misstep.’

This wasn’t enough. ‘Rosa Corder,’ she said, ‘talks of conflict.’

‘Yes, well, conflict may be coming.’ Jim tried to rally. ‘But we’ll prevail, my girl. Things will improve. There are several other strategies under consideration. The Owl, you know, is a most resourceful and well-connected fellow.’

And then for some reason he began to tell her about lithography, and the Portuguese’s proposal that he make a series of lithographic Nocturnes – coloured prints of the river and its bridges, made ingeniously by sketching with crayon upon tablets of damp stone – which would surely amount to a stream of gold so steady and plentiful it might as well be coming in through a pipe. As he went on, he got a disconcerting sense of how he must appear to her. There will be a taxing period, certain friends had warned him, after a woman surrenders a child. It cannot be avoided. No matter what she has promised, no matter the arrangements that have been reached, no matter how unified and durable the two of you were before, there will be distress. Lingering distress. Resentment.

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?’

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