style="font-size:15px;"> ‘All the important ones. We still have an expectation of sales, a strong expectation. The exhibition has three weeks left to run. Stands to reason that the big buyers will wait until the end.’
Owl was nodding sagely. ‘That can be a pattern at shows of this kind.’
This sounded unlikely to Maud. She said nothing, though, as Jimmy was now talking with some candour about how tough things were becoming at Lindsey Row – the outstanding bills, the mounting legal threats, the bailiffs. It was a confession of sorts, a statement of failure, and his spirits dipped accordingly.
‘It’s difficult, old man,’ he concluded, ‘damned difficult. Each and every path seems to promise only fresh disaster.’
Maud felt the beginnings of pity. He was shaken. He needed her, in his way – his ally in penury. She hardened her heart, though, directing her eyes firmly towards the uneven herringbone floor. He deserved her anger. It shouldn’t be that easy.
Owl stepped in. ‘Well, there’s a great deal we can do here. These works of yours mayn’t have buyers, Jimmy, not yet, but they certainly have value. In abundance. The means are before us to generate nothing less than a fortune. From the paintings, and the copperplates as well.’ For all the ambitiousness of his words, his voice was level. Reasonable. ‘As for the bailiffs, what can I say? It shan’t happen a second time. I can promise you that. We shall build a barrier around you, my dear chap – a barrier of gold two miles high, and every one of these accursed philistines will be shut out for good.’
Maud’s doubt must have been showing, for Jimmy approached her, his composure regained, to offer some reassurance. ‘The Owl, Maudie,’ he said, ‘has worked deals that mystify the mind. That send the soul soaring.’
A cigarette was burning between his fingers. Maud plucked it out, deciding right then that she was ready to smoke again, and little caring what these guests might think about it. Jimmy’s tobacco was fine, smooth and strong; one puff set her fingertips tingling. She tilted back her head to exhale, holding his eye. ‘Like what?’
Jimmy turned to Owl. ‘Rossetti’s painting, the last one you handled,’ he asked. ‘That woman, you know, with those monstrous shoulders. How much did you get? It was all anyone talked of for weeks.’
‘A gentleman of my acquaintance,’ replied Owl, marvellously offhand, ‘paid us two thousand guineas.’
Maud coughed on the cigarette, soreness flaring along her side. That was the same sum Jimmy had asked for the entire Peacock Room, as everybody had taken to calling it. The sum he’d been denied. And this fellow was getting it for a single painting. Hope returned, despite her determined wariness; it was breaking through her like a lantern’s light. Everything could change. Their debts could be wiped clean away. Jimmy could be made wealthy. They could travel. Their trip to Italy, to Venice, so long postponed now that the idea had nearly lost all meaning, could be made at last. And dear God, they could talk of Ione. Of their daughter. Maud saw her ruddy hands, bunching the midwife’s shawl, and those glassy blue eyes; she felt the press of the child’s feet against her thigh. She couldn’t ever live with them. This Maud accepted. But if there was to be money, a second property could surely be rented nearby – in Chelsea even. A nurse could be employed. Or the foster family moved in. It had to be possible.
‘A fair figure,’ said Miss Corder, from across the studio. ‘Very fair. Why shouldn’t he pay that? What is he, a banker? A merchant? He should have paid more.’
‘And I could assuredly have got more,’ Owl told her, ‘had I been given another week. No question of it. But you know how damned impatient Gabriel can be.’ He removed his top hat, revealing a head of glossy auburn hair as oiled as Jimmy’s. ‘Where do things stand with the large picture over yonder? The Three Girls?’
This painting had been given only a secondary placing in Jimmy’s little display, out of the studio’s best light. It featured a simple, Japanese-style composition: three female nudes arranged around a potted cherry blossom, its pink flowers scattered against a backdrop of pale grey screens. One girl stood to the right, holding a parasol and clad in a robe so diaphanous it barely existed at all; another crouched beside the plant as if tending to it, her hair tied beneath a red and silver scarf; and there, at the painting’s left edge, was Maud Franklin, rather younger and slimmer and completely stark naked. In the altogether. This had been done right at the start, around the time of Maud’s eighteenth birthday, before anything particular had happened between Jimmy and her. She’d agreed readily enough. The art had required it, she’d reasoned; such was the bargain a model made with her modesty. Still, despite this firm self-instruction, she’d been a mite startled to discover that she wasn’t going to be alone in this picture, the two other nudes having already been laid in on an earlier occasion.
‘Three girls was the scheme agreed upon,’ had been Jimmy’s dry explanation. ‘Three different girls. At the patron’s specific request.’
Parts of it were sketchy, but Maud herself was pretty unmistakable – shown from the side, leaning gently towards the centre of the scene. It had been a hellish pose to hold, even by Jimmy’s standards. You couldn’t tell, though; the figure had a grace to it, and a sleekness, that now seemed frankly incredible. Yet her earlier discomfort did not return. As their guests looked at this painting, she felt only a sickly excitement at the sums that might be proposing themselves to Owl.
‘It’s Leyland’s,’ Jimmy replied. ‘As I suspect you are aware.’
‘And he still wants it?’
‘You know his views on receiving that which he has paid for. How very dogged he can be.’
‘But you don’t think simply to send it to him?’
‘My dear Owl, it is unfinished. Can you not see that? It certainly isn’t ready to be subjected to any form of general inspection. The same goes for the rest of Leyland’s works I still have here. All those blasted portraits, for instance.’
Owl looked about him. ‘And where might they be?’
Commissioned back when Jimmy had been counted among the family’s most intimate friends, the Leyland portraits had provided Maud with her ticket through his door. He usually kept the one of the wife out for show, being rather proud of it, she suspected; but today, along with the rest of them, it was nowhere to be seen.
‘Work upon all Leyland faces has halted, for the time being,’ Jimmy said, ‘and an alternative berth found for the canvases. Being as they are so big, you understand. There just isn’t room.’ He grew subtly mischievous, and gave a sigh of mock-regret. ‘The truth of it, mon vieux, is that having our British businessman in here, all long-limbed and morose – befrilled, you know, with sunken eye, lurking off in the shadows – was proving far too dire a distraction, so I bundled him into the cellar. The painted version, that is. Not the original.’
The Owl and Miss Corder laughed. Jimmy’s forgotten cigarette was almost burned out, the ember scorching Maud’s knuckles; she dropped it with a wince into a grubby saucer. When she’d left for Edie’s back in early May, the Leyland matter had been all but dead. The Peacock Room had been finished with at long last. But she knew their tone. Behind these jokes lay something new.
‘What’s happened?’
The studio door opened to admit John, bearing a tray with his standard air of mild irritability. Upon it was a plate of Jimmy’s American buckwheat cakes, a half-empty bottle of white wine and four smudged glasses. After setting the tray on the
