moustache, a bright enamelled tiepin, and that decoration on his lapel, the folded strip of scarlet ribbon, said to be an honour of some kind from his native land. He knew this man well, or had done: Owl, the resourceful Anglo-Portuguese, an unequalled repository of art knowledge, on familiar terms with everyone. They hadn’t spoken, however, in at least five years; Owl remained close to a number of people Jim no longer saw. Whether this was by drift or rift he could scarcely remember.
‘You still Rossetti’s man, Owl?’
‘That,’ answered Owl, assuming a regretful air, ‘is a complicated question. Gabriel is a blessedly complicated cove. I may as well tell you, however, that it is coming to an end. I fear he and I have done all that we can do. I know that you two have long ceased your intimacy, Jimmy, but I fear for his health. He barely sleeps these days. Why, only the other week Watts arrived at dawn to find him up a tree in his nightshirt. Out on the Walk, this was – practically dangling over the bloody river. He claimed to be counting off the stars. Luckily I was on hand as well. Ended up luring the poor devil down with a beaker of brandy.’
This was Owl, Jim recalled, to the absolute degree. Some men wrote, some painted, some founded factories, or drew up legislation, or commanded troops in battle. The Owl talked. He had a tale for every situation, an endless roll of gossip and indiscretion – things that he really shouldn’t be repeating but was anyway, with every detail vividly and enthusiastically imparted.
‘Frederick Leyland, they say, is half mad with worry,’ Owl went on. ‘Watts tells me that he makes a special point of coming round whenever he’s in town – to spend time, you know, and discuss how he will arrange Gabriel’s canvases in his new London pile. I’ve heard talk of commissions as well. For the future. Something large.’ He paused. ‘Are you still engaged on the decoration there? Is that what brings you to this neck of the woods?’
Jim came close to smiling here – not an especially subtle fellow, this Owl – but his amusement was hindered by unease. So Rossetti got Leyland’s respect. Rossetti got shows of concern and allowances made, and further work promised to him. And for what? Certainly nothing as glorious as that dining room. Not by a very long distance. Jim’s unease grew into resentment. It was quite preoccupying. His eyes glazed over; he clicked his thumbnail against one of the ridges in his bamboo cane. He had to force his mind back to Owl’s enquiry.
‘Barely,’ he replied. ‘Today might well see the last of it.’ After which, he thought, I shall be gone. I shall flee that blasted place like it was Bluebeard’s oubliette. ‘I’ve other things to be doing. My contribution to the Grosvenor Gallery, for instance.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Owl. ‘Sir Coutts Lindsay’s exhibition. I’d heard that he’d approached you.’ An eagerness had crept into him, of the sort that preceded the asking of a favour. ‘I’d like very much to see the room, Jimmy, if I may. Since we are so close to it. Just for a few minutes, as you apply the finishing touches. What d’you say? Can it be done?’
The two men had arrived at the corner of Prince’s Gate; ahead were the Botanical Gardens, the glass roof glittering through a screen of denuded branches. Jim considered the Owl – his languid, humorous eyes, his squarish forehead and rounded chin, the high shine of his expensive-looking top-boots. This was a cavalier, a dandy of the slickest stripe, but his keenness was disarming. That morning, the prospect of showing the peacocks to someone who might value them had a definite appeal. Jim nodded in the direction of Leyland’s house.
Although perhaps a foregone conclusion, Owl’s opinion of the dining room was expressed with his usual flair. ‘Transporting,’ he declared, after two reverential circuits. ‘A chamber utterly apart from the rest of the world, far beyond its troubles and interruptions. It is like – it is like being at the pinnacle of a lofty tower. Or in a gilded car slung beneath a balloon, floating a mile above London.’
How could Jim, propped against the sideboard, not grin at this? ‘Yes, well,’ he said, prodding at an empty varnish tin with his cane, ‘I’m afraid that the patron may disagree.’
‘Leyland? What else can you expect, though, from such a creature? The fellow is callousness made flesh. A shark, old man, of the Great White variety.’
‘Why Owl,’ Jim observed, ‘you appear to know the gentleman.’
‘It is impossible, my dear Jimmy, to work on Gabriel Rossetti’s behalf and avoid him. There’s a fascination between them. A kinship, if you like, despite the obvious differences.’ Owl turned back to the room. ‘We’ve done a deal or two of our own as well, over the years. That Rembrandt head, do you remember?’
Jim did. Rembrandt, in his view, had been a rather optimistic attribution.
‘You can take a cur,’ Owl continued, ‘from the alleys of Liverpool. You can give it an ocean-spanning armada of iron-clad vessels. You can wash its hide, and dress it in mountebank frills and silver shoe buckles. And it is still, under it all, a cur. You can see it in Leyland’s eyes, very clearly. The way he looks at you as if he’d gladly bite off your damned hand. Did you know that his mother ran a pie-shop, back in his home city? Down on the quay?’
Owl spoke incautiously, without so much as a glance out towards the hall, apparently indifferent to the fact that he was standing in Leyland’s house; that anybody could be listening in, as far as they knew, even the cur himself. It was a display, Jim realised this, staged for his benefit, but there could be no denying the nerve involved.
‘I’d heard,’ he said.
‘And yet you were caught out by his reaction to your room?’ Owl faced him again. ‘Forgive me, Jimmy, but this is no enlightened prince. This is Frederick Richards Leyland. The most hated man in Liverpool. This is the modern British businessman, in all his bone-headed viciousness.’
‘I have received a schooling, this past week,’ Jim admitted, ‘in business wisdom – as Leyland understands it.’
‘He has paid you what he owes, though, hasn’t he?’
And then, almost to Jim’s surprise, he was telling the Owl everything. He abandoned his remote, stoical stance – profoundly uncharacteristic as it was – and provided a full account of his travails, assuming the same confidence, the same disregard for discretion, as his companion, relishing every disclosure and the sympathy with which it was received. The climax, the peak of indignation, was reserved for the events of that same morning.
‘So I set aside my material needs – which are grave, I don’t mind saying – and hatch a deal that is wholly to his advantage. He tells me to name my price, Owl, so I do, and when this is deemed unacceptable I agree to take only half of the rightful sum – rewarding him, in essence, for his philistinism. He makes me wait for it, of course. Three rather trying days. Yet finally it arrives. Bon Dieu! The trumpets sound – the angels sing. I tear open the envelope.’
Owl was listening intently.
‘It was pounds. Pounds, Owl! We have moved from the guinea of tradition, of honour – with which he has always paid me in the past – to the base sovereign, the payment of tradesmen. My fee was shorn of its shillings, and left fifty quid lighter as a result. I swear I nearly threw the thing on the fire.’
There was some truth to this. At the breakfast table, Jim had waved the offending cheque aloft, holding forth about how it was a vulgar insult and warranted immediate destruction. After a minute, Maud had risen from her chair and come to his side, to offer consolation he’d thought; but instead she’d plucked the crumpled rectangle of paper from his grasp, smoothed it against
