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 her thigh and tucked it into her sleeve for safekeeping.
Owl understood, however, in a way that dear Maud simply could not. ‘It’s the best the brute can do,’ he said. ‘The one stone he has left to throw. I pity him, almost.’ He gestured towards the room. ‘This, though – this alone remains the fact. All else is mere anecdote. Our friend Leyland has earned himself much the same place in history as the dullard who paid Correggio in pennies.’
Jim liked this. ‘Indeed.’
‘So in sum,’ said Owl, producing a cigarette case and offering one to Jim, ‘your patron works you like a slave. Looks upon your works with no more feeling than a beast of the field. Pays you like a joiner, or a greengrocer, or the man who brings him those frilled shirts of his, and less than half the proper amount.’ He struck a match and held it out. ‘Jimmy old man, I’d say this room was half yours, half yours at least. To do with as you damn well please. Remove the shutters, these wondrous peacocks, and sell them elsewhere. Enhance the design, if you see fit.’
‘Enhance?’ Jim, sensing criticism, was suddenly alert. ‘What d’you mean?’
Owl lit his own cigarette, untroubled by the sharpness of Jim’s tone. ‘The shutters are magisterial,’ he said. ‘It’s the only word. Hiroshige has been eclipsed. And the patterns, these feather motifs – again, exceptional, beyond fault. This, however, this leather …’ He pointed to the panels that stretched behind the shelves and spanned the empty space above the sideboard and fireplace. ‘You’ve made an attempt, I see that. But it doesn’t go. The flowers look Dutch, for God’s sake.’
He was right. Jim knew it at once. There was a challenge here too, plain as day. You have been supine, Owl was saying. Supplicatory. Is this really how an artist should behave?
‘They are antique,’ Jim said. ‘Several hundred years old, I’m told.’
Owl shrugged. He puffed on his cigarette. ‘It doesn’t go.’
*
December 1876
The front door opened, admitting a current of wintry wind; it nosed through the papers scattered across the dining-room floor, lifting the large mural cartoon like the airing of a bedsheet. Jim scowled atop his stepladder. Young Walter Greaves, dispatched on an errand an hour or so earlier, had been instructed most firmly not to use the main entrance. He was shouting out something to this effect when Maud hushed him. She’d been sitting in a corner, wearing her coat, reading one of the art papers; but now she was up, already on her way outside, making for the French doors behind the central set of shutters. He glanced down at her. Several months had now passed, yet he could detect no outward sign of her condition. Her face retained its striking angularity; her figure was as lissom as ever. A small part of him continued to hope that it was a false alarm.
‘Jimmy,’ she said. ‘That isn’t Walt.’
Jim cocked his head to listen. From the hall came not the assistant’s hob-nailed thuds but the sigh of fine fabric, dragging in folds across the bare stone. Maud left, closing the shutters silently behind her. Jim climbed from the stepladder and crept to the doorway. Mrs Leyland and Florence, the middle daughter, were standing in the unlit hall, little more than dark shapes against the marble. Dressed for travel, they were looking around them in a faintly expectant fashion. A male servant came in and summoned the caretaker from his downstairs parlour. There was a brief exchange, then all eyes turned towards the dining room. Jim pulled back; he considered quickly how he should be found.
The room, thankfully, was brilliant. It had been enriched past hope or prediction by Jim’s greatest change: the painting of those awkward leather panels with a deep, obliterating shade of Prussian blue. This had been a mighty feat indeed, demanding every last ounce of his strength and his vision. His hands and forearms were still stained a little, having a greenish, cadaverous hue; numerous aches hampered the movement of his shoulders, his elbows, his wrists. But none of this mattered. His satisfaction with the result was difficult to overstate. In certain sections – and particularly now, under gaslight – the effect was so smooth and intense that it quite confounded the notion of surface, the gilded shelves seeming to float before a field of pure colour. The whole thing was transformative. Entering the dining room changed your mood, the very feel of your skin.
And then there was the mural. Emblazoned across the southern wall – upon which Leyland had once talked of hanging one of Jim’s own canvases – this was the feature with which he was most pleased of all. He chose a spot beneath it and darted over, arranging himself next to the sideboard.
The two fine Leyland ladies stood speechless, blinking as people do when brought forward suddenly into the light. They looked remarkably similar at first: the compact luxury of their clothes, the corseted uniformity of their figures, the handsome solemnity of their faces. Leyland, however, was in the daughter as well – those dark, baleful eyes, that regrettably broad forehead – and seemed even to taint her aesthetic responses; for as her mother’s initial shock was replaced by a kind of incredulous regard, her own expression grew rather more negative.
‘It is every bit as bad,’ she announced, ‘as it sounded in that wretched newspaper. Father will be furious. He will be furious.’
Commendably direct, Jim thought. He’d never seen this in Florence before: how old was she, eighteen? It was hard to keep track. Over the past five or six years he’d painted nearly every member of this family, starting with Ma and Pa and working down from there. Florence’s portrait was the least complete of his Leyland pantheon, now stacked out of sight in a corner of the studio. She’d been a difficult subject, querulous and impatient and impossible to impress; and although wholly at leisure she’d granted him only four sittings, of a couple of hours each. Not at all how Jim liked to work. Luckily Maud had been on hand to stand in her place, just as she had done for the mother and elder sister – wearing the three different gowns, occupying the three different poses, with her usual ease.
‘My only wish, Miss Leyland,’ he said calmly, ‘was to give yourself and your family the most beautiful room that has ever been.’
‘Did you obtain my father’s permission for this? For any of it?’
‘I cannot apologise for inspiration, Miss, and the paths down which—’
‘What of the leather? Did you pause, even, before turning it
