Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin

me with the mental capacity to walk down the stairs.’

      ‘He’s turned the children against me, I think.’

      ‘Of course he has, Mr Whistler. That is how it’s done. That is how you are cast out. Why, he’s managing to do the same to me, even as he leaves me with them all to go about his business. These pressing appointments that he has. He creeps off the instant we arrive in London, you know, then reappears back in Liverpool a week later as if this was a perfectly respectable way for a husband and father to behave.’

      There was applause; Jim joined in, despite having no idea who he clapped or why. He could only think that Leyland was not there. The family had plainly come to Lord’s without him. Was this a last-minute alteration? It didn’t seem so. Mrs Leyland appeared to have invited him along knowing that her husband, the man with whom he needed so keenly to speak, would not be present.

      The cricketers were walking off, heading into a low pavilion at the head of the ground. From conversations around them, Jim gathered that play had stopped for luncheon. The crowd broke apart, drifting in its different directions. Mrs Leyland opened a parasol and took his arm. She led him away from the landau at some speed, towards the long rectangle of paler grass in the centre of the pitch.

      ‘One of his women,’ she said, when they were a distance from her daughters, ‘came to our house. Can you believe it, Mr Whistler? To our house, up to the very door. With an – with an infant. His infant. After money, unsurprisingly.’

      Mrs Leyland’s grip had become ferociously tight; Jim winced a little, both at the pressure of her fingers and the obvious extent of her distress. What, though, could he reasonably be expected to do? The thought occurred – ignoble, yes, but impossible to help – that if his strongest ally in this family was really in serious danger of exclusion herself, then the Peacock Room was truly lost.

      ‘You’ve known all along, haven’t you? His infidelities. The women he keeps around town.’

      Jim gave a slight shrug, avoiding her gaze. He had a plain sense of escalation, of something growing far beyond him into regions that were really quite unknown, where wit and style and nerve would not even begin to address the problems at hand. He felt a desperate need for a cigarette.

      ‘Naturally you have. Dear God. I know the way you men talk to one another. The great licence you allow yourselves.’

      She was right, worse luck: Leyland had shared a fair deal about his women, usually late at night at his club or in some restaurant or other. This talk hadn’t taken the form of confession or anything like that, or even of boastfulness. It had been closer to a dare – as if Leyland, aware of the familiarity that existed between the painter and his wife, had been challenging Jim to make an objection. Needless to say, Jim had not. They were men of the world, the pair of them, and this particular millionaire had seemed then to contain a deep vein of future commissions.

      ‘I am bound, my dear Mrs Leyland, by many ties. It is not my place to—’ Jim hesitated. ‘Know only that I value your friendship. More than I can tell you. If there is anything I can do, anything at all, to be of assistance, you must tell—’

      He stopped again, as it occurred to him now that this could actually be why she’d encouraged his efforts to repair their connection. The marriage, ailing for years, was entering its final collapse. She needed an accessory. A berth, perhaps. A route out of the Leyland fortress that enclosed her so completely. The current of this whole episode, as he’d conceived it, had been him rejoining the family, via Frances Leyland – not her leaving it via him.

      How did this reversal make Jim feel? Well, flattered certainly. Also consternated, as he had not the least idea how he would manage this, whatever it might turn out to be, in practical terms. It would add immeasurably to his own roster of trouble, in every conceivable area. And alarmed. Yes, most definitely alarmed. It was one thing to clash with a man in the field of art, where your own rectitude, your superiority in both taste and sophistication, could be taken for granted. But this, assisting in the end of his marriage – the removal, quite possibly, of his wife – was something else entirely. Suddenly he wondered whether Leyland already had suspicions. Whether this lay behind the extraordinary venom of that letter. The weakness of a woman. A false position before the world.

      Jim’s offer was never finished. Reaching the centre of the ground – where three sticks were wedged into the turf, serving some obscure sporting function – they came to a halt and simply stood together in the sunshine, arms linked still, both struck mute by the enormity of what had been touched upon, and the panicked flailing of their thoughts. Jim looked back towards the landau. The Leyland girls had alighted from it and were talking with one of the cricketers – an especially tall fellow with a slope-shouldered, vaguely diffident stance and longish auburn curls spilling from beneath his cap. It was Freddie. Even at a distance, Jim could see clearly what was happening. The poor lad was being press-ganged into an unwelcome task. It wasn’t hard to guess what it might be. Soon afterwards, he started in their direction.

      Mrs Leyland released Jim’s arm and began talking loudly about the garden at Prince’s Gate, and how much the new plantings were suffering in the heat, until Freddie arrived before them. Over the years, Jim had gone to some pains to cultivate a friendship with the younger Frederick Leyland, developing a tone both worldly and avuncular. The boy was every last inch his mother’s son – the same doe eyes, the same hint of vulnerability. Without a word to Jim, he trotted out some transparent nonsense about Baby having a headache, which apparently necessitated an immediate return to Kensington. He’d be all right, he added; one of the chaps would be sure to offer him a lift at the end of the match. Mrs Leyland met Jim’s eye very briefly and started to walk back. Jim made to follow – rubbing his forearm to restore the circulation – and found Freddie, sweet, loyal Freddie, deliberately blocking his path.

      ‘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.