Mrs Whistler. Matthew Plampin

paint-flecked stool, head sinking to her knees, dull with despair once more.

      This would not do. She would not be led down this path. She sat up straight, wiped her eyes and made a determined effort to order her thoughts. John was gone by now – as was Mrs Cossins, off on her errands. The house was empty. Raised in a tenement, sleeping three to a bed, Maud had always savoured these stretches of solitude at Lindsey Row. She’d read, or draw; leaf through Jimmy’s albums of Japanese prints, with their blossom-blotted branches and firework displays and tall bamboo bridges, or his many boxes of photographs; or simply watch the light move through the empty rooms. That day, however, she felt blank, without appetite or inclination. She forced herself to think of art. The sky was overcast, muting the garden’s colours, so she decided instead upon a self-portrait. This, according to Jimmy, was an exercise quite essential to a painter’s growth – to his sense of what he could do and where he was heading. Rembrandt, he’d say, as if the name was an argument in itself. Velázquez.

      Maud chose a sheet of red paper and a piece of chalk, put a wicker chair before a mirror and considered her face. She’d thought herself prepared, but still saw the shift in her own expression – the dismay. The eyes had a bruised squint; the skin was pallid, waxen; yet the problem ran rather deeper than that. Sad, she thought, setting down her materials. I look profoundly sad.

      She stood at various windows. She went upstairs and sat on the bed. The summer sun broke through the clouds, the floor growing bright around her feet; and the notion arrived, sudden and irresistible, of travelling north. Of finding Edie, in Lionel Crossley’s office or wherever she might be, and learning the address of the foster family – Edie had it, Maud was sure, even though she’d never admitted as much – and visiting her daughter. This could happen. It would be so simple. She’d let a month pass. More than a month. They were both in this same city. They were a mere handful of miles apart. Why shouldn’t Ione know who she was – why shouldn’t she be held by her mother? She might be smiling by now. She’d surely smile at her.

      Maud wasn’t aware of having made the choice to go – only of being at the end of their path, pushing open the gate in a hat and a jacket that did not match, running the coins in her pocket through her fingers to check she had enough for the fare. Glancing downriver, she saw a lone woman about twenty yards along the Row, over at the rail, gazing out at the water. It was Rosa Corder, clad in a bright coral gown. Maud was in no mood to talk with her. She’d been tight at the Café Royal that night, but not so much that she had no memory of what Rosa had said about Ione – about the fostering, and how it had been so necessary