Her sister and father set out immediately and arrived at Maison Mouton the following day to find Sickert cheerfully waving a handkerchief at them from a window. They were taken aback when he greeted them at the door in a black velvet jacket, his head shaved, his face very white, as if he were wearing makeup. He was pleased to tell them that Christine was alive, though barely. He took them up to her room, where she was unconscious. She was not in the master bedroom. That was downstairs behind the kitchen and had the only big fireplace in the house.
Andrina sat with Christine while their father went downstairs and was so entertained by Sickert’s stories and singing that Angus later felt guilty for enjoying himself. The doctor arrived and gave Christine an injection. Her family left, and soon afterward she died. They did not find out until the next day, the 14th. Sickert sketched his wife’s dead body while it was still upstairs in bed. He sent for a caster to make a plaster cast of her head, then met with an agent who was interested in buying paintings. Sickert asked Angus if he would mind sending a telegram to The Times about her death, only to become irritated that Angus had listed Christine as the “wife of Walter Sickert” and not the “wife of Walter Richard Sickert.” Sickert’s friends gathered about him, and artist Therese Lessore moved in and took care of him. His grief was apparent – and apparently as false as most everything about him, his sentiments about his “dear departed,” as D. D. Angus bitterly described it, “completely bogus.” Sickert, wrote Angus, “lost no time getting his Therese [sic].” In 1926, he and Therese would marry.
“You must miss her,” Marjorie Lilly consoled Sickert not long after Christine’s death.
“It’s not that,” he replied. “My grief is, that she no longer exists.”
In the early months of 1921, when Christine’s ashes had been in her grave not even half a year, Sickert wrote obsequious, morbid letters to his father-in-law, the point of them clearly being that he wanted his share of Christine’s estate prior to the probate of her will. He needed money now to pay the workmen who were continuing to fix up Maison Mouton. It was so “unpleasant” not to pay one’s bills on time, and since Mr. Angus was on his way to South Africa, Sickert certainly could use an advance to make sure Christine’s wishes about the Maison were respected. John Angus sent Sickert an advance of £500.
Sickert – one of the first people in Envermeu to own a motor car – spent £60 on building a garage with a deep brick mechanic’s pit. It “will make my house a good motoring centre,” he wrote Angus. “Christine always had that idea.” Sickert’s many letters to Christine’s family after her death were so obviously self-serving and manipulative that her siblings passed them around and found them “entertaining.”
He continued to worry about dying intestate, as if this could happen at any moment. He needed the services of Mr. Bonus, the Angus family lawyer, to draft a will right away. Mr. Bonus lived up to his name. By using him, Sickert didn’t have to pay legal fees. “I am in no hurry for probate,” Sickert assured Angus. “My only anxiety is not to die intestate. I have given Bonus directions about my will.”
Finally, the seventy-year-old Angus wrote the sixty-year-old Sickert that his relentless “anxiety” about dying “intestate, may be summarily dismissed, as surely it won’t take Bonus years and years and years to draw up your will.” Christine’s estate was valued at about £18,000. Sickert wanted his money, and used the excuse that all legal matters needed to be settled immediately lest he suddenly die, perhaps in a motoring accident. Should the worst happen, Sickert’s wishes were to be cremated “wherever convenient, and my ashes (without box or casket)” were to be poured into Christine’s grave. He generously added that everything Christine had left him was to revert back “unconditionally” to the Angus family. “If I live a few years,” Sickert promised, he would make arrangements to insure that Marie, his housekeeper, had an annual annuity upon his death of 1,000 francs.