The Artist’s Muse

I pant with terror. I dare not move. He looks at my ribbons, my hair, my virgin skin. Frau Wittger’s body stiffens and bristles, soft arms rendered implacable weapons to keep the foe at bay. The man sneers, giving a low, deep, dismissive laugh that is suddenly broken by the soft coo-cooing of a delicate birdlike creature. She swoops and falls around us advertising her wares.

The sight of this fragile, tiny girl, weighing not much more than a bag of cherries, so easily available, catches his attention. He puts out his bearlike hand and grabs her before she flies on. She twitters with the excitement of the young girl that she is before singing a more disturbingly seductive song – gay bright young chirrups dropping to rollingly suggestive coos. My senses pound in pointless rebellion as I hear his low, grunted response.

I sense danger.

My breath leaves my body in despair as he leads her roughly away. But as they fade into the distance I feel relief. Gratitude. I see a tiny, fragile, young girl hanging off the arm of a fat, ageing man. A repulsive sight. But I don’t look away. I watch them. I make myself watch them, as they find their chosen side street where she will allow herself to be snapped. Broken. I am sad for her. Glad for me. What am I to do with this unpalatable truth? Do you think you would have helped her? I thought I would have too. But I didn’t.

I cannot look Frau Wittger in the eye and she does not look at me. ‘How can she?’ escapes from my mouth. As if she’s got a choice. I hold tightly on to my guide. Seeking protection.

She lets out a sigh. ‘Poor cow.’ She rubs my arm reassuringly in return. ‘The modelling work will pay your bills.’

Chapter 4 (#ulink_3b732f37-ac6b-56ca-9553-2dcd34f29ad7)

A vision of red hair in green silk pulls me in quickly, waves a hand briskly, blows a kiss into the air, then shuts the door after us, leaving Frau Wittger on the street. ‘It’s flamin’ freezin’!’ she says in justification as she leads me into the studio.

‘I’m Hilde by the way,’ she tells me. ‘So you’re looking for work here?’ And before I have time to answer she starts putting me through my paces.

‘Move your arm above your head. Look down. Bring your hair forward. He asks you to do it, you do it. You’re the model. He’s the artist. An’ a big ’un at that. Fat as well as famous.’ Hilde pauses dramatically just to make sure that I get exactly how big the painter is before giving in to a whispered, conspiratorial, ‘If you like that sort of thing.’ Then she glowers at me as if I am the one who’s given utterance to such treachery before continuing indignantly, ‘I love his stuff actually. Everyone does. People pay good money to have a painting by him. They do, you know.’

I’m not disagreeing, not saying a word in fact, my whole being so paralysed with fear; I ceased existing on the more rarefied holding-an-opinion plane the moment I stepped over the threshold of the artist’s home a few minutes earlier. Besides, she’s not waited for me to give an answer yet. And all I can see is Hilde’s finger wagging up and down in front of my face. ‘It’s a good studio to be in, this one is, girl, I can tell you.’ She walks away muttering obscenities about ‘sweaty bastards at the Naschmarkt’, and ‘them that loiters in the woods at Schönbrunn’, as if I’ve brought them in with me.

Hilde shudders. I assume that it’s because she’s dressed in next to nothing. A green silk next to nothing embroidered with oriental pink blossom. But the look that sweeps across her face tells me it’s more than just the cold that’s making her twitch so. It’s a fear as intense as my own. I take the artist to be the cause. Because his faceless presence is certainly what’s making me uneasy.

I have no knowledge of the innumerable times that this woman with the red-gold hair has had to pace around the Naschmarkt, or the woods at Schönbrunn – times when she had no choice but to appeal to an altogether different kind of connoisseur to the one she so fervently believes Herr Klimt to be. Just to get by.

‘He’s an artist. He is,’ she argues, though with whom I’m not completely sure. ‘A real, honest-to-goodness one. With all them paints an’ stuff.’ She extends her finger, waving it in the direction of a table, gloriously messy with brushes, palettes, paints, and oily rags. I am struck by its resemblance to Frau Wittger’s dressing table with its stained sponges, pots of colour, piles of powder and scrunched-up tissues. One transforms a canvas. The other a face. My face. Similar tools for not dissimilar trades.

‘And you, young lady, you. Are very lucky.’ Hilde is as fiery as Frau Wittger warned me she would be, her voice ice-prickly, staccato words stabbing. ‘Yes. Remember that. You had better believe it.’ She brings her face up close to mine as she says these words yet I feel no threat. Not from her. The mass of wavy gold-red hair, curls billowing softly around her face like the morning mist, enchants me; and the warmth in her eyes melts the brittle ice knife of her tongue before it can pierce me. (‘She’s got a tongue as sharp as vinegar but don’t let her fool you as she’s got a heart as soft as honey.’ And I don’t, Frau Wittger. I don’t.)

I hold her gaze as she looks at me. With a bold, businesslike wipe of her hands, she pulls away. ‘You’ll do!’ She has made up her mind. Satisfied, Hilde walks up to a covered canvas, beckoning me to follow. ‘There!’ she announces dramatically. ‘See?’

I look at the unfinished painting and I instinctively try to cover myself up. Protectively.

All I see is a naked breast.

I force my eyes to study the entire canvas: follow the gentle curls of red hair, the round outline of a body; try to fix myself in the texture and colour of the fabric that surrounds it, diaphanous and dark, decorated with gold circles. Yet my efforts to see the painting as hair, body, texture, colour, do nothing to protect the sleeping girl at its heart. The fabric has slipped away to reveal the concentric circles of nipple on top of snow-white breast. And I can do nothing to stop it. I blush with shame.

‘Oh that!’ Hilde laughs at my shock and embarrassment and with her left hand she flicks my concern away. She sits down next to the canvas and adopts the same pose as the figure in the painting. She slips her green silk robe over her left shoulder, letting it slide down to reveal herself to me. ‘It’s only a body, love,’ she tuts at me with a roll of her eyes – before yanking the robe back up, her point made.

‘To him, I’m, well, I’m …’ She pauses, heightening the drama of the moment, while I gasp in fearful expectation.

‘Danaë.’

Hilde. Where she has sought to demystify she has brought confusion, where she has sought to becalm she has brought dread. I do not know who Danaë is. And now I do not like what a model does.

My mother always says that I shouldn’t fiddle with my hair. Says it makes her feel nervous. Like there’s something wrong. Makes her feel guilty. Especially when it’s tied back. Like tying knots in knots. And that shouldn’t happen. Tying knots in knots. And that’s what I’m doing now. I can’t help it. Knots in knots in knots. I look at the painting again. Danaë is curled up in a knot. And that doesn’t help her. Perhaps if she’d tied herself in another one.

‘Stop that!’ I’m making Hilde feel guilty, which is making me twist, twirl, curl. Furious fingers screwing their way to oblivion; Hilde’s voice growing sharper prickles by the second. ‘Stop that now!’

We seesaw hysterically. Until I fall off.

Hilde plumps up her pillow-soft hair to catch me.

‘There! There! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. You’re only a child. What was I thinking? Here. Come here.’ She enfolds me in her warm embrace, kissing the top of my head. Oh to be allowed to remain the child that I am. But I’ve seen too much to expect that to happen. I am afraid.

Before I can stop myself, tears roll down my pale face, trickling pink hot rivulets on face-powder-dry white riverbeds. One riverbank-breaking smear deftly made with the back of my left hand and I have created lakes that sit at the bottom of both cheeks. I taste the powder, see it transferred to the back of my hand, and sob some more.

‘Ssh! Ssh! You’ll be fine.’ Hilde’s voice strokes me like a feather, all prickles gone.

‘Now. Let’s start again, shall we? How old are you sweetheart? Twelve? Thirteen?’

‘Fourteen,’ I reply, unconvincingly. I am thirteen now but Frau Wittger warned me that to say so might mean I’m sent away and told to come back next year. Or, worse still, simply sent away. I think of Mother. I think of my three little sisters. I must help them. I remember Ursula, the girl I came across on my way here. I don’t want them, or me, to end up like her. I don’t want to stay but I can’t go. I try really hard to look grown-up. To stop snivelling.

‘Old enough.’ Hilde looks at me encouragingly, nodding her head and smiling.

I stop sobbing.

‘Look!’ she says chirpily. ‘These are what I meant to show you.’ She takes me on a tour of the studio that she hadn’t expected to do, walking me through some of the canvases propped up against the sides of the room. ‘Now this is me. Here I’m a goddess. (Can’t remember which one; I’ve been so many!) And I’m wearing –’ she breaths deeply to emphasize the point ‘– a deep, red wrap.’

She nudges me. ‘And look. Look. This one’s not finished yet but you can see that she’s got on a white dress. And her hair curls at the ends just like yours. And this one’s me. Again. I’m wearing … And her here, she’s dressed in …’ I grasp the point, am thankful for the effort, and feel my breath calm once more.

I catch sight of my reflection in the largest mirror that I have ever seen. I’m smiling. But I am also blotchy. Tear-stained. Shiny black ribbons against lurid red hair. Ghastly. Raw. I don’t smile for long.

‘And he paints us beautiful,’ she tells me, ‘better than in real life.’ She throws her head back, laughing at her own attempt at a joke, when all I can think of when I see my own ghoulish reflection is ‘I hope so’.

‘Well, I’m probably not the greatest of challenges,’ she continues. ‘But believe me, we do have some right ugly Frau vons walking in here hoping for him to turn – what do they say? Water into wine. Mud into gold. Make a silk purse out of a sow’s arse. Or is it ear?’ Chuckling maliciously, she shows me an unfinished painting of a dark-haired woman in a gold patterned dress. ‘Arse. That’s what she is. Oh, you should see her in real life.’

She places her hands on her hips, bends over in mirth, then gives me a nudge strong enough to make me reel. It works. I stop thinking about myself. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she adds. ‘And who says you can’t polish a turd? Or an arse! This one’s bleedin’ gleaming! It’ll make him piles!’ I put my hands to my mouth to stifle a snigger. ‘Of money,’ she explains. ‘And just think –’ she turns to me now warmly ‘– of what he can do with you as his model.’

Model. That’s what I have to be. Why I’m here. Yet the very word ‘model’ still tears me in two. I look at the women who surround me in the paintings for some sort of sign that to be a model, a model for this artist Herr Klimt, is a good thing to be (guiltily avoiding the direct gaze of the polished turd in the gold dress as I don’t expect her to reward my treachery with any words of wisdom).

Then I see her, find the reassurance that I’ve been looking for, in the eyes of a woman to whom Hilde has not yet introduced me. The woman I see has hair like a dark halo, which frames her face, a face that returns my distressed look with serenity and peace. I see no monstrous artist reflected there. And if there’s an arse hidden behind a silk purse it’s not peeping out at me. She looks beautiful. But even that proves to be enough, on a day as important as today, to tilt me over into despair.

First childish sobbing, now self-pitying despair. I even annoy myself but I can’t stop feeling set adrift, my emotions flying to and fro on savage waves. And what makes me calm makes me frantic because I cannot see me in a painting. The women I see are adults, fully formed. Not underaged, poorly fed pretenders. When I look to the future I can see only a workhouse. Or worse, the streets. My eyes well up with tears once more.

‘There there!’ says Hilde in exasperation masquerading badly as compassion. Before I can say a word she moves instinctively on, patting my forearm, briefly, as she guides me towards one of the largest and loveliest paintings I have ever seen through watery eyes, propped up at the very far end of the studio.

‘Calm now. Calm. Breathe deeply. This is a good studio. The best. Gustav’s not so bad. And you’ve got to love his work.’ Hilde lifts a cover to unveil what she calls his ‘crowd-pleaser’ and stands back to let it take full effect.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she coos, pulling me to her, her arm firmly around my shoulders. ‘Every model who’s ever set foot in this studio claims to be her here. Odds are you’ll look back one day and say that it was you an’ all. A pale princess with orange-gold hair, studded with flowers, caught forever in an embrace with a dark-haired prince wearing a leaf crown and kneeling on a floral carpet. Why wouldn’t you? And then there’s the gold.’ The huge canvas shimmers brightly and for a while we are both rendered speechless.

‘It’s gold leaf.’ Hilde breaks the silence. ‘The one over there, of the woman with the horse face, the one who looks like she’s wearing a tin dress, well, that one will look more like this one when he’s properly finished it.’ Then she checks herself. ‘Though not the face of course. Only the dress.’

I’m starting to want to be here and the bewitching spell cast over me by the pale princess on the glittering canvas is only broken because Hilde stands between me and it. She goes down on her knees.

‘Look. Who does she remind you of? Anyone?’

She puts her head to the side, draws her hands up, sweeping her long tresses back, all orange-golden and red. She smiles at me before closing her eyes. ‘See it now?’ she shouts as if I’m standing at the opposite end of the studio.