The Artist’s Muse

‘Wally.’ Hilde puts her hand on my forearm to soothe me. ‘Stop feeling and start thinking. It’s what a model does. Model. And remember, arse, elbow, peach, or pear – it’s just lines, shapes, and colours.’

I’m feeling queasy when I come in the next day. Don’t know why. But Hilde soon has me stretching out at an impromptu bar, warming up for the day’s performance, because that, she’s forever telling me, is what modelling is. I need to be as flexible as a dancer and as convincing as an actress.

The two girls from yesterday are here again and as they undress – ready to turn back into water serpents – the pain in my tummy comes back, only to get worse when I hear Herr Klimt call my name. I am to model for him first. I am grateful to feel Hilde’s warm hands guide me over towards him, otherwise I am sure that I would stay rigid by the bar, all flexibility and desire to convince frozen solid.

The next thing I recall is sitting on a chair in the kitchen with a blanket tightly wrapped around my shoulders, my head pounding. ‘You fainted. Hit your head on the corner of the bed,’ Hilde tells me, her voice a muted mixture of concern and anger. I’m sorry to have let her down. ‘Best if you go in and look and learn today,’ she tells me with a smile that perturbs me, shot through as it is with pity.

After I’ve had a glass of water I go back into the studio to watch Herr Klimt while he paints his water serpents and as I’m pulling the door to Herr Klimt’s cat squeezes itself in. Before I can throw it back out Herr Klimt let’s out a loud ‘Ssssh!’ Quickly, I hide myself, sitting cross-legged in the shadows, relieved that I’m not the body on the bed. Then I see Katze. I beckon her to me but she darts towards the girls, her paintbrush tail sweeping gently across a foot, which twitches involuntarily.

Herr Klimt shouts, ‘Break!’ Flying, flinging, and flinching follow. He storms out into the garden taking Katze with him while the water serpents and me – we don’t move, don’t say a word. He re-enters the studio and walks on through, slamming the door behind him.

Ten minutes later he returns. With a point of his finger the water serpents are out of the studio to receive from Hilde the instructions Herr Klimt is too angry to give. She hands them a postcard Herr Klimt would like delivered. Addressed to Fräulein Emilie Flöge, it reads, ‘I have finished the designs. Drop by the studio to discuss them. Gustav’

The artist turns his attention to me.

‘How old are you girl?’ Herr Klimt asks me. I’m worried. I’ve told him my age before. But he can’t catch me out that easily. ‘F-f-fourteen,’ comes my stammering reply. I need this job. I will get better. Something unspoken passes between Hilde and Herr Klimt as the painter walks out of the studio.

She takes one of my hands in hers, smoothing my hair protectively with the other, so that it frames my face and hangs loose around my shoulders. ‘Remember, I’m here.’

The dizziness can do nothing to keep out the certain knowledge that my time has come.

Hilde prepares me. Respectful. Silent. When she is done, I shiver with cold and with the knowledge that I am naked. She puts her arms around me, rubbing my back. Warming. Reassuring. And she places her lips on my ear, kissing me softly as she whispers, ‘Breathe. Breathe beauty.’

When Herr Klimt starts work, I breathe beauty for what seems like an eternity, and then, when I think I can breathe beauty no more, I start thinking of my loved ones. But not for long. My mother’s face makes me want to cover myself up for fear of her seeing me like this. When I’ve finished I pull my clothes on, hopping and tripping in my haste.

Herr Klimt shows me what he has drawn. I am newly crestfallen. He has rendered my naked body with such anatomical correctness that when he points at the turn of my shoulder, or shallow curve of my breast it is as if he is touching me. My breathing becomes shallow as I hear his low, menacing growl. I sense danger in the presence of this bear with a paintbrush.

Hilde congratulates me with a kiss. ‘I’m here,’ she says softly before appeasing the beast. My relief to see that she’s placed her beautifully soft, pale hands around his rough bull-like neck is greater than my indignation that it is wrong to see youth and age in such an embrace. The growl turns into a low hum of contentment and I am overjoyed that I am not the cause.

She leads him by the hand to the adjoining room, flattering as she goes, closes the door, only to pop her head round a few moments later. ‘Tidy up and get Herr Klimt’s pencils and sketchbooks marked ‘Flöge Sisters’ ready for ten minutes from now,’ she tells me.

I collapse as soon as she disappears, my silent sobbing soon giving way to whimpering so loud that at first I don’t hear the ugly animal sounds coming through the wall. But then I do. Oh, Hilde. What you have done for me. I do what she has asked.

Hilde and Klimt reappear, as Hilde promised they would, exactly ten minutes later. ‘You could set your watch by him.’ She laughs. He looks drained. Flushed. Sweaty. He beckons me over to him. A shudder of relief surges through my body when Herr Klimt announces that he’s going to spend the next ten minutes working on his sketches for Emilie. He holds out his hands for the sketchbooks and pencils and doesn’t notice the tears of relief that have newly sprung from my eyes.

Hilde has. She drags me into the garden, finding for us a secluded spot where the sunlight plays on our faces through the twinkling leaves of a tree. She says nothing to explain herself other than: ‘I know,’ letting me rest my now throbbing head in her lap, while the leaves above make oval shadows on my hair. Shape. Line. Colour. Shimmering in the dappled sunlight.

‘Now I would paint this,’ she says looking down at me. Katze jumps up and nestles into the well I make as I lie there on my side, my knees bent up. I stroke her fur, feel the beating of her heart. Hilde strokes me. She moves her hand down my arm, glides it over the mound made by the outside curve of my thigh then brings her delicate fingers up to trace my eyelids, outline my cheeks in beautiful, sweeping movements before plunging her fingers into my sun-warmed hair.

I lie there and close my puffy eyes, kissed by the warmth of the sun, soothed by an animal with a beating heart and consoled by the kindness of a woman. We sit like this, possibly for ten minutes, and not one of us makes a sound.

Chapter 6 (#ulink_061c4dce-5c16-5858-bee7-d6bcbfd40df6)

What’s right and wrong never really changes. But I’m learning that the colours often run between the two in an all too imperfect world. A man-made world with its man-made language where to be pleasured turns out to be an unpleasant affair.

‘To pleasure.’ There’s a misnomer if ever I heard one. Hilde’s had the dubious honour of having Herr Klimt pleasure her – his words not mine – every time I’ve posed for him naked over the past year. That he has not laid a single calloused, paint-covered finger on me, at least not in a pleasuring way, I owe to her.

But I can tell from what she says that she’s finding it increasingly difficult to keep him away, from spreading joy to one who has yet to experience the evident delights he has to offer. And the worry of this gives her humour a vulgar edge.

‘He thinks we all love a bit.’ She clucks mockingly, nudging my side. ‘Says he likes to give his models a bit of his “Giorgione”. Know what I mean?’

We roll around laughing hysterically for a while. And then I cry and Hilde consoles me as what she is telling me really isn’t very funny. It really isn’t very funny at all. Hilde has kept me safe up until now but we both know that she can’t protect me for ever.

Though Consuela Camilla Huber, the latest model to join the studio, possibly could.

The first time I saw Consuela was a few days ago and she made an impression. Darker, older, more experienced, even than Hilde, she made an entrance to remember, wafting confidently around the studio in a green silk robe that did not belong to her. And she wore it as I’d never seen it worn before – deliberately loose at the front and clinging to her ample curves, with her long, dark, wavy hair worn loose and arranged artfully over her right breast. She breathed confidence. And she’s made an entrance every day since.

No one seems to know where she’s come from although she makes it clear what she has come for: Herr Klimt.

She has seen his work – his portraits of Frida Riedler, of Adele Bloch-Bauer – and she likes it. It’s bold. Obvious. Shiny. Golden. And she wants a piece of it. A big great fat nugget.

Consuela Camilla Huber is the original gold-digger.

And she knows how to dig. Well-versed in Herr Klimt’s work, she is sympathetic to his argument with the university, expresses an interest in his design work for the Flöge sisters. Indeed she has an opinion relating to everything Herr Klimt and a technical knowledge of painting seemingly equal to Herr Klimt’s own.

I learn a great deal about the silent Herr Klimt from the talkative Consuela Camilla Huber. She is a thing of wonder to me. And confusion. She will be Herr Klimt’s muse. And it is clear that she wants to be his mistress.

My fourteen-year-old mind cannot understand why such a glorious woman would deliberately seek out such a role. Yet the two, muse and mistress, are inextricably linked in her mind.

She makes rapid inroads in her quest to secure her role as the latter. She sustains her performance before, during, and after her ten minutes with Herr Klimt. Where Hilde looks sheepish when her time is up, unable to hide her own distaste the moment she comes back in the studio, Consuela makes a regal entrance, standing in the doorway as if straddling two worlds, triumphant.

I am surprised to see that she is more hunter than hunted. I love to observe her from the sleepy shadows of the studio, her strong, shapely body taunting that of her slow, squat victim. She stalks her grizzled, stocky prey, plays with him cruelly, sending paint pots crashing, stained water splashing, across the floor of the studio. And then she pounces. Within six months she is guiding Herr Klimt by the nose.

I shall always be indebted to Consuela.

***

‘Where’s Hilde? She should have set up my paints by now.’ Herr Klimt’s ready to work on another version of his water serpents and there’s no Mizzi, no Devla, and no Hilde. Even Consuela is nowhere to be seen. His serpents have slithered away, upset because Herr Klimt shouted at them two days ago for not getting a pose right (though Herr Klimt has been so busy with Consuela that he hasn’t noticed). My suspicion is that they’re writhing round in the grass in the Schönbrunn woods somewhere.

As for Hilde, I know that she went to sing in the chorus at the Burgtheater last night, though I’m not going to tell Herr Klimt that. Even she’s looking for another job. Especially after Herr Klimt spent the whole morning pleasuring Consuela last Friday. Putting paid to Hilde’s ten-minute theory as well as tingeing her relief at no longer having to endure Herr Klimt’s attentions with a shameful sense of loss.

‘I’ll just have to sketch you,’ he grumbles.

As I get ready, I wonder at how much I’ve changed. I slip my clothes off and hang them up neatly. Though I still hold my petticoat to hide my nakedness I no longer cling to it. ‘Shall I do Mizzi or Devla, Herr Klimt?’ I ask.

‘Mizzi,’ comes the reply and my heart sinks.

Mizzi’s made a lot of noise about how uncomfortable her pose is. Her oft wailed ‘It’s not fair,’ is ringing in my ears as I try to arrange my body as it needs to be.

Herr Klimt walks in a semicircle around the bed. From top to bottom. I can’t get it right and Hilde is not here to help me. I wince and close my eyes. Herr Klimt has to touch me. Yet the sexual threat I anticipate is pure physical pain. I am taken aback at the roughness of his touch as he tugs and pulls at me as though I am modelling clay. ‘Oh! It’s no use,’ he exclaims, exasperated. If he could throw me out for the dogs to run after and chew on he would. But then he thinks again.

Without explaining what he’s doing, he places a pillow under me so that the curve of my bottom rises and falls. I know that he wants the undulating line. I’ve seen Mizzi hold the shape so many times and he pushes me this way and that to get it. I close my eyes to pretend it’s not happening and imagine myself less water serpent more golden mermaid, shiny, and softly gliding through warm comforting waters, moving my tail up and down, rhythmically, keeping time with my heartbeat, warm blood pulsating within. Swimming away, far away from this humiliation.

‘Practice over! I will be your water serpent.’ It’s Consuela. To hear her voice is a joy and as I open my eyes she sees the depths of my misery. I want to cry but her eyes flash a warning at me. ‘Not now,’ they say. And I swallow back the tears, every one. Yet as I falter, the pins and needles causing me to bend and buckle like a newborn faun, so the pain of my failure wraps around my heart like a vice.

Consuela says something to Herr Klimt and within minutes I am free, walking to the art shop to stock up on pencils and sketchbooks. And the paints that were missing from the cupboard earlier on.

Materials keep going missing all the time at the moment. Hilde’s told me that she thinks it’s probably down to Consuela (‘Takes a lot of lead to get all of her in a picture!’ she quips), and indeed it is, but not in the way that she imagines.