The Artist’s Muse. Kerry Postle

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ look at one another, Frau Wittger and I, and do not say a word.

      Ursula links arms with the short well-dressed man with a walking cane and they turn into a side street and disappear into its darkness, the tinkling of her young, shrill, sing-song voice lingering long after she has vanished from sight.

      I want to go and pull her back to us but I don’t. Can’t. In my head I am crying, ‘Don’t go!’ I blame Frau Wittger. Why isn’t she helping her? We walk on in silence along the street of light and shade.

      And I am aware of yet more solitary-predatory men. Brooding and hungry, causing the flocks of women innocently clucking in the light of the streetlamps, which have just come on, to cease their noise. Menace and fear before show time.

      With a theatrical wiggle of their hips, and a come-hither glance cast towards the vague shapes of their audience, faceless in the descending darkness, countless Ursulas make some last adjustments to their hair before flying off, solo, wheezing softly into the unknown.

      Frau Wittger keeps me out of the spotlight and I know not to draw attention to myself in any way. No solo flying. No soft wheezing. Yet a beast of a man is tracking us. As he lurches towards us I see that he is corpulent, whiskers failing to disguise his folded, falling face, and the night unable to mask his enlarged, pickled nose, the nostrils of which flair, breathing us in. He is old. At least forty. And he stares at me, saliva dripping, drooling. ‘How old?’ he asks Frau Wittger of me.

      ‘Not old enough, sir,’ she answers.

      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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ