The Artist’s Muse. Kerry Postle

back of her hand. ‘Always been great with colour as a matter of fact.’ She snorts once more before rolling her hands up and down her clothes as if displaying the proof. ‘Green dress. Brown boots. And just look at my face. Nice touch of green on my lids and my lips, inspired by a dancer I saw at the theatre last month. Could spot her right from the back of the gods. Said to myself that’s what you need, Ursula love, and that’s exactly what I’ve got …’

      Amused and enchanted by the colour-conscious Ursula, I am also horrified that she could be my future. But before she can say any more Frau Wittger takes my trembling hand and reclaims control of the situation before Ursula – she who can only speak loudly, no internal check, she who just opens her mouth and says whatever she wants to whoever she fancies – throws any further verbal fireworks. ‘Well, really, all Ursula is trying to say is that as long as you don’t go shooting your mouth off (just like what Ursula’s so good at) then you will be fine. Really fine.’

      ‘Yes, that’s my advice. What I was going to tell you. But …’ Before Ursula can finish her sentence she starts to vibrate. She’s bending at the knee, her pinned and curled hair bouncing and flouncing loose still further as she makes o’s with her painted red lips, alternately covering them then pointing to a short well-dressed man with a walking cane heading towards us.

      ‘Oh my! Oh my lordy! Oh! Oh!’ Before either I or Frau Wittger can answer she rushes off, smoothing her hair to make sure the escaped tendrils aren’t waving Medusa-like from her head, hands hiding momentarily her battered cheek. She’s swinging her hips excitedly and teetering forward, towards the man who is much older than she is. And as she walks away I can tell from her girlish figure that she is not much older than me.

      She turns and mouths back at us by way of explanation, having suddenly discovered the facility of volume control, ‘Oh it’s Klausy. He’s a good ’un. I’ve got to go.’ And with that she calls to him.

      We 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