The Artist’s Muse

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.

When I return from the art shop, keen to avoid Herr Klimt, I go straight to the materials cupboard to put everything away. Consuela is already there, bag at her feet, rummaging around on the middle shelf for I know not what. She leans back, sticks of charcoal in her hand, relief replacing worry on her face as she sees it’s only me. She says nothing about before.

Instead she bends down to place the charcoal in her bag. ‘Thanks,’ she says as she helps herself to three pencils and two sketchbooks followed by a wink and a finger to lips that say: ‘Sssssh!’

She pulls a well-used sketchbook from her bag and opens it to show me a sketch of a mother and child. At first I imagine it must be Herr Klimt’s work. Even when Consuela tells me it’s a picture of her landlady Wilhelmina and her daughter MargareteKlara, I still don’t get it. But then I do.

‘I have a mission, and that is to exhibit my work at the next women’s art exhibition – God, just to say those words gives me a thrill, Wally. Women’s art exhibition! So exciting! There was one last year. The works of Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzales were there. Even Tina Blau agreed to exhibit her work in it. She usually makes it very clear that she doesn’t want to be judged as a woman artist and so …’ She sees the disbelief in my eyes, laughs, pauses, and takes my hand in hers.

‘B-b-but you’re a model,’ I stammer.

‘Yes, I am and I’m proud to be one,’ she tells me. ‘I inspire one of the greatest artists of our time. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be an artist too.’ I must still look confused, unconvinced, as Consuela retorts with rebellious passion, ‘When not even women believe that we can achieve the same things as men, that we’re simply frivolously fickle females –’ she flicks back her wavy hair and adopts a fashionable pout in self-mockery ‘– it makes me realize what a struggle we have on our hands.’ Her eyebrows arch upwards for her eyes to reach out and accuse me.

‘Consuela! Consuela-a-a!’ Herr Klimt is looking for her, and as she puts her sketchbook back into her bag, she asks if she can draw me some time soon. Of course she can. ‘Consuela-a-a!’ He’s calling out again.

With another flick of her hair and a right hand placed on her hip, she’s off: it’s ‘show time!’

From that time on I am rarely required to pose for Herr Klimt. Instead I am sent on errands for him, delivering messages, bills, receipts, buying more paints, pencils, paper, preparing refreshments, cleaning the studio, tidying up his materials cupboard. I hope that he doesn’t think that I’m the one who’s been stealing his pencils.

He even gets me to feed Katze. And so I’m kept busy. Busier in fact now that I’m moving for my money. Though I do feel, if not sad, then possibly uneasy that I’m not modelling for my living. And I wonder how long it will be before I will have to tell my mother the bad news that must surely be coming before too long.

I watch Consuela to learn from her as she learns from Herr Klimt: my dream is still to be a good model, as hers is to be a good artist. Though watching her brings me to an uncomfortable conclusion. She and Herr Klimt work well together in every way.

Yet recently I’ve observed a change in Consuela and Herr Klimt’s voracious appetite for her is making her look decidedly off colour. Her great artist with great appetites needs to vary his diet a little, feast elsewhere, although she’s careful to guide him away from me.

‘Go!’ ‘Fetch some coffee!’ ‘Buy some paint!’ and I am thankful that she pushes me as far away as she can from the artist’s tools.

‘You’re just a child, Wally dear!’ she whispers to me, as I pass her on my way out. Every night when I say my prayers I thank God for putting Consuela between me and my cloven-footed artist.

Then one day, Consuela’s performance fails to convince. No, that’s not strictly true.

Consuela fails to perform.

Over the next few weeks I notice a definite change in her. She is eating less though looking fuller, and has recently taken to turning up to the studio late in the morning with attractive young women she’s picked up on the way. Prospective models all.

Initially I imagine that she must be spending too much time creating her own art and worry that she’s running perilously close to the edge. But her light is dim, her enthusiasm flat. She no longer helps herself to the materials in the art cupboard. It can’t be that.

Then there are the women she brings in with her. Fresh, flighty, flirty. ‘Now what would your favourite old master do with these lovely creatures, Gustav?’ she asks him and seems delighted that the very suggestion of Giorgione has Herr Klimt strutting and rutting like a cock in a henhouse.

‘I can’t take too much pleasure at the moment,’ she confides.

Then, one morning, as I pass the bathroom, I hear her being sick. I ask her if there’s anything I can do. She begs me not to tell anyone.

No need as everyone knows.

When Herr Klimt discovers that Consuela is pregnant he is attentive, stroking her hair and rubbing her feet. He declares that he will fast but his giorgionesque appetite soon gets the better of him and Consuela begs that I attend her in his place. She still tries to protect me.

But just as she has failed to perform, so soon will she fail to protect. As I attend on the sleeping Consuela, her ankles swelling in the summer heat, I hear Herr Klimt’s voice calling, ‘Wally. Come here. I need a glass of water. Now.’ He has a thirst that needs to be quenched.

I walk into the studio and place the glass of water, half-full, down on the table so that it doesn’t get kicked over.

It’s all over very quickly. Not even ten minutes.

When he’s done, I pick up the glass; my hands shake, spilling tears that my eyes are too afraid to shed. Gustav, now studying his canvas with fresh eyes, turns for a moment and sees the wet floor. ‘Clean that up before you go, Wally,’ he tells me calmly, no trace of remorse or guilt in his voice. As though he’s done nothing wrong. No hint of intimacy either.

I put the glass back down on the table, my head bowed to hide my shame as I stoop to mop up the water with the skirt of my dress. Then I see it. Blood. Along the hem. I throw myself towards the door and hobble to the end of the dark and dusty corridor where I hide myself. And weep.

A tear-filled lake threatens to drown me, its waves of despair overwhelming me so that I am gasping for air in that dim and windowless space. My soul flails. What am I to do? Is this my life? My version of normal? Who am I to tell?

Instinctively I walk towards the light.

As I stand at the sink splashing water on my face and washing away the damage, I watch a wasp trying to burrow its way outside. It moves rapidly around the edges of the window in front of me, pushes itself into the corners, the tiny pinholes in the wooden frame, trying to get out. It feels then flies its way around, wings erect above its deep yellow and black striped body, ever ready. I’m so transfixed by it that I don’t notice Gustav come up behind me.

Whack! He slaps the window with a cloth and the wasp falls, drops onto the windowsill. It’s curled up, on its side, its wings bent by the impact between cloth and glass. No way out any more.

‘There’s a glass still in the studio that needs clearing up, Wally. I’ll be in the living room for a while if anyone calls.’ I rush back as quickly as I’m able to retrieve it.

When I get there I find, sitting by the table and lost in thought, a slim, dark-haired woman. From my young girl’s eyes she seems old. I know that she is respectable from the way she is dressed, covered as she is from neck to toe. And that she is wealthy I guess from the beautiful heart-shaped pendant that she wears around her neck. I have never seen such an unusual piece of jewellery and even in my distracted state I cannot help but notice it. Though the opals in the chain remind me of my tears.

This woman must be here for a portrait. I must keep myself under control.

When I tumble in she barely registers my presence but I feel compelled to acknowledge hers in some way, particularly as my half-empty glass is just to the left of the elbow upon which she rests with her chin on her hand. Facets of mirrored glass catch my eye as her necklace dangles and turns in the light.

‘Hello. Excuse me. Sorry. I left a glass in here. I’ve just come to clear it away.’ I smile sympathetically at her, relieved to show kindness to another. Her body language suggests that she has all the woes of the world on her shoulders. I do too. She looks straight through me, unsmiling. Yet I see myself reflected in her watery eyes. She has a crumpled handkerchief clutched in a hand.

Perhaps she’s not here for a portrait. She has fallen on hard times. Her husband has died. She has children to support. She’s from Slovakia. Or Galicia. She can’t understand the language. Perhaps.

‘Hello,’ I say again. Though it pains me, I smile still. ‘I could get you something to drink, if you’d like.’ I hold up the glass and mime my meaning. ‘Or find you a fresh handkerchief?’ I point to the one she holds crumpled in her hands. She frowns, sniffs, and raises her eyes heavenwards.

‘No.’

Her accent is crisp and Austrian.

I smile again. The sharpness unleashed by a word of one syllable is blunted by my blindness to see what is before me. I remain determined, entrenched in the erroneous belief that this truculent though unhappy woman could be my mother. Or me.

I should have picked up the glass and fled.

Instead I talk. To push out the silence. Decorate the cold, unwelcoming space with kind, warm words. If not for her then for me. I need to run away from what’s been done. Focus on the nice weather. The size of the glass. The prettiness of the flowers in the garden. About … Katze. Thank heavens for Katze. Katze pads into the studio stealthily and with purpose. I beckon her to me but she dismisses me now, too easy, and makes her way towards the prize. The real challenge that is the outwardly hostile woman. Grieving. Wronged. Abandoned. Forlorn. Neither Katze nor I know the reason for this woman’s unhappiness but where I have failed to console Katze intends to succeed.

She arches her back on contact, rubbing her fur back and forth on the hemline of the woman’s skirt so that it pushes up to reveal the black leather of her lace-up boots. But the woman has no need to have them polished today. With a brazen kick of her foot, the woman nudges the surprised cat away. Defiant, Katze gives an angry miaow and jumps up on to the back of the woman’s chair. I quickly sweep her up in my arms before she jumps into the woman’s lap. I stroke Katze firmly into submission and today she lets me.

Then I hear the door open, and a woman’s voice, crystal clear German cascading down and tinkling like a mountain stream in spring.

‘Oh, Emilie! What in heaven’s name are you doing in here? Gustav and I have been waiting for you in the living room.’ There is no mistaking the breeding as the voice turns into a body that walks towards the woman sitting in the chair.

‘Come, sister, whatever is the matter?’ With a tug on her hand, Emilie is led out of the studio. I still have no idea who she is. But, with a taunt from her sister about French lessons, I have it. Emilie. Emilie Flöge.

As the sisters walk towards the door, Emilie throws me a withering look. ‘Know me now?’ it hisses. And just for a moment she lets her gaze drop to the hem of my skirt.

I am left standing there, glass of water in hand, spots of blood on my skirt, hair dishevelled, eyes swollen. I sink to the floor. Emilie Flöge has seen me. I feel disgusting. Ashamed.

I don’t know how long I lie there but it’s Katze who brings me to the surface. This cat has a greater instinct for compassion than the woman who’s just left. With the beating of her heart and warmth of her tongue this creature consoles me.

Emilie Flöge. Now I have her name I can’t let it go. My anger towards her grows. I tell myself that it was nothing. She snubbed me; that’s all. I’m over-reacting because of … Well, I have good reason. You know that I do. I should blame Gustav. And I do. Oh how I do.

But. Gustav. Since I came to Vienna I’ve long recognized how men treat girls in this city – there was never any secret about the danger he posed. No disappointment should come (though it does) when you get what you know has always been on the cards: he was always going to catch me. I knew. Yet the colour of knowledge, so recently cloudy and white, shrouded in a mist that I hoped would never lift, is now a burst bubble of red, pierced, its contents a trickle down the inside of my legs that turns to a red-brown stain on the edges of my dress that sweeps across the floor attracting dust, dirt. And the attention of Emilie Flöge. Emilie.

Since I came to Vienna I’ve known only the kindness of women who’ve sought to protect me from the dangers of men. But Emilie Flöge. She saw, understood and said nothing. Treated me as nothing. When all I tried to be to her was kind.

I go home that evening and let myself into the apartment as quietly as I can. I don’t want anyone to notice me, although soon everybody has. I thump and scrub my skirt – hard, furious. It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re trying to kill something that won’t get out of your head. And no, I don’t want to talk about it. And yes, I feel ill. And no, I’m not hungry. I take myself off to bed. I’ve had enough of concerned looks and my fill of probing questions. I long for the oblivion of sleep. But tonight, even there, all I can do is remember.

A wounded horse. An angry mob. A vixen. A cur. And a woman with a mirror pendant, her back to me: I call out her name. I know she hears but she does not answer. Her silence screams betrayal.

When I wake up in the morning my mind is made up. I will wage war on Emilie Flöge. And all women like her.

Chapter 7

Hilde said something strange to me a few weeks ago, the import of which I did not wholly grasp at the time. It must have been just before I discovered Consuela was pregnant. ‘You know, Wal,’ she sighed, ‘I pity the girl a man desires, because she’s never going to be the one that he goes on to marry. No. Society doesn’t like that at all.’ When she said it I took it as sour grapes at worst, feigned sincerity at best. But since I’ve joined the ranks of girls a man desires, Hilde’s words have replayed in my head, drumming their warning over and over again. ‘The girl a man desires …’ Hilde, Consuela. And now me.

Though I’ve told no one and it’s been two weeks since it happened. You are the only one who knows. As for the military campaign I’d planned to wage on Emilie Flöge, this has not got off to the most brilliant of starts. Short of laughing when Hilde or Consuela make her the butt of a joke, my war hasn’t amounted to much, especially when you consider that the more knowledge I gather about her the less power I have to wield.

Let me explain.

What I’ve discovered so far is this: her sister Helene was married to Gustav’s brother Ernst – older I think – who died, leaving her a widow (she might have been the sister I saw). They say he looks after the whole family now: Emilie, his sister-in-law Helene, and another sister, Pauline. Hilde told me they were a millstone round his neck but, when I see them together, it doesn’t look that way to me. Doesn’t look as if Emilie Flöge is a drain on him financially, a burden on him emotionally – no, these truths are as certain as castles in the air on a windy day. These are not to be my trump cards in this battle.

Though I have another battle to contend with on a still more personal front.

Ever since that Thursday when he showed me I was ‘desirable’, I have turned up for work every day. It has not been easy. Forcing myself out of bed, I have pushed my body out into the street, dragged my feet over cobblestones, breathed deeply before entering the studio. I have done everything within my control to conceal the truth. Yet it is what’s outside my control that threatens to give me away. Oh my own treacherous body. Tangled and taut, it struggles to accept food, rejecting sustenance completely as the day and the time comes round again.

Thursday afternoon: 3 o’clock. My insides tighten. The taste of bile surges up through my throat once again, fills my mouth. Oh no, don’t go thinking I’m pregnant. There could be no two women in more different states. While Consuela expands and blooms with new life, I dwindle and struggle to come to terms with the death of my old one.

Yet Gustav is newly fascinated with his blooming model, drawing her ever-changing shape until he is forced to drop his pencil and run across the hall to his living room. He barely looks at me. If I didn’t know better I would say that he felt if not guilty then uncomfortable around me.

When he has gone to join the three sisters, Consuela and I make the most of this time to lie still and be silent. Though tempted, I resist the urge to infect the peace with my ugly confession. I need to get through this on my own. I am trapped and have no choice but to be here. The sooner I accept that the better.

I lose myself, rubbing Consuela’s back, enjoying the closeness as we listen to the excited voices coming from across the hall. Mainly women’s voices punctuated by a low-growled monosyllable here and there. Gustav. The Bear who sounds more bearlike still when muffled by thick block walls. As for the sisters, they are the Witches: nasty, ugly, old. Their cackling scratches me with broken nails. They have surely cast a spell on him as he treats them with such reverence and care.

Perhaps it is true – these are the women he would marry (nature helping the sisters fulfil the other half of the condition – that he should never desire them – in making them as physically unattractive as frogs). And where does love come in? Desire or marriage? And where does that leave me? Consuela? Her baby? I pray that it’s a boy. Torturing thoughts throw my imagination forwards to the world of the future. I pull it back before it sees too much.

But then we hear something else. Something unexpected to set my thoughts on a completely different path.

The same Thursday afternoon it grows uncomfortably hot for Consuela. I go to the door to let the air in. And in with it comes the soothing breath of hope from across the way. It blows gently on our skin, massaging us with the cooling currents of change.

Change. For women. In the form of votes. It’s Emilie who mentions this first. That my nemesis should breathe the words that herald my liberation astounds me. I’ve seen the posters. How could I miss them? They’re plastered all over Vienna.

‘Do women really believe they’ll get the vote?’ It’s a woman’s voice that utters these words though I can’t put my finger on who she is.

Then I hear her: ‘Please, Pauline. Really. It’s 1911. In this day and age women should surely have it.’

Emilie Flöge’s voice fills me with both awe and hatred: her words are inspiring, but how can the woman, who saw my bloodstained hem and said nothing, possibly mean them?

‘There is to be a rally on the 18th of March and I for one shall be going,’ she adds. I make a mental note of the date as the Flöge sisters express their interest, all at the same time, their excitement at the prospect of a women’s rally now expressed in volume and speed so that, for a while, I am unable to pick out a single word.

Then I get one. ‘Eman –’ I lose it: it comes again. ‘Eman –’ I strain to make it out, waiting for it to be said again. ‘Emancipation.’ That’s it. I’m not sure what the word means, but as I lie there listening to the conversation in the room across the way, it is bandied about with such relish, that I work out it has to mean something wonderful.

‘Oh yes, emancipation, Emilie, for women! Women have been shackled for centuries! It’s time for all of us to slip our chains.’ (I think that’s Helene.)

As these words permeate my consciousness, lying there, next to Consuela, rubbing her back, it dawns on me how they apply to me, much more than to any Flöge sister, as I lie shackled to the bed in the studio, my insides pulled and constricted by fear. Fear to speak out for fear of losing my job. And over the Thursdays to come, as I lie there in my chains, soothing Consuela, remembering to leave the studio door open, the women’s words seep in with a key for my model’s manacles. I dare to hope that change is on its way.

Though the fact the message is delivered via the likes of Emilie Flöge sticks in my throat.

***

She might have been reduced to tears at having to go to French classes on her own but I learn that Emilie Flöge is a strong woman. She exercises a power over Gustav that changes the tone in the studio for a short while, impacting greatly on us all.

We girls wear what we’re told are ‘clothes for liberated women’ for many of our modelling sessions at the moment, and the talk of emancipation has burst the four-walled banks of the living room and is now sloshing around under our feet in the studio, covering the floor in a slippery, insubstantial layer of hope, which, to walk on too enthusiastically, leaves a girl flat on the floor.