A Muse to Live For

by Katherine Wyvern

  And after my sickness, he has always helped. He is my one friend in the world.

  After dinner and coffee, we take a cab to Leicester Square and join in the well-dressed loud crowds in front of the appalling false-Moorish façade of the Alhambra theatre, with its absurd domed turrets.

  This is where the evening goes downhill for me.

  Henry uses his sheer size quite shamelessly to make a path through the crowds outside, and I follow in his wake, although the temptation to fall back, get lost, and make my way home quietly is rather strong.

  Later, I hunker glumly in my seat, while music, loud applause and shrieks and laughter fly over my head like flocks of demented banshees. I wonder how Henry, a man of undeniable taste, can be so besotted with these painted ladies, ventriloquists, one-legged dancers, jugglers, magicians, cyclists, sword swallowers, slapstick sketches, and illusionists. It’s a world upside down, this music hall, men dressed like women, women dressed like men—everything is possible, everything except true beauty. I loathe it.

  I almost find myself praying, as I haven’t done in years. Lord, give me the patience. This too will pass.

  And indeed it does, eventually.

  “Come, Grimsby, my dear fellow, you are growing grimmer by the day with middle age,” quips Henry as we don our hats on the way out.

  “Maybe I am.” The square is so crowded with carriages that finding a cab seems improbable, and in any case the huge dinner and the noise make me heavy and dim.

  “Let’s walk a little,” I say.

  “As you wish,” says Henry amiably, and I find myself regretting my grumpiness.

  “There was some tolerable music in the garble,” I say, trying to make up for my sullenness, as we make our way towards home, along James Street, hoping to find a cab once we are out of the worst of the crowd.

  It is here, in the faint halo of a lamppost along the road that I first see her, and my heart skips a beat, as it has not done in years.

  I think, for a moment, that it is Jane Morris in front of me.

  A straight-backed, lithe, young Jane Morris, as if she just stepped out of La Belle Iseult. But then I realize that her hair is blonde, not raven, that she is smiling and not mourning, and that in any case it is a quarter of a century too late for that particular apparition to manifest.

  The woman is tall and thin, very tall and very thin. She looks like a young lady of fashionable taste, in a flouncy violet dress with black lace at the sleeves, unaccountably walking alone out of the music hall. But when I look more intently at her, captivated by something I cannot define yet, she moves a sly sideways step towards us and she chirrups, just like a blackbird, and grins, ghostly in the orange gas light.

  “Oy, fancy a blowjob?” she says, huskily, and I stare in amazement, utterly flabbergasted.

  Definitely not Jane Morris.

  Definitely not a lady.

  I am so startled that I forget to look down, and for the briefest moment my eyes cross into the glittering beam of her gaze. It is like being hit by lightning. I stagger, unbalanced, as I catch, deep in the shade of her eyebrows a flash of sparkling blue, no, the palest turquoise in fact, and a blackness of huge pupils, utterly deep and endless, absorbing, infinite. I look down quickly, blushing extremely, having looked into something that does not belong to me, does not belong to this world at all. I cannot breathe.

  And the impossible woman laughs and clasps her hands together.

  “Ooh, dear me! A virgin! Oh, I’ll do you for free, sweetheart. My treat!”

  “Thank you, doll, but not tonight,” says Henry, chuckling, taking me by the elbow and pulling.

  I hang my head while walking away, and only after ten paces I turn slightly to look back at her. She is still standing there, laughing quietly with a gloved hand in front of her mouth. I will never see such eyes again. I hope. I don’t think my nerves can take it.

  I am not a virgin, I think indignantly, blushing again. But, truth be told, I am not very experienced either. But what makes me turn once more, is something about her lithe shape, the peculiar, long-limbed, elegant grace of her, and that dark, silky glint in her eyes. There is a depth of expression there that shines out even in the gloom, even at a distance. It is disturbing, too direct, too intense, too searching, and I recoil from it, and yet, and yet … and yet, it has awakened something in me.

  “What a woman,” I comment, pensively.

  “Woman?” Henry chuckles quietly. “That ain’t a woman. Unless her name is Mary Anne.”

  “Mary An…” I stammer. I really am inexperienced. It never occurred to me, not for a second. “How can you tell?”

  But right then Henry hails a cab trotting easily down Haymarket, and the driver reins his horse in so suddenly that the poor beast slips on the mucky road, and goes down in a crash, his rump hitting the ground with a solid meaty smack that makes me wince. The driver swears, passersby laugh, and the moment is lost.

  Later, as we drive home, I think of that straight figure by the lamp-post. What a stunner. I wouldn’t mind painting her.

  I stare, transfixed, at a spot just beside the horse’s pointy ears, as the cab drives us back to Chelsea, and Henry chatters on, about certain skimpily dressed dancers in the show we just left. I am barely listening. Dancers, forsooth. Tinsel and limelight.

  It’s the first time in years that I feel that piercing necessity to put an image onto paper. It’s the first time in years that a set of lines clamors to be recorded, and brought to life, to be made into life. A single, sparkling moment of true existence, recorded in graphite forever, in its fragile, human, perfect imperfection.

  But I will never see her again. I crossed her orbit for a moment, and then I lost her.

  ****

  Loss is an old familiar companion, I think, the next day, sitting in my northeast facing window with a scatter of prints about me, making lifeless, listless sketches of the accursed Shadow. The light-filled bay-window is the one luxury of my modest lodgings, although at this time of the year I sometimes wish I had taken residence on the opposite side of Dartrey Road, where the front windows get the afternoon sun, when there is any sun to get, and maybe the landladies are not as cantankerous as Mrs. Crabwood.

  It’s cold and cheerless in here, and all I can see through these rough pencil sketches of ecstatic Jesuses, carpenter tools, genuflecting virgins, and cross-shaped shadows, is the vague shape of a woman I don’t know, and the even vaguer shape of a woman I used to know.

  Eleanor. She was a thing of beauty, Eleanor Carter. Oh, not beautiful to the world. I never thought so. But beautiful to me, with that head of auburn hair, that thin, long neck, eyes like cornflowers. Not quite a stunner perhaps. She was too lushly built for that, more of a Fanny Cornforth than a Lizzie Siddal. But she did have a spark of true life that made my heart throb. My painter’s heart, you understand.

  I painted her in every guise imaginable, in medieval gowns and angel wings, pastoral landscapes drenched in golden sunshine and stark dark rooms full of gloom and thin gleams of stolen light. That was in the years just after the school and the Royal. I was finally freed from copying dusty plaster casts, and I had hoped to be the new great Pre-Raphaelite, then.

  Eleanor was kind to me. She came to sit even when I could not afford to pay her.

  Later, when the paintings sold, one here, a couple there, never an overwhelming success, but a steady little trickle, that Henry facilitated and encouraged without pause, I made up for it, paid her as liberally as I could afford, and a little more, and pressed handfuls of warm coins in her palm when she rushed in to ask for a loan at odd hours. Most of the loans turned out to be gifts, which I didn’t grudge her.

  She had been kind, until the day the owner of the pub next door to her proposed. I had never known he even existed. One day she was my model, my muse, my all, next day she became Eleanor Cook, and was filling beer tankards and serving liquors behind a grimy bar. And that was that.

  Oh, I went on. In a way. From day to day. There were t
hings to do, commissions to finish, scheduled exhibitions, bills to pay. I could not just stop.

  I told myself I could paint on.

  But my sickness had begun. First it was a slight languid indifference. It didn’t seem so important anymore what the heck I put to paper. Then it became fatigue. The chiaroscuros and colors that had been so vital became a slough to cross laboriously.

  It’s peculiar, how it had all faded away. One day I was feverish with the urgency to put those images on paper and canvas, sketching furiously, painting like a maniac, by day and even by night in the pitiful light of a candle held too close. By the end it had become a complete paralysis. It came to the point where I could not suffer to face that easel anymore. What mattered, all those images of long dead gods and heroes?

  I could not paint any more. It was as if those brief years of furious activity had burnt my talent out. By the end of the year I could not even get out of bed. I just let myself go, and sank deep into my own silence.

  She had been the life of it all.

  I did not love her. I keep telling myself that I did not love her.

  The paintings were not for the girl. The girl was for the paintings. And yet, and yet. Without her sitting on the other end of the room, there was no life to it anymore.

  But now…

  If only I could find her again…

  It is nearly a week before I find the nerve to step out in the evening drizzle, and make my way to Cheyne Walk, and take a cab to Leicester Square. It seems too much to ask, that she might still be there, under that lamppost in James Street. And in fact, she isn’t.

  I wander up and down the street for a little while, uncertain, but unwilling to go home. A woman appears, walking down the pavement in a way that draws my eye. We look at each other, and she gives a smile, and weaves a hand into my arm.

  “It is a crown, dear. A pound for the night. Clean sheets, and I’ll throw in a free breakfast.”

  “Ahem, no. No, I mean, thank you, really, it’s exceedingly kind of you. But I am looking for someone.”

  “Well, you found her,” she says with a laugh.

  “No, no, I mean, someone specific. A very tall, ahem, girl. Sort of thin and, I don’t know, regal.”

  “Regal? Blimey. I wonder how much she charges. Well, I don’t know anyone regal in these parts, but good luck finding her.” She steps away quickly, towards a lone gentleman on the other side of the street. “Regal, regal, my arse is regal,” she grumbles as she goes.

  Well, perhaps “regal” was a bit much. But she had such a presence. I would never have taken her for a prostitute, if she had not offered me a blowjob. I wonder how on earth experienced men go about finding whores on these streets. I can’t even tell a whore from a respectable young woman. Admittedly, a whore with some sense would not make herself too obvious, but even so, I am seriously out of my depth.

  For maybe two hours, I wander about the neighboring streets, looking into every shadow and every spot of gaslight. It is not as crowded as it would be on a Saturday, but it’s still pretty busy, and I meet some unnerving reproving glances from passersby. I must make a poor figure looking for a whore, and a whore of that particular kind, and the awareness of it makes me even clumsier than usual.

  Eventually I give up.

  There is no point. I hail a cab in Leicester Square, give my address, and just while we enter James Street, trotting briskly, I see her.

  She is back at the very same lamppost!

  “Stop, stop, stop!” I call back to the cabman.

  “What now, sir? Come, sir, we are nowhere near home yet.”

  “Let me out!” I pass him a shilling through the hatch, and the doors of the cab snap open. The man is half cursing and half laughing, the horse is capering, I jump off the cab and onto the pavement and nearly fall flat on my face in my haste, and the whole commotion attracts more attention than I could wish.

  I thought I would just watch her for a while from the shadows. Now I am here, half the street is staring at me, she has turned to look, and she is walking towards me.

  I am paralyzed by … what, shyness?

  No. It is not shyness. It is pure, undiluted terror.

  That she might be what I am looking for, and jolt me out of my quiet life-in-death. That she might not be what I am looking for, and condemn me to my death-in-life once more.

  That she is the model who will stir my art to life again, but she will refuse me. That seen up close, when spoken to, she will turn out to be just as vulgar and lifeless as all the other women and men and boys that populate this soot-encrusted city.

  I stand here in an agony of indecision, and she walks right up to me, doing that chirruping sound again. She grins.

  “Ah. I thought it was you. Did the cabbie kick you out, or were you in a hurry to see me, love? You left your chaperone home, I see. Came to lose your virginity then? I’ll still do you for free. Virgins are always quick. It won’t be much out of my way.”

  There is pure mischief dripping from her voice. I shiver at the sound of it. It is so low and husky, at odds with that chirrup she does. The closer she walks the harder it is not to cringe, because her eyes are searching, searching, searching for mine, and I have to look right, left, down, anywhere but her, while I so, so long to look only at her.

  “No. No. I…”

  She smiles, and it is a strange, drawn smile, very cold, and yet, and yet … there is something under the coldness, something of an uncertainty, not unlike my own. In any case looking at her smile is easier than looking at her eyes.

  “I am a painter,” I say, although it is hardly true. When was the last time I actually painted something real? It could have been another life, another person, another world.

  “Oh,” she says, taken aback.

  “And I would beg you, I would beg you the honor, and may I say pleasure…” I am so involved in my own sentence by now that I cannot get out of it.

  “Hm. Pleasure I can do, if you would let me. Honor, that’s doubtful,” she says. She is still trying to look me in the eyes, bending to peer under the brim of both our hats.

  “No, I mean to say, would you, would you, would you consider modelling for me?”

  “Oh. Modelling, is it? With or without clothes on?” she asks. It is a moment before I realize that she is teasing me. Perhaps she would not give a toss either way.

  She is like a Scotch thistle, this woman, stately despite her wildness, beautiful, but full of prickles. There’s no way to touch a person like this without bleeding.

  “Oh, with. With, most definitely. I am not, I am not—I would never… It’s not like that. It would be quite proper.”

  “Oh, pity. Well. That is very … flattering. But what’s in it for me?” While saying this, she extracts a japanned cigarette case from her bag and lights herself a cigarette. I blink. I don’t think I have ever seen a woman smoking. She waves the case at me questioningly, and I shake my head.

  “I will pay you, of course. For your trouble. Two pounds a week.” I say, to cover my confusion. It’s a lot. I am not sure what I was thinking.

  I cannot readily define what it is about her that makes her so absorbing, but it derails my very thoughts.

  The sublime, they say, is always due to some strangeness of proportion. And there is a strangeness or even a fault of proportions to her. She is of course, so tall, so long limbed. Her eyes so deeply set under those firm eyebrows, and her nose, the tip of which is exquisite, the nostrils beautifully carved, is perhaps a little too long, with a distinct bump on the ridge. It is an altogether remarkable face, strong for a woman, but every strong line contributes to set off those eyes, and the superb, perfect arc of her lush lips. And her hands … oh, her hands. I have never seen such hands, except in Rossetti’s later paintings, when his women ceased to be real and became pure dream.

  That is what I want. I want to paint her as Rossetti would have painted her if his genius had not taken such a dark and destructive turn.

  “Oh sweetie, ain’t you
a dear?” she says, after lighting her cigarette and drawing the smoke in deeply. “But I can make that in one night on the street. Well, sure, I’d be hoarse as a crow by the end of the night, and I’d have to tie my jaw shut with tape, but I could, theoretically.” She laughs throatily, and I blush. I literally blush. She has this absurd effect on me. Thank God I have my back to the lamplight.

  “Oh. Oh, I see.” Damn. “I had no idea what… I have never availed myself of—of these services.”

  That makes her laugh again. “I figured that much,” she says, almost affectionately.

  I want to say, it can’t be good for you, what you do here. But it would be repulsively patronizing. I just say, in a rushed stammer. “I’ll have a fire burning. At least you won’t be cold.”

  And to my amazement she gives it some thought, and then nods.

  “Well, that’s something. You know, I honestly can’t remember when was the last time that I had warm feet. Or a warm butt for that matter. Sometime in mid-September I suppose. You have a studio then?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  I think of my two dingy rooms. My little bedroom, and my working room, with its smoky north facing bay-window and a tiny grate. It is pitifully small, but it is a studio, of sorts. There’s a chair for a model to sit it, and a worn damask curtain that I can hang on the bookshelf for a background.

  “Mh. Maybe I will do it. Maybe. Why, I might even fancy having my portrait done, why not. I will come and have a look. At your paintings. But if I do decide to sit for you, it will be three pounds a week, dear, not two. And the fire going, understood? And I can only do afternoons, because in the morning … ugh, well, I’m not fit to be seen before half past one, just take my word for it.”

  Three pounds a week! Can I afford it? I can, just barely, if I do the Shadow of the Cross for Henry really quick, and as for the rent, if I can paint, I can sell, and if I can sell, I can pay the rent. The thought of what Mrs. Crabwood will say if I’m late on that is frightening, but I must take the risk. As for food, I’ll go hungry, I guess. I won’t starve. Not with Henry feeding me at least once a week. I’ll be hungry, but I won’t die of it.