“Deal,” I say. “Will you come tomorrow then?”
“Tomorrow? A Saturday? My, my, but aren’t you in a hellfire hurry? How about Monday? That would be much better. What’s your name? Where is this studio of yours?”
“Grimsby. Nathaniel Grimsby. Dartrey Road, Chelsea. The house with the blue door.”
“Chelsea, uh?” she says, looking me up and down, appraisingly.
I might tell her that Dartrey Road is not Cheyne Walk, and not all of Chelsea is paved with gold, but she’ll figure it out soon enough. I’d rather not discourage her from coming to see me.
“I am … Gabrielle,” she says, with the slightest hint of hesitation, as if unsure about sharing her name. “Gabrielle Kenny. Monday, then. Sometime in the afternoon.”
I breathe out, and then in, as if the air of London has suddenly changed. There is a clean, thrilling feel to it that makes me lightheaded.
She will sit for me. She will! I am thrown. And being thrown, I can only either fall or fly.
There is a whole infinity of beauty and meaning out there, that I cannot begin to grasp. But for some mysterious reason, infinity takes a finite shape in her that is knowable, and true, that I can see and set to paper.
It is all rather pitiful perhaps. I am never going to be one of the greats—I am not going to set the world ablaze with my paintings. But whatever they are, or will be, good or bad, great or small, they will be the best of me. They are my all; they mean everything to me.
If I am to come back from my long sickness, she is the key.
Chapter Two
“He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.”
Christina Rossetti, In an Artist’s Studio
Gabriel
I really can’t go to Chelsea tomorrow. Or at least, Gabrielle can’t.
Gabrielle is a phantom, a creature of the darkness. All her clothes are flashy clothes, which were good enough in their day, and still look the part by gaslight, if one doesn’t look too close, but if I set foot in Chelsea in broad daylight in my working things I’ll get arrested, or worse. If I had any wit, I’d never set foot in Chelsea at all.
What if he finds out?
But surely, it doesn’t matter, does it? Why should it matter? It’s my life. If I want to be fancy, and hang around Leicester Square, and suck rich dicks in Haymarket rather than sticking to the desperate haunts of Spitalfields, I can do so. I earn my wages now, I can come and go as I please. I am what I am, but I made my own way in the world, and I am my own man—and woman. I am not anyone’s property anymore. And if I am offered a job, a real job, can’t I give it a try? And maybe I want to do this, why not?
Gabrielle Kenny. Artist’s model. It has a certain ring to it. Well. Better than Gabrielle Kenny, good at blowjobs.
Hell, I wouldn’t mind stepping out of the gutter for a while, just for a change.
Still. This professional leap requires a trip to the shops. Well, not the shops, quite. That would be expensive. But one of the few good things about living in Mrs. Gride’s fearsome house in Shepherd’s Street is that the old Petticoat Lane market is just around the corner.
So, on Sunday morning I heave myself out of bed at an absurdly early hour (for me) and go out. The house is perfectly silent. Everyone works late here on Saturday nights. I did, too. I needed ready money. Mrs. Gride is having breakfast in her parlor, and I pass her door quickly, as quiet as a cat. I walk out, and down Wentworth Street to Middlesex Street and step into a different world.
The place is so crowded that I can hardly make my way through the press, the noise is unbelievable, and the stink of fried fish hangs over everything like an oily pall, but, absurdly, I love this place, at least on Sunday mornings, the same way I loved the docks in Liverpool as a child. Perhaps it is the mix of languages, the quaint styles, every nation in Europe and half the nations on earth jumbled together.
There is a whiff of foreign lands here (admittedly a rather strong whiff), a proof that there is a world out there greater than this miserable blackened cesspool of a city. A world where one could escape, perhaps. It’s only a dream, for the likes of me. But one could, theoretically.
Though so many sellers in the market are Jews, it is the poor gentiles of London who buy, and I purchase myself a small, greasy pork pie, as a special Sunday indulgence, before making my way across the river of dusty, often filthy, haggling humanity to the very slightly quieter Harrow Alley. There’s a man I know down there. There are stalls for everything in Harrow Alley, from ladies’ boots to ironware. The boots look jaunty enough, polished to a sheen to hide their age. The ironware would be at home in some archaeological display.
But what I’m looking for is a lady’s suit in a size not too far from mine.
“Well, there you are again. My female impersonator. I’m still waiting to see you in the theatres. Are you famous yet? Wipe your hands, young man, here’s a cloth, I don’t want pork grease all over my fares. I sell them clean you know? What will it be today?”
I think I’d rather wipe my hands on a dead rat than on the rag that I am proffered, but there’s nothing for it. Well luckily, I’ve already eaten today. I don’t really clean my hands—I think I merely exchange the pie grease for some different sort of dirt, but after that I am allowed to look at the poor, old, used clothes for offer.
The trouble with women clothes is that they are usually the wrong shape, and too short, and unless they are huge, they are always, always appallingly narrow across the shoulders. What is a man to do who is near on six feet tall and thin as a pole? Whatever I buy will need taking in in places and letting out in others. If clothes were made like concertinas my life would be so much easier.
There is a very pretty purple number, barely worn, that I could afford, but it must have been cut for a pigmy goose. A fabulous striped thing, plummy violet and dove grey that must have been glorious in its day, but is so faded and worn that not even I could bring it back to presentable life. And a pink thing that might almost fit—its last owner must have been a strapping tall lass of the Viking type they make up in the north—but dear me, I’d stand out like a flamingo walking down a ropewalk, strutting down the street in such a thing. It might do for night-work, but not for my current business. No, the way to go is this dark green serge here.
Plain, nothing fancy about it. Even the apron overskirt has hardly a ruffle to it. It will look smart once I’m done with it, but it won’t attract too much attention. It must have been made for some sober, stout lady, and needs a good deal of taking in around the waist. The sleeves and skirt are short. They always are. Oh well.
“This one here will do.” There follows some haggling, but I finally stuff my rolled purchase firmly under my arm and walk off. A different stall has bits and scraps and off-cuts of just about any sort of fabric and trim known to womankind, and I get myself a yard and a half of some slightly faded black velvet, and a few yards of green silk ribbon.
That painter had better be good, to make this infernal bother worth it, I think, as I make my way home. I have a horribly busy afternoon and morning in front of me.
Truth be told I don’t know why I am going. Sure, three pounds a week for sitting still and looking pretty is good pay, if ever I see it. But mostly I think I took pity on him. What a poor bumbling, shambling, star-struck mooncalf he is. He couldn’t even look me in the eye.
At home, I spread my purchases on my narrow bed to take stock of it all, and then I take out my sewing things, themselves a collection of second-hand tools I got here and there, more or less legally, in the past six months.
The lining of the bodice is worn through in places. There’s nothing for it. It will have to do without. I snip it all off, and turn the whole thing inside out, and
pin and baste and cut, and sew, and hem. There is no amateur seamstress in all of London who could do this by midday tomorrow, but you learn to make quick work in the sweatshops of Spitalfields. The pork pie is long gone, and I am both cold and hungry, but I am used to being cold and hungry. The sleeves I lengthen with two long newly-cut cuffs of black velvet, and the skirt with a matching high black hem. I sit cross-legged under my little skylight, stitching fast. The elbows are worn smooth and shiny and they must be patched over. There are no buttons matching the stuff in my few findings, but it takes a minute to cover a button in a little scrap of the same fabric, taken from the bits I have cut to take the sides in. It’s dark, by then, and I leave the buttons and trimmings on my chest of drawers. I’ll sew them on tomorrow morning, with the light.
I stand, and stretch and yawn, and allow myself one cigarette, smoking it slowly as I look up to the lights of London reflected like dull embers by the underside of the black cloudy sky.
I should go and find something to eat. But I am almost all out of cash after my morning shopping. I’ll need it to ride the omnibus west to Chelsea tomorrow if it rains, and I’d have to give a blowjob before I can get myself a decent meal. It’s too much trouble, so I climb into bed, shivering, and wait out the hunger cramps, until I finally fall asleep.
On Monday morning, I finish off my new suit with a trim of green ribbon which sets off the black cuffs and hem quite nicely, and a little row of cloth-covered buttons on each cuff.
By then it’s late, and I really must go. I change into my new dress, making sure the bustle gives it the right lift behind, arrange my hair, paint my eyes and lips, just a little, just to remind the world that I’m a woman today, grab a more or less clean shawl and sidle out of the door and down the stairs quietly.
“Alice,” I whisper at the door just under mine. “Alice, are you up? Alice? Alice, come on, wake up damn it!” I drum my fingertips softly on the thin door again and again, until it is opened by a tall, skinny girl with a wind-blown head of frizzy yellow hair. She’s naked except for a pair of crumpled pantalettes, and her nipples are perky with the cold. “Is Alice awake, Elsie?” I ask.
“I’m sure she is now,” says Elsie, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. Another late-rising night-worker, like me. She disappears back into the dark room and is replaced by a pretty, pale, dark-haired girl in a dirty shift with sleepy, green-blue eyes. She could be my sister.
“What’s up, Gabs, for shame? What’s the time? Oh my, how very elegant you look, upon my word.”
“Hush, sweetheart,” I say, kissing her on the nose. “You don’t want herself to hear, do you? Listen, love, may I borrow your green hat?”
“My green hat? My best hat? Mh. Will you fix the hem of my red skirt?”
“I will, I promise. Tomorrow, first thing. Leave it on my door.”
“Well, all right then, but you’ll bring it back intact, won’t you? It’s my one respectable hat.”
“I am out on a perfectly respectable business, Alice.”
“Dressed like a girl?”
“There are respectable girls,” I say, donning the small hat with the long green ribbon at the back and the bit of black veil over the eyes.
“I wouldn’t know,” says Alice, yawning wide again and scratching her crotch through the shift. “Never met any. Take Elsie’s good umbrella, too, Gabs. It will certainly rain again. You don’t want to spoil the ribbon of my best hat.”
****
Nathaniel
When Mrs. Crabwood knocks on my door the next Monday at about 2 PM, I fly to open it.
“Ahem,” she starts, and then—something unprecedented in my experience—she falters. “Ahem. There is a … a young person to see you. A certain Miss Kenny.”
“Yes, yes, I am expecting her.”
“Oh, indeed.”
“Yes. Would you do me the kindness of showing her upstairs, please?”
“Well, I am sure you know your business best, sir, but in this house, we do not usually allow this—this kind of visitors. This may not be the House of Lords, sir. I am not saying it is the House of Lords. But we do have certain standards, sir.” She juts her chin forward with an exaggerated, snappish tilt of her head. Under her mourning crape she wears the sort of ludicrous, enormous chignon that became fashionable twenty years ago, and for a moment, I am in agony that her hair-piece will fall right off, leaving us all in an appalling social impasse.
“Mrs. Crabwood, please understand that the—the young lady is here to sit for a portrait, nothing more. It is all quite correct. You are welcome to bring your knitting and sit with us all the time, if the—if the proceedings make you in any way uneasy.”
It is a wild gamble. I do hope the old bat will stay out of this. But if I must have her around to sketch Gabrielle Kenny, so be it. I take a quick look at her face. She’s half a foot shorter than me, and yet, with her chin still jutting up and forward like the muzzle of a well-trained pointer, she stares at me along the length of her nose like a Duchess.
It could well be that the nobility can look at people through their nostrils. It probably comes from looking down on peasants from atop a horse for generations, with a neck that is congenitally too stiff to bend forward. Mrs. Crabwood’s skill, however, is totally self-taught. Her husband was a pawn-broker, as far as I know. He’s gone these last ten years and more, but she still wears full mourning, if only to impress her long-suffering lodgers with her “poor widow” act.
“Well. We will let it pass then,” she concedes in the end. I forbid myself to take a sigh of relief yet. “No need for me to intrude in your artistic goings-on. But maybe she’ll take the other entrance next time.”
That makes me stiffen. “I do not see why my visitors should come in from the other door, Mrs. Crabwood!”
“You don’t?” she exclaims, suddenly losing her composure. Her voice rises to a pitch I know only too well. “Well, I do, young man! I have no notion of … of rouged lips, and painted eyes, for shame, at my very own front door!”
I wince and give a sort of desperate whimper. “Mrs. Crabwood, please, calm down! Understand that this is a—a … an artistic exercise, on the part of the lady. She is a very artistic young lady, that’s all. In fact, you may call her a—a paintress, hence the paint. May I see her now, please? The daylight will be all gone if I wait much longer. I am sure we can arrange something quite proper for the future.”
“I am sure you will!”
“Yes, indeed!”
She huffs down the stairs in a crackle of black crape, muttering like a pot of beans on the boil, and after a minute Gabrielle runs up on her own, two steps at a time, and the world suddenly revolves on its axis, and my hemisphere goes from gloomy shadow to dazzling sunshine.
There is no other way to put it.
She sees me on my door and winks.
“Goodness,” she whispers as I close the door behind her, “I had not meant to make such an entrance. I tried really hard to look like a good girl. Rouged lips and painted eyes. Shit, Mr. Grimsby, that’s my ticket to hell, I fear, and yours, too, for consorting with a fallen woman.”
She gives a snort of laughter, and I can’t help laughing, too. I have never known any woman like her, that’s for certain. No woman I have ever known ever winked or said “shit”, to begin with.
Other than that, to my uninformed, deficient male eyes she looks quite proper. Instead of the bright violet habit of the other night she wears a forest-colored skirt and a matching jacket, with no frills other than a broad black velvet ribbon around her throat, and a small black hat with a long green streamer behind. She also wears a dark green shawl against the cold and brown kid gloves. Her wavy blond hair is done in a loose knot behind her head. Sure, her lips are red, and her eyelids marked with a black line. But the black line makes her iris blaze.
It is entrancing.
“Yes, I am sorry, ahem. Mrs. Crabwood is…” What can I say? Respectable? Rigid? Impossible? Terrifying?
But Gabrielle wav
es a hand at me, and I shut up. “I know the type,” she says. “Let me guess, traders’ entrance next time?”
I am speechless, and she gives another snort of laughter. “It’s no big deal really. I am a tradeswoman, after all.” She winks at me again, stooping a little to search my eyes from under the brim of her hat.
I wish she didn’t do that, and I am frankly relieved when she turns those amazing eyes away to gaze ‘round the room . When she bends to look at my Shadow sketches, and the hideous painting taking shape on my easel, with a theatrically rapturous Jesus looking up at the sky, and the crouching Mary, she gives a critical sniff.
“Oh, never mind that, I beg you. That’s just … stuff. It just pays the rent. Barely. I haven’t done any original work in a little while. I was—unwell.”
“I see.”
“Ahem, shall we, then? Shall we try at least? If, if it doesn’t suit you, you can always say no…”
“Sure. Very well. Tell me what to do.”
To be honest I am not quite certain myself. Before she came, I saw a thousand pictures of her. They came to me in flashes, like a waking dream. Every memorable woman I ever read of in my books, I wanted to paint her as all of them. But now that she’s here, I am torn from the ghosts of my fantasy, to the present, physical, unsettling reality of her. I don’t really know how to reconcile this feisty creature with Ophelia, and Beatrice, and Queen Guinevere, and Lady Godiva. She could be anything I choose to paint her as, I am sure of this. She could be goddess and angel, nymph and allegory and anything out of Shakespeare and the ancient myths. But she is so beautiful in herself, so unique in herself, that I believe she does not need my poor artifices. She does not need the patina of literature on her. I believe that she can express all that is mystical, and higher, and divine in her own everyday skin.
“Will you just sit, please,” I say, pointing at the chair at the corner of the bay window where I always placed my portrait models.
A Muse to Live For Page 3