Keeping the World Away (10 page)

One day he began on a statue, for which she was to be the sole model. This statue was to be a monument to Whistler (who had died some two years ago) and was to be put on a site on the Chelsea embankment. She was, he told her, ideal to be the Muse to Whistler, English as she was (though she had told him that she was Welsh) and a one-time student of the artist. Days were spent choosing the position she should stand in, or rather appear to move in, and days more draping fabric first round her waist and then her hips. One leg, her left, was bent at the knee, the foot resting awkwardly on a plinth. It was not an easy position to hold, but she settled into it and he was pleased. His concern for her comfort was, she thought, unusual and surprising – most sculptors, and indeed most artists, in her experience hardly considered the aches and tiredness of their models. And at the end of the sessions, he helped her down from the platform and undid the drapes. That was when it began.

She was ready and eager, though at first he mistook her trembling for apprehension and began to withdraw his hands, but she took hold of them and placed them where they had been, on her naked breasts. To be enfolded in his strong arms gave her such relief
and
she sighed with the pleasure of it. Her body responded to his as she had known it would. There was nothing awkward or shy about it. The thrill made her heart race and she instinctively put a hand to her breast to calm it, which made him look anxiously at her. Did he see how willing and hungry she was? Did he see at last that she was no demure English girl? She thought she saw some sense of astonishment in his expression, and she smiled. She was not in the least astonished. This capacity to love had always been there, waiting. At last it had been found and used.

*

He wanted her to have a proper home, somewhere where she could work, somewhere he could visit and be with her, and she wanted this too, but lack of money was still the stumbling block. She had less money now, not more, because she had spent some on herself. She had been to Bon Marché and bought a new dress, and combs for her hair, and a ruinously expensive shawl which delighted her. ‘It is wonderful,’ she wrote to Ursula, ‘the influence upon the mind clothes have.’ Renting a better room was not possible. But it grieved him to visit her and find she lived in what he thought of as squalor; he looked disdainfully at the mess of clothes and paints around her. An artist, he said, must have order and calmness in his surroundings, and she lacked both. How could she produce good work in those conditions? But, suddenly, alarmingly, she had no desire to produce any work at all. She no longer wanted to paint. Why should she? She was happy and fulfilled without striving to convey emotion and feelings to canvas. It was enough to pose for her master – she liked to call him that,
mon maître
– and make love with him afterwards.

Sometimes they were not alone. Rodin watched her carefully as he said there was something he needed help with and wondered if she would provide it. She was at once eager, he only had to ask. What he requested was that she should pose naked with another woman, the sculptress Hilda Flodin, one of his assistants. Gwen knew her already, she had earned money posing for her, and it was easy to agree. But she had not understood precisely what she was agreeing to. Rodin wanted them to embrace, to
touch
each other, to adopt extraordinarily erotic positions while he sketched them, and though she obeyed and held and touched Hilda as instructed she could hardly restrain herself from calling out to him to take Hilda’s place. The tension exhausted her but it inflamed him and in front of Hilda he came and took hold of her and made love to her, both of them worked into a state of desire ravenous enough to seem almost ugly in its ferocity. How Hilda could bear to watch, Gwen did not know.

He was her secret. Others in the Dépôt des Marbres knew, but outside it she told no one, not even Gus, or Dorelia who had gone back to him, the Leonard adventure over, and was living with him and Ida in Essex. Then they came, all of them, the children too (and now Dorelia had a baby boy to add to Ida’s four) to Paris. They visited her, but still she kept silent as she entertained them, telling only of her work for Rodin and not her love. She did not want to share him with them – they all had each other, she had only him, and even then she did not have him completely and never would. Within the joy he brought her there was a kernel of bitterness because he already had a wife. She had seen Rose. Unable to resist the temptation, she had gone to Meudon, to find her master’s house. It was on a hillside, sloping down towards the Seine, with a landing stage at the foot of the hill from where Rodin could catch a boat into Paris. It was quite a grand house, bigger than she had expected, three storeys and with a large garden. She had seen Rose in the garden; she had spied on her. There seemed nothing remarkable about her, but Gwen knew that Rodin had been with her many years and would never leave her. It was foolish to make herself wretched over this but the tiny hard bit of wretchedness was there.

Rodin felt it and was disturbed by it. He tried to teach her to be tranquil and let all distressing thoughts go. She must strive for harmony in her life, and begin with the small, unimportant details, like her diet and her routine. It was laughable how his advice contradicted everything she had thought an artist’s life should be, but she tried to please him by adapting herself to his standards. When she woke up now, she lay for a few moments taking deep
breaths
, telling herself to relax, not to rush, not to roll out of bed and stare vacantly out of the window, then reach for an apple to eat, but instead to rise in a deliberate fashion and walk to the sink and wash herself, and dress carefully (clean clothes) and brush her hair and pin it back and then sit down properly at the table and eat a breakfast of bread and fruit. It was true, it made her feel better, not so constantly distraught, but the effort to keep to these rules was gigantic. She began to draw again, only a little, but her sketches of her cat pleased him. Outwardly, she was more composed and serene, as he wished her to be, but inwardly she felt volcanic, as though burning lava filled her and would explode with the force of what was beneath it, her overwhelming passion for him.

Rodin was, he said, going to pay her rent, for the first three months at least. All she had to do was find the room: it was an order. She obeyed, searching daily until she found a place in the appropriately named Rue St Placide. He was away from Paris when she found it but she wrote and described the beauty of it, with its red tiled floor and pretty wallpaper and the courtyard outside where her cat could play. It was clean, but she cleaned it again, down on her knees to scrub the floor, the window flung open to air it. She bought a wickerwork chair and made a cushion for the seat, and a simple wooden table with a drawer in it, and a bed. Coming back to the room each day filled her with pride as well as pleasure – who would have thought she could be such a good housewife? Rodin, when he visited, was satisfied. He could see how she had absorbed the lessons he had tried to teach her, and now he expected to see other results. But she could not paint yet, so intense was her longing for him. Every day she waited for him to come to her and when he did not she could hardly contain her impatience. All her energy went into making love when he was with her and yearning for him when he was not. The hand that stroked him could not hold a paintbrush, and her eyes were so concentrated on images of him, they could see nothing else. She was helpless, in thrall to him. He began to tell that he was tired and that she must not expect him to make public their liaison. He had his own life to lead, the life he had before she
came
into it, and she had hers. But he was mistaken. She had
no
life without him. She did not want one. He was her life, he had given her life.

The room in the Rue St Placide, much as she loved it and kept it spotless and adorned it with flowers, was a lie. She stood in the doorway, looking, admiring it, yet thinking that its harmony was a clever exercise in deception. It was not her, this room. It was an image of how her lover wished her to be, and how she had tried to be. All the violent tumult in her was supposedly stilled here. But the struggle went on, and no one, not even Rodin, knew how she was losing the battle. Sometimes, she was afraid of the power of the room she had created. She loved it, but it could make her want to scream and wreck it, hurl the chair out of the window, tear the curtains to pieces, smash the flower pots, and then say to Rodin, Look, behold,
this
is me.

But she never did. She went on straining to match herself to the room and make herself a true reflection of it. Gradually, this led her to paint it, the room on the courtyard, the room as he would have her be.

The lie.

*

But coming home to her new room could be a delight. She stood in the doorway, with the door pushed as wide as it would go, and she stared and stared into it until she felt dizzy and had to lean on the wall. She always left the window overlooking the courtyard slightly open so that the lace curtain blew inwards, a froth of mist in front of her, and the thicker material of the other curtain billowed like a cloud. The wickerwork chair, positioned near the window, with its cushion of apricot silk, took on its own beauty in the light that filtered through, seeming fragile (though it was sturdy) and its criss-cross pattern looked like a cobweb which might at any moment be blown away. She hardly dared to enter the room. The minute she did so, the feelings of inadequacy rushed out of her and fought with what had been total harmony before she stepped into it. She could barely breathe for fearing she was contaminating the peace. She tiptoed across the
red-tiled
floor and laid her coat on the chair and then at once removed it because it ruined the grace of the chair. To paint this room she would have to empty it of herself.

But then she found she could not do this. She or a version of herself had to be in the picture. She needed to show the tension she felt. She painted a woman in black in front of the window, sewing. The dense black of her long frock told its own tale when everything else was lightness and colour. When Rodin came, she hid what she was working on, fearing that he would see how unworthy she was, not just of her room. He was so pleased with her progress. He smiled and nodded his satisfaction, admiring the cleanliness and order of her new surroundings. He did not like her to be wild in thought, he did not like her to be tempestuous in gesture, and he did not like her to make her need of his love so blatant. She must be composed and calm and let his own tranquillity enter her soul. Only then, he told her, would she do good work. She listened humbly to him and did not argue, but when they made love she wondered how he could hold composure in such esteem. Their love-making was neither calm nor composed. It was frantic and overpowering, the physical sensations transporting her to a kind of ecstasy and drawing from her cries of what to her own ears sounded like anguish, but which was a pleasure so thrilling she felt half mad. He did not tell her to be tranquil then. On the contrary, he appeared to marvel at her passion and even to be nervous of it. It was he who was the experienced lover, but she would never have known. He seemed almost shy, and was hesitant when he touched her. There was even an air of embarrassment about his undressing whereas she had none and tore off any clothes she was wearing, when he arrived, with great haste. She was proud of her body, but he was not proud of his. His belly was big and he was not happy for her to see him naked. Their love-making, though, was vigorous and his awkwardness disappeared during the sexual act itself. Afterwards, she often found she was bleeding but this neither frightened nor disgusted her – she was ready to begin again, when he was ready. He called her voracious and begged her, with a
smile
, to remember his age – he was sixty-four, an old man, he said. She put her hand over his mouth, silencing him.

He came to her room only once a week, never for more than an hour. Again and again she waited for him, and he did not come even when he had led her to believe he would. She tried to paint, but could not continue, her senses too alert for his foot on the stairs. Often, he was at home with Rose in Meudon, and her envy of Rose grew and grew until she could not contain it and had to go and spy on her again. That was how she felt, like a spy, a sneak, taking the train to Meudon, walking with head lowered to his house, and then looking through the hedge into his garden, watching for Rose to come out. When she did so, the woman moved very slowly round the garden, hands clasped in front of her, head held high, an expression of deep thought on her face. Gwen had not expected such dignity. It was humiliating to see at once that this woman was what Rodin wanted and would never let go. She had borne him a son, she had lived with him more than twenty years. How could she, Gwen, compete?

She could have a child, his child. Her cat had had kittens that summer. It struck her that she ran the risk herself of becoming pregnant, though Rodin had, from the first, said he would take care that she did not, and he was more reliable than Gus was with Ida and Dorelia. She did not want a baby (and she drowned the kittens), but she might end up with one and then she would have a hold over Rodin. This crossed her feverish mind but she dismissed the thought. What would she do with a child? All around she saw women artists whose work seemed stopped by giving birth – look at Ida, look at Edna, look at Dorelia. None of them producing anything now except sketches. A child would be a disaster, and would not help her keep Rodin. Nothing would. He had his own life which he intended to preserve, and besides she wearied him. He reminded her that he was old, and could not match her energy. The energy he had he reserved, for the most part, for his work. She must, he said, let him rest.

But when he did not come to her, it did not always mean he was resting. That, she could have borne. More hurtful was to hear
that
he was seeing other women. Sometimes, after yearning for him over several empty days, she would go to his studio and find him holding court. He liked sophisticated women who were the very opposite of herself. She felt dowdy and shabby beside them, though she bought new clothes and had thought herself elegant in them. She would stand on the fringe of these gatherings not knowing whether she was about to burst into tears or howl with rage, and he told her later that her very presence made him uneasy. Once, he paid her for her to model in front of these other women and she was humiliated. He said she should not demand so much of him. She should stay in her home and wait for him and paint while she did so. But she could not. She could not keep away from him. When she tried to stay in her room and paint, misery slowed her brush and she had to abandon yet another canvas, and start again.