Her nakedness was like a challenge—her young body a weapon. She talked often, and although Jasper Gwyn showed no sign of answering and was repeatedly driven to explain to her that silence was indispensable to the success of the portrait, every day she started talking again. She wasn’t recounting anything, she wasn’t trying to describe something: she chanted a perpetual hatred, and an indiscriminate cruelty. She was magnificent, not at all childish, and powerfully animal. For days she insulted, in a ferocious yet graceful way, her parents. Then she digressed briefly on school and her friends, but it was clear that she did it hastily, imprecisely, because she was aiming at something else. Jasper Gwyn had given up silencing her, and had grown used to considering her voice a detail of her body, only more intimate than others and in some way more dangerous—a claw. He didn’t pay attention to what she said, but that caustic singsong became so vivid and seductive that it made David Barber’s sound cloud seem vaguely useless, if not actually irritating. On the twelfth day the girl reached the point she had been aiming at, that is, him. She began to attack him, verbally, flare-ups alternating with silences in which she merely stared at him with unbearable intensity. Jasper Gwyn became incapable of working, and as his thoughts spun vainly he reached the point of understanding that there was something tremendously perverse and seductive in that aggression. He wasn’t sure he could defend himself against it. He withstood it for two days, and on the third he didn’t show up at the studio. Nor did he for the four days that followed. He returned on the fifth day, almost sure he wouldn’t find her, and strangely disturbed by the idea of not being wrong. But she was there. She was silent the whole time. Jasper Gwyn felt, for the first time, that she had a dangerous beauty. He began working again, but with a troubling confusion in his head.
That evening, at home, he got a phone call from Rebecca. Something unpleasant had happened. In an afternoon tabloid, there had appeared, without specific proof but in the usual vulgar tone, a curious story about a writer who made portraits, in a studio behind Marylebone High Street. It left out his name, but it mentioned the cost of the portraits (slightly inflated), and there were many details about the studio. There was a malicious paragraph about the nudity of the models and another that described incense, soft lighting, and new age music. According to the tabloid, having a portrait done in that manner had become, in a certain high London society, the fashion of the moment.
Jasper Gwyn had always feared something like this. But over time he and Rebecca had understood that the way of working in that studio led people to become extremely jealous of their own portraits and instinctively inclined not to damage the beauty of the experience with something that invaded the private sphere of their memory. They talked about it a little, but of all the people who had been in the studio, they couldn’t think of one who would have taken the trouble to contact a tabloid and cause that mess. It was inevitable, finally, to think of the girl. Jasper Gwyn hadn’t said anything about what was happening with her in the studio, but Rebecca by now could read every little detail and it hadn’t escaped her that something wasn’t working as usual. She tried to ask questions and Jasper Gwyn confined himself to remarking that the girl had a very special talent for spite. He wouldn’t add anything else. They decided that Rebecca would monitor how the rumor circulated in the media and that for the moment the only thing to do was go back to work.
Jasper Gwyn returned to the studio the next day with the vague impression of being a lion tamer entering a cage. He found the girl sitting on the floor, in the corner where he usually squatted. She was writing something on the cream-colored pages of his notebook.