Keeping the World Away

III

A GLORIOUS AUGUST day, the dirty Thames for once a sparkling silver and the sky as blue and cloudless as ever it could be in France. But the steamer was not what they had expected. Their cabin was hardly worthy of the name – so tiny, the door without a lock, the single porthole covered in salt and impossible to clean from inside. Their painting equipment filled most of the space. They were going to have to climb over the wrapped-up easels every time they went in or out, like climbing over rocks. Each had a cloth bag of clothes which went on their bunks, under the thin pillows. If they were seasick, this would be a dreadful place to suffer.

But they were not seasick, not once. They spent most of their time on deck, leaning on the rails, eyes closed, smiling into the wind. Away! They were away, from London, from Fitzroy Street, from poor Ida and her noisy babies, from Gus and his demands. Hardly anything had been decided. ‘Come with me,’ Gwen had urged, ‘walk with me to Rome.’ And Dorelia had stared at her, and raised her eyebrows, and put her hands on her hips, and her head on one side, and then she nodded. She left all the preparation to Gwen, who launched herself immediately into a flurry of timetables and tickets and maps. They would sail to Bordeaux and walk the rest of the way along the Garonne and then to the Mediterranean coast and so into Italy. It was mad, quite mad. Everyone said so. ‘Walk?’ people exclaimed, and they lifted their long skirts and showed off their strong, laced walking boots. They were prepared.

On the steamer, they went barefoot, to the consternation of the only other passengers, a single elderly gentleman on his way to visit a relative, and a couple from Yorkshire who were prim and proper and changed for dinner. Gwen and Dorelia never changed. It was a nonsense in such circumstances, and ‘dinner’ the most basic of meals. They wore the same dresses all the time, Gwen’s a dark brown, Dorelia’s a vivid blue. They washed only hands and faces and, of course, their bare feet (twice a day). When they reached Bordeaux – even the Bay of Biscay was calm – they had to put on their boots before taking a single step on French soil, and it was a painful business. The delicious freedom had made their feet spread, or so it seemed. Their feet resisted being confined in thick woollen socks, purchased with such pride – they were so sensible – before the journey, and once the socks were forced on, the feet would not fit comfortably into the boots. ‘What are we to do?’ Gwen wailed. Dorelia sat on the edge of her bunk, quite still. She thought. Carefully, she undid the laces in her boots and spread the opening wide. Then she removed the woollen socks, rolled them into a ball and put them aside before finding and donning her thin stockings. She stood up and tried the boots, saying nothing. Gwen followed suit. She looked down at her flapping boots and took a step forward. They stayed on. Dorelia did the same. They looked at each other and laughed and laughed.

The laughter faded on the quayside. They had so much to carry and their feet weighed them down. To get out of Bordeaux, which they were in a hurry to do, they were obliged to hire a cart and its driver, a surly fellow who did not seem to understand their French and whose face was one tight mask of complaint. But he took them to the outskirts of the town, as they had requested, and dumped them by the River Gironde near Podensac. It was late afternoon, the light beginning to fade from a dazzling blaze to a shimmering glow. They stood beside their heap of equipment and sighed, stretching their arms out wide and throwing their heads back to feel the sun on their faces. Then they took off their boots, and moved into the grass beside the road, taking up their bundles and walking slowly along the river-bank. Where to? They did not know. They had taken the precaution of buying bread before they left Bordeaux, and had filled their water bottles. When they were tired, they would lie down and sleep under a hedge, if need be.

That first night, it was what they did.

One night was spent in a barn, empty except for straw, the perfect place to bed down, though the straw had a yeasty smell; another night under a cart, left in the corner of a field, the ground under it dry when all around it was wet; several nights in ferny hollows, the moon bathing them in white light and making the thought of sleep absurd. But every third or fourth night they paid to stay in a house, glad to be able to wash and attend to their hair. Gwen was more particular about her hair than Dorelia, though her hair was finer and not so prone to pick up bits of grass and twigs from the ground they lay on. They were both particular about their clothes, not wishing to appear vagabonds even if they were living like tramps. They regularly washed and pressed their dresses and cleaned their boots and made sure they were presentable. They needed to look respectable and attractive when they set up in village streets to offer themselves as portrait painters, or if, as sometimes happened, they had earned nothing from portraits and must sing for their supper.

At La Réole, thirty miles from Bordeaux, they met another artist. He came to stare at them, with other men, as they slept in a stable. His name was Leonard Broucke. Gwen did not like him – she thought him arrogant, with his offer to give them a lesson – but Dorelia stared at him, and Gwen wondered if she saw something of Gus in him. They left La Réole poorer than when they arrived, earning only 1.50 francs there and spending 2. Next night it was cold and they slept under a haystack, waking very early, shivering, and rolling together, Gwen on top of Dorelia, to try to warm themselves. When they got up, Dorelia said she had not slept at all but Gwen had done so, her arms loosely round Dorelia’s neck and her body burrowing into the folds of Dorelia’s dress and cloak. She felt entirely happy, in spite of the cold and lack of comforts. For breakfast, they picked grapes, but the fruit was not yet quite ripe and tasted sour. Every day, their portfolios and equipment seemed to grow heavier and they prayed for a cart to come along and relieve them of their burden.

Carts did stop, quite often, attracted by the sight of Dorelia whose attractions were obvious. Twice they were followed, after they had sung in an inn, by men eager to give them money for other services. The men were not frightening, not rough or threatening in manner, but they were persistent and once the two women had to seek refuge in a church (where the verger took pity on them and gave them a bed in his own house for the night). But on they went, mile after mile, walking or riding in carts (and once in a motor car, unimaginable luxury), the weather glorious except for a few isolated heavy showers which they rather enjoyed though the rain made them look bedraggled. How far had they travelled when, towards the end of October, they felt the first cold wind? They did not know. Not far, for sure. Gwen was aware of a change in herself, not just in the weather. She wanted to be inside, she wanted an interior to make her own. Four walls, and a floor. To be enclosed again, and have order and certainty, to shut out distraction. Dorelia, though she said nothing, looked astonished, even perhaps alarmed, when Gwen remarked that they should look for a room in the next village and stay there for a while. She was happy, in the open all day, as happy as Gus always was. She liked not knowing where they would lay their heads. She liked having the sky for a roof and trees for walls.

They came to Toulouse in November, on a grey, misty day, and Gwen said, ‘Enough.’ Toulouse was nowhere near Rome, it wasn’t even Italy, but she could wander no further, or not for the moment. Dorelia shrugged, and let Gwen knock on doors and make enquiries about cheap lodgings until they were directed up a hill, up a cobbled street, to a house where a tiny woman in black glared fiercely at them and asked to see their money before she showed them a room. The room was small but clean and practically empty. It had a bed (only one bed, but quite wide, room enough for two) a table, and two chairs. ‘Perfect,’ said Gwen. The window looked out on to a stream and had heavy wooden shutters which kept the east wind from blowing in. On the table was a lamp, quite a large oil lamp which once lit gave a steady yellow light. The moment it was lit, Gwen reached for her paintbrush. This was what she had wanted: this sense of containment, of calm. All around the edges of the glow from the lamp it was dark, the light fading gently as it reached outwards, making the walls mysterious and shadowy. She held her breath.

Dorelia studied. The book was difficult, her French uncertain, but the intensity with which she studied it pleased Gwen. The heightened sensibility gave to Dorelia’s face a touching and unusual solemnity. She had asked Dorelia to wear her grey dress today, grey but with black threads drawn through it, a black belt tied at the side, and black trimming round the high neck. A sombre dress against which Dorelia’s skin looked peach-like. A demure dress, chaste, the sleeves long, her body hidden beneath it. Gus dressed her flamboyantly in vivid colours but Gwen wanted nothing to detract from Dorelia’s loveliness. Her portrait was not about clothes.

She asked Dorelia to stand, and to raise her eyes from the book – but a direct stare ruined the atmosphere. She told her to drop her gaze again, back down to the book on the table, but to remain standing, one hand on the back of a chair. There was a bird singing outside, very close to the window, and the rushing of the stream was loud, yet within the room the silence was intense. Gwen could hear her own brushstrokes, the faint, light sweep of them, and the rustle of Dorelia’s dress as from time to time she shifted her weight. The lamp was lit. She had given up trying to paint in daylight. There was not enough of it in the room, and during the day they were busy. By four o’clock these winter nights they were inside with many hours to pass so she had accepted the challenge of painting by artificial light. It had its own problems, its own excitements. Shadows came and went and could not be depended upon.

There had been letters earlier that day, each of them read a dozen times. Gus wrote to say he had opened a school of painting in Chelsea, with William Orpen. There was a letter from Ida too, from the new home in Essex, a house with the lilting name of Matching Green. She was there with the babies. Gus came and went. She longed for Dorelia to return, and said so with unmistakable emphasis. They could all live together and be happy.

Dorelia’s reaction to Gus’s letter was strange. Used as she was to her friend’s inscrutable expressions, Gwen wondered at the blankness in her face while she was reading. Did she not see why Ida pleaded? Did she not understand that Ida was prepared to share Gus with her? If so, she did not appreciate Ida’s generosity, or the self-sacrifice involved. Gus had written that he longed to look upon Dorelia’s ‘fat’ again, and that had made Dorelia smile. For Ida’s words, written, Gwen was sure, in a great pain, there had been neither smile nor frown. ‘You write to Ida,’ she said to Gwen. Gwen did not need to be told. She wrote to Ida and Gus, and Ursula, all the time. ‘What shall I tell her?’ she asked. The famous Dorelia shrug … But then, ‘Tell her we are not going on to Rome.’

It was true, of course, but neither of them had stated it out loud, as a fact. They had just stopped thinking about it. They were going nowhere in this cold and damp, it did not encourage travelling. Holed up in their room, living on bread and cheese and figs, they had lost their adventurous spirit. To Gwen, it did not matter so much because she was teaching herself to paint in a new way, but for Dorelia it did. She was not a painter like Gwen, she could not paint all the time. ‘Does Dorelia take two hours to do an eye?’ Ida had joked in a letter to Gwen. Yes. She did. And after two hours’ struggling with one eye she was bored and had no desire to go on to the other. Like Gus, she wanted to be outside, sketching in fields or by the river, not toiling in one room to get some minute detail right. And she wanted company other than Gwen’s, even the girl they had found to sit for them. She was young, only fifteen, but pretty in a disordered sort of way, her hair unbrushed and wild, her nails far from clean. Nothing would persuade her to take her clothes off – she had squealed at the request and had had to be hurriedly reassured that there was no absolute need. She was a fidgety sitter and exasperated Gwen, but Dorelia was amused. She rather enjoyed the girl’s bounciness. The sitter brought some spirit into the room. Gwen would not let her talk. She thought her thick red lips bad enough without having to watch them move. After the girl had gone, she shuddered and told Dorelia that the mouth made her feel ill, it was so fleshy, so greedy, so wet-looking.

Had Gwen known passion? Dorelia did not think so. She had felt it, for Ambrose – everyone knew and it had been terrifying to witness, or so Gus had said – but had she known it? Dorelia saw that it was all there in Gwen, it boiled within her, but that while she was painting it did not plague her. Had she even been kissed, a real kiss? They did not ask each other such things. Dorelia had watched Gwen naked, posing for herself, and had seen how easy she was with her own body. It was a good body, lithe and firm but feminine in its gracefulness, not just in the breasts and genitals. It had a delicacy, Dorelia realised, which her own more voluptuous body did not. But had any man known it? She thought it unlikely. Mirrors had known it, other artists had known it, but never a man, surely.

In February, the sun came out again. Blossom appeared on the trees and once more they could work outside if they wished. But Gwen did not wish. She had learned more in their room and did not want to leave it for the open road. Their landlady put the rent up. It appeared they had been enjoying special winter rates. And that decided them.

A long day searching, and then to come to this … A dismal room, none too clean and far too crowded, but they were exhausted and had to lay their heads somewhere. Gwen would rather have slept in the Luxembourg Gardens, but Dorelia, usually so phlegmatic, had protested that she could not bear to be soaked and that they must find shelter somewhere inside. The room in the Hôtel Mont Blanc was inside, and that was all that could be said for it. Dorelia went to sleep immediately, fully clothed. Gwen sat and sketched her sleeping, but the light was harsh. Already she missed the lamp in Toulouse, and the sound of the birds, and the stream when it was in full spate. Coming to Paris from London, she had marvelled at the difference but now she despaired. The grime in the street outside, the infernal clatter of carts on cobbles, the shouting – all threatened to depress her.

When she woke up next morning, she was astonished to find that Dorelia was gone. There was no note. Her bag was still packed and lay on the floor next to the bed. Had she gone in search of food? Gwen doubted it. She could see that it was still raining and that the sky was grey and that Dorelia would be getting wet wherever she was. She had been strange ever since they left Toulouse and started for Paris, constantly turning her head away and staring into the far distance as though she could see something that Gwen would not be able to see. Normally patient, she had become impatient, and this was alarming, curiously hurtful. It was not Dorelia’s place to be irritated by small things. ‘You are vain,’ she had said one day, and had told Gwen, ‘You are admiring yourself in that mirror. You are not studying your body to paint it.’ It was rather shocking to be accused of vanity, and by Dorelia. Did they love each other still? Gwen was not so sure. She could not talk of love, as Ida could. She could not ask Dorelia this, and she had never needed to until now. Their love was there, and of a special kind, and it did not need reassurance. But lately it had felt weaker. It might, Gwen thought, be due to Leonard Broucke, the artist they had met on the road, and she did not like that thought. Dorelia had seemed too smitten with him, and he had given her his address in Paris.

When, by midday, Dorelia still had not returned, she went out herself and bought bread and cheese and some grapes. If Dorelia came back with the same, no matter. The rain had stopped and a faint glimmer of sunshine defused the thin mist hanging in the air. She found a café and, though the seats were damp, she sat outside and ordered coffee and a roll. It was not pleasant sitting there – the trams passed very near and their roar shook the little tables – but she did not want to go inside and face people. Here, nobody bothered her. Everyone was too busy dashing past. Several dogs came up to her but she ignored them and they took the hint. Then, at the corner of the untidy street, where the tram turned, she saw Dorelia walking along. How she stood out in these drab surroundings! In the red skirt, given to her by Gus, and her yellow embroidered blouse and the brown velvet coat, open all the way down the front, Gwen could not take her eyes off her friend as she came towards the café, lighting up the street with her progress.

She was not at all surprised to see Gwen. Sitting down beside her, she broke off a piece of roll and popped it into her mouth. Gwen did not ask where she had been – they never asked such banal questions of each other – and Dorelia did not tell her, but Gwen could see that she had a letter sticking out of her pocket. From Gus? From Leonard Broucke? Sent poste restante? There were secrets now between them. The waiter came out again, would Dorelia require anything? Dorelia looked at Gwen. ‘I have no more money,’ she said. Gwen felt in her pocket: enough for coffee or a roll, but not both. The waiter brought a roll (larger than Gwen’s had been) and a glass of water in which he had kindly put a slice of lemon. ‘Well,’ Dorelia said, ‘Paris.’ And she looked about her with an air of incredulity.

It was not difficult to find modelling work. There were artists’ studios everywhere and it was only a matter of knocking at doors and announcing oneself. The women were safest, the German painter Miss Gerhardie, the Swiss painter Ottilie Roederstein, and others. They were pleased to see Gwen, even more pleased when she was willing to strip to the waist. For hours and hours she posed, easily adopting the poses they requested, never uttering a word, even when invited to converse. At the end of these sessions, she collected her money and left as quickly as possible, never pausing to look at how the artists had portrayed her. But she did not then go back to her room in the Hôtel Mont Blanc. Instead, she roamed Paris, walking miles along the Seine, watching the boats, or around the public gardens, her sketchbook always with her. The weather was good now, and she could sit in comfort on benches and draw whatever took her fancy. Scores of drawings, but no paintings. She had nowhere to paint. She could not paint in that dreary room and as yet she could not afford anywhere else. Leaving Toulouse had, for her, been a mistake. A bigger one might be to return to England, but the inevitability of this was beginning to worry her.

Dorelia had been gone weeks now. She had joined Leonard Broucke, who was in Bruges. Gwen’s face, when she realised what had happened, felt hot and clammy. Dorelia had gone to Leonard, not to Gus, with whom she belonged, without consulting her, without a word. It was not being alone that troubled Gwen – she was not alone, she had a cat now – but the shock of realising that Dorelia had not trusted her. Maybe, as Ida suggested in a letter, she had been afraid. Am I so fierce? Gwen thought about it. She imagined that she was kind, a good listener, someone whom those she loved could confide in and find support from, but it seemed this was not true. She was too strong, too firm in her opinions, or at least Dorelia must have thought so. And that hurt.

The room in the Hôtel Mont Blanc was no more sympathetic but she could not afford to move out of it. With Dorelia gone, she had more space but she could not work there, still she was obliged to sketch outdoors and now that the winter was coming she was often so cold her hands could hardly hold a pencil. One day, she took the yellow tram to the end of the Rue de l’Université, to the Dépôt des Marbres. ‘Rodin likes English ladies,’ Gus had said in a letter, and she needed more work, so why should she not be brave and seek out Rodin? But she was nervous as she walked through the huge, mossy, paved courtyard, its corners overgrown with grass, where great blocks of marble – oblong, upstanding, flat – stood waiting to be claimed by the sculptors in the workshops surrounding it. She did not know which workshops were his, only that he had two of them. Hesitant, she stood awhile, listening, then moved towards the door from which she judged the noise was coming. She knocked, once, twice, and a third time, louder still.

A woman opened the door at last. A woman wearing a white apron and white cap pulled down almost to her eyes. A woman whose hands were covered in a fine dust and who had a chisel in one of them. ‘Yes?’ she said, abrupt, frowning. Gwen gave her name. She said she was a model, an experienced model, an artist herself, and that she had been told that Monsieur Rodin might consider employing her services. She spoke in French but the woman replied in English, inviting her to step inside. Monsieur Rodin was in his studio, working, and could not, at the moment, be disturbed, but she could wait. Humbly, Gwen followed her. She was led through a vast room, where three men were hacking away at blocks of stone in a frenzied manner, chips of stone flying dangerously everywhere, to an arch at the other end. Here her guide paused, and beckoned her to come close. She pointed through the arch at a man who seemed to be caressing a half-finished statue, smoothing it over and over again and staring intently at the surface he was smoothing. ‘Monsieur Rodin,’ the women said, quietly. ‘He will break soon, and then you may introduce yourself.’

Alone, Gwen stood and waited. Waiting and watching felt comfortable, natural. Rodin, she saw, was short, but powerfully built, with huge hands and a massive head, out of proportion with his body. His beard was reddish-blond, streaked heavily with grey. He was dressed like a workman, in an old knitted vest and blue trousers with a smock over the top. She thought, from the way he peered so closely at his work, that he must be short-sighted. As she watched, he took a mouthful of water from a jug on the floor and to her amazement spat it over the clay. She saw he was in the grip of some intense emotion, his face calm but concentrated, not a muscle moving. It was as though he were listening for the statue to speak, to hear its voice and obey its commands whatever they might be. She went on staring, thinking that he looked like an ancient patriarch, coolly assessing his physical qualities, and reminding herself of his reputation. She did not feel awed exactly. There was the excitement of anticipation, but of what? It was hard to tell. She wanted to stand there for ever, watching a master at work. But at last he stopped. He stood back and looked at the statue, appraising it, his head first on one side then the other. He shut his eyes, kept them shut for several minutes, then opened them wide again. This time, he looked beyond his statue. He looked past it straight at Gwen.

They seemed to stay still, eyes locked together, for a long time. The heat crept up Gwen’s face. She remembered his erotic sculptures which she had seen at the Exposition Universelle, the lovers entwined together … But she was resolute, she would not drop her gaze and yet she feared that she might be considered impudent. She tried to put into her stare a pleading expression. What, she wondered, was Rodin putting into his scrutiny? I am not striking, Gwen thought; he is not looking at me with wonder or astonishment, but is he curious? When he called out, ‘Come here, if you wish to speak to me,’ she moved slowly, mouth dry, and could not manage more than a whisper when she reached him. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I am a model. I would like to model for you.’ She said nothing about being an artist herself, did not mention her brother. He smiled slightly, a mere twitch of the lips. His lips, she saw, were fleshy, his eyes a clear grey. He looked at her differently, she thought, quite challengingly, while he asked if she had experience. She named names. He nodded. Turning away from her to wipe his hands, he said she should go into the corner of his studio where she would find a peg to hang her clothes, which she should remove, and then he would look at her.

Many times she had taken her clothes off for other artists, over many years now, but she could not do it easily that day. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons on her boots, which she took off first, and again with the hooks and eyes on her blouse. She was wearing a white cotton chemise under her blouse but no corset, which was a mercy. She hung up her skirt and her blouse on the thick wooden peg sticking out of the wall and folded her chemise and knickers, putting them in a bundle on top of her boots and stockings. Once naked, she felt less nervous. She heard footsteps and knew Rodin was walking across the room towards her, so she began to turn round to face him but he stopped her with ‘No! Just as you are, if you please, for a moment.’ She stood straight, her feet slightly apart, arms hanging at her side. ‘A good back,’ he said. ‘Now turn.’ His eyes were looking at her feet. She looked down at them herself. She had, she thought, pretty feet, the toes almost all the same length, and not a corn or bunion to be seen. Slowly, his eyes moved up her body, pausing at her breasts, which she knew were small but believed to be nicely rounded, and finally they were looking into each other’s eyes again. ‘Raise your arms,’ he said. She did. She did not shave under her arms but was not very hairy. He frowned, disapproving of the hair, she imagined. ‘Hands on hips,’ he said. She liked that pose and adopted it confidently. He asked her to assume several other positions and then he nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘tomorrow, at ten.’

Elated, she dressed rapidly and left the studio. All the way back to the hotel she found herself humming odd refrains from songs she hardly knew and had only heard sung in snatches. She bought some violets from a woman in the street and held them tightly, wanting immediately to paint them, to capture the trembling blue delicacy of the flowers. With a sense of surprise she registered her happiness and thought it could not merely be because Rodin was going to let her model for him – it must be more than that, surely. He had been responsible for this new buoyancy she felt, he himself, not what he had offered her in the way of work. She would earn no more than she had earned from other sculptors (though money had not been discussed). It was the man who invigorated her, the very sight of him. She warned herself to be careful but immediately scorned her own warning. Rodin was as old as her father, perhaps even older, she did not know. She knew he had a wife, or a woman who had been with him so long that she was regarded as his wife, and that he had mistresses, so she must not entertain fantasies in which he did more than notice her and use her as a model. She was not a schoolgirl, not a student, but a grown woman of almost thirty years. She must be sensible.

But all sense left her in the months that followed. She felt herself bewitched, enchanted, changed utterly from the lonely young woman she had been. Almost every day she made her way to Rodin’s studio and posed for him, and soon he was calling her his little Marie, which pleased her and strengthened the conviction that she was now someone else entirely. She had thought he would work in silence but no, he liked to talk: he asked her questions and listened and then asked more. Of course, she told him of her work, and that her brother was Augustus (of whom he had heard), and he took such interest in her. Soon she was showing him sketches of her cat and he appeared impressed, though there was no false flattery. How many hours a week did she work, he wanted to know, what was her routine, where did she buy her paints, her canvases – he wanted to know everything about her from the trivial to the more important. He told her how he himself worked. He rose at seven in the morning, was in his studio by eight, had a short lunch break at noon, worked on until eight, or even later, in the evening. He worked standing, or perched on a stool, and had no electric or gas light in his studio – candles, lanterns, sufficed. He told her he had always been ‘wild’ about working, and she said so had she, but circumstances sometimes curbed her passion. He did not like hearing that she lived in a lodging house in such an undesirable area. He frowned and said it was not comme il faut. She agreed, but was reluctant to plead poverty so could not explain why she lingered there. But he guessed, and went on to offer her other work apart from modelling. He needed, he said, someone other than his secretary to deal with his correspondence and to translate articles from English to French. She could be that person. She could get herself out of that miserable hotel room.

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.

Then he told her to leave her room. There was not enough sunshine in it, he said, and it was too stuffy. She should give notice, and move.

Another room, another beginning, and, at first that same sense of dismay which always filled her before she took possession. How was she to make this space, these four walls and window and door, her own? It was too much, she had been happy eventually in the Rue St Placide and had finally succeeded in owning her room there. She had painted it well, it had grown on her and by leaving it she was afraid that she was abandoning part of herself.

The new attic room she found was in a rather grand house and stood on a boulevard that was wide and impressive. There were five floors, reached by a spiral staircase, and her room was at the top, on the left. Getting her furniture up there was an almost impossible task which stretched over a whole day, from seven in the morning until ten-thirty at night, and before it ended she was in a state of collapse. The removal men were drunk and at first would not even try to get her wardrobe beyond the second floor. If it had not been for the other tenants in the house, who emerged to see what the commotion was about, they would never have been forced to persist. She carried her paintings up herself, and then her hats, not trusting the men, hating them for their boorish behaviour and wishing she could have managed on her own. And then, the furniture was at last in the room but looked all wrong. She was so tired. She could not bear to start moving things to better positions and instead suddenly went out, fleeing down the staircase back to her old room in the Rue St Placide where she had left her cat. They went together, she and the cat, to a café, where she had a glass of wine and some lamb and green beans, and felt better. She prayed that she would never have to move again. That night, she stood in her nightdress at the window, listening to a nightingale, and weeping for the beauty of its song.

In the morning, waking up, she felt strange. Keeping perfectly still, her eyes closed, she tried to analyse this feeling. It was the light, surely, and the air. She opened her eyes and yes, the dawn light was rising through her window, which she had left slightly open, and now the cool air was filling the room. She shivered deliciously, wrapping the coverlet round and round her body. She saw where the wardrobe Rodin had given her should go, and where the chair should stand, and the wooden table. It would not take so long. She would buy some material and make a new cushion for the chair – apricot was the wrong colour for this room, she needed white or cream, some linen or cotton stuff. Her plants would flourish on the table if she put it in front of the window. Slowly, she began to hope. She would put this new room to rights, and her maître would love it and be pleased with her. She would bring out from herself all that he believed precious in her.

And then she would paint her room.

Gus and Ida and Dorelia and all their babies were still in Paris, but Gwen did not tell them about Rodin. Perhaps they knew without being told – she felt herself so transformed by love that surely it shone out of her – but they made no reference to it. Ida was near her time again, with her fifth child. Her body was distorted with the weight of it, her eyes lacklustre and her skin without its usual bloom. Gwen felt for her, and shuddered a little at the sight of her, feeling suddenly apprehensive in case by some unlucky chance she herself should suffer such gross interference with her own body.

The likelihood of this had lessened. Rodin came to her new room, admired it, and made love to her, but he did not come even once a week now, and he did not always promise to come again. There was a change in him and she sensed it and grieved. She wrote to Ursula, telling her that she felt Rodin liked to make her furious and then take her in the middle of her rage. He kept her waiting for a visit for days, because he said he was so busy, and then when he did come he accused her of being lazy and not trying either to work herself or find other work modelling, though all the time he was the cause of her inertia. How could she paint, how could she leave her room and go to pose for others, when she was ever waiting for him? She knew that his excuses were not always true. He was at home in Meudon more and more, with Rose, and he travelled to England and to Germany, but that was not the whole reason for his absences. But she was posing for him again, naked, willingly adopting the erotic poses he required – to prove, she hoped, that he still had need of her – and she tried to silence the resentment that was building up within her towards him. She worked, too, producing portraits she was not ashamed to show him, though it was not his artistic, professional praise she yearned for but a greater share in his life. When she did not see him she could not contain her love, it was too huge, it swamped all other feeling, and so she wrote to him, pleading with him to come to her and accept more fully what she had to offer. But it seemed more and more that what she did have to offer was not what he wanted. He told her he liked her ‘anonymously’, as a body, as a woman, but she appeared not to be able to supply what he wanted emotionally and intellectually. He gave her books to read – Richardson’s novels, Pamela and Clarissa – and she did so but could not see why he wanted her to read them. Increasingly, he made her feel stupid and she knew she was not stupid. It hurt when she found he had told his concierge that she was not to be let into his apartment unless she had a letter from him arranging a visit. It was cruel, humiliating, but she could not do without him. She only had to see him to feel her body on fire.

Yet Ida called her ‘reserved’. She did not know how lacking in the smallest scrap of reserve she had become when she was with her maître. Ida would have been shocked to see how brazen she could be, utterly without inhibition. But then Ida knew about a love like this. She loved Gus, but her devotion to him had not kept him by her side. Aware of this, Gwen wondered if there might be a lesson she ought to learn from Ida’s position, and apply to herself. She did not like to think so – could not bear to imagine that by keeping nothing back, by exposing herself so completely to Rodin, laying before him all her love, she might have made him wary. Calm, calm, he was always advising, compose yourself, be tranquil, he urged, and what was that but a warning? A warning which she could not heed, and which made her angry. She saw herself as a blue flower growing high in the Alps, refusing to be found and cut and killed.

She voiced none of this to Ida, who had her own troubles, but she thought about doing so. She trusted Ida, and needed a confidante. But then, suddenly, it was too late. In the first week in March 1907, Ida felt her labour pains begin, mild enough to permit her to walk from her apartment to the Hôpital de la Maternité, where she gave birth to yet another boy. Gwen, when she received the message, said out loud, though there was no one with her, ‘Oh dear!’ Ida had so wanted a girl, every time. Mrs Nettleship arrived and, Gwen knew, would be in charge, so she would wait until later to visit Ida. There never was a later. On the 14 March another message came: Ida was dead, and Gus was drunk.

The studio was enormous. Gus had told her it would be magnificent when the workmen had finished, and she could see what he meant. But standing in the doorway that day she thought how its echoing emptiness, its disarray, the chill in the air were like a form of grief itself. Gus wandered about, still drunk, sometimes singing, sometimes whistling, a look of what anyone who did not know him might interpret as contentment on his face. Silently, Gwen moved about, clearing away some of the builders’ debris, lifting bits of plasterboard very, very carefully and stacking them neatly. Gus should not really be here at all but she had guided him here, encouraging him to believe that it was perfectly proper for him to try to work. He was no good to his crying children and he antagonised Mrs Nettleship who, with Dorelia, was looking after them.

There was to be a cremation. Gus would not attend and neither would she. What was the point? They did not want to see a row of weeping mourners when their own distress was so savage. Work, that was the only thing. Work, try to put into their art all that they felt, and so keep Ida alive and warm within them. They did not talk about her. Neither of them mentioned her, not since the first moment when she went to collect Gus (she felt that is what she had done, scooped him up, taken him away from Mrs Nettleship). He had told her then how beautiful Ida had been just before she died. ‘Here’s to love!’ Ida had said, and the two of them had drunk a toast in Vichy water. Gwen could hardly bear to hear this and had put her finger to his lips. She wondered if she should embrace him but instead she led him to his easel, and put a paintbrush in his hand. After staring at the canvas for a long time, he began to paint.

And she drew him. Sitting to his right, she positioned herself on a stool, sketchbook on her knee, and drew him, and while she drew she thought of her lover. Rodin would hear about Ida’s death, everyone would, and when he returned to Paris he was sure to come to her, knowing how shocked she would be. She had left a note with the concierge and he would read it and come to the studio, but delicacy would prevent his entering, so she had left another note with the concierge here, saying when and where she would meet him. She needed his comfort. He would hold her, and stroke her hair, and do for her what she could not do for Gus. But instead, on the third day, when Gus had slept as though in a coma, and she had not slept at all, a telegram was brought round by her own concierge. Rodin was not coming to her. He expressed his condolences but said nothing more. And he had been in Paris all this time.

Anger began to mix with grief as she stayed close to her brother. Death was so near, time so limited, and her lover did not seem to appreciate this. He could die, like Ida. He was more likely to die than Ida had ever been. She developed a hissing noise again in her head and felt she might explode with the frustration of it all. Gus, awake at last, properly awake after days of stumbling about and drinking heavily, when she could not persuade him to paint, was unaware of her state of mind. He wanted his children back. Mrs Nettleship had taken the three eldest back to Wigmore Street with her, and he had had to let her do this, leaving the two babies with a nurse and Dorelia. Now he wanted them all reunited. Gwen could not begin to comprehend how this could be managed and was no help in making plans. But Gus was full of schemes, and the energy needed to explore all the alternatives began to come to him, so Gwen went home, back to her attic room, feeling that she was not needed so much any more. She could return to her own life.

Back in her room, soothed by its peaceful air, she wondered about her life. Did it have meaning without her master at the centre of it? But he was not at the centre now, perhaps never had been. He was on the edge, and ever threatening to slip off it. Dying would solve everything – if she were to die, like Ida, not him. She could kill herself and have done with him. What, after all, was there to live for if she had lost his love? She had no children to mourn her, no dependants she would be deserting. More and more it seemed attractive to end her own life. Wicked, but attractive. Lying on her bed, watching the tops of trees tremble in the wind outside her window, she thought how easy it would be to drift off for ever, fall into a deep, deep sleep, toasting not love, as Ida had done, but death itself.

Then he wrote to her, a letter full of concern, saying that he did love her and that he wanted her to be happy. He would come to her soon, and wanted to find her tranquil and working well. One last chance, she promised herself.