William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

There was a letter from Blanche in Lysander’s post that morning. He ripped it open with his thumb and for a brief second he caught a residual odour of rose water, the scent she used. She had covered four leaves of lilac writing paper, dense with her big, jagged scrawl.

Darling One and Only,

Flaming June is going to be an enormous success — I can feel in my bones that it’s going to run and run for months. When are you coming home? Are you feeling better in yourself? Your little kitten wants to curl up in your lap again. I have a part in a ‘film’ — can you believe it? Loads of lovely money. You must have a test when you come back. It’s so easy — no lines to learn! I think your handsome face will be perfect and the whole experience is simply fun, as easy as pie compared to what we do night after night in the theatre –

He put the letter down, deciding to finish it later, and noticing with some irritation that Blanche hadn’t bothered to answer any of his questions. Writing letters to each other was meant to be a form of dialogue, a conversation — but Blanche wrote as if the traffic was one way, a declamation about her feelings and what she was up to that paid not the slightest notice to his replies. When he wrote to her he always had her latest letter by his side. A correspondence should feed off its two parts; monologues — however lively and intimate — were not necessarily interesting.

His mood of mild irritation persisted as he walked to the Stadtbahn station and bought his return ticket to Ottakring. He looked out of the window at the western suburbs of Vienna as the little train chuffed around its branch line to its destination. Suddenly he didn’t feel like posing for Miss Bull and being drawn by her — why had he agreed? But Miss Bull was persistent, it was hard to say no to her — this much he’d already learned.

At Ottakring he showed the driver of a two-horse Fiaker the address of the studio and climbed up into the cab. They rattled further westward, past rows of allotments and orchards of apple trees and a large graveyard with a wooden paling fence before turning up a muddy farm lane. The cab stopped at a gate painted a vibrant scarlet and Lysander stepped down and paid the modest fare. Already he was thinking of his journey home: it was all very well taking a cab from the station but how did one return to the station? He would stay an hour — no more.

From the gate, a clinker path led to what looked like an old stone barn at the edge of a tree-lined field in which two shire horses grazed. Flower pots were clustered round the front door to the barn, bright with marguerites and zinnias. He pushed the gate open and set a brass bell, mounted on a whippy length of curved metal, clanging loudly. Miss Bull appeared at the doorway almost immediately. They shook hands. She was wearing a knee-length canvas smock covered in splashes of clay and plaster.

“Mr Lysander Rief, you’re actually here. I can’t believe it!” she cried and led him into her studio.

The old barn had been converted into a capacious, windowless, ceilingless sculpture-room. A wide section of the tiled roof had been removed and replaced with glass panes. In the corner was a large squat cast-iron stove with a tall thin chimney pipe climbing up in a series of angled lengths to the roof. Along one wall ran a line of trestle tables covered with trays and pots and variously sized blocks of wood. Twisted wire armatures were stacked at one end. In another corner was a seating area — four cane chairs round a low table with a bright throw on it and a jug of anemones. In the very middle of the room on a high turning table was a crude clay sculpture, three feet tall, of a crouching minotaur — a blunt bovine head with stubby horns set on a massy, muscled body beneath. Beside it stood a small dais, with a square of carpet cut to fit the surface. Lysander looked around.

“Marvellous light,” he said, thinking this was the sort of remark to make on entering an artist’s studio.

Miss Bull removed her smock to reveal that she was wearing a cream muslin blouse over a mid-calf black serge skirt. She had wooden clogs on her feet. Her dark hair was tousled, pinned and piled up on her head with long strands falling from it carelessly. There were no paintings on view.

“Does Hoff work here?” Lysander asked.

“No, no. We live across the field, about half a mile away. Udo’s family home. We both tried working in his studio but it was a disaster — we did nothing but fight. So I rented this old place and renovated it after a fashion.” She pointed up. “Got some proper light in.” She indicated a door at the far end. “There’s a bedroom in there, if I feel like a snooze, and a sink and scullery. Thunderbox outside round the back.”

“Very nice.” He corrected himself. “Ideal.”

“Have a glass of Madeira,” she said, going to the trestle table and pouring the wine into two small tumblers. Lysander wandered over and they clinked glasses and drank. He didn’t really like fortified wines — sherries and ports and the like — and immediately felt a small dry headache form over one eye.

“This is impressive,” he said, gesturing at the crouching minotaur.

“I’m going to cast it in bronze,” Miss Bull said. “If I can afford it. Udo posed — never again. Moaning, complaining. I pose nude for him all the time. Most unfair.” She put her glass down and picked up a large drawing pad and a stick of charcoal. “Talking of which — shall we get to work?”

“Should I stand on the dais?”

“Yes. But once you’ve got your clothes off.”

Lysander smiled reflexively, assuming this was a typical Miss Bull-style risqué joke.

“Clothes off ?” he said. “Most amusing.”

“I don’t sculpt the clothed figure. So there’s no point in me drawing you with your clothes on.” She smiled and pointed to the door at the end of the big room. “You can change in there.”

“Fine. Right.”

It was a small basic bedroom with whitewashed walls and rough planked floor covered with a rag-rug. There was a single iron-framed bed with a brown blanket and a dresser with a plain jug and ewer. On the ledge of a small window that looked over a vegetable garden lost amongst its rank weeds was a small glass jar filled with dried grasses, the only sign of individuality.

Lysander stood in the middle of the room thinking what to do. What was going on here? For a second he considered the option of opening the door again, striding out and telling her that it was impossible and that he had to leave. But he knew Miss Bull would think the less of him if he did that. He didn’t want her to see him as a prig or an insecure stuffed-shirt. He emptied his mind as best he could and began to undress.

When he was down to his socks and his drawers he began to feel a stirring of excitement at the audacity of what he was about to do. He looked at his clothes laid neatly on the bed. Last chance. He slipped off his socks and tugged at the bow of the waistcord. As his drawers fell he felt his genitals cool. There was a towel on a towel-rail by the dresser and he tied it around him and stepped back into the studio. Miss Bull was sitting in a wicker chair that she’d drawn closer to the dais. She held out something that looked like a small leather sling.

“It just struck me. Would you prefer a cache-sexe ? I don’t mind.”

“No, no. Au naturel — all the same to me.”

He stepped up on to the dais, feeling the coarse carpet under the soles of his feet and hearing his suddenly thumping heart in his ears.

“Ready when you are,” Miss Bull said, calmly.

He let the towel fall and concentrated his gaze on the sooty chimney rising from the stove opposite, hearing only the hurried scratch of the charcoal on Miss Bull’s sketch pad. He squared his shoulders and told himself to relax, once more. He was not the tallest of men but he knew he had a good slim-waisted, broad-shouldered figure — certainly his tailor was always complimenting him on his build. “Classic, Mr Rief. The ‘manly ideal’ — you should see my other customers. Gor blimey.”