Free The Kiss by Joan Lingard

going to keep an appointment with a genius? Will he want to model me once he sees me naked? I am conscious of how thin I am whereas I know that he likes his models to be firm-fleshed and mature, with generous breasts and buttocks. My Finnish friend Hilda Flodin, who is a sculptor herself and who introduced me to Rodin, told me that he thinks that young girls are poor specimens in comparison. But he did ask me to come and show him my body so why would he do that unless there was something about me that he found attractive? And I need to earn money. I can’t expect to live from my painting.
    I knock and wait and while I wait I think about running away. And then the door opens and one of his assistants admits me and conducts me into the high, vaulted room where he works. My eyes are dazzled by the array of female sculptures in every imaginable pose, some of them quite suggestive and daring. They seem almost to be alive. Flodin told me that Paul Claudel, the writer and brother of his former mistress, Camille, called them a ‘banquet of buttocks’. I hesitate in front of such a formidable array. I want to turn and run again, for I know I cannot ever expect to measure up to women like these, but he is coming towards me, the great man himself, in his long white smock, with his strong head and bushy white beard, his hands held out to mine, and my heart is leaping. I take his hands, I could not refuse, and he leads me kindly to the stove, and brings forward a wicker chair and sits me down. I want to faint.
    ‘Warm yourself,’ he says. ‘There’s no hurry.’
    I feel overwhelmed by him, this giant of a man. He puts me at my ease, he is gentle, so when it is time for me to go to the model’s couch behind the screens and take off my clothes my nervousness has gone. I even feel proud of my body. I stand erect and await his verdict.
    He tells me that I have ‘un corps admirable’. I glow with pleasure, I am no longer cold. He says he likes my legs and my swan-like neck. I lift my head high.
    ‘Come tomorrow,’ he says.
    From that moment onward I know that I shall be prepared to come whenever he wishes and to do whatever he wishes. I am entranced by him. I am happy with my nudity and I know that I shall be happy to be with him. When the work is finished for the day and the assistants leave he will light candles in wine bottles and then we shall be alone together. We shall kiss in the warm, flickering light, and that will be the beginning of something wonderful. I can feel his hands on my body, moving over it, caressing it. I will cry out. Each time we are left alone he will make love to me. It will be the moment of the day that I wait for, hunger for. I will never have enough of him. I do not care that he is sixty-three years old and I am so much younger, and that he might tire when making love more quickly than me. Rodin says he claims that sex makes him feel old but I cannot believe that. I know it will it make me feel young and liberated.
    Cormac, remembering the essay now, looked at Clarinda frowning with frustration over her map. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in looking any further,’ he said.
    ‘Since we have obviously been chasing wild geese,’ said Robbie.Clarinda came reluctantly. They turned back along the rue de l’Université and headed up past the massive pile of Invalides to the rue de Varenne and the Rodin Museum, formerly the Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had installed himself in 1908, renting the room on the ground floor with three tall windows looking onto the garden.
    ‘Gwen hated it when he left his old studio,’ said Clarinda. ‘She found the old one more friendly.’
    ‘Familiar, aren’t we?’ said Robbie. ‘ Gwen .’
    ‘What do you mean by friendly?’ asked Cathy.
    ‘Intimate?’ suggested Robbie.
    Clarinda was not to be drawn.
    Before going into the house she went purposefully round the garden until she found the black marble statue she was seeking. The rest followed, as if she, with