The Sculptor – Part 1: The Pose

The studio was a converted warehouse, vast and high, with a skylight, a cluster of plaster figures and a smell of damp clay and linseed. A heater ticked in the corner. A single lamp lit the platform in the centre of the room.

Ottilie was fifty-one, a sculptor whose work stood in three public squares, a tall, rough-handed woman in a stained canvas apron. Raphael was forty-three, her partner of seven years, a violinist, deft and calm, who had once said, watching her work, that he wished she would sculpt him into stillness.

At the workbench she set out a sheet on a clay-spattered board. Studio Terms. His limits and hers: no marks, nothing painful, no humiliation beyond the night, no photographs, no one else. The word was Kiln.

"Say it."

"Kiln."

"If you say it, I put down the tools. We sit by the heater."

"Yes, Ottilie."

"Not yet." She wiped her hands on her apron, and her voice dropped, low, slow and unhurried. "Raphael. You will be my model."

"Of course."

"Of course, Maestra." She waited. He said it. "Good. Take the platform."

He climbed onto the low wooden platform and stood in the lamplight. She walked round him slowly, studying him with a calm professional eye, and said nothing for four full minutes. Then she touched his shoulder with two fingers and moved it a quarter inch. She tilted his chin. She stepped back, narrowed her eyes, and said, "Hold."

He held. The studio was silent. The heater ticked. Every few minutes she adjusted him with a word, a touch, a lift of her pencil, and he obeyed, and the stillness grew deeper.

"Are you content?" she asked, at the half hour.

"Content, Maestra."

"Good. Continue to hold."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Fired Clay.