FREYA NORTH
Fen

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

William Heinemann 2001

Copyright © Freya North 2001

Afterword © Freya North 2012

Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Sigmund Freud @ Copyrights, The Institute of Psycho-Analysis and The Hogarth Press or permission to quote from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud translated and edited by James Strachey. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007462216

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007462223

Version: 2017-11-28

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

For Felix

The only boy for me

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Epilogue

Afterword

About the Author

Acclaim for Freya

Also by Freya North

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Always keep in touch with nature, always try to get close to your model.

Auguste Rodin

Paris 1889

Julius Fetherstone had absolutely no need to sketch Cosima Antoine. Having met her, just the once, six days previously, and having fallen in love with her immediately, he knew her features off by heart instantly. Julius could have created a portrait bust of Cosima with his eyes closed. Literally. For, whenever he closed his eyes, there she was soliciting his every thought, setting his senses on fire, firing his artistic desire.

So it was a deplorable double con. Professionally, he had no need to see Cosima again. Ever. Whether commissioned or not, he would have been sculpting her. Again and again. Now he was charging his patron, her fiancé Jacques, more than he’d ever dared ask for a portrait bust. The fee would clear the debt to his landlady that a placating fuck every Thursday had done so far. More than just pay the rent and preclude further unsavoury carnal commerce; it would also keep him in clay and casting for a good long while. But far more valuable than the financial gains, Cosima’s image, imprinted in his soul, was now destined to provide source material for all future works.

He need never see her again. As he flipped through his sketch-book of the last week, her features stared back at him from every page apart from one with his copy of the new Manet he’d seen on display in the Salon des Indépendants and another with a charcoal of a maquette by his master, Rodin. But Cosima dominated all other pages. No further analysis today could make any portrait more complete than these done from memory, from knowing someone for less than twenty minutes. Yet in half an hour, she’d be at his studio and he’d be given carte blanche, plus a sizeable purse, just to stare at her.

Cosima Antoine was herself about to deceive her fiancé and con the sculptor. Julius Fetherstone had dominated her thoughts, asleep and awake, for the last six days. She told herself she was not in love with him because love was a state that should be avoided at all costs. She had decided this from an early age when witnessing how her mother’s love for her father was rebuffed by his compulsive infidelities with a succession of maids, friends and young cousins. No, Cosima told herself she was not in love with the brooding British sculptor, but feelings for him she certainly had. For her fiancé, she had no feelings, rather she had reasons. He would be a good man to marry. He would make a good husband. He would make a good father to her children. Sometimes, she found all that inherent goodness just a little unsavoury, but Cosima could cope because still the dark places in her heart and mind were free to take her wherever she pleased. And now her fiancé was taking her to the sculptor, walking her to a place where her fantasies of the past week might just take solid form.

Never had Paris looked so beautiful. It was autumn, leaves on trees were burnished bronze and breathtaking, those underfoot crunched and disintegrated most satisfyingly. The October sun, rosy and mellow, infiltrated her body and brought a rare warmth to her soul which saw her nodding politely at the inane witterings of her fiancé, though she chose not to hear a word.

‘I think we should ask Monsieur Fetherstone what he feels about a hat,’ Jacques was saying. ‘I think it would be most avant-garde for a portrait sculpture to be crowned by a hat. Otherwise, it might be like any old bust. We need to define you. To have a sculpture that says “1889; Cosima Antoine at twenty years old”.’

Cosima nodded thoughtfully; glad she had decided to leave the house hatless despite her fiancé’s concern and her maid’s horror.

There is absolutely no need for Cosima to undress. Julius has not asked her to, nor has she offered. They have simply exchanged cordial salutations and she has calmly walked over to the carved wooden screen in the corner of his studio. She has slipped behind it, unhooking her clothing as she goes.

‘I won’t be a moment,’ she says.

‘That’s fine,’ he replies, loosening his cravat with one hand, unbuttoning his trousers with the other.

Naked but for his loose, damask shirt, he folds the window shutters almost closed, affording his studio privacy as well as investing it with sultry shadows. October sun seeps through, licking all it touches with melancholy gold; a visual swansong of summer edged with the faintest prelude of forthcoming winter. He pads, barefoot, across the rug, closing his eyes to feel the transition between fabric ending and the well-worn, warm run of smooth old floorboards. He recalls how floorboards in Derbyshire, at the height of summer, were never as warm and welcoming as these in Paris in autumn. One more reason never to return. The other, just then, appears from behind the screen and time is suspended for Julius.

Ten twenty-two, the first Wednesday in October, 1889.

He, Julius Fetherstone, is wide awake in dream-time.

The briefest glimpse of Cosima’s nudity would have sufficed. Instead, she is walking over to him, fantastically naked. His senses are ablaze; his past, his twenty-three years until this moment, have lasted but a blink. His future will be governed by his ability to savour the present.

They stand, a foot apart, staring at each other. They have not touched but the heat emanating from their bodies seems to meet and merge. They have not kissed, but their lips are as wet as if they have. He stares at her. This body before him, the flesh and muscle, the curves and hair, is the composite of all his fantasies to date and will constitute the standard for all future fantasies. She can be everything. Angel–virgin–whore–wife.

Cosima takes her fingertips to his face and hovers them over his lips. His mouth parts and she can feel his breath on her fingers. He licks his lips and her fingertips are caught, like bees to honey paper. His tongue flicks over them. His hands encircle her waist and pull her against him. She brushes her now damp fingers over his cheek and down, so that she cups the back of his neck, dragging his hair between her fingers. Her other hand she takes to his chest, slipping behind the cotton of his shirt to meet his skin. He makes to kiss her but she turns her face at the last moment.

‘How long do we have?’ he breathes.

‘How long does a portrait take a sculptor these days?’ she asks, quite loudly, with a sly smile.

‘I need a day,’ he says, ‘that’s what I told your – him.’

‘Jacques,’ she states.

‘Jacques,’ he confirms.

‘My fiancé,’ she elaborates.

‘Your fiancé,’ he verifies.

‘Who,’ she says, licking her top teeth, ‘is commissioning my portrait in bronze.’

‘As a celebration of your impending union,’ he states.

‘So,’ she says coyly, ‘I suppose there was no need for me to undress?’ She eases Julius’s shirt over his shoulders and away.

‘No need at all,’ he confirms, skimming his hands up from her waist to her breasts. He places a thumb over each of her nipples and rubs small circles. The sound of her gasp causes his eyes to close and he sinks his mouth against hers, their tongues talking passion while their bodies begin to taste each other.

Since arriving in Paris three years ago, Julius Fetherstone has had sex with four prostitutes, two wealthy clients his senior by extremes, one of the studio models, and his landlady – coupling with whom is a necessity in lieu of rent, but necessitates closed eyes throughout. This afternoon, though, with Cosima, sex is different. New. They are both virgins together. Exploring and experiencing pleasures that are a taste, a smell, a sensation. At times tender, at others lewd, they fuck and make love, alternating seamlessly between the two, all afternoon.

At four thirty, he comes inside her one final time and they sleep for half an hour on the rug. When they awake, she walks calmly over to the screen and dresses. Barefoot, but in his shirt again, he folds the shutters back. The sun has gone. It surprises him. The studio had radiated such heat, appeared to be bathed in brilliance, time standing still. Cosima appears from the screen, neatly dressed. She sits demurely on the high stool and obediently turns her face this way and that at Julius’s command. He does not lift a pencil. He spends an hour just looking at her.

‘That’s fine,’ he declares, folding down the cover on the blank sheets.

‘I shall marry Jacques,’ Cosima proclaims, still holding her pose and looking out of the window. ‘He is rich and kind and he treasures me.’

‘I wish you happiness and health,’ Julius says, but he says it quietly. It doesn’t seem fair. Timing is lousy. He meets a mesmerizing woman, but she is betrothed to another to whom, ultimately, Julius is beholden.

‘Now that I have had you,’ Cosima adds, a breath of softness to her voice, ‘I can say that I truly want to marry Jacques. For whatever may be, however my life will unfurl, I will always have the memory of today.’

‘And now that I have had you,’ Julius clears his throat, ‘every time I sculpt a nude, your body will be at its core. Every time I model a pair of breasts, or carve the lips of a cunt, I will be feeling you again.’

‘Jacques arrives,’ Cosima whispers, taking her gaze from the window to the sculptor.

‘Goodbye, Cosima,’ says Julius.

‘Goodbye, Monsieur Fetherstone,’ says Cosima.

ONE

Art has the objective of leading us to the knowledge of ourselves.

Gustave Courbet

The lurcher, who appeared to be wearing a 1970s Astrakhan coat dug from the bottom of a jumble-sale pile, strolled nonchalantly up to the McCabes. The dog regarded Pip McCabe cursorily, expressed mild interest in Cat McCabe’s plate of food and then thrust its snout emphatically, and wholly uninvited, into Fen McCabe’s crotch. When Django McCabe, the girls’ uncle, roared with laughter, the dog took one look at him, at his genuine 1970s Astrakhan waistcoat, and lay down at his feet with a sigh of humble deference. The dog’s tail, like a length of rope that had been in water too long, made a movement more akin to a dying snake than a wag.

‘Barry!’

The dog’s owner, whose exasperation suggested this was a regular occurrence over which he had no control, gave a whistle. The dog leapt up, seemed as startled by the McCabes as they were by him, and swayed on four spindly legs as if trying to remember whence his owner’s voice had come. The solution – to escape, to feign deafness – seemed to lie in Fen’s crotch. This time, he attempted to bury his entire head there, as if hoping that if he couldn’t see a thing, no one else could see him.

‘Barry! Good God!’

Reluctantly, Barry could not deny that his owner’s voice was now very near and very cross. He extracted his face from his hiding place, gave Fen a reproachful look, dipped his spine submissively and slunk to his master’s heels, out of the pub and, no doubt, into disgrace in the back of a Land Rover.

‘He comes from a broken home,’ the owner said on his way out, by way of explanation, or apology. ‘Derbyshire via Battersea.’

Django McCabe, who’d brought up his three, Batterseaborn nieces single-handedly in Derbyshire, nodded sympathetically. Pip and Cat McCabe thought they ought to close their mouths (especially as Pip still had some steak-and-kidney pie to swallow). Man and dog left, Pip swallowed. Cat gulped.

‘I thought dogs were meant to look like their owners,’ Cat said incredulously. ‘There’s justice in the world that he looks nothing like his dog!’

‘Be still, my beating heart!’ said Pip theatrically.

‘Country squire?’ Cat mused.

‘Farmer needs a wife?’ Pip responded.

Fen hadn’t a clue what they were talking about. She’d had her back to the man throughout. ‘I’d love a dog,’ she said, ‘but I’d settle for one sculpted by Sophie Ryder or Nicola Hicks in the meantime.’

‘Jesus, Fen,’ Pip sighed, pressing the back of her hand against her forehead, ‘can you not retrain your eye to appreciate the finer points of real life?’

‘Pardon?’ Fen looked at her sister, and then assessed the level of liquid in Pip’s pint of cider, as well as that in her own. ‘Django?’ Fen turned to her uncle for support. Django, however, puffing away on his old meerschaum pipe, regarded her quizzically.

‘Fenella McCabe is a lost cause,’ Cat asserted, arranging peanuts into complex configurations on the table. ‘She’s studied as an Art Historian for far too long—’

‘—and had one too many disasters in love—’ Pip continued her sister’s sentence, picking peanuts from Cat’s pattern.

‘—to allow her eye to appreciate the merits of any man now not hewn from marble,’ Cat went on.

‘—or cast in bronze,’ Pip added for good measure, forming the remaining peanuts into a ‘P’.

‘Django!’ Fen implored her uncle, with theatrical supplication, to come to her rescue and defend her from her goading sisters.

Django merely tapped his pipe on the heel of his shoe and gave Fen a smile. ‘I think another pint,’ he remarked, ‘is the order of the day.’

‘You’ll have us sloshed,’ Pip enthused, looking at her watch. To be sipping very good cider in their uncle’s local, in Derbyshire, at half three on a Saturday afternoon in March, seemed a very good idea.

‘Nonsense!’ Django said, as if offended by the remark. ‘I’ve brought you girls up not to fear alcohol – the fact that you’ve known the taste of drink since you were tiny means, I do believe, that it has no mystique.’ He popped his pipe into the breast pocket of his waistcoat and went to the bar.

Fen McCabe watched her uncle wend his way, his passage hampered by the number of people whom he met and talked to en route.

Funny old Django, his attire so out of kilter amongst the flat caps, waxed jackets and sensible footwear. I mean, it’s not just the waistcoat – he’s teamed it with a Pucci neckerchief today, and truly ghastly shirt that wouldn’t look amiss on some country-and-western crooner. Jeans so battered and war-torn they’d have done Clint Eastwood proud, plus a pair of quite ghastly cowboy boots that shouldn’t see the light of day in Texas, let alone Derbyshire. And yet; Django McCabe, who came to Derbyshire via Surrey and Paris and had three small nieces from Battersea foisted upon him, is now as indigenous as the drystone walls. He fits in, in Farleymoor. Like he suited Soho when he was a jazz musician. But he fitted his life around us when we came to live with him. He’s barking mad and he’s the most important man in my life.

‘If our mother hadn’t run off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Fen said, ‘but if our dad had still had the heart attack, do you think we might have been brought up by Django anyway?’

This was a conundrum upon which each girl had mused frequently, though never in earshot of Django.

‘I would guess,’ Cat said measuredly, though she was merely giving back to Fen a theory her older sister had once given to her, ‘that the whole “cowboy-Denver-I’m-off” thing was probably a key ingredient in his heart attack.’

‘Sometimes,’ Pip reflected, ‘I feel a bit guilty for not caring in the slightest about my mother and not really remembering my father.’

‘I’ve never envied anyone with a conventional family,’ Fen remarked, ‘in fact, I felt slightly sorry for them.’

‘I used to wonder what on earth their lives were like for want of a Django,’ Pip said.

‘Me too,’ Cat agreed.

‘Do you remember when Susie Bailey hid in the old stable, made herself a kind of hide-out from Django’s old canvases?’ Fen laughed.

‘And her mum had to promise her that she’d make Django’s midnight-feast recipe of spaghetti with chocolate sauce, marshmallows and a slosh of brandy!’ Pip reminisced.

‘Do you remember friends’ houses?’ Cat said. ‘All that boring normal food? Structured stilted supper-time conversation? Designated programmes to watch on TV? Bedtime, lights out, no chatter?’

‘Django McCabe,’ Fen marvelled. ‘Do you think we’re a credit to him? Do you think we do him proud? That we are who we are, that we’re not boring old accountants?’

‘Or housewives,’ Cat interjected.

‘Or couch potatoes,’ Pip added.

‘Or socially inept,’ Cat said.

‘I’m sure he’s delighted that my career entails me being a clown called Martha rather than an executive in some horrid advertising agency,’ Pip said hopefully.

Django returned, his huge hands encircling four pint glasses. ‘Philippa McCabe,’ he boomed, ‘every night I pray to gods of all known creeds and a fair few I make up, that you will be phoning to tell me of your new position as a junior account manager on the Domestos Bleach account.’

Pip raised her glass to him.

‘And you, Catriona McCabe,’ Django continued, his eyes rolling to the ceiling, while he produced, from pockets in his waistcoat that the girls never knew existed, packets of peanuts and pork scratchings, ‘speed the day when you trade your job as a sports columnist for a career in the personnel department of a lovely company making air filters or cardboard tubing.’

Cat took a hearty sip of cider and grinned.

‘Fenella McCabe,’ Django regarded her, ‘how long must I wait before you exchange a dusty archive in the bowels of the Tate Gallery for the accounts department of a financial services company? And the three of you! The three of you! Why oh why have I been unable, as yet, to marry any of you off?’ He clutched his head in his hands, sighed and downed over half his pint.

Fen laughed. ‘Hey! I’ve only just landed this job. I’m going to spend my days with Julius!’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Cat wailed, finding solace in cider, ‘Julius.’

‘Bloody Julius,’ Pip remonstrated, chinking glasses with Cat.

‘Oh Lord, not that Fetherstone chap,’ Django exclaimed, rubbing his eyebrows, letting his head drop; a strand of his silver hair which had escaped his pony-tail dipping into his pint, ‘please, dear girl, please fall in love with a man who is at least alive.’

‘Who’s to say,’ Cat mused, ‘that while you’re waiting for the right bloke to come along, you can’t have lots of fun with all the wrong ones!’

‘Please,’ Fen remonstrated but with good humour, ‘my new job starts tomorrow.’ She regarded her two sisters and her uncle. ‘One for which I was head-hunted,’ she emphasized. She ate a peanut thoughtfully, took a sip of cider and looked out of the pub window to the moors. ‘So, my life wants for nothing at the moment.’

TWO

Julius Fetherstone (1866–1954) arrived in Paris in 1886 at the age of 20. There, he begged, bargained and all but bribed his way into the studio of Auguste Rodin, for whom he worked as a technician in return for materials and tutelage. However, though the great Master esteemed his foreign pupil, Julius was never truly accepted by the French who firmly believed, at the exclusion of all visual evidence to the contrary, that the English could no more sculpt than they could cook. When Julius returned to England for a one-man-show in 1935, the British art world looked the other way. ‘Vulgar in theme and execution’ was the The Times review in its entirety. Only 3 works were bought, all of them by Henry Holden. Holden became something of a patron to Julius until the sculptor’s death in 1954.

F.A.McCabe

Unpublished MA thesis

Fen McCabe first came across Abandon by Julius Fetherstone four days after losing her virginity at the age of eighteen. She was in Munich, on her A level Art History study trip when she found herself transfixed by a mass of bronze depicting two figures embroiled in the very moment of orgasm. To her humiliation and regret, it made her realize that the fumbling poke she had recently endured was utterly at odds with what the experience obviously should have been.

From that point on, Fen has been obsessed with the sculptor and his work. On her return from Munich, she unceremoniously dumped the virginity-taker and spent eighteen months apparently celibate. In body at least. However, the more she studied Fetherstone’s work, the more she analysed his drawing and physically handled his sculptures, the more worldly she became. She studied the fall of light on mass, the relationship between form and space. She also learnt about the tension that intertwining figures could create. She came to understand how bodies could stretch to accommodate both their own desire and that of another. She discovered how the sensation of orgasm could manifest itself in facial expression, the throw of a neck, the twist of the stomach, the flail of arms, the jut of a breast, the buck of buttocks.

She devoted both her Bachelor and Master degree theses to Fetherstone, resolutely ignoring her tutors’ advice that she stand back from the material and certainly refrain from referring to the sculptor by his Christian name.

She fantasized about being the woman in Abandon. She forsook film stars as masturbatory stimulus in favour of the image of the male in Abandon. She looked forward to the day or night when she too could enjoy a coupling commensurate with that of the bronze figures; when she would be seduced to a state of abandon by the desire for, and of, such a man. Consequently, she spurned the advances of a relatively long queue of students who all fell short of her ideal. Too puny. Or too gym-induced beefy. Too uncouth. Too affected.

In her mid-twenties, two men came close; but the reluctance of the first to commit and then Fen’s reluctance to commit to the second, rang the death knell on both. Now, at twenty-eight, Fen is single. She isn’t spending much time looking for a partner, nor is she losing sleep over the situation. After all, would a man enhance her life that much? It’s rather good as it is, in Chalk Farm, North London, where she rents a terraced house with damp and with two friends, bohemian neighbours and her two sisters nearby. Life’s busy with her new job and her bi-monthly lectures at the Courtauld and Tate galleries, which she gives voluntarily. No time for romance and all its panoply. Yes, she recently bought a pine double bed from Camden Lock market, with a king-size duvet for added luxury. However, the wink wink nudge nudging from her housemates met with her rebuttal.

‘Hasn’t it come to your attention,’ she told them, ‘that our landlord sees fit to provide us with mattresses apparently filled with sand and gravel which, in places, congeal into concrete?’

Monday morning, the first of April. After sleeping undisturbed through the last night of March, Fen awakes and finds herself sprawled at a luxurious diagonal across her bed. With Radio 4 making her reverie all the more civilized, she cocoons herself in her duvet and stares at the window, whose frame is clearly visible through flimsy curtains. Pinch and a punch for the first of the month. What kind of idiot starts a new job on April Fool’s Day, Fen wonders as she gazes across her room?

After Thought for the Day, which Fen doesn’t think much of today, she leaves her bed and checks her reflection in the mirror.

My hair needs a wash. What do I feel like wearing? What ought I to wear? Do I dress for the weather? Or for the job?

She peers out through the curtains but soon enough she forsakes meteorological reasoning (it’s sunny and bright) for sky gazing instead. But that gets her nowhere so she goes to her cupboard and looks inside. Then she looks from the palm of her left hand to the palm of her right, as if reading one theory and then another, pros and cons; an idiosyncrasy that she knows causes friends and family much mirth and sometimes irritation, but which provides Fen with the answers she seeks. She regards her left hand.

It’s April, it’s positively spring-like. Time for my Agnès B skirt – bought in the sale and worn only once so far.

She looks at her right hand.

I’m an archivist. My office is to be a small room of dusty papers, acid-free boxes, brass paper-clips and shelving with sharp edges. There’ll be no one to see me in Agnès B.

She dons jeans.

‘I’ve hardly slept,’ Abi moans, sitting at the table-cum-storage-surface in the sitting-room-cum-dining-room, rubbing the small of her back and rolling her head cautiously from side to side, ‘bloody bloody bed.’

‘Ditto,’ Gemma says drowsily from the settee, holding a mug of hot tea, her eyes, though partially hidden by her mass of dark curls, drawn to breakfast TV with the volume off. ‘God, my head. Why do I invariably start the week as I end it – with a hangover? Why don’t I learn?’

‘I slept like a babe,’ says Fen, who has appeared at the foot of the stairs, ‘and awoke to a room spic, span and fragrant with Shake ’n’ Vac.’

Abi and Gemma regard their housemate, who looks annoyingly fresh herself both in countenance and clothing.

‘Take your halo—’ Abi starts.

‘—and shove it!’ Gemma concludes.

Fen grins and makes much of sashaying past both of them en route to the kitchen. ‘Toast?’

‘Can’t eat a thing,’ Gemma groans, ‘bloody hungover.’

‘Can’t eat a thing,’ Abi bemoans, ‘bloody on a diet.’

Fen returns with heavily buttered toast and takes a seat at the table next to Abi, balancing the plate on a pile of CDs which are themselves atop a heap of Sunday papers.

‘It’s one of life’s great injustices,’ Abi decrees, glowering at Fen’s plate, ‘that you basically have toast with your butter and you’re still slim and spot free. Bitch. I hate you.’

‘Hate you too,’ Fen says with her mouth full. The two of them sit affably and procrastinate over 14 Across in Saturday’s Guardian crossword.

‘And me,’ Gemma chips in, having been momentarily distracted by the weather girl’s quite staggering choice of lipstick, ‘I hate you.’

‘Hate you,’ Abi stresses non-specifically.

‘Hate you,’ Fen says with no malice and to no one in particular.

‘Hate hate you,’ Gemma recapitulates. And then they all laugh and sigh and say oh God, what are we like? Sigh some more and moan about Monday mornings.

‘Are we going to Snips this evening?’ Fen asks.

‘Yup. Every sixth week at six o’clock,’ Abi confirms.

‘Do you think it a bit odd,’ Gemma wonders, though her eyes are caught by TV presenters doing extraordinary things with sarongs, ‘our obsession with little rituals?’

‘It makes sense to have a communal outing to the hairdressers,’ Abi shrugs, analysing her housemates’ hair: Gemma’s ebony ringlets, Fen’s dark blonde long-top-crop. She twists pinches of her own hair, bleached and razor-cut short into pixie-like perfection. ‘It’s all about synchronization. What’s the point of spending time apart on the mundanities, when we can actually make them something of an institution?’

‘What, even the dentist?’ Gemma asks, turning away from the television, the sight of cooking in a bright studio kitchen making her decidedly queasy. ‘And leg waxing?’

‘Which reminds me,’ Abi says, stroking her calves.

‘Not yet!’ protests Gemma, for whom the pain of a leg wax is on a par with her fear of the dentist.

‘How did we manage to coincide our periods?’ Fen wonders, dabbing at toast crumbs and thinking she could do with another slice, were there another slice left to toast.

‘That’ll be the Moon Goddess,’ Abi says, very earnestly. ‘We’ll dance in her honour next time we’re on Primrose Hill.’

‘Abi,’ says Gemma, ‘you need help.’

‘I’m not going to bother to wash mine this morning then,’ says Fen.

‘Wash what?’ the other two shriek.

‘My hair – if we’re going to Snips.’ Fen fingers her locks gingerly. ‘Anyway,’ she reasons, ‘who’s going to see me in my little archive? Just a bunch of dead artists and benefactors.’

‘Are you excited?’ Abi asks, excited for her friend.

‘Nervous?’ Gemma asks, nervous for her friend.

Fen upends her right palm. ‘Nervous? Yes,’ she says. Then she upends her left palm. ‘Excited? Yes,’ she says. Then she clicks her fingers and punches the air: ‘But I get to have Julius all to myself!’

‘Bloody Julius,’ mutters Abi, when Fen has shut the front door behind her.

‘Bloody Julius,’ murmurs Gemma. ‘Fancy fancying a dead sculptor.’

Abi sighs. ‘It’s not the dead sculptor she’s obsessed with but some lump of marble he made in the shape of two people having a shag.’

‘Our Fen is way overdue a bonk,’ Gemma reasons.

‘So am I,’ Abi rues.

Gemma counts the months off on her fingers. ‘Er, and me.’

‘Maybe we should set aside some time and synchronize,’ says Abi.

THREE

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence.

Byron

Oh God. Oh Gawd. Oh Jesus. Matthew Holden has just woken up. The start to the day, to the week, could not be much worse. He has a hangover. He has a bad taste in his mouth. He’s late for work. And his ex-girlfriend is lying in bed next to him. With a contented smile on her sleeping face. He has a very bad taste in his mouth indeed. He tries closing his eyes but realizes that to stare at the ceiling, at the blooms of new paint on top of old, is far preferable to confronting all the current hassles of his life which parade around his mind’s eye as soon as his eyelids touch. Wake up. But he’s so damn tired. Wake up. Stay awake. Force eyes open. Monday. Monday. April Fool’s Day. Only this is no joke. No prank. He’s been a fool, full stop. It would be easier to just go back to sleep, slip into nothingness, to will it all to be a bad dream. However, while sleep might be a good antidote to his raging hangover, it won’t actually remedy the situation in hand or make it any less real. In fact, he’d have to wake again and do the whole oh God oh Gawd oh Jesus thing once more.

He daren’t move. Memory tells him that if he does, she’ll reach for him, claim him with encircling arms and clamping legs. Never let him go.

I wanted to get away.

The severity of his sigh is pronounced enough for her to turn to him, wrapping her limbs around him. She sighs herself. Triumphant.

Oh God. Oh Gawd. Oh Jesus no.

And then the phone starts to ring and Matt has an escape route though he knows in an instant that it is Jake’s mobile phone. He slithers from his bed and hurries through the flat, very naked.

Jake had, of course, answered his mobile phone. Jake was also late for work. But at least he was dressed. Jake just had a hangover, no ex-girlfriend in his bed. Not today. He had, in fact, bedded Matt’s ex-girlfriend. Quite recently. But never again. And not that Matt was to know. Certainly not today. Matt slumped into the armchair, placed a cushion over his dick and stuck two fingers up at Jake’s superciliously raised eyebrow. He couldn’t remember whether the clock on the mantelpiece was five minutes slow or five minutes fast. Whichever, he was categorically late. Jake had finished on the phone. He let his eyebrows soften though he refused to erase the vestiges of a smirk from his face. He sat down on the sofa. Though dressed, he placed a cushion across his crotch in a gesture of camaraderie.

‘Julia’s in my bed,’ Matt groaned, head in hands.

‘April Fool?’ Jake asked, in a vaguely hopeful way. Matt shook his head and cast his eyes to the ceiling. Only, unlike that in his bedroom, it had been replastered and repainted fairly recently and there were no hairline cracks or nuances of old against new paint to provide any welcome distraction.

Neutral nothingness.

It was realizing that I felt neutral nothingness that saw me finish a five-year relationship two months ago.

‘I could say,’ Jake mused, looking out of the window and deciding that it appeared to be spring-like enough to roll up shirtsleeves, ‘you’ve made your bed, now you must sleep in it.’

‘And my only reply would be, “I can’t, my ex-girlfriend is sprawled all over it”,’ Matt groaned.

‘How on earth did it happen?’ asked Jake.

Matt looked at him and couldn’t resist giving an elaborate, if quite medical, description of the sex act.

‘Really?’ Jake marvelled, playing along. ‘You put your weenie where?’

‘In a lady’s front bottom,’ Matt joshed.

‘How the hell did it happen?’ Jake asked again, seriously, stroking his goatee contemplatively.

Matt shook his head, shrugged and made a knocking-back-of-glasses motion before scratching his tufty cropped hair. ‘Oh God,’ he groaned, ‘oh Gawd. I’m late for work. Jesus.’

Clean, dry, if crumpled clothing in the washer-dryer provided Matt with no reason to go back to his bedroom. He dressed in the kitchen, hopping around trying to wriggle crumb-soled feet into odd socks. Shoes. Shoes? Matt had a rather sizeable shoe collection. But they were all under his bed. Jake had an enviable selection himself. Distributed quite evenly around the various rooms in their flat. Matt honed in on a pair of smart loafers behind the hi-fi.

‘Can I?’

‘What! My Patrick Cox? With those trousers?’

‘Excuse me – they’re Paul Smith, thank you.’

‘Well, that’s fine then.’

‘Cheers, mate.’

Though Jake could barely function without being fuelled by a hefty injection of caffeine, he left the cafetière full and smelling gorgeous so he could leave the flat with Matt. He didn’t want to be alone with a sobbing girl, nustling up to his neck, pleading for comfort and affection, advice and inside information. If he answered her direct questions with direct answers, she’d cry and nustle and need comfort and affection all the more. If he didn’t, she’d believe there was still a chance to rekindle the relationship with Matt. And he couldn’t do that to Matt. Plus, quietly, he found weeping women craving affection and comfort rather difficult to resist. And how she had sobbed that day a month or so ago. And they’d ended up in bed. And all the while, deludedly, he’d told himself he was performing not just a selfless act, but a charitable one which was useful too. He was doing it for Julia. He was doing it for Matt. A good distraction. Get her off his case. Help her get over him. Proof for her that she’s attractive to other men. Bla bla. Etcetera. When he had come, however, he had come to the more fitting conclusion.

Big mistake. Bad idea.

The two men stopped for bagels and coffee en route to Angel tube. Nourished by the former and woken up by the latter, they chatted.

‘Oh God,’ said Matt, ‘why, why, why?’

‘I’d’ve done the same, mate,’ said Jake.

‘But what now?’

‘Dunno? Give up drinking?’

‘You what?’

‘Celibacy?’

‘You what?’

‘Find a distraction,’ Jake concluded. ‘You can’t go on the rebound with your ex-girlfriend. It defeats the object of the exercise. You need a good old zipless fuck.’ Jake was rather proud of such logic despite his hangover and juggling a bagel, a coffee and a ringing mobile phone.

‘Who was that?’ Matt asked, when Jake had finished the call.

‘Your ex-girlfriend,’ Jake said, ‘asking me if she could stay at ours. That she’d clean the flat and have dinner awaiting our return from work. Asked whether she thought you’d like her to iron all your shirts. And change your sheets.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Matt moaned, losing his appetite and throwing the bagel away, the coffee too – knowing nothing could help a headache whose provenance was now not alcohol driven.

‘Hey, Matt,’ Jake called, as they headed for their separate platforms.

Matt turned.

‘April Fool!’ Jake laughed, winking and making to pull an imaginary pistol. ‘It was just Jim on the phone. About five-a-side on Thursday.’

‘Wanker!’ Matt mouthed very clearly.

I did love her. Really love her. I was madly in love with her, for a while, way back when. But it faded. I didn’t really love her at all towards the end. I guess I kept hanging on in there because I was in love with the idea of it all. That it seemed easier to stay together than to split up. On a practical and emotional level. We went through months of arguing. And then months of indifference. Which was worse?

Matt! Pimlico station. You’re about to miss your tube stop.

Splitting up hurt. Though it was something that, amongst the acrimony and indifference, had seemed like a good idea, it still hurt. I was afraid that the decision was wrong. It took some getting used to, but I never actually missed her. Not Julia herself. Her position in my life, yes. The familiarity of having her, yes. But her? In person? No.

Matt! It’s a red pedestrian light and there’s a double-decker haring along Vauxhall Bridge Road towards you.

Oh God. Last night. It happened but it can’t happen again. Shit. It happened and it can’t happen again. Jake is right. I should take a leaf out of his book. Dip in here and there. Just like he does. Dips his dick here and there. No relationship-incumbent panoply. Have a laugh. Be light-hearted. I’m twenty-nine. Thirty soon. Rebound? Sure, whatever.

You’ve arrived at the Trust Art offices, Matt. And you’re following Fen McCabe along the corridor. You have no idea who she is. You’re too preoccupied to really notice anyway. You’re late. Not very seemly for the editor of the Trust’s bimonthly magazine, Art Matters. Don’t make a habit of it.

FOUR

Fen McCabe firmly believes one should trust art because art matters. Henry Holden, who died sixteen years ago aged eighty-three, founded Trust Art in 1938 specifically to enable national art institutions to acquire works of modern art by grant, bequest or gift. Since his death, the Trust has published a bi-monthly magazine, Art Matters. Fen is unsure whether this is Happy Coincidence or Fate though she has consulted her left palm and right for an answer. She thinks it has to be more than coincidence and fate that the man who founded the organization for which she now works also championed Julius Fetherstone, befriending the artist in the 1930s, buying his works and bequeathing them to British galleries. Fen feels that Henry Holden is somehow passing the baton on to her. Lucky Julius. Safe hands.

Along with the Arts Council and the National Art Collections Fund, Trust Art ensures that works of art which may otherwise be sold overseas, are given homes in galleries and museums in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. It has stayed true to its original aim of saving modern art for the nation.

Originally, Henry Holden was the only salaried member of staff. The other six workers were volunteers and all but one were the eyelash-fluttering sisters of his Oxford rowing fraternity; the odd one out being the mother of the cox. They were all utterly in love with Henry. All had double-barrel led surnames, flats in SW Somewhere and places ‘in the country’. Trust Art now employs fourteen people, of whom three are part-time and three are volunteers. Continuing the tradition, these three are minor aristocracy.

Trust Art has long been housed in a clutch of rooms which are part of the labyrinthine network in Tate Britain’s back buildings. Not for them the prestigious Millbank address or approach. You cannot see the Thames from Trust Art’s offices; the view from the John Islip Street windows is of the nicely maintained mansion blocks. There’s little more than a sandwich bar and a newsagent nearby and the shops at Victoria necessitate a veritable march; consequently little more than brief window-shopping during a lunch-hour is possible. Fen is quite relieved that most her earnings will see their way into her bank account, and not be squandered on some impulsive lunch-time purchase, as Gemma’s and Abi’s invariably are.

Fen had arrived at her new job a full quarter of an hour before her contractual start time. And that was with a delay in a tunnel just after Camden Town. There was a veritable welcome brigade awaiting her. If she analysed the palm of her left hand, she was really rather embarrassed by the fuss. Her right hand, however, said that she was quietly rather flattered. Amongst the croissants and coffee set out in the boardroom-cum-library, Fen soon realized that it was all at the whim of Rodney Beaumont, the director of Trust Art; not so much to welcome her as to indulge himself. Consequently, watching him tuck into pastries and talk animatedly about anything but shop with his staff, made Fen feel much less conspicuous. And it was nice to meet the fourteen staff who, it soon occurred to Fen, were as diverse as the art the Trust was saving for the nation.

From Fundraising, three girls with pearls, hearts of gold and hyphenated surnames provided a nice contrast with the two dowdy accountants, sweet but dull, with little interest in art but a near-obsessive passion for stretching the Trust’s funds in all directions. The sober Acquisitions team, essentially art historians rather than administrators, dressed demurely and talked art earnestly with Fen, in hushed tones and with much eye contact. The two women in Membership could double for headmistress and hockey captain and Fen found herself promising them that she’d deliver Trust Art leaflets to all the streets within walking distance of her own.

Fen particularly liked Bobbie, the receptionist, who was clad in an extraordinary polka-dot ensemble as daring for a woman in her fifties as for an institution as seemingly staid as Trust Art. Bobbie was as categorically Cockney as Rodney Beaumont (who looked like an extra in a Merchant Ivory production of any Evelyn Waugh novel) was wholly Home Counties. He lolloped around the room like a young labrador, or an overgrown schoolboy (though he must be nearing fifty), tucking into the croissants. Fen mused that there were probably conkers and catapults and dusty pieces of chocolate in his pockets. He was affable and ingenuous and kept grinning at Fen, sticking his thumbs up or saying crikey! what goodies you are going to unearth! terrifically exciting, terrifically!

And then a tall man, much her own age and appearing to be constructed from pipe-cleaners and drinking straws, such was his thinness, introduced himself. Sidling up to her, he ate his croissant in a silent and contemplative fashion whilst visibly assessing Fen from top to toe. After much teeth sucking and de-crumbing of fingers, he smacked his lips, held out his hand and made her acquaintance.

‘Otter. I’m Otter. Charmed to meet you,’ he said in a voice so camp that Fen initially thought he was putting it on.

‘What do you do here?’ Fen asked, wanting to stroke his hand for fear of breaking it on shaking it. ‘And why are you called Otter?’

‘I work in Publications,’ he said, running bony fingers through a surprisingly dense flop of sand-blond hair, ‘and I am called Otter because Gregory John Randall-Otley is a mouthful.’ He paused, licked his lips and leant in close. ‘A fucking mouthful,’ he bemoaned. ‘Anyway, what sort of a name is Fen, then?’

Fen whispered, ‘It’s short for Fenella.’

Suddenly, she felt utterly buoyant; as if she’d just been afforded a glimpse, via coffee and croissants and people coming to say hullo, of future fun to be had at work. Fen had been excited enough about the job itself and now she discovered, almost as an added bonus, colleagues so affable. On the face of it, backgrounds were distinctly contrary and yet (hopefully not just on the face of it) the staff of Trust Art seemed non-judgemental, genuine and unconditionally friendly. Apart from Judith St John, deputy director, whose steely exterior and somewhat cursory handshake Fen had told herself must just be an unfortunate manner, surely.

‘And when are you Fenella?’ asked the man called Otter. ‘Only on very special occasions?’

‘I am only ever Fen,’ she declared, pausing for effect, ‘unless I’m being told off.’

Otter narrowed his eyes and put his hands on his skinny hips. ‘And are you told off often?’

Fen feigned offence and clasped her hand to her heart. ‘The dread of being called Fenella ensures that I behave perfectly all the time.’ She kept her eyes wide whilst Otter narrowed his all the more.

‘It will become,’ he said, with great conviction, ‘my aim in life to make you misbehave. I shall then call you Fenella at the top of my voice and with much satisfaction,’ Otter proclaimed triumphantly. ‘Now Ed,’ he said, looking around the room, ‘Ed would have you misbehaving in no time, Fen McCabe. Where is he, the bugger? Late. Must have been misbehaving himself.’

Fen laughed. ‘Does that mean we’re going to call him Edward or Edwyn, or whatever his full name is, very sternly all day today?’

Otter regarded her quizzically but before he could answer, Rodney whistled piercingly through his fingers, compounding Fen’s overgrown-schoolboy theory. ‘The meet and greet is over!’ the director exclaimed with gusto good enough for a town crier, or a master of ceremonies, or a soapbox at Speaker’s Corner. ‘There is art to save for the nation – and, more to the point, no bloody croissants left!’

The Archive room was smaller than Fen remembered from her interview, and the boxes seemed to have increased twofold. She sat down in the typist’s chair and swivelled hard, discovering that however hard she propelled herself, the chair conscientiously returned her dead in front of the computer. She ran her fingers lightly over the keyboard, as if eliciting soft notes from a piano, then rotated herself once clockwise, once anti-clockwise. She stared out of the window to the courtyard below which separated Trust Art from the Tate. The incongruous floral roller blind was half down and she gave it a tug to zap it up and let in more light. However, it unfurled with a clacketting whoosh, like a roll of wallpaper from on high, and subsequently refused to be rolled up by hand, let alone spring back by a pull at its cord. Let it hang. Switch on the light instead. A travesty on a fine April morning but better than wrestling with the blind or being held in the dark.

Fen regarded the floor-to-ceiling metal shelving standing up valiantly under the tonnage of brown archive boxes. She felt simultaneously unnerved and excited.

Julius is in there, somewhere. I can’t believe I’m being paid to do a job I’d gladly pay to do. Where on earth do I start? Only half the boxes are labelled and most of those are ‘Misc.’ or have question marks. Six miscs. See here: ‘1954?’, and there: ‘Symposium?’. I’ll start here: ‘Members’ gala dinner (1963) + Trip to Blenheim + Poster for Post Impressionism show + Misc. correspondence’.

Cross-legged on the floor, having hauled the box off the shelf and been sent staggering under its weight, Fen eased the lid off and grinned at the contents as if she’d just prised open a treasure chest. She was engrossed. When the phone rang, she leapt.

‘Hullo?’ she said, as if the call had come through to the wrong extension.

‘Miss McCabe?’

Fen was silent before she clicked that she was Miss McCabe and the call was most certainly for her.

‘This is Barnard Castle Museum.’

‘Hullo! Barnard Castle Museum!’ she greeted them with excessive delight.

‘Just wondering whether you’ve received our package?’

No, she hadn’t but she assured them she’d go down to Reception to check and would call them as soon as it arrived. By the way, what is it? Oh, only photos and documents. Only? Only? Fantastic!

‘I’m expecting a package from Barnard Castle Museum!’ Fen announced triumphantly in Reception, where Rodney was peering with intent into the biscuit barrel.

‘Marvellous,’ he said, though whether this was about the Bourbon biscuit or Barnard Castle was unclear.

‘Not arrived yet, ducks,’ said Bobbie. Seeing Fen look a little crestfallen, Bobbie suggested a biscuit. Seeking some solace in a Jammy Dodger, Fen climbed the stairs and walked briskly back along the corridor to the Archive.

And that was when Matt Holden was a few steps behind her. But as he had arrived so late for work, and she was eager to return to the treasure, neither noticed the other.

‘Have you met the new archivist?’ Otter asks Matt, an hour later.

‘Nope,’ Matt replies, ‘not yet. But I think it’s time for a biscuit break so I’ll go and make my acquaintance. How old is this one? The last one was older than any of the documents.’

‘Nah,’ says Otter nonchalantly, rather amused and starting to scheme, ‘she’s a little bit younger, this one.’

Matt knocked and entered. Fen was sitting amidst dunes of papers and appeared too engrossed to have heard him. He was quite surprised that she was not old enough to be his grandmother.

She looks too young to be an archivist! Who am I to judge on what an archivist should or shouldn’t look like? And who am I to complain!

‘Hullo, archivist.’

‘Fantastic!’ Fen said, spying a large brown envelope tucked under the arm of a man she presumed to be a courier. After all, she didn’t know what the editor of Art Matters looked like. ‘Are you from Barnard Castle?’

‘Er,’ said the courier, looking a little perplexed, ‘no, Gloucestershire originally.’

‘Oh,’ said Fen, nodding at the envelope, ‘isn’t that for me?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘just thought I’d say hullo.’

‘Oh,’ said Fen, slightly taken aback by his forthrightness and wondering whether it was harassment and whether she should have Bobbie phone or fax or e-mail a complaint to his delivery company. ‘Nothing for Fen McCabe?’ she asked, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

‘Er, no,’ said the courier.

‘Bugger,’ said Fen, disappointed and now disinterested; turning from him to regard the boxes instead. ‘You probably want Fund-raising next door,’ she said with her back to him.

‘Do I?’ the courier asked.

‘Or Acquisitions,’ she continued breezily, as if she was a long-term member of staff, ‘down the corridor, before Publications.’ Then she stood on tiptoes to retrieve the box marked 1956. ‘Bugger Barnard Castle,’ she said under her breath and obviously to herself.

The courier raised his eyebrows. At her language, at her turned back, at her neat bottom; at the fact that she was working in a room with the lights on and the blind down on a particularly fine April day. At the fact that she worked here now. But Fen didn’t notice. Not just because she had her back to him. She had lifted the lid off the box and was already enthralled by its contents.

‘Blimey,’ she murmured. The box had revealed an original catalogue to the Picasso–Matisse exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Matt left her to it, hearing her mutter, ‘But that was 1945, what’s it doing in 1956? Matisse was already dead,’ as he shut the Archive door.

Fen was blazing through 1956 when the phone in the Archive rang. She scrambled up from 1942, 1958 and 1979 (all found in the 1956 box – despite it being the only box without a question mark on the label, for goodness’ sake), and grabbed the receiver.

‘Barnard Castle?’ she asked hopefully.

‘It’s Otter. Ed and I are ready for our lunch. Come to our room in five minutes. Next to Acquisitions.’

My God, lunchtime already.

Only Otter isn’t in the room. Just the overfamiliar courier.

‘Oh,’ says Fen, ‘still lost?’

‘Hullo,’ says the courier, ‘again.’

She makes to leave. ‘Are you looking for someone?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘Otter and Ed.’

‘I’m Matt,’ he says.

Fen nods somewhat cursorily at him.

As she made to leave a second time, Otter came in.

‘Fen!’ he greeted her. ‘Meet Ed.’

Fen was starting to feel a little exasperated and she glanced from Otter to the Man With Two Names. ‘Who?’ she shrugged. ‘Which? What?’ Otter looked worryingly nonplussed at Fen’s confusion. But the courier came to her rescue.

‘I’m Matt,’ the courier persists, ‘I edit Art Matters. Hence “Ed”. Although I hasten to add that it is only Otter who calls me Ed.’

‘You’re not a courier?’ Fen asks, frowning first and then blushing, much to Otter’s delight and Matt’s surprise.

‘No,’ confirms Matt generously, ‘just an editor. Sorry to disappoint you. Hullo.’ He held out his hand which Fen took. They shook hands just a little gingerly.

‘Hullo, Matt, then.’

‘Thyu.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Matthew. I edit Art Matters and anything else you want to know you can ask over lunch. I’m starving.’

‘Hangover?’ Otter said not so much presumptuously as from experience.

‘Worse than,’ Matt groaned and hoped that Otter wouldn’t pry or comment.

Otter, however, was now near-obsessed with his self-crowned role as matchmaker. ‘Matthew Holden is a modest sod,’ he said as the three of them walked along John Islip Street to the sandwich shop, ‘he’s twenty-nine, he is a brilliant editor – if a quite dastardly cad. He’s relatively solvent and comes with car and mortgage.’

Fen backtracked and ground to a halt as she did so: ‘As in Henry?’

‘Henry Moore-gage?’ Otter quipped.

‘Holden,’ Fen stressed, staring at Matt.

Please please please! Please let it be so! I’ll cook and clean and perform base acts for him. I’ll marry him and bear him an heir. But please please please!

‘Any relation?’ she said, with hastily employed nonchalance.

‘Father,’ Matt confirmed without fanfare, ‘late.’

‘How fantastic!’ Fen said, wincing as she did so. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … I’m sorry for your loss. But I’m a huge Julius Fetherstone fan, you see, and your father was such a wonderful patron.’

‘I applied under a pseudonym,’ Matt said almost defensively, ‘and anyway, most of his Fetherstones were already bequeathed to national art institutions.’

Fen touched Matt’s arm. He felt firm. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’

Matt reassured her by laying his hand fleetingly between her shoulder-blades.

Otter noticed the physical contact with satisfaction.

‘Did you say “most”?’ Fen asks, as they take their sandwiches into the little gardens opposite the Trust. ‘Did you say most the Fetherstones were bequeathed?’

Matt nods because he has a mouthful of pastrami and ciabatta.

‘Can I marry you?’ Fen asks, all wide-eyed and winsome.

‘OK,’ he confirms through a muffle of bread and sausage.

Otter is delighted with their exchange.

‘It’s not an April Fool,’ Fen stresses, glancing at Matt’s profile and liking it so much she has to cast her eyes away, alighting on his legs instead; feeling suddenly a little light between hers.

Oh God. Not on my first day at work. Not a colleague. Not after so long without. Not after landing my dream job after so long doing mind-numbingly boring placements. So he has great cheekbones, milk-chocolate-coloured eyes and funky this-way-and-that sandy hair. So what. OK, so he’s not too tall, not too beefy but fit. Big deal. And he has good teeth and a gorgeous smile. Well la-di-bloody-da.

So, he’s charming and handsome and he’s Henry Holden’s son.

I am not going to have a flirtation, let alone a fling, with a colleague.

So says your right palm, Fen. What can you read on your left?

Egg-mayonnaise sandwiches never tasted so good. For Fen McCabe, Christmas has come early.

Pastrami on ciabatta is a taste sensation today. Matthew Holden has just appointed the role of rebound to the archivist. No one else need apply.

FIVE

‘A good day at the office, darling?’ Abi jested when Fen took a seat at Snips, the hairdressers, between her and Gemma.

‘Save any art for the nation?’ Gemma asked her.

Even with her hair sopping wet and the stylist’s clips parting it into strange configurations whilst he snipped, Fen looked quite elated.

‘I met a man called Matt,’ she said with a blush that neither Abi nor Gemma had seen for many many months.

‘Please not a frigging statue,’ Abi groaned, wanting to lean forward to clasp her head in her hands but finding her hair tugged back by her irritated stylist.

‘No no,’ Fen breezed, ‘but he is Henry Holden’s son.’

‘So he’s as good as a bloody statue,’ Gemma concurred, ‘God, you’re mercenary!’

‘Probably just your average office flirtation,’ said Fen.

‘Yeah right,’ Abi snorted, from experience, ‘you just try and stop it there!’

Matt hardly gave Fen a moment’s thought when he returned home. His ex-girlfriend was still there. Looking very comfortable. She’d cooked him supper. Some for Jake too, but Jake didn’t show. Matt didn’t have the heart to send her home. Or was it that he didn’t have the nerve? He let her sleep in his bed. Again. He felt somewhat defeated by it all. Exhausted. She entwined her limbs around his and gave his ear lobes sweet little kisses, his chest too; she tried her best to arouse his flaccid cock.

‘I have a headache,’ Matt said, turning away from her but staying awake for hours.

SIX

James Caulfield was woken by his lurcher, Barry, and, in turn, woke the labrador, Beryl, over whom he tripped on his way to the bathroom. He had a leisurely pee and then yawned at length, hanging on to the basin and staring vaguely at the mirror until the fog of reverie lifted and his reflection gawped back.

‘Christ,’ he groaned, stretching his chin to analyse bristle length, ‘reckon I can go another day?’ His dogs did not answer, merely observed him before glancing away in the approximate direction of the kitchen and their breakfast.

‘What’s today?’ James asked, this time not expecting an answer from his canine companions. ‘Thursday, I do believe. That means Mrs Brakespeare and as she’s rather short-sighted, the razor can wait until tomorrow.’ He stroked his chin thoughtfully, sprayed a long blast of deodorant under each armpit and went downstairs in his T-shirt and boxer shorts to feed the dogs. He stood over them, hands on hips, as he always did, while they slurped down their food before staring at him imploringly as if they could eat the same again. ‘Come on, out you go.’ He opened the arched oak door and the dogs bounded out into the morning.

Standing barefoot on the stone steps of his home, he watched the dogs race each other over the lawn. ‘In-digestion!’ he called after them in warning, stopping them momentarily in their tracks, before they resumed their intricate chase in and out of the cedars. James looked over to the great house, the gables of which he could see through the shrubs and trees. ‘Morning all,’ he said quietly, ‘apologies, as ever, should my dogs shit in your shrubs.’ He shut the front door and went to change. It was ten in the morning and he was running late.

James Caulfield is forty-nine years old. He lives at the Keeper’s Dwelling of Delvaux Hall, near Bakewell, Derbyshire. The Hall itself is no longer lived in by Lord Delvaux, or anyone of remotely aristocratic lineage, however tenuous. Fifteen years ago the Hall was converted into ten luxury apartments, the stables, the keeper’s dwelling and the forester’s lodge into self-contained residences. James is a landscape gardener for whom an address as seemly as Keeper’s Dwelling, Delvaux Hall, Near Bakewell, Derbyshire, is essential to his trade. His clientele would be strictly limited if his van and cards gave some cul-de-sac in Chesterfield as his abode. James bought the building as a forsaken shell fourteen years ago, taking on most of the interior renovations himself. Consequently, though his mortgage is relatively small, the upkeep of the place requires a monthly input of funds that his landscape gardening only just about provides for. It certainly does not stretch to fixing the temperamental heating system, or the extensive roof repairs.

While most men his age dress in suits for the office or casuals for tele-working, James’s work attire consists of old khakis, a black cotton polo-neck (the polo part becoming unstitched at the neck), a quilted checked lumberjack shirt, thick socks and hiking boots, an old battered wax jacket slung over his shoulder but worn only in utterly antisocial weather. The whole ensemble, clothing as it does a strong six-foot frame, makes James look much more Ralph Lauren than he does Percy Thrower and that’s why most of his clients are female. His Italian mother bequeathed him a head of tenacious, dark curls that he keeps cut close to his scalp. Though his hairline has receded a little, it has not drawn back further since he was twenty-six, nor have the silver flecks which pepper the sides increased. Because he scrutinized it daily until he was thirty, and it didn’t creep back even a millimetre, James rarely looks at it now – he is more concerned with his torso. When he looks in the mirror, he is always unnerved to see that it is not the body of a man in his mid-twenties that he still fully expects to see. But there again, when he goes for his thrice-weekly run, he is always unsettled that three miles feel much more of an effort than seven ever used to. He fears that age is playing havoc with his memory and powers of logic. Saying that, he is blessed by good looks; working out of doors affords his skin a year-round healthy bloom and his olive complexion accentuates the glint of his nut-brown eyes. His teeth are good. His humour is excellent. His hands are anomalously fine and clean for his job. His self-sufficiency, however, is wholly exasperating.

James is a prime topic of analysis amongst the women he works for. Word of mouth passed him from client to client, and much conversation is devoted to hypothesizing on why such an eligible man is unattached. In their pursuit of the tiniest clue (they’ve given up on full-blown answers), they rarely allow James to garden uninterrupted. He is paid by the hour and if they choose to force him to spend lengthy periods at the kitchen table drinking tea, or juice, or sometimes, according to the season, Pimm’s or spiced cider, then that’s their prerogative. Most would love to object to the presence of his dogs, especially the lurcher with the lascivious glare and probing snout, especially the labrador who invariably digs up much of James’s work before he leaves; but none voice their concern. Whatever makes James happy. What is it that would make him happy? But is he unhappy? He can’t be happy all alone, surely. Do you know? No, do you? Any ideas? Any clues?

He’s an enigma. In Derbyshire, he is day-dream material, fodder for fantasy. He is Mellors. And Angel. He is Gossip. He’s the highlight of many a Matlock Mrs’s week. He knows it and he chuckles to himself amongst the hydrangeas. He plays up to it. He likes the attention. The company. And the control.

Once James had arrived at Mrs Brakespeare’s near Hassop, had been given a cup of tea, a bun and a run-down on her week, there was just time for him to do an hour’s work before lunch-time; a hearty affair of ham and eggs, orange barley water and the recounted ways, wiles and woes of Mrs Brakespeare’s daughters and granddaughters.

‘And you, James, what are we to do with you?’ Mrs Brakespeare declared quite brazenly, folding her arms in a motherly way, for emphasis and persuasion, while she observed him.

‘What do you mean, Mrs B?’ James asked, quietly enough to disguise his teasing tone.

‘Please, after all this time, and all my assurances, please call me Ruth.’

James nodded, though both knew he never would. All his clients begged him to be familiar but the closest he came was to abbreviate their surnames to the first letter. Mrs Woodgate, in Hathersage, one of his newest clients, longs for the day when she will finally be Mrs W.

‘James, James,’ Mrs B chided amicably, ‘we don’t like to think of you all on your own in Keeper’s Dwelling – it’s a grand place, perfect for a family. Well?’

‘Mrs B,’ James replied, clearing his throat and helping himself to an apple which he bit into and chewed for a tantalizing period before answering, ‘as far as I can see, the only way a family will live at Keeper’s is if I sell it on to one.’

‘But you can’t be happy, truly so, just you on your own?’

‘Oh, but I am,’ munched James. ‘Best to be with nowt, than with the wrong’un,’ he said in an accent that was a whole county north and not at all the Cheltenham-born, Cambridge-educated, Derbyshire-living gardener.

‘But you’re not getting any younger,’ Mrs B all but pleaded, ‘you don’t want to become too set in your ways. I mean, you really should shave regularly, too.’

‘Mrs B,’ James said in a voice that blended warning and flattery, ‘Lunch, as ever, was delicious.’ He kissed his fingers and threw them theatrically to the air, fluttering Ruth Brakespeare’s heart quite intentionally as he did so. Still she knew no more about him than she had six months ago. There’d be little to recount to Babs Chorlton, whom she’d promised to phone at tea-time.

‘James,’ Mrs B called from the back door. James looked up from the roses and cupped his hand to his ear. ‘James,’ said Mrs B, ‘promise me one thing – keep the door ajar, never let it close completely.’

James, who had understood her very well, nevertheless sauntered over to the garden shed, opened the door a little and gave Mrs B the thumbs up. Exasperated, she blinked skywards and then went in to phone Babs because it just couldn’t wait.

James had no more jobs that day and, after an arduous trawl through Safeways, and a demoralizing visit to the petrol pump (he was constantly bemused by the fuel gauge in his Land Rover always hovering at empty), he told the dogs he had spent over half the cash he had earned that day, that it was therefore Safeways’ own brand rather than Winalot Supreme for the next few days. After a run which hurt his legs, his lungs and his pride, he sat down to a bowl of Heinz tomato soup followed by a bowl of cereal: Cornflakes, Alpen and Coco Pops, all mixed together and saturated with full cream milk. The combination was delicious and satisfying – and eaten, as often it was, in gleeful defiance of Dawn.

Dawn, with whom James had spent most of his mid-twenties in a gracious apartment in Bath when he was working as a highly paid surveyor, had insisted on providing three courses at seven thirty sharp. With her predilection for well-cooked meat, overcooked veg and stodgy puddings, along with her need to have everything washed and dried just as soon as it was finished with, she made the evening repast about as enjoyable as the taking of cod liver oil as a child. James rebounded into a relationship with an American model so faddish about food that often supper was little more than herbal tea gulped down with air, egg whites blended in the Magimix or, as a rare luxury, liquidized frozen bananas. It was then, in his early thirties, that James decided all potential bed-mates must be dined on the very first date; their choice from the menu and the amount left on their plates determining the level of involvement he was willing to invest.

Ultimately, it cost him a fortune in restaurant bills and redundancy between the sheets. Aged thirty-five, James turned to dogs, Derbyshire and delphiniums for respite. He liked dogs. Dogs ate anything at any time and licked the bowls clean themselves. And Derbyshire was down to earth, with folk whose humour was as dry as their stone walls. And delphiniums? Ah! Delphiniums. The season would arrive soon enough.

And are the Derbyshire dames gems to rival those of the Blue John Caverns? Or are they Bakewell Tarts? Come on, James, don’t tell us you’ve been celibate for fourteen years.

Lord above, no! But you know what they say about discretion …

Do we?

Exercise it and you’re rewarded – lay after lay.

No one has scratched a little deeper?

No. If I’d been an idiot, I’d have married my childhood sweetheart at twenty-one. Anyway, my father had two wives, several mistresses and innumerable dalliances. I look on him as an example – albeit, one not to follow. Women are complicated. And they are expensive too. And noisy.

And you’re forty-nine now.

Yup. Stuck in my ways with my heart shared equally between two dogs and a draughty house. Not much more room in there. Anyway, I’m not that inviting a proposition. I had a couple of women last year, one in Glossop, one in Crookes, for whom I was the height of glamour on account of my age (I was at least twice theirs) and accent. Folk round here would love to see me set up in the Dwelling with a wife and the proverbial 2.4 – but they’ll be keeping their ripe daughters well away.

Why?

Because I think they feel if I’m unmarried and with sperm awaiting at forty-nine, there must be some reason for it, something wrong.

OK, what about their older daughters?

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that an unmarried man, at forty-nine, is far more attractive a proposition than an unmarried woman of that age.

But are you happy like this?

I’m used to it. Familiarity breeds content.

With a huge mug of tea and a clutch of digestive biscuits, James goes to the room he calls the study to divide his attention between three days of unopened mail and today’s Guardian. Bill. Bill. Bill. Bill Clinton. James does some hasty mental arithmetic and reckons that the amounts owing will swallow nicely both the amount earned last month and to be earned this.

Swallow nicely – hey, Mr Clinton?

Barry and Beryl look at him with expressions bordering on pity. James studiously ignores them and the pile of red bills, and tries to ignore the fact that he is verging on broke. He turns the page of the newspaper and reads that an anonymous bidder at Calthrop’s paid £3 million for a Matisse.

‘Shame we don’t have a Matisse or two knocking about,’ James says, regarding a pair of oil sketches above the fireplace. ‘My bank manager hates me.’ He looked at the numbers under the Matisse painting. He thought about his bank manager. He looked at the pile of red bills. He thought about the Fetherstones. ‘Compared to a Matisse, we’d probably need to subtract most of the noughts if we put the Fetherstones up for auction.’ He ventures over and unhooks one of the paintings from the wall. It is about the size of a coffee-table book.

How awful that something as prosaic as a leaking roof and irate bank manager would make me think of selling my Fetherstones. There again, pruning rhodos does not a rich man make.

‘Anyway, my lot are probably not even worth half of a pencil smudge by Monsieur Matisse.’ He looks at the back of the board he has just taken down. ‘Adam, 1895. Eve,’ he murmurs, taking down the other, ‘1894. Biblically impossible – but artists are gods of a type – creating and destroying and having tomes of nonsense written about them.’ He looks at the wall and cringes at the two light rectangles edged by dusty outlines. He places the two paintings side by side. He feels ashamed that he’s trying to read price tags on them. He feels irritated that, at forty-nine years of age, his finances are in disarray and his bank manager is rude to him. He looks at the oil sketches, butting up against each other. Without the width of the extravagant stone mantelpiece separating them, he suddenly appreciates how they were conceived as much more than a pair. He feels ashamed for having kept them apart.

‘Dirty bugger!’ he chortles under his breath with deference to the artist. He sees how, if he was to cut the figures from the board, they would entwine together in copulatory ecstasy. ‘Hang on,’ James says, leaving the room and disappearing out into the garden followed by his dogs. He returns without them, but with a small sculpture of two figures. ‘I forgot about you two, pumping away privately under the boughs of the weeping willow. I’ll bet you anything – yes! You see!’ He brandished the statue as if it was an Oscar, glancing only cursorily at the woodlice clinging haplessly to its base. ‘Put the two figures in the paintings together, cast the lot in bronze and this is what you get.’ He read the base. Eden, 1892.

‘That can’t be right. Surely he’d have done the sketches first? More to the point, if this is not a culmination piece, is it worth less?’

What am I doing? Am I really thinking of selling them? Just because I’m broke?

He scrutinized the dates on the boards and the bronze and knew he read them correctly. ‘I might ring Calthrop’s tomorrow. Just out of interest. Or for insurance purposes.’

Clipped tones in the Nineteenth Century department at Calthrop’s assured James that they’d be frightfully interested in any works by Fetherstone and, whilst they could estimate nowhere near the number of noughts of the Matisse league, they said they were confident of a sum far more princely than James had ever imagined.

‘I say, you wouldn’t like to bring them down to Bond Street, would you? Let us have a good old snoop? Valuations are free.’

‘I may,’ said James cautiously.

‘And you say the sculpture is just over a foot high?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s a bugger.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We live in hope of the marble Abandon being brought in unannounced one day. Now that would earn you a bob or two and a place in the history books.’

‘Really. Well, sorry to disappoint. But perhaps I will bring the others – I don’t know if I want to sell them, though my bank manager would. Do I need to make an appointment? Ask for who?’

‘A triple-barrelled surname,’ James exclaimed to his dogs, before filling a bowl with cornflakes and two crushed Weetabix. Eden, now free of woodlice and soil, stood at the foot of the stove; Adam and Eve were propped against the knife block and the washing-powder box. It was nearly eleven in the morning. Mrs G’s at noon, just for a prune, then Mrs M all afternoon, hopefully till tea-time and a good feed. So, no rush then. James perused the Guardian. He started the crossword, but without a pen it soon became a little trying. Then the name Julius Fetherstone leapt out at him from the small print of the galleries listings.

‘“Julius Fetherstone: Art and Erotica”. F. McCabe. Tate Britain. Thursday Lunch-time Lecture. Millbank, SW1,’ he murmured. ‘Flavour of the month, Fethers old boy?’ He put down his spoon and looked hard at the paintings. ‘Doesn’t fashion dictate an inflated value?’ He rummaged around in a kitchen drawer, found a rail timetable that was surprisingly not out of date, and consulted it for a train for the day after next that would bring him into London in good time.

‘Looks like we have a date.’

SEVEN

Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world.

William James

I’ll just nod, Jake decides over a mouthful of Chicken Madras. I’ll just nod and not comment.

Matt was remarking on the physical similarities between a girl on a TV advert for dandruff shampoo and Fen McCabe.

I won’t comment, Jake thought, I won’t say, ‘Yes, but you said that one of the girls we chatted to in the pub last night looked like her’. I’ll just nod.

‘Fen’s face doesn’t have that hardness, though.’

I won’t ask you how Fen can look like that girl on the adverts and the girl in the pub and Gwyneth Paltrow and your very first girlfriend.

‘Not that willowy, though. Just normal height, I suppose.’

I mean, if she looks like all the above, she probably doesn’t look remotely like any of them. A crazy mixed-up kid – which is what you’re sounding like, Matthew Holden. You can’t possibly go for a healthy rebound brand of zipless fuck with someone occupying your thoughts as much as this Vanilla girl.

‘Don’t fuck the payroll,’ Jake says.

‘I’ve no intention of doing so,’ says Matt, who feels suddenly just a little vulnerable, as if he’s been caught out. ‘I’m just saying that it’s refreshing to have a nice view at work. She seems like a laugh. Like we could be mates.’

‘Like you want to mate her,’ Jake counters, offering to swap the foil container with his Madras for the remains of Matt’s Rogan Josh.

Matt shrugs. ‘Nah,’ he says, feigning indifference by appearing incredibly interested in Newsnight.

‘Anyway,’ says Jake, ‘if she looks like a hybrid of that model crossed with Gwynnie and the girl in the pub, if she’s intelligent and a laugh and all that – well, she’s probably happily ensconced with some lucky bloke whom she blows to heaven and back every other night.’

‘Probably,’ Matt agrees, after a moment’s thought. It made sense that Fen would already be taken. ‘Bugger Newsnight,’ Matt says, ‘let’s go for last orders.’

‘How’s Matthew Hard-on?’ Abi asks Fen whilst wrestling to uncork a second bottle of Sauvignon.

‘I had lunch with Otter today,’ Fen replies, taking the bottle and deftly wielding the corkscrew. ‘He’s recently broken up with a long-term girlfriend.’

‘I thought Otter was gay?’ Abi says.

‘Huh?’ says Fen, ‘Oh. No. I mean Matt.’

‘Ah!’ says Abi, messing Fen’s dark blonde long-crop.

‘Aha,’ says Gemma, twiddling her dark curls herself.

‘I mustn’t get involved,’ Fen says.

‘Nope,’ cautions Abi, ‘he’ll be on the rebound.’

‘And the impression you ought to be making at your new job is of archivist extraordinaire,’ says Gemma.

‘Not slapper,’ says Abi.

‘You’re right,’ says Fen. ‘Anyway, I don’t really know him at all, do I? I just find him attractive because he seems like a nice bloke and he’s really sexy looking.’

‘When really he might be a total prat,’ muses Gemma, having had one too many of those.

‘Or a complete sod,’ Abi warns, having had one too many of those.

‘Exactly,’ Fen says decisively. But she goes to bed planning on what to wear the next day. Perhaps she’ll be loitering with intent, accidentally on purpose, outside Publications near enough to lunch-time.

Bugger! I can’t. I’m lecturing at the Tate at lunch-time. Just as well. Just as well.

EIGHT

Defy the influential master!

Cézanne

‘Don’t moisten too much,’ Auguste Rodin told Julius Fetherstone, a little surprised at his student’s uncharacteristic ineptitude, ‘use your finger to check.’ The great master had been slightly perturbed that today, his English protégé seemed fractious, distracted. He had therefore given Julius the simple task of moistening the clay maquettes so they did not dry out and crack. But he observed that the young artist sponged and sloshed the slip as if he was bathing a horse. Rodin suggested Julius stop. That he sketch.

‘Don’t want to sketch,’ Julius said defensively.

‘Take over from Pierre and continue the carving of The Kiss,’ Rodin instructed. Such an exacting task was also an honour – to allow the young Englishman time with the master’s current work. The marble was in another studio. By itself. Away from Rodin. An ante-room away from the other students. Away from the six models, of both sexes, moving naked around the studio so that whenever a sculptor turned and wherever his gaze fell he was confronted by the human form and the play of light upon it.

‘“Love led us to a single death”,’ Rodin quoted as he walked his young student around The Kiss.

‘Paolo and Francesca,’ Julius elaborated, wanting to impress his master that he had read Dante’s Inferno and knew the story. ‘Paolo’s brother goes to war entrusting the welfare of his wife to him. Paolo and Francesca fall in love and have an affair. Hell is their reward.’ Rodin nodded sagely. ‘Tell me that it is only in the arts that love could lead to eternal damnation,’ Julius pleaded privately under his breath. Rodin, who at once now understood the provenance of his student’s malady, decided it wise not to comment. He left the room, encouraging Julius to imagine he was stroking the skin of the figures to define their form, rather than carving into marble to reveal it.

Which is precisely what Julius did – and did very well – for an hour.

Then he left the ante-room and returned to the main studio as if in a trance, not seeming to notice that his master was regarding him quizzically and soon with irritation. In fact, Julius was not aware of any other person being in that studio. He scooped up an armful of terracotta clay, cradling it like a baby as he walked to the end of the room. There he sat down on the ground and laid the clay between his legs. He was sweating profusely. Panting. Little under an hour later, Julius suddenly growled, shouted, wailed, as if something was being wrenched from him. His body was twisted into spasm before collapsing and becoming as flimsy as rags. Rodin, quietly, ventured over. His young student looked up at him, tears silently streaming down his clay-smeared face. The great sculptor looked at what the young Englishman had created, had created in a frenzy, that tortured him so.

Two figures. About a foot high. Their bodies simultaneously flowing into each other like liquid but also bucked solid at the moment of sexual ecstasy. The redness of the clay accentuating the sense of flesh, blood and arousal.

‘Paolo and Francesca?’ Rodin asked carefully, not wishing to intrude on the intensity of personal experience that had so obviously consumed his student.

‘Yes,’ Julius replied. His voice was hoarse, not from the lie but from the exertion of wresting the form away from his soul and out into clay. Rodin told him to go, to rest for two days, not to visit the studio but to indulge himself with time, to work and create alone, slave only to what this inner inspiration was dictating.

‘I will keep your clay moist,’ Rodin assured him. And he would. For to see brilliance in one’s students is affirming for the teacher. A legacy. A testament. A lineage in the making. The future in safe hands. ‘I am the bridge between the past and the present,’ Rodin muttered at a naked young woman who smiled politely and wondered if she should tell the sculptor that pellets of terracotta clay clung to his great beard like berries to holly.

Oh, how I hunger for her. Never more. Never more. lam full. And yet I starve.

Julius bought a baguette and a hunk of ham. With his teeth, he ripped the bread as he walked to his apartment but his mouth was dry and the bread stuck in his throat.

She has sucked me dry. And yet creative juices overflow and threaten to consume me.

His master had told him not to work and yet Julius broke into a jog. Home, home, he had to be there now! As soon as he entered his apartment, he dropped his provisions on the floor, fell to his knees and, with white chalk, drew Cosima across the floorboards. Where she had been. This time yesterday. Stretched out. Enfolding him. Him in her. Where did he end and where did she begin? That was the point. There was no beginning; there could be no end. And yet it had ended between them. He had to abandon himself to this fact. He would do so willingly. To be enslaved by the memory of Cosima was a captivity he could only welcome, however torturous it might be. Pain is good. Salvation from despair. Growth and creation.

There was a knock at the door.

Cosima!

No. Of course not.

Oh shit!

Thursday.

Rent day.

It would be Madame Virenque who knocked.

This week, as last, Julius was penniless. Jacques Antoine would pay for the portrait bust of his fiancée only on delivery. A small advance had been given for materials. And spent. Oh God, still she knocks.

Julius opened the door. Madame Virenque raised an eyebrow. She saw the chalk drawing on the floorboards and her other eyebrow was raised.

‘You have money?’

‘Non, pardon, Madame.’

One eyebrow down, the other now cocked lasciviously.

Close your eyes, Julius. Imagine Cosima. Forget that your landlady’s breasts are pendulous, spongy; the skin akin to used crêpe paper. Remember instead the pertness of Cosima’s, the translucence of her skin, the blush of her nipples. Do not allow the more pungent smell of this woman to override your memory of Cosima’s sweet muskiness. If where you are dipping your cock now is slack, undefined, hold the base of your shaft and conjure the heat, the tightness of Cosima’s sex. Come quickly. If you come, she will go.

Cosima, Cosima. Oh God.

Madame Virenque was disappointed. Her eyebrows told him so. But still, she could not now argue for the rent. An orgasm for her was not a condition of the barter.

The orgasm for Julius emptied his mind as much as it emptied his testicles. The pall had lifted and he was thinking clearly.

‘I need money,’ he said to himself after she had gone, knowing too that he must eat, so he sat down to his ham and bread. ‘I will never fuck for lodgings again.’ He wanted to move. He needed money to do so. There was a substantial amount for the taking, merci beaucoup, Monsieur Antoine. ‘I must commence the portrait bust of his fiancée.’

That evening, Julius started his portrait of Cosima. Only it wasn’t Cosima – not that Jacques or their friends would know. Julius idealized her natural beauty, enhancing her features to create an exquisite face atop an elegant neck and a stunning décolletage. Of course, the result would so flatter Jacques Antoine that he would pay the sculptor gladly. And yet Julius could keep Cosima to himself.

‘A true sculptor works from the inside out,’ Julius said out loud when his wire armature was complete and his fingers throbbed, ‘even when you carve away at rock – when you work from the outside in, rather than when you model with clay and build up mass – it must be the essence of the subject which dictates the surface details.’ He turned the banding wheel slowly, staring hard through the wire mesh as it rotated before him. It was like a network of atoms, the most rudimentary step towards breathing life into sculpture. ‘And yet most people who look at sculpture see only the exterior. Just the periphery. The superficiality of the surface.’

By creating a portrait that was idealized, Julius knew he would be flattering Jacques Antoine’s vanity.

Julius took to his bed in the early hours, unwashed even though his hands were bloodied from torn fingernails and cuts from the wire. ‘My piece will have pride of place in their drawing room. And Jacques will present it to all those who enter. “See how beautiful is the woman who is my wife!” he will boast. “Did you ever see beauty more complete? How skilled is this young Fetherstone! Of course I will introduce you – I am sure he will sculpt your wife too.”’

Julius slept deeply, dreaming of his work in progress: the portrait bust, also his clay maquette. Wherever he was in dream-time, that writhing twist of terracotta was in sight. When he woke, he knew somehow how significant it was. How the work itself would dictate his future as much as his passion for Cosima.

As soon as it was light, Julius began to build muscle and tendon and bone and gristle aboard the armature with nuggets of clay. He worked all hours for two weeks; borrowing money from a rich student of Rodin’s to pay rent to Madame Virenque. The bust progressed. It was a virtuoso piece; emotion poured from the tilt of the face or the sweep of the forehead and even now the sculptor knew just how light would catch and suffuse the work once it was cast in bronze. When he carved the eyes and parted the lips and swirled the hair idealistically, then he knew he had hidden Cosima deep within the piece. He had her to himself. She would reappear, he knew she would, whenever he sculpted an anonymous female form again. And no one would know it but him. And ah! how he would know.

He felt a certain smugness knowing how he could con Jacques and his circle into believing that this idealized beauty in bronze was the spitting image of the woman herself. But they would be incapable of recognizing her in Abandon, or Eden, or Hunger, and all the related works that were already in embryo, propagating as rampantly as cells, in the mind of the sculptor.

They would not recognize her. But Julius would see her, possess her again, from this day forth whenever he carved a breast, modelled a pair of lips, shaped a waist, defined a buttock, the run of a stomach, the intimacy of an ear lobe. It would be her. Unmistakably. No one else would know, though. For they would be too caught up in surface details. They did not know her inside out.

This distortion, though slight, was enough to condition all those who saw the sculpture to reappraise the way they regarded and recalled Cosima. Her own face swiftly became that of the sculpted version to all who knew her. Thus, when Julius created his masterpiece, Abandon, no one recognized the female figure as Cosima though he had commanded all his power and dexterity as a sculptor to best describe the woman who had both liberated and destroyed him.

For the rest of his life, alongside pot-boiling portrait busts and garden sculpture, Julius Fetherstone devoted maquette after maquette and volumes of sketch-pads to the theme of Cosima and Abandon. He cast four versions in bronze. There is one in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, another in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay. A late version was bought by Getty and is on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago. The remaining bronze is at the Neue Pinakotek in Munich.

Julius Fetherstone’s masterpiece, his magnum opus, the marble version of Abandon, exists now only in photographs. It has disappeared. Presumed stolen. It was at the artist’s studio around the time of his death in 1954 because it can be seen in the background of photographs chronicling the artist’s last weeks, bedridden in his studio surrounded by his work. There is scant documentation about Abandon, only Julius declaring to the great art historian Herbert Read that ‘within the rock, all my desires as a man and a sculptor were contained and released’.

Of what value are grainy, monochrome, two-dimensional records of something that was conceived and created to be experienced in the round?

A tease. Torture. A tragedy.

NINE

Love is essentially copulation, the rest is only detail, doubtless charming, but detail nevertheless.

Auguste Rodin

‘Blimey mate,’ said the cloakroom attendant at the Tate gallery when James handed him the rucksack containing the Fetherstones, ‘what you got in there? Bleeding crown jewels?’

‘You never know,’ said James who then wished he hadn’t because the attendant promptly opened his bag for a suspicious look inside.

The attendant smirked and raised his eyebrows at Adam and Eve enclasped in ecstasy. ‘Is that art, then?’ he asked James.

‘God no,’ said James, ‘pornography.’

Matt and Otter both knew why Fen had refused sandwiches with them. They knew exactly what her prior arrangement was. And, though they knew that she obviously wanted to keep her lunch-time lecture secret, they couldn’t resist going.

‘We’ll keep out of sight,’ Otter reasoned.

‘We’ll be silently supporting her,’ Matt justified.

‘We’ll be fleshing out the audience,’ Otter continued.

‘We’ll sit at the back and sneak out before the lights come up,’ Matt concluded.

Only Fen’s lecture was of course conducted not in an auditorium but in the sculpture hall, so Matt and Otter found pillars to hide behind.

‘My God!’ Otter exclaimed. Matt, though, was speechless.

There was Fen, sitting on the lap of a large stone man whilst a stone woman pressed her back against his, her head thrown back, one arm extended down with her hand firm over her pubis, the other arm stretching above, her fingers enmeshed in the male’s hair. Fen sat very still, having positioned herself so that the male form seemed to be nuzzling her neck, his right hand masked from view by her body but apparently cupping his cock. Or wielding it. Or touching Fen’s bottom. Or delving right in. The sight was quite something. Quite the saucy threesome. Matt’s jaw dropped. Otter giggled involuntarily. James felt his trip to London was already proving well worthwhile though he had yet to visit Calthrop’s. Judith St John arrived late. She coughed when Fen was about to speak. Fen swiftly told herself that perhaps Judith simply had the beginnings of a cold. Judith St John had no interest in Julius Fetherstone, whom she considered a second-rate Rodin. But she was interested to hear just what this Fen McCabe had to say. Bloody double distinction from the Courtauld Institute. She herself might only have one distinction but she’d graduated five years prior to Fen McCabe. Hardly second-rate. Standards had been much higher then. And the true distinction was that she was deputy director of Trust Art. And look at Matt Holden, all mesmerized. Oh for God’s sake.

‘Julius Fetherstone,’ Fen started, assessing that Judith’s cough had subsided and that the audience of around twenty was all above the age of consent, before stretching her arm above her, stroking the male’s cheek before placing her hand over that of the female, ‘was obsessed with sex.’

Fen slid from the lap of the sculpture and, with her hand on the male’s hand which, it transpired, was indeed lolling over his cock, she ran her fingertips up his arm while she continued. ‘Fetherstone seemed to delight in the paradox of capturing in stone, or bronze, and in a frozen moment, all the heat, the moisture, the movement and, most of all, the internal sensation of the sex act.’ She brushed the cheek of the man with the back of her hand and then rested her head gently on his shoulder, draping her arm down over his chest. The women in the audience wanted to be where Fen was, wanting to touch and clasp and grapple with the awesome sculpture. Many of the men in the audience, however, just wanted to touch Fen. Apart from Otter who was transfixed by the male sculpture. And by a rather athletic-looking tourist a few yards away.

‘This work is called Hunger,’ Fen said, standing back from it though it meant her all but pressing herself against two young women listening. She gazed at the stone and then faced her audience. She made eye contact with all of them, with Otter and Matt and James and Judith. But she did not glance away, or give a blink of discomfort or recognition. Fen McCabe, art historian, was rather different from Fen McCabe, archivist. Or was this merely the spell of Fetherstone’s works? ‘It’s called Hunger,’ she repeated, standing much closer to her audience than to the sculpture, ‘but the couple themselves seem quite sated, don’t you think?’ The audience bar James was staring at the sculpture. ‘Don’t you think?’ It was a question. James wanted to answer but could not establish eye contact and didn’t really want to raise his hand. Anyway, the lecturer was staring directly, almost at point-blank range, at the two young women near to her. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Definitely,’ one whispered. The other could only nod. They were both flushed. Not from humiliation or embarrassment. But from the effect the mass of copulatory stone had on them.

‘Fetherstone worked on the theme of sexual abandon from 1889. His great treatise – titled Abandon – now exists in four supreme bronzes. Though the whereabouts of the marble Abandon – staggering even in the few photos we have of it – remains a mystery. Just look at them,’ Fen implored, turning back to the sculpture, ‘just look at them.’ She gave her audience a tantalizing few seconds of silence. ‘Now, this portrait bust of Jacques Lemond,’ she said, moving to a plinth nearby, ‘is not just conventional in conception, it was staid and boring even for the time in which it was executed.’ Fen McCabe had cast the spell and then broken it. The audience had to follow her dutifully to another work, a rather uninspiring, if well executed, head and shoulders. But Fen was manipulating her audience. Her talk ended ten minutes later, having utilized a cross-reference with Maillol and a look at the two oil sketches by Fetherstone (which James was most pleased to deduce were inferior to his in execution and subject matter). She’d answered the obligatory questions (having anticipated, by the look of her audience, what they were to be) and then she’d left the gallery. Briskly. Perhaps to have a sandwich or something. Buy an Evening Standard. Cosmo, maybe. She knew well what would be going on in the sculpture hall. Most of the audience would remain. She’d observed their reaction to her lecture, to Hunger, to sculpture, on several occasions. They’d potter about half glancing at other works. Some would linger at Rodin’s The Kiss. But all would gravitate back to Hunger, however long it took. To circumnavigate. For a deeper look. To feed their hunger.

Judith had left noisily midway through the Q&A. Matt left the gallery unseen, leaving Otter to chat up the athletic young tourist. Matt’s semi hard-on disconcerted him.

It’s not just the look of her. Not the sculptures, for Christ’s sake. I think it’s that she’s so damned passionate. I don’t know!

James took a taxi to New Bond Street. There was a stirring in his trousers too. But he rationalized that he was turned on by the thought of the money his own Fetherstones might generate. Or by art, of course. Not by F. McCabe. No no no. He peered into his rucksack. Adam and Eve were still at it. Again. Leave them to it. Recall the content of the lecture so he was well armed to rebuff any bluff from the auctioneers. What did she say? That F. McCabe? She called him Julius. What does F stand for? Fiona? Frederika? Frederika probably. Freddie to her friends. Something like that. What had she spoken of? James couldn’t remember. He chastised his age as the culprit. But how come he could remember everything about her? Down to her having just the one dimple when she smiled which increased to two when she laughed.

Whilst James sat on a rather hard but aesthetically fine mahogany bench outside the Nineteenth Century European department, he wondered if the higher up you were at Calthrop’s was directly proportionate to the number of hyphens in your surname. And whether the number of hyphens to the surname might equate with the number of noughts such an expert might achieve on the sale of works. And how long they were entitled to keep a visitor waiting. Ten minutes and counting. He concentrated hard on two seascapes and thought how he’d really much rather have the Fetherstone oil sketches on his wall than those. Why was he selling them then? Money? Yes. But not because he was greedy. Because he needed to.

‘Mr Caulfield? Margot Fitzpatrick-Montague-Laine – good afternoon,’ an immaculate woman with a warm smile and affably outstretched hand, who looked too ordinary to have hyphens in her name and too young to hold a job of such stature, greeted James and ushered him through to her office, her eyes wide and expectant at the sight of his rucksack. ‘I think it most honest that my colleagues in Nineteenth Century British passed you to me,’ she said. ‘I mean, Fetherstone was British by birth – but he is so quintessentially European.’ She looked at James earnestly. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Quintessentially,’ James responded, stressing a different part of the word to imply it was a conclusion he had himself made already, whilst racking his brains to recall anything F. McCabe had said along those lines in her lecture. He couldn’t remember if she had. She’d talked about moisture. And sex. And carnal delirium. And this Nineteenth Century European woman was very attractive and she was talking money and was thus all the more attractive because of it. And because she could enunciate words like ‘quintessentially’ in a most sonorous way.

‘So,’ she was saying with an eyebrow raised almost coquettishly, ‘what do you have for me?’

‘Adam and Eve having a fuck,’ said James without thinking, because he was thinking how much he’d like to have a fuck. With F. McCabe. Or Margot F-M-L. Whoever. It had been a while. He wondered whether to apologize. Or to bite his lip. Or make light of it. Or just ignore it. But seeing her eyes light up, he decided that to show her Adam and Eve having a fuck was a good start.

‘1892,’ he said, by way of introduction to the sculpture. He gave her a few moments to feast her gaze upon it and then brought out the sketch of Eve. ‘1894,’ he said, watching Ms F-M-L hone in on the painting. Then he brought out Adam. ‘1895,’ he said, titillated by seeing how excited Miss Margot was. He didn’t really care whether this was over their monetary or aesthetic value, or a mixture of both. She looked hungry. And it turned him on. ‘What am I bid?’ he jested. She stared at him.

‘We offer the paintings as a pair,’ she suggested in a most conspiratorial voice, as if hatching an illicit plan, leaning close to him with an almost clichéd amount of cleavage on view. ‘It would be a travesty to split them. We put the reserve at around thirty thousand.’ James worked hard not to gulp because he felt she was scrutinizing him to see if he would. Or to see whether he’d noticed her bust. He had. He didn’t gulp. He nodded sagely. ‘The bronze,’ she said, musing, ‘forty thousand is realistic.’ James was sure to tip his head to one side and look out of the window as if considering whether this was the most financially viable route for him to take. ‘I propose we offer them in the July sale. It’s a biggie. Lots of Americans. Fetherstone is growing in popularity over the pond.’

‘Would you care to have lunch with me?’ James asked.

‘I’m hungry,’ Ms M. F-M-L said, licking her lips.

She chose two starters. Asparagus. Predictably. And oysters. Ditto. James tried to tuck into a Caesar salad but anticipated it would all be gone in two mouthfuls. Actually, it was five. He was still hungry. Watching Margot do what she was doing to the asparagus, he didn’t know what he longed for more – her or one of Mrs Brakespeare’s substantial platters of ham and eggs.

‘Will you let me have them?’ she asked, leaning across the table and exhibiting her cleavage again to great effect.

‘No,’ said James.

‘Or, let me just keep them in the department for a while?’ she compromised, her pupils as dark as the espresso in front of her.

‘No,’ said James.

‘Oh go on,’ she purred, ‘just come back to my office – I’m sure I can persuade you somehow.’

‘Roger!’ she calls across the vestibule to a man who comes over. ‘This is James Caulfield. He’s brought in three delightful Fetherstones. They’re in my office. Do come and have a look.’ This offer she extends to two other men they encounter on the way back to her office. James watches her bottom, clad in a tight skirt, swaying seductively as she takes the stairs. He has to thrust his hand deep into his trouser pocket in a bid to conceal his erection. She opens the door to her office and a shaft of light streams in, soaking Adam and Eve who are still having sex. Right there, on her desk.

‘Let me see now,’ she says, ‘how am I going to persuade you to part with them?’ Closing the door with her back, all of a sudden she pulls James towards her and gorges herself on his mouth. She doesn’t sip him down as she did the oysters. She doesn’t tongue him tantalizingly like she did the asparagus. She doesn’t linger over him and take her time. She gobbles him, sucks him, chews and gulps at him. Her hands grab and squeeze and pull at him. Her body is bucking and writhing against his. His face is wet from her mouth. His lips are being bitten both accidentally and on purpose. His hair is being pulled, his shirt tugged, his belt yanked. He isn’t kissing her back – her mouth is in the way. And it’s all so sudden, he hasn’t had the chance to think about it, to object, to stop himself, to participate.

Oh my God! She’s going to give me a blow-job! Oh my God! There’s someone knocking at the door.

It is Roger from downstairs wanting to see the Fetherstones. Anyone there? James’s thudding heart is in his mouth. And Margot has her mouth full. Roger has gone away, thank God.

Oh God, what is she doing?

James raises his eyes to the heavens but they hit the ceiling where fat cherubs are cavorting with whimsical unicorns and baby centaurs. He closes his eyes.

It’s been a while. Not since that girl in Hathersage.

Margot has stopped sucking. Her knees crack as she stands up to face him. James doesn’t know what to say or where to look. He’s desperate not to take leave of his senses but his brain has now taken residence in his balls. Coming is such a priority that it overwhelms any thoughts of intruders or condoms or impropriety or ramifications or repercussions. She hoicks up her skirt and guides him inside her. A few quick thrusts is all it takes.

The relief.

God. Now what? Where to look? What to say?

‘Definitely July,’ Margot is saying, rearranging her clothing, ‘the Americans will be here on a shopping spree.’

‘They’ll be sold to a private collector?’ James asks, zipping himself up, turning away from her and giving Adam and Eve an apologetic look.

‘Undoubtedly,’ she confirms, walking over to her desk.

‘And they’ll leave the country?’ James asks, staring at his Fetherstones as if they’re children about to be committed to boarding-school overseas.

‘I would say so,’ she says, regarding him levelly.

‘Don’t you think that would be a shame?’

‘With the money they could generate?’ she retorts, astutely. ‘It’s not my job to make sure that works of art go to the right home, wherever that may be, just that they achieve the highest amount possible.’

‘Say it’s a bank vault in Los Angeles?’

‘Then it’s a bank vault in Los Angeles that forked out around £70,000 to make space for them.’

James obviously doesn’t like the sound of this.

‘Look,’ she says, too sweetly so that it verges on patronizing, as if she’s lost interest with him, as if his soft side or conscience was not the reason for her having fucked him, ‘if you’re worried about where they’ll go, why not offer them to a national institution via the NACF or Trust Art? We can still be your advisors. You will forfeit the whole premise of an auction, of prices rising alongside salesroom hysteria.’

‘Phone the Tate?’ James asks.

‘Wherever,’ she says, ‘then the gallery will try to raise funds via a grant from, as I said, the NACF or Trust Art. You know who you should contact? Fen McCabe. She works at Trust Art now. She’s a Fetherstone fanatic. We offered her a job which she declined because she said she’d protest every time one was sold to a home of which she might not approve.’

‘Fen,’ James mused.

‘McCabe, short for Fenella, bit of a mouthful,’ said Margot Fitzpatrick-Montague-Laine, ‘we were in the same year at the Courtauld. She was the class swot. Mind you, it gained her the sole double distinction that year.’

James didn’t feel like telling her that he knew exactly who Fen was, that he had just been enthralled by her lecture, by her passion. But he was surprised just how pleased he was to learn her first name. How fortuitous it was that he could contact her. And he was surprised that, suddenly, he felt very hungry again.

‘Think about it,’ Margot said whilst ignoring James, and Adam and Eve, to flip through the documents on her desk, ‘call me.’

TEN

Otter observed Matt trying to settle. He watched him stroke his chin, scrunch his already short scrunched ochre-coloured hair, rummage through sheaves of paper, tap a number on the phone with a pencil but not make the call, take the pencil to his mouth and drum his teeth lightly. With his spectacles now replacing the pencil and hanging off his lips, Matt had his eyes fixed at absolutely nothing going on outside the window. His mind, Otter mused, was not fixed on the job in hand.

He should be thinking about editing that article on Kandinsky and Schönberg? But I rather think he’s thinking about sculpture. But there again, I should be writing the side bars for the Antony Gormley article. And I’m thinking about Jorgen who is twenty-five, Scandinavian and just happened to be listening to the same sculpture lecture at the Tate as I was.

‘How’s the Kandinsky piece shaping up?’ Otter asked Matt, to distract himself from the distraction of the shapely Jorgen. Almost begrudgingly, Matt turned his head, dragging his eyes around, looking slightly baffled. ‘And Schoenberg,’ Otter prompted helpfully. Matt gave him a slow, thoughtful nod backed up by a noncommittal noise from his throat that told Otter that Matt had given the article little attention.

Matt stretched and yawned in a way that was far too considered to be natural. ‘We should ask Fen to write a piece on Fetherstone,’ he said in a tone he was employing to be nonchalant but which was far from it. It was four o’clock and Otter felt ready and entitled to a jolly little gossip about Fen, Jorgen, whomever, but Matt was already walking from the room.

‘To talk articles with Fen,’ Otter said to his computer screen. ‘Go on, lad, ask her out for a drink.’

Matt chastises himself as a soft sod for hovering, even for but a second, outside the door of the Archive. That he can hear her rustling makes him want to ease the door open and observe her unseen. See her on tiptoes wrestling with boxes; see her sitting on the floor, making piles; perhaps standing with her back to one of the shelves, engrossed in some catalogue, or comfortable in her chair, mesmerized by a fan of black-and-white photographs. He doesn’t knock.

She’s sitting on three of the toughened boxes. With her toes turned in. Matt can see down her top.

‘How timely,’ Fen says, who’s had a most productive afternoon and has given little thought to anything but the contents of 1952. ‘Have you ever seen these?’ She offers him a clutch of old photographs. He looks at them and, from his vantage point, he glances down Fen’s top again.

‘It’s my father,’ he says, locking on to her eyes and realizing for the first time that they are blue. ‘Who’s the old chap with the beard?’

‘Matisse!’ Fen all but whispers in deference and excitement.

Matt scrutinizes the photos, sneaks another look at Fen’s breasts. ‘I really enjoyed your lecture,’ he tells her.

She’s blushing! The girl who practically masturbated herself on a stone man – and woman – is blushing.

‘Thanks,’ Fen mumbles, feeling the need to study a Post-it on a box that says ‘Misc’.

Go on, Matt – ask her for a drink after work. Make it casual – a Trust thing; no ulterior motive, a trust thing. Have a little flirt!

‘Maybe you could write a piece on Fetherstone for Art Matters?’ Matt asks.

‘Sure,’ Fen replies briskly, tucking hair neatly behind her ears, back ramrod straight. Archivist. Art historian. Colleague. Art is what matters.

Fen pouted and rested her head on Abi’s shoulder. Abi stroked Fen’s hair, stroked her shoulders, and thought that now was not the time to ask Fen what on earth she was doing wearing her Paul Smith top. Gemma came back from the bar with vodka and Red Bull for each of them.

‘Fen’s sulking,’ Abi said to her, ‘don’t quite know why – here lovey, have a little sippy to help lubricate your vocal chords.’

Fen had more than Abi’s suggested sippy, she practically downed her drink in one. Gemma and Abi regarded her expectantly. ‘First, I go and bloody blush,’ she said.

‘Well,’ Abi started, wondering why the facts should amount to a pout of such proportions. She wasn’t quite sure how to continue so she took a long slug at her drink and filched a fag from Gemma.

‘Then,’ Fen pouts, ‘then I go and get all disappointed that all he wanted was an article from Fen Fen the Fetherstone Fan.’

Gemma and Abi smoke their cigarettes contemplatively.

‘I was primed, ready and willing to say, “Why, I’d love to have a drink with you”,’ Fen said, ‘instead the only sane answer was, “But of course, how many words and when’s the deadline?”.’

‘Yes, but …’ Gemma started. If that had been me, she thought, I’d have suggested discussing word limit over a drink. But it was Fen. And she’s as predictable as I am.

Fen, having finished her drink and having no need for a cigarette (she’d smoked without inhaling as a teenager and inhaled when she was at university, just the once, before throwing up quite spectacularly), was suddenly lucid. ‘No!’ she exclaimed, ‘the point is that I quite wanted him to make a pass.’

‘Cool!’ Abi said. ‘You fancy him.’

‘About time too,’ said Gemma.

‘Could be dangerous,’ Fen muttered.

‘Or the start of something very beautiful,’ Abi jested.

‘A good old flirt is quite good fun,’ Gemma shrugged.

They all nodded. Fen, though, still looked a little perplexed.

‘Another drink?’ she offered, though no answer was needed.

Abi and Gemma spied her at the bar, having a surreptitious look from her left hand to her right. And though this affectation often irritated them, tonight they praised it as they saw that her eyebrows were no longer knitted together in a furrow of discontent. No doubt she’d be ordering doubles all round. A shot for the right hand, a shot for the left.

It’s not just Otter who wants to play a part in bringing Fen and Matt together. And it’s all very well Gemma and Abi encouraging Fen to the hilt. And Jake banging on about the merits of a zipless fuck, the necessity of The Rebound. More fortuitous, though, Fate is set to lend a helping hand too. Just like in the movies. Eyes meeting across a crowded bar and all that.

‘Crown and Goose?’ Jake suggested to the five-a-side team as dusk descended on Regent’s Park. ‘Who’s coming?’

‘Sure,’ Matt said, slightly disgruntled that he was in jogging bottoms and an old rugby shirt while Jake had brought along a change of trousers and a clean top. ‘Are you just vain or merely more organized?’ he asked.

‘I’m always fastidiously prepared for all eventualities,’ Jake countered, slightly irritated that their team-mates were sloping off to wives and partners and a civilized glass of Chardonnay, ‘plus I had lunch with a firm near us so I nipped back home.’ Matt regarded him nervously. Jake smiled and slapped his back. ‘Fear not,’ he assured Matt, ‘there was no bunny boiling on the stove, no messages on the answerphone and the flat was just as we left it.’

‘Three days of silence,’ Matt said. ‘Perhaps she’s genuinely cool about things. Or do you think she’s planning something?’

‘Your wedding?’ Jake glibly suggested. ‘Or your death,’ he tempered, on observing Matt’s horror.

‘Come on,’ Matt said, walking into the Crown and Goose, ‘lager?’

‘Actually,’ says Fen, looking imploringly at the barmaid and darkly at Jake, ‘I was next.’

‘Two pints of Carlsberg,’ Jake ordered, momentarily and conveniently deaf; looking squarely at Fen before turning on the charm for the barmaid. Giving Jake an accidentally-on-purpose jab with her elbow and a look of utter distaste, Fen raised her eyebrows at the barmaid in a ‘Men! Pah!’ kind of way, hoping to appeal to her feminist proclivities or sense of conduct at the very least. The barmaid, however, was silently praising God that the softball season had started early and, though it gave her no satisfaction to blank Fen, it gave her much pleasure to serve Jake, even more so because she had pipped Sonia, who’d worked there longer, to the post. Fen started humming Aretha Franklin’s ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ but the irony was lost on the barmaid who was engrossed in Jake’s tip and smile; both disproportionate to the service she had provided.

‘Come on come on!’ Abi implored Fen when she returned with what were definitely doubles, ‘more Matt!’

‘Yes,’ said Gemma, ‘details.’

Fen, all of a sudden slightly sloshed, was happy to oblige. ‘I was chuffed that he came to the lecture. I think he was genuinely interested, his father championing Julius and all.’

‘Oh God, not that bloody bloody sculptor,’ Abi cried, swiping her brow as if a mammoth headache had descended.

‘Come on,’ Gemma nudged, ‘vital statistics.’

‘I told you,’ Fen said, ‘he’s tall. Ish. And good-looking. Ish. And blond.’

‘Ish?’ asked Gemma.

‘Well – dark blond. Ish?’

‘Natural?’ asked Abi.

‘I would hope so,’ said Fen primly.

‘God, for an art historian, your powers of description are terrible,’ Abi teased.

‘Just because he’s flesh and blood and not stone or metal doesn’t excuse you from technicolor detail,’ Gemma added.

‘I’ve only been there four days!’ Fen remonstrated. ‘I just quite fancy him. Not specifically for his looks. Or his personality. He just seems …’ she stopped and her jaw dropped.

‘Just?’ Abi prompted.

‘Seems?’ Gemma pressed.

‘Over there,’ Fen said.

Thank God the bar was noisy enough for the ensuing squeaks of delight and giggles of excitement from Fen’s group to go unheard. Thank God the bar was crowded enough to dissipate the heat from three sets of eyes burning into Matt.

‘Oh God,’ Fen cried, ‘what do I do? Smile? Wave? Ignore? Die? Loo? Home?’ Gemma took Fen’s left hand and gave it a quick but tight squeeze. ‘Has he seen me?’ Fen asked. ‘Has he?’

‘Delicious,’ Gemma said, not quite knowing if she should be raising a glass to Matt or his friend.

‘You certainly haven’t done him justice,’ said Abi, ‘you didn’t say about the facial hair.’

‘The other one, the other one!’ Fen said, wishing she could just stare at one spot and keep her eyes from continually flitting over to the boys.

‘I rather like the look of the-other-one-the-other-one,’ Gemma said, ‘I’ve never had a man with a goatee. I quite like them. I rather think they could tickle my fancy – if strategically placed.’

‘I’ve had one,’ Abi declared, ‘very strategically positioned. In fact, it tickled my fancy so much, I had a fit of the giggles and fanny-farted in his face.’

‘Shush!’ Fen pleaded. ‘Stop! Where are you going?’

‘Over there,’ Gemma said.

‘To make our acquaintance,’ Abi said, ‘to see if he passes muster and whether he warrants our seal of approval and, therefore, whether we grant you our go-ahead.’

‘Oh God, he’s seen me. I’m going to the loo,’ said Fen, who didn’t need to go and didn’t know why she wanted to disappear. She went, though, and stood by the sinks for a while trying to compose herself, compose what to say. She was simultaneously excited yet felt a certain timidity too. She was bemused.

Abi and Gemma were also bemused.

‘Shy? Fen?’

‘Why?’

‘That girl has spent far too long persuading herself that art nourishes her every need,’ said Gemma.

‘And she’s spent far too long listening to us bang on about the Inevitable Bastard Element Of All Males,’ said Abi, ‘though it’s a risk she’ll just have to take. I mean, we do, don’t we?’

‘We do,’ Gemma confirmed, ‘and it’s often Fen who picks us up when we’re in pieces.’

‘But we invariably go for the wrong ones,’ Abi rationalized.

‘And Fen doesn’t go for anyone at all,’ Gemma continued, ‘so, though Matt might not be a Wrong One, she probably doesn’t want to find out the hard way. Hence taking the easy route direct to the loo. Or home. Or back to the bronze of a nineteenth-century sculptor’s studio.’

‘Oh blimey,’ Abi sighed, ‘she might so be missing out!’

‘That’s the risk she’d probably rather take,’ Gemma qualified.

‘She won’t let us give her a helping hand,’ Abi mused, ‘so let’s just shove her right in there.’

Gemma regarded Abi, knowing the idea would be fine if it was she whom Abi was setting up, but just slightly concerned that they were meddling too deeply, too fast, for someone like Fen.

‘Feeling brazen?’ Abi asked slyly, eyeing up Jake just as much as he was eyeing her.

‘When am I not?’ Gemma sighed as if it was some great affliction, eyeing up Jake just as much as he was eyeing her.

Oh God, no!

Fen?

Cows!

What’s the problem?

They’re over there – with Matt and that bloke. I’m not prepared.

You can’t map out life like you plan a lecture, you know. See – Matt’s spotted you. He’s raising his glass. He’s grinning. They all are. Just a bunch of people chatting. Go and join them. Go on.

Sometimes, a good cliché is hard to beat. Sometimes, it’s priceless, especially if it is obvious that the person delivering it is doing so quite intentionally. Even more so, if they are doing so because it is quite obvious that they need it as a prop, a shield, without which they wouldn’t quite know what to say. Therefore, Matt’s opening line of ‘Fancy seeing you here’ – though it was met with Jake raising his eyebrows and Abi and Gemma swallowing down a snigger – made Fen grin.

‘Do you come here often then?’ she countered.

Refusing to be out-clichéd, Matt retorted, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

Gemma couldn’t resist, ‘What makes you think that Fen is a nice girl?’ and Fen, who was floundering for a cliché to bat back, didn’t mind this in the least.

Jake murmured to Abi, ‘Can’t really say that nice girls are my bag. I like them naughty.’

‘I’m downright dirty, mate,’ Abi responded, staring at him straight before turning her back on him to give Matt the Spanish Inquisition.

‘What does Abi do?’ Jake asked Gemma.

‘She edits a teenage girls’ magazine,’ Gemma told him. ‘And you?’

‘Advertising,’ Jake said, ‘I’m afraid. You?’

‘I,’ said Gemma, pausing to make sure her lips were parted to great effect and that her eyes had darkened, ‘do most things. But I draw the line at animals.’

Matt and Fen talked mainly about work. But they nattered nineteen to the dozen and were excessively interested in what the other had to say. Even though some would argue that a noisy pub in Camden Town wasn’t quite the venue for a lecture on Fetherstone’s deconstructionist foray 1927–29. Nor was it a convivial setting for Matt’s stories of homesickness at boarding-school from the ages of nine to eleven. But the anonymity of the setting, the background noise, beer and vodka, the unexpectedness of it all, made it seem safe. Fun too.

‘See you in the morning, then,’ said Matt, because last orders had been and gone and the bar staff had stopped begging the punters to leave and were now demanding they do so.

‘Mine’s a cappuccino,’ said Fen cheekily, ‘and a pain au chocolat.’

She winked, did Fen McCabe. She even winked. She didn’t even think to marvel at the disappearance of all that previous timidity. But Gemma and Abi did. And they knew it could not be attributed to vodka alone. The girls walked home, Fen swelling with pride and joy as her friends assured her that Matt didn’t just pass muster but scored very highly on their excessively exacting set of standards.

‘Stringless sex?’ Jake tosses casually as he and Matt make their way down Parkway hoping to hail a cab before they reach Camden Town tube station and have to suffer the Northern Line to Angel. ‘Zipless fuck?’ Jake bandies yet detects a momentary discomfort in Matt. ‘Fanbelt Macbeth?’

Matt shrugs. ‘Taxi!’

‘Well, if you don’t, mind if I do?’ Jake hazards, not because he has any designs on Fen, but merely to elicit a response of more satisfying proportions from Matt.

‘Yes, I bloody do!’

Aha! Jake thinks. ‘You couldn’t have stringless sex with her anyway,’ he declares.

‘Why not?’ Matt says defensively.

‘Because she has you nicely knotted up already,’ Jake defines.

‘Sod off,’ says Matt, unnerved by Jake’s perception.

‘It’s true!’ Jake says. ‘So my advice is not to venture to Vanilla McCabe until you’ve had a good poke elsewhere.’ Matt hopes that his expression doesn’t register “why ever not?” but obviously it has. ‘You do need time out,’ Jake defines. ‘You can’t go from one straight into another. It’ll be out of the frying pan into the fire.’ Jake assessed it was time to lighten up. ‘If she’s out of my bounds,’ Jake says, with a change of tone, ‘what about her flatmates then? The raven-headed sultry Gemma; the feisty blonde sprite, Abi?’

‘Be my guest,’ says Matt, relieved to deflect the attention away from himself and Fen. ‘Which one?’

‘Either,’ Jake shrugs, as is his way.

Matt raises his eyebrows.

‘Both,’ Jake shrugs, as is his way.

ELEVEN

Fen wasn’t quite sure what the score was with personal phone calls. Her job didn’t require much time on the telephone; just the occasional call, made or received, to a gallery or museum. But on this, the last day of her first week at Trust Art, Fen wanted desperately to make a call. Should she ask? Even if the response was laughter? Or a frown of disapproval? Would Bobbie’s switchboard sound the alarm, start flashing in another colour? Would Rodney scurry in and cry, ‘Good Grief! Fenella McCabe – we’re a charity. You are eating into funds that could be spent saving modern art for the nation!’ Was it a good excuse to pop along to Publications and ask Matt to specify the rules and regulations concerning communication equipment at Trust Art? Just an excuse, any, to pop along to Publications?

I’ll be quick. I only need to say a sentence. It’s too good to keep to myself.

Fen phoned Gemma at work, at the TV production company, though she had to hang on for an agonizing few minutes whilst Gemma was located.

‘Guess what!’ Fen whispered.

‘What?’ Gemma whispered back but had to repeat herself due to much background noise in the editing room.

‘Guess who came into work to find a cappuccino waiting on her desk, piping hot?’

‘Blimey, Fen,’ said Gemma, ‘I’d regard that as symbolic as a diamond ring, if I were you.’

Fen told Gemma to piss off and phoned Abi in search of less sarcasm.

‘But did he remember the pain au chocolat?’ was Abi’s response.

Fen told Abi to piss off and phoned her older sister Pip immediately, hoping for less cynicism and a distraction from her sudden concern over the lack of pain au chocolat.

‘Don’t read too much into it,’ said Pip thoughtfully.

Fen wanted to tell her sister to piss off, but knew Pip meant well and spoke from love as much as from experience. So she phoned her younger sister Cat, now craving a response that was neither sarcastic, cynical nor commonsensical.

To Fen’s delight, her sister cooed appreciatively (though privately Cat felt Fen was reading far too much into it) and said things like ‘He sounds gorgeous’ with the inflection in all the right places. Feeling bolstered, Fen had no need to further abuse the Trust’s trust in her use of their phone; she drank and savoured her cappuccino and then felt well equipped to commence her duties for the day. She didn’t feel like a pain au chocolat anyway. She’d had toast with her butter, for breakfast, as always she did, before leaving for work.

TO: m.holden@trustart.co.uk

FROM: f.mccabe@trustart.co.uk

RE: caffeine

dear m, thanks for the essential caffeine injection – i’m whizzing through the files at twice the normal speed. for future reference, one sugar too, please. F McC

It took almost seven minutes, and three full edits, before Fen sent that one.

TO: f.mccabe@trustart.co.uk

FROM: m.holden@trustart.co.uk

RE: caffeine allocation

dear f, and I thought you were sweet enough. M

Matt didn’t send that one.

TO: f.mccabe@trustart.co.uk

FROM: m.holden@trustart.co.uk

RE: caffeine allocation

dear f, not only will I remember sugar, I’ll also make sure it’s not decaff. Must be the frothy topping that’s enabled you to feel so productive this morning. M

‘Oh God,’ Fen groaned quietly, hiding her head behind a sheaf of letters from 1965 between Lord Bessborough and Henry Holden discussing the gift of a Barbara Hepworth Pierced Form, ‘it was decaff, it was decaff.’

TO: m.holden@trustart.co.uk

FROM: f.mccabe@trustart.co.uk

RE: RE: caffeine allocation

dear m, froth had fizzled away by the time I prized off the lid. and the pain au chocolat had mysteriously self-combusted because, though I searched in drawers and in a box marked 1965, there was not a crumb of evidence of its existence. f McC (hungry)

Fen fired that one off without so much as checking it.

TO: f.mccabe@trustart.co.uk

FROM: m.holden@trustart.co.uk

RE: RE: RE: caffeine allocation

head hanging low with shame and remorse. No froth? No sugar? No caffeine? No p au c? Would a sandwich lunch make it up to you? If you haven’t already expired before you’ve made it to 1966? M

Fen actually printed that one off, folded it, slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans and reread it at ridiculously regular intervals during the morning. She also checked her e-mail with alarming regularity but her in-box remained empty.

Mind you, I haven’t responded to his last.

Playing hard to get, Fen McCabe?

No, just playing. It’s fun.

Of course she had a sandwich lunch with him. Sitting in the gardens of the flats opposite the Trust. Otter came too. But neither Fen nor Matt minded. Fen felt a certain pride that their chemistry should be witnessed and later commented on; Matt just didn’t mind that Otter was there. Otter, who adored Matt and, in just one working week, felt very tenderly towards Fen, nevertheless couldn’t resist a gossip and a little action. That a drama in miniature could be played out before his eyes, under his direction, fed the lascivious and puckish side of his nature. A necessary antidote to his daily grind of correcting punctuation and typos. It was therefore with careful timing and timbre of delivery, that he told Bobbie he would let her into a little secret. But he did so only when he knew Judith St John would be in earshot.

‘Love loiters along the corridors of Trust Art,’ he said in a hushed but knowing voice.

‘Ooh blimey!’ Bobbie exclaimed. ‘Who is it, Otter? I thought you was the only nancy boy here!’

‘I am!’ Otter declared proudly, laying a thin hand on Bobbie’s shoulder, which was padded extravagantly in the receptionist’s enduring homage to Joan Collins.

‘You swinging the other way then?’ Bobbie asked him almost accusatorily. She looked him up and down, hoping whomever he chose, of whichever sexual persuasion, would be someone kind who’d feed the poor duck with meat and at least two veg on a nightly basis.

‘Dearest Bobsleigh,’ said Otter, ‘’tisn’t me at all. But lust lurks, mark my words!’

‘Who?’ Bobbie whispered, eyes so wide that the false eyelashes on her upper lids all but meshed with her eyebrows. ‘Where?’

‘In. The. Archive,’ Otter defined, noticing that Judith’s head was unmistakably tilted though her hands rifled through the pile of post in her pigeon-hole. ‘Our Matthew has his eye on young Fenella. You mark my words.’

‘Ahh!’ Bobbie said, tutting with appreciation and high hopes for the young ’uns.

‘There’ll be all sorts of shenanigans behind the Archive shelving,’ Otter prophesied, noting with satisfaction that Judith, post in hand, was nevertheless standing stock-still. ‘Debauchery amongst the boxes,’ Otter offered as his parting shot, winking at Bobbie and walking past Judith as if she wasn’t there.

Not if I have anything to do with it, thought Judith, smiling somewhat disdainfully at Bobbie, whose only crime on this day was a Dynasty-style suit in a lurid cerise.

Judith had no need to go upstairs, but she swanned past Publications and waltzed into the Archive. ‘We don’t, as a rule, use the Trust phones for personal calls,’ she told Fen, ‘not even if it’s supposedly pre- or post official work hours. We’re a charity.’

‘I am so sorry,’ said Fen, wanting at once to be swallowed by the box on her lap and taken to the safety of 1966 (before she had been even a twinkle in her father’s eye).

‘You weren’t to know,’ said Judith, covering her triumph with a spite-sweet smile, ‘but you do now.’

If he doesn’t want me, he’s not having her. Not that I know if he wants me or not. Haven’t tried that one. Yet.

Judith swanned out of the Archive and into Publications, inviting Matt to the opening of the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern the following Tuesday evening.

‘Welcome to the end of your first working week,’ said Matt, who’d found the pretext of a missing hole punch as the excuse to visit the Archive for the second time since lunch. ‘We’re going to the pub for a—’

Fen’s phone silenced him and he soaked up her wide-eyed excitement at its ringing.

‘Archive?’ she said, almost with incredulity, on answering it.

‘Fen McCabe?’

‘Yes?’

I don’t recognize the voice yet he’s Fen-ing and not Fenella-ing me.

‘James Caulfield,’ the voice drawled. ‘I was told to call you by Margot Fitzpatrick-Montague-Laine – I think that’s the right order and the right quota of hyphens – at Calthrop’s. You know, or knew her.’

God! Margot! thought Fen, who really hadn’t thought about Margot Fitzpatrick-Montague-Laine since leaving the Courtauld.

God! Margot, thought James, who had thought of her on occasions when he couldn’t sleep.

‘It concerns three Fetherstones in my collection,’ he said, clearing his throat and rearranging his semi-hard cock in his trousers.

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