by Freya North
Though, if it’s so good an idea, why is my mouth so dry?
There’s Beryl! Or is it Barry? The Land Rover must be parked outside. There’s James. Smiling. Approaching. Here.
‘Fen,’ he greets, laying his hand on her shoulder, leading the way out.
It was lovely to be back at Keeper’s Dwelling. There felt nothing untoward in being in such close proximity to this man. Fen was in no moral maze because she had no thoughts of Matt whatsoever. Now, feelings for James – positive and good – were at the forefront. Which is why, when she went to the loo, she was so horrified by the knickers she had chosen with such care that morning.
What was I thinking? I am wearing tatty old knickers, chewing-gum grey, back to front. I know my trousers don’t allow for Visible Panty Line – but why did I improvise? Why didn’t I wear one of my G-strings? Why have I tried to emulate the G-string effect with a pair of shabby pants, back to front?
She knew it was for the same reason that she hadn’t shaved her armpits or legs – because this morning, full of the joys of her union with Matt, she wanted to dissuade herself from the temptation that is James. She thought shabby underwear and stubbly limbs would deter her. Alone in James’s toilet, she tried to return to that mind-set.
Art. Art. Think and talk art. Phone Django.
‘Where are Adam and Eve?’ she asked James, who was sitting in the snug with Barry lolling over his feet and Beryl slumped over Barry, both dogs sharing a plate of Jaffa Cakes with their master. James didn’t want to tell her they were on top of each other upstairs under his bed. He didn’t want to say the words ‘upstairs’ or ‘bed’.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said instead, ‘they’re in the other room – nicely unframed, of course.’
Fen took the easy chair opposite him and accepted a Jaffa Cake. He watched as she nibbled all around the edge and then levered off the orangey bit to suck and savour. It was both seductive and charming – rather like Fen. On the one hand, James found her mesmerically sexy; on the other, he sensed a freshness and naivety. He imagined he could take her to bed and subject her to the rudest of sex, or he could sit her in his chair and treat her like a porcelain doll.
‘James?’
Sit still, Fen.
‘Fancy some exercise?’
Just you sit in that chair and stay as you are.
‘James, shall we take the dogs out for a walk?’
Marvellous idea.
‘Marvellous idea.’
Striding through Forestry Commission land near the Folly, James and Fen let their bodies touch, even bump, accidentally-on-purpose. Every now and then, Fen would fall back a step or two. She liked to see James ahead of her. His hands slung into his pockets, his head cocking this way or that to locate some bird or admire some tree. His profile fine, a smattering of bristles enhancing his rugged, outdoorsy mien. She felt he was leading the way, setting the pace, taking her for a walk. She liked his control, his dominance. He took natural paths at random, the carpet of pine needles making footfalls soft and springy. She loved the way his walk was so confident, so in tune with the environment. The dogs were like balls on a bagatelle, careering this way and that, bounding between trees and over logs and through dank-smelling marshy patches; every now and then depositing chunks of well-chewed branch at Fen or James’s feet as a gift.
‘Tell me about Django,’ James said, because it was a safe subject and one in which he was genuinely interested. ‘It’s highly likely that we have crossed paths at some point.’
‘Django is our mother, our father, our guardian angel, our best friend,’ Fen said without gushing, ‘and you’d certainly know if you’d crossed paths with him!’
‘Your mother?’ James probed. ‘How did you cope?’
‘Easily,’ Fen said, ‘as far as I can remember. I wasn’t even three when she eloped with her cowboy from Denver. My only real memory is Battersea. Of our front room. The room is more vivid in my mind’s eye than my parents, though. It had fabulous wallpaper – a little like the opening of Doctor Who – lots of receding circles and stuff.’
They walked on quietly.
‘In fact,’ Fen said, with a chuckle edged with slight remorse, ‘I used to think of those shapes as advancing – only in recent years, I think of them as receding.’
James observed her; she was smiling lightly but there was a fatigue to her eyes. ‘Must be your advancing years,’ he jested gently, ‘you’re getting old.’
‘I wouldn’t want the memory ever to fade altogether,’ she said.
‘It never will,’ said James, as if with authority, ‘I assure you.’ On they walked. James put his arm across Fen’s shoulders. ‘On the face of it, you’re practically an orphan.’
‘Not with Django,’ Fen remonstrated.
‘No,’ James nodded, ‘by all accounts. Plus you have sisters, of course. I hated being an only child.’
Barry interrupted them, hurtling at great velocity on account of being pursued by Beryl who was carrying a branch of such menacing proportions in her mouth, that Fen was sent flying.
‘Bloody dogs!’ James muttered as he righted Fen and brushed her down. ‘Mangy mutts.’ Fen was laughing, having taken no offence from the dogs’ behaviour and having been amused by James’s response. Beryl and Barry squirmed around Fen and James, their noses trying to detect the humans’ true mood, to work out whether punishment or forgiveness was imminent. Dirty paws scratched imploringly at trouser legs whilst brown eyes gazed adoringly upwards; the combined effort saying, ‘Sorry! We love you!’
‘There there,’ Fen soothed, patting heads matted with forest-floor debris.
‘Bloody dogs,’ James said, but not unkindly. ‘Fancy a drink?’
Fen knew the Cross Oaks public house – but not as well as she knew the Rag and Thistle. She was confident therefore that she would not be recognized. Momentarily, she was disturbed by her desire for anonymity. Soon enough, though, she settled in and enjoyed a half-pint of lager and lime to James’s full pint of bitter. She helped herself to the lion’s share of the quite sizeable packet of cheese-and-onion crisps he brought to the table.
‘How about you, James,’ she said, with crumbs at the corner of her mouth, ‘are your folks Derbyshire people? Are they alive?’
‘Both dead,’ James said, ‘my father more recently so. Though it was my mother to whom I was closest as she brought me up and I saw little of my father for many years.’
‘That’s sad,’ said Fen, because she could truly empathize, ‘you really are a bonafide orphan!’
‘All alone in the world,’ James chuckled, ‘though far from lonely.’
‘I love my sisters,’ Fen said, ignoring the internal voice asking why she was keeping such fundamental secrets from them, then.
James drained his glass and chinked it against Fen’s. ‘You’re privileged,’ he said. ‘Come on, we ought to walk back – it’s a good mile and a half from here.’
‘I’ll phone Django,’ said Fen, with little conviction, as they collected the dogs who had been tied up outside and were now excessively pleased to see them.
‘I can drive you over there later,’ said James, unconvincingly.
‘Django!’
‘Hullo there!’
‘I’m sure I saw that niece of yours today.’
‘Niece? Who?’
‘The middle one – the arty one.’
‘Fenella?’
‘In the Cross Oaks.’
‘I doubt it – she’s in London. Lives and works there.’
‘Well, I’ve not seen her for a year or so, mind, but I’ll say it were her all right.’
‘Can’t have been – though she has been up recently. On business.’
‘She was with that Caulfield chap – you know, fancy gardens and all?’
‘Lives at Delvaux.’
Django took his leave of the bar-proppers at the Rag and Thistle and returned home. Just in case Fen was here. Just in case she was trying to call. Bugger. He must buy an answering machine.
Poor girl might have resorted to bedding down on the moors. If she is indeed here. Ah, but she’d ring – of course she would.
But Fen doesn’t ring Django. And when he phones Pip to clarify her younger sister’s whereabouts, Pip tells him that Fen is far more likely to be in the bed of her new suitor than on a bed of heather.
‘Matt lives in Islington,’ Pip tells her uncle.
‘Does he now,’ Django says, wondering if Islington is impressive.
James sleeps the opposite way to Matt. Fen has awoken at four in the morning, thinking she may as well be alone in a bed. James is very much on one specific side of the bed. If she lays a hand on his shoulder, or touches his leg with her foot, he moves over even more. Not in a flinch, just a slight but undeniable shift. It occurs to Fen that James Caulfield is as self-contained in sleep as he is in his life. She lies there, wondering if she is taken aback by this. No. She feels that if he was not happy for her to be in his bed, it would be she who would be shunted far over to one end. He is sleeping peacefully. She recalls his words, whispered in the dark, earlier.
‘I will sleep with you, Fen McCabe,’ he had said, ‘but I won’t sleep with you.’
Because he had said so, whilst his hands had expertly traversed her body, she had been unsure of his intention. Would they have sex and then he’d sleep in the snug? Or would they not have sex but sleep together in his bed?
Despite two bottles of Fitou shared during the evening, despite the dogs being banished to the utility room, despite Fen and James gravitating from facing chairs to sitting on the floor with their backs to the couch, no direct pass was being made by either of them. Though he laid his hand on her leg and fondled her knee, the conversation contradicted this, focused as it was on Fen’s opinion of fin de siècle sculpture. Though she ran her fingertips over the back of his hand, tracing his veins, stroking his knuckles, he spoke to her of rosebay willowherb and, tangentially, of having seen Jimi Hendrix play live on the Isle of Wight. Actually, they both found this momentarily a little disconcerting, privately acknowledging that Fen would have been in nappies at the time.
At not even eleven o’clock, Fen yawned first. James yawned very soon after.
‘Did you know,’ Fen said, knitting fingers with him, ‘that the yawn is the most contagious thing in the world? It’s the same yawn, being passed around and around, ad nauseam.’
James laughed. ‘No, I did not know that,’ he said, encircling her wrist and then stroking the inside of her elbow. ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!’
There was silence. Fen was acutely aware of his touch and of the hush and she felt awkward. ‘Pregnant pause?’ she remarked, not to be witty but to break it. James looked at her, looked a little uneasy. ‘I’m tired,’ Fen said. ‘Bed?’ As soon as she heard the words out in the open, she wanted to take them back again.
‘We can,’ James replied. ‘You’ll have to share my toothbrush, though.’
And she’d used his toothbrush. And she did notice that his physique bore no vestige of youth, that gravity was doing its thing. And she didn’t really mind because to her James was incredibly masculine. She thought how some would say that this man was no longer in his prime. To her, though, he was. Because this is what he looked like right now, and it was right now that Fen had him. In her eyes, there was no room for improvement – because she had no knowledge of his physique when younger to serve as a point of reference or comparison. She wasn’t self-conscious about undressing in front of him. And she didn’t mind if he did notice her strange improvisation at a G-string. James didn’t notice. For him, the beauty of Fen’s naked body far exceeded his anticipation.
Then James had said about not sleeping with her, but sleeping with her. Fen had lain in the dark, wondering what he meant. She didn’t think, therefore, that she should reach for him though she so wanted to. In the dark, after a while’s silence, James touched her. Lightly at first, then assertively. For Fen, it was like him taking her for a walk in bed. Leading the way again. His pace. His territory. It turned Fen on to be passive under his expertise. James was absolutely silent. It was pitch-black in the bedroom. Hands explored and tongues danced and mouths tasted and sucked. James’s lips enclosed Fen’s mouth, swallowing her moans as she came on his hand. She was then ravenous to return the favour but James resisted her. They didn’t have penetrative sex. He didn’t come. And, at the time, it didn’t seem strange.
Odd, Fen thought much later, as she lay awake with James asleep far on the other side of the bed, but in truth, that was the best sex I can remember having.
THIRTY-ONE
Intelligence designs but the heart does the modelling.
Auguste Rodin
Henry Holden had family money – unlike other members of his family, however, he did not put it into ships, but art. His father was appalled – especially when it transpired that the art his son was purchasing was of the modern school. It would have been different if his son had invested in oil paintings of great seafaring vessels. But no, Henry Holden Junior, at the age of seventeen, purchased a nonsensical scrawl by some Russian chap.
‘Wassily Kandinsky!’ Henry marvelled in a whisper, holding the painting up like a father worshipping a new baby. To Henry’s father, it sounded as though his son was blaspheming. However, though strict and not particularly demonstrative with his children, Mr Holden Senior’s particular view on parenting and child development was neither to discourage nor encourage.
‘Courage!’ he had declared to his wife before their first child had been born, ‘Courage is the key! It is attainable only through personal choice. Our offspring must make their own mistakes. They must be accountable for their actions, positive or negative.’
And so, though Mr Holden thought little of Henry’s taste for the seeds of German Expressionism, and though he thought even less of his son’s utter lack of interest in boat building and its history, he allowed his son to spend his funds in whichever way he felt was best.
In Henry Holden’s collection, the Kandinsky sketch joined a small Pissarro drawing, a Sisley snow scene and a Lautrec lithograph. But with the Kandinsky, Henry felt he was bringing back to Britain an example of something not yet seen by his countrymen but which was life-enhancing. It made him feel both archaeologist and pioneer – that he had unearthed a treasure and would start a whole movement of appreciation. And that was the keyword – appreciation – he never bought art for its potential as investment, but only ever on purely aesthetic grounds. He loved passionately every work he had purchased. He bought them to hang on his walls, to illuminate his room and the lives of his family and friends. And when Henry founded Trust Art, he decreed that the acquisitions policy should remain faithful to his own. He would not fund galleries which wished to acquire works of art for any other reason than that they greatly enhanced the institutions’ walls, or floor space, or display cabinets; would thus enrich the lives of those who worked there or came to visit.
When Henry Holden first met Julius Fetherstone in Paris between the wars, all funds for art, for anything really, were at once directed towards the British sculptor. Julius felt suspicious at first, rather sickened by such a sycophant, and he overcharged his young patron accordingly. Before long, he realized that Henry – or Holden as he had decided to call him – was a genuine fellow with a rather charming and unadulterated zeal for art. He was soon at ease with the notion of the young collector being his long-term patron, rather than merely a client. He knew that Holden bought the works to keep, never to sell; that his near doe-eyed interest had absolutely no homosexual overtones, that when he made his frequent trips to Paris, he had no desire to be entertained by the artist, to creep into his world. He came to Paris to sit in Julius’s studio, to gaze at the sculptor while he worked, or thought, or napped; to part with good money and often accompany his acquisitions home personally. Much to his first wife’s exasperation.
‘Who is she?’ Henry Holden, circumnavigating Abandon or Hunger or Desire or any of the other works featuring Cosima,
would marvel. ‘Who is she?’ But Henry asked not out of inquisitiveness, but rather out of wonder. He never expected or craved an answer.
‘Do you really want to know?’ Julius once asked Henry.
Henry regarded the sculptor with alarm. ‘Lord, no!’ he gasped. ‘If she exists, if I am to know her name, if it transpires she has crooked teeth, or a lazy eye, or a pungent scent about her, the spell she has cast over me would be broken!’
Julius nodded and returned to chiselling. He remembered Cosima having straight pearly teeth, eyes which swallowed you like a whirlpool. And the scent of her – ah! lilac and musk, lilac and musk.
THIRTY-TWO
By mid-June, the acquisitions committee have met and made their decision. Fen, Tate Britain and James Caulfield are delighted that Trust Art has agreed to contribute funds towards the hallowed gallery’s purchase of the three Fetherstones. Matt has postponed Otter’s article on Winnifred Nicholson to make pride of place for Fen’s assessment of the Derbyshire Fetherstones. Otter hammed up how offended he was. Fen had to dampen down how honoured she was. The works themselves are to remain in Derbyshire until the transaction is finalized. The Trust saw it as an honour, while the Tate saw it as practical, that Fen McCabe should accompany the works back up north. She took the bronze back to Mr Caulfield’s last weekend. The sketches are being X-rayed and analysed and she is to return them soon. Mr Caulfield actually came down to London a fortnight or so ago – at the invitation of Margot Fitzpatrick-Montague-Laine from Calthrop’s, who had sent him a train ticket.
‘You could make much more if we handled the sale for you,’ she had said seductively, whilst eating her prawns most suggestively and running her fingertips up and down the stem of her champagne flute, licking her lips and fixing her sultry gaze on James.