by Freya North
‘Continue,’ Pip encouraged, her mouth full of chocolate.
‘James Caulfield,’ Fen started, as if it were the title of a lecture about to be delivered. She refused the chocolate. ‘Is incredibly and compellingly self-contained. He’s classically dark and handsome – looks slightly Mediterranean. True, he’s turning fifty – but I really, truly don’t think about the age gap. It’s not an issue, not for me. He was a surveyor in Bath but he down-shifted to Derbyshire and took up landscape gardening. He’s not as sociable, as outgoing as Matt – in fact he can be a little outspoken or else frustratingly quiet.’
‘He sounds like a sulky old git too set in his ways,’ Pip muttered, because she’d already decided Fen should forsake all others for Matt.
Cat, however, was suddenly rather taken with the idea of James. ‘He sounds rather brooding and exotic to me,’ she marvelled.
‘He is,’ Fen assured them, ‘he’s intelligent and experienced and, I don’t know, smouldering. What I love about James is essentially a wavelength thing,’ Fen mused. ‘His family background is similar in its dysfunction. Even his house is a bit rumble-tumble down. So it’s comforting – and it’s a refreshing change from London pretensions. Plus he has two gorgeous dogs. And of course, we share a love of Fetherstone.’ Fen reflected for a moment. ‘James and I tried to resist the strong mutual attraction – initially, it was most definitely a physical desire that existed between us, on account of him not being that sociable and me meeting him with my art historian’s hat on. Yet, when we went to bed, it was really quite tender. The hunger we initially felt gave way to gentle lovemaking rather than raw sex.’
‘Who’s the better in bed?’ Pip asked.
‘Again – incomparable – both great, both different.’
‘Who do you fancy more?’ Cat pressed.
‘Neither one,’ Fen said. Both her sisters raised their eyebrows. ‘Honestly.’
‘Who gives you the better orgasm?’ Cat asked, with a giggle she couldn’t help.
‘Believe me,’ Fen shrugged, ‘both leave me begging for a break, rather than wanting more.’
‘Do you worry that you’re James’s totty?’ Pip probed. ‘That it’s every fifty-year-old’s fantasy to have a nice nubile bit of skirt?’
‘Do you worry that you might be a mere conquest for Matt? He and Jake being lads-about-town?’
Fen wasn’t offended. ‘They’re both special,’ she said, ‘and I know that they both adore me. It’s lovely to hear it from Matthew, and just to sense it from James.’
‘Does James not tell you how he feels?’ Cat asked. ‘Has he not told you that he loves you?’
‘He doesn’t need to,’ Fen said.
Pip opened her mouth and then closed it. She tilted her head and twitched her lips. ‘That may be so,’ she said, ‘but actually a women deserves to be told.’
Fen shrugged. ‘It doesn’t make me doubt the depth of his affection.’ Pip nodded to concede that this may well be so. Deep down, though, she felt that her gorgeous sister was perhaps being somewhat short-changed by this mature gardener.
‘At the end of the day, though,’ Pip said, ‘I still feel you should choose one or the other. The more involved you become with both, the more hurt is in the offing.’
‘They say men are like buses,’ Fen said, ‘that you wait and wait and suddenly two or three come along at the same time.’
‘But Fen,’ Cat pointed out, ‘you can only get on one bus at a time. What’s the point of hopping off one just to hop on another? You’ll never get anywhere.’
‘Different routes?’ Fen tried feebly. ‘Different places to visit?’
Cat and Pip regarded their sister looking from palm to palm. Fen didn’t tell them how analysing each man to the nth degree had actually made her realize just how much she loved both of them.
‘Matthew Holden,’ Fen said, holding up her right hand. ‘James Caulfield,’ she said, holding her left. She grasped both together and clutched them to her heart. Then she dropped her head to her hands and sighed. Pip took her right hand. Cat took her left. They all sat still and silent, holding tight.
THIRTY-SIX
Fen left Pip’s, having phoned Matt to ask if he’d mind if she just went home. He sounded touchingly disappointed. Family pow-wows, she explained to him, always left her exhausted. While they spoke, she heard Jake return.
Oh to be a fly on the wall, thought Fen.
Gemma and Abi were sitting very comfortably, sipping wine. They looked neither surprised nor embarrassed to see Fen. In fact, if the clean, extra wineglass was anything to go by, they were actively anticipating her return. Fen wondered why on earth it should be her who smiled sheepishly. Anyway, smiling sheepishly, she accepted a glass of wine and took her seat in the armchair opposite Abi and Gemma snuggled on the sofa together.
‘Are you horribly shocked and disgusted?’ Abi asked with true concern, her pixie crop looking far more tousled by tension than by passion or pillow.
‘Do you judge us and hate us?’ Gemma asked, in a tone that suggested that she truly hoped Fen didn’t.
Fen sipped and contemplated.
How can I judge? I’m hardly a paragon of moral virtue myself. Anyway, what is it I feel about the torrid triangle?
She sipped and contemplated some more.
And which torrid triangle? My own? Or theirs?
Fen took another sip. ‘What can I say?’ she said, wondering what to say.
‘You can call us a pair of slappers,’ Gemma suggested, as if it would make her feel better if Fen did.
‘Because, categorically, that’s what we are,’ Abi said. It was as if both girls actively wanted Fen to be livid, insulted and moralistic, that if she was, they’d then not feel quite so badly.
Fen sipped her wine and replenished all three glasses.
‘I mean, we know you’re a one-man woman,’ said Abi to Fen’s undetectable wince, ‘and we’re one-man women too – it’s just that he happens to be the same man.’
‘Yes,’ Gemma said, ‘it’s not like we’re promiscuous and out shagging anything in trousers.’ Her voice carried an edge of relief, as if it had suddenly occurred to her that she was not wanton at all. ‘It’s not like I’m sleeping with two men at once,’ Gemma continued, ‘just that the sole man I’m sleeping with happens to be sleeping with two women at once.’
Fen nodded vigorously. She felt hot and bothered. Put the way Gemma had theorized it all, Fen felt that it was she who was morally inept.
‘We’re all happy with this arrangement,’ Abi explained, ‘jealousy doesn’t figure.’
‘But your best mate is sleeping with your boyfriend,’ said Fen, to make herself feel not so smutty.
‘But I’ve ceased to see him as my boyfriend,’ said Abi.
‘And he certainly isn’t my boyfriend,’ Gemma agreed.
Fen frowned. ‘But you two …’ she said, gesticulating with her hands and knotting her fingers together in simulation of writhing bodies.
‘It’s sex as a recreational and non-emotional, physical activity,’ Abi enlightened.
‘It’s not like we’re in love with him,’ Gemma agreed. ‘I don’t know whether the sex would be as exciting if that was the case.’
‘But the more emotionally involved you are with someone,’ Fen said, ‘the more erotic the sex.’
Abi sipped. Gemma sipped. Both regarded Fen with absolute tenderness and respect.
‘That’s why you’re blessed with fulfilling relationships,’ Abi reasoned genuinely. Her innocent use of the plural hit Fen in the solar plexus. Fen didn’t dare say a word, though. She wasn’t going to tell Abi or Gemma about her own infidelities.
They wouldn’t understand. They might even feel let down. They’d probably only see the situation in a titillating light.
‘God knows what Matt’ll make of all of this,’ Abi said. ‘I only hope he wouldn’t dare to judge you by it.’
And how you and Gemma would judge me if you knew what I’m involved in.
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br /> ‘It’s odd,’ Fen said out loud instead, ‘and I mean this with no disrespect – but I’ve been worried that he’ll share Jake’s traits.’
‘I doubt it,’ Gemma assured her. ‘Jake often moans that a revelation of his sexploits falls on deaf ears and withering looks from Mr Holden.’
Shit, thought Fen, excusing herself and soon staring menacingly at herself in the bathroom mirror. Shit. I can’t, then, behave like this to Matt. He deserves more. Cat and Pip are right. Someone is going to be very hurt. I’ve been thinking solely of myself, focusing only on me – that I’d be the one hurting.
So, you are going to finish with James?
Finish it with James? No!
You intend to call a stop with Matt, then.
I couldn’t do that!
But you can’t go on like this, can you?
No.
So you have to do something about it.
I know.
What, though?
I don’t know! I don’t know! I do love them both so.
Fen returned downstairs.
‘So you don’t think we’re wicked, wanton wenches?’ Abi asked.
‘Well,’ said Fen, ‘I do – actually – but it doesn’t change my depth of affection for you. And just don’t ever – ever – even consider inviting me to participate.’
Abi and Gemma laughed. ‘Just as long as you promise you won’t take it personally that ultimately we simply don’t fancy you,’ Gemma said slyly.
They finished the wine and watched a terrible game show on Channel 5. Fen gave an expansive, half-fabricated yawn. ‘I’m going to have an early night,’ she said. ‘I’m off home to Derbyshire tomorrow.’
I’m so looking forward to seeing James. But I miss Matt even now.
Fen sits up in bed, the phone in her lap. Matt or James. James or Matt. God, it was difficult enough deciding which man to phone first. She has a headache and a leaden taste in her mouth.
When I’m in James Land, Matt is safely far away. When I’m in Matt World, James is totally out of the picture. But just now, alone in my own space, these two men collide. And that’s not right.
THIRTY-SEVEN
‘Children!’ Django boomed as his three nieces piled out of Pip’s car and bounded into his kitchen where they stood in line, hands behind their backs, rocking their bottoms against the Aga though it was nearing July and no one was cold. ‘It’s an outrage that you haven’t been to see me, en masse, since I don’t know when!’ He loosened his Pucci neckerchief. ‘I can’t remember who is who.’ He then proceeded to incorrectly name each of his girls. Soon enough, they were all falling about laughing and hugging and wondering why on earth they didn’t come home more often. Tea was taken in the garden. Django had run out of jam so cranberry jelly had to do. But it was very nice on malt loaf. He’d forgotten to buy chocolate biscuits but had improvised quite successfully making a paste from cocoa, muscovado sugar and a dab of margarine, trowelled on to rich tea biscuits slightly past their prime. It was a beautiful day and the garden looked magnificent though, as Django said, it basically looked after itself.
‘I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Django reasoned with Cat, ‘but you chasing through France after a bunch of boys on bikes – well, isn’t that taking the family tradition to new extremes?’
The family chatted about Cat’s imminent departure. Though they worried that a month away, travelling as a journalist with the Tour de France, might take its toll on the still emotionally fragile Cat, they all agreed that it was potentially a very good thing, the chance for adventure, the opportunity to move on. The conversation soon turned to the other two sisters. Though Cat and Pip teased Fen in front of Django for having a choice between two men to make, no one acknowledged that Django had spied his middle niece with her gardener, nor that he had discussed the fact with her two sisters. This enabled him to deliver something of a pep talk, and it also meant that Fen had to listen openly, rather than switch off or jump to the defensive.
‘Fen,’ he said, eyes closed under a battered Panama hat, ‘you are undeniably gifted with fall-in-loveable qualities. This is both a blessing and an affliction. It is something you have that you must respect and must never take advantage of.’
‘But it’s the reverse,’ Fen remonstrated quietly. ‘You misunderstand. I didn’t set out to ensnare these two men. I’ve just gone and bloody fallen in love with both of them.’
‘I did the 1960s,’ Django proclaimed wearily, as if the experience had been a most tiresome one. ‘The only conclusions I drew were that marijuana smokers are boring sods, the Aldermaston march gave me frightful blisters, Joe Cocker did a better job on ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ than the Beatles and, fundamentally, monogamy was a very good concept.’ His nieces gawped at him. They wanted to know more about everything. ‘Believe me – but please, without questioning me too probingly – I’ve done them all. I was there. I did it, saw it, smoked it.’ He sighed and sipped a Pimm’s into which he’d put coriander in lieu of mint. ‘Hash, acid, mushrooms. Credence Clear Water. Barclay James Harvest. Ten Years After. Free love, paid-for love, secret love, open-air love, love under the influence of drugs, love under the instruction of Mahringi Yogu Prishna,’ he listed. ‘They were all so –’ Django paused. Pip held her headstand. Cat and Fen hung on his every word. ‘forgettable. Ultimately. Damn tiring too.’ He observed Fen. ‘You see, Fen, you look peaky,’ he commented, ‘thin, too. Love should make you bloom. But alongside your well-being is the fact that I do not want you turning into a cavorting self-obsessed moral imbecile.’ The accusation sounded harsh to all the girls. Fen looked at her uncle steadily. ‘You might be in love with both men,’ he said, ‘but do not lose sight of the fact that each is in love with you exclusively.’
Fen looked at her lap.
‘They deserve to get what they give,’ Django qualified, ‘they do not deserve to be toyed with just so that you can indulge your whims.’
Fen plucked blades of grass and nodded. ‘I’m not playing with them,’ she said, ‘they are not toys. I feel deeply for both.’
‘I will not have you turn into your mother,’ Django said, staring at her hard. ‘This has nothing to do with your father’s memory, nothing to do with the fact that it was he who was my sibling. It has only to do with a moral judgement I believe I am informed to make.’
Fen felt all eyes upon her. She bit her lip.
‘It’s make-your-mind-up time, Fenella,’ Django cautioned, using her name in full to emphasize the gravity of the situation.
Fen went to bed and really tried to make her mind up. But by the next afternoon, she is sitting in James’s kitchen watching him singe the Scotch pancakes. His shirt sleeves are rolled up and revealing his gorgeous forearms. His lips are pursed in concentration of preparing tea. He’s in socks. So is Fen. They both leave vaguely damp imprints from their footfalls. They’ve been for a vigorous walk. It was gorgeous – the weather, the land, the privacy, the togetherness. Now Beryl is spark out across the doorway, Barry is slumped over Fen’s feet and James is preparing food for her. She looks from dog to dog to man.
I daren’t move. I can’t get out anyway. I’m being held captive. Willingly.
‘Here,’ says James, proffering a plate heaped with heavily buttered drop scones and toasted teacakes, ‘eat.’
Fen feels revived. And nourished. By the food, but mostly by her feelings for James. The thought of denying herself its sustenance seems utterly idiotic.
THIRTY-EIGHT
‘Bugger Matisse,’ Fen said under her breath, but not quietly enough for Matt not to have heard as he passed by the Archive after a heated exchange with Accounts, who were suggesting that Art Matters be printed on cheaper paper of a lesser quality.
‘Beg your pardon?’ he said, poking his head around the Archive door. ‘Doesn’t that constitute blasphemy?’ Matt enquired, coming into Fen’s room and swivelling on the chair while she remained cross-legged on the floor, papers and illustrations scattere
d about her like the skirts of some old fashioned petticoat. In fact, she was wearing a tight little T-shirt under a strappy navy-blue sun dress which, when she stood, skimmed an inch or so above her neat knees. As she was sitting cross-legged, though, it hitched itself up to reveal a glimpse of white knickers.
‘Love the white knickers,’ Matt said with a lascivious wink.
‘But they match my top and my trainers,’ Fen protested with a cheeky pout, ‘that’s all.’
Immediately, it struck her just how easy it was to slip back into London, into life and love with Matt, despite the fact that her afternoon with James in Derbyshire was all that had filled her mind that morning. And yet because of her sisters challenging her, the pep talk from Django, the impact of coming across Jake and Abi and Gemma, for the first time, Fen felt a fleeting stab of guilt.
‘What has Monsieur Matisse done to piss you off?’ Matt probed. Fen was grateful for the change of subject. She could put the guilt and what to do about it to the back of her mind for the time being and put her art historian’s hat on instead. Actually, Matt had changed the subject to distract himself from incorrigible thoughts of molesting Fen in her white knickers.
‘He died the same year as Julius,’ Fen explained, ‘1954.’
‘How very inconsiderate,’ Matt said.
Fen nodded vigorously. ‘Much as I adore Matisse, I wish he’d died the year before or after Julius. I just feel that Julius didn’t receive the recognition he deserved. He wasn’t even granted a respectful measure of obituary column inches. The Times merely mentioned his passing most cursorily.’
‘I’d boycott the paper if I were you,’ Matt teased gently.
‘Oh, I already have,’ Fen answered.
‘What’s brought all this on?’ Matt asked.
‘Actually,’ said Fen, rummaging around the papers, ‘you’ll find this quite interesting. I came across a clutch of photos from your father’s collection taken in the artist’s studio a few months before his death.’ She presented Matt with a fan of photographs. Though the studio was lofty and capacious, the space seemed dwarfed by the proliferation of sculpture. Despite there being only seven humans in the studio, the room seemed packed on account of the crowd of characters cast in bronze, hewn from marble or modelled in clay or plaster. Though wizened in stature and sitting in a bath chair piled high with blankets, Julius nevertheless dominated the room in each photograph. It was as if the sculptures and the visitors to the studio were on pilgrimage, paying homage to the great artist in the last months of his life. Henry Holden was in each frame, standing close to Julius. A couple admiring the works kept a respectful distance from the sculptor. Elsewhere, a tall woman, her back to the camera, appeared to be lost in her own world, staring into the middle distance, or at the elbow or ankle of one of the works. A small child was captured in each frame, darting here and there. In one, with a tiny hand on the arm of the old sculptor, the child appeared mesmerized by Julius’s beard. In another, the child seemed to be mid-hop – holding on to Henry’s trouser leg for balance. In another, the child was clambering over a headless reworking in plaster of Eve. In another, the child was skipping out of shot.