Fen - Freya North

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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

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