Fen. Freya North
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‘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.