The McCabe Girls Complete Collection

by Freya North

  Bloody bloody women. I think I need a break from them altogether.

  TWENTY

  Fen walked to work with some trepidation. Matt hadn’t called her over the weekend and she’d been furious with herself for glancing at her phone with alarming regularity throughout the two days. She had even dialled her voice mail, despite common sense and the most basic knowledge of telephone technology assuring her that if a message had been left, her phone would have beeped accordingly and flashed up a little picture of a telephone receiver. On Sunday morning, she went back to her house, taking Cat with her. ‘For fresh air and a change of scene,’ Fen told her sister.

  More, though, for me to check the home answerphone and see if Abi might offer any information, indirectly or otherwise, on account of Jake being the cad’s flatmate.

  Neither Abi nor Gemma was at home. And there were no messages for Fen on the answering machine, no Post-its proclaiming ‘Jake says call Matt’ stuck to the fridge, no scrawled number hastily penned on the corner of the newspaper by the phone. Nor on the back of the paper bag from the bakery lying scrunched by the toaster. Nor on Gemma’s bed, or Abi’s dressing-table.

  Fen’s emotional reaction and her behaviour unnerved her. For so long, she hadn’t been remotely bothered by love and all its panoply; she had found romantic day-dreaming, or simple masturbation, more than satisfactory. She had deemed the traumas many women suffer on account of men to be self-inflicted and for the most part unnecessary. Now, however, here was she not just experiencing all the pangs and neuroses she’d hitherto read about and ridiculed, she was also exhibiting textbook behaviour of the Forsaken Woman.

  Oddly, though Fen had spent most of Saturday feeling unattractive and a fool (Why hasn’t he called?) and by Sunday she was silently cursing the bastard (Who the hell is he anyway?), now Monday sees her feeling rather timid and dreading seeing him (Why didn’t he call? Why did he kiss me like that? Does he or doesn’t he find me attractive? If he does, why didn’t he call? And if he doesn’t, why kiss me?).

  Standing pensively in the queue for a cappuccino, Fen was struck by a notion so feasible that she felt utterly jubilant and practically skipped to Trust Art.

  How could I be such a cow! Poor Matt probably won’t be at work today at all! Why on earth didn’t I think of this before, why the hell didn’t I credit him more? He probably has the flu! That’s it! Even if it’s just a cold – we all know how such ailments knock a man down and render him incapable of little more than groaning and being bedridden!

  Fen, dearest, it’s almost May. And mild.

  Food poisoning, then. Shut up.

  Fen was pleasantly surprised to hear Otter and Matt chatting as she passed by Publications, though she was slightly miffed that there was no e-mail, let alone cappuccino, awaiting her in the Archive. By lunch-time, with no visit and no telephone call, she was starting to feel glum again. This was alleviated by Fen reminding herself fiercely that these very feelings were precisely why she’d forsaken men for such a relatively long time.

  All this ‘will he won’t he’, all that ‘does he doesn’t he’ – it’s a waste of my time and a drain on my emotions.

  She threw herself into her work, skipping lunch altogether and not feeling hungry in the slightest. Bobbie’s Jammy Dodgers more than sufficed. Most exciting was that, by tea-time, Tate Britain had returned her call, requesting more information and expressing interest in the Derbyshire Fetherstones. She thought of James but then thought she oughtn’t to be spending time thinking of him at all. Not yet. Not until there was sure business to discuss. But then she wondered if he’d appreciate a courtesy call.

  ‘Mr Caulfield?’

  There was a pause. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Fen,’ said Fen.

  There was silence.

  ‘McCabe,’ Fen said, a little embarrassed.

  ‘Hullo, Fen McCabe,’ James said.

  Fen felt a little awkward. ‘Just thought you’d like to know that Tate Britain has expressed an interest in your Fetherstones. I mean, it’s no done deal but they’d like to know more so I thought you’d like to know.’ She was gabbling.

  ‘That sounds promising,’ James said, ‘but I’m just on my way out. Can we talk some other time?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Fen rushed, ‘I mean Tate Britain would definitely be my first—’

  James butted in. ‘I really have to go – let’s talk soon.’ And he hung up. He hadn’t told Fen that he was taking Beryl to the vet to have a boil on her paw lanced.

  Fen continued to hold the receiver to her ear. She wished she hadn’t phoned. She was suddenly tired. She needed a Jammy Dodger.

  ‘It’s the Wild Woman of Bleeding Borneo!’ Bobbie declared on seeing Fen. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Just 1974.’ Fen attempted to quash Bobbie’s wink wink, nudge nudging. Judith, who was loitering by the pigeon-holes, wasn’t convinced.

  I’m going to have a lovely luxuriate in Neal’s Yard bath oil when I’m home, Fen decided, leaving Reception, wash my hair in all things Aveda. And then, methinks, drink copious amounts of vodka.

  She enters the Archive. Matt is there. He is seemingly engrossed in a hastily scribbled note from David Hockney to his father.

  ‘Hey, Fen,’ he says, with no hint of a cold and good colour to his cheeks putting paid to her theory of flu or food poisoning. She swiftly settles on a weekend-long migraine. Which actually isn’t far from the truth.

  ‘Matt,’ she says, hoping that she’s smiling in a non-affected way though she’s been taken off her guard.

  Am I meant to be aloof? Alluring? Angry? Amorous? And that’s only the As. How about Baffled? Bolshy? Brazen?

  ‘I’m sorry about not calling you,’ Matt says and he does look apologetic, his blue eyes searching her face for forgiveness, his hair going this way and that, suggesting his regret has caused him to ruffle and scratch it. He’s wearing a crisp, mint-green shirt open at the neck, rolled up at the sleeves and tucked nonchalantly into black jeans. Fen feels a little dusty by comparison. Her white shirt is grey around the cuffs and only half tucked into her jeans, which she’s worn all weekend.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Fen says, brushing away any awkwardness he might be feeling.

  ‘Did you have a good weekend?’ he asks politely.

  ‘Fabulous,’ Fen lies, ‘but too short.’

  ‘I –’ Matt starts, twitching his lips and tilting his head whilst looking at her.

  Longingly. He’s definitely looking at me longingly. And he looks tired. So I’ll forgive him. Because, at the end of the day – literally – he is here, after all, looking for me, in my Archive.

  ‘Are you free tonight?’ he asks.

  Fen purses her lips apologetically and shakes her head. ‘Sorry,’ she says, knowing this is the response that Abi and Gemma would have her make. ‘Tomorrow,’ she ventures, ‘I have no plans tomorrow.’

  The girls will probably cringe and chastise me. I’m probably meant to wait at least forty-eight hours.

  ‘Great,’ Matt smiles, ‘wonderful.’

  Fen sees that he looks awkward. It makes her feel calm, confident even. She goes to Matt and puts her hand gently on his neck. Ever so slightly on tiptoes, she kisses him lightly, mainly on his cheek but just catching the corner of his lips. Before she can move away, Matt grabs her against him and slips his tongue immediately into her mouth. She is so turned on by this forcefulness that she bucks her body against his instinctively. She laps at him readily. His hand is grasping her buttock; the other is against her back. He can feel no bra strap. He is desperate to see her breasts. Feeling them through her shirt will have to do for the time being. Until tomorrow. He makes an appreciative noise in his throat whilst he kisses her, which she echoes when her breast is being fondled. She’s grasping his buttocks too. She can even feel his straining cock against her despite its being behind two layers of denim.

  And this is precisely how Judith St John finds them. Her two employees. Archivist and editor. Heavy petting
in the Archive. She is outraged.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ she barks.

  Fen and Matt leap apart and are speechless. Everyone is acutely aware of wet mouths and the impressive bulge in Matt’s trousers and Fen’s flush and Judith’s indignation. Judith doesn’t just hold her ground and command their darting eyes to her steely glare, she steps right into the Archive. In silence, she holds the door open and raises an eyebrow which suggests Matt should leave. Immediately. Fen feels backed into a corner though neither woman has moved. What excuse can she give? Mind you, what crime has she committed? What should she say? She shouldn’t look guilty. She should be grinning. She feels incapable of doing the latter and fears she is doing the former involuntarily. She waits an eternity for Judith’s response. Judith comes close to her and picks up the Hockney letter, studying it with great interest.

  ‘Fenella,’ she says at long last, as if to a gifted but tiresome child, ‘I just thought I’d pop in because I know you like to leave on the dot. I was wondering if we could have lunch tomorrow? I’d love to hear an update on the Archive.’ She says it with barbed affability and apparently no memory of what she has just witnessed.

  ‘Yes!’ Fen enthuses, more from gratitude and relief than from the invitation itself. ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘Super,’ Judith smiles spikily, ‘I’ll book the Tate restaurant for one p.m. Come and fetch me from my office at ten to.’

  ‘OK!’ Fen gabbles. ‘That would be wonderful. I’ll really look forward to it. I won’t have my morning croissant and I’ll try to abstain from Bobbie’s biscuit barrel. I’ve never eaten in the Tate restaurant, just the canteen which is really quite good. And I’ve loads to tell you. Not just about the Archive but there seems to be some movement on those Derbyshire Fetherstones too!’

  Judith, however, smile fixed in place while her mind whirrs behind, is already on her way out.

  She passes Otter. Otter looks simultaneously horrified and elated. Matt has just recounted the ambush. In an instant, from a glance at Otter twisting his fingers and desperately avoiding eye contact, Judith knows that he knows.

  ‘I’m taking Fenella for lunch,’ she says, connivingly, ‘I feel there are a few things she ought to know.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Otter wails quietly, though Matt is in a meeting downstairs with Rodney and Fen has left, ‘perhaps it is my duty to enlighten poor Fen before Judith does. Otherwise, it could be the end of something that won’t have had the chance to unfurl.’

  What a bizarre end to a very long day, Fen contemplates, walking down John Islip Street to Pimlico tube.

  It isn’t over yet, Fen.

  Fen had a lousy journey home and, too exhausted to walk up the escalator at Camden Town tube station, she is fantasizing about vodka, lime and soda, Neal’s Yard aromatherapy bath, Aveda hair products and Clarins body lotion, too. She makes a quick detour to the fruit and vegetable market in Inverness Street to buy limes, unwilling for her fantasy to be compromised in any way. When she arrives home, it doesn’t seem that anyone is in so she troops, shoeless, up to her room and lies on her bed awhile, waiting patiently for the water to be absolutely piping hot. She dozes off, happy that sleep should prevent impatience with the temperamental immersion heater. She wakes, undresses and wraps a towel around her. She goes down a floor to the bathroom. A floor beneath that, the front door opens.

  ‘Hiya,’ calls Abi.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ calls Fen, hand on the bathroom door handle, ‘just going to have a bath. There’s lime for vodka – do you fancy rustling us up a couple?’

  Fen enters the bathroom and comes across a rustling couple. It is Gemma. And Jake. Jake has snatched his hand from Gemma’s unbuttoned jeans, revealing a glimpse of Gemma’s snatch in the process. Not that there’s much to see, Gemma having gone for a Brazilian bikini wax over the weekend.

  ‘I’ll have one too,’ Gemma calls down to Abi, kissing a flabbergasted Fen on the cheek as she leaves the bathroom. ‘Jake’s just arrived – shall I ask him if he fancies one?’ Jake follows Gemma, kissing Fen’s cheek too. ‘Well?’ Gemma whispers saucily to Jake, well in Fen’s earshot though she’d rather not hear. ‘Do you fancy one then?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jake murmurs back, ‘with a twist.’

  Fen runs her bath full blast, rejecting Neal’s Yard for the last glob of her Penhaligon’s lily of the valley bath essence for added luxury. She emits a near-orgasmic sigh as she eases herself down into the fragrant foamy water.

  Abi comes in with her vodka. Fen thinks how bright and funky she looks, like a pop pixie. She must have bleached her hair over the weekend. Her skin is clear and her eyes sparkle. ‘Don’t be too long, Fen,’ she says, ‘Jake’s taking us all out for sushi.’

  ‘I don’t like sushi,’ Fen says truthfully, the weight of the day making her visibly sink a little deeper into the bath. ‘Too raw,’ she says, ‘too fishy.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

  Thomas Hardy

  Please tick appropriate box(es) and return to Publications (sealed envelope advisable) by lunch-time.

  Fen munched the pain au chocolat and sipped the cappuccino Matt had provided, whilst she read and reread and giggled at his note. He was a flirt – but a creative one at that. She didn’t know which boxes she should tick. She knew which ones, privately, she’d like to tick, but she didn’t know if she ought. She felt a little awkward. Matt’s inventiveness touched her, his presumptuousness turned her on; the fact that he was obviously looking forward to the evening charmed her. But still she felt a little trepidation. Was all of this just too full on? She had so little recent experience to go by. Was Matt too forward for someone who, after all, had only recently split from a long-term girlfriend?

  Two hours later, though, she put 1977 to one side to reread Matt’s list once again. She chewed her pen thoughtfully, then made her marks.

  Please tick appropriate box(es) and return to Publications (sealed envelope advisable) by lunch-time.

  She couldn’t find an envelope, so she slipped the sheet of paper into an acid-free folder and stuck a Post-it note to it, on which she’d written ‘Information from the Archive. FAO Matthew Holden Esq’. She hovered outside Publications and, believing the room to be empty, entered. Otter was there. No Matt. Good. She knew Otter was both party to the attraction between her and Matt and that he actively encouraged it.

  ‘Hey, Otter,’ she said, ‘just leaving this for Matt.’ She placed the file on his desk. ‘We have a hot date tonight!’ she confided in a whisper.

  ‘Oh, dearest Fenella,’ Otter groaned, holding his head theatrically in his hands while sheets of paper fluttered and sighed all around him.

  ‘Otter!’ Fen soothed, going to him and laying a hand gently on his twig-twist shoulders, presuming it was some finer point of punctuation or the choice between adjectives which vexed him. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘But you’re having lunch with Judith?’ he wailed, dragging his palms down his cheeks so that he resembled an emaciated bloodhound.

  ‘Yes,’ Fen confirmed artlessly, ‘but I can eat like a horse at lunch-time and still manage a hearty dinner.’

  ‘Darling girl.’ Otter looked and sounded as though he was going to weep. Fen felt a little alarmed. Only, Matt came in and she suddenly felt it was more important to exit hastily and leave him alone with the Archive folder, than it was to discover what grieved Otter so. Matt regarded the head-bowed Otter and thought him to be a trifle odd, which he regularly thought anyway, thus finding nothing ominous in his assistant’s deportment today.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Matt said lightly, ‘it might never happen.’

  Otter sighed. ‘Oh but it will, sweet knave, it will.’

  Matt saw the Archive file instantly but busied himself with a couple of phone calls before looking inside. He was delighted with Fen’s response and went to the Archive to return the folder and sneak a snog. Meanwhile, Judith St John entered Publications, and spoke briefly at Otter whilst sauntering over t
o Matt’s desk and glancing at his form for Fen. She noted Fen’s ticks. Immediately, Judith sensed lead in her stomach and tasted bile at the back of her throat. But she had more than one trump card up her sleeve. She left Publications making no comment to Otter who was gnawing his right thumbnail, having already chewed the fingernails of that hand.

  Otter didn’t want to have lunch with Matt. He couldn’t stomach a thing, full stop – not food, nor talk of Fen or Judith. He practically ran down to Victoria station to hide, to get away. He spent a very full lunch-hour browsing around the concourse shops; the tannoy comfortingly loud so that he didn’t have to listen to the dilemma in his head.

  Fen had spent her frugal freelance days on a lunch-time diet of toast and Marmite (with tinned alphabetti-spaghetti if she’d had an article published); her lunch times at Trust Art had been perfectly served by sandwiches from the nearby café. Therefore, to have lunch at the Tate Gallery Restaurant was a real event. Accordingly, she had dressed very carefully that morning, more for lunch than for the evening with Matt which was to follow. She had no desire, let alone the wardrobe, to match Judith’s penchant for Armani (always collarless, jacket long, skirt short or trousers slim in navy, black or charcoal, T-shirt in crisp cream mercerized cotton), but she had teamed her most expensive skirt (a lilac-grey, crepey, bias-cut just-below-the-knee Ghost special) with a slate-grey Agnés B cardigan. And a selection of Gemma’s Bobbi Brown eye make-up too. Matt of course thought she’d dressed for him. And the notion, along with the indisputably braless fact of Fen’s tits beneath the cardigan, had made him kiss her very intensely when returning the folder.

  Fen chose from the menu carefully, nothing with any juice or sauce that might splash or stain. Smoked salmon to start. Grilled corn-fed chicken with celeriac mash to follow. Crème brûlée to round things off nicely. Judith chose salad to start and a salad with goat’s cheese (which she pushed to one side) to follow. And fresh fruit salad for dessert.