The McCabe Girls Complete Collection

by Freya North

  Come on! Come on! What was said? What was the conversation like? Did it flow? What was discussed?

  Actually, she was really sweet to me!

  Did she call you Fenella or Fen?

  Fen. Throughout.

  Do you suspect it was a veneer?

  No! I’d much rather credit her with having an unfortunate manner in company. She was very attentive – asked me lots of probing questions about the Archive.

  And?

  Was I enjoying myself, had I made friends amongst the staff? You know, usual stuff.

  No! More details.

  Well, she was even light-hearted about catching Matt and me! She said, ‘Fen, I doubt whether the Archive is the most salubrious of setting for clinches with Matthew.’ I laughed and she raised her eyebrow and told me to be careful.

  To be careful?

  Yes. Actually, I wasn’t quite sure of the meaning behind that one either. Was she talking about safe sex? Or the metal corners of the shelving being hazardous? Or stains on the papers? Or people not as tolerant as her walking in on us? Anyway, the conversation became quite girly – I told her we were having a hot date tonight. In W1, food and drink – I didn’t say about the bases and breakfast.

  What was her response?

  Actually, she was fiddling with a message on her mobile phone and fiddling with the spun sugar on her fruit salad and trying to summon the bill. I don’t think she was that interested.

  Not that interested?

  No. I think Judith St John is wedded to work and promoting her image as a thrusting young force in the art world. I think respect is what she lusts after, and success is what turns her on. She was interested in the Tate’s response to the Derbyshire Fetherstones. There’s an acquisitions meeting in three weeks’ time. I’ll call James Caulfield and see if he can arrange to have the works sent down.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ James sighs, wriggling out of his boots. He is dressed and ready to go to his afternoon assignments, having come home for lunch and to give Barry his antibiotics. He was just about to hold the door open for the dogs when the house phone rings. Whether James is merely stuck in his ways or whether he has standards, he resolutely adheres to a policy of no boots beyond the hallway mat. The phone is ringing.

  ‘Call my fucking mobile, why don’t you?’

  The boots have to come off. He jars his left ankle in the process and winces. He practically skates across the flagstones to answer the phone.

  ‘Yes!’ he barks.

  Fen is taken aback by the aggression.

  ‘Who is this?’ he demands.

  ‘Mr Caulfield?’

  In an instant, James knows it’s Fen. The pain in his ankle subsides; the fact that Beryl is chewing his right boot is irrelevant. Barry is engrossed in giving his balls a meticulous licking. James sees that, subconsciously, he is holding his own testicles. It’s the sound of Fen’s voice. It’s a balm. It has smoothed away the furrows of irritability from his brow, it has soothed his ricked ankle.

  ‘Mr Caulfield?’

  The fairer sex indeed. Remember, I spend most my life listening to dogs snoring or barking, or to middle-aged busybodies divulging their opinions, and to me droning on to myself.

  ‘Hullo?’ Fen says again. ‘It’s Fen McCabe. From London. From Trust Art. The Fetherstones.’

  ‘Hullo, Fen,’ James says in an instantly soothed tone of voice, ‘this is James.’

  Fen is smiling subconsciously. She can smell Derbyshire. She can feel the spring breeze on her cheeks. She is relatively full from lunch at the Tate but she could easily manage a slice of Mrs Merifleld’s Bakewell tart from the Rag and Thistle. The Archive is all brown boxes and grey shelving and paint that needs a face-lift. Keeper’s Dwelling smells of wood fires and has dogs that are effusive in their affection. And Fetherstones. Three of them. ‘How are you, Fen?’ James asks. Barry has finished cleaning his testicles and is now humping his rump in a peculiar dragging fashion across the large doormat. ‘Bugger – can I worm him on antibiotics?’

  ‘What?’ Fen reacts.

  ‘Sorry, Fen,’ James laughs, ‘Barry is on antibiotics. And I think he’s probably got worms.’

  ‘Is he doing that funny bottom shuffle across the floor?’ Fen asks.

  ‘Spot on.’

  ‘Worms,’ Fen proclaims, ‘yeuch.’

  ‘Anyway,’ James says affably, ‘enough about my dog’s anal afflictions, what can I do you for?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fen says, becoming the official voice of Trust Art, ‘could we have your Fetherstones in London, please? The Tate want to see them and then there’s our acquisitions meeting later this month.’

  ‘Sure,’ James says, ‘sure. Shall I bring them? Send them? Will you send for them?’ He paused. ‘Come for them?’

  ‘I’ll send for them,’ says Fen, though she does pause momentarily to think twice.

  It was nice speaking to James. It was almost four o’clock. The evening with Matt seemed imminent. She’d arranged that Pip should be on Cat duty, but under no circumstances to tell her that Fen had a date.

  It had been nice, speaking to James. He has the most wonderful Fetherstones in his collection. Fen would send for them and see them again. It was something to truly look forward to. For the time being, though, the coming evening was what Fen was looking forward to.

  Judith St John entered Publications. She glanced at Otter whose eyes were wide with fear for some reason. She looked at Matt who was tapping a pencil between his top and lower teeth whilst looking out of the window.

  ‘Matthew,’ Judith breezed. He looked up. It was very obvious to her that he had been lost in thought, not thinking about the running order of the current issue of Art Matters.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘I suggest we leave here at five thirty-ish.’ She said it so nonchalantly, but with such confidence that, though Matt temporarily had no idea to what she alluded, he felt it was more than his job’s worth to enquire what, where, why. Luckily, Judith continued. ‘The Whitechapel is a bugger to get to from Pimlico. The private view starts at six thirty. I’ll order a cab. I thought we’d have a light supper afterwards. I’ve booked that new fusion restaurant in Hoxton.’

  There was no room to comment, let alone protest. Matt kept the pencil in his mouth. His facial expression was neutral. Only the flexed muscles on his cheek gave away that he was biting down on the pencil, hard. Judith, feeling triumphant, smiled in a girly-sweet way utterly at odds with her character. ‘It could be an interesting evening,’ she said, most beguilingly.

  Both Otter and Matt sat with their heads in their hands. Matt has a sense of duty. He has manners. The arrangement with Judith was made before that with Fen. He was hugely disappointed. But he had to do what is right. His father had drummed it into him. Honesty. Politeness. Decorum.

  ‘Bugger,’ he sighed, ‘what a fuck-up.’

  It was five o’clock.

  He went to the Archive.

  It is five thirty. Matt and Judith have gone.

  ‘Fuck,’ says Otter, ‘what a fucking fuck-up.’ He goes to the Archive. He finds Fen, a brownish smudge on her white vest, typing data into the computer. She has a line of biro ink on her left hand. Whether she is chewing something, or whether she is merely masticating with concentration, Otter cannot tell. But he thinks how gentle she looks, fragile even. Oh dear.

  ‘Fen, dearest,’ Otter says, laying a hand carefully on her head.

  ‘Hey,’ Fen says. Then she pulls a forlorn face. ‘He blew me out. He’s spending the evening with Judith.’

  ‘I know,’ says Otter, not wanting to know more, and therefore not noting that Fen’s expression has a theatrical edge.

  ‘Bastard,’ Fen says, but Otter, so caught up in what he thinks has happened, does not hear the lightness to her tone of voice, that she uses the term almost affectionately.

  Fen is indeed hugely disappointed. In fact, she felt quite annoyed when Matt left the Archive; a little rejected too. She tried to understand. It was work, afte
r all. A prior engagement, that’s all.

  Otter, however, does not understand what Fen has understood. All he knows is that she has had lunch with Judith, and that Judith had told him that she’d be enlightening Fen on a couple of matters. Otter can only begin to imagine what was said. And what he imagines is enough to compel him to reassure Fen in any way he can.

  ‘She’s a manipulative bitch,’ he proclaims, now stroking Fen’s hair quite frenetically. Fen frowns and ducks her head from Otter’s touch; she swivels in her chair to face him and he perches on the edge of her desk like a raggedly crow in a bird sanctuary. ‘I promise you, dearest, she’ll have made it sound much more than it was – certainly much more than it ever meant to Matt.’ Fen is frowning still. ‘You have to remember,’ he says very carefully, ‘that he is recently released from a troublesome break-up of a long-term relationship.’ Fen has no idea where this conversation has come from, where it is going, or why Otter is engrossed in it. She doesn’t even know who the ‘she’ is.

  ‘It was only sex,’ Otter stresses, ‘Matt fucked Judith because he was on the rebound.’

  Fen scrunches her eyes tight shut.

  Oh fuck. Judith.

  She keeps her eyes closed. Otter has presented her with a mapped-out canvas. She has only to fill in the colour. Painting by numbers. Joining the dots. A picture to be revealed.

  I don’t want to know!

  I want to know everything!

  Matt?

  Judith?

  Sex?

  When?

  Otter feels that the best thing to do, the most tactful and constructive way to handle all of this, is to play down completely the coupling of Matt and Judith. He will simply stress the physical and do away with any emotional significance Judith might have – must have – emphasized over lunch. ‘And he was drunk,’ Otter proclaims, as if this fact further undermines any relevance whatsoever to the fornication between Matt and Judith. ‘I mean,’ he continues, hoping to calm Fen’s darting eyes, ‘I know it was a couple of a weeks ago – the Rothko private view – but honestly, honestly, it was just a one-off, drunken exchange of bodily fluids. Purely physical. It hadn’t happened before – and I promise you, dearest sweetest darlingest Fen, it won’t happen again. Certainly not tonight.’

  Shut up, Otter.

  ‘It was just sex.’

  Stop it.

  ‘Alcohol fuelled.’

  Enough.

  ‘Seriously, love – for Matt it was little more than an assisted wank.’

  Otter, leave it!

  ‘Don’t let Judith have suggested to you otherwise. She’s a fucked-up cow. She feels threatened by your success and your beauty and Matt’s obvious attraction to you.’

  Yeah, right.

  ‘But just because she’s trying to replicate that evening again tonight – well, I assure you, Matt’ll have none of it.’

  Yeah, right.

  ‘I mean, his ex-girlfriend has been trying to claw her way back on the scene – our poor Matthew, he had a lousy weekend trying to wrest her off him. He only wants you, dearest Fen.’

  Now an ex-bloody-girlfriend is thrown into the equation!

  ‘I give you this privileged information because I will not have you judge this fine boy on the bullshit that Judith fed you over lunch. Nor on the trials of his past. Trust him. You can.’

  Privilege? Trust? It’s all bullshit. Judith didn’t tell me a thing, you bumbling, interfering idiot.

  ‘It was a one-off, drunken, pointless shag. But hey, haven’t we all been there?’

  No. I haven’t, Otter. And I’d rather not consort with those who have.

  Otter could not persuade Fen to come out with him for a restorative drink. She said she had cat duty at her sister’s, or something. Matt likes cats, Otter thought to himself as, exhausted but with a weight off his mind, he made his way to the tube and home to his meticulous one-bedroom flat in Notting Hill.

  Fen sits at her desk feeling shell-shocked. And betrayed. By all of them. Would she rather not have known? She can’t think straight. She doesn’t think she likes Matt very much. She doesn’t like Judith at all. She thinks Otter is an insensitive, gossip-obsessed fool. She stares blankly at the wall. Her focus changes and fixes on a postcard of Abandon.

  Yes. Absolutely. Abandon. Abandon it all.

  Even from the black-and-white two-dimensional reproduction of this great work, the play of light on mass, the shapes of the spaces in between the forms, the dance between limbs, the intensity of the emotion emanating from within these two lust-locked people, takes her breath away.

  It’s crazy. A lump of bronze. And yet they breathe.

  ‘What a genius.’

  Fen stares and stares at the work of art that has obsessed her for over a decade. A tear oozes from the corner of her eye as painfully as the lump that has lodged itself at the base of her throat.

  These people do not exist. The physical forms that are here are merely testimony to this sculptor’s knowledge of human anatomy. This is not real. They are as fictitious as characters in a novel, or in a film. I feel I’ve been conned!

  ‘Con artist,’ she spits. She rips the postcard from the wall and tears it in two. She has severed He from She. Not that they were one, anyway. Not that they were anyone at all.

  Cat, who had wept on and off all evening, was fast asleep by ten o’clock. Fen flicked channels on the television. Her mobile phoned beeped that there was a message. She hoped it wasn’t Matt. It wasn’t. Fleetingly, she was disappointed but swiftly chided herself. It was Abi.

  ‘How wz yr date? R U inflagrante?’

  Fen snorted. She sent Abi a text message back.

  ‘Pants.’

  Abi didn’t understand.

  ‘???’

  Fen was too tired to phone through the information. She sent Abi a final text.

  ‘Tell U 2morro.’

  She switched her phone off and put it in her bag. There were two pieces of folded paper. One was a copy of Matt’s list. This she folded into the smallest possible form and expertly launched over to the waste-paper basket. The other piece of paper was a print-out of James’s phone number and address. Fen folded this twice and then tapped it contemplatively against her nose. What had he said?

  ‘Shall I bring them? Send them? Will you send for them? Come for them?’

  She had told him she’d send for them.

  She has changed her mind.

  ‘James?’

  ‘Fen McCabe? Good God, you’re not still at work are you?’

  ‘I think I’ll come for them.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.

  Mae West

  The next morning, if Fen had any second thoughts about her impromptu visit to Derbyshire, then what she found in her house when she returned from Cat’s flat, decided her at once that she should be gone from London which, in her eyes, was rapidly disintegrating into a city of iniquity. She wanted to change her clothes, to wash away any vestige of yesterday. Dress not for Judith, nor for Matt. Matt, she thought with a smirk to her face but a churn to her stomach, was probably hunting for his clothes amongst the debris that had no doubt been flung around Judith’s flat in erotic abandon.

  Or maybe he went home alone at half past nine. Whichever, what do I care?

  It was cloudless. Though the sun wasn’t yet in appearance, a soft spring day was prophesied. As Fen strolled through Camden towards her house, she felt nicely restored. She’d slept well and now the weather put her in a balanced mood.

  I have a fair few postcards of Abandon. I must take one or two in to work.

  ‘God, you’ve a great arse, babe.’

  Jake’s lust-soaked voice filtered down the stairs and into the kitchen where Fen was trying to enjoy a simple, refreshing glass of grapefruit juice. Jake’s description was accurate, Fen thought, objectively classing Abi’s bottom herself as ‘pert and inviting’.

  Fen found herself straining her ears to hear Abi’s re
sponse. There was something simultaneously repellent and yet utterly compelling about eavesdropping on another couple’s sex. She felt both awkward but quite titillated. As though she shouldn’t listen, as though she really should go, but as though some voyeuristic side to her was revealing itself and goading her to stay. Stay, inch closer, listen more, have a peep! A desirous groan from Jake made Fen clasp her hand to her mouth to hold back schoolgirl giggles. Jake was now really moaning and gasping and the bed was creaking.

  With all the noise, it seemed the opportune moment for Fen to make her way quietly up to her room. The house was tall and thin with the kitchen and living-room, open plan, spanning the ground floor. The bathroom and Abi’s room were on the first floor and Gemma’s and Fen’s rooms, separated by a twist in the hallway and three small steps to a landing, were on the top floor. Abi’s door was wide open, Jake’s clothes were strewn around it. The bed was unmade but empty. They were obviously up a level.

  Please God don’t let me find her strapped to the banisters or Jake humped over the stairs on the landing. Or the two of them in some yogic configuration on my Lloyd Loom chair!

  Actually, they are in Gemma’s room, Fen.

  What the hell are they doing in there? That’s outrageous, she’ll be truly pissed off.

  No, she won’t.

  Of course she will be! I would be!

  But it is Gemma.

  Fen knew she should have just tiptoed past and looked steadily ahead. But there was a magnetic force dragging her eyes to the left. And what she saw rooted her to the spot. She was alternately turned on and revulsed, titillated and appalled.

  It was indeed Gemma who Jake was screwing. Fen was stunned to the spot, like a rabbit transfixed by the headlights of a car, drawn to danger. She observed through the slightly ajar door, Jake humping and thrusting and gyrating against Gemma’s admittedly great arse.

  ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’