The McCabe Girls Complete Collection

by Freya North

  ‘But who are you?’ she asked the figures, her face on a level with their stomachs. ‘Who are you?’ she asked the man, looking up at him. ‘Are you Julius?’ She thought he very probably was. ‘But then, who are you?’ she asked the woman, staring intently at her beautiful face. ‘I mean, I know you are Eve – and every non-portrait female form Julius ever sculpted – but who – who – were you?’

  ‘Fen?’

  James.

  ‘Tell me!’ Fen pleaded quietly, as if she believed the sculptural figures could do so only whilst the shed door was locked and they were together.

  ‘Fen?’

  James. Don’t! Don’t let me out! Don’t unlock the door! Don’t break the spell!

  James, though, had no intention of letting Fen out until she so requested.

  Fen walked behind Abandon and looked towards the window of the shed. She couldn’t really see much, just blurs of green and, once or twice, a dark patch she realized was James’s shadow. With one palm pressed against the woman’s shoulder-blades, with the other pressed against the small of the man’s back, Fen held her cheek to the heavy space their bodies created. She breathed deeply. She sighed. She left them. Why should they speak to her? Who on earth was she, Fen McCabe, to them? They were utterly self-contained in their desire for one another. As they had been since Julius Fetherstone had released their forms from the great chunk of marble a century ago.

  ‘James?’ Fen called a few feet from the door.

  ‘Would you like to come out?’ James’s voice replied.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Fen.

  She comes out, blinking, into the light; into the late July late afternoon. She walks with James over and up the lawn, across the gravel promenade, up the stone steps and into the house. He has his hand on her shoulder, lightly, very supportively. She’s comforted that it should be there.

  ‘I expect,’ said James, ‘that you have a fair few questions for me?’

  Fen nodded. James settled into an armchair in the snug. He turned over his hands so his palms were uppermost, signifying that she should start, that he was ready and open.

  ‘Did you,’ Fen faltered, ‘steal your Fetherstones?’

  James was not offended. ‘No, Fen, I did not, they were left to me by my father.’

  She believed him. ‘But why do you have Abandon? How did your dad come by that? Why you?’

  ‘It was decreed that he should have it,’ James said, ‘to hold it for me.’

  Fen stared at him, her eyes darting around his face to try and glean some tiny particle of sense.

  ‘Come with me,’ James said. He led her out of the snug, across the flagstone hallway and up the stairs to his bedroom. There, he opened the drawer of his bedside cabinet and placed a clutch of photos on his bed.

  Fen sat down and looked at them. ‘How odd!’ she said, ‘these are like the photos in the Archive at Trust Art and in the Fetherstone files in Paris.’ She turned them over. From what she could remember, the handwriting on the back was identical to that on the back of those in Paris. There were five photos, she’d seen them all before. She looked at James expectantly. He handed her three more. Fen took them from him, looked at each quickly and then drew breath sharply. Her hands began to shake.

  In the first, the elusive woman was staring directly at the camera, standing posed formally between Julius and Henry. In the second, she was half out of frame, Henry and Julius were in deep conversation, and the small child sat on Henry’s knee, his back to the camera. In the third, a close-up, Julius was hazy in his bath chair in the background. The frame cut off half of Henry and half of the woman. It was focused entirely on the child. The child was holding the hand of the woman, the hand of Henry. It was unmistakably a boy. About four years old. Smiling at the camera. Filling the frame. It was, unmistakably, James Caulfield.

  Fen stares at James who nods, silently. Fen looks at the photos again. James takes her hand and leads her to the chest of drawers, with the lovely old framed photos.

  ‘This is my mother,’ he says, and Fen recognizes her as the lady in the studio. Is that why she looks so familiar? But didn’t Fen feel she was familiar, for some unknown reason, when she first set eyes on James’s photo? Fen is tired and overawed and can’t really remember. ‘This is my father,’ says James, showing Fen a photo in a silver frame she hasn’t seen on the chest of drawers before.

  ‘No, no. Actually, this is Henry Holden,’ Fen explains to James, as if he might not know, as if he might be mistaken, misled; as if he hasn’t realized.

  ‘I am Henry Holden’s son,’ James says, ‘and Theresa’s son too.’

  Fen is frowning with the effort of trying to absorb too much near-surreal information. James sits her down on the bed, allowing her to keep hold of the two framed photographs. ‘Theresa Cattaldi was the granddaughter of Cosima Cattaldi.’ These made no sense to Fen. ‘Cosima married Jacques Antoine.’

  ‘Oh!’ Fen interrupts artlessly. ‘Julius did a portrait bust of Cosima Antoine!’

  ‘Fen,’ James says, ‘this is privileged information. Julius had an affair with Cosima. Brief. Passionate. That’s all I know. She is the Woman – the anonymous woman. In Eve. In Abandon. In Hunger. In Desire. In all the works where the sitter is unknown. We’re so used to knowing Cosima’s face from the official portrait bust and sketches, we would not recognize her in any other way.’

  Fen is dumbstruck.

  ‘Henry Holden had a brief affair with Theresa Cattaldi. He was married to his first wife at the time. Theresa fell pregnant. Henry, therefore, had an illegitimate son.’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re English!’ Fen remonstrates, as if it is the one true fact she knows. ‘You’re not French! Or Italian!’

  ‘Henry brought Mother and me over the year after this photo was taken. I was four and a half years old. Abandon was left to me. Julius told Henry I was to have it.’

  ‘But Henry was married,’ Fen says, slotting the jigsaw together, ‘hence the need for discretion – secrecy.’

  James nods. ‘We didn’t really see him,’ he tells her, a little sadness tingeing his voice, ‘but he ensured we were comfortable which, in those days, counted for a lot. I adored my mother,’ he says taking the photograph of her that Fen is holding, ‘I adored her. Anyway, when I was a teenager, Henry married a second time and lived happily ever after until his death, I do believe. I did so adore my mother.’

  It is difficult for Fen to find her voice or think of what to say or ask next. She lies back on James’s bed and closes her eyes and drifts off into a numb sleep.

  They awake, wrapped in each other’s arms, very late that night. They undress and slip between the sheets. Fen snuggles up to James.

  ‘I love you, James.’

  ‘I know you do. And I believe – truly I do – that what you’re suggesting is for the best.’

  ‘Being born of Cosima’s blood,’ Fen says sleepily, ‘you are probably as near as Julius came to having a son.’

  ‘He liked to think so,’ James says.

  ‘That’s why he bequeathed you Abandon,’ Fen defines, feeling at ease for the first time in days. It all makes sense. Or at least, much more sense than it had made earlier. It makes enough sense to allow her to go to sleep relatively content.

  Over breakfast the next morning, Fen and James talked easily.

  ‘You do realize,’ Fen said, ‘that if we put Abandon up for sale, it’s not just a new roof you can buy!’

  ‘I do know that,’ James replied, ‘but it simply isn’t for sale.’

  Fen looked at him. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked. ‘I mean, there’s something of an indignity about it being in a shed in Derbyshire under a smelly old sheet.’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything with it,’ James said, quite abruptly, staring at her squarely, ‘but you are.’

  Fen is back in the shed. She has a train to catch. She wants time alone with Abandon.

  ‘Goodbye, Julius,’
she whispers, gently touching the man’s forearm. ‘Goodbye, Cosima,’ she whispers affectionately, lightly stroking the woman’s knee. ‘I’ll find somewhere safe and beautiful for you both, I promise. Goodbye, lovers, goodbye.’

  James drives Fen to Chesterfield station. Fen hugs the dogs so tightly they yelp. James walks her to the platform. He gives her an envelope.

  ‘It’s a letter from Julius to Henry, about Abandon, about me,’ he tells her.

  ‘We can do this,’ she assures him, ‘discreetly.’

  ‘In your hands,’ he says, ‘in your hands. Abandon couldn’t be safer anywhere else.’

  Fen smiles at him. She gazes into his eyes. For a moment, there’s the possibility they will sink their mouths against each other. He clasps her against him in an enveloping hug and kisses the top of her head four or five times. ‘I could ask you to think again,’ he says, ‘but I won’t. You have so much ahead of you, Fen – so much to do. And, truthfully, I am very content as I am, as I have been for some time. I love you and I will miss you but I am happy to part as we are parting today.’

  When I woke this morning and gazed at you sleeping, I realized that, unknowingly, I had been waiting most of my adult life for you. You came with the key to unlock my Fetherstone dilemma, but not the key to my heart. Now you have done so, you can go, I can let you go.

  Fen’s train is pulling in. Should she tell him? Should she tell him? Now? She touches James’s cheek. ‘You have a half-brother, James,’ she tells him.

  But should I tells him?

  ‘He works at Trust Art.’

  Should I tell him everything?

  ‘He’s called Matthew,’ says Fen. She looks at her feet. She thinks of Matt. She smiles.

  ‘He’s lovely.’

  FORTY-NINE

  Fen didn’t tell a soul about Abandon. She knew that when the time came to divulge, to share, her private audience with the work – still vivid to her – would have to be relinquished. She kept Julius’s letter under her bed, in the shoebox that contained all her childhood treasures. She knew that when it came to handing the letter over – to validate, authenticate and legitimize James’s loan – that then she would be grown up. She wouldn’t be able to chat to Julius thereafter, nor to refer to him by his Christian name. She wasn’t quite ready for that just yet, so she kept the letter under her bed and didn’t tell anyone what she’d seen in the shed.

  She thought of James often, wistfully. But she thought of Matt even more – despite seeing him every day. They were friendly towards each other. Fen, though, did not make a play for him. She didn’t feel entitled. She’d regarded her right palm which said, ‘Fight for him! Tell him you demand the relationship is given a fair chance! Ask him if abstaining from the comforts and commitments of a relationship is making him happier!’ Her left palm, however, said, ‘You blew it, girl. This is your just deserts for wanting everything your own way, for not respecting the potential you had for abusing his honesty, for damaging him, should he ever have found out that you were spectacularly unfaithful to him.’

  Otter just wants to bang their heads together hard, to then enable them to kiss each other better. He wants to tell Matt that he’s being ridiculously self-righteous, he wants to tell Fen she’s being a feeble martyr. He can see that neither of them is happy being apart, and because he knows both of them well, he is absolutely adamant that a romantic attachment between them is fail-safe.

  ‘You’re perverted, you are,’ he jested with Matt, ‘letting Fen go!’

  ‘Pervert!’ Matt remonstrated. ‘Me? It’s you who indulges in poking around bottoms of the same sex – I rather think Pervert is your middle name!’

  I shouldn’t have let Fen go! I shouldn’t! But I felt I ought. And now I feel I ought to stick with that. Partly, I suppose, because I’m not quite sure how to get her back. And if I were to, it really would signify that we embark on a full-on bonafide relationship.

  ‘For God’s sake, Ed,’ Otter said, exasperated with Matt. He clasped his fingers and stretched them back on themselves, the ensuing hollow crackings setting Matt’s teeth on edge. ‘Now I have your attention,’ Otter said. ‘I just feel – really believe – that you are making a mistake. Fen is charming and gorgeous and sexy and you interact and interlock together beautifully.’

  Matt stood up and stormed out. ‘What would you know,’ he barked, ‘gay boy!’

  ‘Woo him!’ Otter pleaded with Fen. ‘Pursue him!’

  ‘I wouldn’t know how,’ Fen told him, ‘and anyway, his reasons for ending the relationship make sense. I don’t like them, but I do understand.’

  And then came the day when, without fanfare or palm-consultation, Fen brought Julius’s letter into work. She came across Rodney by the pigeon-holes.

  ‘Please could you spare me five minutes?’ she requested.

  ‘Good Lord, Fenella!’ he remarked. ‘Are you telepathic?’ He took a custard cream from Bobbie’s biscuit tin and left Reception, shaking his head. In her pigeon-hole, Fen found a note, hand-scrawled from Rodney, suggesting a quick chat in his office after lunch. Fen half wondered if perhaps James had called or written. Oh well, she’d soon find out.

  By lunch-time, it became immensely important to her to let Matt know before she told anyone else. She went along to Publications.

  ‘Hullo, Matt,’ she said, really wishing she could simply not notice that he looked very fine in indigo jeans and a quite tight T-shirt. She glanced at Otter with a faint but perceptible raising of one eyebrow and he took the hint immediately.

  ‘Dying for a slash,’ he said, rising and leaving the room with a highly exaggerated bladder-about-to-bust walk.

  Fen hovered. ‘Um –’

  Matt looked up. He refused to be swayed by her smooth bare legs and the fact that she was in the little navy-blue sun dress that had secretly been a favourite of his. ‘Hiya,’ he said. He swivelled in his chair and Fen walked over to him.

  ‘I wanted to tell you something,’ she said.

  Tell me that you love me, Fen. Tell me that you refuse to allow me to be so stupid. Tell me that you will not tolerate this relationship being over, just when it was on the verge of really taking off.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked instead.

  ‘I’ve –’ Fen regarded him. ‘It’s just – I wanted to tell you something.’

  Matt looked at her expectantly. Fen approached his desk and perched on it. Her knees, all he could focus on were her knees. He sat on his hands for safety and made a rotation swivel on his chair.

  ‘I’ve found Abandon,’ Fen said.

  Though of course it would have appalled Fen, if truth be told, she really was the only person – possibly anywhere – who thought about Julius Fetherstone on such a regular basis. Matt, though appreciative of the sculptor’s work, certainly didn’t think about him on a weekly basis, let alone daily or hourly. Consequently, he stared at Fen rather vacantly and, because her revelation did not blow his mind, it did not divert his attention from the pressing distraction of her neat knees.

  ‘In Derbyshire,’ Fen continued, as if that was the further information Matt required to comprehend the magnitude of her announcement. ‘Julius Frigging Fetherstone’s Abandon!’ she marvelled. ‘In a shed in Derbyshire!’

  The penny dropped for Matt and he was suitably impressed. ‘Blimey!’ he said. ‘Well done you.’ To emphasize his praise, he felt a friendly tap on her knees was appropriate. God, he wanted to linger. God, did Fen want him to linger!

  ‘I have a meeting with Rodney this afternoon,’ she told him. ‘I can’t wait to tell him.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Matt said, ‘good for you.’

  And then he didn’t really know what to say next. Nor did Fen. What she wanted to do was fling her arms around his neck and be kissed by him, to have him suggest champagne and celebration. But, sadly, she acknowledged that wasn’t going to happen. ‘Anyway,’ she shrugged, ‘you’re the first person I’ve told. Because I wanted you to know first.’

  Matt liked th
e sound of that. ‘Let me know how Rodney reacts,’ he told her. ‘My bet is that he’ll jump up and down on his desk and say, “Yippee!” and then charge around his office giving the thumbs up!’

  Matt and Fen shared laughter at their director’s expense.

  Only Rodney didn’t behave like an overgrown schoolboy. He didn’t jump for joy and shout, ‘Yippee!’ and dart about brandishing his thumbs. When Fen knocked on his door, Judith’s voice told her to enter. Fen came into Rodney’s office to find him and Judith sitting there, looking very serious indeed.

  ‘Have a seat,’ Rodney said. Fen sat down. Her director looked very unhappy indeed. Oh well, news of the Fetherstone would no doubt lift his spirits and make his day. How could it fail to do otherwise!

  Rodney fiddled with paper-clips on his desk and pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Dear Fenella,’ he said, ‘dear Fenella.’

  Judith took the reins. ‘With the Archive so near completion,’ she said, wearing a smugness across her face utterly opposed to the clear distress etching Rodney’s, ‘we thought it only fair to alert you to the fact that the job itself will also be complete.’

  Fen looked a little blank. Weren’t they meant to be talking about Julius Fetherstone? Judith watched for Fen’s reaction. Fen obviously hadn’t understood. Judith would have to be more blatant. Rodney wasn’t going to be much help, Judith noticed, seeing the director poking paper-clips into an empty juice bottle nervously. ‘Fen,’ Judith said, with kindness so gracious that it was jarringly false, ‘we’re going to have to let you go.’

  ‘Go where?’ Fen asked, her mind still being firmly in the shed in Derbyshire.

  ‘Well, with the Archive project finished,’ Rodney said, snapping to attention and wresting control from Judith so he could add the tact and sensitivity Fen deserved, ‘unfortunately, the job is finished too. And there isn’t anything else here that we can give you.’ Fen stared at him. He looked as if he was going to sob. ‘I wanted to give you warning – so you could start scouting around. I wish the Archive had been bigger!’ he rued. ‘Then you could still work with us.’