Fen

FREYA NORTH

Fen

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

William Heinemann 2001

Copyright © Freya North 2001

Afterword © Freya North 2012

Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Sigmund Freud @ Copyrights, The Institute of Psycho-Analysis and The Hogarth Press or permission to quote from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud translated and edited by James Strachey. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007462216

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007462223

Version: 2017-11-28

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

For Felix

The only boy for me

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Epilogue

Afterword

About the Author

Acclaim for Freya

Also by Freya North

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Always keep in touch with nature, always try to get close to your model.

Auguste Rodin

Paris 1889

Julius Fetherstone had absolutely no need to sketch Cosima Antoine. Having met her, just the once, six days previously, and having fallen in love with her immediately, he knew her features off by heart instantly. Julius could have created a portrait bust of Cosima with his eyes closed. Literally. For, whenever he closed his eyes, there she was soliciting his every thought, setting his senses on fire, firing his artistic desire.

So it was a deplorable double con. Professionally, he had no need to see Cosima again. Ever. Whether commissioned or not, he would have been sculpting her. Again and again. Now he was charging his patron, her fiancé Jacques, more than he’d ever dared ask for a portrait bust. The fee would clear the debt to his landlady that a placating fuck every Thursday had done so far. More than just pay the rent and preclude further unsavoury carnal commerce; it would also keep him in clay and casting for a good long while. But far more valuable than the financial gains, Cosima’s image, imprinted in his soul, was now destined to provide source material for all future works.

He need never see her again. As he flipped through his sketch-book of the last week, her features stared back at him from every page apart from one with his copy of the new Manet he’d seen on display in the Salon des Indépendants and another with a charcoal of a maquette by his master, Rodin. But Cosima dominated all other pages. No further analysis today could make any portrait more complete than these done from memory, from knowing someone for less than twenty minutes. Yet in half an hour, she’d be at his studio and he’d be given carte blanche, plus a sizeable purse, just to stare at her.

Cosima Antoine was herself about to deceive her fiancé and con the sculptor. Julius Fetherstone had dominated her thoughts, asleep and awake, for the last six days. She told herself she was not in love with him because love was a state that should be avoided at all costs. She had decided this from an early age when witnessing how her mother’s love for her father was rebuffed by his compulsive infidelities with a succession of maids, friends and young cousins. No, Cosima told herself she was not in love with the brooding British sculptor, but feelings for him she certainly had. For her fiancé, she had no feelings, rather she had reasons. He would be a good man to marry. He would make a good husband. He would make a good father to her children. Sometimes, she found all that inherent goodness just a little unsavoury, but Cosima could cope because still the dark places in her heart and mind were free to take her wherever she pleased. And now her fiancé was taking her to the sculptor, walking her to a place where her fantasies of the past week might just take solid form.

Never had Paris looked so beautiful. It was autumn, leaves on trees were burnished bronze and breathtaking, those underfoot crunched and disintegrated most satisfyingly. The October sun, rosy and mellow, infiltrated her body and brought a rare warmth to her soul which saw her nodding politely at the inane witterings of her fiancé, though she chose not to hear a word.

‘I think we should ask Monsieur Fetherstone what he feels about a hat,’ Jacques was saying. ‘I think it would be most avant-garde for a portrait sculpture to be crowned by a hat. Otherwise, it might be like any old bust. We need to define you. To have a sculpture that says “1889; Cosima Antoine at twenty years old”.’

Cosima nodded thoughtfully; glad she had decided to leave the house hatless despite her fiancé’s concern and her maid’s horror.

There is absolutely no need for Cosima to undress. Julius has not asked her to, nor has she offered. They have simply exchanged cordial salutations and she has calmly walked over to the carved wooden screen in the corner of his studio. She has slipped behind it, unhooking her clothing as she goes.

‘I won’t be a moment,’ she says.

‘That’s fine,’ he replies, loosening his cravat with one hand, unbuttoning his trousers with the other.

Naked but for his loose, damask shirt, he folds the window shutters almost closed, affording his studio privacy as well as investing it with sultry shadows. October sun seeps through, licking all it touches with melancholy gold; a visual swansong of summer edged with the faintest prelude of forthcoming winter. He pads, barefoot, across the rug, closing his eyes to feel the transition between fabric ending and the well-worn, warm run of smooth old floorboards. He recalls how floorboards in Derbyshire, at the height of summer, were never as warm and welcoming as these in Paris in autumn. One more reason never to return. The other, just then, appears from behind the screen and time is suspended for Julius.

Ten twenty-two, the first Wednesday in October, 1889.

He, Julius Fetherstone, is wide awake in dream-time.

The briefest glimpse of Cosima’s nudity would have sufficed. Instead, she is walking over to him, fantastically naked. His senses are ablaze; his past, his twenty-three years until this moment, have lasted but a blink. His future will be governed by his ability to savour the present.

They stand, a foot apart, staring at each other. They have not touched but the heat emanating from their bodies seems to meet and merge. They have not kissed, but their lips are as wet as if they have. He stares at her. This body before him, the flesh and muscle, the curves and hair, is the composite of all his fantasies to date and will constitute the standard for all future fantasies. She can be everything. Angel–virgin–whore–wife.

Cosima takes her fingertips to his face and hovers them over his lips. His mouth parts and she can feel his breath on her fingers. He licks his lips and her fingertips are caught, like bees to honey paper. His tongue flicks over them. His hands encircle her waist and pull her against him. She brushes her now damp fingers over his cheek and down, so that she cups the back of his neck, dragging his hair between her fingers. Her other hand she takes to his chest, slipping behind the cotton of his shirt to meet his skin. He makes to kiss her but she turns her face at the last moment.

‘How long do we have?’ he breathes.

‘How long does a portrait take a sculptor these days?’ she asks, quite loudly, with a sly smile.

‘I need a day,’ he says, ‘that’s what I told your – him.’

‘Jacques,’ she states.

‘Jacques,’ he confirms.

‘My fiancé,’ she elaborates.

‘Your fiancé,’ he verifies.

‘Who,’ she says, licking her top teeth, ‘is commissioning my portrait in bronze.’

‘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. He fits in, in Farleymoor. Like he suited Soho when he was a jazz musician. But he fitted his life around us when we came to live with him. He’s barking mad and he’s the most important man in my life.

‘If our mother hadn’t run off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Fen said, ‘but if our dad had still had the heart attack, do you think we might have been brought up by Django anyway?’

This was a conundrum upon which each girl had mused frequently, though never in earshot of Django.

‘I would guess,’ Cat said measuredly, though she was merely giving back to Fen a theory her older sister had once given to her, ‘that the whole “cowboy-Denver-I’m-off” thing was probably a key ingredient in his heart attack.’

‘Sometimes,’ Pip reflected, ‘I feel a bit guilty for not caring in the slightest about my mother and not really remembering my father.’

‘I’ve never envied anyone with a conventional family,’ Fen remarked, ‘in fact, I felt slightly sorry for them.’

‘I used to wonder what on earth their lives were like for want of a Django,’ Pip said.

‘Me too,’ Cat agreed.

‘Do you remember when Susie Bailey hid in the old stable, made herself a kind of hide-out from Django’s old canvases?’ Fen laughed.

‘And her mum had to promise her that she’d make Django’s midnight-feast recipe of spaghetti with chocolate sauce, marshmallows and a slosh of brandy!’ Pip reminisced.

‘Do you remember friends’ houses?’ Cat said. ‘All that boring normal food? Structured stilted supper-time conversation? Designated programmes to watch on TV? Bedtime, lights out, no chatter?’

‘Django McCabe,’ Fen marvelled. ‘Do you think we’re a credit to him? Do you think we do him proud? That we are who we are, that we’re not boring old accountants?’

‘Or housewives,’ Cat interjected.

‘Or couch potatoes,’ Pip added.

‘Or socially inept,’ Cat said.

‘I’m sure he’s delighted that my career entails me being a clown called Martha rather than an executive in some horrid advertising agency,’ Pip said hopefully.

Django returned, his huge hands encircling four pint glasses. ‘Philippa McCabe,’ he boomed, ‘every night I pray to gods of all known creeds and a fair few I make up, that you will be phoning to tell me of your new position as a junior account manager on the Domestos Bleach account.’

Pip raised her glass to him.

‘And you, Catriona McCabe,’ Django continued, his eyes rolling to the ceiling, while he produced, from pockets in his waistcoat that the girls never knew existed, packets of peanuts and pork scratchings, ‘speed the day when you trade your job as a sports columnist for a career in the personnel department of a lovely company making air filters or cardboard tubing.’

Cat took a hearty sip of cider and grinned.

‘Fenella McCabe,’ Django regarded her, ‘how long must I wait before you exchange a dusty archive in the bowels of the Tate Gallery for the accounts department of a financial services company? And the three of you! The three of you! Why oh why have I been unable, as yet, to marry any of you off?’ He clutched his head in his hands, sighed and downed over half his pint.

Fen laughed. ‘Hey! I’ve only just landed this job. I’m going to spend my days with Julius!’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Cat wailed, finding solace in cider, ‘Julius.’

‘Bloody Julius,’ Pip remonstrated, chinking glasses with Cat.

‘Oh Lord, not that Fetherstone chap,’ Django exclaimed, rubbing his eyebrows, letting his head drop; a strand of his silver hair which had escaped his pony-tail dipping into his pint, ‘please, dear girl, please fall in love with a man who is at least alive.’

‘Who’s to say,’ Cat mused, ‘that while you’re waiting for the right bloke to come along, you can’t have lots of fun with all the wrong ones!’

‘Please,’ Fen remonstrated but with good humour, ‘my new job starts tomorrow.’ She regarded her two sisters and her uncle. ‘One for which I was head-hunted,’ she emphasized. She ate a peanut thoughtfully, took a sip of cider and looked out of the pub window to the moors. ‘So, my life wants for nothing at the moment.’

TWO

Julius Fetherstone (1866–1954) arrived in Paris in 1886 at the age of 20. There, he begged, bargained and all but bribed his way into the studio of Auguste Rodin, for whom he worked as a technician in return for materials and tutelage. However, though the great Master esteemed his foreign pupil, Julius was never truly accepted by the French who firmly believed, at the exclusion of all visual evidence to the contrary, that the English could no more sculpt than they could cook. When Julius returned to England for a one-man-show in 1935, the British art world looked the other way. ‘Vulgar in theme and execution’ was the The Times review in its entirety. Only 3 works were bought, all of them by Henry Holden. Holden became something of a patron to Julius until the sculptor’s death in 1954.

F.A.McCabe

Unpublished MA thesis

Fen McCabe first came across Abandon by Julius Fetherstone four days after losing her virginity at the age of eighteen. She was in Munich, on her A level Art History study trip when she found herself transfixed by a mass of bronze depicting two figures embroiled in the very moment of orgasm. To her humiliation and regret, it made her realize that the fumbling poke she had recently endured was utterly at odds with what the experience obviously should have been.