Fen

And you’re forty-nine now.

Yup. Stuck in my ways with my heart shared equally between two dogs and a draughty house. Not much more room in there. Anyway, I’m not that inviting a proposition. I had a couple of women last year, one in Glossop, one in Crookes, for whom I was the height of glamour on account of my age (I was at least twice theirs) and accent. Folk round here would love to see me set up in the Dwelling with a wife and the proverbial 2.4 – but they’ll be keeping their ripe daughters well away.

Why?

Because I think they feel if I’m unmarried and with sperm awaiting at forty-nine, there must be some reason for it, something wrong.

OK, what about their older daughters?

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that an unmarried man, at forty-nine, is far more attractive a proposition than an unmarried woman of that age.

But are you happy like this?

I’m used to it. Familiarity breeds content.

With a huge mug of tea and a clutch of digestive biscuits, James goes to the room he calls the study to divide his attention between three days of unopened mail and today’s Guardian. Bill. Bill. Bill. Bill Clinton. James does some hasty mental arithmetic and reckons that the amounts owing will swallow nicely both the amount earned last month and to be earned this.

Swallow nicely – hey, Mr Clinton?

Barry and Beryl look at him with expressions bordering on pity. James studiously ignores them and the pile of red bills, and tries to ignore the fact that he is verging on broke. He turns the page of the newspaper and reads that an anonymous bidder at Calthrop’s paid £3 million for a Matisse.

‘Shame we don’t have a Matisse or two knocking about,’ James says, regarding a pair of oil sketches above the fireplace. ‘My bank manager hates me.’ He looked at the numbers under the Matisse painting. He thought about his bank manager. He looked at the pile of red bills. He thought about the Fetherstones. ‘Compared to a Matisse, we’d probably need to subtract most of the noughts if we put the Fetherstones up for auction.’ He ventures over and unhooks one of the paintings from the wall. It is about the size of a coffee-table book.

How awful that something as prosaic as a leaking roof and irate bank manager would make me think of selling my Fetherstones. There again, pruning rhodos does not a rich man make.

‘Anyway, my lot are probably not even worth half of a pencil smudge by Monsieur Matisse.’ He looks at the back of the board he has just taken down. ‘Adam, 1895. Eve,’ he murmurs, taking down the other, ‘1894. Biblically impossible – but artists are gods of a type – creating and destroying and having tomes of nonsense written about them.’ He looks at the wall and cringes at the two light rectangles edged by dusty outlines. He places the two paintings side by side. He feels ashamed that he’s trying to read price tags on them. He feels irritated that, at forty-nine years of age, his finances are in disarray and his bank manager is rude to him. He looks at the oil sketches, butting up against each other. Without the width of the extravagant stone mantelpiece separating them, he suddenly appreciates how they were conceived as much more than a pair. He feels ashamed for having kept them apart.

‘Dirty bugger!’ he chortles under his breath with deference to the artist. He sees how, if he was to cut the figures from the board, they would entwine together in copulatory ecstasy. ‘Hang on,’ James says, leaving the room and disappearing out into the garden followed by his dogs. He returns without them, but with a small sculpture of two figures. ‘I forgot about you two, pumping away privately under the boughs of the weeping willow. I’ll bet you anything – yes! You see!’ He brandished the statue as if it was an Oscar, glancing only cursorily at the woodlice clinging haplessly to its base. ‘Put the two figures in the paintings together, cast the lot in bronze and this is what you get.’ He read the base. Eden, 1892.

‘That can’t be right. Surely he’d have done the sketches first? More to the point, if this is not a culmination piece, is it worth less?’

What am I doing? Am I really thinking of selling them? Just because I’m broke?

He scrutinized the dates on the boards and the bronze and knew he read them correctly. ‘I might ring Calthrop’s tomorrow. Just out of interest. Or for insurance purposes.’

Clipped tones in the Nineteenth Century department at Calthrop’s assured James that they’d be frightfully interested in any works by Fetherstone and, whilst they could estimate nowhere near the number of noughts of the Matisse league, they said they were confident of a sum far more princely than James had ever imagined.

‘I say, you wouldn’t like to bring them down to Bond Street, would you? Let us have a good old snoop? Valuations are free.’

‘I may,’ said James cautiously.

‘And you say the sculpture is just over a foot high?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s a bugger.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We live in hope of the marble Abandon being brought in unannounced one day. Now that would earn you a bob or two and a place in the history books.’

‘Really. Well, sorry to disappoint. But perhaps I will bring the others – I don’t know if I want to sell them, though my bank manager would. Do I need to make an appointment? Ask for who?’

‘A triple-barrelled surname,’ James exclaimed to his dogs, before filling a bowl with cornflakes and two crushed Weetabix. Eden, now free of woodlice and soil, stood at the foot of the stove; Adam and Eve were propped against the knife block and the washing-powder box. It was nearly eleven in the morning. Mrs G’s at noon, just for a prune, then Mrs M all afternoon, hopefully till tea-time and a good feed. So, no rush then. James perused the Guardian. He started the crossword, but without a pen it soon became a little trying. Then the name Julius Fetherstone leapt out at him from the small print of the galleries listings.

‘“Julius Fetherstone: Art and Erotica”. F. McCabe. Tate Britain. Thursday Lunch-time Lecture. Millbank, SW1,’ he murmured. ‘Flavour of the month, Fethers old boy?’ He put down his spoon and looked hard at the paintings. ‘Doesn’t fashion dictate an inflated value?’ He rummaged around in a kitchen drawer, found a rail timetable that was surprisingly not out of date, and consulted it for a train for the day after next that would bring him into London in good time.

‘Looks like we have a date.’

SEVEN

Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world.

William James

I’ll just nod, Jake decides over a mouthful of Chicken Madras. I’ll just nod and not comment.

Matt was remarking on the physical similarities between a girl on a TV advert for dandruff shampoo and Fen McCabe.

I won’t comment, Jake thought, I won’t say, ‘Yes, but you said that one of the girls we chatted to in the pub last night looked like her’. I’ll just nod.

‘Fen’s face doesn’t have that hardness, though.’

I won’t ask you how Fen can look like that girl on the adverts and the girl in the pub and Gwyneth Paltrow and your very first girlfriend.

‘Not that willowy, though. Just normal height, I suppose.’

I mean, if she looks like all the above, she probably doesn’t look remotely like any of them. A crazy mixed-up kid – which is what you’re sounding like, Matthew Holden. You can’t possibly go for a healthy rebound brand of zipless fuck with someone occupying your thoughts as much as this Vanilla girl.

‘Don’t fuck the payroll,’ Jake says.

‘I’ve no intention of doing so,’ says Matt, who feels suddenly just a little vulnerable, as if he’s been caught out. ‘I’m just saying that it’s refreshing to have a nice view at work. She seems like a laugh. Like we could be mates.’

‘Like you want to mate her,’ Jake counters, offering to swap the foil container with his Madras for the remains of Matt’s Rogan Josh.

Matt shrugs. ‘Nah,’ he says, feigning indifference by appearing incredibly interested in Newsnight.

‘Anyway,’ says Jake, ‘if she looks like a hybrid of that model crossed with Gwynnie and the girl in the pub, if she’s intelligent and a laugh and all that – well, she’s probably happily ensconced with some lucky bloke whom she blows to heaven and back every other night.’

‘Probably,’ Matt agrees, after a moment’s thought. It made sense that Fen would already be taken. ‘Bugger Newsnight,’ Matt says, ‘let’s go for last orders.’

‘How’s Matthew Hard-on?’ Abi asks Fen whilst wrestling to uncork a second bottle of Sauvignon.

‘I had lunch with Otter today,’ Fen replies, taking the bottle and deftly wielding the corkscrew. ‘He’s recently broken up with a long-term girlfriend.’

‘I thought Otter was gay?’ Abi says.

‘Huh?’ says Fen, ‘Oh. No. I mean Matt.’

‘Ah!’ says Abi, messing Fen’s dark blonde long-crop.

‘Aha,’ says Gemma, twiddling her dark curls herself.

‘I mustn’t get involved,’ Fen says.

‘Nope,’ cautions Abi, ‘he’ll be on the rebound.’

‘And the impression you ought to be making at your new job is of archivist extraordinaire,’ says Gemma.

‘Not slapper,’ says Abi.

‘You’re right,’ says Fen. ‘Anyway, I don’t really know him at all, do I? I just find him attractive because he seems like a nice bloke and he’s really sexy looking.’

‘When really he might be a total prat,’ muses Gemma, having had one too many of those.

‘Or a complete sod,’ Abi warns, having had one too many of those.

‘Exactly,’ Fen says decisively. But she goes to bed planning on what to wear the next day. Perhaps she’ll be loitering with intent, accidentally on purpose, outside Publications near enough to lunch-time.

Bugger! I can’t. I’m lecturing at the Tate at lunch-time. Just as well. Just as well.

EIGHT

Defy the influential master!

Cézanne

‘Don’t moisten too much,’ Auguste Rodin told Julius Fetherstone, a little surprised at his student’s uncharacteristic ineptitude, ‘use your finger to check.’ The great master had been slightly perturbed that today, his English protégé seemed fractious, distracted. He had therefore given Julius the simple task of moistening the clay maquettes so they did not dry out and crack. But he observed that the young artist sponged and sloshed the slip as if he was bathing a horse. Rodin suggested Julius stop. That he sketch.

‘Don’t want to sketch,’ Julius said defensively.

‘Take over from Pierre and continue the carving of The Kiss,’ Rodin instructed. Such an exacting task was also an honour – to allow the young Englishman time with the master’s current work. The marble was in another studio. By itself. Away from Rodin. An ante-room away from the other students. Away from the six models, of both sexes, moving naked around the studio so that whenever a sculptor turned and wherever his gaze fell he was confronted by the human form and the play of light upon it.

‘“Love led us to a single death”,’ Rodin quoted as he walked his young student around The Kiss.

‘Paolo and Francesca,’ Julius elaborated, wanting to impress his master that he had read Dante’s Inferno and knew the story. ‘Paolo’s brother goes to war entrusting the welfare of his wife to him. Paolo and Francesca fall in love and have an affair. Hell is their reward.’ Rodin nodded sagely. ‘Tell me that it is only in the arts that love could lead to eternal damnation,’ Julius pleaded privately under his breath. Rodin, who at once now understood the provenance of his student’s malady, decided it wise not to comment. He left the room, encouraging Julius to imagine he was stroking the skin of the figures to define their form, rather than carving into marble to reveal it.

Which is precisely what Julius did – and did very well – for an hour.

Then he left the ante-room and returned to the main studio as if in a trance, not seeming to notice that his master was regarding him quizzically and soon with irritation. In fact, Julius was not aware of any other person being in that studio. He scooped up an armful of terracotta clay, cradling it like a baby as he walked to the end of the room. There he sat down on the ground and laid the clay between his legs. He was sweating profusely. Panting. Little under an hour later, Julius suddenly growled, shouted, wailed, as if something was being wrenched from him. His body was twisted into spasm before collapsing and becoming as flimsy as rags. Rodin, quietly, ventured over. His young student looked up at him, tears silently streaming down his clay-smeared face. The great sculptor looked at what the young Englishman had created, had created in a frenzy, that tortured him so.

Two figures. About a foot high. Their bodies simultaneously flowing into each other like liquid but also bucked solid at the moment of sexual ecstasy. The redness of the clay accentuating the sense of flesh, blood and arousal.

‘Paolo and Francesca?’ Rodin asked carefully, not wishing to intrude on the intensity of personal experience that had so obviously consumed his student.

‘Yes,’ Julius replied. His voice was hoarse, not from the lie but from the exertion of wresting the form away from his soul and out into clay. Rodin told him to go, to rest for two days, not to visit the studio but to indulge himself with time, to work and create alone, slave only to what this inner inspiration was dictating.

‘I will keep your clay moist,’ Rodin assured him. And he would. For to see brilliance in one’s students is affirming for the teacher. A legacy. A testament. A lineage in the making. The future in safe hands. ‘I am the bridge between the past and the present,’ Rodin muttered at a naked young woman who smiled politely and wondered if she should tell the sculptor that pellets of terracotta clay clung to his great beard like berries to holly.

Oh, how I hunger for her. Never more. Never more. lam full. And yet I starve.

Julius bought a baguette and a hunk of ham. With his teeth, he ripped the bread as he walked to his apartment but his mouth was dry and the bread stuck in his throat.

She has sucked me dry. And yet creative juices overflow and threaten to consume me.

His master had told him not to work and yet Julius broke into a jog. Home, home, he had to be there now! As soon as he entered his apartment, he dropped his provisions on the floor, fell to his knees and, with white chalk, drew Cosima across the floorboards. Where she had been. This time yesterday. Stretched out. Enfolding him. Him in her. Where did he end and where did she begin? That was the point. There was no beginning; there could be no end. And yet it had ended between them. He had to abandon himself to this fact. He would do so willingly. To be enslaved by the memory of Cosima was a captivity he could only welcome, however torturous it might be. Pain is good. Salvation from despair. Growth and creation.

There was a knock at the door.

Cosima!

No. Of course not.

Oh shit!

Thursday.

Rent day.

It would be Madame Virenque who knocked.

This week, as last, Julius was penniless. Jacques Antoine would pay for the portrait bust of his fiancée only on delivery. A small advance had been given for materials. And spent. Oh God, still she knocks.

Julius opened the door. Madame Virenque raised an eyebrow. She saw the chalk drawing on the floorboards and her other eyebrow was raised.

‘You have money?’

‘Non, pardon, Madame.’

One eyebrow down, the other now cocked lasciviously.

Close your eyes, Julius. Imagine Cosima. Forget that your landlady’s breasts are pendulous, spongy; the skin akin to used crêpe paper. Remember instead the pertness of Cosima’s, the translucence of her skin, the blush of her nipples. Do not allow the more pungent smell of this woman to override your memory of Cosima’s sweet muskiness. If where you are dipping your cock now is slack, undefined, hold the base of your shaft and conjure the heat, the tightness of Cosima’s sex. Come quickly. If you come, she will go.

Cosima, Cosima. Oh God.

Madame Virenque was disappointed. Her eyebrows told him so. But still, she could not now argue for the rent. An orgasm for her was not a condition of the barter.

The orgasm for Julius emptied his mind as much as it emptied his testicles. The pall had lifted and he was thinking clearly.

‘I need money,’ he said to himself after she had gone, knowing too that he must eat, so he sat down to his ham and bread. ‘I will never fuck for lodgings again.’ He wanted to move. He needed money to do so. There was a substantial amount for the taking, merci beaucoup, Monsieur Antoine. ‘I must commence the portrait bust of his fiancée.’

That evening, Julius started his portrait of Cosima. Only it wasn’t Cosima – not that Jacques or their friends would know. Julius idealized her natural beauty, enhancing her features to create an exquisite face atop an elegant neck and a stunning décolletage. Of course, the result would so flatter Jacques Antoine that he would pay the sculptor gladly. And yet Julius could keep Cosima to himself.

‘A true sculptor works from the inside out,’ Julius said out loud when his wire armature was complete and his fingers throbbed, ‘even when you carve away at rock – when you work from the outside in, rather than when you model with clay and build up mass – it must be the essence of the subject which dictates the surface details.’ He turned the banding wheel slowly, staring hard through the wire mesh as it rotated before him. It was like a network of atoms, the most rudimentary step towards breathing life into sculpture. ‘And yet most people who look at sculpture see only the exterior. Just the periphery. The superficiality of the surface.’

By creating a portrait that was idealized, Julius knew he would be flattering Jacques Antoine’s vanity.

Julius took to his bed in the early hours, unwashed even though his hands were bloodied from torn fingernails and cuts from the wire. ‘My piece will have pride of place in their drawing room. And Jacques will present it to all those who enter. “See how beautiful is the woman who is my wife!” he will boast. “Did you ever see beauty more complete? How skilled is this young Fetherstone! Of course I will introduce you – I am sure he will sculpt your wife too.”’

Julius slept deeply, dreaming of his work in progress: the portrait bust, also his clay maquette. Wherever he was in dream-time, that writhing twist of terracotta was in sight. When he woke, he knew somehow how significant it was. How the work itself would dictate his future as much as his passion for Cosima.

As soon as it was light, Julius began to build muscle and tendon and bone and gristle aboard the armature with nuggets of clay. He worked all hours for two weeks; borrowing money from a rich student of Rodin’s to pay rent to Madame Virenque. The bust progressed. It was a virtuoso piece; emotion poured from the tilt of the face or the sweep of the forehead and even now the sculptor knew just how light would catch and suffuse the work once it was cast in bronze. When he carved the eyes and parted the lips and swirled the hair idealistically, then he knew he had hidden Cosima deep within the piece. He had her to himself. She would reappear, he knew she would, whenever he sculpted an anonymous female form again. And no one would know it but him. And ah! how he would know.

He felt a certain smugness knowing how he could con Jacques and his circle into believing that this idealized beauty in bronze was the spitting image of the woman herself. But they would be incapable of recognizing her in Abandon, or Eden, or Hunger, and all the related works that were already in embryo, propagating as rampantly as cells, in the mind of the sculptor.

They would not recognize her. But Julius would see her, possess her again, from this day forth whenever he carved a breast, modelled a pair of lips, shaped a waist, defined a buttock, the run of a stomach, the intimacy of an ear lobe. It would be her. Unmistakably. No one else would know, though. For they would be too caught up in surface details. They did not know her inside out.

This distortion, though slight, was enough to condition all those who saw the sculpture to reappraise the way they regarded and recalled Cosima. Her own face swiftly became that of the sculpted version to all who knew her. Thus, when Julius created his masterpiece, Abandon, no one recognized the female figure as Cosima though he had commanded all his power and dexterity as a sculptor to best describe the woman who had both liberated and destroyed him.

For the rest of his life, alongside pot-boiling portrait busts and garden sculpture, Julius Fetherstone devoted maquette after maquette and volumes of sketch-pads to the theme of Cosima and Abandon. He cast four versions in bronze. There is one in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, another in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay. A late version was bought by Getty and is on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago. The remaining bronze is at the Neue Pinakotek in Munich.

Julius Fetherstone’s masterpiece, his magnum opus, the marble version of Abandon, exists now only in photographs. It has disappeared. Presumed stolen. It was at the artist’s studio around the time of his death in 1954 because it can be seen in the background of photographs chronicling the artist’s last weeks, bedridden in his studio surrounded by his work. There is scant documentation about Abandon, only Julius declaring to the great art historian Herbert Read that ‘within the rock, all my desires as a man and a sculptor were contained and released’.

Of what value are grainy, monochrome, two-dimensional records of something that was conceived and created to be experienced in the round?

A tease. Torture. A tragedy.

NINE

Love is essentially copulation, the rest is only detail, doubtless charming, but detail nevertheless.

Auguste Rodin

‘Blimey mate,’ said the cloakroom attendant at the Tate gallery when James handed him the rucksack containing the Fetherstones, ‘what you got in there? Bleeding crown jewels?’

‘You never know,’ said James who then wished he hadn’t because the attendant promptly opened his bag for a suspicious look inside.

The attendant smirked and raised his eyebrows at Adam and Eve enclasped in ecstasy. ‘Is that art, then?’ he asked James.

‘God no,’ said James, ‘pornography.’

Matt and Otter both knew why Fen had refused sandwiches with them. They knew exactly what her prior arrangement was. And, though they knew that she obviously wanted to keep her lunch-time lecture secret, they couldn’t resist going.

‘We’ll keep out of sight,’ Otter reasoned.

‘We’ll be silently supporting her,’ Matt justified.

‘We’ll be fleshing out the audience,’ Otter continued.

‘We’ll sit at the back and sneak out before the lights come up,’ Matt concluded.

Only Fen’s lecture was of course conducted not in an auditorium but in the sculpture hall, so Matt and Otter found pillars to hide behind.

‘My God!’ Otter exclaimed. Matt, though, was speechless.

There was Fen, sitting on the lap of a large stone man whilst a stone woman pressed her back against his, her head thrown back, one arm extended down with her hand firm over her pubis, the other arm stretching above, her fingers enmeshed in the male’s hair. Fen sat very still, having positioned herself so that the male form seemed to be nuzzling her neck, his right hand masked from view by her body but apparently cupping his cock. Or wielding it. Or touching Fen’s bottom. Or delving right in. The sight was quite something. Quite the saucy threesome. Matt’s jaw dropped. Otter giggled involuntarily. James felt his trip to London was already proving well worthwhile though he had yet to visit Calthrop’s. Judith St John arrived late. She coughed when Fen was about to speak. Fen swiftly told herself that perhaps Judith simply had the beginnings of a cold. Judith St John had no interest in Julius Fetherstone, whom she considered a second-rate Rodin. But she was interested to hear just what this Fen McCabe had to say. Bloody double distinction from the Courtauld Institute. She herself might only have one distinction but she’d graduated five years prior to Fen McCabe. Hardly second-rate. Standards had been much higher then. And the true distinction was that she was deputy director of Trust Art. And look at Matt Holden, all mesmerized. Oh for God’s sake.