Freya North - Fen

‘“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 He rummaged around in a kitchen drawer, found a rail timetable that was surprisingly not out of date, and consulted it for a train for the day after next that would bring him into London in good time.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.’

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.

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.