Freya North - Fen

‘Say it’s a bank vault in Los Angeles?’

‘Then it’s a bank vault in Los Angeles that forked out around £70,000 to make space for them.’

James obviously doesn’t like the sound of this.

‘Look,’ she says, too sweetly so that it verges on patronizing, as if she’s lost interest with him, as if his soft side or conscience was not the reason for her having fucked him, ‘if you’re worried about where they’ll go, why not offer them to a national institution via the NACF or Trust Art? We can still be your advisors. You will forfeit the whole premise of an auction, of prices rising alongside salesroom hysteria.’

‘Phone the Tate?’ James asks.

‘Wherever,’ she says, ‘then the gallery will try to raise funds via a grant from, as I said, the NACF or Trust Art. You know who you should contact? Fen McCabe. She works at Trust Art now. She’s a Fetherstone fanatic. We offered her a job which she declined because she said she’d protest every time one was sold to a home of which she might not approve.’

‘Fen,’ James mused.

‘McCabe, short for Fenella, bit of a mouthful,’ said Margot Fitzpatrick-Montague-Laine, ‘we were in the same year at the Courtauld. She was the class swot. Mind you, it gained her the sole double distinction that year.’

James didn’t feel like telling her that he knew exactly who Fen was, that he had just been enthralled by her lecture, by her passion. But he was surprised just how pleased he was to learn her first name. How fortuitous it was that he could contact her. And he was surprised that, suddenly, he felt very hungry again.

‘Think about it,’ Margot said whilst ignoring James, and Adam and Eve, to flip through the documents on her desk, ‘call me.’

Otter observed Matt trying to settle. He watched him stroke his chin, scrunch his already short scrunched ochre-coloured hair, rummage through sheaves of paper, tap a number on the phone with a pencil but not make the call, take the pencil to his mouth and drum his teeth lightly. With his spectacles now replacing the pencil and hanging off his lips, Matt had his eyes fixed at absolutely nothing going on outside the window. His mind, Otter mused, was not fixed on the job in hand.

He should be thinking about editing that article on Kandinsky and Schönberg? But I rather think he’s thinking about sculpture. But there again, I should be writing the side bars for the Antony Gormley article. And I’m thinking about Jorgen who is twenty-five, Scandinavian and just happened to be listening to the same sculpture lecture at the Tate as I was.

‘How’s the Kandinsky piece shaping up?’ Otter asked Matt, to distract himself from the distraction of the shapely Jorgen. Almost begrudgingly, Matt turned his head, dragging his eyes around, looking slightly baffled. ‘And Schoenberg,’ Otter prompted helpfully. Matt gave him a slow, thoughtful nod backed up by a noncommittal noise from his throat that told Otter that Matt had given the article little attention.

Matt stretched and yawned in a way that was far too considered to be natural. ‘We should ask Fen to write a piece on Fetherstone,’ he said in a tone he was employing to be nonchalant but which was far from it. It was four o’clock and Otter felt ready and entitled to a jolly little gossip about Fen, Jorgen, whomever, but Matt was already walking from the room.

‘To talk articles with Fen,’ Otter said to his computer screen. ‘Go on, lad, ask her out for a drink.’

Matt chastises himself as a soft sod for hovering, even for but a second, outside the door of the Archive. That he can hear her rustling makes him want to ease the door open and observe her unseen. See her on tiptoes wrestling with boxes; see her sitting on the floor, making piles; perhaps standing with her back to one of the shelves, engrossed in some catalogue, or comfortable in her chair, mesmerized by a fan of black-and-white photographs. He doesn’t knock.

She’s sitting on three of the toughened boxes. With her toes turned in. Matt can see down her top.

‘How timely,’ Fen says, who’s had a most productive afternoon and has given little thought to anything but the contents of 1952. ‘Have you ever seen these?’ She offers him a clutch of old photographs. He looks at them and, from his vantage point, he glances down Fen’s top again.

‘It’s my father,’ he says, locking on to her eyes and realizing for the first time that they are blue. ‘Who’s the old chap with the beard?’

‘Matisse!’ Fen all but whispers in deference and excitement.

Matt scrutinizes the photos, sneaks another look at Fen’s breasts. ‘I really enjoyed your lecture,’ he tells her.

She’s blushing! The girl who practically masturbated herself on a stone man – and woman – is blushing.

‘Thanks,’ Fen mumbles, feeling the need to study a Post-it on a box that says ‘Misc’.

Go on, Matt – ask her for a drink after work. Make it casual – a Trust thing; no ulterior motive, a trust thing. Have a little flirt!

‘Maybe you could write a piece on Fetherstone for Art Matters ?’ Matt asks.

‘Sure,’ Fen replies briskly, tucking hair neatly behind her ears, back ramrod straight. Archivist. Art historian. Colleague. Art is what matters.

Fen pouted and rested her head on Abi’s shoulder. Abi stroked Fen’s hair, stroked her shoulders, and thought that now was not the time to ask Fen what on earth she was doing wearing her Paul Smith top. Gemma came back from the bar with vodka and Red Bull for each of them.

‘Fen’s sulking,’ Abi said to her, ‘don’t quite know why – here lovey, have a little sippy to help lubricate your vocal chords.’

Fen had more than Abi’s suggested sippy, she practically downed her drink in one. Gemma and Abi regarded her expectantly. ‘First, I go and bloody blush,’ she said.

‘Well,’ Abi started, wondering why the facts should amount to a pout of such proportions. She wasn’t quite sure how to continue so she took a long slug at her drink and filched a fag from Gemma.

‘Then,’ Fen pouts, ‘then I go and get all disappointed that all he wanted was an article from Fen Fen the Fetherstone Fan.’

Gemma and Abi smoke their cigarettes contemplatively.

‘I was primed, ready and willing to say, “Why, I’d love to have a drink with you”,’ Fen said, ‘instead the only sane answer was, “But of course, how many words and when’s the deadline?”.’

‘Yes, but …’ Gemma started. If that had been me , she thought, I’d have suggested discussing word limit over a drink. But it was Fen. And she’s as predictable as I am .

Fen, having finished her drink and having no need for a cigarette (she’d smoked without inhaling as a teenager and inhaled when she was at university, just the once, before throwing up quite spectacularly), was suddenly lucid. ‘No!’ she exclaimed, ‘the point is that I quite wanted him to make a pass.’

‘Cool!’ Abi said. ‘You fancy him.’

‘About time too,’ said Gemma.

‘Could be dangerous,’ Fen muttered.

‘Or the start of something very beautiful,’ Abi jested.

‘A good old flirt is quite good fun,’ Gemma shrugged.

They all nodded. Fen, though, still looked a little perplexed.

‘Another drink?’ she offered, though no answer was needed.

Abi and Gemma spied her at the bar, having a surreptitious look from her left hand to her right. And though this affectation often irritated them, tonight they praised it as they saw that her eyebrows were no longer knitted together in a furrow of discontent. No doubt she’d be ordering doubles all round. A shot for the right hand, a shot for the left.