‘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.
From that point on, Fen has been obsessed with the sculptor and his work. On her return from Munich, she unceremoniously dumped the virginity-taker and spent eighteen months apparently celibate. In body at least. However, the more she studied Fetherstone’s work, the more she analysed his drawing and physically handled his sculptures, the more worldly she became. She studied the fall of light on mass, the relationship between form and space. She also learnt about the tension that intertwining figures could create. She came to understand how bodies could stretch to accommodate both their own desire and that of another. She discovered how the sensation of orgasm could manifest itself in facial expression, the throw of a neck, the twist of the stomach, the flail of arms, the jut of a breast, the buck of buttocks.
She devoted both her Bachelor and Master degree theses to Fetherstone, resolutely ignoring her tutors’ advice that she stand back from the material and certainly refrain from referring to the sculptor by his Christian name.
She fantasized about being the woman in Abandon. She forsook film stars as masturbatory stimulus in favour of the image of the male in Abandon. She looked forward to the day or night when she too could enjoy a coupling commensurate with that of the bronze figures; when she would be seduced to a state of abandon by the desire for, and of, such a man. Consequently, she spurned the advances of a relatively long queue of students who all fell short of her ideal. Too puny. Or too gym-induced beefy. Too uncouth. Too affected.
In her mid-twenties, two men came close; but the reluctance of the first to commit and then Fen’s reluctance to commit to the second, rang the death knell on both. Now, at twenty-eight, Fen is single. She isn’t spending much time looking for a partner, nor is she losing sleep over the situation. After all, would a man enhance her life that much? It’s rather good as it is, in Chalk Farm, North London, where she rents a terraced house with damp and with two friends, bohemian neighbours and her two sisters nearby. Life’s busy with her new job and her bi-monthly lectures at the Courtauld and Tate galleries, which she gives voluntarily. No time for romance and all its panoply. Yes, she recently bought a pine double bed from Camden Lock market, with a king-size duvet for added luxury. However, the wink wink nudge nudging from her housemates met with her rebuttal.
‘Hasn’t it come to your attention,’ she told them, ‘that our landlord sees fit to provide us with mattresses apparently filled with sand and gravel which, in places, congeal into concrete?’
Monday