butter, for breakfast, as always she did, before leaving for work.
FROM: [email protected]
RE: caffeine
dear m, thanks for the essential caffeine injection – i’m whizzing through the files at twice the normal speed. for future reference, one sugar too, please. F McC
It took almost seven minutes, and three full edits, before Fen sent that one.
FROM: [email protected]
RE: caffeine allocation
dear f, and I thought you were sweet enough. M
Matt didn’t send that one.
FROM: [email protected]
RE: caffeine allocation
dear f, not only will I remember sugar, I’ll also make sure it’s not decaff. Must be the frothy topping that’s enabled you to feel so productive this morning. M
‘Oh God,’ Fen groaned quietly, hiding her head behind a sheaf of letters from 1965 between Lord Bessborough and Henry Holden discussing the gift of a Barbara Hepworth Pierced Form, ‘it was decaff, it was decaff.’
FROM: [email protected]
RE: RE: caffeine allocation
dear m, froth had fizzled away by the time I prized off the lid. and the pain au chocolat had mysteriously self-combusted because, though I searched in drawers and in a box marked 1965, there was not a crumb of evidence of its existence. f McC (hungry)
Fen fired that one off without so much as checking it.
FROM: [email protected]
RE: RE: RE: caffeine allocation
head hanging low with shame and remorse. No froth? No sugar? No caffeine? No p au c? Would a sandwich lunch make it up to you? If you haven’t already expired before you’ve made it to 1966? M
Fen actually printed that one off, folded it, slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans and reread it at ridiculously regular intervals during the morning. She also checked her e-mail with alarming regularity but her in-box remained empty.
Mind you, I haven’t responded to his last.
Playing hard to get, Fen McCabe?
No, just playing. It’s fun.
Of course she had a sandwich lunch with him. Sitting in the gardens of the flats opposite the Trust. Otter came too. But neither Fen nor Matt minded. Fen felt a certain pride that their chemistry should be witnessed and later commented on; Matt just didn’t mind that Otter was there. Otter, who adored Matt and, in just one working week, felt very tenderly towards Fen, nevertheless couldn’t resist a gossip and a little action. That a drama in miniature could be played out before his eyes, under his direction, fed the lascivious and puckish side of his nature. A necessary antidote to his daily grind of correcting punctuation and typos. It was therefore with careful timing and timbre of delivery, that he told Bobbie he would let her into a little secret. But he did so only when he knew Judith St John would be in earshot.
‘Love loiters along the corridors of Trust Art,’ he said in a hushed but knowing voice.
‘Ooh blimey!’ Bobbie exclaimed. ‘Who is it, Otter? I thought you was the only nancy boy here!’
‘I am!’ Otter declared proudly, laying a thin hand on Bobbie’s shoulder, which was padded extravagantly in the receptionist’s enduring homage to Joan Collins.
‘You swinging the other way then?’ Bobbie asked him almost accusatorily. She looked him up and down, hoping whomever he chose, of whichever sexual persuasion, would be someone kind who’d feed the poor duck with meat and at least two veg on a nightly basis.
‘Dearest Bobsleigh,’ said Otter, ‘’tisn’t me at all. But lust lurks, mark my words!’
‘Who?’ Bobbie whispered, eyes so wide that the false eyelashes on her upper lids all but meshed with her eyebrows. ‘Where?’
‘In. The. Archive,’ Otter defined, noticing that Judith’s head was unmistakably tilted though her hands rifled through the pile of post in her pigeon-hole. ‘Our Matthew has his eye on young Fenella. You mark my words.’
‘Ahh!’ Bobbie said, tutting with appreciation and high hopes for the young ’uns.
‘There’ll be all sorts of shenanigans behind the Archive shelving,’ Otter prophesied, noting with satisfaction that Judith, post in hand, was nevertheless standing stock-still. ‘Debauchery amongst the boxes,’ Otter offered as his parting shot, winking at Bobbie and walking past Judith as if she wasn’t there.
Not if I have anything to do with it, thought Judith, smiling somewhat disdainfully at Bobbie, whose only crime on this day was a Dynasty-style suit in a lurid cerise.
Judith had no need to go upstairs, but she swanned past Publications and waltzed into the Archive. ‘We don’t, as a rule, use the Trust phones for personal calls,’ she told Fen, ‘not even if it’s supposedly pre- or post official work hours. We’re a charity.’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Fen, wanting at once to be swallowed by the box on her lap and taken to the safety of 1966 (before she had been even a twinkle in her father’s eye).
‘You weren’t to know,’ said Judith, covering her triumph with a spite-sweet smile, ‘but you do now.’
If he doesn’t want me, he’s not having her. Not that I know if he wants me or not. Haven’t tried that one. Yet.
Judith swanned out of the Archive and into Publications, inviting Matt to the opening of the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern the following Tuesday evening.
‘Welcome to the end of your first working week,’ said Matt, who’d found the pretext of a missing hole punch as the excuse to visit the Archive for the second time since lunch. ‘We’re going to the pub for a—’
Fen’s phone silenced him and he soaked up her wide-eyed excitement at its ringing.
‘Archive?’ she said, almost with incredulity, on answering it.
‘Fen McCabe?’
‘Yes?’
I don’t recognize the voice yet he’s Fen-ing and not Fenella-ing me.
‘James Caulfield,’ the voice drawled. ‘I was told to call you by Margot Fitzpatrick-Montague-Laine – I think that’s the right order and the right quota of hyphens – at Calthrop’s. You know, or knew her.’
God!
