the first Wednesday in October, 1889.
He, Julius Fetherstone, is wide awake in dream-time.
The briefest glimpse of Cosima’s nudity would have sufficed. Instead, she is walking over to him, fantastically naked. His senses are ablaze; his past, his twenty-three years until this moment, have lasted but a blink. His future will be governed by his ability to savour the present.
They stand, a foot apart, staring at each other. They have not touched but the heat emanating from their bodies seems to meet and merge. They have not kissed, but their lips are as wet as if they have. He stares at her. This body before him, the flesh and muscle, the curves and hair, is the composite of all his fantasies to date and will constitute the standard for all future fantasies. She can be everything. Angel–virgin–whore–wife.
Cosima takes her fingertips to his face and hovers them over his lips. His mouth parts and she can feel his breath on her fingers. He licks his lips and her fingertips are caught, like bees to honey paper. His tongue flicks over them. His hands encircle her waist and pull her against him. She brushes her now damp fingers over his cheek and down, so that she cups the back of his neck, dragging his hair between her fingers. Her other hand she takes to his chest, slipping behind the cotton of his shirt to meet his skin. He makes to kiss her but she turns her face at the last moment.
‘How long do we have?’ he breathes.
‘How long does a portrait take a sculptor these days?’ she asks, quite loudly, with a sly smile.
‘I need a day,’ he says, ‘that’s what I told your – him.’
‘Jacques,’ she states.
‘Jacques,’ he confirms.
‘My fiancé,’ she elaborates.
‘Your fiancé,’ he verifies.
‘Who,’ she says, licking her top teeth, ‘is commissioning my portrait in bronze.’
‘As a celebration of your impending union,’ he states.
‘So,’ she says coyly, ‘I suppose there was no need for me to undress?’ She eases Julius’s shirt over his shoulders and away.
‘No need at all,’ he confirms, skimming his hands up from her waist to her breasts. He places a thumb over each of her nipples and rubs small circles. The sound of her gasp causes his eyes to close and he sinks his mouth against hers, their tongues talking passion while their bodies begin to taste each other.
Since arriving in Paris three years ago, Julius Fetherstone has had sex with four prostitutes, two wealthy clients his senior by extremes, one of the studio models, and his landlady – coupling with whom is a necessity in lieu of rent, but necessitates closed eyes throughout. This afternoon, though, with Cosima, sex is different. New. They are both virgins together. Exploring and experiencing pleasures that are a taste, a smell, a sensation. At times tender, at others lewd, they fuck and make love, alternating seamlessly between the two, all afternoon.
At four thirty, he comes inside her one final time and they sleep for half an hour on the rug. When they awake, she walks calmly over to the screen and dresses. Barefoot, but in his shirt again, he folds the shutters back. The sun has gone. It surprises him. The studio had radiated such heat, appeared to be bathed in brilliance, time standing still. Cosima appears from the screen, neatly dressed. She sits demurely on the high stool and obediently turns her face this way and that at Julius’s command. He does not lift a pencil. He spends an hour just looking at her.
‘That’s fine,’ he declares, folding down the cover on the blank sheets.
‘I shall marry Jacques,’ Cosima proclaims, still holding her pose and looking out of the window. ‘He is rich and kind and he treasures me.’
‘I wish you happiness and health,’ Julius says, but he says it quietly. It doesn’t seem fair. Timing is lousy. He meets a mesmerizing woman, but she is betrothed to another to whom, ultimately, Julius is beholden.
‘Now that I have had you,’ Cosima adds, a breath of softness to her voice, ‘I can say that I truly want to marry Jacques. For whatever may be, however my life will unfurl, I will always have the memory of today.’
‘And now that I have had you,’ Julius clears his throat, ‘every time I sculpt a nude, your body will be at its core. Every time I model a pair of breasts, or carve the lips of a cunt, I will be feeling you again.’
‘Jacques arrives,’ Cosima whispers, taking her gaze from the window to the sculptor.
‘Goodbye, Cosima,’ says Julius.
‘Goodbye, Monsieur Fetherstone,’ says Cosima.
ONE
Art has the objective of leading us to the knowledge of ourselves.
Gustave Courbet
The lurcher, who appeared to be wearing a 1970s Astrakhan coat dug from the bottom of a jumble-sale pile, strolled nonchalantly up to the McCabes. The dog regarded Pip McCabe cursorily, expressed mild interest in Cat McCabe’s plate of food and then thrust its snout emphatically, and wholly uninvited, into Fen McCabe’s crotch. When Django McCabe, the girls’ uncle, roared with laughter, the dog took one look at him, at his genuine 1970s Astrakhan waistcoat, and lay down at his feet with a sigh of humble deference. The dog’s tail, like a length of rope that had been in water too long, made a movement more akin to a dying snake than a wag.
‘Barry!’
The dog’s owner, whose exasperation suggested this was a regular occurrence over which he had no control, gave a whistle. The dog leapt up, seemed as startled by the McCabes as they were by him, and swayed on four spindly legs as if trying to remember whence his owner’s voice had come. The solution – to escape, to feign deafness – seemed to lie in Fen’s crotch. This time, he attempted to bury his entire head there, as if hoping that if he couldn’t see a thing, no one else could see him.
‘Barry! Good God!’
Reluctantly, Barry could not deny that his owner’s voice was now very near and very cross. He extracted his face from his hiding place, gave Fen a reproachful look, dipped his spine submissively and slunk to his master’s heels, out of the pub and, no doubt, into disgrace in the back of a Land Rover.
‘He comes from a broken home,’ the owner said on his way out, by way of explanation, or apology. ‘Derbyshire via Battersea.’
Django McCabe, who’d brought up his three, Batterseaborn nieces single-handedly in Derbyshire, nodded sympathetically. Pip and Cat McCabe thought they ought to close their mouths (especially as Pip still had some steak-and-kidney pie to swallow). Man and dog left, Pip swallowed. Cat gulped.
‘I thought dogs were meant to look like their owners,’ Cat said incredulously. ‘There’s justice in the world that he looks nothing like his dog!’
‘Be still, my beating heart!’ said Pip theatrically.
‘Country squire?’ Cat mused.
‘Farmer needs a wife?’ Pip responded.
Fen hadn’t
