Fen. Freya North
Blenheim + Poster for Post Impressionism show + Misc. correspondence’.
Cross-legged on the floor, having hauled the box off the shelf and been sent staggering under its weight, Fen eased the lid off and grinned at the contents as if she’d just prised open a treasure chest. She was engrossed. When the phone rang, she leapt.
‘Hullo?’ she said, as if the call had come through to the wrong extension.
‘Miss McCabe?’
Fen was silent before she clicked that she was Miss McCabe and the call was most certainly for her.
‘This is Barnard Castle Museum.’
‘Hullo! Barnard Castle Museum!’ she greeted them with excessive delight.
‘Just wondering whether you’ve received our package?’
No, she hadn’t but she assured them she’d go down to Reception to check and would call them as soon as it arrived. By the way, what is it? Oh, only photos and documents. Only? Only? Fantastic!
‘I’m expecting a package from Barnard Castle Museum!’ Fen announced triumphantly in Reception, where Rodney was peering with intent into the biscuit barrel.
‘Marvellous,’ he said, though whether this was about the Bourbon biscuit or Barnard Castle was unclear.
‘Not arrived yet, ducks,’ said Bobbie. Seeing Fen look a little crestfallen, Bobbie suggested a biscuit. Seeking some solace in a Jammy Dodger, Fen climbed the stairs and walked briskly back along the corridor to the Archive.
And that was when Matt Holden was a few steps behind her. But as he had arrived so late for work, and she was eager to return to the treasure, neither noticed the other.
‘Have you met the new archivist?’ Otter asks Matt, an hour later.
‘Nope,’ Matt replies, ‘not yet. But I think it’s time for a biscuit break so I’ll go and make my acquaintance. How old is this one? The last one was older than any of the documents.’
‘Nah,’ says Otter nonchalantly, rather amused and starting to scheme, ‘she’s a little bit younger, this one.’
Matt knocked and entered. Fen was sitting amidst dunes of papers and appeared too engrossed to have heard him. He was quite surprised that she was not old enough to be his grandmother.
She looks too young to be an archivist! Who am I to judge on what an archivist should or shouldn’t look like? And who am I to complain!
‘Hullo, archivist.’
‘Fantastic!’ Fen said, spying a large brown envelope tucked under the arm of a man she presumed to be a courier. After all, she didn’t know what the editor of Art Matters looked like. ‘Are you from Barnard Castle?’
‘Er,’ said the courier, looking a little perplexed, ‘no, Gloucestershire originally.’
‘Oh,’ said Fen, nodding at the envelope, ‘isn’t that for me?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘just thought I’d say hullo.’
‘Oh,’ said Fen, slightly taken aback by his forthrightness and wondering whether it was harassment and whether she should have Bobbie phone or fax or e-mail a complaint to his delivery company. ‘Nothing for Fen McCabe?’ she asked, giving him the benefit of the doubt.
‘Er, no,’ said the courier.
‘Bugger,’ said Fen, disappointed and now disinterested; turning from him to regard the boxes instead. ‘You probably want Fund-raising next door,’ she said with her back to him.
‘Do I?’ the courier asked.
‘Or Acquisitions,’ she continued breezily, as if she was a long-term member of staff, ‘down the corridor, before Publications.’ Then she stood on tiptoes to retrieve the box marked 1956. ‘Bugger Barnard Castle,’ she said under her breath and obviously to herself.
The courier raised his eyebrows. At her language, at her turned back, at her neat bottom; at the fact that she was working in a room with the lights on and the blind down on a particularly fine April day. At the fact that she worked here now. But Fen didn’t notice. Not just because she had her back to him. She had lifted the lid off the box and was already enthralled by its contents.
‘Blimey,’ she murmured. The box had revealed an original catalogue to the Picasso–Matisse exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Matt left her to it, hearing her mutter, ‘But that was 1945, what’s it doing in 1956? Matisse was already dead,’ as he shut the Archive door.
Fen was blazing through 1956 when the phone in the Archive rang. She scrambled up from 1942, 1958 and 1979 (all found in the 1956 box – despite it being the only box without a question mark on the label, for goodness’ sake), and grabbed the receiver.
‘Barnard Castle?’ she asked hopefully.
‘It’s Otter. Ed and I are ready for our lunch. Come to our room in five minutes. Next to Acquisitions.’
My God, lunchtime already.
Only Otter isn’t in the room. Just the overfamiliar courier.
‘Oh,’ says Fen, ‘still lost?’
‘Hullo,’ says the courier, ‘again.’
She makes to leave. ‘Are you looking for someone?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘Otter and Ed.’
‘I’m Matt,’ he says.
Fen nods somewhat cursorily at him.
As she made to leave a second time, Otter came in.
‘Fen!’ he greeted her. ‘Meet Ed.’
Fen was starting to feel a little exasperated and she glanced from Otter to the Man With Two Names. ‘Who?’ she shrugged. ‘Which? What?’ Otter looked worryingly nonplussed at Fen’s confusion. But the courier came to her rescue.
‘I’m Matt,’ the courier persists, ‘I edit Art Matters. Hence “Ed”. Although I hasten to add that it is only Otter who calls me Ed.’
‘You’re not a courier?’ Fen asks, frowning first and then blushing, much to Otter’s delight and Matt’s surprise.
‘No,’ confirms Matt generously, ‘just an editor. Sorry to disappoint you. Hullo.’ He held out his hand which Fen took. They shook hands just a little gingerly.
‘Hullo, Matt, then.’
‘Thyu.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Matthew. I edit Art Matters and anything else you want to know you can ask over lunch. I’m starving.’
‘Hangover?’ Otter said not so much presumptuously as from experience.
‘Worse than,’ Matt groaned and hoped that Otter wouldn’t pry or comment.
Otter, however, was now near-obsessed with his self-crowned role as matchmaker. ‘Matthew Holden is a modest sod,’ he said as the three of them walked along John Islip Street to the sandwich shop, ‘he’s twenty-nine, he is a brilliant editor – if a quite dastardly cad. He’s relatively solvent and comes with car and mortgage.’
Fen backtracked and ground to a halt as she did so: ‘As in Henry?’
‘Henry Moore-gage?’ Otter quipped.
‘Holden,’ Fen stressed, staring at Matt.
Please please please! Please let it be so! I’ll cook and clean and perform base acts for him. I’ll marry him and bear him an heir. But please please please!
‘Any relation?’ she said, with hastily employed nonchalance.
‘Father,’