FREYA NORTH

Home Truths

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition 2006

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Freya North 2006

Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007180356

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007325788

Version: 2015-10-13

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Praise for Home Truths:

‘An eye-poppingly sexy start leads into a family reunion laced with secrets. Tangled mother/daughter relationships unravel and tantalising family riddles keep you glued to the end.’

Cosmopolitan

‘An engrossing emotional drama that's sure to feature on bestseller lists.’

Eve

‘You'll laugh, cry, then laugh some more.’

Company

‘Freya North manages to strike a good balance between drama, comedy and romance, and has penned another winner in Home Truths … touching, enjoyable.’

Heat

‘Extremely skilful.’

Daily Telegraph

Praise for Freya North:

‘Freya North has matured to produce an emotive novel that deals with the darker side of love – these are real women with real feelings.’

She

‘Tantrums, tarts, tears and text-sex … what’s not to love about this cautionary tale for true romantics?’

Heat

‘A distinctive storytelling style and credible, loveable characters … an addictive read that encompasses the stuff life is made of: love, sex, fidelity and, above all, friendship.’

Glamour

‘Passion, guilt, envy, love and sex, topped with lashings of laughs. Freya North has done it again, only better.’

Daily Express

Dedication

For Georgiamy beautiful, beautiful girl

Epigraph

Write your sister’s weak points in the sand and

her strong points in stone.

Anon

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Django McCabe

Tuesday

Django McCabe and the Nit-Pickin’ Chicks

The Rag and Thistle

Penny Ericsson

Home from Home

Winter Ice

Road Kill

Waterworks

He’s Not There

April Fool

My Round

Freeze a Jolly Good Fellow

Derek

Then What?

1960s and All That Jazz

The M1

Dovidels

Kate and Max and Merry Martha

Sweet is the Voice of a Sister in the Season of Sorrow

Coupling

On the Phone

Seeds Sown

Seeds Not Sown

Seeds in a Packet

Bad Seed

Stray Cat Blue

A Fish Out of Water

Al and the Girl from Purley

Cat Out of the Bag

The Ten o’Clock News

Where Were You When You Heard that Django McCabe Had Cancer?

Testing Time

Time for Tests

VT 05154

Lester Falls

Plastic Tubing

Love at Long Distance

No-Brainer

Freedom Trail

Red-Eye

Return of the Natives

Fen McCabe and Matt Holden

Pip and Zac Holmes

Cat and Ben York

To the Bone

Hard Facts and White Lies

Sundae

Moving On

Christmas

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Freya North

About the Publisher

Prologue

‘How do you say goodbye to a mountain?’

From her vantage point, Cat York looked across to the three Flatirons, to Bear Peak and Green Mountain. She gazed down the skirts of Flagstaff, patting the snow around her and settling herself in as though she was sitting on the mountain’s lap. ‘It’s like a giant, frozen wedding dress,’ she said. ‘It probably sounds daft, but for the last four years, I’ve privately thought of Flagstaff as my mountain.’

‘There’s a lot of folk round here who think that way,’ Stacey said. ‘You’re allowed to. That’s the beauty of living in Boulder.’

The sun shot through, glancing off the crystal-cracked snow on the trees, the sharp, flat slabs of rust-coloured rock of the Flatirons soaring through all the dazzling white at their awkward angle.

‘When Ben and I first arrived and I was homesick and insecure, I’d walk to Chautauqua Meadow and just sit on my own. It felt like the mountains were a giant arm around my shoulders.’ Cat looked around her with nostalgic gratitude. ‘Then soon enough we met you lot, started hiking and biking the trails and suddenly the mountain showed me its other side. You could say it’s been my therapist’s couch and it’s been my playground. It’s now my most favourite place in the world.’

Stacey looked at Cat, watched her friend cup her gloved hands over her nose and mouth in a futile bid to make her nose look less red and her lips not so blue. ‘This time next week, the only peaks I’ll be seeing are Victorian rooftops,’ Cat said, ‘grimy pigeons will replace bald eagles and there’ll just be puddles in place of Wonderland Lake. Next week will be a whole new year.’

‘Tell me about Clapham,’ Stacey asked, settling into their snow bunker.

‘Well,’ said Cat, ‘it’s a silent “h” for a start.’

They laughed.

‘God,’ Cat groaned, leaning forward and knocking her head against her knees, ‘I’m still not sure we’re doing the right thing – but don’t tell Ben I said so. I can’t tell you about Clapham, I don’t think I’ve ever been.’ She paused and then continued a little plaintively. ‘God, Stacey, I have no job, my two closest friends don’t even live in the city any more and I’m moving to an opposite side of London to where I used to live, where my sisters still live.’

‘It’s exciting,’ Stacey said, ‘and if you don’t like it, you can always come back.’ She tore into a pack of Reese’s with her teeth, her chilled fingers unfit for the task. ‘And there’s some stuff that’s really to look forward to.’

Placated and sustained by the pack of peanut butter, the comfort of chocolate, Cat agreed. ‘I’ve missed my family – by the sound of it, my middle sister Fen is having a tough time at the moment. And it’s going to be a big year for Django – he’ll be seventy-five which will no doubt warrant a celebration of prodigious proportions.’

‘I’d sure like to have met him,’ Stacey said and she laughed a little. ‘I remember when I first met you, I thought you were like, so exotic, because you came to Boulder with your English Rose looks and a history that Brontë couldn’t have made up. You with the mother who ran off with a cowboy, you who were raised by a crazy uncle called Django, you and your sisters brought up in the wilds of Wherever.’

‘Derbyshire’s not wild,’ Cat protested, ‘not our part. Though there are wallabies.’

‘What’s a wallaby?’

‘It’s like a mini kangaroo,’ said Cat. ‘They were kept as pets by the posh folk in eighteenth-century Derbyshire – but some broke free, bred, and now bounce happily across the Dales.’

Stacey took a theatrical intake of breath. ‘So we have you and your sisters, living in the countryside with your hippy dude uncle and a herd of mutant, aristocratic kangaroos because your mom eloped with J. R. Ewing?’ She whistled. ‘You could sell this to Hollywood.’

‘Shut up, Stacey,’ Cat laughed. ‘We’re just a normal family. Django is a very regular bloke – albeit with a colourful dress code and an adventurous take on cuisine. I’m starting to freeze. Let’s go into town and get a hot chocolate. My bum’s numb even in these salopettes.’

‘Weird, though,’ Stacey said thoughtfully.

‘What is? My bottom?’

‘Your butt is cute, honey,’ Stacey assured her, as they hauled each other to their feet. ‘I mean it’s a little weird that your mom runs off with a cowboy from Denver when you were small, right?’

‘Yup.’

‘And you’ve been living pretty close to the Mile High City these last four years, right?’

‘Yup.’

‘But you never looked her up?’

‘Nope.’

‘Never even thought about it? Never went shopping in Denver and thought, Hey, I wonder if that lady over there is my mom?’

Throughout Cat’s life, it had always been her friends who’d been far more intrigued by her family circumstances, her absent mother, than she. ‘But I never knew her. I was a baby. I have no memories of her,’ Cat explained. ‘I’m not even curious. We had Django, my sisters and I – we wanted for nothing. Just because we didn’t have a “conventional” mother or father didn’t mean that we were denied a proper parent.’

Stacey linked arms with Cat. ‘Conventional families are dull, honey – stick with your kooky one.’

‘Oh I’m sticking with my kooky one all right!’ Cat laughed. ‘I love them with all my heart. And now that Ben and I want to start our own, it feels natural to want to be within that fold again.’

At the time, Cat and Ben York had argued about putting the set of three matching suitcases on their wedding list. Cat had denounced them as boring and unsexy and why couldn’t they peruse the linen department one more time. Ben told her that some things in life were, by virtue, boring and unsexy and he pointed out there were only so many Egyptian cotton towels a couple could physically use in a lifetime. Three years later, Ben and Cat are contemplating the same three suitcases: frequently used, gaping open and empty, waiting to be fed the last remaining clothes and belongings. The process is proving to be far more irksome than the packing of the huge crates a few weeks ago, now currently making their passage by sea back to England.

‘Weird to think that this time next week we’ll be back in the UK,’ Ben says.

‘Weird that we both now refer to it as “the UK” rather than “England” or simply “home”,’ says Cat. ‘Stacey and I went for a fantastic walk this morning.’ She looks through their picture windows to the mountains, a huge cottonwood tree in its winter wear with stark, thick boughs boasting sprays of fine, finger-like branches, the big sky, the quality of air so clean it is almost visible. ‘God, it’s stunning here.’

‘Hey,’ says Ben, ‘we’ll have Clapham Common on our new doorstep.’

Cat hurls a pillow at him. He ducks.

‘We can always come back,’ Ben tells her, ‘but for now, it is time to go. We have things to do. That was the point, remember. That’s why we came here in the first place. It’s the things we do now which provide a tangible future for our daydreams. That’s why it’s timely to return to the UK.’

‘Do dreams come true in Clapham?’

Ben hurls the pillow back at Cat. She hugs it close and looks momentarily upset. ‘I don’t even have a job to go back to,’ she says, ‘and not from want of trying. And I’m not pregnant yet – not from want of trying. I feel like I’m just traipsing behind you.’

‘We’re a team,’ Ben states, ‘you and me. I’ve been given a great job which will be big enough for both of us. I’ve taken it – for the both of us – so you can take your time and think about you.’

‘I know,’ Cat smiles sheepishly. ‘But what’ll I do in Clapham all day? Are we packing the pillows?’

‘I don’t know – do furnished flats come with pillows?’

‘I’m not sleeping on pillows used by God knows who,’ Cat protests, though she calculates that three pillows will fill an entire suitcase.

‘You do in hotels,’ Ben reasons, with a frustrated ruffle through his short, silver-flecked hair. ‘It’s not as if we’re going to some boarding house – I told you, the flat is really quite nice. And when I’m up and running, we’ll look for somewhere to buy.’

‘In North London,’ Cat says and Ben decides not to react to the fact that this is emphatically not a question. ‘Pip says she’s worried about Fen.’

‘Your eldest sister worries about everyone,’ Ben says, remembering that, actually, these pillows came with this apartment. He doesn’t comment.

‘But she says that Fen and Matt aren’t getting along. Since the baby.’

‘You’re not your sisters’ keeper,’ Ben says carefully.

‘Oh but I am,’ Cat says, as if she’s offended, as if Ben’s forgotten to understand the closeness between the McCabe girls, ‘we all are. It’s always been that way, it had to be.’

Ben decides to change the subject. He knows that when his wife is emotional, the legend of her family can be detrimentally overplayed. But he knows, too, that once she returns to their fold again, all the normal niggles and familial irritations will surface and Cat will no doubt be glad of Clapham. He wedges socks into spaces in the cases and then crosses to Cat. ‘Your family won’t recognize you,’ he says. ‘They’ll be expecting that blonde girl with the pony-tail they saw last summer – not this auburn pixie. Mind you, they won’t recognize me – you couldn’t call my hair “salt and pepper” any more, it’s just plain grey.’

‘Makes you look very distinguished,’ Cat says, brushing her hand tenderly through Ben’s hair. She tufts at her elfin crop with a beguiling wail. ‘Do you think mine’s too short? I told them to cut it shorter than usual, and colour it stronger than normal because I wouldn’t be coming back for a while. It’s like I forgot that the UK basically invented places like Vidal Sassoon and John Frieda.’

‘You look gorgeous,’ Ben says, ‘really sexy and cute and fuckable.’ He’s behind her, nuzzling the graceful sweep of her neck that her cropped hair has exposed. He fondles her breasts and then takes his hand down to her crotch and cups at it playfully.

‘Dr York!’ Cat says. ‘I have packing to do.’

‘And I want to fuck my wife,’ Ben whispers, with a titillating nip at her ear lobe.

Cat resists theatrically but he catches her wrists and suddenly he’s tonguing her hungrily. ‘Come on, babe. Procreation is top of our list after all, remember.’

‘Making babies is a very serious matter, Dr York,’ says Cat with mock consternation though she is wriggling out of her clothing.

Ben plugs her mouth with a kiss and takes her hand down to his jeans where his hard-on wells at an awkward angle. ‘Well then, we’d better commit ourselves to honing our technique.’

‘You’re the doctor,’ Cat says, dispensing with her knickers. Ben’s hands travel her body, he gorges on the sight of her. He loves her naked when he’s still fully clothed, the tantalizing interference of fabric between him and his wife’s silky skin. She squats down and unbuckles his belt, makes achingly slow progress with the flies of his trousers, easing down his boxer shorts as if it’s the first time she’s done so. She’s on her knees. His cock springs to attention. Her mouth is moist but teasingly just beyond reach.

‘Christ, Cat,’ Ben says hoarsely, clutching her head and bucking his groin to meet her.

‘Blow-jobs don’t make babies,’ Cat tells him artlessly, but she kisses the tip of his cock and follows this with swift, deep sucks that make him groan. She stands and looks up at him. His height has always turned her on and when he dips his face down to kiss hers it darkens his brown eyes. ‘Isn’t there some position that’s meant to facilitate fertility, doctor?’

‘Yes, Mrs York,’ Ben confirms, turning her away from him, running his hand gently up her back, pushing between her shoulder-blades so that she is bent forwards, ‘there is. Just. Like. This.’

He takes her from behind. The sensation is so exquisite that, for a while, they are silent, motionless.

‘Dr York? Are you sure doggy-style is medically proven to assist conception?’

‘No,’ Ben pants as he thrusts into her, his hands at her waist to haul himself in, ‘but I’m quite certain that the sight of your immaculate peach of an arse improves the quality of my load.’

Django McCabe

Often, making light of the dark makes good sense. When Django McCabe was trekking in Nepal in the early 1960s, en route to some saffron-robed guru or other, he came across a man who had fallen down a screed slope along the mountain pass.

‘Need a hand?’ Django had offered.

‘Actually, wouldn’t mind a leg,’ the man had responded. It was then that Django saw the man in fact had only the one leg, that his crutch had been flung some distance. Django learnt more from his co-traveller than from the guru: not to let hardship harden a person, to keep humour at the heart of the matter, to make light of the dark. A decade later, when Django found himself guardian to three girls under the age of four, the offspring of his late brother, he thought about his one-legged friend and decided that the circumstances uniting him with his nieces would never be recalled as anything other than rather eccentric, strangely fortunate and not that big a deal anyway. ‘I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver, but …’ has since prefixed all manner of events throughout the McCabe girls’ lives.

I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver, but crying because I accidentally taped over Dallas is a little melodramatic.

It was mid-morning and Django McCabe felt entitled to a little sit-down. But there wasn’t time for forty winks. It was Monday and if the girls were coming home for the weekend then he needed the week to prepare for their visit; he couldn’t be wasting time with a snooze. However, to sit in a chair and not nod off was as difficult, perhaps even as pointless, as going to the Rag and Thistle and not having a pint of bitter.

‘I’ll multi-task,’ Django muttered. ‘Apparently it’s a very twenty-first-century thing to do.’ And so he decided to combine his little sit-down with doing something constructive, in this instance scanning today’s runners. After all, studying the form would stop him dozing off.

And there it was. Staring him in the face. 2.20 Pontefract. Cool Cat. Rank outsider – but what did they know.

‘It’s a sign,’ he said, patting himself all over to locate his wallet which, after an extensive grope through the collection of jackets draped over most of the chairs in the kitchen, he finally found. ‘I’ll put a tenner on the horse. In honour of Cat. I need to pop into town anyway so either way, it won’t be a wasted trip.’

Django would never place a bet by phone. He doesn’t trust the telephone. He says, darkly, that you never know who may be listening. But his Citroën 2CV he trusts with his life and, along the lanes of Farleymoor and the roads around Chesterfield, the little car filled to bursting with Django is a familiar sight. At seventy-four, Django is physically robust. Tall and sturdy, affably portly around the girth and crowned by a mane of grey hair always pony-tailed. He toots and waves as he drives. He thinks fellow drivers are slowing down to let him pass, to wave back. Actually they’re swerving to keep out of his way, holding up their hands in protest.

There are people in every continent who regard Django as their friend, though his travelling days ended with the arrival of his three small nieces some thirty years ago. He has rarely left Derbyshire since and it is the area around Farleymoor, on the Matlock side of Chesterfield, where his warmest clutch of friends are massed.

‘Morning, Mary, and don’t you look divine for a Monday,’ Django says, entering the bookmakers.

‘And don’t you look colourful for January,’ Mary says, wondering if he’s warm enough in his paisley shirt and tapestry waistcoat.

‘From Peru,’ Django tells her, opening his waistcoat wide, like a flasher. ‘I had to trade with bandits on a mountain pass.’

‘And what did they get of you, duck?’

‘My passport,’ Django says and he roars with laughter. ‘A tenner on Cool Cat, if you please.’

‘Rank outsider,’ Mary warns him.

‘I know,’ Django shrugs, ‘but the odds were worse for Fenland Star yesterday and truly terrible for Pipistrelle last week and they both won.’ He hands over a ten-pound note. ‘She’s flying home as we speak, you know. Cat. I have all three girls descending on me for the weekend.’

Mary knows Django’s girls. They were at school with her daughters. ‘No doubt you’ll be cooking up a treat for them, then?’

‘She’s been in America for four years,’ he says, leaning on the counter and beckoning Mary closer. ‘That’s an awful lot of McDonalds. Apparently her hair is now red.’

Mary can’t see the connection between McDonalds and hair colour. If she remembers correctly, Cat is the sporty one who married the doctor of a professional cycling team.

‘So I am indeed preparing a Spread to welcome her home and put back some nutrients,’ Django is saying. ‘Oh, and let’s have a tenner on Three’s Company at Fakenham. Good little horse, that.’

Django McCabe hasn’t had a beard for over twenty years, yet still, in moments of contemplation, he strokes his chin with fingertips light and methodical as if his goatee still sits proud on his face. The habit is one that he uses for all manner of pontification, from selecting horses according to their names or the form given them by the Racing Post, to his choice of the next domino at the Rag and Thistle. Currently, he is toying with his chin while wondering what to cook. Laid out before him are all the foodstuffs from the fridge, most of those from the larder, and a few from the capacious chest freezer too. He doesn’t believe in shopping according to a recipe, he cooks to accommodate available ingredients; he invented food combining in its most oblique sense. He fingers his invisible beard and begins to make his considered selection, as an artist might choose pigment for the day’s palette. Indeed, Django feels at his most creative when cooking – he sees blending, mixing, combining, concocting, as art, not science. Thus he never measures or weighs and he believes cookery books are to cooking what painting-by-numbers kits are to painting.

Whenever his nieces visit from London, it warrants a Spread. And as the forthcoming weekend is to be not just an ordinary visit, but a homecoming celebration, it has to be a Monumental Spread. Django hasn’t seen Cat since the summer. None of them has. Christmas was peculiar for her absence. She’d turned thirty-two years old in the autumn and he hadn’t been able to make her a birthday cake. On top of that, Pip implied recently that Fen has been a little down. He knows of no way better to warm the heart and feed the soul than to fill the stomach with all manner of home cooking first.

Django is at his happiest when cooking for his girls, even though they are all in their thirties, with homes of their own, and their health has never been of concern.

‘It’s habit,’ he’ll say when they say he needn’t have, when they say a pub lunch or ready-meal supper would be fine by them, when they say they are too full for seconds let alone thirds. ‘I’m old and stuck in my ways,’ he’ll declare. ‘Humour me.’ He’ll say the same thing when presenting them with carrier bags bulging with Tupperware containers when they leave again for London.

Django McCabe is their family tree. The desertion of their mother, the death of their father gave him no choice – but ultimately gave him his greatest blessing. His arms, like great branches, have been the protective clasp, the loving embrace of mother, father, confidant and mentor to Cat, Fen and Pip. He provided the boughs in which their cradles were rocked. His are the roots which have always anchored them and kept them safe.

Tuesday

Fen McCabe used to enjoy looking in the mirror. Far from it being a vanity kick, she’d found it an affirming thing to do. In the scamper of a working day, to grasp a private moment to nod at her reflection was sustaining. Hullo you, she’d sometimes say, what a busy day. And in the heady period when Matt Holden had wined, dined, wooed and pursued her, she’d frequently nip to the loo in some restaurant or bar, for a little time out with herself. He likes me, she’d beam at her reflection, you go girl! She’d wink at herself, give herself the go-ahead to party and flirt and charm the man who, soon enough, wanted to be with her for life.

Since having a baby six months ago, Fen has hated looking in the mirror. Not because she finds the sight depressing but because she finds the sight so strange. She doesn’t so much wince away from the sight of a few extra pounds, the limp hair, the sallow skin, the dark and puffy eyes, as glance bewildered and wonder who is that? How can this be my reflection when I don’t actually recognize the person staring back? And mirror mirror on the wall, wasn’t I once a damn sight fairer than this? So it’s something of a relief not to have the time during the day and to be too tired in the evening to face the facts staring back from the looking glass.

The phone is ringing, the baby is crying. Fen is nearer to the phone and Matt is nearer to the baby. Matt knows that Fen can find little wrong with the way he answers the phone so he’s happy to swap places here in the kitchen.

‘Hullo?’ he answers. ‘Well hullo!’ He looks over to Fen. She’s wearing truly awful pyjamas. Even if they’d been a matching set they’d have little to commend them. The bottoms have polka dots on a sickly lilac background. The top is littered with cutesy cartoon animals, a strange hybrid love child of a dog and a rabbit and even some teddy bear chromosomes somewhere along the line. ‘Hold on, I’ll just pass you over.’ He holds out the receiver.

‘Who is it?’ Fen mouths but Matt will only cock his eyebrow and grin. As Fen shuffles over to the phone, the placated baby at home on her hip, Matt notes her slippers. The grey, felted monstrosities he once termed ‘eastern-bloc lesbian clogs’. He’d had her in stitches at the time, she’d done a bastardized folk dance in them and had him in hysterics, before she’d banished them under the bed. For good, so he’d thought, until just then.

‘Hullo?’ says Fen.

‘Boo!’ says the voice.

‘Cat?’

‘I’m back! We’re in a cab, on the M4. Heading for Clapham.’

Matt watches the smile warm her face. He thinks how clichéd it sounds to say that the sun comes out when Fen smiles. But in his eyes, it does. And suddenly he forgives her the pyjamas and the clogs and he feels bad for having felt irritated with her and now he wants to go to her and put his arms around her and kiss the asymmetric dimples on her cheeks, brush her overlong fringe away from her forehead and kiss her there too, scoop her hair into a pony-tail and bury his nose in her neck. She’s hanging up the phone and he thinks that, though he’s now ready to leave for work perhaps there is time for a little spontaneity, for affection, for physical and emotional contact. The baby can stay on Fen’s hip. They’re a family after all. Group hug and all that. So he crosses the kitchen and he’s about to reach for her when her nose wrinkles.

‘Gracious,’ she’s saying to the baby, ‘how can someone so little and cute make such a revolting smell.’

‘I’ll change her,’ Matt offers.

Fen falters. ‘It’s OK,’ she says, ‘I’ll do it. I want to check that her nappy rash has cleared.’

She may only be six months old but Cosima Holden-McCabe has decided, quite categorically, that she will not be eating anything unless it is orange in colour. Fen is fretting over whether puréed carrot and mashed sweet potato for the fourth day running – and currently for breakfast – might give her baby carotene poisoning. Or have caused the nappy rash. Or created the current extreme pungency of the nappies.

‘Wouldn’t you rather have a nice squidgy banana? Are you OK, pumpkin?’ Keeping her eyes on her baby, waggling a spoon loaded with orange mush, Fen speaks to Matt. ‘Does she look orange to you?’

‘Pumpkins are orange – you’re probably giving her this complex.’

Fen looks at him for a loaded moment.

‘Joke?’ Matt says with a sorry smile. ‘She looks bonny – she has a lovely glow to her fat little cheeks.’

‘She’s not fat!’ Fen protests.

‘It was a compliment,’ Matt assures her. ‘I meant it affectionately.’

‘But do you think the glow to her cheeks is a bit orange?’

‘No, Fen, I don’t.’ Matt peers in close to his baby and kisses her cheek. ‘She looks fine.’ He glances at his girlfriend. ‘I think Cosima is happy and healthy and that carrot-and-sweet-potato mush is her favourite food of the moment. I reckon it’s because you look peaky in comparison, Fen.’

‘If I do look peaky,’ Fen says defensively, ‘it’s because I’m so bloody tired.’

‘I know you are,’ Matt says and it irritates him that Fen heard an insult instead of the concern intended. He wants to say, I’m tired too, you know; but he hasn’t time for a petty dispute over who is the more exhausted. ‘Why don’t you ask your sister if she’s around today? You can have a little time to yourself?’

‘She’s only just got off the plane!’

‘I meant Pip.’

Somewhere, Fen knows Matt’s intention is sweet. But lately, unbridled sensitivity has lain far closer to her surface than sense. ‘You don’t think I’m coping, do you?’ she says.

‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ Matt says, because the books and the magazines have instilled the sentence in him and advised him to ignore the ironing mountain, piles of toys and general debris. ‘I’m late. What are you doing today? Is it Musical Minis?’

‘No, that’s Thursday.’

‘TinyTumbles?’

‘No, that’s tomorrow. I may meet up with the baby-mums this afternoon.’

‘That’ll be nice.’

Fen shrugs. ‘I always come away feeling a bit insecure,’ she confides. ‘Their babies apparently sleep through the night and most have at least one tooth. And I’m not really sure about the women – I can’t find a connection apart from the babies being the same age. They’re forever trying to out-purée each other with increasingly exotic organic recipes. But all my baby wants is orange stuff.’

‘You’re being unnecessarily hard on yourself,’ Matt says, ‘and on Cosima. And possibly on that bunch too. Stop being silly. You’re wondermum and we love you.’

Fen can’t hear the last sentence. Her ears are ringing with the fact that Matt says she’s silly. She wants to say, Well fuck you. But they’ve made a pact not to swear in front of their child.

‘I’m late.’ He gulps his coffee. ‘Work is mental at the moment – I’ll try and leave early, cook us something nice.’ He kisses the top of Fen’s head and brushes his lips over the peach fuzz adorning Cosima’s. ‘Bye, girls. Have fun.’

* * *

Tom Holmes likes Tuesdays very much. He doesn’t like the fact that at school Tuesdays mean dictation followed by football. Tom finds it difficult to coordinate hearing a word, then assessing its meaning in context and having to write it down, all in the space of about two seconds. It thus seems entirely logical that instructions for rigging a yacht could well be ‘Pacific’ instead of ‘specific’. It frustrates him that he never does well in dictation and that there’s no opportunity in dictation to saliently reason that ‘Pacific’, taken contextually, is just as appropriate as ‘specific’. He’s slightly taken aback that Miss Balcombe won’t at least acknowledge that ‘Pacific instructions for rigging’ sounds fairly logical. He doesn’t like it that there’s no room for manoeuvre with meaning where dictation is concerned.

Football makes Tom miserable, more so because he’s acutely aware that a nine-year-old should never admit to being miserable in the context of football. He supports Arsenal, which has won him friends at his North London prep school, but he hates playing the game. He hates playing because his limbs are often sore from eczema. Mud can actually sting but tracksuit trousers can catch and snag on chapped skin. Though his teammates are pals enough not to comment, Tom still catches them glancing at his body, unintentionally repelled. However, what makes dictation and football bearable is that, on Tuesdays, he stays with his dad and stepmum at their cool place in Hampstead.

They actually only live a mile or so from his home in Swiss Cottage and, though Tom spends every Tuesday, Wednesday and every other weekend with them, and any time in between that he fancies, the novelty value is still high. His dad’s place is closer to school than his other home so instead of his mum slaloming her Renault through the school run (which has its plus points because she appears unaware how much she swears) Tom strolls down Hampstead High Street with his stepmum. And, without actually holding hands (he’s nine now, someone might see), Tom can still subliminally tug her into a detour to Starbucks for hot chocolate.

Tom’s had Pip for nearly four years. Her presence at the school gates continues to provide much intrigue. Being a clown by trade, Pip is well known to many of Tom’s classmates from the birthday-party circuit of their younger years. She’s also been to assembly to talk about the other work she does, as a clown at children’s hospitals. She did the splits and a flikflak on the stage, bonked the headmaster on the head with a squeaky plastic hammer, made a motorbike from balloons in four seconds flat and Tom was the centre of attention all that day. His friends still make a point of saying hullo to her when she collects him. Invariably, she has rushed to school from the hospital, with her hair still in skew-whiff pigtails and traces of make-up on her face. Far more exotic than the widespread Whistles and ubiquitous Nicole Farhi worn by the other mums.

*

This Tuesday was no different. There was Pip, eye-catching in orange-and-purple stripy tights and clodhopping boots, chatting amiably with the other Hampstead mums.

‘Hi, I’m starving. It was shepherd’s pie for lunch. Heinous,’ said Tom, keen to drag her away.

‘Dear oh dear,’ said Pip, ‘heinous shepherd’s pie? I’d turn vegetarian, if I were you.’

‘No way, José,’ Tom retched. ‘The veggie option is always vomtastic.’

‘Vomtastic,’ Pip marvelled, planning to use the word in her clowning. ‘How was football?’

Tom gave a small shrug. ‘Cold.’

‘Are you angling for a brownie and hot choc?’ Pip nudged him.

‘If you say so,’ Tom said.

‘Well, your dad won’t be home till sevenish,’ Pip reasoned with herself, as much as with Tom.

‘It would be very good for my energy,’ Tom said not entirely ingenuously. ‘Starbucks would really help my homework.’

Pip laughed. ‘Come on, tinker,’ she said. They walked towards the High Street. ‘I had a sad day at the hospital. It’s lovely to see you.’

Tom slipped his hand into hers. Just for a few strides or so.

Pip looked at the kitchen table laden with the remains of supper later that evening, then she looked at her husband and his son embroiled in PlayStation. She put her hands on her hips and cleared her throat. They didn’t look up.

‘Hullo?’ she called, as if testing whether anyone was there.

Zac glanced up briefly from the console, but not briefly enough to prevent Tom taking advantage.

‘Dad!’ Tom objected. ‘Concentrate!’

And then Pip decided she’d just smile and ask if anyone wanted a drink. She still found it difficult to gauge her boundaries as a stepmother. Her own standards, based on her childhood and her family’s dynamic, said that a nine-year-old should help clear the table, or at least ask to be excused a chore. But she also acknowledged that this father and son hadn’t seen each other for a week and Zac had been first down from the table challenging Tom to a PlayStation final-of-finals. So she tidied up and allowed them their quality time.

She glanced at the clock and felt relieved that it really was nearing Tom’s bedtime. Zac had worked so late the last couple of nights she felt she hadn’t seen him at all. ‘I’ll run your bath, Tom,’ she said.

‘One more game,’ Zac called to her.

‘I’ll run it slowly,’ Pip said.

Despite actually trying his damndest to win, Zac lost at PlayStation. Far from being wounded, his pride soared at Tom’s skill and after a noisy bathtime, he cuddled up with his son for a lengthy dip into James and the Giant Peach. Pip could hear the soft timbre of Zac’s reading voice. She poured two glasses of wine and organized Tom’s school bag for the morning.

Zac appeared and made the fast-asleep gesture with his hands. ‘He was tired,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s late for him,’ said Pip, offering a glass of wine.

Zac looked at his watch. ‘I just have a little work to do,’ he told Pip who looked instantly deflated, ‘just an hour or so.’ He took the wine, kissed Pip on the lips, squeezed her bottom and disappeared with his laptop. He’s happy, Pip told herself. She looked on the bright side, which was very much her wont. At least it gave her the opportunity to phone Cat, as long as her youngest sister had been able to resist the jet lag on her first day back in the country.

*

Many would say that being a high-flying accountant would have its ups and downs: financial remuneration in return for long hours and often relatively dull work; a bulging pay packet to compensate for a dry grey image. How else would accountants have become such a clichéd race? But the only things grey about Zac Holmes are his eyes which are dark slate to the point of being navy anyway, and the only dry thing about Zac is his sense of humour. If Zac’s looks and his personality had dictated a career, it would have been something on the funky side of creative. But Zac’s brain, with its amazing propensity for figures, decreed accountancy from the outset. Anything else just wouldn’t be logical. Zac likes logic, he likes straightforward solutions and simple answers to even the most complex of problems. Consequently, he never judges anything to be a dilemma because he knows intrinsically that there is always a way to work it all out. Zac believes that problems are merely perceived as such. If you just sit down and think carefully, there’s nothing that can’t be solved. Problems don’t really exist at all, it comes down to attitude. That goes for his personal life as much as his professional. So, when ten years ago, his on-off girlfriend announced she was pregnant a few weeks after a forgettable drunken friendship fuck, Zac welcomed the news with a shrug and easily devised a formula that would suit them all.

2 firm friends + 0 desire to marry/cohabit

(+ never ÷ by £/ issues) = great + modern parents = 1 lucky child.

June, the mother of his child, can never be an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend because she was neither when Tom was conceived. She’s Zac’s friend and Zac is her friend and for Tom to have parents who are friends is a gift. Tom also has two step-parents. Everyone is friends. It might appear unconventional, but it works. A large family of friends.

Django McCabe may have trawled the sixties, trekking from ashram to commune, hiking from yurt to kibbutz, in search of the same. But he was happy to admit that his eldest niece had found its apotheosis in London NW3.

Pip is hovering. Zac’s hour at his laptop has turned into two.

‘Coffee?’ she offers.

‘No, ta,’ says Zac, ‘need to crack on.’

‘Tea?’ she suggests.

‘Nope, I’m fine thanks, Mrs,’ says Zac. ‘I have to knock this on its head.’

‘Whisky?’

‘No, nothing – I’m good. Thanks.’

‘Rampant sex?’

‘Tempting – on any other night. I have to work. Seriously.’

‘One of my very special blow-jobs?’

Zac looks at his screen. He has a very good head for figures. But if there’s one figure that gives very good head, it’s Pip. His eyes don’t leave his laptop, his finger hovers above the mouse-pad. ‘A special blow-job?’ Zac asks, as if it’s a deal-breaker. ‘Not just a standard one?’

‘Trust me,’ Pip winks.

‘Because,’ says Zac, ‘if it’s just run-of-the-mill sucky-sucky, I’ll pass. This audit is crucial.’

‘I’m not capable of run-of-the-mill sucky-sucky,’ Pip clarifies, hands on her hips, chin up.

‘I mean, I’m talking cosmic, Pip,’ Zac stipulates with a lasciviously raised eyebrow. ‘It needs to be mind-blowing.’

‘I assure you it’s not just your mind I’ll be blowing.’

Finally, Zac looks from his laptop to Pip, then back again. Contriving a sigh, as if he was doing her the favour, he logs off. ‘I’m sure the powers that be will understand,’ he says.

‘I’ll write your boss a note,’ says Pip. ‘I’ll tell him the dog ate your homework.’ She takes Zac by the hand and leads him to the bedroom. They undress silently and have rude sex as quietly as they can.

* * *

Matt had come back from work early, made sausages, mash and onion gravy. Perfect for a cold January night and essential for his girlfriend who’d told him she hadn’t had time to eat more than toast and Marmite during the day. He’d bought a DVD too, which Fen managed to stay awake through despite snuggling up against the cosiness of Matt’s chest. Now she’s reading in bed and Matt is nuzzling the fragrant softness of his girlfriend’s neck. His cock is surprisingly responsive. He’d only intended to kiss her goodnight. He didn’t know he had the energy to feel horny.

‘How did we make Cosima again?’ Matt whispers, running his hand the length of Fen’s thigh, spooning against her, the sensation of her buttocks against his erection causing his pelvis to rock automatically, his hands to travel up along her torso. He bypasses her breasts. They’re Cosima’s for the time being. He doesn’t really mind, it’s lucky he’s always been a legs and bum man. And his hands sweep down to Fen’s thighs again, and over them, and around. And he walks his fingers up through the fuzz of her sex then attempts to tiptoe them down in between.

Fen’s hand joins his. ‘I do want to,’ she announces, a tinge of apology, a ring of reluctance, which stills Matt’s hand immediately. ‘I’m just really really tired. Sorry.’

‘I bet I can have you in the mood; bet you I can have you hollering for mercy,’ he tells her. He always used to be able to. He leans across her and kisses her, pulls her to face him, holds her against him. He rocks his groin gently against her, takes her hand down to his perky cock and works his hands over her body. He is not sure whether he’s taken her breath away or whether she’s holding it to pull her stomach in. But he feels her stiffen, and a glance at her face, where anxiety is mixed with reluctance, causes him to turn away from her, to stare at the ceiling with a sigh.

‘Do I feel different to you?’ she asks. ‘I’m still so squidgy and unattractive.’ And then she mutters that she shouldn’t have had all that bangers and mash.

‘You look gorgeous,’ Matt says, ‘I keep telling you. God. Wasn’t my raging hard-on proof enough how much I fancy you?’

Fen shrugs and looks downcast. ‘I know you do,’ she says quietly, ‘but I have to fancy myself, too, to feel horny.’

‘Will you give yourself a break,’ Matt says. He switches off the bedside light and kisses her lightly on the shoulder. ‘Stop being silly.’

Fen lies in the dark, wide-eyed and confused and wishing they had a spare room she could withdraw to. She encourages a hot, oily tear to sting its way from the corner of her eye and slick down her cheek and onto the pillow. She knows it’s bizarre, but rather than being bolstered by Matt’s assurances that he loves and lusts for her however she feels she looks, she’s cross that he appears to trivialize her concerns, her loss of confidence, her fragile self-image.

He called me silly. For the second time today. Silly is a stupid, insensitive word to use. He just doesn’t understand.

God. It’s gone midnight. Cosima will wake in a couple of hours. I have to get some sleep.

Django McCabe and the Nit-Pickin’ Chicks

Though only three years separated the oldest and youngest of the McCabe sisters, Cat had always been very much the baby of the family. She was a little shorter than Pip and Fen, her features more petite. She lacked Pip’s aptitude for performing, to entertain, which gave her eldest sister her apparent sassy confidence. Nor did she have Fen’s self-containment, her ability to seem so quietly self-possessed, so attractively serene. While Pip and Fen had encountered the various dramas in their lives head-on and for the most part single-handedly and discretely, Cat had always simply stood there and cried loudly for help. It wasn’t that she was particularly feeble, nor was she excessively attention-seeking or spoilt; Cat was accustomed to being looked after because there was something about her that inspired others to care for her. Ben believed it was to do with the arrangement of her features; her large eyes set winsomely around the childlike upturn to her nose which led down to the natural pout to her lips. It compelled one to offer protection, even if it was not specifically needed or asked for. However, Cat’s strength was that she was never too proud to ask. She’d grown up knowing that what made her feel strong and able was the presence of her support network, her sisters in particular.

When Cat had gone to live in America with a relatively new boyfriend (as Ben was then) and brand new job, everyone anticipated floods of tears to wash her soon back again. But the anticipated plea to be rescued never came. Her letters and e-mails and phone calls attested to her happiness, and her occasional visits home confirmed this. Her apparent self-sufficiency was a source of joy and relief for her family and soon enough they were delighted for her that she’d gone. Not half so thrilled as they are now, four years later, that she has come back.

Being swept north by rail for their family reunion, the McCabe sisters were initially preoccupied with three-way inane grinning and quietly assessing physical details and changes.

‘So.’

‘So?’

‘So!’

‘You’re back.’

‘I am.’

‘For good?’

‘Indeed. For better, for worse.’

‘I do love your hair,’ Pip told Cat. ‘When you e-mailed to say you’d gone short and red, I had visions of a ginger buzz-cut.’

‘It’s very gamine,’ Fen said whilst hastily retying hers into a hopefully smoother pony-tail, ‘very Audrey Hepburn. God I feel a dowdy frump.’

‘You don’t think it’s too short?’ Cat asked them. ‘And you’re sure you like the colour? Yours is so much longer,’ she said to Fen, ‘and darker.’

‘That’s probably because it’s greasy,’ Fen said. She took a twist of her hair and scrutinized the ends. ‘I can’t remember the last time I went to the hairdresser.’

‘Go this weekend,’ Pip said. ‘Django will know somewhere.’

‘When did he last go to a barber?’ Cat interrupted. ‘You’re not telling me he’s chopped off his pony-tail? I expected things to change while I’ve been abroad – but nothing that drastic.’

‘It’s still his crowning glory,’ Pip assured her with a smile.

‘How’s he been?’ Cat asked.

‘Fine and dandy,’ Pip said. ‘Same as ever, really.’

‘It’s funny, initially I’d curse him for not having e-mail, but actually I loved receiving his letters and writing back,’ Cat said. ‘I’ve kept them all. They’re hysterical. He’d send me the TV listings page every single week so I could keep up with Corrie.’

‘Zac and I bought him an answering machine for his last birthday – but he took it back,’ Pip said. ‘I suggested a mobile phone – but you can imagine what he said.’

‘Talking of birthdays, I wonder what we’ll do for his,’ Cat said brightly. ‘Can you believe he’ll be seventy-five this spring?’

‘He’ll either throw a huge party – or go on a retreat,’ Pip said. ‘In which case we’ll make him a surprise party.’

‘Yes!’ said Cat. She gazed at the sleeping baby nustled up to Fen in a papoose. ‘Cosima is so beautiful,’ she said dreamily, watching Fen’s fingers tap out a mother’s instinctive, gentle rhythm against the baby’s back. Absent-mindedly, Cat rolled her thumb against her wedding ring. ‘Still no plans to wed then, Fen?’ She felt Pip glance at her.

Fen balked. ‘What an odd thing to say.’

‘Sorry – I just mean, you know, since you now have a baby.’

‘Shock, horror, an illegitimate child? Is that what you’re implying?’ Fen said.

‘Blimey Fen, I was only teasing,’ Cat said, because she had been. She glanced back at Pip who, ever the diplomat, decided it was a good idea to change the subject.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Pip.

‘I’m hungry now too,’ said Fen. ‘Do you think Django’s made a late lunch for us?’

‘Followed almost immediately by an enormous tea with just time enough to burp before a Spread for supper?’ Cat laughed.

‘I’ll go and buy sandwiches for us,’ said Pip.

‘And salt-and-vinegar crisps!’ Cat called after her. Fen smiled at her. Cat turned her gaze out to the English countryside zipping by outside the train. So different to Colorado, where she had remained in awe of her surroundings. Here, the scale was comfortingly familiar, if a little tame by comparison, the colours darker, damper.

‘Sorry about before,’ Fen said. ‘I’ve been horribly snappish, lately. I hate it and I can’t help it. I’m just so tired. And – well – things at home have been a little strained.’

Cat watched Fen’s gaze drop. She’d been shocked by the physical change in Fen, the wan complexion, the dark eyes, puffiness here and a general lankness there. Objectively, Fen had always been the true beauty of the three of them; her features and complexion adding refinement where Pip was just pretty, where Cat was simply cute. Today, though, Cat noticed a certain pallor now veiling this.

‘Is it Matt?’ Cat broached, though she’d intended to seek details from Pip later.

‘I don’t know, Cat,’ Fen said, a tear clouding one eye, ‘but I think it might be me. My love for my baby is so primal and complete that sometimes I feel like running away so it’s just the two of us.’

‘Don’t do that,’ Cat said and she reached across the melamine for her sister’s wrist, ‘please don’t do that. I’ve just come thousands of miles to be back in my family fold. I want Cosima to get to know her Auntie Cat. And when I am pregnant, I’ll need you within arm’s reach to tell me how to do it all properly.’

Fen smiled. ‘I’ll need bloody long arms to stretch to Clapham from East Finchley,’ she said.

‘Clapham is not, I repeat not, permanent,’ Cat said. ‘You know I’ve always had a thing for Tufnell Park.’

‘It’s good to have you home,’ Fen said, ‘but it’ll be even better to have you on the doorstep.’

Pip returned. ‘Cardboard bread with rubber cheese in between,’ she announced. ‘Don’t anyone tell Django what we’re about to eat.’

Peeping through the window, it is a joy for Django to behold his three precious girls spill out of the taxi. Momentarily, he turns away from the sight and offers a prayer of sincere thanks to all the gods and spirits who have ever interested him at any stage during his life. He can hear their laughter and their excited chatter. Will you look at Cosima – how she has grown in the last month. How naturally Fen has the baby against her. See the sun spin gold through Pip’s hair. And Cat, that can’t be Cat! Cat was the little girl with the jaunty pony-tail. Who is this beautiful woman? And what’s with the red hair!

Django had intended to position himself in the hallway, so that when the girls opened the door he’d be there; his arms flung wide, like a celebrity tenor on an album cover. In the event, he is as excited as they are and he strides out to meet them, booming his welcome. The only member of the family who does not cry is Cosima. She regards the grown-ups with her solemn unblinking eyes, absorbing all the facts and details as if logging the information that when you haven’t seen your family for a long time, you leap about and sob and touch each other’s hair a lot.

‘I’m still stuffed from tea-time!’ Cat whispered to Pip while Django tinkered in the kitchen. ‘Those scones were like cannon balls. Never mind enough to feed an army – enough to sink the navy!’

‘Shh,’ Pip said.

‘Has he been well?’ Cat asked quietly. ‘Hasn’t had flu, or something? It’s just that he looks a little tired to me, a bit peaky, since I last saw him.’

‘I think he’s been fine,’ said Pip. ‘He certainly hasn’t said anything to the contrary. He’s probably been slaving over the stove all week, preparing for our arrival.’ She spied a copy of the Racing Post. ‘Or else he’s put all his money on some old nag and lost the lot.’

Cat walked around the living-room, fingering objects, lingering over framed photos, feeling the heavy brocade of the curtains, running her hands over the worn warm upholstery, filling her nostrils with the scent of home. It was like remaking her acquaintance with the essential elements of her personal history; reminding herself how everything looked and felt and smelt and should be, while at the same time reasserting her own presence in this sacred family space.

The Spread was simmering and sautéing and roasting and steaming. Elements of it were happily marinating, or being chilled, or else ripening at room temperature. All the pots and pans were in use and every utensil had served many a purpose. The various scents emanating from oven and hob joined forces to create an olfactory explosion that, to Django, was as contradictory yet ultimately pleasing as a jazz chord.

The point of cooking and the point of jazz are essentially one and the same, Django thought to himself as he ran a sink of water and half a jar of Bar Keeper’s Friend to soak all the knives. It’s about an element of surprise, of revelation and re-education. Of experimentation. Like when the African pentatonic scale met the European diatonic scale and jazz was born; a sound that was initially bizarre, disconcertingly discordant. It simply required one to open one’s ears and one’s heart to the flattened third and seventh notes and suddenly the aural pleasure of the blue note coursed through one’s veins. Likewise, one’s initial concern that Tabasco and tuna may be odd accompaniments to duck with a celery stuffing, dissipates when one shrugs off preconceptions of convention and allows the tastes to speak for themselves.

‘Not too dissimilar to Kandinsky either,’ Django mused as he left the kitchen in search of his nieces, ‘seemingly an arbitrary cascade of colour and shape yet utterly grounded in structure and purpose. Jazz, Cookery, Abstraction. It’s all art.’

He found them in the living-room and observed them unseen for a nostalgic moment. Just then, the girls could have been any age. The scene was immediately familiar and timeless and the continuity was poignant. ‘By golly,’ Django declared, ‘sing hey for the return of the nit-pickin’ chicks.’

The nit-pickin’ chicks looked up at him. Fen stopped plaiting Pip’s hair, Pip stilled her hands from massaging Cat’s foot, Cat brought her head up from Fen’s lap and ceased tracing patterns on her sister’s legs.

‘Django, you’re not going all sentimental on us are you?’ Pip asked, resuming her massage in a businesslike way. The girls laughed. Privately, they each felt suddenly very sentimental, in an affirming way. It had been years since Django had referred to them as the nit-pickin’ chicks, because it had been such a long time since they’d sat in their huddle with their hands almost absent-mindedly working on each other.

‘Stop fiddling,’ Django said. ‘Let’s eat.’

‘I’ll just check on Cosima,’ Fen said.

‘You were only up there half an hour ago,’ said Cat, ‘and she was quiet then.’

‘You’ll see,’ Fen said, slightly defensively, feeling entitled to her knowing nod, ‘you’ll see.’

‘It transpires that Cat hasn’t just come home because she misses your cooking,’ Pip told Django, slipping her arm around his waist, ‘she’s come home to breed.’

Django took a moment. ‘Wonderful!’ he then said, placing his hand on Cat’s head as if blessing her. ‘Another reason to celebrate. There’s some champagne somewhere. It may well be in the bottom drawer in your room, Pip.’

‘I could look in on Cosima for you while I check,’ Pip suggested to Fen.

‘No,’ said Fen decisively, ‘I’ll go. I’ll do both.’

‘The meal is organic,’ Django told her, ‘mostly. Shall I purée a little for Cosima for tomorrow?’

‘No, thanks,’ Fen said, hoping she hid her alarm.

‘The sauce is relatively orange,’ Django elaborated.

‘That’ll be the Tabasco,’ Fen said, ‘which isn’t really appropriate for a six-month-old baby.’

‘It’s never too early to prepare the palate,’ Django said.

Despite the size of the scones, the aromas from the pots and pans were too tantalizing to resist and appetites magically expanded to meet the quality and quantity of food prepared. Though the menu was predictably unorthodox and though they started with dessert because Django didn’t want to risk the lemon-and-rum soufflé collapsing, traditional manners had always been proudly upheld in the McCabe household. Don’t hold your knife like a pencil, elbows off the table, don’t talk with your mouth full. Between courses, after polite dabbing with napkins, news and plans were discussed.

‘A toast to absent menfolk,’ Django said, charging his glass, ‘to the accountant, the publisher, the doctor.’ He took a sip. ‘There was plenty of food for them, you know, even if you lot want second helpings.’

‘But we didn’t actually want them here,’ Pip said as if revealing a secret. ‘We wanted you to ourselves.’

‘And Ben’s mum wanted him to herself,’ Cat reasoned.

‘Next time you come, you bring your boys,’ Django said. ‘This stew will be good for days – you’re all to take a tub home.’ He topped up his glass again. ‘Well, another toast. To the clown.’ Everyone chinked Pip’s glass. Django cleared his throat: ‘To the art historian.’ They raised their glasses to Fen. And then they all looked at Cat. ‘What shall we toast you as?’ Django asked her. ‘Sports journalist? Redhead?’

Cat looked concerned. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘But you so love the cycling world,’ Pip said, ‘and you had such respect as one of the few female reporters.’

‘And you’re married to the doctor of one of the world’s top cycling teams,’ Fen said.

‘Ex-team doctor,’ Cat pointed out.

‘No more gallivanting around the globe with that circus of Lycra and bicycles then?’ asked Django.

‘No,’ Cat laughed though she looked a little forlorn. ‘I’ve fallen out of love.’ Pip and Fen jerked with concern. ‘With the sport,’ Cat clarified. ‘So has Ben. Too many drugs, too much cheating.’

‘So, what’ll you do?’ Pip asked again.

‘I’m not sure – maybe write more widely. Maybe not just yet.’

‘And are you back for good?’ Django asked. ‘Or is this a pit stop?’

‘This is home. This is where we want to start a family. Maybe I’ll take a leaf out of Fen’s book – and yours, Django – and make motherhood my career.’

‘No finer, more noble job than that,’ Django said, ‘mark my words.’

‘You forgot to add knackering,’ Fen laughed. ‘Academia was a breeze in comparison. Not that I have any desire to go back to it.’

‘But you’re so talented,’ said Cat, ‘you’ve had stuff published. You’ve lectured at the Tate. You’re the authority on the sculpture of Julius Fetherstone. You have all those hard-earned letters after your name.’

‘Art is still my great love – just because I choose not to work in that field doesn’t negate that,’ Fen shrugged and continued more defensively. ‘I’ve gone for a change of career. Raising my baby is just as challenging, as stimulating – and far more time-consuming.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to see which comes first – a blue line on the dipstick, or a job offer,’ said Cat.

‘I’d like to propose a toast,’ said Pip, ‘to my sisters, to our Django. To family.’

Django makes his announcement over strong Turkish coffee and enormous petits fours. He clears his throat and asks for silence, please, ladies.

‘No doubt my impending milestone birthday has been the cause for much speculation – and I hope you haven’t already planned a surprise party.’

‘You’re not going on a retreat are you?’ Cat asks.

‘On my seventy-fifth birthday?’ Django objects. ‘Good Lord no. I have no intention of retreating anywhere. Quite the opposite. They’ll be coming out of the woodwork, far and wide, because I’m going to throw a party.’

‘Here?’

‘Of course here,’ Django says, ‘a huge rollicking knees-up that will rewrite the significance of May 16th in history. I’m going to have a party that’ll be totally, eye-openingly unsuitable for someone of such an age.’

Cat, Fen and Pip gawp at him.

‘You’re all invited,’ he assures them earnestly, ‘along with anyone who thinks they might ever have known me.’

The Rag and Thistle

Early the following evening, Django placed his hands on Fen’s shoulders. ‘Do it for me,’ he said quietly.

‘It’s only the Rag and Thistle,’ said Pip, ‘it’s only down the road.’

‘And it’s my welcome-home weekend,’ Cat protested.

‘I don’t feel like it,’ Fen said.

‘Your sisters request your company and I’d like to have my granddaughter all to myself,’ Django said but he could see that he hadn’t dented her defence. ‘You do have faith in my abilities, don’t you? Did I not bring up you three single-handedly – and fabulously – when your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver?’ He paused carefully to assess the just perceptible upturn to the corners of Fen’s mouth. ‘And isn’t Cosima already sound asleep and unlikely to waken anyway?’

‘It’s not that,’ Fen said. ‘Of course I have faith in you. It’s just I don’t really feel like going out.’ She wanted to sound needy rather than defensive so that they’d sympathize.

‘But it’s my weekend!’ Cat reiterated.

Fen looked deeply uncomfortable. ‘I don’t want to go to the Rag and Thistle because I don’t want to leave Cosima,’ she explained, looking at the semicircle of her family surrounding her. ‘It’s not something that I’ve done. Why can’t we just stay here – open some dodgy home-made elderberry wine?’

Her sisters and uncle regarded her while she scrutinized a threadbare patch on the Persian rug. Was that newspaper beneath it? Probably. When from, Fen wondered. She’d known the rug all her life.

‘You mean to say you haven’t had any time apart from Cosima in six months?’ Cat asked.

‘No – yes,’ Fen elaborated, ‘not really. Matt has babysat a couple of times.’

‘You mean you and Matt haven’t been out together since she was born?’ Cat asked, thinking it sounded preposterous.

‘That’s right,’ said Fen, with a tightness that told her audience she thought they shouldn’t be questioning.

‘That’s not right,’ said Cat, ‘that’s terrible.’

‘Fuck off, Cat,’ Fen said sharply.

‘Don’t swear,’ Django said.

‘I have offered,’ Pip said to Cat and Django, ‘to babysit.’

‘But Cosima was colicky,’ Fen said.

‘No one’s likely to judge your mothering abilities on whether you occasionally have some me-time,’ said Django.

‘It’s not that,’ Fen sighed.

‘It’s good for you,’ said Pip, ‘it said so in that baby book you keep in the loo.’

‘What’s all this Fen-bashing?’ Fen asked. ‘God, you’re my bloody family. Cosima is a tiny baby and I’m allowed to indulge my maternal instincts.’

‘I simply want the treat, the honour, of looking after my first granddaughter, and your sisters just wanted a couple of hours down the local with you to themselves,’ Django reasoned. ‘As you say – we are a bloody family.’

‘It’s not a challenge,’ Pip said, ‘it’s just a quick drink down the pub, silly.’

‘Christ, why is everyone calling me silly these days?’ Fen muttered to herself. ‘And it is a challenge, actually, to me. Do you not think it doesn’t disturb me that my self-confidence can leak away like breast milk? That I’d reject my sisters’ invitation to go out for a couple of drinks? That a strange and terrible part of me doesn’t even trust the man who raised me to look after my baby for two tiny hours?’ Her eyes darted around her family from under knotted eyebrows.

‘Look – I’m sorry, Fen,’ said Cat, who looked it. ‘Please come. I’m so excited to be back. I’ve missed you.’

For a moment, Fen thought she might cry. Then she wanted to stand her ground and refuse. ‘I don’t know,’ she faltered.

‘Leave me a long list,’ Django said brightly, ‘with illustrations.’

So, still a little reluctantly, Fen took him at his word and did just that. When she was quite sure Cosima really was fast asleep, she left with her sisters for the Rag and Thistle.

As pubs go, the Rag and Thistle was both lively yet homey. Having been in the Merifield family for four generations, it retained the charm and authenticity that many brewery-owned pubs never achieve despite trying so obviously to replicate. Thus there were no mass-produced sepia pictures of Street Scene Anywhere but photos instead of Merifields old and young, dead and alive, their various dogs and horses, adorning most of the wall space. The cast of Peak Practice had signed beer mats which David Merifield had framed in a jaunty pattern around a cast photo. There was a paper serviette, illegibly autographed by an actress whose name no one could remember and sometimes this was hung upside down in case it was meant to be so. There were no laminated menus with novelty meals and photos of the dishes. Just simple home cooking, available whenever required. The bell for last orders was usually rung when someone remembered to ring it. The Rag and Thistle was a mainstay of the community and its community cherished it. Though the McCabe girls left home over a decade ago, they still think of it as their local and the Merifields welcome them back as if they last served them a drink just the day before.

‘G & T,’ Pip ordered.

‘Glass of house red,’ said Cat. ‘Fen?’

‘Oh go on then,’ Fen said guiltily, ‘V.a.T. But loads of tonic and easy on the vodka. I’m still breast-feeding, remember.’

‘We couldn’t possibly forget,’ Pip murmured to Cat though it landed her a harsh glance from Fen.

‘I’ll bring them over,’ said the publican Mr Merifield, who always treated the girls like royalty on their visits home. ‘You’ll be wanting to nab that table that’s just come free.’

‘So Django’s going to throw a birthday party,’ Cat marvelled, making a beeline for the table in the corner bedecked with horse brasses. ‘Is he serious about having it at home? He could have it here.’

‘This place couldn’t fit everyone in – they’ll be coming from the four corners of the earth,’ said Pip.

‘Didn’t you know the earth was round?’ said Mr Merifield, setting down their drinks.

‘We’re talking about Django’s birthday.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Merifield, ‘and the party. No point us opening the pub that night – everyone will be at yours, if memories of his sixtieth party serve me right.’ The girls laughed and everyone buried their heads in their hands.

‘Can you believe he’s going to be seventy-five?’ Fen said, arranging a beer mat in front of each of them and removing the ashtray to the window sill with a look of utter distaste.

‘It sounds so old,’ said Cat. ‘Seventy-five.’

‘He is a grandpa,’ Fen defined, ‘though actually he likes to be called Gramps.’

‘Tom calls him that,’ Pip explained to Cat. ‘Tom calls him Django Gramps which is weird really, because he’s even less of a real grandfather, in the literal sense, to Tom than he is to Cosima.’

‘I laughed when you told me in that e-mail that Django refers to Tom as his “step-grandsonthing-or-other”,’ Cat told her.

‘I wonder if our children will be confused that they have a grandpa for an uncle, but a non-existent grandmother?’ Fen mused.

‘They have other grandmas,’ Pip said. ‘Matt and Zac’s mums.’

‘It’s odd,’ said Fen and then she stopped. ‘Nothing.’

‘What?’

‘It’s just that, having really thought of her so rarely, just recently I’ve thought of her more.’

‘Who?’

‘Our mother,’ Fen shrugged. ‘Now that I have my baby. I just can’t figure out how a mother can leave.’

‘That’s why we’ll all make grade A mummies,’ Cat said. ‘We’ll be automatically compensating for the fact that our mother was sub-Z grade.’

‘It struck me recently that the only person I’ve ever called “Mummy” is myself,’ Fen said. It quietly struck her sisters that they hadn’t called anyone ‘Mummy’ at all.

‘I can’t wait to be called Mummy,’ Cat said dreamily. ‘Do you realize I was pretty much Cosima’s age when our mother left?’

‘It’s only since having Cosima that maternal instincts, in all their crazy hormonal cladding, have made sense,’ Fen continued, ‘and to be honest, though previously I never much cared about her, it now makes me shudder. A woman ran off with a cowboy from Denver and left behind three girls under the age of four? How could she do it? How can a mother not have maternal instincts? It’s criminal. They’re chemical.’ Fen looked at her sisters. ‘I gaze at my daughter and I think of us three. Three tiny little girls. How could she have walked out?’

‘I reckon life would still have been better under Django than under her if she hadn’t left,’ Pip reasoned. ‘His maternal instincts more than made up for her lack of them.’

‘It never bothered me before, really, because there were never situations when we wished we had her,’ Fen reiterated quietly, ‘but now, recently, it’s made me utterly bewildered. Indignant too. That’s why I don’t like to be separated from Cosima. That’s why I hold her so tight.’ Pip and Cat regarded her and felt bad about before. ‘I don’t like missing a minute with her – not because I’m a hormonal fruit cake, though you probably think I am. But because, in my book, there cannot be such a thing as an overprotective mother.’

‘Do you want another?’ Cat asked Fen.

‘God no,’ said Fen, ‘this one’s gone to my head already.’

Cat laughed. ‘I meant another baby – not vodka.’

‘That would necessitate Matt and me having sex,’ Fen said glumly.

‘Oh God, does all that really go down the nappy-bin?’ Cat asked.

‘Pretty much,’ Fen admitted. ‘To be completely honest, we prefer that extra hour’s sleep to banging away for an orgasm.’

‘The royal “we”?’ Pip asked. ‘Do you speak for Matt?’

Fen blinked a little. ‘You know blokes,’ she laughed it off but didn’t elaborate. ‘The weird thing is, it all seems a bit irrelevant. As if Cosima has shown us what life’s all about. It’s like, in retrospect, it was all a means to an end. Fancying Matt, falling in love with him, rampant sex, domestic daydreams – it’s as if all that was a preamble, all a clever cloak to ensure the continuation of the species. Having Cosima has shown us that life is about going forwards with her, rather than backwards trying to cling on to pre-baby days.’

‘Us?’ Pip questioned. ‘The royal “us”? Do you speak for Matt too?’

Fen glanced at her with fleeting annoyance. ‘Life is more meaningful now that I’m a mummy,’ she said to Cat. ‘I have a true function, a role. I’m a mummy. I don’t feel any need to reclaim my sexuality. This is me now. This is what I was made for. This is the best thing I’ve ever done.’

Cat thought this sounded extreme, mad even. Pip thought it was sad and she immediately wondered how Matt was. He was going out with Zac for a pint that night. She’d probe. She was fond of Matt and, being the Great Looker-Afterer, she’d see to it that his relationship with her sister did not suffer.

‘God,’ said Cat with nostalgic admiration, ‘and you used to be such a vamp, Fen.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Fen rubbished. ‘Me? A vamp? Hardly.’

‘You were a downright slapper,’ Pip teased.

‘Piss off,’ Fen protested, suddenly knowing to what they alluded and not wanting to revisit the past.

‘Don’t tell me your nappy-addled memory doesn’t stretch back four years when you were having to choose between two men?’ Pip said.

They looked at Fen who was peering through a cage of her fingers as if shying away from a horror movie that turned out to be her history. ‘Stop it you two,’ she winced, ‘it was ages ago. It was a different me.’

‘It was right here in Derbyshire,’ Pip said pointedly.

‘He moved away,’ Fen said, ‘a while ago. You know that.’

‘Regrets?’ Cat asked.

‘Don’t be daft,’ Fen said.

‘Does Matt know?’ Cat wondered. ‘Did you ever tell him?’

‘Are you mad?’ said Fen. ‘It had no bearing on my feelings for Matt. When it ended, it didn’t release extra love for me to bestow on Matt. My feelings for Matt never changed – my feelings for the other man did.’

‘I love Matt,’ Pip said.

‘Me too,’ said Fen, ‘me too. I’m very lucky.’ Suddenly she felt overwhelmingly sad. Just then she longed for Matt even more than she longed for Cosima. ‘I’m such a crotchety old bag at the moment,’ she admitted and her sisters could see fear written across her brow. ‘I’m tired and narky the whole time. I can’t seem to help it. Who is this Fen who doesn’t have the energy to make love to her boyfriend, who has lost the desire to be touched but doesn’t really care? I can’t remember when I last told Matt that I love him.’

‘You should, you know,’ Pip said sternly, ‘according to that baby book you keep in your loo.’

‘Do you and Zac plan to have proper babies?’ Cat asked. Fen and Pip stared at their younger sister whose cheeks suddenly turned the colour of her hair and she buried her head in her hands. ‘God that sounded awful. Poor Tom – I didn’t mean—!’

‘It’s not in our game plan,’ Pip laughed. ‘We’re a gang of three. I like being a stepmum. It suits me. I’m not really broody, I don’t think.’

‘You wouldn’t have time anyway,’ Cat said, ‘because you’re always so busy looking after everyone else.’ Pip looked a little nonplussed. ‘It’s a compliment,’ Cat assured her. ‘Even Django calls you the Great Looker-Afterer. You’re only three years my senior but you’ve always mothered me. Capably, too.’

‘And me,’ said Fen.

‘Someone had to,’ Pip shrugged.

‘To us,’ said Fen, now toasting with mineral water, ‘to sisterhood and motherhood.’

Pip went to bed hoping everyone was all right. She was worried about Fen. If having a baby had brought such sense and sunshine into her life, as Fen claimed, why did she seem so out of sorts? Alternately under-confident and yet smug, defensive yet somehow needy too. Pip didn’t doubt that it was normal and right to be so absorbed in her child, but she was concerned that Fen seemed so defiantly blasé about the other aspects of her life. As if being a mother had given her a superiority complex and inferiority issues in one fell swoop.

And what about Cat and Ben? Pip lay there anxious that her youngest sister had skipped back home hoping to play out a rather unrealistic daydream of easy baby-making and rosy domesticity.

She thought about Zac. And Tom. Just then Pip felt intensely grateful for Tom. Really, what a joy her gorgeous stepson was – what a privilege to have so many rewards without any of the hormonal rumpus apparently affecting her younger sister. She chastised herself sharply for certain occasions when she was irritated by Tom; when he hogged Zac or overran the flat, when Zac all but ignored her, when Tom appeared to think he needn’t listen to what she said.

I’d hate anything to disrupt what I have with Zac. There’s a safe harmony between us; I know when our tides come in and go out. Tom graces our lives but ultimately, by virtue of the living arrangements, lets them be as well. Zac and I are man and wife in the conventional sense but I still feel we’re girlfriend and boyfriend too. Nothing is a chore, nothing is a bore. Everything is a treat. The sexual buzz I feel for him is as charged now as ever it has been. Our domestic set-up is perfect. Nothing can better it. As a couple, we have freedom and privacy and Tom.

As Cat lay in bed, she wondered whether she could still blame jet lag for making her feel suddenly so teary. She considered going downstairs – Django would be up for another hour or so, with his ‘medicinal’ brandy. Or whisky if he’d used all the brandy in the soup. Or she could knock out the special sequence on the wall dividing her room from Pip’s. Pip would remember their childhood code, the tympanic lingo of knuckle against plaster. Long, short, short – Are you awake? Short, long, long – Come in here. Long, long, short, short – Can I come in?

It’s just the jet lag. I’ll let Pip sleep. I’ll let Django relax over the day-before-yesterday’s crossword. I won’t disturb Fen. Actually, I don’t really want to talk to her. I hope having a baby won’t make me like her. That sounds awful. Fen’s consuming passion for Cosima, her zeal for her role as mother, is beautiful on one level – lucky little Cosima. But where’s my sister gone? Where’s Matt’s girl? Where’s Trust Art’s brilliant art historian and archivist? I’ve come home to find that Fen has only half an ear to lend us and half her personality available. That sounds harsh. Perhaps I don’t understand. But I don’t want it to be like that for me. Cosima has gained a brilliant mother but we’ve lost Fen. It will be different for Ben and me. A baby is for the two of us. At the end of the day, it will always be Ben and me and when baby makes three, we’ll welcome it into our life. I can’t wait.

Fen’s daughter slept soundly in her pop-up travel cot, making occasional grunts and snuffles. Fen listened carefully, while gazing around her childhood bedroom which Django had lovingly preserved. Above her head, an Athena poster of a semi-nude faceless bloke in peculiar tones of lilac duelled for attention against pouting men with big hair and a penchant for frills who postured down from album covers drawing-pinned to the wall. Teenage angst novels crammed a shelf, flanked by two chunks of Derbyshire stone holding their skinny spines straight. Under the Formica dressing-table, oversized tiger-feet slippers, padded with scrunches of Racing Post from 1989. In her bedside drawer, the jewels of her pocket-money days: a Mexican silver brooch in the shape of a cat, small 9ct gold hoop earrings with a single seed pearl, a silver-plated heart-shaped locket whose hinge broke when she opened it and found it empty, a three-band Russian wedding ring she’d bought for Pip’s fifteenth birthday but decided to keep for herself yet never felt comfortable wearing. It was all tarnished, everything was a little bashed.

It felt strange to be in a single bed, strange that only two-thirds of her own little family were together that night, nicely strange to miss Matt. She smiled at the pin-ups of her teenage years and suddenly Matt’s face loomed large in her mind’s eye. She hoped she loved him as much as she used to. Again, she felt subsumed by a longing tinged with loneliness and she sent him a text message saying night night love your girls xxxx. She looked at it and worried over the lack of punctuation, that he might think she was nagging him to love his girls. Hopefully he’d be distracted by all the x’s instead.

Her mind drifted back to a time before Cosima. Not so long ago, really, there was a girl called Fen for whom motherhood had then been such a distant notion as to have had no realism. It was like recalling a best friend she hadn’t seen for years, a soulmate who had gone so far away that their paths would never now cross. Just then, it made Fen wistfully sad. She reminisced that there had been fun in all that dangerous gallivanting. It had been liberating and energizing, being responsible for no one but herself.

She thought back to that heady time when she and Matt had just met at work and were embarking on the definitive office fling. She conjured again the feeling of exquisite anticipation, remembered so clearly sitting amongst the papers and pictures and boxes in the archives willing Matt to rudely interrupt her with a furtive snog and a grope. She relived the joy of racing down the corridor to delight Matt with her unbridled enthusiasm about some discovery or other amongst the dust and documents. She felt again the euphoric pride when their romance was exposed amongst their colleagues, when they were the centre of attention, the focus of gossip and approval, soon enough the benchmark for love and romance.

And then she thought back to those short, secret trips to Derbyshire around the same time, to those exhilarating afternoons of sex with another man; the urgency to have her desire sated but to make her home-bound train. It’s really only now that she feels horror while she wonders what on earth all that was about, how bizarre it all was. At the time she’d divided her heart meticulously into two and coolly separated her body from her conscience. It had been intoxicatingly exciting for a while. It hadn’t felt wrong. But then her sisters found out. And, in retrospect, thank God for Cat and Pip badgering her on the finer points of morality. Thank God she chose Matt and he never found out. And thank God she’d grown out of all of that. And grown up. And most of all, thank God for her beautiful beautiful baby.

As Fen lay thinking, her hands subconsciously assessed the changes in her body. Really, she knew she ought to adore her post-birth figure, her fuller breasts and becoming curves. But lying there, squidging more than an inch to the pinch, she did not. Instead, she tormented herself with clear images of how her body had been when it was the object of all that sexual attention. Pert and lithe and powerful in its energy and desirability. Ultimately, though, it did not come down to aesthetics. Her body was no longer her own now. It was as if, in nurturing a baby, she’d renounced sole ownership. Though she was slowly scaling down breast-feeding she knew she’d never have the same freedom with her body, she wouldn’t be reclaiming it as her own.

Does Matt miss it? My body? Does he miss the way we were? I don’t like to think that he might. I haven’t asked him on purpose. I’ve just been hoping that his tolerant nature and all those ante-natal classes plus the magazines I leave lying around and the baby book that’s in the loo will have filtered through, will have put paid to any resentment or disaffection.

Anyway, what was all that spontaneity actually worth? Was it really such a privilege to be able to do as we pleased whenever we liked? I suppose I’m on a crusade of sorts – that what we have now completely outweighs what we were then. Surely Matt feels the same?

Django pottered around downstairs. He couldn’t find the crossword from the day before yesterday. He couldn’t even find today’s paper. Then he remembered he’d used one to wrap up the giblets. And he’d used another to wrap up the broken wine bottle which had tumbled onto the flagstone floor after he’d sloshed its contents into the stew with excessive flamboyance. Instead, with jazz playing softly, he tidied and swept and took lengthy breaks to sip a little whisky.

He had loved babysitting Cosima. She was an angel who hadn’t woken once but still he’d taken his responsibility gravely and hadn’t dared tidy or sweep or search for lost crosswords lest she should wake and he not hear her. Sipping whisky any earlier had been quite out of the question. He’d spent most of the evening intermittently creeping up the stairs to the point where he knew the treads would creak. He could sense the baby in the silence and he’d had a lovely evening, halfway up the stairs. He was pleased Cosima hadn’t woken because he wanted to be able to reassure Fen on her return. He hoped the fact would bolster her, encourage her to breathe a little more deeply in fresh space of her own, or even breathe a little more lightly in other spaces.

I can reason it out. I can see why. Couldn’t anybody? Her mother buggers off with a cowboy so Fen has decided she won’t be leaving her baby at all. That’s OK. That’s OK. It’s still relatively early days. But I hope all is well with Matt. I’ll invite them for a weekend soon. I’ll take him to the Rag. Or perhaps I’ll babysit and send the two of them there for a little them-time.

How lovely to have our Cat back in the bag. A relief that her accent is unmodified by her time abroad. She’s grown, she’s bloomed, she’s chopped off her hair and she’s home. I must have her and Ben up for a weekend too. He’s a good chap. I’ll try and find an opportune moment to slip in my little query. I’m sure it’s nothing but if he could just pop his doctor’s hat on for a minute or two I could ask him a couple of questions and be done with it. I don’t want to worry the girls, or waste my own GP’s time. It’s probably nothing. I’m probably daft for even noticing it. After all, I am growing old – I can hardly expect the rude health I used to enjoy.

Pip looks well. Whoever would have thought that the wilful girl who denounced any merit in love and money, found both in the good form of Zac? And a ready-made son too! Tom may officially be a stepson but that doesn’t place him on any lower rung in my affection. He’s my grandson-thing-or-other. And I’m most certainly his Gramps. I haven’t seen him for far too long, though I wrote him a letter in rhyme last week which I’ll try and remember to post when I’m in Bakewell next Tuesday.

Funny thing, blood ties. I don’t think of Tom as any less my grandchild than Cosima. Some pompous old genealogist wouldn’t even consider me a grandfather. I’d be stuck out on a limb on a sub-branch of some silly conventional family tree. But the girls do and the children do and that’s what counts. My nit-pickin’ chicks, back together in the embrace of our funny family.

Penny Ericsson

On the other side of the Atlantic, it is still the day before and Penny Ericsson is wondering how to handle the hollow stretch of another evening alone. This is her twenty-fourth since Bob, her husband of thirty years, died. And though friends have ensured that she does not often spend long tracts of time on her own, Penny has felt utterly alone whether she has company or not.

Her house is immaculate. She is not hungry. She doesn’t care for television. There’s nothing to do but grieve. In some ways, it makes sense of her life. You love, you lose, you grieve for ever more.

Even the staircase feels longer and steeper now Bob’s gone.

‘Life’s gonna be one long drag,’ Penny murmurs as she ventures downstairs because she’s been doing nothing upstairs for ages. She rotates all the scatter cushions from resting like squares on the two large sofas to perching like rhombs. She changes the angle of the many framed photographs on the mantelpiece so that they all seem to be standing in line to the right. She chooses two large art books from the shelves to replace the current photography books on the coffee table. She sits beside them and laughs hysterically. So many places to sit, so much time. Too much time. She decides the scatter cushions look ridiculous and they should live up to their name so she chucks them around the sofas until she feels they’ve found their natural grouping. Still she doesn’t fancy sitting there. She gazes at Bob’s chair and her laughter is stilled by a sigh that seems to start in the pit of her gut and expels every molecule of breath in her body.

‘You know, I always thought you were ugly and nothing but,’ she says. ‘I mean, my cooker may be ugly but I like it. But you, you I never liked. If I’d had my way I’d’ve sent you back just as soon as you arrived.’ She looks out of the window. More snow. ‘Think what I could’ve had here without you taking up all the space. You’re the ugliest chair in the world. With some things, you can appreciate that form simply follows function. My summer sandals for example. If they were pretty I’ll bet you they wouldn’t be comfortable. But look at you – you’re ugly and you don’t even look like you’d be comfortable.’

There’s someone at the door. A rattle of friendly knocks followed by a ring of the bell.

‘Penny? Penny honey – you home?’

It’s Marcia and she’s gonna let herself in anyway.

‘Pen? It’s me. I’ve brought soup. Snow’s said to be bad tomorrow. You in here?’

‘In here,’ Penny’s voice filters through to the kitchen where Marcia has put the soup on the stove. She goes through to the sitting-room to find Penny.

‘Hey you.’

‘Hullo, Marcia.’

‘You sitting in the dark on the coffee table for a reason? You want me to get some lights on in here?’

‘Sure. I didn’t see it’s gotten dark. I’ve been sitting here, Lord knows how long, cussing Bob’s chair.’

‘Cussing Bob’s chair,’ Marcia says sagely. ‘Well, you never did like that thing.’

‘If the first sign of madness is talking to oneself, then talking to a chair must make me insane. But hell, it’s ugly.’

‘Ah – but is it comfortable?’

Suddenly Penny finds she’s laughing again. Marcia seems taken aback. ‘You know something, I don’t know! I never even sat on it! I never tried!’

Marcia’s eyebrows, tweezered into supercilious arches, shoot heavenwards. ‘In thirty years, you never sat on it once?’

‘Not once.’

The notion is simultaneously idiotic and rather amazing. ‘Was that out of pure stubbornness?’

‘A little,’ Penny smiles forlornly, ‘but then you see, Bob was usually sitting there himself.’

Marcia sits down alongside Penny and places a hand gently on her arm. They gaze over to the chair, both trying to privately conjure Bob – any image of him, at any point over the years – sitting in his chair. Marcia finds she can do so with ease; for Penny it’s impossible.

When is his face going to come back to me? Why can’t I remember how tall he was? Which way did he position his legs when he sat in that chair?

‘Did you ever see Bob sit anyplace other?’ Penny remarks wistfully.

‘You know what,’ Marcia marvels gently, ‘no I did not.’

‘For thirty years I’ve been complaining about it – I told Bob over and again that it was a clumpy, ugly thing, out of keeping with all our other furniture. But he wouldn’t consider looking at an alternative. He’d sit there, relaxed as you like, while I cussed.’ Penny gives just a little laugh. ‘I can throw it out now,’ she says, with dull triumph, ‘I can dump it outside. I can have it chopped up for the fire.’

‘Oh don’t chop it up, my dear,’ Marcia takes Penny at her word. ‘Perhaps the refuge – they might find a good home for it?’

‘Perhaps,’ says Penny. Then she frowns. ‘You know something, crazy as it sounds, I couldn’t bear to. All these years I’ve been hating it. But just now, this instant, I love it. It’s just where it’s always been. And here it shall stay. I’ll give it a good home – right here. How insane is that?’

‘Honey, are you doing OK?’ Marcia asks tenderly, giving Penny’s arm a squeeze of wordless sympathy and concern.

‘No. I’m not,’ Penny states confidently, sucking in her bottom lip so hard her face looks turtle-like and inappropriately comic.

‘It’s been less than a month,’ Marcia almost doesn’t want to remind her.

‘Twenty-four days,’ Penny shrugs.

‘Honey,’ Marcia tries to soothe though she feels impotent in the presence of such pain.

‘What am I going to do without him?’ Penny asks. ‘What else do I have?’

Suddenly, Marcia is acutely aware of the fact that her own husband is just fine. Just down the street and just fine. It’s almost embarrassing. She feels guilty. And she’s horribly aware that next week, she’ll be swanning off to their winter home in Florida. ‘Why don’t we all go to Boca for the winter?’ she says. ‘I mean, Mickey and I are planning to leave next week but there’s so much room for you too. Oh say you’ll come. Stay as long as you fancy. I’d love it. It would be good, Penny.’

‘I’ll be fine here,’ Penny says, surprising herself at how decisive she sounds. ‘This is my home.’

‘You know you can just call whenever? Come whenever?’ Marcia says. She looks out of the window. ‘I’d better go – it’s snowing hard now. You eat that soup. I’ll call you later. I’ll see myself out.’

‘Thanks for stopping by,’ Penny says and she’s ready for Marcia to go. She wants to be on her own, free to grieve, free to drift into a space where just perhaps she might feel Bob still. A semi-dreamland.

She listens to the muffled sound of Marcia’s car driving through the fresh snow and away. She turns the lights out in the sitting-room and stands in the darkness quietly. The snow sends silver glances into the room. The moonlight silhouettes the hills as a lumbering but benign presence. Penny wishes she hadn’t rubbished clairvoyance and the concept of the Spirit. Because just say it is for real, say it really does exist – has she jinxed herself by being a cynic most of her life? Are you there? Can I sense you? Is that you I can hear? How was your day, honey? Can I fix you a drink? You sit yourself down in your chair. That goddam ugly chair. Let me fetch you a Scotch. Then you can tell me about your day.

‘I never even sat in that chair.’

Penny goes to it and sits down. She has no idea whether the chair is comfortable or not. It is as close as she can now get to being with Bob again. She sleeps.

Home from Home

Cat sat at the table, in the furnished flat she and Ben were renting, tracing a pattern someone else had gouged into the wood at some point. Some previous tenant with little respect, she assumed with distaste. As she ran her finger over it, she considered perhaps it wasn’t wilful carving, it might even be as old as the table – a slip of the original carpenter’s chisel? It was a nice piece of old farmhouse pine. Ben watched Cat work her middle finger along the furrow as if she was gouging it anew.

‘Are you OK, babe?’ he asked, looking from one tub of fresh pasta sauce to another. He held them to Cat for final selection.

‘Arabiata,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Liar,’ said Ben. ‘What’s up?’ He left the sauce to simmer and sat, cowboy style, astride the chair next to Cat. He brought his face to the level of hers. Cat looked at him, stuck out her bottom lip in an over-exaggerated pout that she knew would invite a kiss, and shrugged.

‘How are your sisters?’ he asked. ‘How’s Django? Everything was all right up there, wasn’t it?’

‘God, fine,’ Cat assured him. ‘I don’t know. It’s just that it’s all changed a little since we’ve been gone. I suppose I was expecting to find my life, my family, just as I left them. As if they’d been happily freeze-framed in anticipation of my return.’

‘And?’ Ben said.

‘Now Django’s going to be seventy-five,’ Cat said quietly.

‘You staying in the UK the last four years couldn’t have prevented that,’ Ben pointed out.

‘And Pip is more sensible than she used to be,’ Cat bemoaned. ‘By that I mean she’s all settled and content with her grown-up role as a school-run stepmum.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Ben asked. ‘And aren’t you settled and content?’

‘Of course I am, you know I am,’ said Cat. ‘But Pip’s the one who should be doing cartwheels down the hallway, who makes teaspoons disappear and then reappear from behind my ear. She didn’t do one handstand against the wall this weekend.’

‘It was the weekend. She was off duty,’ Ben pointed out. ‘It’s normal for people to not want to take their work home with them. Imagine if I came home with my stethoscope, or took the blood pressure of any visitors to our house.’

‘But we don’t own a house,’ Cat mumbled, ‘just this horrid rented flat.’

‘Cat!’ Ben remonstrated. ‘We’ve been back in the UK two bloody minutes.’

Cat ignored him by changing the subject. ‘Fen is in the throes of this immense love affair with her baby and she can talk of nothing else.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Ben asked. Cat shrugged.

She wasn’t prepared to say out loud that though her niece was utterly adorable, she had found Fen uptight, boring even.

‘They’re not who they were,’ Cat said. ‘Their identities have changed.’ She could hear the plaintive edge to her voice.

‘That’s par for the course – growing up, growing old,’ Ben said, though he saw his wife flinch from his cheeriness. ‘Anyway, they probably find you different too. But that’s no bad thing.’

‘I don’t like this place,’ Cat said, irritated. ‘I don’t like other people’s furniture. I don’t like stupid Clapham. I want to be in our own place, with our stuff. Perhaps we should have rented unfurnished. Perhaps we should have stayed in the US. It’s all going to take ages.’

Ben looked at her, suddenly serious. ‘Nothing’s going to happen overnight,’ he said. ‘It’ll take a while to attain Pip’s peace of mind and Fen’s healthy baby. Nine months at the very least.’

Cat thought for a moment. Perhaps that was it – perhaps she didn’t resent her sisters their changes, perhaps she aspired to what they had. Or there again maybe it was just jet lag.

‘I’ll tell you what was peculiar,’ she said. ‘Fen talked about how being a mother had made her really think about our own mother. It had me thinking too.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘But say. Just say.’ She looked imploringly at Ben, as if he might know what without her having to just say.

‘Just say what?’ he asked.

Cat paused. ‘Just say it’s hereditary?’

‘But you just said that Fen is a caring mother to the point of being obsessed,’ Ben said carefully.

Cat glanced at him shyly. She shook her head. ‘I don’t mean Fen. Say it runs in the family. Say I’ll be a crap mother? Maybe I should concentrate on my career for the time being.’

Ben thought for a moment, scratched his neck. ‘Actually, genetics rarely play a part in such extreme behaviour,’ he said. ‘For all you know, your mother sucks in her bottom lip – like you do – and that’s the only family trait you’ve inherited from her. Think of Fen – mother superior, however much she might irritate you. Think of Pip – her maternal connection with Tom is great and there’s no blood there. You McCabe girls are all destined to be extraordinary mothers – by virtue of the fact that your own set such a poor example.’

He watched Cat start to thaw. He ruffled her hair and she ruffled his. Then they put their foreheads together for a moment.

‘Being a mother is a state of mind, a condition of the heart, as much as it is biological,’ Ben said. ‘Christ, look at Django – he’s the best mother you girls could have wished for. Stop worrying, Cat. You’ll be a star.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Cat asked, a little bashful but privately delighted.

‘I do,’ said Ben, ‘but we have to get you pregnant first.’

Cat propped her head, chin in her hand, and looked over to Ben. ‘It’s what I love about you,’ she said in an intentionally dreamy tone, ‘that you know me inside out but I never feel I’m getting on your nerves. You love me in spite of my foibles. You’re so tolerant. That’s what I so love about you – that you so love me.’

‘Stop it,’ Ben joshed, getting up and checking his pager, ‘you make me sound a wuss. And anyway, I thought you loved me for my enormous dick.’

* * *

‘I cannot believe that I’m going to spend my Saturday traipsing around Alexandra Palace at a convention of model railway nutters and their train sets!’ Pip declared, only half joking, surveying the hall and its eccentric population.

Zac raised his eyebrows. ‘Firstly, it’s the Thames and District Society of Model Engineers. Secondly, if it wasn’t for me, you’d have to spend every Saturday dressed ridiculously trying to entertain roomloads of sugar-crazed party children.’

Pip fanned out her fingers in front of her sulky expression, then furled them away to reveal a winsome look with much batting of doe eyes. Zac crossed his arms and regarded her sternly. She fanned and then furled her fingers once more, reinstating a natural grin to her face.

‘Thirdly,’ Zac continued, ‘we haven’t had Tom for two weekends in a row.’

Pip nodded. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’m only joking.’

‘Look at him,’ Zac said softly, noting that his son had teamed up with a new-found posse of young rail boffins, ‘he’s in his element.’

Tom was a thoughtful child; not shy, popular at school, but thoughtful. Zac had a theory that boys were divided into two camps: football and fantasy. His nine-year-old son was firmly in the fantasy camp. It wasn’t that the restrictions of his eczema ruled out football, it was that Tom’s natural interests were dominated by trains and dinosaurs. My son the trainspotter who knows his connector rods from his couplings, Zac would say with pride. My son who could spell pterodactyl before he could spell his own name, Zac would beam.

Watching an animated Tom admiring the array of essential pieces of kit and name-dropping each model engine from at least fifty paces with his new pals, Pip was consumed by a totally unexpected pang. It was like an electric shock and she jolted physically.

‘Are you OK?’ Zac asked.

Pip nodded earnestly and went off at a tangent to dislodge the thought. ‘Django called us lot the “nit-pickin’ chicks” last weekend.’

‘That’s a fine Djangoism if ever I heard one,’ Zac laughed, strolling on to the next stand.

‘He hasn’t called us that for ages. Mind you, it’s been a while since the three of us sat like that,’ Pip said wistfully. ‘We always used to, when we were little – gravitate into a huddle, play with each other’s hair, trace patterns on each other’s clothes, tickle each other’s forearms. We do it absent-mindedly.’

‘Nit-pickin’ chicks,’ Zac mused. ‘I’d’ve called you a bunch of monkeys, I think. Did you ever actually have nits?’

Pip laughed. ‘I do remember that we all had them at the same time – some epidemic at school. But of course Django couldn’t be doing with those torture combs and vile chemical shampoos so he doused our hair in some bizarre concoction of mustard powder and bicarbonate of soda. Or something. Tabasco. I don’t know.’

‘Did it work?’

‘The daft thing is, I can’t remember,’ Pip laughed. ‘I can only remember feeling slightly miffed that not even a case of head lice was going to make Django conform to conventional methods. I do remember the three of us having pretty short haircuts soon after. Django appeased us by saying our hair was so glorious that he’d been able to sell the offcuts to a master upholsterer in London and we would each be paid £5. We believed him. Even though the salon junior was sweeping it all away.’

‘And you were £5 richer?’

‘We were,’ Pip laughed, ‘though of course, Django made a rod for his back because we expected payment for every haircut thereafter.’

‘You must have done well, between the master upholsterer and the tooth fairy,’ Zac said.

‘The tooth fairy never paid cash,’ Pip bemoaned.

‘Can I have some money?’ a flushed and rather breathless Tom jogged over to ask. ‘I’d like to buy the guys a juice. They’re 50p each. I need about £2.’

Pip looked over to where the other three boys were loitering by a spectacular G Scale display. ‘They seem nice,’ she said, ‘nice guys.’

‘They are,’ said Tom proudly. ‘They’re coming again tomorrow. It’s the last day of the show. There’s a prize draw. A model of Lampton Tank. Can we come again too?’

‘Sure,’ Zac told Tom, and Pip took a deep breath. Hadn’t they planned to take Tom to Tate Modern and then have lunch with Cat and Ben? Yes, father and son hadn’t had a whole weekend together for three weeks but Tom had met Cat only a handful of times over the last four years. However, watching Tom belt off to buy refreshments for his steam gang, Pip let her breath and the objection go. He was a sweet, sweet boy.

Again, the pang confronted Pip and she shuddered. Zac sensed it. ‘Pip?’

‘Do you think Tom minds?’ she asked Zac. ‘I mean, do you think he ever minds being an only child?’

Zac looked at Pip and frowned into thought. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said at length, ‘I mean, he’s never mentioned it. He has plenty of pals and he’s thick as thieves with his first cousin.’

‘I know,’ Pip rushed, ‘I just meant. I was just thinking about my sisters. Our closeness. I read a lovely saying the other day – Vietnamese, I think. Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet.’

Zac kissed Pip. ‘Well, worry no more,’ he said, ‘because Tom isn’t to be an only child for much longer. I mean, he may be our only child, but he’s soon to have a sibling. June is pregnant. She told me this morning when I picked Tom up. He doesn’t know yet – June wants to wait till the tests are all-clear. Rob asked me if we’d mind having Tom an extra night now and then while June is feeling ropy.’

Pip was dumbstruck, felt flushed and suddenly lightheaded.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Zac pressed. ‘You look a little odd, Mrs.’

‘I’m fine. Good for June. Great news. I’ll call her later. Odd, though,’ Pip said, though she was aware that her thoughts were unreliably half-formed and should stay silent until worked through, ‘odd that Tom’s being was the result of two friends getting drunk, feeling horny and being careless – yet his half sibling has been meticulously planned. I wonder how he’ll feel about that later on.’

Zac stopped. ‘What a weird take on it all, Pip,’ he murmured.

Pip shrugged. ‘I used to wonder if I was planned, you see,’ she said. ‘I used to presume that I wasn’t planned – because that meant my mother had some kind of excuse for buggering off.’ Pip linked arms with Zac. ‘But then I think of Fen and Cat and my theory goes out the window. No one could be that careless.’

Zac slipped his hand into the back pocket of Pip’s jeans and gave her buttock a light feel. ‘Well, I’m pleased for June and Rob. And I’m made up for Tom.’

‘Me too,’ Pip said, ‘me too.’ But she turned away from Zac to conceal the prickle of tears, feigning interest in a Hornby set-up, while trying to figure out the provenance of these tears. And whether they were happy or sad.

Cosima was fed orange food, entertained, fed more orange food, played with, bathed, given some bosom, sung to, cuddled, cuddled some more and placed gently in her cot where she’d promptly fallen into a blissful sleep with the revolving night light and an Elvis for Babies CD playing softly.

‘Perfect perfect baby,’ Fen thought to herself as she padded out of the room. ‘Bloody awful day.’

She went to the bathroom and tidied up, catching sight of herself in the mirror.

‘Yuk. You haggard old bag.’

With a rubber duck in one hand and a Miffy flannel in the other, she peered closer at her reflection. Sallow and saggy, limp and lacklustre, hollow and haggard, she thought. Then she thought, poor old Matt. Fancy coming home to this every evening. Not much to fancy at all. So she rummaged around in her long-forsaken make-up bag and turned to her faithful Clarins mainstays for assistance. Just closing her eyes and slowly, properly, cleansing her face felt as heavenly as a spa facial. Exfoliate. Moisturize. A careful dab of concealer under the eyes, a swipe of mascara, a lick of lippy for the hell of it. Lastly, a few pinches to her cheeks which made her eyes smart a little but gave her cheek-bones a comely emphasis. Matt’s key in the door. Hear Matt sigh. A dormant butterfly taking wing in her stomach. Here, Matt, this’ll make you feel better.

‘Hullo,’ Fen said, walking downstairs, carefully tucking her hair behind her ears.

‘Hiya,’ Matt replied. ‘You look – have you got make-up on?’

‘Yup.’

‘Why?’

Fen frowned and wondered which way to take this. She felt helpless not to opt for the wrong way. ‘Because I feel a frump and I feel I look worse than I feel,’ she snapped.

‘Are you fishing for compliments and craving attention?’ Matt teased her. Fen felt embarrassed.

‘Well, I think you look very pretty,’ said Matt, ‘and it’s a nice distraction from the baby puke on your top.’

Fen didn’t know which to take off first, the make-up or her messy top.

By the end of a rerun episode of Taggart, Fen was chanting to herself, I will instigate sex; I will, I will. But by the end of News at Ten half an hour later, she was willing herself to simply stay awake.

‘Tired?’ Matt asked.

Ruefully, Fen nodded.

‘Go to bed,’ he suggested with a friendly pat to her knee.

And therein lay the calamity. As much as Fen feared the platonic mundanity of Matt’s knee-patting, she loved his suggestion that she go to bed. She still wanted Matt to desire her, she thought she wanted to desire him, but actually her strongest inclination at the moment was to go to sleep. She sat beside him, torn between what her body was shouting at her and what her conscience was whispering and what her partner was sweetly telling her.

‘I was trying to be all vampy for you,’ she confessed, ‘like the girl you fell for. But I’m just a tired old frump.’

‘Fen,’ Matt said, ‘don’t worry about it. Just go to bed.’

Fen had looked nice. Matt thought about it as he zapped TV channels. The messy top didn’t matter. He felt a little badly for her – she’d made an effort but an effort it had obviously been. There was nothing on television. Matt looked around the living-room. A soft towelling rabbit on the armchair, one tiny sock under it. A muslin square, scrunched up, on top of yesterday’s Evening Standard. A glob of something orange just above the skirting board. The all-pervasive scent of laundry washed in hypo-allergenic powder. But suddenly, Matt didn’t want to smell drying babygros. He snapped his eyes shut. He didn’t want to see any of these accoutrements of fatherhood. Actually, all he wanted to see was tits and arse. Quietly, he tiptoed up to the bedroom. It was dark, Fen was sleeping. Could he wake her? Would she mind? Dare he risk it? But realistically, was there really much point trying? He went instead to the cupboard, eased open the door, waited a moment to see if she’d woken. She hadn’t. By feel, he differentiated between the suits that were hanging there, found the Paul Smith one according to its superior cloth. He slipped his hand into the pocket and tiptoed his fingers along the edges of some discs. One would do. It didn’t matter which. Though Fen slept on oblivious, Matt still felt obliged to tuck the DVD up his jumper and hurry from the room as noiselessly as he’d entered.

Porn. Odd stuff, really. In reality, pneumatic women had never been Matt’s type, let alone the stuff harboured in secret fantasies. He’d never pursued a situation of sharing a girl with another bloke, exotic underwear had never really turned him on and he could take or leave the thought of getting down with a pair of rampant twin sisters. But Matt had always enjoyed porn. He’d been sustained by top-shelf supplies as a teenager, even wondering if sex for real could ever match up to the thunderous wanks he indulged in. And then in his early twenties, purchasing hardcore videos by mail order became a rite of passage. Did he dare? Yes he did. Matt Holden became Mr M. Smith and Mr M. Smith shared his consignments amongst the lads with whom he lived. By his mid-twenties, Matt was a serial monogamist and there were rarely fallow periods long enough between girlfriends to warrant the purchase of new porn. But then his girlfriend had become the mother of his child, their sex life had dwindled and porn had progressed to DVD.

Tiptoeing back downstairs, he didn’t check which disc he’d pulled out. He’d never been one for the stories; he never had to start a scene from the beginning. He wanted cunts and cocks to fill his screen just as soon as he pressed play; fast forward any kissing or slinky foreplay, just delve in deep to the fucking and sucking. Matt loaded a disc and, with the sitting-room door ajar and the TV volume low, skipped forward until a mêlée of bodies was having sex in his face. Fantastic, he commented under his breath, as a variously pierced woman with a shorn head and spiked dog-collar was simultaneously being double penetrated, wanked upon, and orally stuffed from an incongruously orderly queue of erections.

Matt masturbated frantically and synchronized his orgasm with a generalized spurting from the remainder of his onscreen cohorts who were not yet spent. Their spunk was gobbled up; Matt had to mop up his from his belly. He didn’t realize until he’d done it that he’d used the muslin square his daughter nustled up to, not the sheets of kitchen paper he’d prepared in advance. He was aghast. He put the soiled muslin into a plastic bag, knotted it and then threw it away in the dustbin outside. He wouldn’t even want it washed on the hottest cycle. He took his DVD and made his way quietly upstairs, putting it back in the pocket of his Paul Smith suit before going in to check on Cosima. He slipped into bed and lay in the dark, staring at an approximation of the ceiling. He felt utterly empty.

I’ve always thought a wank to porn is similar to a curry. The sort of thing one craves, one hungers for. You’re absolutely in the mood, so looking forward to it, ravenous to the point of visible drool – poppadams or a smooth little blow-job scene to whet the appetite and get you started, then straight for the glut of hot and spicy. Stuff it in. Gorge. But like a curry, once you’ve had your fill you really don’t want to look at what’s left on your plate; so it is with hardcore – once you’re done you just don’t want to see any more.

I feel grubby and not nice. I wanked into my baby’s muslin. Fen’s asleep upstairs while downstairs I’m shooting my load with a bunch of blokes over some really quite ugly woman. Physically I’m relieved, sated. But I feel a bit, I don’t know – sad.

He listened to Fen’s breathing, soft and shallow. Turning towards her he spooned lightly against her. The sleep-scent wafted from her neck. Matt closed his eyes.

My sexy girlfriend who I used to fuck became this amazing vessel who carried and bore my child. But I miss fucking my sexy girlfriend.

Winter Ice

‘Perhaps I’ll thaw when spring comes,’ Penny muttered to herself, a gaze at the wide white world beyond her picture windows informing her that she could thus stay exactly as she was for a good couple of months still. Her solitude and grief felt cathartic, they were becoming a way of life though she quietly wondered if they risked becoming a habit that would soon be hard to break. Penny Ericsson may have lived in the States for most of her adult life and though her accent was commendable and she had not left the country for practically thirty years, she displayed a control when it came to expressing emotions that her friends fondly remarked was transparently English.

‘Oh honey,’ Marcia once laughed, ‘you fool no one with your rhinestones and your blue jeans and your Chevy and all. You’re still an English Rose at heart – and that’s because you keep your heart all polite and proper.’

‘You mean to say that English women are incapable of expressing their emotions?’ Penny had retorted.

‘Heavens no,’ Marcia had said, ‘it’s just we guys gush, while you chaps are more, well, sparing. It’s genetic, is all. Nothing any of us can do about it. We are who we are. Can’t deny that.’

And yet just recently, Penny felt her all-American friends, with their gushing and their ability to frequently say I love you, now seemed to expect her grief to have lessened. That she ought to feel able to find closure, be ready to move on, and confront a host of other emotional achievements carrying the Oprah Winfrey seal of approval.

Noni had left her a message, inviting her to see a movie at the Mall.

‘I’ll not go,’ Penny told herself and justified that it was because she didn’t share Noni’s taste in film. Really, she didn’t want to have to act upbeat and lie that she was doing just fine. But what else to do? What might pass time, occupy a couple of hours of her day which would be otherwise devoted to the futility of missing Bob? Where could she go in her snowbound county on a bright February afternoon and not bump into a soul?

‘I could go for an ice cream,’ she said, and she found that the notion was sweet. In fact, she was nearly excited. She’d go in honour of Bob, who had always loved the stuff, and by venturing by herself back to their favourite parlour she’d be simultaneously closer to him while also laying just a little more of him to rest.

There was only the one road into the mountains, with three communities of decreasing scale placed along it. They’d developed organically but a town planner could not have done better. Nothing was duplicated. Everything was shared. Lester Falls, where Penny lived and the largest town, had the Mall and a cinema and a Pack’n’Save on the outskirts. The smaller Hubbardton’s Spring, further along and higher up, had a great fish place, a lively pizzeria, a gallery and a hardware store amongst its amenities. The last village, smallest in population but servicing the wider community no less, was Ridge. There, on Main Street, cosy alongside the bookstore, a small theatre, art supplies and a cheese maker, was Bob’s favourite ice-cream parlour, Fountains.

Supply and demand. Make superior ice cream from the finest ingredients and people will want it, whatever the weather. The parlour wasn’t busy, but it was by no means empty and Penny was relieved to see it wasn’t patronized solely by brave widows out for day-trips. Recently, when browsing at the Mall, or strolling the nature trail to the panorama, or visiting the library, Penny had passed other women who’d catch her eye and hold her gaze with a searching nod of recognition. Yes, I lost my husband too, you know, they seemed to say. Join the club.

But I don’t want to join your club, Penny would divert her gaze quickly, I’m not ready to be a widow. It’s different for me. You wouldn’t understand. I don’t want to nod knowingly back at you. I don’t want to learn to play bridge. I’m not going to buy a little dog to give me a reason to leave the house every day and join communal walks. I’m perfectly content to pop out for an ice cream. By myself.

‘You want a taste?’

Penny looked up. The waitress behind the counter was offering her a pink plastic spoon on which was a furl of ice cream the colour of butter and the texture of suede.

‘It’s a new flavour. Banudge-Nudge.’

‘Banudge-Nudge,’ Penny marvelled at the appetizing name, accepting the sample.

‘Banana, double fudge – half fat. Delicious, hey? You want a scoop?’

Penny glanced swiftly along across the colourful tubs like a pianist travelling the length of a keyboard with a single finger. ‘You know what,’ she said, ‘actually I think I’ll sit and have a sundae.’

‘You take a load off,’ the woman encouraged her. ‘Menus are on the tables. Juliette’ll be right over.’

Aren’t the staff great, Penny thought, they give you long enough with the menu so that you’re truly salivating and desperate to order. ‘I’ll have Chippy Chippy Bang Bang, please,’ she said, just as soon as she was aware that the waitress hovered, ‘with hot chocolate sauce. And nuts. And Lucky Charms. Hell, why not.’

The waitress brought over the sundae, perfectly presented in a pretty frosted dish, oozing with sauce and smothered in extras.

‘Enjoy,’ she said.

‘Oh, I will,’ Penny assured her, ‘thank you very much.’ She sensed the waitress linger, so with the long elegant spoon she dug up a glut of sundae and held it aloft as if to say cheers. Penny experienced a sensory burst that was delicious and exquisitely sweet and intensely painful. She closed her eyes. She closed her eyes to appreciate the taste. She closed her eyes because it hurt, because she suffered from sensitive gums and always seemed to forget the fact where ice cream was concerned. She closed her eyes because she used to bring Bob here when ice cream was the only thing he found digestible and that didn’t taste metallic from the chemotherapy. That was the sweetest thought, and that’s what hurt the most.

When Penny left, leaving an empty dish and a grateful tip, the waitress Juliette who had served her turned to Gloria behind the counter.

‘I recognize her – do you?’

‘Not especially,’ Gloria said.

‘Sure you do – she used to come in, with her husband I guess. You do remember him. He was sick. They used to sit right there. Sometimes she’d spoon it for him, feed him. Like a child.’

‘Hey, I do remember,’ said Gloria, ‘but that was a few months back.’

‘Yes. But today she comes in on her own,’ Juliette said.

‘You think he died?’

‘I guess,’ said Juliette. ‘Sad.’

Noni invited Penny to the cinema again the following week but Penny thanked her and declined, citing other plans. She took herself back to the ice-cream parlour, which was no less empty though the day was dull and the weather was now too cold to snow.

‘Hi,’ said the counter waitress, ‘have a taste.’ The pink spoon, today laden with an ice cream the colour of coal, was passed to Penny.

‘Liquorice,’ Penny said, having assessed it with the commitment of a sommelier.

‘And?’ said the waitress.

Penny tasted it again. ‘I’m not sure – there’s something. I can’t—’

‘Raspberry.’

‘Raspberry,’ Penny marvelled, ‘and liquorice. Fancy that.’ And she went to the same table she’d sat at the week before. The one in the window, furthest from the table in the corner she used to seat Bob at.

‘Hi, I’m Juliette,’ the younger waitress came over to take her order. ‘How are we today? You set?’

‘I’m good,’ said Penny, ‘and I’d like a scoop of that liquorice one.’

‘You should get a sherbet with that – brings out the flavour.’ Juliette was quite forthright about that. Penny looked up. The girl looked like a confection herself, in her uniform striped the colours of apricot and strawberry, her hair in a high pony-tail, a jaunty little pink-peaked thing on her head, her name in copperplate across it. ‘I’d recommend lychee,’ Juliette said and Penny nodded.

When Juliette brought the bowl over, Penny took a small taste and nodded her approval. Her gums didn’t seem so sensitive today. She didn’t have to close her eyes so often. But there again, she’d abstained from hot chocolate sauce or candy toppings. And Bob had not liked liquorice at all. She felt relaxed, as though she needn’t scurry away just as soon as she finished. So when the waitress suggested a cup of coffee, Penny accepted.

‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ the waitress said after placing the cup and turning the saucer so that the handle was correctly placed. Penny looked up and read the girl’s name again. Juliette. Well, Juliette looked a little concerned. ‘I don’t mean to – well, Gloria and I, we just. We remember you from the summer, from the fall. You used to come in with the gentleman? He was – he was.’

How old? Penny thought. Early to mid-twenties, she guessed. Nice-looking in a plain way, perhaps nicer-looking on account of her politeness and her slightly shy sweetness.

‘Is he?’ Juliette was bending down a little, as if in a reverential curtsy. ‘Was he?’

‘He was my husband,’ Penny told her. ‘He died. Near enough two months ago.’

‘Oh I’m so sorry,’ said Juliette, instinctively clutching her heart for emphasis. It touched Penny. It was as if everyone, no matter how little they knew Bob, had been rooting for him to pull through.

‘Thank you,’ said Penny. ‘He sure loved this place.’

Penny returned two days later. Not to avoid any social invitation, nor because she had a craving for ice cream, but because Fountains felt like a nice place and seemed a good space to be. Comfort and warmth. Lovely warm chocolate sauce. Beautiful, pastel-coloured candy. Ice creams whose names brought a smile. Everything sweet. If you licked the blossom-coloured walls or bit the backs of the chairs, you’d probably discover they were made from candy. Everything there was sweet. The staff especially. They were like a personification of some of the ices. Pink Wink. Smile Sweetie.

When Juliette brought over Honey in Heaven, with chocolate sauce and marshmallows, Penny spooned into it but then spoke before tasting. ‘We were married thirty years nearly,’ she said. She looked up. Juliette didn’t seem taken aback by the information, her expression invited Penny to continue. ‘He called me dear. Always did, right from the start. Good morning, dear. Well dear, I’ll be off to work now. I’m home, dear. What a nice supper, dear, shall I fix the coffee? It may have sounded formal, but I always heard it as charming and old-fashioned.’ Penny tasted the ice cream. Heavenly indeed. She had two more spoonfuls but Juliette stood beside her, quietly attentive. ‘I guess you wouldn’t call us a lovey-dovey couple. But we were a good team.’

Juliette was shaking her head shyly. ‘I watched you feed him,’ she said very quietly. ‘That’s far more beautiful than lovey-dovey. It must be so hard – but I guess it’s a blessing that his suffering should be over, that he is at peace.’

‘I’m not a superstitious type,’ Penny said, working her spoon busily against the sundae as she spoke, ‘I don’t believe in astro-mumbo-jumbo, I pooh-pooh voices from the dead, I don’t do karma and yin-yang spirit guides; you know? But when Bob was fading I’d whisper to him, over and over, Find a way, Bob, find a way to be with me. Stay in touch. Send a message. Show me a sign. Promise me?’

‘I believe,’ Juliette confided with quiet earnestness, while Penny ate.

‘Nothing,’ Penny said gruffly as if disappointed by Juliette’s response. ‘I haven’t seen any signs, I haven’t felt warmth – nothing at all. Just the icy emptiness of being on my own.’ Her hand formed a fist around the spoon, the skin so taut across her knuckles they looked like the snow-sharp mountains outside. ‘There is no blessing,’ she ridiculed. ‘He shouldn’t have suffered in the first place. Death is not a good thing. It’s very cruel and it’s a waste.’ She didn’t finish her ice cream and she didn’t leave a tip. And she didn’t go again the following week.

But she did return the week after that. And she felt her eyes smart at the bright sweetness of the welcome Juliette gave her. Fountains, she decided, was better than any support group. ‘Hey stranger, you missed out on Chuckle Berry last week. Gloria will give you a taste. You sitting?’

Penny sat. She managed to make the sundae last an hour and at any opportunity, she passed the time with the waitresses about the weather, or about ice cream. Then she ordered coffee. And a refill. She was obviously lingering but no one, herself included, was quite sure for what.

‘My father passed,’ Juliette told her, when she accepted a second refill.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Penny said, genuinely shocked. She’d practically forgotten that grief could befall other people. ‘Can you sit awhile?’ Penny asked. Juliette glanced around the parlour, raised her eyebrow at Gloria who gave her a nod. ‘When?’

‘Coming up to a year and I need to tell you that I think death is a great thing. He was a rotten drunk and he hurt me and my mom. So I guess I envy you a little,’ Juliette said with a reluctant smile. ‘Not your pain, not the longing that must weave the minutes into the hours and drag your hours into these dark days right now. But I envy you the fact that your loss is so great because your love itself was so great. I never had that.’

Penny didn’t know where to put herself. For the first time she experienced the guilt that she assumed her own friends were feeling. The guilt at one’s own good fortune. She put her hand over Juliette’s wrist because she was lost for words. She didn’t know what to say because recently Bob was all she really talked about. Just then, though, she wasn’t actually thinking about him at all.

Road Kill

Pip butters toast, Zac is skim-reading the Financial Times and the Today programme drifts sedately through the kitchen; not loud enough to be an active part of breakfast but audible enough to be an integral component in their morning routine. Pip knows to savour these few minutes before Tom breaches the peace.

And here he is. Hastily dressed for school. His nine-year-old physique spurting in fits and starts; just recently his feet have apparently doubled in length yet the softness of his peachy cheeks remains unchanged from when he was a toddler. His fingernails exhibit the indelible grubbiness commensurate with a boy of his age but the pale pitch of his voice seems so pure and clean. His hair truly has an energy of its own and Tom is not yet of an age to exhibit much interest in styling or even basic control. Consequently, it tufts itself into increasingly haphazard configurations, caused as much by spasmodic keratin production as by the freedom of such deep sleep. Today, it resembles something that the forefathers of punk rock spent hours trying to achieve.

‘Happy St David’s Day,’ Tom announces. ‘We’re doing it in school today.’

‘Good Lord,’ Pip declares, ‘it’s the mad March hair.’

Zac looks up from his paper. ‘Or the mad March heir,’ he quips though neither Pip nor Tom cotton on to the pun. It’s too early to hear silent ‘h’s. It’s too early to have to explain, thinks Zac, returning to the pink pages.

Pip attempts to smooth down Tom’s hair with her hand. He shirks away and ruffles up Pip’s meddling. ‘Toast?’ she asks.

‘Yep,’ Tom says. Zac glances over his paper. ‘Please,’ Tom adds with a sigh.

‘Do you want to go through your piece?’ Pip asks.

Tom looks alarmed. ‘My piece?’

‘For assembly this morning? On the patron saints of the British Isles. Aren’t you St George?’

‘Oh. That. I thought you meant my piece of toast,’ says Tom. ‘Digby says that the dragon is a metaphor. But he doesn’t even know what a metaphor is.’

‘And do you?’

‘No,’ says Tom, ‘but it sounds boring, like something Miss Balcombe would go on about. And on and on. Yawns-ville.’

‘Well, would you like to go through your piece about St George?’ Pip asks.

‘I know it off by heart,’ Tom says proudly, and launches into a fast, monotone delivery. Pip can see the Financial Times quivering. She surreptitiously kicks Zac under the table. Tom finishes his recitation to applause from the table and the 8 a.m. GMT pips from the radio.

‘If babies are such a great thing, if they’re such a miracle and stuff – why do they make their mums so poorly and so mega grumpy?’

Pip wasn’t prepared for this. Usually when she walked Tom to school she was entertained with a diatribe of the personal hygiene habits and physiognomic misfortunes of his teachers, which merely required tuts of her disapproval whilst she bit back laughter.

‘Seems a bit stupid to me,’ Tom continued darkly. Pip wasn’t sure what to say. Was Tom about to probe for the facts of life? She felt uneasy, having not yet discussed with Zac the information and terminology he was prepared to give his son. ‘Did I do that to her, to my mum, do you think? When she was having me, did I make her puke like mad and be a grumpy old moo?’

Tom was asking Pip about something on which she had actually no authority to answer. ‘Perhaps,’ she answered cautiously, having never actually discussed the vagaries of June’s first pregnancy, ‘but excuse me, young man, your mum is not an old moo.’

‘But she is grumpy,’ Tom muttered. ‘I thought she would be chuffed about having a baby but all she does is grumble and puke.’ He allowed Pip to take his wrist as they made to cross the road. ‘There’s going to be buckets of blood too, of course, when the baby comes. And do you think Mum’ll scream her head off – like that woman on Holby City last week?’

Pip couldn’t really answer that one, not knowing June’s take on epidurals.

‘I can see why you don’t want all that madness,’ Tom said darkly, with much sage nodding.

‘Pardon?’

‘You and Dad,’ Tom shrugged. ‘Don’t tell my mum I said stuff like that about her and stuff.’

Pip and Tom were about to step off the kerb when they saw the squirrel. Tom was still young enough to point and declare ‘Hey! Squirrel!’ as it bolted into the road. And then came the car at the same time and they both foresaw the death of the squirrel by a second or so.

‘Oh God,’ Pip gasped, helpless not to be transfixed by the spatter of guts, the barb of torn limbs, the stark stare of sudden death.

‘Gross!’ Tom said, not quite sure if he was thrilled or distraught.

‘We’ll cross the road further down,’ Pip said.

‘Do you think it’s really dead?’ asked Tom.

‘Yes,’ said Pip, ‘I do.’

‘Oh.’

‘Poor little thing.’

‘Poor little thing. Do you think it was a boy or a girl?’

They crossed the road and Pip began to gamely tell Tom that babies didn’t cause their mums to feel poorly and be grumpy, all that was down to chemicals causing a lady’s body to be able to grow and carry a baby. And anyway, mums and dads so want to have babies that a bit of yukkiness now and then didn’t matter at all in the long run.

‘Tom?’

Tom was quietly sobbing though the school gates were in sight.

‘Your mum is fine – please don’t you worry about her. She doesn’t mean to be grumpy and she can’t help feeling a bit yuk.’ Pip gave Tom a hug. ‘Do you want your dad to talk to her? I promise you she can’t wait to give you a little baby brother or sister.’

‘Not the baby,’ Tom sniffed, ‘the squirrel.’

happy st david’s day!!! Pxxx

Fen stared at the text message Pip had sent her and wondered for a moment whether St David’s Day was something she’d forgotten that they celebrated despite having no Welsh blood in the family. Funny old Pip, Fen smiled, texting back.

and to you. F + C xx

Fen knew Pip would start to text her at length but soon tire of the thumb effort and phone her instead. The call came a couple of minutes later.

‘Happy St David’s Day.’

‘Same to you, with bells on.’

‘What are you up to today?’

‘Oh, the usual – puréeing things, changing nappies, singing daft songs, spending the afternoon with women I have nothing in common with other than postcode and the fact that our babies were born in the same month.’

‘Shall we meet up, then? I’m not clowning today – and I’d love to see Cosima. And you.’

Fen looked around her home. It was a tip. She ought to prioritize the chores and say no. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘that’ll be lovely.’

‘Kenwood?’ Pip suggested. ‘It’s equidistant. Let’s have coffee and cake. See you in an hour or so?’

Fen looked at the clock. It was ten o’clock and though Cosima was dressed beautifully in Catimini, Fen was still in her dressing gown. She opened her wardrobe and perused her pre-pregnancy Agnès B skirts and John Smedley cardigans. It was a perverse, masochistic ritual she taunted herself with almost daily. She didn’t dare hold them against herself, let alone try them on; scrambling instead into yesterday’s cargo pants. Packing Cosima in a snowsuit that made the baby resemble the offspring of the Michelin Man and Laa-Laa the Teletubby, Fen crammed essentials and non-essentials into the changing bag and just about remembered to grab her own jacket before heading out of the house.

Big Red Bus, Cosima!

Look at that little fluffy doggie!

Can you see the blue car, baby girl? Yes, it is a blue car, a nice blue car. Blue, blue, blue car blue.

Walking through East Finchley, Fen and Cosima passed buses and dogs and cars of various descriptions. However, there was little to point out to Cosima about the Bishops Avenue other than Great Big Houses and Great Big Trees and Great Big Cars.

But then Fen saw the young man with the flowers.

She slowed her pace. He was some distance ahead, fixing a bunch of flowers – tulips, they looked like – around the trunk of a tree. Fen was captivated; how often had she passed by a tree, some railings, displaying a bunch of bedraggled flowers as a memorial to a life lost? But such flowers had simply been there and, usually by the look of them, for quite some time. Had she ever actually seen someone placing such flowers? No, she hadn’t. Had she ever seen flowers tied to this tree-trunk? She didn’t think so. Not until today. She was approaching him, the man now fixing a bunch of daffodils alongside the tulips. Fen was close enough to see that some had orange trumpets, others white; a cut above the bog-standard yellow for sure.

Should I cross the road? Should I treat him as the bereaved – give him space and peace so he can have his ritual as solemn as is fitting? He looks so young. Who did he lose?

And the young man was offering a daffodil with a broken stem to Cosima. ‘Happy St David’s Day,’ he was saying.

‘Oh!’ Fen chirped. ‘A lovely flower! A lovely daffodil. Are you Welsh?’

‘No. Will she eat it if I give it to her?’ the man asked.

‘Probably,’ said Fen.

‘Here, you have it, then,’ he said, worrying his hand through his already tousled jet black hair as if he was genuinely concerned. ‘Put it in her room. Or something.’

‘Oh. OK. Thank you.’

The man paused. ‘My sister would like it.’

Fen looked at him. Christ, how awful. Suddenly she wanted to know details; how awful. She should say something. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you,’ the man said, and he genuinely seemed touched. ‘She was twenty and was killed three years ago. My mum lives in Manchester and I’ve promised her that I’ll replenish the flowers each anniversary.’

‘Was it a car?’ Fen asked, cringing that this sounded both tactless and interfering.

‘No, a motorbike,’ the man said.

Fen regarded him. He was fresh-faced and slightly gawky, looked as though he should be putting up leaflets about drama soc at Oxford or Cambridge, rather than road-kill flowers in East Finchley. How old was he? Early twenties? Had he been a younger or older brother to his late sister? ‘How long do the flowers last?’

‘Longer than in a vase, bizarrely,’ he replied, ‘but I hate seeing commemorative flowers all withered and limp. I always come back and check. I take them down before they’ve passed their best. You could say my sister was in full bloom when she was cut down. So I don’t think she should be remembered any other way.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Kay. What’s your name?’

‘Fen.’

‘Short for Fenella?’

‘Yes,’ said Fen, charmed. ‘Not many people know that.’

‘I was at college with a Fenella.’

‘What’s yours?’

‘Al.’

‘Short for Alan?’

‘No, Alistair.’

‘Ah.’

‘Know any Alistairs?’

‘Nope, you’re my first.’

‘What’s the baby’s name?’

‘Cosima.’

‘That’s pretty.’

‘I think some people think it’s a bit pretentious.’

‘Is the mum a bit arty-farty then?’

‘The mum?’ Fen was simultaneously shocked and charmed again. ‘I am the mummy.’

‘No way! I thought you were the nanny.’

‘No. I’m the mother all right.’

‘Cool. I see. Wow.’

There followed a pause that was simultaneously awkward yet heightened as they both scrambled around for some other common ground, just something to say, to prolong conversation.

‘Anyway, we’d better go – we’re meeting my sister at Kenwood,’ Fen said, as if she’d been miles away and had suddenly come to. ‘It’s been nice talking to you. And I’m sorry – about Kay.’

‘Thanks. Thanks. Nice to meet you too – and Cosima. How old is she?’

‘Eight months old,’ said Fen, now really wanting to know how old Al was and whether he was younger or older than his late sister. They’d paused too long for her to ask now. ‘Bye, then,’ she said, a little reluctantly. And just a little coyly too.

Fen walked on. She stopped and turned. Al was looking after her. She waved and he raised his hand. She strolled onwards to Kenwood House, breaking into a sudden grin every now and then. Flattery. How good it felt. ‘I don’t know whether to be charmed or insulted,’ she said to Cosima as she walked. ‘I thought I had “Frumpy mum” written all over me.’

The unusual incident, the unexpected attention of a stranger, the break from the drag of just a normal day, served as a tonic that Fen wanted to keep private for utmost potency. So when Pip said how bright she looked, Fen didn’t mention Al. She didn’t say that attraction is a peculiar, sly thing that can work wonders on the complexion. She pointed instead to a good night’s sleep at last and that Cosima had gobbled up pear purée that morning that had no orange tinge to it whatsoever.

‘It wouldn’t be wise to tell Auntie Pip anyway,’ Fen chattered at Cosima as they walked back. ‘Auntie Pip would only give me her worried look – her “Motherhood has made my sister loopy” look.’ Fen stopped at Al’s flowers. Cosima was fast asleep. Fen tucked the fleece around the baby and stroked her cheek. ‘I feel a bit ambivalent that I should feel just slightly flattered that Al thought I was the nanny, not your mother. He said “Wow” when I corrected him. What did that “Wow” mean exactly? That I look good for my age? That I’m a yummy mummy? That I’m the first person he’s met with an eight-month-old baby? I can’t remember the last time I wowed someone. Daddy just calls me silly.’

Waterworks

‘Mr and Mrs York! Mr and Mrs Holmes and Master Holmes! Mr Holden, Ms McCabe, Miss Holden-McCabe! Welcome one and all.’ Django genuflected flamboyantly throughout his roll-call, much to everyone’s amusement. He was wearing the jeans he’d worn to Woodstock, tessellations of denim patchworked together, teamed with a shirt swirling brightly with paisley motifs. His belt was all buckle, in the bashed bronze form of a mounted Red Indian, bow and arrow poised. Pip had seen similar go for princely sums on ebay. ‘Cuppa tea? Something to dunk?’

‘Can I have squash?’ Tom asked, but directed the question to his father. ‘And something to dunk?’ Although Django was certainly the most exotic adult he knew, Tom still passed all requests via his father first.

‘You can, my boy, you can,’ Django responded to Zac’s nod, ‘but you’ll have to tell me how to squash it – I’m sure to have the ingredients.’

‘You just untwist the bottle top, pour in about a centimetre and then top it up with water. Even water from a tap,’ Tom explained helpfully despite being somewhat incredulous. It occurred to Django only then that they were talking different types of squash. He realized with some relief that he needn’t attempt to juice the pumpkin. And he realized with some disappointment that he did not own the bottled cordial to which his step-grandson-thing-or-other alluded. Good job, really, because he hadn’t a clue what a centimetre was anyway. A dash he knew intrinsically, a dollop too; he could do a smidgeon blindfolded and had always denounced the pinch as miserly. Feet and inches he was fine with, metric however was another matter; one he staunchly felt did not matter. ‘I have some cherry syrup,’ he said quietly to Zac. ‘Do you think that might do?’

‘I’m sure it will,’ Zac said, laying an affectionate hand on Django’s shoulder. ‘But what on earth do you use cherry syrup for?’ he asked as they walked on up the path and into the house.

Django stopped. ‘Do you know, I don’t think I’ve used it for anything. I think it’s unopened. I’ve had it ages.’

In the event, Django couldn’t find the cherry syrup but he did have cherry brandy and decided that a smidgeon watered down excessively with flat R White’s lemonade wouldn’t do the boy any harm at all. He was right. Tom acquired a liking for it and asked for more.

‘I hope you left the beds for the blokes to do,’ Pip said, all stern, ‘like I suggested in my letter and on the phone.’

‘Yes, I have,’ Django sighed, ‘but only because you’re so bossy I didn’t dare do otherwise.’ He didn’t confess to certain relief at Pip’s directive; that he didn’t actually feel like shunting and shifting divans about any more, didn’t feel he could. ‘There’s a zed-bed out in the shed,’ he added, ‘though I’ve used its mattress to lag the water tank.’

‘Can’t I sleep in the shed?’ Tom sighed, looking imploringly to Zac before winking beguilingly at Django.

‘Have you been incorrigible?’ Django asked him.

‘No, actually, I’ve been exemplary,’ Tom said. ‘Miss Balcombe told me that’s what I am in some things – like maths. It’s just that Pip told me all about the shed.’

Django’s contrived haughty expression softened. ‘In the summer,’ he said, ‘if you promise to be as incorrigible as Pip was when she was young, before she was bossy, I promise to banish you to the shed for a night. Now come along, troops, we have a party to plan. There’s only two months to go.’

No one would hear of Django sleeping on the sofa; they were reluctant enough to let him give up his bed but the deal was settled on Django sleeping in Fen’s bed and Tom sleeping in Fen’s room on the zed-bed plumped up with two sun-lounger mattresses, Fen and Matt in Django’s bed with Cosima in her pop-up travel cot, Zac and Pip in her old room with Cat’s bed dragged through, Cat and Ben on various cushions and beanbags in her room. ‘You’re the youngsters,’ Django had told them, ‘you won’t have the spinal issues of those over a certain age.’

‘Shall I point out that I’m older than Matt?’ Ben joshed.

‘No, don’t do that,’ Django replied. ‘You know how I enjoy my theories.’

At the crack of dawn, Django came across Fen boiling a kettle in the kitchen.

‘Did Cosima wake you?’ she asked, alarmed.

‘No darling,’ Django said, ‘just the infernal need to pee. Not that you’d want to know the finer details of my waterworks. It’s an age thing.’

‘And a pregnancy thing – I remember it well,’ Fen groaned. She took the kettle from the hob. ‘Can we buy you an electric kettle for your birthday?’

‘No thank you,’ Django said, ‘far too dull.’

‘I don’t suppose you’d like a microwave then?’

‘Absolutely not. What would a seventy-five-year-old want with one of those?’ Django said.

Fen poured boiling water into a Pyrex jug and immersed a baby bottle to heat through. ‘I’m trying to reclaim my boobs,’ Fen explained, with a tone of regret and a look of guilt, ‘not that you’d want to know the finer details of my lactation.’

‘Quite,’ said Django. He paused. ‘Matt must love it – the bottle feeding – enables him to feel hands-on and useful.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Fen. ‘I like watching him.’

‘Watching or checking?’ Django posed. ‘It’s good for him to feel useful – because, you see, you are so very capable, Fenella.’ Fen was taken aback by the use of her name in full and she detected a subtle note of warning from Django. ‘It must be easy for Matt to feel left out a little – on account of you being so very capable.’

Fen felt a little defensive but it was too early and she was too tired to express it with much vehemence. ‘It’s not that Matt does things wrong,’ Fen attempted to explain, ‘it’s that he doesn’t do things quite right. It’s often easier for me just to do it in the first place. It saves time. And tears.’ With that she took the warmed milk upstairs to feed a now grumbling Cosima.

Fen gazed down at her daughter, sucking contentedly on the bottle, locking eyes with her and sharing silent waves of intense love. She looked over to Matt who was sound asleep. How strange to feel simultaneously grateful but also resentful of the fact. Though nothing, not even a much-needed simple lie-in, was worth trading these silent waves of love, yet still Fen felt a little put upon that Matt never woke instinctively in advance of the baby stirring. However, though she knew that he’d be happy for her to boot him out of bed and be on early-morning bottle duty, she also knew she’d only lie there wondering if the bottle had been mixed correctly, whether it was the right temperature. She’d end up double-checking anyway. So what was the point in not doing it herself in the first place? There was no such thing as a lie-in. Did it slightly offend Matt? She rubbished the notion – he understood, didn’t he? He understood that it’s a mother’s prerogative to be finicky. It’s out of love for the baby anyway. No bad thing.

An hour later, swathed in his voluminous velvet dressing gown, his hair not yet pony-tailed and so fanning around his shoulders in silver skeins, Django sat in state, in the huge old Windsor chair in the kitchen. He looked like a Norse god, or straight from a William Blake painting, receiving his house guests one by one. First Tom, who scampered down, hair in hysterics, to see where his roommate was. Then Zac, to check his son hadn’t actually woken Django. Then Pip, to check Zac and Tom were helping themselves to breakfast though of course she found Django busy rustling up his panffles, because he’d offered to make his highly complicated hybrid of pancake and waffle and Zac and Tom had readily accepted. Cat and Ben appeared because the scent of maple syrup warming over pancakes or waffles or some such, had drifted evocatively into their room and filled them with hungry memories of American breakfasts. Next came Fen and Cosima, the baby dressed immaculately down to the colour-coordinated tiny hair grip gathering together the few strands she had, while her mother wore mismatched socks. Finally, Matt emerged, still sleep-crumpled but characteristically cheerful.

‘The morning is for Chatsworth, the afternoon is for lolling and party planning, and the evening is for the Rag and Thistle – for men who are over the limit,’ Django announced.

‘Over the limit?’ Zac and Matt asked.

‘Over the age limit,’ Django said, with an apologetic ruffle to Tom’s wayward hair.

‘I see,’ said Cat, hands on hips with consternation that wasn’t wholly mock, ‘while we womenfolk keep the home fire burning?’

‘And do the washing-up,’ Django added calmly. The men cheered. The baby cried. Let the day begin.

* * *

If Django was a perk of being married to, or partnered with, a McCabe girl, it was definitely a high point of a trip to Derbyshire to share an evening at the Rag and Thistle with their eccentric host. While Zac, Matt and Ben donned a change of shirts, Django certainly dressed for his big night out; watched by Tom fascinated with the provenance of each article of clothing. Django gathered this was a delaying tactic but it was his pleasure to spin yarns about his threads. Whether they were fact or fancy was of little relevance to Tom. He’d further embroider it all at school next week anyway. Tales of Django Gramps and his pink shirt with the gold buttons. Real gold. A gift from the King of Kathmandu.

To Matt, Ben and Zac’s urbane, understated signatures of Ted Baker, Gap and Paul Smith, Django added a certain flamboyance with his Astrakhan waistcoat, his Pucci neckerchief, his peculiar multi-seamed corduroys and yet another great big fuck-off belt, this one with an amber-encrusted buckle. The only item no one had seen before was the excessively floral shirt.

‘I knew a woman who worked at Liberty’s,’ Django explained nonchalantly. ‘Her name was Maureen. The summer of 1970. She was spectacular.’ And with that, the men left.

While Fen checked on Cosima, who was compliantly sound asleep, Pip served up the casserole Django had left simmering and Cat poured the wine.

‘Come on, Fen,’ Cat muttered to herself, ‘I’m starving.’

‘Cravings?’ Pip probed.

‘Unfortunately not,’ Cat said, ‘but not for want of trying.’

‘Django’s recipes would be perfect for pregnant women,’ said Fen, who’d appeared and sat herself down in a chair with a great exhausted sigh, ‘on account of all his bizarre combinations.’

‘I’ve just found a walnut,’ Cat said, chewing thoughtfully. She detested walnuts and was privately slightly irked that Django appeared to have forgotten this. ‘God, I’ve only been away four years.’

‘They’re very good for you,’ said Fen.

‘Isn’t there stuff one should eat if you want to have a boy, and other stuff if you want to have a girl?’ Cat asked her.

‘Apparently there is,’ said Fen, ‘but I couldn’t tell you which was which. Would you like one more than the other?’

‘No, no,’ Cat said, ‘but I would like just the one – I don’t think I have the space for twins.’

Fen glanced at her sister’s slender frame with gentle envy.

‘You certainly wouldn’t have the space in that Clapham place,’ Pip remarked. ‘What’s happening with all that?’

Cat sighed. ‘Apparently, we’re under contract until June. I keep telling Ben it’s never too early to scout around. There’s no harm in planning. It’s fun. I’ve always really loved Tufnell Park,’ Cat enthused, ‘and Parliament Hill. I know it can be expensive – but what an investment. Then we’d all be within a mile or so of each other. And I’d have Hampstead Heath on which to push my pram and have picnics. It’s Nappy Valley, isn’t it?’

‘You need to conceive first,’ Fen said.

Cat giggled. ‘Each time we have sex, I hold my legs up for about five minutes. Ben thinks I’m daft.’

‘It’ll happen when it happens,’ Fen tried to reason.

‘I hope it happens soon,’ Cat said wistfully. ‘I’m doing everything right with the folic acid and the yoga and the magazines. Or watching repeats of Location Location Location. I’ve always had a thing for Shaker kitchens and tumbled mosaic tiles in bathrooms.’

‘You need to find a job,’ Pip interjected. ‘You have a little too much time on your hands at the moment, methinks.’

‘And expensive taste,’ said Fen.

‘That’s easier said than done,’ Cat muttered. ‘I have looked. There’s nothing. Not even freelance work.’

‘Maybe you should think tangentially,’ Pip suggested.

‘You mean settle for less?’ Cat said gloomily.

‘No,’ Pip said gently, ‘but perhaps you have to consider the bigger picture rather than fixate on details.’

‘You’re so sensible,’ Cat muttered with slight irritation.

‘What do you expect me to say?’ Pip said.

‘It was something he said,’ Fen interrupted.

‘Who?’ Cat was confused. Hadn’t they been focusing on her?

‘Django,’ said Fen, ‘about that flowery shirt. About a woman called Maureen.’

‘Who was spectacular!’ Pip mimicked.

‘I wonder who she was,’ Fen said. ‘A spectacular woman called Maureen, who defined Django’s summer of 1970.’

‘We can ask him,’ Cat suggested. ‘He’s bound to be fantastically verbose when he comes rolling home with the boys later.’

‘Come to think of it, I do remember him in other floral shirts,’ Pip said. ‘They were probably all Liberty. Perhaps they were all from this Maureen.’

‘When you have children, there’s so much you leave by the wayside,’ Fen said pensively.

Instinctively, it didn’t seem right to Pip or to Cat to tease their sister just then for contradicting her previous conceit.

‘Flowers by the wayside,’ said Fen, her voice cracking. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, ‘sorry.’

‘Are you OK?’ Pip asked. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Are things no better with Matt?’ Cat asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Fen, ‘I don’t know. I’m just tired, I suppose.’

Django’s posse was the centre of attraction at the Rag and Thistle, especially when it became known that the main topic of discussion was the forthcoming infamous seventy-fifth birthday party to which, it seemed, all the clientele and staff of the Rag and Thistle, plus their pets, had already been invited.

‘I was thinking of three marquees,’ Django proclaimed, accepting a complimentary pint of Guinness with effusive thanks, ‘the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’

‘But Django,’ Zac pointed out, ‘how will you decide which guest goes in which tent?’

‘Marquee!’ Django objected.

‘Marquee,’ said Zac. ‘It’s rather subjective. I mean, take Matt, he’s bad and ugly.’ Matt raised his pint.

‘I didn’t see it like that,’ Django mused, as if he now found Zac’s take rather interesting. ‘I envisaged a natural progression from tent to tent—’

‘Marquee,’ chorused Ben, Matt and Zac.

‘Mar-bloody-quee,’ Django sighed. ‘You know: a suitable, conducive environment to assist the three key stages of any good party. Conduct starts off good, behaviour then worsens until hopefully proceedings become downright shameful. Each marquee would have food to facilitate, cocktails to complement and soft furnishings to, well, accommodate.’

‘McCabe,’ said Mr Merifeld the landlord, with a grave shake of his head, ‘sounds right costly to me.’

‘Merifield,’ said Django, ‘what’s money? I can’t take it with me and I am well into my eighth decade.’

‘Marquees don’t come cheap,’ said Mr Merifield.

‘Tents it is then!’ Django exclaimed, to much raucous approval.

By the time the four men made their somewhat unsteady passage up the garden path after a lock-in at the Rag and Thistle, Django’s party had been planned to an imaginative degree; the minutiae mapped out down to the wording of the invites, the order of speeches and cleverly themed playlists for each hour.

‘The devil is in the details,’ Matt justified, with drunken solemnity.

‘Then the devil can come too!’ Django proclaimed. ‘Who’s for a cup of tea or a nightcap?’

‘Nightcap,’ said Ben.

‘Nightcap,’ said Matt.

‘Nightcap,’ said Zac.

Ben gave Django a hand, while Zac checked on Tom and Matt tiptoed in on Cosima and Fen, who sleepily protested that he reeked of booze.

‘Django,’ Ben said cautiously, while he searched under the kitchen sink and found a bottle of cognac shoulder to shoulder with Domestos, ‘are you happy with your health? Is all well?’

In the context of the lightness of the evening’s conversation, Ben’s question surprised Django. ‘I’m in rude health, doctor,’ he declared, placing four enormous brandy balloons on a tray.

‘Any concerns?’ Ben pressed. ‘However minor?’

‘I can’t shift and shunt the beds about like I used to,’ Django joked.

‘It’s my job to notice that you appear to go to the loo a lot,’ said Ben. ‘Have you noticed an increase in this? Pain? Discomfort? Any change in the old waterworks?’

‘You cheeky whippersnapper,’ Django protested, ‘don’t you go calling my waterworks old.’

‘I’m just saying perhaps a check-up might be a good idea,’ Ben said evenly.

Django didn’t reveal that he’d thought the same himself. He didn’t tell Ben he’d gone so far as keeping an appointment with the GP.

But the GP turned out to be a girl who looked no more than twelve. Don’t doctors seem younger and younger these days? I’d really rather not discuss my waterworks with a young lady. I had to invent a sore throat as the purpose of my visit. She told me to go easy on the Tabasco. And she recommended Strepsils. Jolly nice they are too.

‘Django?’ Ben was saying. ‘There are basic steps you can take – restrict fluid intake after 6 p.m., cut down alcohol and caffeine. Limit spicy food. Increase fish, carrots, broccoli. And exercise.’

Django nodded thoughtfully. ‘Life would be a bit of a bore,’ he said.

‘Just cut down on some stuff and increase other things. Invent new stews,’ Ben suggested.

Django was about to respond but then Matt and Zac were joining them again, switching the conversation back to party planning.

He’s Not There

If the devil is in the details, if the pleasure is in the planning, then the fun is in the fantasy. Though Fen knew well enough how reality can let a daydream down, that Monday she made sure she forgot. Though she was aware that the planning might well be pointless, she happily indulged herself. Though she knew that her own guardian devil was guiding her, she turned deaf ears to her conscience. All her conscience wanted to say was Think about it – what is the point? But for Fen, just then, the point was that her imagination had been ignited and running with it was fun. And wasn’t it refreshing to have the energy and the desire to spend a little time choosing what to wear? And didn’t it seem entertainingly decadent to put mascara on in the daytime? And wasn’t it fun to think about something other than baby food for a little while? And when it all seemed suddenly fanciful, questionable even, Fen simply justified that Cosima needed some nice fresh air. And wasn’t a stroll up Bishops Avenue as good a route as any? And if further corroboration was needed, then a date with Cat at the café in Kenwood House provided it.

*

‘He’s not there,’ Fen said to Cosima as they walked up the Bishops Avenue, ‘but there again, why would he be?’ She walked on, mulling theories on coincidence, unrealistic expectations and downright improbability. She stopped to pick up Cosima’s teething rings. She looked back over her shoulder to the tree and the flowers. ‘Shall we leave a little note?’ she asked. ‘There’s no harm in that. It would be friendly, wouldn’t it – might make his sad task a little less so.’ She turned the buggy and retraced her steps.

Hi Al!

Cosima and I were passing.

I noticed a couple of Kay’s daffodils were looking peaky so I’ve removed them.

Hope that’s OK.

Fen.

‘Shall we leave Mummy’s mobile number too? I mean, it’s no big deal, is it, it’s just a friendly gesture – communication being a global thing.’ Fen added her number after her name.

She set off for Kenwood in earnest and thought to herself how she’d just done the right thing.

It’s not like I’m hoping he’ll call. It’s not like I’m swept up in daft daydreams. She spent the rest of the route distinguishing between the Daydream and the Distraction.

There’s a major distinction between the two. A daydream can be pointless, a distraction useful.

It was with a spring in her step that she crunched along the sweep of gravel driveway heralding Kenwood House.

Cat was already there, sitting in the converted coach house, caressing a cup of tea. Fen zoomed the buggy over to her, mimicking a screech of brakes with her voice. An elderly couple looked slightly alarmed, as if that was no way to handle a buggy, as if babies should be in nice coach-built prams, not bizarre three-wheeled monstrosities.

Though they’d spent all weekend together, Fen gave Cat a kiss and a hug. She took Cosima from her buggy.

‘Here, you cuddle your Auntie Cat,’ she told the baby. ‘Mummy’s going to get herself an enormous slice of cake.’

‘You’re chirpy,’ Cat told Fen on her return, declining the gateaux that Fen had bought.

‘And you look miserable,’ Fen commented, giving Cosima an organic sugar-free rusk. ‘Everything OK?’

‘I feel glum,’ Cat admitted, ‘and I want to be allowed to feel glum. So thank God you’re not Pip.’

‘What’s up?’ Fen asked, spooning butter-cream from the cake’s surface directly into her mouth.

‘I’m not pregnant. I don’t have a job. I don’t like Clapham. Ben’s never home and I wish I’d stayed in Colorado,’ Cat declared.

‘Cat,’ Fen said, ‘you’ve only been home two minutes.’

‘It’s been three months,’ Cat corrected. ‘I’ve had sex forty-two times and have sent out nineteen pre-emptive letters for jobs. Nothing.’

‘Cat, you make the former sound like a chore and you’re being unrealistic about the latter,’ Fen admonished her lightly.

‘And you sound like Pip,’ said Cat, ‘so stop it because I need you to be the one who there-theres me.’

Fen paused to consider this. It was true. Go to Pip for practical advice and accept her authority. Go to Fen for a hug and be assured of some plain sympathy. ‘It takes time,’ Fen soothed, ‘both take time.’

‘You got pregnant overnight!’ Cat objected.

‘It wasn’t planned,’ Fen said.

‘Then it’s not fair,’ said Cat.

Fen looked at her younger sister apologetically and put her hand over Cat’s. ‘Come back to mine this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Let’s look at my books and magazines. There’s sure to be Ten Top Tips For Tip Top Fertility or something.’ Though Fen made it sound as though she was doing Cat the favour, privately she liked the idea of a way out of the mums-and-babies group.

‘What’s wrong with Clapham anyway?’ Fen asked. ‘I thought it was meant to be quite a happening place?’

‘I stick out like a sore thumb,’ Cat said. ‘All the women bustle about with perfect children, or sit smug behind the wheels of their SUVs.’

‘But that’s your goal too,’ Fen said, ‘that’s what you’re hoping for. And actually, it doesn’t sound dissimilar to this part of North London.’

‘But while it’s not happening for me, it makes me feel so isolated,’ said Cat, ‘and it’s made me realize that I really want to be nearer to you. And Pip. I felt less far away when I was living in Colorado – how mad is that? I feel lonely stuck over the river. Ben’s really upbeat about his job but he’s working really long hours. I haven’t made any friends. I miss Stacey and the gang in Boulder. And I miss my mountain.’

‘Your what?’ Fen asked.

‘Flagstaff. Remember that hike we went on? That’s my mountain. You saw where Ben and I lived, Fen. You saw the awesome wilderness right on our doorstep. You filled your lungs with that crystal-pure air. You stayed in our gorgeous apartment. You hung out with our mates. You saw how people drive SUVs out there because of the terrain, not fashion. You had a taste of our quality of life.’

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