Читать книгу Home Truths - Freya North - Страница 12
ОглавлениеEarly 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.
