Читать книгу Fen - Freya North - Страница 7

Art has the objective of leading us to the knowledge of ourselves.

Gustave Courbet

The lurcher, who appeared to be wearing a 1970s Astrakhan coat dug from the bottom of a jumble-sale pile, strolled nonchalantly up to the McCabes. The dog regarded Pip McCabe cursorily, expressed mild interest in Cat McCabe’s plate of food and then thrust its snout emphatically, and wholly uninvited, into Fen McCabe’s crotch. When Django McCabe, the girls’ uncle, roared with laughter, the dog took one look at him, at his genuine 1970s Astrakhan waistcoat, and lay down at his feet with a sigh of humble deference. The dog’s tail, like a length of rope that had been in water too long, made a movement more akin to a dying snake than a wag.

‘Barry!’

The dog’s owner, whose exasperation suggested this was a regular occurrence over which he had no control, gave a whistle. The dog leapt up, seemed as startled by the McCabes as they were by him, and swayed on four spindly legs as if trying to remember whence his owner’s voice had come. The solution – to escape, to feign deafness – seemed to lie in Fen’s crotch. This time, he attempted to bury his entire head there, as if hoping that if he couldn’t see a thing, no one else could see him.

‘Barry! Good God!’

Reluctantly, Barry could not deny that his owner’s voice was now very near and very cross. He extracted his face from his hiding place, gave Fen a reproachful look, dipped his spine submissively and slunk to his master’s heels, out of the pub and, no doubt, into disgrace in the back of a Land Rover.

‘He comes from a broken home,’ the owner said on his way out, by way of explanation, or apology. ‘Derbyshire via Battersea.’

Django McCabe, who’d brought up his three, Batterseaborn nieces single-handedly in Derbyshire, nodded sympathetically. Pip and Cat McCabe thought they ought to close their mouths (especially as Pip still had some steak-and-kidney pie to swallow). Man and dog left, Pip swallowed. Cat gulped.

‘I thought dogs were meant to look like their owners,’ Cat said incredulously. ‘There’s justice in the world that he looks nothing like his dog!’

‘Be still, my beating heart!’ said Pip theatrically.

‘Country squire?’ Cat mused.

‘Farmer needs a wife?’ Pip responded.

Fen hadn’t a clue what they were talking about. She’d had her back to the man throughout. ‘I’d love a dog,’ she said, ‘but I’d settle for one sculpted by Sophie Ryder or Nicola Hicks in the meantime.’

‘Jesus, Fen,’ Pip sighed, pressing the back of her hand against her forehead, ‘can you not retrain your eye to appreciate the finer points of real life?’

‘Pardon?’ Fen looked at her sister, and then assessed the level of liquid in Pip’s pint of cider, as well as that in her own. ‘Django?’ Fen turned to her uncle for support. Django, however, puffing away on his old meerschaum pipe, regarded her quizzically.

‘Fenella McCabe is a lost cause,’ Cat asserted, arranging peanuts into complex configurations on the table. ‘She’s studied as an Art Historian for far too long—’

‘—and had one too many disasters in love—’ Pip continued her sister’s sentence, picking peanuts from Cat’s pattern.

‘—to allow her eye to appreciate the merits of any man now not hewn from marble,’ Cat went on.

‘—or cast in bronze,’ Pip added for good measure, forming the remaining peanuts into a ‘P’.

‘Django!’ Fen implored her uncle, with theatrical supplication, to come to her rescue and defend her from her goading sisters.

Django merely tapped his pipe on the heel of his shoe and gave Fen a smile. ‘I think another pint,’ he remarked, ‘is the order of the day.’

‘You’ll have us sloshed,’ Pip enthused, looking at her watch. To be sipping very good cider in their uncle’s local, in Derbyshire, at half three on a Saturday afternoon in March, seemed a very good idea.

‘Nonsense!’ Django said, as if offended by the remark. ‘I’ve brought you girls up not to fear alcohol – the fact that you’ve known the taste of drink since you were tiny means, I do believe, that it has no mystique.’ He popped his pipe into the breast pocket of his waistcoat and went to the bar.

Fen McCabe watched her uncle wend his way, his passage hampered by the number of people whom he met and talked to en route.

Funny old Django, his attire so out of kilter amongst the flat caps, waxed jackets and sensible footwear. I mean, it’s not just the waistcoat – he’s teamed it with a Pucci neckerchief today, and truly ghastly shirt that wouldn’t look amiss on some country-and-western crooner. Jeans so battered and war-torn they’d have done Clint Eastwood proud, plus a pair of quite ghastly cowboy boots that shouldn’t see the light of day in Texas, let alone Derbyshire. And yet; Django McCabe, who came to Derbyshire via Surrey and Paris and had three small nieces from Battersea foisted upon him, is now as indigenous as the drystone walls. He fits in, in Farleymoor. Like he suited Soho when he was a jazz musician. But he fitted his life around us when we came to live with him. He’s barking mad and he’s the most important man in my life.

‘If our mother hadn’t run off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Fen said, ‘but if our dad had still had the heart attack, do you think we might have been brought up by Django anyway?’

This was a conundrum upon which each girl had mused frequently, though never in earshot of Django.

‘I would guess,’ Cat said measuredly, though she was merely giving back to Fen a theory her older sister had once given to her, ‘that the whole “cowboy-Denver-I’m-off” thing was probably a key ingredient in his heart attack.’

‘Sometimes,’ Pip reflected, ‘I feel a bit guilty for not caring in the slightest about my mother and not really remembering my father.’

‘I’ve never envied anyone with a conventional family,’ Fen remarked, ‘in fact, I felt slightly sorry for them.’

‘I used to wonder what on earth their lives were like for want of a Django,’ Pip said.

‘Me too,’ Cat agreed.

‘Do you remember when Susie Bailey hid in the old stable, made herself a kind of hide-out from Django’s old canvases?’ Fen laughed.

‘And her mum had to promise her that she’d make Django’s midnight-feast recipe of spaghetti with chocolate sauce, marshmallows and a slosh of brandy!’ Pip reminisced.

‘Do you remember friends’ houses?’ Cat said. ‘All that boring normal food? Structured stilted supper-time conversation? Designated programmes to watch on TV? Bedtime, lights out, no chatter?’

‘Django McCabe,’ Fen marvelled. ‘Do you think we’re a credit to him? Do you think we do him proud? That we are who we are, that we’re not boring old accountants?’

‘Or housewives,’ Cat interjected.

‘Or couch potatoes,’ Pip added.

‘Or socially inept,’ Cat said.

‘I’m sure he’s delighted that my career entails me being a clown called Martha rather than an executive in some horrid advertising agency,’ Pip said hopefully.

Django returned, his huge hands encircling four pint glasses. ‘Philippa McCabe,’ he boomed, ‘every night I pray to gods of all known creeds and a fair few I make up, that you will be phoning to tell me of your new position as a junior account manager on the Domestos Bleach account.’

Pip raised her glass to him.

‘And you, Catriona McCabe,’ Django continued, his eyes rolling to the ceiling, while he produced, from pockets in his waistcoat that the girls never knew existed, packets of peanuts and pork scratchings, ‘speed the day when you trade your job as a sports columnist for a career in the personnel department of a lovely company making air filters or cardboard tubing.’

Cat took a hearty sip of cider and grinned.

‘Fenella McCabe,’ Django regarded her, ‘how long must I wait before you exchange a dusty archive in the bowels of the Tate Gallery for the accounts department of a financial services company? And the three of you! The three of you! Why oh why have I been unable, as yet, to marry any of you off?’ He clutched his head in his hands, sighed and downed over half his pint.

Fen laughed. ‘Hey! I’ve only just landed this job. I’m going to spend my days with Julius!’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Cat wailed, finding solace in cider, ‘Julius.’

‘Bloody Julius,’ Pip remonstrated, chinking glasses with Cat.

‘Oh Lord, not that Fetherstone chap,’ Django exclaimed, rubbing his eyebrows, letting his head drop; a strand of his silver hair which had escaped his pony-tail dipping into his pint, ‘please, dear girl, please fall in love with a man who is at least alive.’

‘Who’s to say,’ Cat mused, ‘that while you’re waiting for the right bloke to come along, you can’t have lots of fun with all the wrong ones!’

‘Please,’ Fen remonstrated but with good humour, ‘my new job starts tomorrow.’ She regarded her two sisters and her uncle. ‘One for which I was head-hunted,’ she emphasized. She ate a peanut thoughtfully, took a sip of cider and looked out of the pub window to the moors. ‘So, my life wants for nothing at the moment.’