Home Truths

‘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?’