Home Truths (37 page)

He gave himself to us, he did. Entirely. I don't know anyone as well as I know him. Not even Ben, I suppose. I've had a lifetime of knowing Django.

She linked her arm through his. ‘Hum me your favourite Django Reinhardt tune,’ she asked him, laying her head against his arm; closing her eyes as the vibration of his humming ‘Georgia On My Mind’ travelled through to her heart.

I can't believe you're my father. My real father. My own dad. My very own daddy. The thing is, you're so nice to share. Pip and Fen might never be able to say ‘my real father’ in connection with you – but they'll always be able to say ‘our very own father’.

Say it out loud, Cat.

I can't seem to.

‘All right petal, time for your photo shoot.’ The nurse had appeared, accompanied by a porter with an empty wheel-chair. Momentarily, Cat thought she spoke to her. It seemed very odd to refer to Django as ‘petal’.

‘Your limo awaits,’ said the porter, giving the wheelchair a twirl.

‘I can walk,’ Django objected.

‘We'd rather you didn't, duck,’ the nurse chided amicably.

‘I pride myself on a smooth ride,’ the porter protested, with a wink to Cat. ‘You'll not find finer in the whole of Derbyshire.’

‘Can I come?’ Cat asked urgently, not wanting to leave him, or be without him.

‘Only room for one,’ the porter said, ‘and I don't do pillion.’

‘I meant—’

‘I know,’ the nurse said.

‘Can she come?’ Django asked.

‘Of course she can,’ said the nurse, ‘as far as any of us can go. Come along ducky. How are you feeling, Mr McCabe?’

‘Please,’ he said, easing himself down into the wheelchair, ‘call me Django.’

Cat insisted that she drove the 2CV back to Farleymoor though Django was a notoriously annoying passenger, stamping on imaginary brake pedals and gasping when corners were not taken at the angle he would have chosen.

‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre,’ he muttered under his breath at regular intervals.

‘It's a beautiful afternoon,’ Cat said, when they arrived back in Farleymoor, ‘shall we go for a walk?’

‘I'm a little tired,’ Django said.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ Cat asked. ‘You look a little pale – not the Chernobyl glow we were expecting.’

‘Just a little tired.’

‘Sit in the garden,’ Cat told him, repositioning the ancient Lloyd Loom chair. ‘I'll make a pot of tea.’

By the time she came out, Django was fast asleep. She sat on the grass, listening to him breathing, the occasional extravagant, gruffled snore that always made the sisters laugh. Pip tape-recorded him once.

Cat looked at him. His mouth was slightly open, the deep laughter lines around his eyes a map of his life. ‘Dad,’ she said quietly.

‘Daddy.

          Dadda.

                    Pops.

                         Da.

                              Papa.

                                   Pa.’

None of them actually suited him. Tellingly, nor did he awaken.

‘Derek,’ she said softly. Certainly not. On he slept.

‘Django,’ she all but whispered.

‘Yes?’

He could only ever be Django, really.

‘Sorry – did I wake you?’

‘Heavens, what's the time? How long have I been asleep?’

‘About an hour,’ Cat told him. ‘I can make this into iced tea,’ she said, tapping the teapot. ‘My train leaves in a couple of hours.’

So iced tea it was.

‘I've ordered a cab – I don't want you driving,’ she said, ‘but I can stay, Django, if you like. I'm sure work will give me dispensation.’

‘I'll be fine,’ Django said. ‘What's a bit of radioactivity? I can drive you.’

‘No,’ Cat insisted. ‘You can – but you won't.’

He shrugged.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, shyly.

‘Of course,’ Django said, clenching his jaw on a yawn.

‘Maybe when you're not tired,’ Cat wavered, thinking better of it.

‘Ask now,’ he told her.

‘Do you think it's a bit ominous,’ she asked, ‘that I wasn't really born of Love? That actually, I was the result of Adultery? A brief fling?’

Django sipped his tea silently. ‘Don't be overly biblical and sanctimonious, Catriona,’ he said crossly.

She plucked at the grass and thought about it. ‘Sorry,’ she said after a while.

‘Let me ask
you
something,’ Django said. He was feeling supremely tired now, a little nauseous too. ‘Should I not expect
you
to love me
more
than Fen or Pip love me?’ He let the concept hang. ‘You're my daughter after all, aren't you? You're my
real
daughter, my
proper
daughter,’ he tapped her quite briskly on the shoulder. ‘Don't you think
you
ought to love me the most?’

Cat was simultaneously taken aback by his challenge and humbled by the astuteness of the remark. She felt immediate remorse. She'd so rarely been chastised by Django and neither had Pip or Fen. Their family dynamic had hardly ever necessitated it.

‘None of us could love you more,’ she proclaimed, relishing the new sense of clarity. Her smile grew from her soul and she could see the positive effect it had on Django. ‘I'm ashamed to admit that we tried to love you less – last month,’ she revealed, ‘but we couldn't do that either.’

VT 05154

An early symptom of Django's cancer was to effectively kill off the anger and hurt that Fen and Pip had each experienced towards him since his birthday. It was as if the diagnosis packed up the past and placed life gently on new ground with a firmer footing. Cancer would define them, all of them. They would become nicer people for it. In the meantime Fen and Pip decreed that whatever had happened BC – before cancer – was largely irrelevant. They would pull together; life was too short, family was everything. Cat did so want to flow with their energy but unconditional love and trust were still in a holding bay, guarded by a self-protective wariness. She found herself both chipping away at it but building it back up too.

For Ben and Matt and Zac it was quite simple, really. Men for the most part are blessed with the ultimate take on the situation. Say less. It's not Neanderthal, it's genius. A variant on the theory that it takes a multitude of muscles to frown, but only three to smile. It was far easier to be nice than to be at loggerheads, it was far nicer to just feel love than argue about the vagaries of it. Love wasn't a matter of equality after all, but of equilibrium.

However, though Fen and Pip felt a welcome sense of relief at the warm waves of harmony and support, Cat's feelings of unease and dissatisfaction were contagious and before long a gnawing realization crept in that fundamentals remained untreated, unfixed.

So, though Fen acknowledged her present disinclination to even think about Al or anyone like him was due to her overriding concern for Django, the fact that she
had
been indisputably courting infidelity, could not be explained by Django's cancer. Similarly, though Pip now welcomed Zac's embrace and found great comfort in his calm and level-headed assessment of her uncle's illness, she knew too that joining forces on Django's behalf cleverly waylaid them from tackling the impasse existing in their marriage. As for Cat, if she split her time on a purely practical level between being a nurse and a bookshop manager, if she focused on jazz with Django and cancer with Ben and ISBNs with head office, then she reasoned she would have no time for the needling concerns about her own sense of self.

Mothers, daughters, lovers, liars – who were they? And how might Django's illness shape who they could become? In the clear light of each new day, questions yet to be answered came more and more to the fore. Questions to face head-on and answers not to be flinched from. They were prepared, at last, to question themselves. And at last they felt prepared to seek answers from somebody else too.

‘What will Denver be like at this time of year?’ Pip asks Cat.

‘Hot,’ Cat says and she doesn't need to say
Why?
It's of sudden comfort to her that the telepathy gifted amongst sisters obviously extends to half sisters too. She's always had it with Fen and Pip. The more recent discovery of specific DNA wasn't going to alter it. ‘Lovely,’ she says, ‘but hot.’

Fen looks from left hand to right, from Cat to Pip, and lets
her gaze rest on her daughter who is grabbing at Pip's rug in a bid to get onto her knees. ‘I've never left my baby for more than a few hours,’ Fen says quietly, attuned to their thinking.

‘Could you leave her for a few days?’ Pip asks tentatively, burning a knowing look at her sister.

Fen locks eyes with her. She shrugs. She nods. She shrugs again.

Pip turns to Cat. ‘Could the shop spare you for a few days? Do you have any holiday entitlement?’

Cat shrugs and then she nods.

‘Django will have an address,’ says Pip. ‘Who's going to call him?’

‘You are,’ say Fen and Cat together.

Django isn't surprised by the request. But he won't tell them he is relieved until they're back home again. ‘OK. Hold on. It's in my address book. Where's my address book?’ The telephone receiver is clattered down as he rummages around for some time. Pip raises her eyebrows to her sisters who listen in and smile. ‘Here's my address book,’ they can hear him say in the background because he's momentarily forgotten to retrieve his receiver. He picks it up. ‘Hullo? Hullo? Are you still there? Ericsson. Here we are. Mrs P. Ericsson. 84 Emerson Street. Lester Falls.’

‘Thanks,’ says Pip, about to change the subject, as if the intended trip is no big deal.

‘Vermont,’ Django adds, ‘VT 05154.’

Pip's pen hovers, frozen. Fen mouths,
What? What!
‘Pardon?’ Pip says.

‘It's a zip code. VT 05154.’

‘I know it's a zip code,’ says Pip, ‘but what's it doing in
Vermont
?’ Cat and Fen now crowd around the telephone, which irritates her. She's trying to concentrate and figure it out. She brushes them away as if they're children.

‘Because your mother lives in Vermont,’ they all hear Django clearly say, however, ‘she never moved.’

‘You said Denver,’ Pip objects and Cat backs away now, feeling deflated at possibly more twists to the tale.

‘I did not,’ Django is saying carefully. ‘Your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver when you were small. But you've never asked where they lived. And they lived in Vermont. Never moved.’

Lester Falls

They didn't expect rain. Nor did they anticipate Lester Falls to be so plain. Pip knew better than to expect the maple trees to be ablaze with fiery foliage in June, but she had hoped for pretty weather-boarded houses, Adirondack chairs on porches, the odd covered bridge or white wooden church; it was thus difficult not to feel hard done by with this incessant drizzle in a rather nondescript town. Especially after an arduous three-hour drive from Boston. For Fen, picture-postcard perfect scenery had been an imperative notion when it had come to packing her suitcase and leaving her eleven-month-old baby; her ache for Cosima was now manifest in the gut-hollow, throat-ripped perpetual threat of tears. Cat found herself resenting her sisters for organizing the trip in the first place and she lagged behind, sulking to herself darkly that it must be easier for them than for her. With Fen close to tears and Cat glowering to herself, it was down to Pip to jostle maps and leaflets and figure out what they should do and where they might stay. Privately, she cursed her mother for not living somewhere more picturesque and she cursed her sisters for standing around gormlessly leaving everything to her. She remembered the quote on the mug Fen had bought
her last Christmas which said that an older sister helps one remain half child, half woman; just then, Pip wished her younger sisters would opt for the grown-up identity.

‘We should have stayed in Boston,’ Cat said sulkily. ‘A little retail therapy would probably be far more curative than some misguided fact-finding mission with some woman we don't even know.’

‘We shouldn't have come in the first place,’ Fen muttered, staring at outdated fashions fastidiously displayed in a shop window. ‘What do we hope to achieve anyway? We don't even know what we want to say. We'd have been better off spending time in Derbyshire with Django.’

‘For God's sake you two!’ Pip snapped. ‘We're jet lagged and we're nervous. But we're here. So let's find somewhere to stay – and something to eat. It's lunch-time.’ She stomped off with Cat and Fen mooching behind her.

There's little a great cup of coffee can't soothe. Especially when served by a friendly soul in the comfortable surroundings of a genuine diner. Combined with a sturdy plateful of eggs and grits to raise blood sugar levels and stave off tiredness, Cat and Fen felt revived and able to assess their surroundings and consider their options with Pip.

‘We don't know where exactly she lives,’ Cat said, squinting at the map.

‘Or if she's even here,’ said Fen.

‘Please God let her be out of town,’ Cat said. ‘Then we can justify a weekend's shopping in Boston.’

‘If she isn't here, I might just fly back home, actually,’ said Fen, brightening at the possibility.

‘I'll ask the waitress if she knows where Emerson Street is,’ Pip said.

‘Don't mention her name!’ Cat rushed.

The waitress, who had ‘Betty’ embroidered on a pristine pale blue gingham uniform, was sorry to be unable to help,
but she asked the short-order chef who scribbled down directions on a paper napkin.

‘Is it walkable?’ Pip asked.

‘Joe – lady here wants to know if it's walkable?’

Joe came right out of the kitchen, appeared to evaluate the age and fitness of the girls and nodded. ‘I reckon. About a half-hour. Who you looking for?’

The girls paused.

‘Oh, no one, really,’ Cat said.

‘You guys on vacation?’ Joe asked. ‘In
Lester
?’

‘Just passing through,’ Pip said lightly. ‘A friend of a friend of a friend lives on Emerson Street – we thought we'd look her up.’

‘Who's that?’ Joe asked.