Home Truths (42 page)

‘Were any of us conceived out of love?’ Cat asked. ‘Did you create any of us intentionally – or were we just the inconvenient consequences of some 1960s recklessness?’

‘Well—’

But Cat needed to continue. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘most of my friends' parents got through the 1960s just fine, with little more than photographic evidence of a dodgy dress sense for proof.’

‘I hadn't time,’ Penny said slowly, ‘or maybe I blocked it out. Who knows. It was such a long time ago. I was so young. So caught up in the shock of the new. I'd never been out of England, let alone on an aeroplane. I filled my every waking hour with Bob.’

‘Did you not miss us? Did you
ever
miss us?’ Fen challenged her but Penny's face wore no emotion. ‘Christ – did you even
think
about us?’ she pressed.

Penny thought about it. ‘Occasionally,’ she said quietly, nodding.

‘And?’

‘I just occasionally thought about you.’ Her voice was quiet.

‘You do know our father died of a heart attack quite soon after you left?’ Pip declared.

‘A
heart attack
?’ Penny looked confused.

‘Did you ever regret it?’ Cat asked. ‘Do you have any regrets?’ She wanted to ask her if she regretted her fling with Django. But what if she quickly nodded to that too? It would be such a searing indictment of Django. And wouldn't it mean she regretted Cat's birth too? And wouldn't Cat then have to live with the notion that she was never meant to be? So she said nothing. She stared at her mother, hoping to compel the woman to look straight into eyes that were just like Django's.

Penny looked from Cat to Fen to Pip. She looked to the
middle distance and her face crumpled a little as she shook her head apologetically. ‘No regrets – not as such. Though I am sorry – but I guess that doesn't help.’ The sisters stood, staunchly unmoved. ‘How can I explain it?’ Penny flailed. ‘I don't see it as a sacrifice because it never felt like I had a choice to make. The kids round here have an expression they use when something is glaringly obvious. And for me, back then, it was a
no-brainer
. Bob came along and everything made sense. Sure, on paper, my actions appear inexcusably wicked but, I don't know, it made perfect sense to me back then. Even now. I can't explain. I don't expect you to understand.’

Penny took a step back. ‘If I was evil,’ she said hoarsely, ‘if I'd done wrong then surely the natural balance of the world would ensure I wasn't entitled to a smudge of the bliss I was blessed with?’ She felt so tired. She wanted to shut the door and sit down and be on her own. ‘Perhaps not all women are cut out to be mothers. Maybe I'm just not maternal,’ Penny said, starting to close the door. ‘Perhaps there's a flaw in my genes; something missing. But anyway, it appears you three have not inherited it. So there you go. You're the lucky ones. Go ahead and hate me if it helps you bury your past and reclaim your lives. I guess we're strangers, you and me. We always were.’

The three sisters stand side by side. Their mother's door has been shut in their faces. Though their limbs are touching, they stand distinct and alone; each constricted by hermetic self-sorrow.

My mummy never loved me.

My mummy never loved me.

My mummy never loved me.

Freedom Trail

To be homeward bound the next morning seemed all that mattered. It mattered more than delaying their departure from Vermont with a last breakfast at their little diner. Instead they boarded the first bus to Boston hungry but desperate to be on their way, to turn their backs on Lester Falls and Emerson Street. To head home. But they arrived in Boston with a day to get through and even for Cat, shopping held no allure. In the end, Pip suggested they walk the Freedom Trail, not because she was particularly interested in Paul Revere and John Hancock, but because it gave them a red line to follow and she didn't have to think. They meandered and mooched and didn't really take in the culture or the sights. They were wasting a day but they felt there was little else they could do with it. They idled at Rowes Wharf before taking the water shuttle across to Logan airport, still managing to arrive at the airport with three hours to spare.

Penny, however, had arrived a whole two hours before that. The girls didn't see her but she watched them, waiting until they turned away from the check-in desk, before she approached. She could hear Pip suggesting to the other two
that they might as well go through passport control immediately. Penny thought to herself how easy it would be to turn away; they'd be none the wiser. Perhaps it would be for the best to go now because all of a sudden she wasn't entirely sure what had possessed her to make the trip anyway. It wasn't as if she had anything new to say. If she went now, she could catch the bus that would go to Lester direct. And she'd be home at just past her usual supper-time. It made sense. She didn't like cities and she disliked airports more. She'd come on a whim anyway, and perhaps it was common sense to turn on her heels and just go. She observed Cat, Fen and Pip from behind, thought how nicely cut their hairstyles were. Pip's neatly French-braided, Fen's light and loose, Cat's softly cropped. And then it struck her that, regardless of their colour being natural or not, she actually couldn't recall the hues of their childhood locks. Cat had been practically bald when she left anyway. But had Pip always had such beautiful glints of caramel? Had Fen's hair been spun with threads of gold from the start?

Something is catching in Penny's throat. And whatever it is has now transferred to her eyes and charged her tear ducts. Passport control is just yards away. And if she doesn't go now she'll have to say something. But if she goes now, she'll never see them again. Maybe that is for the best. They're fumbling with their tickets and passports. If they drop something, they'll see her. If they don't, they'll be gone from view in the next moment or two.

Pip is moving.

‘Wait!’ Penny cries.

The sisters turn. They turn and they stare. They weren't expecting to see Penny Ericsson again. Not at the airport. Certainly not with tears running down her face.

‘Hi,’ she offers them, ‘hi.’ She dips her head and sobs,
buries her face in her hands and half hopes that when she next looks up, these three girls will have gone.

But they're standing here still.

‘I,’ Penny falters, ‘I took the bus.’ It doesn't really mean much at all, but it is a short enough sentence for everyone to cope with. ‘I didn't know which flight you were on.’ This was true. ‘British Airways!’ she marvels, as if the airline is indicative of the girls' affluence. ‘Very nice.’

‘We're early,’ Cat says but though she's glanced at Pip, it seems her eldest sister has yet to find her voice.

‘Oh,’ Penny enthuses, ‘it's so good to be early. It's a great idea. You get the good seats, with the leg room. You get to shop and relax. Good for you. Good for you.’

‘Actually,’ Pip says, ‘we just want to be on our way. We just want to go home.’

Penny stops, a little startled. ‘I'm sure,’ she says, ‘I'm sure you do. To your families and your children.’

‘I don't have children,’ says Cat.

‘I have a stepchild,’ says Pip, ‘he's called Tom. He's nearly ten years old.’

‘He's a lucky, lucky boy,’ says Penny, with such feeling that some of it seeps over to Pip.

‘Thank you,’ Pip mumbles. ‘I feel I'm the lucky one, though.’

Penny is trembling visibly. ‘Anyway, I guess I'd better go,’ she says. ‘Just wanted to wish you a safe journey, and all.’ And she turns and starts to walk away.

‘Wait!’ Fen calls when Penny is precariously close to being beyond earshot. Penny stops and faces them again; this time they move towards her. Fen's hand baggage feels heavy, cumbersome; reason enough to walk slowly, with stilted gait. ‘Why did you come today?’ Fen asks, busy with the straps of her bag.

Penny is swiping away tears as if they're as irritating as
midges, she's rubbing at her nose as if something has gotten right up it. ‘Oh,’ she waves the air dismissively, ‘you know.’ But the look on Fen's face tells her that no, she doesn't know. Penny considers inventing a pal who works at the airport – but what a lame and crazy thing that would be to say. She falters, then she broadens her shoulders and nods emphatically. ‘I guess I just wanted to say I'm glad that you girls have had a good life.’

‘All things considered,’ Pip says bluntly, ‘yes, we have.’

‘You've been so well brought up,’ Penny compliments them.

‘That'll be Django,’ Fen says pointedly, ‘on account of our father's heart giving out not long after you'd gone.’

Penny frowns. She takes a moment, then she nods. ‘Yes, sure,’ she says, ‘his heart.’ She rocks gently on her heels, begins to talk with her hands in lieu of words. ‘I came here to find you,’ she says, her voice breaking, ‘to tell you I lied. I
lied
. I wanted you to know that, actually, I
have
thought about you. I have thought about you over the years, but in deep, dark privacy.’

Her daughters glance at each other and then regard her non-committally.

‘I was never made to be a mother and I never told Bob I was one,’ she confesses and she lets the huge fact hang, lets it resound in the departures hall; declared out loud and never to be denied. ‘I never told Bob,’ and she shook her head sadly at herself. ‘He never knew I had three daughters.’ She can see these three daughters of hers balk at this. ‘I met him when we were still living in Battersea – I'll bet you don't remember that house? The wallpaper on the ceiling in your room? Floral – yellowy beige? I hardly ever went beyond Battersea but I had to go to Victoria – there was a clinic there that I'd heard of, I guess now they call such places Well Woman or Family Planning. I wanted the pill. But when I
got there I just couldn't face going in. And I walked around and I was hot and upset and I went into a hotel and ordered Earl Grey tea. And Bob was there.’ She shrugs, as if it had been the simplest turn of events, as if he'd been waiting there for her all along. ‘There was Bob. That was it.’

Pip, Fen and Cat regard her. They don't have words just now.

Penny sighs. ‘Your life is the richer for having not had me – I assure you,’ she tells them, sounding quietly defiant. ‘But my life – my life has been the poorer.’ Her voice is now hoarse, as if the honesty has taken all her energy. She takes a moment and continues brightly, bravely. ‘Look at you!’ she marvels in a whisper that is sandpaper yet silk. ‘Look at you! Such very fine women. You beautiful beautiful girls.’

I'm so proud of you.
She mouths the words.
So proud of you.

Again, the sisters stand side by side but in their own closed-off spaces. Penny has no voice now. She presses her fists against her heart. She opens her mouth but no sound comes out. Her lips move and her daughters can read what she says.

My beautiful, beautiful girls.

Then she shrugs and begins to back away. She raises her hand in a small, motionless wave and forces her quivering lips into a semblance of a smile while she watches as Cat cautiously raises her hand too. Fen is gazing at her, tears slicking down her cheeks. Pip's head is downcast but she flickers her eyes up to meet her mother's and though there's wariness, there's no hostility now.

Finally, Penny has to turn. She has to go. The scamper and whirl of an international airport takes her away. She goes without telling them that actually their father died of liver failure because he was a drunk – and not heart failure
as they thought. It was her gift to them; to Django too. And it could also be part of her penance. She goes without telling them that she loves them, because she doesn't think they'd believe her and she didn't know herself until that morning when she rushed for the bus to Boston.

Red-Eye

The red-eye flights which leave the east coast of the US in the evening to arrive at the crack of UK dawn, offer a peculiar phenomenon of time travel. The flight isn't a long one but each hour it gains, as it races to catch up with GMT, is an hour lost in the lives of those on board. All around Fen, Cat and Pip, fellow travellers were desperate to sleep, eschewing the in-flight entertainment, the meals, to busy themselves with towelling socks and eye masks and fluorescent plugs of foam which, despite moulding and compacting, soon appeared to ooze uselessly out of their ears. Seats were cranked back to the maximum but still allowed only a paltry degree of recline, and small excuses for pillows were wedged around already cricked necks. With thin, static-creating blankets offering a little privacy, but not much in the way of warmth, passengers prayed for sleep and tried not to think that beyond those curtains boastfully closed at the front of the cabin those who never flew cattle class were prostrate under cotton-covered quilts and already fast asleep.

Though there had been an exasperating two-hour delay, and though it was now midnight in Vermont, or 5 a.m. GMT, the McCabe sisters couldn't sleep. Just then, time wasn't one
coast or the other, time wasn't passing in minutes or hours, nor was it night or day, not even yesterday or tomorrow, in this hinterland up in the sky. In a twilight zone of sorts, life seemed suspended at 40,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. A little like the sensation of jet travel itself. Allegedly, the plane's ground speed is over 600 miles an hour, yet everything feels quite still. It's the same with the sound of flying; it's a little like a dog whistle, neither noisy nor soundless but there, unmistakably, all the while.

In a dimmed cabin, illuminated sharply here and there with the overhead reading lights, the McCabe sisters sat. After thrashing around with the blanket and the pillow and the freebies that were meant to assist her flight experience, Cat now read Fen's magazine; the eye mask propped atop her head making chaos of her hair. Pip and Fen were doing the
Times
quick crossword, having shared the paper and pored over every page as though it was a link with a country they'd been far from for years.

‘
Makes world go round
,’ Fen mulled, ‘four letters.’