Home Truths (49 page)

Fen snuggled up to Matt later that night. She knew if he kissed her forehead and then kissed the bridge of her nose immediately after, he was feeling horny. If he kissed her forehead twice in succession, he was tired. If he kissed it once, and kissed nowhere else, there was something on his mind. Two kisses it was: one to her forehead and one to the bridge of her nose.

‘Wait!’ she giggled a whisper and slipped out of bed, tiptoeing from the room which, in an old creaky house like
that on Farleymoor, was a pointless exercise really, laughably futile actually. Matt grinned in the dark. What on earth was she up to? He was full – dear God don't let her be raiding the fridge for whipping cream. Or ketchup. Fen returned and padded back to the bed. She ripped back the quilt and straddled Matt, his hands on her hips as he attempted to lever her into position.

‘Oh no you don't!’ she chided, twisting her body away from him. The room was extremely dark, there was no moon, no street lamps, no night lights. ‘Merry Christmas, big boy,’ Fen whispered coyly and Matt could feel something caressing his balls, tickling up and down the shaft of his cock. His pelvis rocked in response to his desire. What was it? A feather? Some as yet unidentifiable foodstuff? Something from under the Christmas tree?

‘Ouch!’ That didn't feel so nice, it felt as though his prick had been pronged, something scratching his balls. ‘What the fuck
is
that?’ he asked.

‘Mistletoe, silly,’ Fen giggled, ‘it's Christmas.’

‘How do you feel?’ Zac asked Pip, who was sitting bolt upright in bed, staring straight ahead, while he wrapped Tom's presents on the end of the bed.

‘A bit indigestiony,’ Pip admitted.

‘Nothing that a nice mug of Bisto couldn't cure?’ Zac asked. ‘Would you like me to make you a mug? I have to go downstairs to nibble the biscuits Tom left for Father Christmas.’

‘Oh Zac, would you?’ Pip said gratefully. ‘You won't mind it stinking the room out?’

‘How can I mind,’ Zac said, ‘when Santa's bought me a Rolex Oyster?’

‘But Santa hasn't bought you a Rolex Oyster,’ Pip told him sadly.

‘I'm teasing,’ Zac said. ‘I don't believe in Santa. But do you think you could make your next craving camomile tea or something?’

Pip sipped her gravy and Zac wrapped presents. Pip marvelled how someone so precise with figures and percentages could make such a hash of papering a parcel. ‘Zac,’ she said, ‘fold in, fold in, turn up. Here, hold my gravy, I'll do it.’

‘Can you believe this time next year a little person will be celebrating Christmas with us?’ Zac mused.

Pip smiled. And then she felt very sad. ‘I pray that we'll
all
be here,
all
of us.’

Zac took her hand. ‘He looks well, I thought. No different to when we were here a month ago.’

‘He seems tired, though, don't you think?’

‘Christmas is a tiring business,’ Zac levelled, ‘when you're making it for a big family. He seems very happy, to me.’

Tom and Cosima were sharing Cat's old bedroom. Cat and Ben weren't staying at the house at Farleymoor. They now had their own little house in Darley Dale, just twenty minutes away. But they would be back in time for breakfast with the family the next morning.

‘Funny isn't it?’ Cat says, jolting Ben from the verge of slumber.

‘Hysterical,’ he murmurs sleepily, hoping if he agrees she'll say no more and let him drift off to sleep.

‘What's hysterical?’ Cat asks and with all the movement on the mattress and rearrangement of the duvet, Ben can sense she's propped herself up and is staring hard at the back of his head.

He rolls onto his back with a sigh. Then he turns towards her. ‘Are you about to put the light on?’

‘Yes,’ says Cat, doing just that. ‘What's hysterical?’

‘What's funny?’ Ben counters.

Cat is diverted. ‘Oh. I just meant it's funny how everyone is up at the house, and you and I are snuggled up here. Yet this – more than any place I've ever known – this is home. This is my home.’

Ben wonders why this is funny. But he swiftly decides not to ask.

‘It's also funny how I thought I had everything meticulously planned – and this time last year Darley Dale was way off my map,’ Cat says, beguilingly incredulous. ‘Isn't it funny how a year of chaos can actually organize itself into the life that's right? Totally be beyond one's control.’ She pauses and then smiles, her eyes closing with the surge of emotion. ‘I love this place,’ Cat enthuses. ‘I
love
this place, Ben. I know it's higgledy-piggledy and the water is sometimes brown and there's that damp problem in the sitting-room and you clonk your head on the beam in the hallway and this bedroom is barely big enough to take our bed – but I love this place passionately. I can't believe anyone other than us has ever lived here. It's our
home
.’

‘I don't mind that beam,’ Ben says, ‘and we do have a preposterously large bed.’

‘It's about full circles, I suppose,’ Cat muses, hovering the palm of her hand lightly over the surface of his cropped, silver-flecked hair to get that velvety feel. ‘Because you see it's only now that I know I could never have settled here – less than five miles from my childhood home – unless I'd done the London thing as a single girl and then had a stint out in Colorado as a newly-wed and then returned to the UK all blasé about what was best for us. And the whole time I was destined to be here. It's
here
that I feel my most centred.’

Ben smiles at her. ‘Welcome home,’ he says lovingly.

‘I suppose it's a similar thing with Django,’ Cat muses, to herself as much as to her husband. ‘I couldn't love him as
unconditionally as I do now – had I not had that dreadful period of absolutely loathing him.’

Ben is pleased finally to have the opportunity to elaborate. He's waited for this opening since the day after Django's party. ‘And perhaps you couldn't have come this far in accepting the woman on your birth certificate had you not gone out to find her, stood right there in her territory and felt OK about her and, most importantly, felt good about yourself,’ Ben says. ‘Our parents do define us. And if we like ourselves, then it means that they're not so bad after all.’

Cat is thoughtful. ‘You're so wise,’ she says and she gazes at him with dreamy affection.

‘And hunky,’ Ben adds with a frown.

Cat biffs him with a pillow. She wriggles back down and settles her head into her pillow with a tired, happy sigh. ‘Merry Christmas, Dr York,’ she says and she touches his cheek.

‘Merry Christmas, babe,’ he says.

‘Boys,’ Django said late morning after the mountain of ripped wrapping paper and redundant packaging had been cleared away, the presents stacked into individual piles at well-spaced positions around the room, ‘why don't you go for a blow-through. The girls are going to help me with the lunch. Cosima, you can be an honorary boy.’

‘Turtle,’ Cosima cooed, which had been her first word and remained her favourite.

‘You can be an honorary turtle then, poppet,’ Django said. ‘Tom, you can lead the expedition. You can take my gnarled old cane – no, not that one. That one is from Selfridges. The other one – it was given to me when I was trekking in Tibet. If anyone can unearth its mystical powers, it's you.’

They stood on the flagstone doorstep, Django and his girls, and waved the party on their way; Tom stomping off at a good pace, the men following behind, Cosima sitting proud on her Uncle Zac's shoulders while Ben picked up one pink welly and Matt the other.

‘Shall I lay the table?’ Pip said.

‘I usually do that,’ said Fen.

‘We'll do the table later, I need you three in the kitchen with me.’

They are in the kitchen, humming to a CD of Christmas carols that Fen bought from the motorway services. There is food on every available surface, including the window sill and the top of the fridge, and the
Times Atlas of the World
is lain across an opened drawer to provide another surface still.

‘Now I want you to know, that the thing to remember about parsnips is they're plain. They even look plain. If you enliven something plain, you forget it was plain in the first place. Like Plain Jane at school – pop a lovely hair band on her
et voilà
.’ The girls give each other their secret
he's-nuts
look that they've honed over the years to being all but imperceptible to anyone else. ‘And so it is with parsnips,’ Django continues. ‘Ginger is the key. I always add a little ginger to parsnips. Ginger root, mind you, not that powdered excuse.’

‘God, I quite feel like chewing ginger root,’ Pip murmurs.

‘Well, if there's any left, you can,’ says Django. ‘And I always like to use this knife for the parsnips. And I find this angle works best. You try, Cat. Now you, Fen. Pip – your turn. Good stuff.’

The girls break into a pseudo-operatic chorus of fa-la-las for ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’ and Django conducts them momentarily with the soup ladle before noticing the time. ‘Carrots and broccoli,’ he says. ‘There's a secret here and it's
to do with texture. Broccoli can be alarmingly woolly – but I find if you add a little lemon juice to the water in which you steam it,
pas de problemo
!’

The girls nod earnestly and then sing along with ‘Good King Wenceslas’.

‘Carrots!’ Django declares above their din. ‘Brown sugar elevates this humble but highly hued vegetable above its common status as horse fodder.’ The girls keep singing but they give him the thumbs up.

‘Have you a secret for sprouts that stops them smelling like farts?’ Cat giggles.

‘Catriona!’ Django objects. ‘We don't do sprouts in this family.’ The girls consider this. It was true. ‘I think I'll sit down for a moment,’ Django says and makes his way, a little falteringly, to the chair.

The girls hurry round.

‘Are you OK?’

‘What's the matter?’

‘What can we do?’

‘I'm fine,’ says Django, ‘it's just the excitement.’

‘But you look in pain,’ Pip says.

‘Just a few aches and gripes,’ Django says. ‘Don't read into it – I
am
seventy-five. What did I want to say? Ah yes, roast potatoes. Roast potatoes.’

And it suddenly strikes the girls hard in their hearts that, actually, they're not helping Django prepare Christmas dinner. This isn't a cookery lesson. This is not about this Christmas or past Christmases, this is about Christmases yet to come. This is the passing down of family recipes, the imparting of knowledge, the handing over of experience and quirks, the conveying of preference and methods in the sincerest hope that family traditions will continue. The room rings far louder with the resonance of this, the solemnity of such responsibility, than it does with ‘Silent Night’.

‘Don't cry,’ Pip whispers to Django who is dabbing his eyes furiously.

‘I'm not crying, darling,’ he says, ‘it's just the onions. It's just the onions. The buggers. When it comes to onions, my advice is to suck a spoon and chop them in water.’

With the children sound asleep upstairs, their new favourite toys propped up on the bedside tables so that they can be viewed and adored on waking, downstairs it is time for the McCabe yuletide tradition of The Great Ring Round. This is the one occasion in the calendar when Django McCabe cannot be prised off the telephone and it is the one day when the telephone company realizes he is a viable customer after all. Bibi is phoned in Paris, Toni is phoned on the shores of Squam Lake, Rayner is rung in Sausalito. They call Babs Chorlton down the road and then Jim McKenzie up in Glasgow. Django bestows Christmas cheer and chatter before passing the caller to Pip, Fen and Cat; going through the ages, over the years. Gregor and Ferdy stay on the phone for over half an hour. The Merifields laugh and say, Why are you phoning us, McCabe, we'll see you tomorrow for Boxing Day drinks. Django shouts down the phone to make himself heard to Vauxhall Vinnie who is now rather deaf. This year, sadly, there are no Bebop Boys left to phone. Joe and Jack go through their own tradition of asking the McCabe girls to tell them about each and every present and what exactly it does. Everyone adds the word ‘healthy’ in wishing Django a happy new year.

‘I'm all talked out,’ says Cat, popping an After Eight into her mouth.

‘I don't think Joe and Jack quite got what an iPod is all about,’ says Pip, ‘though personally, I thought I explained it pretty well.’

‘It was so nice to speak to Bibi,’ says Fen. ‘I don't think I've spoken to her since your birthday.’

‘Just one more phone call,’ Django declares, to groans all round, ‘then I promise you, I'll put the thing in the broom cupboard.’

‘But we've done everyone,’ Pip declares.

‘I thought we might phone your mother, actually,’ says Django. The girls fall silent. It's one thing to honour the requests of a dying man, to learn his way with roasting potatoes, it's another to agree to a potentially bad idea. But Django reads their minds. ‘It's not a bad idea,’ he says quite firmly, ‘it's the right thing to do.’

Penny had refused Marcia's invitation to Christmas lunch; it was her first on her own and she wanted to spend it at home, not for any maudlin self-indulgence, but because she and Bob had never made a big fuss about Christmas anyway.

She is eating her lunch, direct from the foil container, when the phone rings.

‘That'll be Marcia,’ Penny murmurs, ‘hoping to change my mind. Well I've eaten now – but perhaps I will join them for cards this evening.’ She walks over to the phone.

‘Hullo?’

‘Penny? It's Django.’

‘Django?’

‘In England. United Kingdom. Derek McCabe.’

‘No – no, Django is fine. Django is good. My
goodness
.’

‘I'm phoning long-distance – can you hear me?’

‘Yes, I can hear you. I can hear you just fine.’

‘We're all here, all of us, in Derbyshire, as per usual. We thought we'd give you a tinkle. To wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.’

Penny is speechless. But being speechless scares her because she knows Django hates telephones and he might misconstrue
it as a fault on the transatlantic line. She must speak. She must. ‘My,’ she says, ‘my. That's very nice of you. I wish you a merry Christmas too. You – plural.’