Home Truths

‘It’s odd,’ said Fen and then she stopped. ‘Nothing.’

‘What?’

‘It’s just that, having really thought of her so rarely, just recently I’ve thought of her more.’

‘Who?’

‘Our mother,’ Fen shrugged. ‘Now that I have my baby. I just can’t figure out how a mother can leave.’

‘That’s why we’ll all make grade A mummies,’ Cat said. ‘We’ll be automatically compensating for the fact that our mother was sub-Z grade.’

‘It struck me recently that the only person I’ve ever called “Mummy” is myself,’ Fen said. It quietly struck her sisters that they hadn’t called anyone ‘Mummy’ at all.

‘I can’t wait to be called Mummy,’ Cat said dreamily. ‘Do you realize I was pretty much Cosima’s age when our mother left?’

‘It’s only since having Cosima that maternal instincts, in all their crazy hormonal cladding, have made sense,’ Fen continued, ‘and to be honest, though previously I never much cared about her, it now makes me shudder. A woman ran off with a cowboy from Denver and left behind three girls under the age of four? How could she do it? How can a mother not have maternal instincts? It’s criminal. They’re chemical.’ Fen looked at her sisters. ‘I gaze at my daughter and I think of us three. Three tiny little girls. How could she have walked out?’

‘I reckon life would still have been better under Django than under her if she hadn’t left,’ Pip reasoned. ‘His maternal instincts more than made up for her lack of them.’

‘It never bothered me before, really, because there were never situations when we wished we had her,’ Fen reiterated quietly, ‘but now, recently, it’s made me utterly bewildered. Indignant too. That’s why I don’t like to be separated from Cosima. That’s why I hold her so tight.’ Pip and Cat regarded her and felt bad about before. ‘I don’t like missing a minute with her – not because I’m a hormonal fruit cake, though you probably think I am. But because, in my book, there cannot be such a thing as an overprotective mother.’

‘Do you want another?’ Cat asked Fen.

‘God no,’ said Fen, ‘this one’s gone to my head already.’

Cat laughed. ‘I meant another baby – not vodka.’

‘That would necessitate Matt and me having sex,’ Fen said glumly.

‘Oh God, does all that really go down the nappy-bin?’ Cat asked.

‘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.