Home Truths - Freya North

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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.

      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.

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