Home Truths Page 28

  ‘Enough!’ Django slammed his hand against the worn wood of the table. ‘Enough. My name is Derek McCabe – it's a ghastly name and there should be a law against it. I have three daughters one of whom is biologically mine. I have cancer.’ He rose. ‘With regard to your blood lines, on my gravestone I want it said that I was a good father to my three girls,’ he almost bellowed. ‘You can punish me and condemn me for the details I withheld; put me in the proverbial stocks and pelt me with how rotten you think me. It was naive of me to believe I could protect you – but then all parents wish to protect their offspring so the whole bloody lot of us must be fools.’ He shoved his chair back. ‘You tell me – any of you – that our life thus far was not better for turning a blind eye to the finer facts of biology and fore-names.’ He smote the table. ‘Pip – you dish up, I need the lavatory. Bugger the Eton Mess and bugger my blasted bladder.’

  When Django came back after an infuriating and unsuccessful trip to the toilet, the Eton Mess was still intact, or as intact as a smash of meringue, gluts of fruit and great clods of cream defining this dessert can be. He looked around the table. Poor Ben, mortified, at the periphery of his comfort zone. The girls, looking glum, staring at their laps. Slowly, Pip stood up and Fen lifted her eyes and Cat raised her head a little. ‘It's your job,’ Pip said to Django with humility, ‘you're head of our family.’ And she held out the serving spoon. Before Django took it, he turned his attention to Fen, who could only mouth ‘Sorry’ on account of the choke of emotion tightening her throat. Then he looked to Cat, whose tears bounced on her plate like hailstones.

  ‘Don't do that, dear,’ Django chided her softly, ‘it's the best china. And the recipe does not call for salt. Just sweet things.’ A glance back at Fen and Pip showed their tears had started to fall too.

  ‘Dear God,’ Django exclaimed softly, ‘I'm about to do that ghastly Hollywood thing and tell you all how much I love you, how I never meant to hurt you.’

  Oh Christ – mass hysterics, thought Ben, we so don't do this in my family.

  Django went to Pip, took the serving spoon from her hand and embraced her tenderly; then went and stood behind Fen's chair and bent down to kiss her forehead over and again before pulling Cat to her feet and straight into the warmth of his bear-hug.

  But nor do we do this, Ben thought enviously and he moved quietly from the kitchen, taking his dessert into the garden, leaving the McCabes to their ways.

  Bolstered by brandy and heartened by After Eights, the girls shyly gathered around Django's armchair in the drawing-room, as if he was about to read a story though it was the truth only that they craved and that finally he was prepared to give. With the apologies and declarations of love now fulfilled, a spew of questions surfaced, though it was only Fen and Pip who could voice them.

  ‘Was it a shock, that she came back?’ asked Pip.

  ‘Yes and no,’ Django told them. ‘We've had no contact and yet I must admit to an inkling that at some point, she'd show up.’

  ‘Did he know?’ Pip pressed. ‘Our father?’ She glanced at Fen and then, apologetically, at Cat.

  ‘No,’ Django said emphatically, ‘he did not.’

  ‘So how can you be sure?’ Fen asked abruptly, having slipped her hand into Cat's.

  ‘Unlike me, my brother wasn't very good at maths,’ Django said nostalgically. ‘Perhaps I would have told him – when the dust had settled. When a little more time had passed. But life was back on an even keel – Battersea had been left, we were all happy here together. And within two years, he was gone.’

  ‘Is it really really as you've always told it?’ Fen asked, a little accusatorily.

  ‘It really really is,’ Django said.

  ‘About everything?’ Fen pressed. ‘About all of you?’

  Django nodded. ‘Though with hindsight, I suppose one can see that she was on this mission to find herself and all that transcendental nonsense which, in the 1960s, we simply accepted as right-on and far-out. Nowadays I reckon one would call her a crazy mixed-up kid.’ There was a pause as the girls tried to tag this description to the woman in her early fifties they'd met for the first time just over a month before.

  ‘Did you actually have an affair with her?’ Pip asked. ‘A love affair?’

  ‘No,’ Django admitted, ‘not technically.’

  ‘Just a fling,’ Cat commented sadly.

  ‘But did you love her?’ Fen asked, unnerved by the thought of a reckless one-night stand. She glanced at Cat but could not decipher the emotion that dulled her eyes.

  ‘In a make-love-not-war zeitgeisty kind of way – yes, I suppose I did,’ Django said and he could feel Cat's eyes burning into him. He looked at her and nodded again. ‘There was a lot of love around,’ he continued, ‘between everyone in those days.’

  ‘Did you think she'd come back?’ Pip asked. ‘At the time?’

  Django looked upset. ‘Of course I did!’ he declared. ‘Gracious, she had three beautiful beautiful babies.’

  ‘Did you think she'd come back for all of us?’ Fen pressed, squeezing Cat's hand and half hoping her sister would hear that she'd asked the question as much on her behalf as for herself.

  ‘Of course I did!’ Django said, a little impatiently. He paused and continued in a softer tone. ‘I was mortified that she'd left – but soon enough I dreaded her returning. I didn't want to lose you three. Especially not after my brother passed away.’

  ‘Was it a shock? When you realized about me?’ Cat asked. They were her first questions and her voice rang out. Django, Fen and Pip looked at her, though just then she remained unable to establish eye contact with any of them.

  ‘Well, yes it was. Goodness me, yes,’ Django told them all. ‘Although I didn't know until after she'd left. She told me in a letter. A letter that was unopened for days on end because I was so busy running around after you all.’

  ‘But why did she leave?’ Cat asked urgently. ‘Why did she leave us? Did she say? Do you still have the letter? Why didn't she come back for us? All of us?’

  What could Django do but shrug? What could he say but, ‘I don't know, girls. I don't have that answer. You'd really have to ask her that.’

  Time for Tests

  After an exhausted sleep in which thoughts of their mother and thoughts of cancer were banished, the family reconvened at the breakfast table where the cutlery could no longer be heard, but could be seen making swift work of the stack of panffles and maple syrup. The C word was now horribly anticipated, but none of the girls could bring themselves to articulate it. Yet it was the news of Django's cancer that had facilitated this return home and they were leaving later that day.

  Ben was acutely aware of this fact. And he was eager that the issue be broached with sufficient time to do it justice.

  ‘How are you feeling, Django?’ he asked, as conversationally as such a loaded question could possibly sound.

  ‘I had the most dreadful procedure on Friday, truly ghastly,’ Django replied in a similar tone, and he pointed his steak knife at Ben. ‘You medical men are an imaginative and sadistic lot. Pass the syrup. Thank you, Fen. They trussed me up, Ben, they trussed me up.’

  ‘A TRUSS?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Django regarded the girls. They'd stopped eating. They looked terrified. ‘As you know, I don't trust technology and I'm not one for all these new-fangled gizmos. It was a camera,’ he muttered, shaking his head, ‘at the end of a medical hosepipe.’ Fen laid her hand over his wrist. He gave a little shrug. ‘Not one for the family photo album,’ he said robustly.

  ‘You'll be fine,’ Pip said.

  ‘What's next?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Toast?’ Django offered. ‘Fresh tea?’

  ‘I meant for you, at the hospital, test-wise,’ Ben clarified.

  ‘Let's see – tomorrow, it's something about “ice”,’ Django said.

  ‘Isotope bone scan?’ Ben asked.

  ‘That's the one,’ said Django benevolently, as if he'd been quizzing Ben on his med
school revision. ‘It all sounds increasingly Ridley Scott to me.’

  The sisters stared at Ben intently.

  ‘OK,’ said Ben, ‘OK. I'm the doctor so you can all listen to me. The bone is perhaps the most common place for prostate cancer to spread to. This scan can detect abnormal areas of bone. A mild radioactive liquid is injected into a vein in the arm and because abnormal bone absorbs more than normal bone, the radioactive stuff shows up as highlighted hot spots.’

  ‘I could bag myself a role on Doctor Who,’ Django said brightly, ‘or audition as the new ReadyBrek boy.’ But Fen had now begun to cry. The sudden sound of her distress rang out the truth about Django's alarming situation. ‘Poppet,’ he tried to protest but when he looked over to Pip for assistance, he saw that she hid her face behind her hands and a glance at Cat showed her tears falling steadily if silently.

  ‘The scan is just diagnostic,’ Ben told them, his arm around Cat.

  ‘But what if it diagnoses horrible things?’ Fen sobbed. ‘We've only just got each other back. We want to rebuild our family, not have it taken away from us.’

  ‘I've always worried that the more they look for the more they find,’ Pip said, working hard not to let her voice crack.

  ‘Girls,’ said Django, ‘it's probably just a spot of the lurgy. I have all my faculties. I just cannot take a pissing leak.’ No one laughed. No one said, Language, Django.

  ‘Did they warn you that after the injection you have to wait a good two or three hours before the scan can be taken?’ Ben asked Django.

  ‘No,’ said Django, a little unnerved. ‘I can't remember. Perhaps they did.’

  ‘Nothing sinister,’ Ben assured him, ‘just a lengthy process – so take a book.’

  ‘I'll stay,’ Cat announced suddenly, decisively. ‘I have a day off tomorrow. I'll come with you, Django.’

  With the car packed and ready to leave later that day, Fen and Pip shuffled around and loitered, having final drinks of water and double-checking the rooms upstairs.

  ‘I could stay too,’ Pip offered.

  ‘And me,’ Fen added quietly though she was now desperate to see her baby.

  ‘Thank you,’ Django said, his hand at his heart, ‘but much as I love the image of arriving at the hospital with my entourage, my bevy of beauties, I think you two should be back with your families tonight.’ Pip asked him over and again if he was sure, and then she asked the same of Cat. Fen didn't want to ask if Cat and Django were sure because actually she was missing Cosima so much she felt sick.

  ‘I'll call, as soon as there's anything to call about,’ Cat told them, transformed into a capable nurse, currently in the arms of her doctor. ‘I'll call you anyway.’ While she hugged her husband, Fen and Pip said goodbye to Django.

  ‘Oh Django,’ Fen whispered, letting him make her feel better in his arms.

  ‘Behave,’ Pip told him, giving him the tight hug and brisk kiss to each cheek she gave to Tom when she took him to school. ‘Do what the doctors say.’

  ‘She's so bloody bossy,’ Django said to Fen.

  Fen suddenly felt great affection for her sister. ‘And we love her for it,’ she said. Pip looked a little embarrassed. Fen linked arms with her. ‘Sit in the back with me?’ she asked. ‘Even though Cat won't be in the front.’

  ‘I have dominoes tonight,’ Django tells Cat as they wave the others off.

  ‘Big Brother is on anyway,’ she tells him, ‘and you don't have a video recorder. Anyway, I'm all talked out for today.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Django, ‘me too.’

  They feel awkward but strangely excited to be in such close proximity, to have the opportunity to spend quality time, alone together. It is almost easy to forget the reason why Cat is staying on in Derbyshire.

  When she first saw the hospital the next morning, Cat was pleased that Django was having the tests done there and not in London. In contrast to the vertical sprawl of the London hospitals, and the unfriendly busyness of Ben's in particular, this place was welcoming. Set amidst dunes of neatly tended lawns, a series of low buildings constructed in the buff-coloured local stone sat peacefully and spaciously, a little like the sheep that grazed the hills just beyond the perimeter fence. Cat wanted to say how she hated hospitals, hated the smell, that they made her feel nervous, but wisely she changed her perspective and wittered on about the landscaping and the architecture instead.

  ‘Prince Charles opened it,’ she marvelled, reading from a brass plaque.

  ‘Well then!’ Django declared, implying the Royal Family wouldn't waste their time opening hospitals not at the cutting edge of medical excellence.

  It still smelt like a hospital, though. And the sights and sounds were indisputable too. The rubbery squelch of the staff's sensible shoes against highly sheened linoleum; the rumble of trolleys and the clatter of wheelchairs; the whistle and cheeriness of the porters ferrying patients. The universally familiar typeface pointing out departments. Cat wondered whether an element of acting was an integral part of a nurse's training. Like barristers. As if facts and procedures could be dressed up or played down through their performance. But the kindness of the matronly nurse who led Django through, delivered in broad Derbyshire vernacular replete with affectionate monikers, was genuine in its down-to-earthiness. She might as well have been serving him chips in a café in Matlock as preparing his arm for radioactive fluid. And whether Django had been seventy-five, seventeen or seven, she'd still have addressed him as ‘ducky’.

  And Django was injected. And the wait began. Initially, Cat eyed him vigilantly, as if she'd be able to detect when the liquid came across something sinister, but soon enough the tedium kicked in and disparate topics of conversation were mused over in varying degrees of detail. After they had spent ages trying to remember the various teachers at the girls' school, there was a lengthy and loaded silence.

  ‘Do you – did you ever – oh never mind,’ Cat mumbled but she dragged her eyes to Django.

  ‘Did I what?’ he asked her gently.

  ‘Doesn't matter. Nothing. Feel differently towards me than Fen and Pip?’ Cat whispered. Django took a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘It's just Fen says a parent's love for their child should, by definition, be supreme,’ Cat explained in a small, guarded voice.

  Django took time to answer. ‘Well, I must be an exception to the rule because I have never distinguished between the three of you.’ He paused. ‘Would you say that makes me a bad parent?’

  Cat twisted her fingers and wished she'd not veered from their mild and mundane nattering.

  ‘Did I distinguish between you?’ Django rephrased it. ‘Do you think I should have?’

  ‘I've always felt an equal,’ Cat qualified, ‘but it's difficult – it's difficult to wonder whether I shouldn't have. Whether I should have at least wondered.’

  Django turned in his chair to face her head-on, wincing as he moved. ‘Blasted ancient bones. Sometimes I've wondered, if your mother hadn't left, whether you'd have been told earlier.’

  Cat thought about this. ‘Would you have told me later, then – would you have told me ever, if she hadn't come back last month?’ Then she gestured around her. ‘With all of this now on the agenda?’

  ‘I,’ Django paused, ‘actually, no – I don't suppose I would. I don't know, Cat. With this cancer business, might I have told you?’ Django shook his head. ‘I don't know. What's important in all of this? I don't know. I sway from thinking it matters not one jot, to it mattering a lot.’

  Cat nodded but she didn't understand.

  ‘I would hate Fen or Pip to think I ever loved them less,’ Django said, sounding weighed down and tired, ‘because the truth is, I simply couldn't have loved any of you more.’

  Cat waited for the information to reach her brain, though she knew it might take a while longer, weeks, months even, for it to settle comfortably in her soul.

  ‘I suppose you girls ought to think of it as you are my daughter and they are my adopted daughters.’
Django paused. ‘Take Tom – he's about to have a baby brother or sister made by his mother and her new husband but I don't think he'll ever doubt that he's loved equally. And if Zac and Pip ever have a child, I can't imagine that Tom would feel they had more love for their offspring.’

  ‘I hear what you're saying,’ said Cat, rubbing her forehead. Over the last month she found she could only spend limited time on the subject before a headache encroached. She felt like a soaked sponge; she'd absorbed so much that she was clogged; if she wasn't careful much of the cherished information would start to leak because she did not have the capacity to hold so much, as yet. ‘So who was this Django Reinhardt?’ she asked, needing to veer off at a tangent.

  Django sighed, partly with relief, partly with pleasure, partly with comfort that this topic was one he could happily and knowledgeably discourse on for the duration of this radioactive trip.

  ‘Django Reinhardt was the stuff of legend,’ he began as if starting a biopic, his voice animated in contrast to the hush with which he'd previously spoken.

  ‘When are we talking?’ Cat asked.

  ‘Well, he was born in 1910,’ said Django, ‘to a gypsy family. He was a banjo prodigy by the age of nine, horribly burnt and partially paralysed by a fire in his caravan when he was eighteen.’ He checked to see that Cat looked suitably alarmed. ‘Because of his handicap, he had to invent a technique to play at all – he'd use a whalebone collar-stiffener as a plectrum and a two-fingered method with sudden explosions of strumming.’ Django gave a brief air-guitar demonstration, which made Cat laugh. ‘His discovery of jazz – and his friendship with Stephane Grappelli, the great violinist, resulted in a musical marriage which gave birth to a new sound. He wouldn't play tunes straight. Gypsy music delights in improvisation and embellishment so Django and Stephane would take the melody of a dance or song as a starting point – “Sweet Georgia Brown”, or “Jeepers Creepers”, or “Ain't Misbehavin”—’

  ‘I know those!’ Cat interrupted, feeling proud rather than embarrassed that other waiting patients appeared to be listening in now. ‘The house used to ring out with them.’