The McCabe Girls Complete Collection

by Freya North

  ‘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.’

  ‘Axis?’ Pip suggested.

  ‘A X I S,’ Fen spelt, somewhat unnecessarily, out loud. ‘It fits.’

  But it didn’t. Because 4 down had to be ‘pompous’ on account of 13 across being ‘Israel’.

  ‘Shit,’ said Fen, ‘something O something something. Makes world go round.’

  ‘Pole?’ Pip said, her mouth busy with a Murray Mint which, along with the round tin of boiled square sweets dusty with sugary powder, was confectionery she’d never normally choose yet always bought for travel.

  ‘Pole,’ Fen mused, ‘yes, I see. Like North and South. Well, it fits. I’ll put it in lightly.’ Her biro scribbled out A
I X and she wrote P L E in small, light, neat letters.

  ‘Poles don’t make the world go round,’ Cat piped up. ‘It’s gravity, isn’t it? What’s a four-letter word for gravity?’ They thought hard but had no answer.

  ‘Doesn’t the earth rotating have something to do with the moon?’ asked Fen ingenuously, never much of a scientist or astronomer. ‘That’s four letters, second letter O.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Pip challenged, ‘is there a question mark after the clue?’ Fen confirmed that there was. ‘Ah,’ said Pip, ‘then it’ll be a Funny. You know – not a straight answer.’

  They pondered what could make the world go round in only four letters, second letter O, that was amusing.

  ‘Got it!’ said Cat. ‘Money makes the world go round! D O S H.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Pip laughed, while Fen’s biro was poised, ready to scribble out and reinsert.

  ‘Let’s do 17 down instead,’ said Fen, ‘and come back to it.’

  A few clues later, they were still none the wiser. Something O something something. They gave up, and did a quiz in Cosmo instead: ‘Apron Strings or Fur-Lined Hand Cuffs – domestic dominatrix, or just dull?’ Maybe it was a quirk of altitude to reveal more at 40,000 feet than at ground level, but much to everyone’s surprise, it transpired Cat was the most adventurous of the lot, even by Cosmo standards.

  Pip shared out her powdered sweets. ‘Love!’ she suddenly proclaimed. ‘L O V E. LOVE makes the world go round. Second letter O.’

  ‘Genius,’ Cat declared, ‘love makes the world go round.’

  ‘Love makes the world go round,’ Fen nodded, writing in the letters to complete the puzzle. ‘It would be nice if it did,’ she said thoughtfully. She looked from sister to sister and shrugged sadly.

  It was probably that quirk of altitude again, of being neither here nor there in time or space; the opportunity of this strange non-Newtonian moment. ‘Do you know what I think?’ Cat said, leaning in from her window seat to regard Fen. ‘I think that you’re a bit too in love with the fantasy of being in love.’ Fen looked taken aback. ‘Remember that Shakespeare sonnet you read at my wedding? About love not changing?’

  ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,’ Fen quoted softly.

  ‘Well, you see old Will may be a genius in some respects – all that iambic pentameter and a zillion plays – but actually, I think he was wrong with the Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds bit.’ Cat paused as if she was guilty of the most appalling blasphemy. ‘People do change and love has to change with them; it’s logical that the process of love goes through changes too, and we have to adapt.’ She stopped to give a little shrug. ‘I think you’re probably frustrated that you don’t feel that heady rush for Matt any more, that the butterflies don’t rampage around your stomach every time you look at him or he touches you. That instead of floating around the still point of the turning world you now trip over toys strewn over the floor and argue at midnight over whose turn it is to stack the dishwasher.’

  Fen’s downcast eyes revealed this was obviously the case.

  ‘But I think you’ve misread the situation as having fallen out of love with Matt,’ Cat defined. ‘You just need to put on your glasses and read it a little more carefully. I read somewhere that being in love is just a cocktail of chemicals which course through the body for the first twelve months – natural amphetamines. Which is why the sensation is so addictive.’

  Quietly, Pip wondered when her little sister had become so wise, but then she had to consider that Cat was thirty-two years old and married to Ben. And she’d lived abroad, not knowing a soul, for four years, striding out in an alien territory, finding friends and making a happy life for herself. She smiled at her fondly.

  ‘Matt gets on my nerves,’ Fen was admitting sadly, drawing Pip’s attention back. ‘He irritates me. In that stupid, clichéd, lid-off-the-toothpaste kind of way. I think I’ve always known that Matt is the one, but for a while, one wasn’t enough.’

  ‘You’re bored,’ Pip defined.

  ‘Our life is boring,’ Fen agreed. ‘I think I’m boring. I’m a woman of no substance. And you’re right about the dishwasher, Cat.’ It felt safe to talk, as if what was to be said would stay there, in no man’s land, in no time, sealed in a bubble of altitude. Fen looked from one palm to the other. Talking out loud verified the situation; but it made her feel both a little disloyal to Matt, yet greedy for support. ‘I’ve gone off sex with him,’ she admitted, ‘it’s so predictable. I have to shut my eyes and fantasize. But that stupid thing with Al – it wasn’t about sex, it was about me being bored and feeling hard done by because of it.’

  ‘I think we have too high expectations of sex,’ Pip suggested. ‘Our society is over-sexualized. Something essentially private has become so public – all those sex scandals to read about, from politicians to pop stars, emblazoned everywhere, from the red-tops to the broadsheets, from Heat magazine to Marie-Claire. What was seedy and underworld has become everyday. Sex shops on the high street. Pole dancing and Pilates sharing gym space. Porn now a middle-class pastime. Desperate Housewives. Footballers’ Wives.’ She gave a shrug. ‘It’s easy to think everyone’s having more sex, better sex, than you.’

  ‘Well I still fancy Ben,’ Cat confided, making it personal, ‘but I constantly fantasize. God, if I open my eyes when we’re having sex, I’m quite surprised to see him, my husband, not Johnny Depp. Or a Viking. Quite disappointed, actually.’

  ‘A Viking?’ Fen shrieked.

  ‘Sometimes I leap forward a few centuries and allow Henry the Eighth to overpower me in the maze at Hampton Court,’ Cat admitted and she was absolutely serious, ‘codpieces, serving wenches – the lot.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Cat!’ Pip marvelled.

  ‘Don’t tell Ben.’

  ‘So you’re advising me not to close my eyes and think of England,’ Fen mused, ‘but of Nordic pillagers and fat dead monarchs?’

  ‘Whatever takes your fancy,’ Cat nodded with a wink. ‘Actually, what I’m saying is you have the power to improve your sex life.’

  ‘Is that a quote from Cosmo?’ Pip asked. Cat stuck out her tongue. Pip raised her eyebrows and turned again to Fen. ‘And on a purely practical level, your life simply can’t be the same as it once was, not now there’s a baby added to the equation.’ Fen looked at her sharply. ‘Because you’re a perfectionist, Fen, it follows that you’re not very tolerant,’ Pip defined diplomatically. ‘I mean, in some respects it’s great to have such high standards, but in others it’s your biggest hindrance.’

  Cat nodded. ‘You’re a brilliant mother and Cosima is a credit to you, but if Pip, or I, or Matt don’t dress her or feed her or play with her or put her down quite like you do, it doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong – just differently. And your way probably is better – but that doesn’t mean we’re doing it badly—’

  ‘And Cosima doesn’t seem to mind,’ Pip added, ‘as long as she’s dry, fed and cuddled.’

  Fen, sitting between them, momentarily felt persecuted. But she couldn’t flounce off because there wasn’t the leg room. And she couldn’t block her ears with the foamy plugs because she’d already dropped them on the floor. She’d just have to sit still and work out how to lessen her discomfort. A little shift, here and there. ‘Deep down, I know,’ she said at length. ‘Deep down I think it’s a matter of identity and how mine has changed – beyond my belief and beyond my control. An identity crisis, if you like. Suddenly, I’m a stay-at-home mum.’ She stopped abruptly and stared at the clasp on the drop-down tray. ‘I don’t think it suits me,’ she said quietly. Her sudden honesty, her clarity of her situation, surprised Cat and Pip. ‘I was never a thrustingly ambitious career woman,’ Fen said, a little wistfully, ‘but I did love work, and my role, and my world in which I excelled. God, I used to be asked to lecture at the Tate Frigging Gallery! I’ve had papers published! I have a double distinction at Masters level from the Courtauld Institute!’ She stoppe
d abruptly. ‘How can I say all this – with such longing?’ she whispered aghast. ‘It’s a terrible insult to my little baby.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ Pip said cautiously, ‘it’s about you – not Cosima. Not Matt. You only think Matt is boring because actually you find your life now a little dull in comparison to how it was. And because you perceive that to be a loaded thing to admit, so you pass the buck and shift the blame.’ Pip could see from the wince on Fen’s face that the nail had been hit square on the head. ‘But a fling is not the answer,’ she continued sternly. ‘It’ll only make you feel worse. You need a deeper embrace – and to feel it, you need to embrace what you do have.’

  ‘I know, I know. God, I can’t believe I tried to liven it up by fooling around with that idiot, Al,’ Fen said darkly.

  ‘Don’t call Al an idiot,’ Cat now joined in, ‘it’s not his fault. He didn’t know. It was about you. He was just the antithesis of Matt. That was the initial attraction for you – and ultimately, his downfall too. Thank God.’

  Fen dropped her head at the weight of the truth. She nodded sadly. ‘It wasn’t so much that I felt bad about myself, more that I’ve lost sight of who I am. I wanted to feel more than just Cosima’s mother. No one looks at me any more – when I open the door to you, or Matt – whoever – you don’t even look at me; attention is focused downwards, to where Cosima is. I don’t want attention taken from her, my God she’s so amazing she’s worthy of day-long marvelling – but I feel I’ve ceased to exist beyond being her mummy. And after that, I’m Matt’s long-term partner. So where’s Fen gone?’ She stopped, as if about to physically search. ‘Can she still hold her own? I suppose that’s what I went looking for with Al. A little excitement that came not from Matt, not from Cosima. Something naughty but essentially harmless that would make me feel good.’