by Freya North
Penny could have gone home. Hubbardton’s Spring was pretty much equidistant from Ridge where Fountains was, and Lester Falls where she lived. But it was a fine afternoon. And there was nothing to do at home. And still there were hours until bedtime. Anyway, perhaps Juliette didn’t work Sundays. And with the trails now fully open, the parlour would be fuller anyway. Though there were more cars parked along the way, people were obviously out and about on the trails because Fountains was no busier than when Penny had last been in.
‘Well look who it is,’ said Juliette, rushing to the counter to have Gloria load a taster spoon with Coffeebanoffee. ‘So good to see you!’ she told Penny. ‘Sit! How was your trip?’ Juliette’s mousy little face, with her generous smile and button-black eyes, was alert with anticipation and affection. Penny fixed a beatific smile to her face which she hoped would tell the girl all she could possibly want to know. And shut her up. She sat at the table and chided herself for not ordering her ice cream to go; for coming here in the first place.
Juliette returned with the sundae and loitered, waiting for Penny to engage her in conversation or even invite her to sit. But Penny appeared not to notice her, so engrossed was she in a leaflet she’d picked up outside the gallery in Hubbardton’s Spring. When Penny noticed that Gloria was busy serving at the counter and Juliette had gone through to collect orders, she left the parlour and her uneaten sundae.
‘Hey – Penny? Wait up.’
Penny turns to see Juliette hurrying down the street, with her sweet smile and a warm wave and something held aloft in her other hand.
‘Hey Penny,’ says Juliette, a little breathless, ‘here. You hardly ate a bite.’ She hands Penny a polystyrene block encasing the tubbed-up leftovers of her sundae. Juliette regards her, tilts her head, frowns a little whilst smiling. A contradiction in terms, Penny thinks to herself, like so much of life.
Love blossoming from a bad seed.
‘You crying?’ Juliette seems perturbed.
Penny touches her cheeks and swipes away the tears.
‘I don’t know whether our relationship was blessed or doomed,’ Penny announces and is helpless to stem the flow of words streaming out. ‘I try and defend my actions, I try to justify that I was young, that it was the 1960s, that I was a crazy mixed-up kid, that I wasn’t in love with Nicholas anyway. But actually, what Bob and I did was wrong. Love blossomed from a bad seed – it screwed with the lives of others.’ She stops abruptly, gasping a little.
‘I think you have it wrong, Penny,’ Juliette says with a caring tilt to her head. ‘It’s not your fault Bob died – and it’s not your fault that you guys fell in love,’ and she touches Penny’s arm tenderly.
Penny feels surprisingly irritated. How bizarre to feel the need to defend the bad in herself. ‘But my dear, you really don’t know me,’ she protests in an accent more English than at any time over the last three decades.
‘Sure I don’t know the ins and outs – who does? But I’m a good judge of character,’ Juliette says, a little defensively, ‘and I sense you and Bob shared something beautiful.’
‘We did,’ Penny says flatly, ‘but at a high price. And I’m sorry, Juliette, but you are not a particularly good judge of character – you have me all wrong.’
‘Great love isn’t given to those not worthy of it,’ Juliette says. Then she quickly regards her feet and looks a little bashful. ‘That’s a song lyric by my favourite band, actually. But it says what I believe. You were lucky, you and Bob. You were blessed.’ She looks up and gives Penny, who is glowering, a little grin.
‘But those around us weren’t,’ Penny says stonily. ‘Juliette honey, I’m tired and I just want to drive home.’
‘Sure, sure,’ says Juliette, but still she loiters. ‘It’s just I didn’t like to hear you say you were a bad seed – you’re not, you’re what me and my mom call a good egg.’
Suddenly, Penny is disconcerted that her words have been listened to so earnestly but that the impression they’ve given is erroneous. And that this sweet young girl, troubled by the death of a useless alcoholic father, should have Penny so wrong too. Penny might once have been wryly amused at being glorified, but just now it seems immoral.
‘You draw a picture only from what you’ve heard,’ Penny tells Juliette. ‘Believe me there’s a whole bunch of stuff you wouldn’t want to know.’
Juliette looks a little taken aback. ‘But I like you.’
‘Juliette,’ Penny says, scrunching her eyes shut against the headache of it all, ‘if I told you I had three daughters – whom I abandoned when the youngest was just a baby, would you believe me? Would you like me then?’
Juliette balks. What a weird question. ‘Of course I wouldn’t believe you,’ she says.
‘Well, I did,’ Penny declares hoarsely. ‘I did the unbelievable, OK? I walked out on three little girls. And you know something, I actually never regretted it. Now you stand there and tell me that the love I had with Bob was a good thing. You stand there and tell me I’m not a bad seed. You tell me you like me now.’
‘But—’
‘I’m no better than your father – in fact I’m worse. He treated you bad when he was drunk and in some ways not accountable for his behaviour. I walked out on my children when I was stone cold sober.’
Juliette stares; disbelief and hurt and horror striating her face. Penny perversely welcomes the scorch of shame which cuts through her. ‘You know what,’ Penny mutters, ‘I have to go.’ And though Juliette stands there motionless, dumb-struck and bereft, Penny walks the short distance to her car, dumps the polystyrene container in a trash-can on the way and drives off without a backward glance.
What is one more person hating her? What is one more person to have let down? Join the queue, Juliette, join the queue.
Penny is still awake in the early hours of the next morning. She’s sitting in the dark, in Bob’s chair, wondering why. In the last twelve hours, she’s said goodbye to Bob at the vantage point near Hubbardton’s, she’s revealed the ugly truth of her life to Juliette and she’s re-recorded the answering-machine message. So why does she feel so anxious and fretful? Why is there no sense of peace, of relief, of lightness, of that oft-bandied term closure?
Penny knows why. She can’t achieve closure because the door cannot yet be shut. It is jammed with issues she must confront and own, see in black-and-white in the clear light of day, acknowledge out loud. Where she’d gone that previous afternoon, what she’d spoken of to Juliette, what she’d recorded into the answering machine, were single strands in a knot of loose ends which need to be untied.
STRAY CAT BLUE
Ben hadn’t asked Cat what she was going to do on her day off which, this week, fell on a Wednesday. He hadn’t asked and she hadn’t mentioned it because he seemed a little distracted anyway, somewhat stressed. He was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through the newspaper as if every item of news irked him.
‘Everything OK, doctor?’ she asked, handing him a mug of coffee and then giving his neck a quick rub.
‘What? Oh, fine,’ said Ben. ‘It’s probably going to be a bit of a full-on day, babe. I may be home late.’
‘I’ll have your pipe and slippers waiting,’ she laughed, stroking his closely cropped hair; the flecks of grey catching glints of silver as she did so.
‘That’s my girl,’ he said.
‘Although you may have to fetch your slippers yourself – I might be late home too,’ Cat said.
‘Oh? Staff meeting or something?’ said Ben.
Cat shook her head. ‘It’s my day off,’ she said. She took a seat beside him, pulled the chair close so their knees touched. He looked at her: her cheeks were a little flushed, her eyes flitted with whatever she was on the verge of saying. She gave a quick shrug. ‘I’m going to go to Derbyshire. Just a day-trip.’
Ben stared at her, fighting hard to keep horror from his face. He must not let his dismay show. He must say nothing. He must smile and nod and instead say, Wow, babe, wow.
He must fight the urge to say, Don’t! You can’t! Not today, Cat! He can’t warn her that today’s not a good day for a round trip to Derbyshire. Because then she’d ask why. And he couldn’t say, Because Django’s coming to see me. Because, as a doctor, he was bound by the Hippocratic oath. And anyway, just look at her, all flushed with the supreme effort of arriving at such a proactive and possibly tough course of action. How much late-night thinking had she done to come to this decision? How much soul-searching had she accomplished to be ready to go home and face her father? Ben loved her so much for her courage and her reckoning, but as full as his heart was for her, it bled for her too. Ben had been so anxious that Django might not make this trip – but suddenly he was hoping this would be the case precisely. Ben felt torn and compromised. He’d made the appointment on Django’s behalf and without Cat’s knowledge because he was worried about Django. Because he had thought it was the right thing to do. Just now, though, he wondered what right he had at all. He felt quite sick.
‘What?’ Cat said, her eyes darkening to khaki as her brow furrowed and she regarded Ben anxiously. ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’ She looked crestfallen, her lips pouting inadvertently.
‘It’s an amazing idea,’ Ben assured her, though his instincts goaded him otherwise. ‘I’m so proud of you. Sorry – I’ve just got stuff on my mind. Sodding politics with the Trust and the NHS. Budgets. Funding. Targets. Sorry.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Cat, ‘but you do think I should go, don’t you? It’s not so much a gut instinct I’m acting on – my gut is in a knot right now – it’s a carefully considered decision. The timing seems good to me. It feels like it’s the right thing to do.’
‘Have you told your sisters?’ Ben asked. ‘Are you going alone?’
‘I am going alone,’ Cat said, with slow, awkward nods. ‘I haven’t asked them along. I haven’t actually told them I’m going.’ She looked a little unnerved, trying to find twists of hair to bind around her finger though mostly it was too short and quickly sprung free. ‘Do you think I should have told them? Or asked them along?’
‘Not if you don’t want to,’ Ben told her while his mind sped through a variety of plausible suggestions to dissuade her from going. But it was too complicated. He needed more time to figure it all out. But Cat needed his advice. Now. ‘This particular side of the story is yours,’ he told her. ‘You need to act on what feels right.’
‘It’s a rare old thing for me not to feel I have to analyse such a momentous decision with Pip and Fen first,’ Cat said. ‘I was proud of myself for having arrived at it on my own.’
‘I’m proud of you, too,’ Ben repeated. ‘You’ll be even more proud of yourself when you step down from the train at Chesterfield station.’ And he wondered whether he should be phoning Django and alerting him. Ben’s sense of duty, always hailed as one of his key qualities, was today giving him a headache. He rubbed his eyes. Not a good sign to feel this knackered at only breakfast-time. He suddenly loved his own family for being so conventional and dull. He must phone his mother, it was a good couple of weeks since he’d done so. He wouldn’t phone Django. He couldn’t. Ultimately, it wouldn’t be fair on Cat. He rapidly justified that his duty to Cat was partly to ensure that Django kept the appointment he’d made for him.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to say,’ Cat was saying, ‘but I feel ready to talk. To listen. I just need to make sense of my past, Ben. I feel in limbo until I do.’
Ben put his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her face close for a kiss. ‘I hope you have a good day, babe,’ he said. ‘I hope it feels good to go back there, whatever you hear or don’t.’
‘Thanks,’ said Cat. ‘If you wait, I’ll walk to the Tube with you.’
We know Django won’t be there. But Cat spent the train journey alternately smiling and frowning as various scenarios came into her mind’s eye. She even laughed out loud at a fanciful scene in slo-mo, she and Django running down the platform into each other’s arms. Daft. She hadn’t even tried the Farleymoor number from her mobile phone, let alone announced her visit to him in advance. She didn’t want to give him a shock though she knew he’d be taken off guard. She anticipated his initial concern would be that he hadn’t prepared anything special for lunch. What was she going to ask him? What did she hope to learn? She gazed out of the window and watched the landscape rush past, slip seamlessly from one landscape into another. The flatness of the South-East, the uniformity of the Midlands, soon enough the rolling promise of the Derbyshire Dales.
She thought about phoning from the station. Then she thought about phoning from the cab. But soon enough she was within ten minutes of the house and if she phoned now, the adrenalin coursing through her would surely give her voice little more than a whisper. The house came into view, sitting solid and squat in the grounds, as indigenous to the locality and as comfortable in the landscape as the moor-land ponies or hardy little sheep.
‘Just here is fine,’ she told the cab-driver. She needed the walk up the drive to take deep breaths, plucking at the ivy which clustered along the drystone wall. If Django wasn’t looking out of the window, she’d have the chance to stand awhile on the doorstep and collect her thoughts. As she walked up the path to the front door, she could only fix her sight on her feet. Her teeth chattered. It’s June! she told herself, and it’s only Django.
No Django.
No one at home.
She’s been sitting on the great grey flagstone doorstep for some time, hugging her arms around herself. She’d envisaged a bear-hug from Django. It had been one of the driving thoughts that had got her here. She’d thought that no matter what she might say, or hear, that hug was a given. Only it wasn’t. Because Django is not here.
The courage Cat had summoned to make this journey, the pride and excitement she’d felt in a huge affirmative surge when she’d stepped from the train at Chesterfield station, have now dwindled into disbelief and deep loneliness and despondency. Where could he be? Cat circumnavigates the house, peering into all the downstairs windows. Were there no clues? A pot of jam is on top of the Racing Post on the kitchen table. Not much to read into that. The living-room is extremely tidy. The flip-flops that Fen was wearing on Django’s birthday, one broken, are on the bench in the utility room with other variously sized footwear neatly laid out to either side. The opaque window to the downstairs toilet is fixed ajar but though Cat squints inside, she can’t really see anything, certainly no pointers to the whereabouts of the master of the house.
I don’t believe this. Where can he be? Where does he go on a Wednesday? Dominoes is Thursday afternoon and he usually shops on a Tuesday and a Friday.
She taps on all the windows as she makes her way back round to the front door. She raps on that and calls through the letter-box. She has a long look through, but the hallway is empty of details.
‘Django!’ she calls. ‘Django!’ She waits and listens. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ she mutters under her breath because she knows Django is not here to admonish her language. ‘What am I going to do?’ she sobs, sitting heavily on the doorstep.
You could go to the Rag and Thistle?
But I wanted Django to myself. And if he’s not there, word will soon be out that I came looking. But that I didn’t stay. Stupid man for not having a mobile phone!
Are you not going to wait awhile? Write a note?
And say what? ‘Hi, Dad, I summoned every ounce of courage to come and see you. Oh well, never mind, I’ll try again tomorrow?’ No. I may as well just call a cab to take me back to the station. My gesture was meant to be momentous. But all that’s happened is that the moment has passed. It’s all been spoilt. It’s no good. I just want to go home to Ben.
If only Django had said yes to the answering machine Pip wanted to buy him, hey?
Whatever. It was probably a stupid idea of mine anyway. Perhaps I should’ve run it by Pip first.
A FISH OUT OF WATER
Django had always liked trains, but recent
ly he liked them more so on account of Tom’s fervent and endearing obsession with them. As he boarded at Chesterfield station early that morning, Django thought of Tom, thought how much he’d like to see him that day, to tell him about the Virgin train ferrying him to London and back. Wouldn’t it be nice if Pip brought Tom to meet him at St Pancras? She might well have done so, had he not been Derek, the father of her youngest sister. Half sister. Anyway, they didn’t know he was coming to town. Only Ben knew. He’d sent Django the ticket. Django felt uncomfortable about this. He would reimburse Ben the price of the ticket. He had the cash on him. Most, though, he felt uncomfortable about the trip itself; he didn’t like London, he didn’t like hospitals and he didn’t like it that Ben felt it necessary to send him a ticket to ensure he’d keep the appointment.
As he settled into the seat, arranged the Telegraph and his Thermos flask in front of him, he tried to think of trains and tracks and north and south and not that he hadn’t spoken to his girls since Pip’s call to him over a fortnight ago. He curtailed the thought that told him he hadn’t seen them for a month. Customarily, their visits home were every two months or so. But, devoid of all contact, this one month seemed the longest separation yet. Django thought about Cosima, wondered if she was crawling by now, imagined Fen dressing her in sweet, pink cotton creations. Did Cosima have more teeth? Did they make her grin look different? He smiled sadly but gazed out of the window as if he was particularly interested in the passengers alighting at Derby station. And was Cat perhaps pregnant, Django wondered, taking a long time to pour a cup of tea from his flask, trying to counteract the careen of the train. How wonderful that would be – although no more wonderful than Fen having Cosima or Pip having Tom of course – just a blessed situation for all three girls.