the back of her hand against her forehead, ‘can you not retrain your eye to appreciate the finer points of real life?’
‘Pardon?’ Fen looked at her sister, and then assessed the level of liquid in Pip’s pint of cider, as well as that in her own. ‘Django?’ Fen turned to her uncle for support. Django, however, puffing away on his old meerschaum pipe, regarded her quizzically.
‘Fenella McCabe is a lost cause,’ Cat asserted, arranging peanuts into complex configurations on the table. ‘She’s studied as an Art Historian for far too long—’
‘—and had one too many disasters in love—’ Pip continued her sister’s sentence, picking peanuts from Cat’s pattern.
‘—to allow her eye to appreciate the merits of any man now not hewn from marble,’ Cat went on.
‘—or cast in bronze,’ Pip added for good measure, forming the remaining peanuts into a ‘P’.
‘Django!’ Fen implored her uncle, with theatrical supplication, to come to her rescue and defend her from her goading sisters.
Django merely tapped his pipe on the heel of his shoe and gave Fen a smile. ‘I think another pint,’ he remarked, ‘is the order of the day.’
‘You’ll have us sloshed,’ Pip enthused, looking at her watch. To be sipping very good cider in their uncle’s local, in Derbyshire, at half three on a Saturday afternoon in March, seemed a very good idea.
‘Nonsense!’ Django said, as if offended by the remark. ‘I’ve brought you girls up not to fear alcohol – the fact that you’ve known the taste of drink since you were tiny means, I do believe, that it has no mystique.’ He popped his pipe into the breast pocket of his waistcoat and went to the bar.
Fen McCabe watched her uncle wend his way, his passage hampered by the number of people whom he met and talked to en route.
Funny old Django, his attire so out of kilter amongst the flat caps, waxed jackets and sensible footwear. I mean, it’s not just the waistcoat – he’s teamed it with a Pucci neckerchief today, and truly ghastly shirt that wouldn’t look amiss on some country-and-western crooner. Jeans so battered and war-torn they’d have done Clint Eastwood proud, plus a pair of quite ghastly cowboy boots that shouldn’t see the light of day in Texas, let alone Derbyshire. And yet; Django McCabe, who came to Derbyshire via Surrey and Paris and had three small nieces from Battersea foisted upon him, is now as indigenous as the drystone walls. He fits in, in Farleymoor. Like he suited Soho when he was a jazz musician. But he fitted his life around us when we came to live with him. He’s barking mad and he’s the most important man in my life.
‘If our mother hadn’t run off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Fen said, ‘but if our dad had still had the heart attack, do you think we might have been brought up by Django anyway?’
This was a conundrum upon which each girl had mused frequently, though never in earshot of Django.
‘I would guess,’ Cat said measuredly, though she was merely giving back to Fen a theory her older sister had once given to her, ‘that the whole “cowboy-Denver-I’m-off” thing was probably a key ingredient in his heart attack.’
‘Sometimes,’ Pip reflected, ‘I feel a bit guilty for not caring in the slightest about my mother and not really remembering my father.’
‘I’ve never envied anyone with a conventional family,’ Fen remarked, ‘in fact, I felt slightly sorry for them.’
‘I used to wonder what on earth their lives were like for want of a Django,’ Pip said.
‘Me too,’ Cat agreed.
‘Do you remember when Susie Bailey hid in the old stable, made herself a kind of hide-out from Django’s old canvases?’ Fen laughed.
‘And her mum had to promise her that she’d make Django’s midnight-feast recipe of spaghetti with chocolate sauce, marshmallows and a slosh of brandy!’ Pip reminisced.
‘Do you remember friends’ houses?’ Cat said. ‘All that boring normal food? Structured stilted supper-time conversation? Designated programmes to watch on TV? Bedtime, lights out, no chatter?’
‘Django McCabe,’ Fen marvelled. ‘Do you think we’re a credit to him? Do you think we do him proud? That we are who we are, that we’re not boring old accountants?’
‘Or housewives,’ Cat interjected.
‘Or couch potatoes,’ Pip added.
‘Or socially inept,’ Cat said.
‘I’m sure he’s delighted that my career entails me being a clown called Martha rather than an executive in some horrid advertising agency,’ Pip said hopefully.
Django returned, his huge hands encircling four pint glasses. ‘Philippa McCabe,’ he boomed, ‘every night I pray to gods of all known creeds and a fair few I make up, that you will be phoning to tell me of your new position as a junior account manager on the Domestos Bleach account.’
Pip raised her glass to him.
‘And you, Catriona McCabe,’ Django continued, his eyes rolling to the ceiling, while he produced, from pockets in his waistcoat that the girls never knew existed, packets of peanuts and pork scratchings, ‘speed the day when you trade your job as a sports columnist for a career in the personnel department of a lovely company making air filters or cardboard tubing.’
Cat took a hearty sip of cider and grinned.
‘Fenella McCabe,’ Django regarded her, ‘how long must I wait before you exchange a dusty archive in the bowels of the Tate Gallery for the accounts department of a financial services company? And the three of you! The three of you! Why oh why have I been unable, as yet, to marry any of you off?’ He clutched his head in his hands, sighed and downed over half his pint.
Fen laughed. ‘Hey! I’ve only just landed this job. I’m going to spend my days with Julius!’
‘Oh Jesus,’ Cat wailed, finding solace in cider, ‘Julius.’
‘Bloody Julius,’ Pip remonstrated, chinking glasses with Cat.
‘Oh Lord, not that Fetherstone chap,’ Django exclaimed, rubbing his eyebrows, letting his head drop; a strand of his silver hair which had escaped his pony-tail dipping into his pint, ‘please, dear girl, please fall in love with a man who is at least alive.’
‘Who’s to say,’ Cat mused, ‘that while you’re waiting for the right bloke to come along, you can’t have lots of fun with all the wrong ones!’
‘Please,’ Fen remonstrated but with good humour, ‘my new job starts tomorrow.’ She regarded her two sisters and her uncle. ‘One for which I was head-hunted,’ she emphasized. She ate a peanut thoughtfully, took a sip of cider and looked out of the pub window to the moors. ‘So, my life wants for nothing at the moment.’
TWO
Julius Fetherstone (1866–1954) arrived in Paris in 1886 at the age of 20. There, he begged, bargained and all but bribed
