The Family Way. Tony Parsons
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and clambered onto the sofa where Jessica was sucking her thumb, for all the world, Cat thought, as if she was the baby of the house. Cat hefted her youngest sister onto her hip and said, ‘Come on, dopey,’ to the other one. They were just in time.
The three sisters pressed their faces against the bay window of their newly broken home just as the black cab pulled away. Cat remembered the profile of the man in silhouette – a rather ordinary-looking man, hardly worth all this fuss – and her mother turning around for one last look.
She was very beautiful.
And she was gone.
After their mother had left, Cat’s childhood quietly expired. For the rest of that day, and for the rest of her life.
Their father did all he could – ‘the best dad in the world’, Cat, Jessica and Megan wrote annually on his Father’s Day cards, their young hearts full of feeling – and many of their childminders were a lot kinder than they needed to be. Years after they had gone home, Christmas cards came from the ex-au pair in Helsinki, and the former nanny in Manila. But in the end even the most cherished childminders went back to their real life, and the best dad in the world seemed to spend a lot of his time working, and the rest of the time trying to work out exactly what had hit him. Beyond his restrained, unfailingly well-mannered exterior, and beyond all the kindness and charm – ‘He’s just like David Niven,’ awe-struck strangers would say to the girls as they were growing up – Cat sensed turmoil and panic and a sadness without end. Nobody ever sets out to be a single parent, and although Cat, Jessica and Megan never doubted that their father loved them – in that quiet, smiley, undemonstrative way he had – he seemed more unprepared than most.
As the oldest, Cat learned to fill in the gaps left by the parade of nannies and au pairs. She cooked and childminded, did some perfunctory cleaning, and a lot of clearing up (many of their kiddie-carers refused to do anything remotely domestic, as if it were against union rules). Cat learned how to program a washing machine, knew how to disable a burglar alarm and, after a few months of frozen meals and fast food, taught herself to cook. But there was one thing she learned above all others: before she was in her teens, Cat Jewell had some idea of how alone you can feel in this world.
So the three sisters grew.
Megan – pretty and round, voluptuous, her sisters called her, but the only one of them who would always have to watch her weight, academically brilliant – who would have thought it? – with all the fierceness of the youngest child.
Jessica – the doe-eyed dreamer, the sensitive one, prone to laughter and tears, who turned out to be the unexpected boy magnet of the three, looking for that one big love behind the bicycle sheds and in the bus shelters of their suburban neighbourhood, quietly nursing a desire for a happy home.
And Cat – who quickly grew as tall as their father, but who never outgrew the small-breasted, long-limbed dancer’s body she had as a girl, and never outgrew the unspeakable rage of being abandoned, although she learned to disguise her scars with the bossy authority of the eldest child.
They clung to each other and to a father who was rarely around, missing their mother, even when things were bad and they hated her, and after a while the fact that Cat had forsaken her childhood seemed like the least of their worries.
Cat loved her father and her sisters, even when they were driving her nuts, but when the time came, she escaped to Manchester and university with a happy sigh – ‘As soon as someone left the door slightly ajar,’ she liked to tell her new friends. And while Jessica married her first serious boyfriend and Megan moved in with her first real boyfriend, Cat lost herself in her studies and later her work, in no rush to build a home and start a family and return to the tyranny of domesticity.
She knew all about it. Family life meant nothing in the fridge, a mother gone, Jessica crying and baby Megan squawking for ‘bis-quits, bis-quits’.
Family life was their father away working, the au pair shagging some new boy out in the potting shed and not a bloody bis-quit in the house.
More than either of her sisters, Cat had seen the reality of a woman’s work. The hard slog, the thankless graft, the never-ending struggle to keep bellies fed and faces clean and bottoms wiped and eyes dried and washing done.
Let Jessica and Megan build their nests. Cat wanted to fly away, and to keep flying. But she was wise enough to know that this wasn’t a philosophy, it was a wound. As a student, emboldened by one term at university, Cat angrily confronted her mother about all that had been stolen from her.
‘What kind of mother were you? What kind of human being?’
‘Your parents ruin –’
‘Ah, change the record.’ Cat was deliberately loud.
Megan stared with wonder at her big sister. Jessica prepared herself for a good cry. They were in a polite patisserie in St John’s Wood where people behind the counter actually spoke French and shrugged their shoulders in the Gallic fashion.
‘You were our mother,’ Cat said. ‘We were entitled to some mothering. I’m not talking about love, Mummy dearest. Just a little human decency. Was that too much to ask?’
Cat was shouting now.
‘Don’t worry, dear,’ her mother said, calmly sucking on a low-tar cigarette and eyeing up the young waiter who was placing a still-warm pain au chocolat before her. ‘One day you’ll have fucked-up children of your own.’
Never, thought Cat.
Never ever.
When she was certain that her husband had settled down in front of the football, Jessica crept into his study and stared at all his pictures of Chloe.
It was turning into a shrine. The few carefully selected favourites were in their silver frames, but there were more propped up on bookshelves, and a fresh batch was spilling out of a Snappy Snaps envelope and fanning out across his desk, burying a VAT return.
Jessica reached for the envelope, and then hesitated, listening. She could hear Bono and U2 singing, ‘It’s a beautiful day’. He was watching the football. For the next hour or so it would take a small fire to get Paulo off the sofa. So Jessica reached for the latest pictures of Chloe, and thumbed through them, frowning.
There was Chloe in the park, in the baby swings, one vicious-looking tooth glinting at the bottom of her wide, gummy mouth. And here was Chloe looking like a beady-eyed dumpling on bath night, wrapped up in a baby version of one of those hooded towelling outfits that boxers wear on their way to the ring. And here was Chloe in the strong, adoring arms of her father, Paulo’s younger brother, Michael, looking ridiculously pleased with herself.
Chloe. Baby Chloe.
Bloody baby Chloe.
Somewhere inside her, Jessica knew that she should be grateful. Other men furtively pored over websites with names like Totally New Hot Sluts and Naughty Dutch Girls Must Be Punished and Thai Teens Want Fat Middle-Aged Western Men Now. Jessica was certain that the only rival she had for Paulo’s heart was baby Chloe – the child of Michael and Naoko, his Japanese wife. Jessica knew she should have been happy. Yet every picture of Chloe was like a skewer in her heart. And every time that Paulo admired his shrine to his niece, Jessica felt like strangling him, or screaming, or both. How could a man that kind, and that smart, be so insensitive?
‘Michael says that Chloe’s at the stage where she’s putting everything in her mouth. Michael says – listen to this, Jess – that she thinks the world is a biscuit.’
‘Hmm,’ Jessica said, coolly staring at a picture of Chloe looking completely indifferent to the mushy food smeared all over her face. ‘I thought all Eurasian babies were pretty.’ Cruel pause for effect. ‘Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’
Paulo, always anxious to avoid a fight, said nothing, just quietly collected his pictures of Chloe, avoiding his wife’s eyes. He knew he should be hiding these pictures in a bottom drawer, while Jessica knew it hurt