Home Truths by Freya North Read Free Book Online Page A

speak for Matt too?’
    Fen glanced at her with fleeting annoyance. ‘Life is more meaningful now that I'm a mummy,’ she said to Cat. ‘I have a true function, a role. I'm a mummy. I don't feel any need to reclaim my sexuality. This is me now. This is what I was made for. This is the best thing I've ever done.’
    Cat thought this sounded extreme, mad even. Pip thought it was sad and she immediately wondered how Matt was. He was going out with Zac for a pint that night. She'd probe. She was fond of Matt and, being the Great Looker-Afterer, She'd see to it that his relationship with her sister did not suffer.
    ‘God,’ said Cat with nostalgic admiration, ‘and you used to be such a vamp, Fen.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ Fen rubbished. ‘Me? A vamp? Hardly.’
    ‘You were a downright slapper,’ Pip teased.
    ‘Piss off,’ Fen protested, suddenly knowing to what they alluded and not wanting to revisit the past.
    ‘Don't tell me your nappy-addled memory doesn't stretch back four years when you were having to choose between two men?’ Pip said.
    They looked at Fen who was peering through a cage of her fingers as if shying away from a horror movie that turned out to be her history. ‘Stop it you two,’ she winced, ‘it was ages ago. It was a different me.’
    ‘It was right here in Derbyshire,’ Pip said pointedly.
    ‘He moved away,’ Fen said, ‘a while ago. You know that.’
    ‘Regrets?’ Cat asked.
    ‘Don't be daft,’ Fen said.
    ‘Does Matt know?’ Cat wondered. ‘Did you ever tell him?’
    ‘Are you mad?’ said Fen. ‘It had no bearing on my feelings for Matt. When it ended, it didn't release extra love for me to bestow on Matt. My feelings for Matt never changed – my feelings for the other man did.’
    ‘I love Matt,’ Pip said.
    ‘Me too,’ said Fen, ‘me too. I'm very lucky.’ Suddenly she felt overwhelmingly sad. Just then she longed for Matt even more than she longed for Cosima. ‘I'm such a crotchety old bag at the moment,’ she admitted and her sisters could see fear written across her brow. ‘I'm tired and narky the whole time. I can't seem to help it. Who is this Fen who doesn't have the energy to make love to her boyfriend, who has lost the desire to be touched but doesn't really care? I can't remember when I last told Matt that I love him.’
    ‘You should, you know,’ Pip said sternly, ‘according to that baby book you keep in your loo.’
    ‘Do you and Zac plan to have proper babies?’ Cat asked. Fen and Pip stared at their younger sister whose cheeks suddenly turned the colour of her hair and she buried her head in her hands. ‘God that sounded awful. Poor Tom – I didn't mean—!’
    ‘It's not in our game plan,’ Pip laughed. ‘we're a gang of three. I like being a stepmum. It suits me. I'm not really broody, I don't think.’
    ‘You wouldn't have time anyway,’ Cat said, ‘because You're always so busy looking after everyone else.’ Pip looked a little nonplussed. ‘It's a compliment,’ Cat assured her. ‘Even Django calls you the Great Looker-Afterer. You're only three years my senior but you've always mothered me. Capably, too.’
    ‘And me,’ said Fen.
    ‘Someone had to,’ Pip shrugged.
    ‘To us,’ said Fen, now toasting with mineral water, ‘to sisterhood and motherhood.’
    Pip went to bed hoping everyone was all right. She was worried about Fen. If having a baby had brought such sense and sunshine into her life, as Fen claimed, why did she seem so out of sorts? Alternately under-confident and yet smug, defensive yet somehow needy too. Pip didn't doubt that it was normal and right to be so absorbed in her child, but she was concerned that Fen seemed so defiantly blasé about the other aspects of her life. As if being a mother had given her a superiority complex and inferiority issues in one fell swoop.
    And what about Cat and Ben? Pip lay there anxious that her youngest sister had skipped back home hoping to play out a rather