She is surrounded by her family at Christmas and on other special occasions. They all live in funny places, Chester-le-Street, Penrith, Bath. They split apart and come dutifully back when they can. There is still a distance there. With her oldest girls especially, Fran can’t really talk. When she tries to, on the phone, she finds that she is passing on the other children’s news. She is a one-woman grapevine. To each other and to her face they accuse her of making trouble. Of telling tales. Of making nasty comparisons of what one sister is getting, of what they can afford, who is having a posh holiday or a new car, and who isn’t. This isn’t Fran’s intention. She simply wants to keep them up to date with each other. They need to know, she thinks, what’s happening in the family. She can’t stand it when families break apart. She’d hate that to happen to hers.
The most loyal is the youngest, little Jeff. Although he’s in the army, his room is still there at home for him. How much like his father he is.
Frank has been dead ten years. Fran thinks they would be a closer-knit family if he was still there. Last Boxing Day there had been a row. Her eldest daughter Kerry told Fran she’d killed her dad by nagging him about the booze. If she’d let him be, his heart wouldn’t have given up.
This was over dinner. The whole clan at the large dining-room table. Fran had gone to such effort: napkin rings, candelabra, everything from her mother’s posh cupboards. She was shocked, ladling out the bread sauce, stooped over, with her mouth hanging agape. At last she said, “You know nothing about it.” She stared at Kerry. Kerry had no idea how Frank had secretly learned to hate and resent his eldest daughter. He thought she was a young tart. Fran had struggled to keep Kerry ignorant of her father’s beliefs. Kerry has grown up angry without knowing why. Last Christmas she turned the full force of it on her mother.
That scene ended with little Jeff getting up, walking around the festive table and slapping his eldest sister full in the face. Anything in defence of his mam. Kelly’s husband made a half-hearted attempt to get up and Jeff warned him, with a glance, not to even try. Kerry sat and quietly sobbed into a freshly pressed napkin.
“Your dad killed himself,” said Fran quietly, and then she went on serving up dinner.
That was last Christmas. Fran wonders what this year’s will be like. If, after that, her family will even want to get back together.
She sighs and goes to open the fridge. She’ll get some bacon going. An anticipatory growl from her stomach. She hopes the smell of bacon will wake her newest guest and bring him downstairs to keep her company.
Company. Fran is sixty-eight this year. She feels much the same as ever, and she craves company. Even Elsie is welcome to stay the odd weekend. She comes to drink Fran’s gin.
This year’s Christmas will be different. Even if her ramshackle family do decide to turn up and disgrace themselves by fighting, there will be other elements present. Fran has taken it upon herself to invite those from Phoenix Court who have moved away in recent years. It will be a reunion, of sorts, of a looser, even more dysfunctional family. Penny, Nesta, Elsie, Craig, Liz, Mark, Jane...whoever else she can contact. There’s plenty of room in Fran’s house. Before she popped her clogs, Fran’s mother saw to it that there was a lot of room. The woman was obsessed with building extensions.
For once Fran is grateful to the memory of her mother. That ostentation and carelessness with money has enabled Fran to gather her invented family around her. The old white farmhouse with its pear and apple trees and stables, its sanded wooden floors, its furnishings and rugs and ornaments picked up from all around the world, is the place Fran can gather her gang.
The bacon in the frying pan hisses and spatters as she turns it over with her wooden spoon. It sounds as if it quarrels with itself.
Fran is now at the age her mother was when she died. She sees no gloomy symmetry in this. Fran thinks that you make life up as you go along. If you’re not careful you can wish yourself to an early grave. It’s all in the mind. Mind over circumstances.
And her brothers? They are somewhere exploring the wider world. Adventurously, having lives bigger — they say — than Fran could imagine.
Lives as big as Jane’s, marrying her Tunisian man and living six months out of every twelve in a desert. That has lasted these good few years. She swears blind she’s not in a harem, but Fran won’t let the joke drop. Jane is happy.
Lives as big as Liz, who rediscovered glamour. And also her abandoned lover, Cliff. Who moved to London.
Lives as big as Elsie, who escaped a murder charge and lives, the one remaining neighbour, in Phoenix Court.
Lives as big as Penny, whose father once said she’d go to the moon. Who grew up with special powers and didn’t know what to do with them. Penny is still deciding what to do with her life. She has three bairns, the first two with Craig. She’s in Darlington.
In her cooking reverie Fran is interrupted by her new house
guest.
He pads into the kitchen and startles her. She spins around and, when she sees him, sighs, smiling with relief. He gives one of his swift and unsure grins in
