groan. She stands and looks up at him. His height has always turned her on and when he dips his face down to kiss hers it darkens his brown eyes. ‘Isn’t there some position that’s meant to facilitate fertility, doctor?’
‘Yes, Mrs York,’ Ben confirms, turning her away from him, running his hand gently up her back, pushing between her shoulder-blades so that she is bent forwards, ‘there is. Just. Like. This.’
He takes her from behind. The sensation is so exquisite that, for a while, they are silent, motionless.
‘Dr York? Are you sure doggy-style is medically proven to assist conception?’
‘No,’ Ben pants as he thrusts into her, his hands at her waist to haul himself in, ‘but I’m quite certain that the sight of your immaculate peach of an arse improves the quality of my load.’
Often, making light of the dark makes good sense. When Django McCabe was trekking in Nepal in the early 1960s, en route to some saffron-robed guru or other, he came across a man who had fallen down a screed slope along the mountain pass.
‘Need a hand?’ Django had offered.
‘Actually, wouldn’t mind a leg,’ the man had responded. It was then that Django saw the man in fact had only the one leg, that his crutch had been flung some distance. Django learnt more from his co-traveller than from the guru: not to let hardship harden a person, to keep humour at the heart of the matter, to make light of the dark. A decade later, when Django found himself guardian to three girls under the age of four, the offspring of his late brother, he thought about his one-legged friend and decided that the circumstances uniting him with his nieces would never be recalled as anything other than rather eccentric, strangely fortunate and not that big a deal anyway. ‘I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver, but …’ has since prefixed all manner of events throughout the McCabe girls’ lives.
I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver, but crying because I accidentally taped over Dallas is a little melodramatic.
It was mid-morning and Django McCabe felt entitled to a little sit-down. But there wasn’t time for forty winks. It was Monday and if the girls were coming home for the weekend then he needed the week to prepare for their visit; he couldn’t be wasting time with a snooze. However, to sit in a chair and not nod off was as difficult, perhaps even as pointless, as going to the Rag and Thistle and not having a pint of bitter.
‘I’ll multi-task,’ Django muttered. ‘Apparently it’s a very twenty-first-century thing to do.’ And so he decided to combine his little sit-down with doing something constructive, in this instance scanning today’s runners. After all, studying the form would stop him dozing off.
And there it was. Staring him in the face. 2.20 Pontefract. Cool Cat. Rank outsider – but what did they know.
‘It’s a sign,’ he said, patting himself all over to locate his wallet which, after an extensive grope through the collection of jackets draped over most of the chairs in the kitchen, he finally found. ‘I’ll put a tenner on the horse. In honour of Cat. I need to pop into town anyway so either way, it won’t be a wasted trip.’
Django would never place a bet by phone. He doesn’t trust the telephone. He says, darkly, that you never know who may be listening. But his Citroën 2CV he trusts with his life and, along the lanes of Farleymoor and the roads around Chesterfield, the little car filled to bursting with Django is a familiar sight. At seventy-four, Django is physically robust. Tall and sturdy, affably portly around the girth and crowned by a mane of grey hair always pony-tailed. He toots and waves as he drives. He thinks fellow drivers are slowing down to let him pass, to wave back. Actually they’re swerving to keep out of his way, holding up their hands in protest.
There are people in every continent who regard Django as their friend, though his travelling days ended with the arrival of his three small nieces some thirty years ago. He has rarely left Derbyshire since and it is the area around Farleymoor, on the Matlock side of Chesterfield, where his warmest clutch of friends are massed.
‘Morning, Mary, and don’t you look divine for a Monday,’ Django says, entering the bookmakers.
‘And don’t you look colourful for January,’ Mary says, wondering if he’s warm enough in his paisley shirt and tapestry waistcoat.
‘From Peru,’ Django tells her, opening his waistcoat wide, like a flasher. ‘I had to trade with bandits on a mountain pass.’
‘And what did they get of you, duck?’
‘My passport,’ Django says and he roars with laughter. ‘A tenner on Cool Cat, if you please.’
‘Rank outsider,’ Mary warns him.
‘I know,’ Django shrugs, ‘but the odds were worse for Fenland Star yesterday and truly terrible for Pipistrelle last week and they both won.’ He hands over a ten-pound note. ‘She’s flying home as we speak, you know. Cat. I have all three girls descending on me for the weekend.’
Mary knows Django’s girls. They were at school with her daughters. ‘No doubt you’ll be cooking up a treat for them, then?’
‘She’s been in America for four years,’ he says, leaning on the counter and beckoning Mary closer. ‘That’s an awful lot of McDonalds. Apparently her hair is now red.’
Mary can’t see the connection between McDonalds and hair colour. If she remembers correctly, Cat is the sporty one who married the doctor of a professional cycling team.
‘So I am indeed preparing a Spread to welcome her home and put back some nutrients,’ Django is saying. ‘Oh, and let’s have a tenner on Three’s Company at Fakenham. Good little horse, that.’
Django McCabe hasn’t had a beard for over twenty years, yet still, in moments of contemplation, he strokes his chin with fingertips light and methodical as if his goatee still sits proud on his face. The habit is one that he uses for all manner of pontification, from selecting horses according to their names or the form given them by the Racing Post, to his choice of the next domino at the Rag and Thistle. Currently, he is toying with his chin while wondering what to cook. Laid out before him are all the foodstuffs from the fridge, most of those from the larder, and a few from the capacious chest freezer too. He doesn’t believe in shopping according to a recipe, he cooks to accommodate available ingredients; he invented food combining in its most oblique sense. He fingers his invisible beard and begins to make his considered selection, as an artist might choose pigment for the day’s palette. Indeed, Django feels at his most creative when cooking – he sees blending, mixing, combining, concocting, as art, not science. Thus he never measures or weighs and he believes cookery books are to cooking what painting-by-numbers kits are to painting.
Whenever his nieces visit from London, it warrants a Spread. And as the forthcoming weekend is to be not just an ordinary visit, but a homecoming celebration, it has to be a Monumental Spread. Django hasn’t seen Cat since the summer. None of them has. Christmas was peculiar for her absence. She’d turned thirty-two years old in the autumn and he hadn’t been able to make her a birthday cake. On top of that, Pip implied recently that Fen has been a little down. He knows of no way better to warm the heart and feed the soul than to fill the stomach with all manner of home cooking first.
Django is at his happiest when cooking for his girls, even though they are all in their thirties, with homes of their own, and their health has never been of concern.
‘It’s habit,’ he’ll say when they say he needn’t have, when they say a pub lunch or ready-meal supper would be fine by them, when they say they are too full for seconds let alone thirds. ‘I’m old and stuck in my ways,’ he’ll declare. ‘Humour me.’ He’ll say the same thing when presenting them with carrier bags bulging with Tupperware containers when they leave again for London.
Django McCabe is their family tree. The desertion of their mother, the death