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    Django had intended to position himself in the hallway, so that when the girls opened the door He'd be there; his arms flung wide, like a celebrity tenor on an album cover. In the event, he is as excited as they are and he strides out to meet them, booming his welcome. The only member of the family who does not cry is Cosima. She regards the grown-ups with her solemn unblinking eyes, absorbing allthe facts and details as if logging the information that when you haven't seen your family for a long time, you leap about and sob and touch each other's hair a lot.
    ‘I'm still stuffed from tea-time!’ Cat whispered to Pip while Django tinkered in the kitchen. ‘Those scones were like cannon balls. Never mind enough to feed an army – enough to sink the navy!’
    ‘Shh,’ Pip said.
    ‘Has he been well?’ Cat asked quietly. ‘Hasn't had flu, or something? It's just that he looks a little tired to me, a bit peaky, since I last saw him.’
    ‘I think He's been fine,’ said Pip. ‘He certainly hasn't said anything to the contrary. He's probably been slaving over the stove all week, preparing for our arrival.’ She spied a copy of the Racing Post . ‘Or else He's put all his money on some old nag and lost the lot.’
    Cat walked around the living-room, fingering objects, lingering over framed photos, feeling the heavy brocade of the curtains, running her hands over the worn warm upholstery, filling her nostrils with the scent of home. It was like remaking her acquaintance with the essential elements of her personal history; reminding herself how everything looked and felt and smelt and should be, while at the same time reasserting her own presence in this sacred family space.
    The Spread was simmering and sautéing and roasting and steaming. Elements of it were happily marinating, or being chilled, or else ripening at room temperature. All the pots and pans were in use and every utensil had served many a purpose. The various scents emanating from oven and hob joined forces to create an olfactory explosion that, to Django, was as contradictory yet ultimately pleasing as a jazz chord.
    The point of cooking and the point of jazz are essentially one and the same , Django thought to himself as he ran a sink of water and half a jar of Bar Keeper's Friend to soak all the knives. It's about an element of surprise, of revelation and re-education. Of experimentation. Like when the African pentatonic scale met the European diatonic scale and jazz was born; a sound that was initially bizarre, disconcertingly discordant. It simply required one to open one's ears and one's heart to the flattened third and seventh notes and suddenly the aural pleasure of the blue note coursed through one's veins. Likewise, one's initial concern that Tabasco and tuna may be odd accompaniments to duck with a celery stuffing, dissipates when one shrugs off preconceptions of convention and allows the tastes to speak for themselves.
    ‘Not too dissimilar to Kandinsky either,’ Django mused as he left the kitchen in search of his nieces, ‘seemingly an arbitrary cascade of colour and shape yet utterly grounded in structure and purpose. Jazz, Cookery, Abstraction. It's all art.’
    He found them in the living-room and observed them unseen for a nostalgic moment. Just then, the girls could have been any age. The scene was immediately familiar and timeless and the continuity was poignant. ‘By golly,’ Django declared, ‘sing hey for the return of the nit-pickin' chicks.’
    The nit-pickin' chicks looked up at him. Fen stopped plaiting Pip's hair, Pip stilled her hands from massaging Cat's foot, Cat brought her head up from Fen's lap and ceased tracing patterns on her sister's legs.
    ‘Django, You're not going all sentimental on us are you?’ Pip asked, resuming her massage in a businesslike way. The girls laughed. Privately, they each felt suddenly very sentimental, in an affirming way. It had been years since Django had referred to them as the