Читать книгу Christmas Magic - Cathy Kelly - Страница 6

Primrose Cottage sat at the very end of Johnson’s Lane, an enchantingly pretty little house with wisteria snaking into the low roof and rose bushes clustering up to peer in the windows.

It was owned by the Malone sisters, Dolores and Genevieve, and although they didn’t get a lot of post, the sisters were on first-name terms with the postman, Bernard, who often stopped at Primrose Cottage for a quick cup of tea of a morning.

When he had anything for them, Bernard’s routine was to arrive at about nine thirty, by which time Genevieve would have completed the crossword and Dolores taken the dogs for their first little stroll of the day, up past that nice young couple’s cottage and back. The kettle would be boiling away happily on the range and Dolores’ scones would be warming in the small oven, ready for dollops of Genevieve’s crab-apple jelly.

Genevieve was the chattier, more outgoing of the two: older than her sister, Bernard thought, but more worldly and keen on wearing silver combs in her white hair. She was a smiling sort of person, always neatly dressed in flower colours and with tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose. Dolores, who still had a hint of softest auburn in her hair, was shyer and more inclined to let Genevieve do the talking, but she never stopped chatting to her beloved dogs, feeding them little bits of scone all the time.

Time permitted Bernard to stop only a couple of times during his morning round and, despite a number of very talented housekeepers in the town, there was no place he liked stopping better than at the Malone sisters’. Their home reminded him of how life used to be when he was a boy.

‘You’re wonderful, the pair of you,’ Bernard would say, when he had a cup of tea in one hand and a bit of hot buttered scone in the other.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Dolores would reply. ‘It’s just what Mother used to do.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Genevieve. ‘Mother always made her own bread, scones and jam, but she had the hens too.’

Both sisters looked a little mournful at this recollection. Mother had always made them feel inadequate. She had been amazing, a domestic goddess long before such a term had been invented. Everyone over a certain age in Ardagh agreed: there had been nobody like Mrs Malone.

She was a powerful woman, people said, using the rural sense of the word, which conveyed strength and purpose rather than an ability to lift tall buildings. She had been on every committee going, a stalwart churchgoer, organiser of the church flowers and a woman with firm views no matter the subject.

There were a few people who felt that perhaps Mrs Malone had been a bit too powerful when it came to setting the ground rules for her daughters. And a really critical person might say that Dolores and Genevieve Malone were still under her thumb even though Vera Malone was long since dead and buried.

Her ‘girls’ might be cruising towards seventy, but they still adhered to her strict rules and, somehow, along the way, they’d never courted, never got married and never moved out of Primrose Cottage with its long back garden, half an acre of ground that still boasted a vegetable garden and several crab-apple trees. Though no chickens.

Bernard Kavanagh could see that the sisters were bothered about the lack of chickens bustling about.

‘Chickens are an almighty nuisance, you know,’ he insisted. ‘My sister-in-law has them and the eggs are lovely, there’s no doubt about that. But they’re mad creatures, always fluttering all over the place, escaping out on the road or getting killed by the fox.’

‘Mother never lost a single hen to the fox,’ Dolores informed him gravely. It had been a source of great pride to Mrs Malone – no fox had ever got the better of her.

On that fateful morning in mid-December, Bernard had a couple of fliers in his hand, at least one bill, and a large insulated package addressed in a wild scrawl to The Malones, Primrose Cottage, East Ardagh. ‘I wonder what this is?’ said Bernard, who normally could tell with a single look. Packages from mail-order clothes companies, court summonses: he knew the feel of them all.

‘Interesting,’ said Genevieve, taking it from him.

She examined the package for a moment. It was heavy, a big solid thing, like a heavy book, perhaps, but they hadn’t ordered any books. When they wanted something that Devine’s bookshop didn’t stock, they asked Mrs Devine to look it up on her computer and she’d order it for them. She’d then phone them when the book in question arrived. She’d never sent anything to the house before and, even if she did, she’d hardly be so rude as to write The Malones on it. Genevieve decided she’d open it and get to the bottom of the mystery when Bernard was gone.

‘Tea, Bernard?’ she asked, putting the package down on the table. ‘We have mince pies.’

Bernard wanted tea because he wanted to know what was in the package. It was very heavy for a book. But he’d long since discovered that Dolores and Genevieve weren’t as consumed with curiosity as he was, and would quite happily leave the package on the table for ages before opening it. He was running late as it was, so he politely declined the offer of tea.

After he was gone, Genevieve returned to the crossword. She was having a bad run of it. Yesterday, she’d had to leave three spaces blank and, when she checked the answers today, had been horrified to find they were so simple. I must be losing my marbles, she thought mournfully. It was a horrible prospect. Mother’s mind been like a rapier until the day she died.

‘Genevieve, don’t slouch,’ was the sort of thing Mother said. ‘Just because I’m dying doesn’t mean you have to lose your posture, for heaven’s sake!’ Or: ‘Cook the ham yourself. That butcher charges the earth for boiling it up and slicing it. Daylight robbery, that’s what it is.’

Mother had never forgotten a thing in her life. She’d have been horrified to see her daughter losing the run of herself. Genevieve wished the mysterious package had never come.

She said nothing to Dolores about these worries.

She’d always protected Dolores and she wasn’t about to stop now. Instead, she eyed the big package on the kitchen table. It definitely looked like a book and Genevieve had absolutely no memory of ordering such a thing. Dolores would never have done so without telling her. Dolores never so much as bought a litre of milk without mentioning it first to her sister.

The package sat reproachfully at the other end of the table, as if daring her to open it.

Dolores was happily talking to the dogs. Pixie – half Chow, half something else, with an adorably scrunched-up face and big eyes like a bushbaby – was dancing happily around Dolores’ feet. Snowy – white, wispy-haired, with delicate paws grey with mud – was quietly waiting for the post-walk dog biscuits.

Around eleven, Sidney, a fat grey tomcat who looked as if he’d been fluffed up in the tumble drier, ambled in for a snack. He and the dogs muddled along quite well together with a comfortable sharing of territory and only the odd unsheathed claw.

Mother had not been a dog or a cat person. In fact, Genevieve knew that Mother would have disapproved of both the pets and their unusual names. Genevieve’s own name had been given to her by her father, a kind man who had also been rather under his wife’s iron thumb. By the time Dolores arrived, two years later, Vera Malone had put a stop to her husband’s brief flirtation with fancy names. Vera wanted to call her second daughter Dolores after the blessed saint. Stuart Malone had mentioned Lola, but this was deemed racy. Dolores it was and had remained so for seventy years.

That morning, Genevieve went about her normal chores, and waited until Dolores had taken the dogs out into the garden for a quick pre-lunch meander. Then she seized the big packet from the kitchen table. She opened the flap carefully and her fingers touched the hardcovers of a book.

Where had it come from? Banishing the prospect of senility from her mind, Genevieve pulled the book from its wrapping.

She stared at it for a full moment in absolute stupefaction. It was no ordinary book.

Magic for Beginners was the title, written in dark green script on a background of what looked like Tudor embroidery in saffron yellows and rich olive greens. A book about magic. Where had this book come from? It definitely had their name on it and their address. Surely neither of them would have been mad enough to go into Devine’s bookshop and order something like this? There was no note from Devine’s, and no return address on the back of the big padded envelope. But how else would such a book have arrived at Primrose Cottage? There was no other explanation for it: Genevieve Malone must be losing her mind.

For a whole week, Genevieve kept the book hidden in the pantry cupboard at the very top, wrapped in an old scarf. Dolores had a bockety knee and relied on her older sister to climb on a stool to reach anything up that high. But despite its being stashed away, the magic book haunted her thoughts. I am still here and you are losing your marbles, it seemed to be saying.

She said nothing to Dolores about the contents of the package. Dolores could worry on a grand scale and, when she did worry, she was prone to faintness. Genevieve invested a lot of time in avoiding such circumstances.

Instead, Genevieve phoned Devine’s bookshop on Saturday morning, talked to Mrs Devine herself and had a most unsatisfactory conversation.

‘No, there was no order here for you, Miss Malone,’ insisted Mrs Devine. ‘I have all your last orders and the most recent one was Tours of the Holy Land, which you picked up. Are you sure you couldn’t have ordered it on the computer?’

‘No,’ said Genevieve sadly. ‘I didn’t.’

There was no computer in the Malone sisters’ home. It wasn’t, the sisters had always felt, the sort of thing Mother would have approved of. Mother had been sceptical of electricity, never mind computers. When the whole town had been connected up to the national grid in 1947, Genevieve could recall her parents fighting over it.

‘You can’t stand in the way of progress, Vera,’ her father had said, exasperated.

Her mother’s answer had been typically dogmatic: ‘I will do what I want.’

In the end, the Malone household had been the only house on their road to refuse connection. After a year, her mother finally yielded because Mrs Kemp had bought one of those newfangled vacuum machines to clean the rugs. For a brief while, the balance of power on Johnson’s Lane had shifted. Mrs Kemp held sway with talk of how the dust just vanished with one whoosh of the wonderful machine.

‘You wouldn’t believe how dusty even the cleanest rugs are,’ she’d said, throwing a gauntlet down to Mrs Malone.

A month later, the Malones had both electricity and a vacuum machine.

The kerosene lamps were kept for particularly dark mornings or for nights when the power was weak. But a computer … Truly, Mother would not have approved of any machine with the capability to think for itself.

Genevieve put down the phone to Mrs Devine, her mind troubled.

Upstairs, Tours of the Holy Land lay on the small cabinet beside Genevieve’s bed, along with her rosary beads. She dipped into the book most nights, running her fingers over pages of pictures of the Wailing Wall and the dark, mystical cavern that was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She’d always wanted to travel but had never gone further than Dublin for the odd special-occasion lunch in the Hibernian Hotel. She’d been to Galway once, nearly fifty years ago, to the wedding of her best friend, Mariah.

‘It’ll be you next,’ Mariah had said joyfully the evening of her wedding when she was ready to leave the hotel, her trousseau packed and the bouquet ready to be thrown. Genevieve had caught the bouquet, but there had been no wedding for her.

No trips abroad either. When she was young enough to travel, her mother hadn’t wanted her to. No local man had ever measured up to her mother’s standards, either.

Genevieve Malone wasn’t the sort of person who got angry, but a flicker of naked fury rippled through her now. She and Dolores would have liked a computer, but Mother wouldn’t have approved, so they didn’t have one.

They’d have liked to travel, but Mother didn’t approve of that either. So they had gone nowhere, married no one.

Now that she and Dolores were their own mistresses, their mother’s likes and dislikes still guided them.

Genevieve grabbed the stool and hauled the magic book out of its hiding place.

‘I don’t care what you think, Mother,’ she shouted, surprising both herself and Sidney, the cat. ‘I want to look at it.’ She placed the book on the table and opened it at the first page.

The book was not the heathen volume she’d expected. There were no exhortations to say black masses or other ceremonies designed to undermine Christianity. Instead, the introduction was a gentle ramble through history and the place that magic had in the world. Genevieve read of professional Egyptian magicians: of the burning of the library at Alexandria; and of Celtic, Italian, Romany and Jewish spells.

Although the shadow of her mother’s disapproval hovered, Genevieve kept reading.

She knew, as she read of the power of dancing skyclad, that she would never, ever, attempt any of the spells in the book. Yet there was something deliciously freeing in poring over them. She, Genevieve Malone, would not take to wearing snake bracelets to ward off harm or ask a birch tree to yield up a piece of bark upon which to write a plea for a man to love her. Yet she felt a sneaking envy towards the sort of woman who would.

How would her life have been different if she’d rubbed beetroot all over her body to attract romance?

She thought wistfully about the one man she’d loved from afar, a gentle kind boy named Dermot, who’d left Ardagh without ever knowing that Genevieve Malone watched him walk up the church aisle on a Sunday, her grey eyes following his every move. What if she’d had the courage to disobey her mother then and speak to him?

She wrapped the book up in its scarf, put it up high again, and told Dolores she was off to the shops because they were low on milk. She passed their next-door neighbours’ house where dear Janet Byrne had lived until her heart had finally given out. She’d left the house to her niece, a lovely tall, dark-haired girl named Lori who’d introduced herself one day, and had rarely been seen since. Genevieve supposed she had one of those marvellous new careers where she was always racing off to meetings and such like. Her husband, Ben, was to be seen coming and going, and he was there now, hauling groceries out of the car. He always offered her and Dolores a lift to the shops down the hill when he spotted them. There was something a bit sad about him, Genevieve thought. It must be hard for him to be on his own so often. It was only ten days to Christmas: she might suggest to Dolores that they invite Ben and Lori in for tea as a kindness to dear departed Janet. No, Genevieve thought excitedly, drinks! They’d invite them in for drinks. Mother had been an abstinence pioneer and had never touched a drop. Today, apart from a little Guinness for the Christmas pudding, there was nothing alcoholic in the Malone household, but people had drinks these days, didn’t they? She and Dolores would have a little party!

‘Hello, Ben,’ she said. ‘Lovely bright day, isn’t it?’

Ben Cohen looked up at the sky as if it was the first time he’d seen the day.

‘Lovely,’ he said distantly.

Genevieve instantly understood that he wasn’t in the mood for talk. Understanding other people’s moods was one of her skills: a necessary one with Mother, who used to turn furious in an instant and had to be watched. She’d ask him and his wife in for Christmas drinks another time.

She loved the walk down the lane to the town and admired other people’s Christmas decorations as she went.

Padraig from The Gables had Christmas roses clustering over his front door. Padraig was confined to bed now and Genevieve dropped in most days, but today she could see his niece’s car in the driveway and knew there was no need.

The Cardens, a big family recently moved back to Ireland from Toronto, had the Maple Leaf and the Irish flag amidst all their fairy lights, along with a big sign exhorting the reindeer to stop and nibble the reindeer food.

Dolores and Genevieve had an Advent wreath in their kitchen and a small, discreet Christmas tree that sat in the parlour window. There were no electric lights on it, although Dolores longed for such fripperies. But after a lifetime without sparkling Christmas lights, Genevieve was scared to buy them now. What if they caught fire?

Finally, she was in the town itself and she spotted Sybil Reynolds climbing slowly out of her car, fluffy white hair semi-captured by a knitted red hat. Sybil was eighty if she was a day and she was a keen traveller. Mother had never really liked Sybil or her mother.

‘Far too flighty, those women are never off the road,’ Mrs Malone had pronounced and that had been that.

Secretly, Genevieve and Dolores had envied Sybil her easygoing ways. She’d married the handsomest man in the parish, had five children, and although Harry’s mind was long since gone and he sat quietly in the nursing home, staring out into the world with blank blue eyes, Sybil had not lost her joie de vivre.

Suddenly, Genevieve had a fierce longing to talk to Sybil, a woman who’d never let anybody put a stop to her dreams. She’d bet Sybil’s Christmas tree was a positive fire hazard with twinkling lights.

‘Sybil!’ roared Genevieve across the street, shocked at her own daring.

Ladies never yell, was another of Mother’s dictums.

‘Will you come to the café for a pot of tea with me?’

‘I’d kill for a latte with a double blast of coffee in it,’ said Sybil, beaming as she slammed the door of her Mini.

‘Have you been to the Holy Land?’ asked Genevieve when they were installed in a window seat of the café, Sybil’s coffee and a spirulina shot in front of her.

Genevieve wished she’d ordered something more thrilling than tea.

‘Harry and I went twice,’ Sybil said, a hint of a tear in her eye. ‘I wish I could bring him to Italy with me in March, but he can’t leave the nursing home.’

‘You’re going away?’

Sybil shot Genevieve a shrewd glance that said she was used to people expecting her to put her life on hold because her husband was in a nursing home.

‘Harry and I talked about everything, Genevieve,’ she said. ‘Including what would happen when one of us died or if one of us got dementia. Harry said there was no point in us both being dead. The other one was not to sit shiva forever.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Genevieve said. ‘Where are you going in Italy?’

Sybil shrugged expressively. ‘Haven’t set an absolute date yet.’

‘And, er, is it with a group or something?’

‘Just me.’

‘You’re so brave,’ sighed Genevieve. ‘I’d love to travel, but I’d never have the nerve to go on my own.’

‘Well, you’ve got Dolores to go with,’ Sybil pointed out. ‘And you’re welcome to come with me, anytime you’d like.’

‘Really?’

Sybil drank down her spirulina, grimacing as she did so. ‘Supposed to keep you young, but it tastes awful.’ She put the glass down. ‘Are you saying you and Dolores would like to come to Italy with me?’

‘Goodness no,’ said Genevieve hastily. ‘We wouldn’t want to impose—’

‘You wouldn’t be imposing. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t mean it,’ Sybil replied.

She made it sound so simple. There were no hidden pitfalls in conversation with someone like Sybil, no chance of saying the wrong thing. Not like with Mother.

Genevieve decided to try normal conversation. ‘You see, we’ve never travelled, never been anywhere,’ she said. ‘Mother didn’t approve.’

Sybil’s look of pity nearly made her stop but she kept going.

‘I got this book by mistake during the week and it’s making me think about things.’

‘What sort of book?’ Sybil leaned forward with interest.

‘Magic for Beginners. It was a mistake, we’d never ordered it from Devine’s or anything,’ Genevieve said hastily. ‘I go to Mass and—’

‘Genevieve, I am not your mother. I am not the judge and jury, either,’ Sybil said. ‘I’d love to get a look at that book. It sounds fabulous –’ Her face broadened into a huge smile. ‘There’s Claudia, look.’

Genevieve turned to see the youngest of Sybil’s brood, a woman with wild red hair and a smiling face.

‘Sorry, Genevieve, we’re off shopping today. Claudia’s driving. Must fly. I’d love a look at that book of yours sometime.’

And she was gone.

Genevieve bought some milk and walked slowly up the hill to Primrose Cottage, wondering what her life would have been like if she’d been more like Sybil, more like the sort of person who’d buy Magic for Beginners and use it.

The lights were on in the cottage next door but Ben and Lori didn’t have a Christmas tree put up yet. Janet had always adored Christmas, Genevieve thought sadly as she went inside. It had been such a shock when Janet had died. It had been so sudden. One moment she was there, the next, she was gone.

Life was moving so fast, slipping away from Genevieve, and she felt as if she had done nothing with hers. But she could always change that, couldn’t she?

Ben had fallen in love with Lori the first time he’d seen her. There had been thunder, great howls of energy rumbling across the sky and into his chest, followed by the retina-blasting lightning. And then the rain.

Stalling for time before he had to run out into the rain to get a cab, Ben had been standing under the awning of the restaurant. It was nearly three, most of the lunchtime business diners were gone. Ben would have been long gone too, only his guest – another ad man – was off on his holidays that afternoon and was preparing to start holidaying early.

‘I think I’ll have another glass,’ Jeff had said conspiratorially. ‘You sure you won’t join me?’

Ben shook his head and thought about the work piling up on his desk.

He finally left Jeff with another last glass and the rapt expression of a man who might not get home early to pack – ‘The wife will have it all sorted, she knows what to bring better than me!’ – and ran out of the restaurant, wondering why advertising business lunches weren’t listed in Dante’s Circles of Hell.

It was high summer and the wet, earthen scent of the box hedge outside the restaurant rose up to greet him, reminding him of the summers in his grandmother’s house in West Cork. Earth, sand, the whisper of the ocean across the dunes, the picnics in the garden overlooking the sea, sheltering with old blankets when the wind whipped in across tanned skin.

A woman came out of the restaurant and stood beside him, her eyes scanning the wet street. She was tall, nearly as tall as he was, although she was wearing heels. Without them, he surmised, she might be up to his nose. Dark hair fell to her shoulders on a light-coloured jacket that matched her trousers. He had the chance to watch her because she was so intent on whatever she was looking for: a cab, a person.

Still the rain fell. Ben waited calmly and watched. She was pale, with a dusting of freckles on an aquiline nose, dark lashes touching cheeks tinged with rose as she looked down at her watch.

And then she turned to look at him, eyes a surprisingly light blue, like the sea in West Cork, and smiled. It was the smile that did it.

Released from lunch, not yet imprisoned back in the office, Ben’s true self smiled back at her. As an account manager for an advertising agency, he knew how to smile with his face when a client wanted something impossible. At lunches, he smiled at tales of sailing, golfing, stag parties in Portugal where the groom had literally lost twenty-four hours of his life.

But with this woman, outside the restaurant and the heavens shaking all around him, he smiled from his heart.

The woman crinkled up her eyes at him. ‘You look familiar,’ she said, in a soft accent he instantly identified as Irish, possibly Galwegian.

‘Racial memory,’ he replied, in his own Dublin accent.

She laughed then. ‘How is that that the Paddies always find each other?’

‘Paddy sat-nav?’ he volunteered. ‘And how is it that if anyone else called us Paddies, we’d want to kill them?’

‘The Murphia, that’s what they call us in my work.’

‘Better than Micks,’ Ben said. ‘Although they don’t do it so much with me once they hear my second name. I’m Ben Cohen. They don’t quite know what to make of a Jewish Mick.’

‘Breaking the Oirish Catholic mould!’ she said delightedly, and reached out to shake his hand. ‘Lori Fitzgibbon. Actually Lori Concepta. I even went to a convent.’

‘Convent girls,’ he sighed. ‘We were all warned about you.’

‘That we were wild?’

‘Wild as hell. All that pent-up sexual frustration.’

He fell in love then, with her cool hand in his, and the sight of those blue eyes and the pale Irish skin, fine against the burnished dark of her hair. He’d had to come to London to find a girl from home to fall in love with.

Two years later, they were married. Neither of them had planned to stay in London. Marriage and the purchase of a townhouse in Naas seemed like a wonderful reason to come home.

Lori had a plan: a year of having fun, going away on holidays together and getting the house ready. And then trying for a baby.

‘I like the sound of trying for a baby,’ said Ben. ‘Can we try a lot? Can we try now, in fact? Just to get the practice in.’

How those words stuck in his mind. The trying had been fun, no doubt about it. It was when the trying was getting them nowhere that things started to go wrong.

Ben wasn’t worried. Twelve months wasn’t a long time trying to get pregnant, he told Lori. She rounded upon him.

‘It’s forever!’ she shrieked. ‘You have no idea, Ben, no idea.’

Their GP took it all very seriously. He recommended them to a fertility clinic. Ben’s test was easy, if embarrassing. His sperm proved to be fine.

‘Great swimmers!’ he joked, trying to lighten Lori’s mood.

The laparoscopy showed scarring from endometriosis. Getting pregnant was not impossible, but when the scarring was this severe, it made things harder.

IVF was the most sensible answer.

‘This will work, darling, I know it will,’ said Lori to Ben, her eyes shining that first day she began taking the drugs to push her body into premature menopause.

By the end of the cycle, Lori had produced a worryingly high number of eggs, so high that she was at risk of something the doctors called ‘hyperstimulation’, a possibly fatal condition. They could not attempt to implant any embryos into Lori this time. She’d have to wait three months for another cycle.

Ben had never seen wild grief like Lori’s. He buried his own pain inside him as he tried to soothe her.

‘You don’t understand what it’s like for me,’ she sobbed night after night, as she opened a bottle of wine to try to numb the pain.

That was when Ben felt totally useless. He wanted children too; he wanted Lori’s children, but the pain of failed baby-making was seen as an exclusively female pain. What about a man’s pain? What about being denied the chance to be a father?

The next two cycles, when frozen embryos were implanted into Lori, failed – and cost them all their savings. Then came the miracle: Lori’s great-aunt Janet died and left her a house in Ardagh, a small commuter town outside Dublin. The house was a picturesque two-storey house on Johnson’s Lane, a country road where they had neighbours on only one side, a pair of sweet, elderly ladies.

They thought about selling the Ardagh house, but it was old, and needed renovation. They’d get more money if they sold their own house and moved to Ardagh, thereby freeing up cash for more infertility treatment.

It would mean a longer commute to their jobs in the city, but it would be worth it.

‘It will happen,’ Lori said confidently when their house finally sold. ‘This was all meant to be: Aunt Janet dying, our getting the house – it’s meant to be. It’s like a journey and we had to travel this far to reach the point where our dreams come true.’

She’d looked so beautiful, smiling at him, as young and happy as the girl he’d fallen in love with in London.

‘Let’s go out to lunch to celebrate,’ she went on. ‘A day like today needs a glass of champagne to celebrate the future.’

Ben had felt a frisson of fear then at her utter confidence: there were no guarantees in life or in fertility treatment. Nobody knew for sure. They might spend every penny they had and end up with nothing. But he couldn’t explain this to Lori. It was as if she was living for this dream and without it, she’d crumble. He was worried enough about her as it was.

She was drinking more and more to help her cope with it all and a longer commute meant, Ben hoped, that Lori would no longer be able to party with her colleagues from work. Partying meant drinking, and while Ben could understand his wife’s need to numb her pain with a couple of glasses of wine, she was going out more and more since the failure of the last cycle. And drinking more and more too.

The city was the problem, Ben had decided. Away from the bars, the nightlife and all her old friends from work, it would be like it had been when they were first married. There would be no more slurred phone calls at nine o’clock with Lori saying, ‘Just dropped into the pub with a few pals, I’ve only had two drinks, honestly.’

She never had two drinks. Two drinks per bar, perhaps. But Lori never stopped at two. Ben had read a detective novel once where a virus called a chimera infiltrated a person and changed them utterly.

Lori was like a chimera, the many-sided beast. He never knew which version he was going to get. Sometimes, she’d come home and she’d be the smiling Lori, the one he remembered from London all those years ago before infertility had taken over their life. She’d laugh and hug him joyously, saying, ‘We had such fun! They all wanted to go dancing, but I said no, I had to come home to you, love.’

The muscle in the side of his jaw would stop tensing quite so much. He could handle this Lori, just about. She’d giggle and want to eat crisps or something else they didn’t have in the house. Eventually, she’d grow sleepy and he’d put her to bed, undressing her slowly. The sleepy times were the best. He could almost imagine it was his old wife, the one he married.

Then were nights when she came home in a rage. He’d never discovered precisely what she’d drunk. It probably didn’t matter. Wine versus tequila wasn’t the issue. Something would have set her off; some small thing in her work day: a pregnant woman, an angry customer. And then the rage would emerge, a rage that Lori could apparently only assuage with alcohol.

He got into the habit of talking to her mother every day. It was strange how Yvonne became the person he phoned. He was almost too frightened to phone Lori at work on her mobile. Except on those days when she was guilty and sorry, promising never to do it again.

‘I’m so sorry, Ben,’ she’d cry. ‘I don’t know how you still love me, I don’t know why you stay with me. I’m so horrible. I’ll never, ever do it again.’

There would follow a week of not drinking, a week of Lori coming home on time and making lovely dinners, being the perfect homemaker. Until the next time.

Yvonne, Lori’s mother, seemed to understand.

Yvonne said she’d seen her daughter drunk at too many family get-togethers recently: not falling-down drunk, but the subtle glassiness of the secret drinker who’d been filling her own glass with vodka steadily throughout the evening.

One night at such an event, Ben and Yvonne had helped Lori up the stairs to her old bedroom and the subject had been broached. Ben said he knew that a problem drinker did not need to have lost their job and be living in a cardboard box to be an alcoholic.

‘What should we do?’ asked Yvonne that night, her face drawn and her eyes wet with tears.

Ben shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

That had been nearly six months ago, not long after the move to Ardagh, the move he’d hoped would change it all.

Today, Ben made his daily phone call to his mother-in-law.

‘How is she today?’ Yvonne asked.

Ben could hear trepidation in her voice. He’d grown to hate theirs.

‘Fine today,’ Ben said.

He kept his voice low. Nobody in the marketing department knew what was going on in his life. They thought, laughably, that he had it all: stunning wife, lovely new home in a beautiful town, promotions on the way, no doubt. Life’s biggest irony, Ben thought: there could be such a vast difference between the outer picture and the inner one. If only they knew.

‘We’re going into the clinic on Friday for a consultation about the next cycle,’ he told Yvonne. ‘She never drinks before that. They do so many blood tests. I think she’s afraid of what they’ll find in hers and take us off the programme.’

‘Maybe that’s the answer,’ Yvonne said, startling him. ‘Tell them she drinks every time she’s not on an IVF cycle. Alcohol is definitely a factor in fertility.’

‘She wasn’t drinking that heavily until the last few months,’ Ben protested.

There was an ominous silence on the other end of the phone.

‘She was,’ Yvonne said, so softly Ben wondered if he’d imagined it. ‘She always drank too much, even as a teenager. Her father used to too, but he’s stopped.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said, stunned.

‘I was afraid you’d leave her,’ Yvonne whispered. ‘She needs you. I thought if we shocked her with being thrown off the IVF programme, she might stop.’

Ben left work early that day and drove home towards the rolling Wicklow hills and Ardagh. As he drove, he thought of the years he’d known Lori and how he’d never noticed her drinking more than anyone else. He liked the odd glass of wine, but that was it. True, Lori liked to have an open bottle of white in the fridge, but he didn’t see how she could have been drinking without his knowing. Surely he’d have noticed.

At home, he searched the house. There were several empty vodka bottles in her underwear and sweater drawers, a half-full one in the airing cupboard, and several bottles of wine stashed away in the kitchen. The wine was the same type as the half-full one in the fridge. Very easy to finish a bottle and replace it with another one, Ben realised, making it seem like the same innocently half-full bottle. He discovered many, many empty wine and vodka bottles shoved into the back of the cobwebby old shed. Lori had known he wouldn’t look there. They didn’t use it for anything, just promised themselves that one day, they’d clean it out. She’d known the evidence was safe enough. They’d only been in the Ardagh house for two months and she’d managed to create such a stash in such a short time.

The anger hit him then. Nobody went from being an ordinary drinker to hiding bottles of vodka that quickly. This was, as Yvonne had said, clearly a much longer-running problem than he’d thought. And the thought made him so very angry.

He’d believed he knew everything about Lori and he hadn’t, he hadn’t at all. He thought of all the tests and the sheer agony of waiting. And all the time, his wife was skewing the results by secretly drinking. How did he know whether she’d stopped or not during the actual cycles? He’d given up alcohol, he’d even given up cycling when Lori had read a report about how sports saddles heated the testes, which was bad for fertility.

‘No more cycling!’ she’d said firmly, and he’d agreed.

She might well have been drinking vodka on the tough days, while he stopped even cycling, for God’s sake.

He phoned her mobile and it went straight to voicemail.

‘Hi, Lori, we need to talk.’ He paused before delivering the next line. ‘I found the vodka bottles at home. Call me back now.’

He didn’t sign off with love. At that moment he felt absolutely no love.

There was no phone call in return. He drove down to the supermarket, bought some groceries and was unpacking the car when he saw one of the old ladies from the cottage next door looking at him from their front window. He waved. It was Genevieve, he thought. He wasn’t entirely sure which was which. He went indoors and made some pasta with butter and tried to watch a film on the television, but he couldn’t concentrate. Ten o’clock came, eleven, then midnight and still no sign of Lori. His phone sat silently on the low coffee table in front of him, the screen still blank.

And then he heard the noise.

It was ten to midnight, and Genevieve could hear her sister sleeping. Dolores didn’t snore exactly, but she made a low, trumpeting nasal noise, for sure. Genevieve called the dogs from Dolores’ bed and they came with a clattering of paws, delighted at this late-night game.

‘Hush,’ whispered Genevieve as Pixie began to bark. ‘Biscuits.’

She knew that the dogs would protest loudly if she went outside and they were stuck inside, so she’d collected a few of their doggie biscuits and had them hidden in the pocket of her dressing gown. She handed biscuits to Pixie and Snowy, who devoured them like dogs who hadn’t eaten in months instead of having had half of Dolores’ nighttime toast and jam just an hour before.

Then, she shut her sister’s door and shuffled down the stairs, one hand holding a small bag. The dogs jostled at her heels, keen to be involved. In the kitchen, Genevieve found the candle and the kitchen matches. It was a wild December night and any candle would blow out in an instant outside, so she got out an old hurricane lamp and carefully placed the candle inside. The book stipulated that it should be a special candle. This one was left over from Mariah’s fortieth wedding anniversary, which Genevieve felt was special enough. To add to the light, she put a few tiny tea lights around it. In the small bag, she had the paper upon which she’d written her hopes and dreams, as the book had told her, and she’d said a couple of prayers over it, which wasn’t entirely magic either, but by now Genevieve had read enough to decide that magic was rather more open to personal interpretation than Catholicism.

YOU have the power, said the book.

Genevieve Malone, who’d never felt as if she had any power in her whole life, was determined to reclaim some of it now. She was going to start by dancing skyclad under the moon over a wishlist of her dreams. Perhaps then, she’d have the courage to go to the Holy Land instead of just looking at books about it. Sybil did it. Wasn’t it time that she and Dolores did it too?

The dogs were hysterical with delight to be let out into the garden on this windy night hours after they’d been put to bed. Pixie kept chasing her tail wildly, and bumped into Genevieve.

‘Be careful, sweetie,’ whispered Genevieve, steadying the lamp.

The wind roared around the garden, rattling the holly bushes and the bare trees.

Genevieve picked her way through the dark over to the copse in the middle of the garden. It was obviously entirely accidental that her mother’s garden had hazel, rowan and elder trees in it; all magical trees. There, she put down her lamp and laid the precious paper under it.

‘God, I’m not turning my back on you,’ she said, looking up at the night sky. ‘I’m only opening my mind up to other belief systems. Asking for help wherever it is, if you like. I mean, I’ll still be at Mass on Sunday, and you know we’ve got the Advent wreath in the kitchen. And these are your trees and this is your moon, after all.’

She stripped off her dressing gown and was caught in a riptide of mid-winter air.

‘This is your body, too, God!’ she cried, shivering. ‘I don’t know why we’re supposed to be ashamed of it. Mother wouldn’t let us wear skirts shorter than our ankles, you know. Why? I mean, why?’

There was no point whispering now. Shouting was the only way to go.

She began to twirl with her arms outstretched, feet bare on the damp, cold grass. ‘I want to travel and have adventures. I’m asking the universe to help me do it! You and the universe, God. I’m asking everyone!’

It was at this moment that Pixie started at something, leapt to her feet and bounded off, knocking over the hurricane lamp on to Genevieve’s pink candlewick dressing gown, which burst into flames.

Snowy began to bark, Genevieve began to shriek. She rushed back towards the house to find something to put the flames out, and fell over Dolores’ ornamental wheelbarrow, planted with January’s snowdrops and crocuses. She lay on the grass, her lower back, always prone to stiffness, locked into a spasm of pain, and screamed.

‘I’ve got a gun, I’ll shoot you!’ roared Dolores from her window, brandishing a broom.

‘It’s me,’ yelled Genevieve in agony.

A light was turned on.

‘What are you doing in the wheelbarrow, for the love of God?’ Dolores said. There was a pause. ‘And why are you naked?’

Ben rushed out into his back garden but it was clear that the noise was coming from next door. Dogs were barking and someone was screaming. Without pausing to dial the police, he grabbed a golf club and hopped over the wall connecting the two gardens.

There, he discovered a naked Genevieve sobbing with pain and shivering with cold by a wheelbarrow.

‘She’s never done anything like this before,’ gasped the other elderly lady, emerging from the back door with a blanket and a broomstick.

‘Of course not,’ said Ben. He worked in advertising. He’d seen it all.

He stomped out the fire and rescued a piece of paper that was blowing in the wind. It had some writing on it. Something about hopes and dreams. He put it in his pocket.

He averted his eyes till the naked lady was suitably covered and then tried to calm her. She was consumed with pain and embarrassment, that was clear. The other lady kept saying, ‘What were you doing, Genevieve?’ in bewilderment.

It took a few minutes to extract Genevieve from the plants and she was surprisingly light and sweet-smelling.

‘That’s lovely perfume, Genevieve,’ he said, as if it was daytime and they were meeting out the front of their respective houses.

‘Grapefruit oil,’ she said, and he sensed her relax.

‘But, Genevieve, why? With no clothes on?’ Dolores was saying.

‘I wanted to be out at night,’ began Genevieve shakily.

‘Of course,’ agreed Ben, with no hint that midnight excursions into gardens in the middle of winter might be considered strange by most people. ‘Wonderful for putting you in touch with nature and, er …’ He looked at Genevieve for a hint on which way to go in order to soothe her worried sister.

‘God,’ she said swiftly. ‘God loves us to appreciate our world.’

‘And His great universe,’ added Ben, who only stepped into churches for weddings and funerals. ‘You had a light to see by and your dressing gown caught fire, perhaps?’

‘I had to take it off then,’ said Genevieve, grabbing this explanation.

‘Very wise.’

Ben helped her on to the couch in the kitchen, and Dolores went off to get painkilling tablets and more blankets.

He took the piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to Genevieve.

‘Thank you,’ she said, looking at it sadly. ‘Nobody’s ever come to my rescue before. Dolores would be upset if she knew what I had been doing. Going skyclad into the night. I got this magic book by mistake and it made me want to try something different, you see. I wanted to change my life before it’s too late.’

At that moment, Ben felt a kinship with this old woman.

‘I can understand that,’ he said. He thought of Lori and all the bottles, of how she’d lied, and of how he wanted it all to be different.

If only it could be different.

‘Are you all right?’ It was Genevieve’s turn to ask him. There was something about those wise eyes that made him think she’d understand.

Dolores bustled around making tea. Genevieve told her to go to bed. She’d manage.

Ben said if they wanted, he’d stay to carry Genevieve up to bed when she felt ready.

‘She’ll be safe with me,’ he told Dolores gravely. ‘Plus, the dogs are here too.’

Genevieve’s painkillers took a while to work, but when they did, the spasms were less painful and she was able to get off the couch.

‘Should you do that?’ asked Ben.

‘The doctor says you have to move around, not stay in one place.’

She made more tea, served with home-made mince pies this time, and then directed Ben to the high-up cupboard where Magic for Beginners rested.

They sat at the kitchen table and flicked through the book and talked about their lives.

Ben Cohen, who treated his grandmother with respect but never told her what was in his heart exactly, told Genevieve about falling in love with Lori, about their infertility treatments and about finding all the bottles.

Genevieve, who had never confided to a single person in her life apart from Dolores, whom she tried to protect, told him about the look of pity in Sybil’s face when Genevieve had talked about Mrs Malone.

‘Sybil knows and she pities us,’ Genevieve said. ‘She knows the two of us are prisoners here, even if Mother is dead. She doesn’t think we’ll ever go to Italy with her.

‘The book and Sybil, it’s made me see it all differently now: the past, that is. I never married or went off around the world. I should have.’

Ben looked at her face, pale now with pain, but still warm and lively for all the signs of age. He could tell she had probably been a beauty when she was younger, with those high cheekbones and the fine arched brows. He saw suddenly that she was still beautiful. He’d never seen it before when they’d made small talk in the lane. But then, he’d never seen the truth about his beloved Lori either.

‘It’s not too late,’ he said suddenly. And he wasn’t just talking about a trip to Italy.

‘Do you think?’ said Genevieve.

‘It’s not too late for either of us,’ Ben said. ‘You should tell Sybil you’ll go, both of you. I could mind the dogs for you.’

Genevieve’s eyes filled with tears, but they weren’t sad tears. They were tears with hope in them, hope for a new life because it was never too late.

‘Thank you, Ben,’ she said.

He helped her up the stairs to bed and placed a kiss on her warm papery cheek.

‘Maybe you’d come in over Christmas for a –’ Genevieve paused. ‘Some tea and more mince pies?’

‘I’d like that,’ said Ben. He meant it.

He went home and got into his cold bed. He tried Lori’s phone again, and this time she answered.

‘Darling!’ she said, her voice clearly telling him all he needed to know.

‘How many have you had?’ he asked sadly.

‘Three. Honestly. I didn’t want to, I wanted to come home and explain about the bottles. You see, Scarlett at work had a party when Marcus was away, and she needed somewhere to put them because he hates her partying, so we stuck them in my car, and I forgot to get rid—’

‘Stop.’

‘No honestly—’

‘Stop. No excuses, Lori. I get it. Finally.’ He was more forcible this time.

This was no time to make plans or tell her of discussions they needed to have. That would have to wait until tomorrow when she was sober. He had met plenty of alcoholics over the years. He had never thought Lori would fit into that category.

‘Can you get a taxi and come home?’

‘Well,’ she sounded so unsure then, almost childlike now that the anticipated scolding hadn’t materialised. ‘I suppose I could,’ she said.

‘Do it now. If you’ve no money, tell the driver I have and I’ll pay him. I’ll put you to bed and we’ll start again in the morning.’

She began to cry then, noisy sobs. ‘I thought you’d be so angry with me. I don’t mean to. I tell myself I’ll just have one and then –’

‘It’s OK,’ he said softly. ‘Just come home, love. We’ll start again. We’ll get you into rehab, whatever it takes. It’s never too late.’

There was more noise and muffled voices, then a car door slamming.

‘I’m in the taxi,’ Lori said. ‘I’m coming home.’

‘See you in a little while, Lori,’ said Ben.

He hung up and walked upstairs to where he could overlook Genevieve and Dolores’ garden with the little grouping of ancient trees sending spindly, bare branches up into the night sky.

What he and Genevieve had talked about that night was true, he knew. It was never too late.

Dolores didn’t like going away when the daffodils were still out.

‘And what about the slugs?’ she wanted to know. The garden would be ravaged by them.

Genevieve had heard variations on this theme every week since they’d booked the holiday with Sybil to Italy.

‘There’s no right time to go away,’ she told her sister now, looking up from her final checklist regarding passports, photocopies of passports, tickets and money. The taxi was coming in an hour to take them and Sybil to the airport. ‘We have to trust that this is the right time for us, Dolores. It’s going to be marvellous.’

‘What if something goes wrong?’ said Dolores, looking up at her sister with beseeching eyes like the dogs’.

‘Sybil has travelled the world,’ Genevieve said firmly. ‘She’ll know what to do if something goes wrong.’

‘The problem with Sybil is that I think she’d quite like something to go wrong,’ fretted Dolores. ‘She’s far too fond of adventure.’

Genevieve laughed. ‘I’d quite like an adventure myself.’

Seeing the alarm in her sister’s eyes, she immediately pointed out that if anything went wrong, they could phone Ben and he’d sort it out.

‘Yes, Ben’s so good to us,’ Dolores muttered, mantra-like, ‘taking care of the dogs for us. Pixie and Snowy love both Ben and Lori.’

Genevieve knew that Lori found long walks therapeutic since she’d come out of rehab. She and Ben were looking forward to caring for the dogs and taking them for walks, although Genevieve explained that neither dog had ever had an actual long walk in their life.

‘We’ll take care of them,’ Ben had assured her the day before.

There was a light in his eyes these days. It made Genevieve happy just to see it.

When Genevieve and Dolores came back from their travels, he and Lori were going to Kerry for a few days’ holiday.

‘Lori wants to keep it simple,’ he explained to Genevieve. ‘We’ve never been to Kerry, so it’s not tinged by bad memories of the past. It’s hard for her, but she’s being so strong. And I’m happy no matter where we go, as long as she’s OK.’

‘She’ll be fine with you beside her,’ Genevieve said.

‘What about Dolores?’ he asked. ‘Is she still nervous about going away?’

‘Terribly,’ admitted Genevieve. ‘But wait till we get there. She’ll love it, I know she will. We both will.’

Handbag packed, she took one last trip around the house to make sure all the windows were locked before they left. It was odd to be going away for two whole weeks. She’d never been away from Primrose Cottage for that long ever before.

On her bedside table and carefully left under a knitting book, lest Dolores spot it, lay Magic for Beginners, now well thumbed. Genevieve thought she’d finally got to the bottom of the mystery of how it had ended up in her hands. There had been another Malone on the other side of Ardagh, it seemed. A Mrs Malone of West Ardagh. The man in the big post office had eventually uncovered this information, but only after Genevieve explained that it was just a book that had come to her house by mistake. Not a bill or some vital, private document.

‘Only a book,’ said the man, clearly relieved. ‘You see, if this was a private document, then we couldn’t give you out any details.’

‘Of course,’ said Genevieve. ‘No, it was only a book.’

She’d taken the car on one of its rare trips over to West Ardagh to find the mysterious Miss Malone and had come upon another Primrose Cottage, a tiny sliver of a house wedged between two fine new-builds. The old Genevieve might not have had the courage to ring the doorbell so firmly, or even to peer in the windows when nobody answered the door, but the newly courageous Genevieve had no such qualms.

However, the house was clearly empty. It felt empty. There was dust on the windows and dirt on the mat at the door. Whoever had lived here had moved on. But they’d left behind a gloriously beautiful garden, enclosed by rowan, elder and hazel trees. Magical trees.

Genevieve wrote a note on a piece of paper from her handbag and posted it through the letter box.

Thank you for Magic for Beginners. I still have it, if ever you need it. Fondest wishes

Genevieve Malone