Christmas Magic. Cathy Kelly

‘He’s in a band, too. He plays the bass guitar.’

      For the first time that evening, Felicity and her mother’s smiles were in harmony.

      Rosalie invited her daughter to a charity cake sale the following Tuesday.

      ‘I can’t, Mum,’ Felicity said. ‘I’m working.’

      Rosalie and Mel’s faces formed themselves into similar disapproving looks.

      ‘I don’t see why you have to kill yourself working in that chemist shop, Felicity,’ Rosalie said crossly. ‘You’re only doing it to spite Leo. What’s wrong with you, why can’t you stop all this talk of separation and divorce?’ She almost hissed the word. ‘In my time, we knew how to keep our families together.’

      Mel’s bottom lip wobbled.

      ‘I’m not working to spite Mel’s father,’ Felicity said, keeping herself calm with great difficulty. ‘I’m working because I need to earn my living. Leo and I would each be living in shoeboxes on the side of the road if I didn’t. I’ve always worked, Mum. I’ve just upped my hours and it happens to suit me.’

      Rosalie left soon after, muttering to her grand-daughter about hoping that some people would come to their senses soon.

      Mel said she was tired and stomped off to her tiny room. ‘I need to be on my own,’ she said loftily, the same way she used to end arguments when she’d been a teenager.

      Felicity tidied up the dinner things and wondered how all this had become her fault.

      The next morning, Mel was so happy that Felicity knew something was up.

      ‘Dad just phoned me,’ she said, when they’d had breakfast. The orange juice had been pronounced ‘nearly as nice as the Spanish stuff’. ‘It’s Nanna and Gramps’ fiftieth anniversary in December. They’re having a big party and they want us all to go. You too. No, actually, you especially! Dad says he really wants you to go, and so do Nanna and Gramps.’

      Mel’s pretty face was so child-like in its enthusiasm that Felicity simply couldn’t say no to her. There was no point in admitting that she’d never got on with her husband’s mother and that not having to endure any time ever again with Nanna, aka Concepta Morgan, was one of the great pluses of the separation.

      She could see that her husband’s family were thinking along the same lines as her own mother and daughter: get the recalcitrant pair together and they’d make up. Simple! Everything could go back to the way it was before, a way that suited everyone except Felicity herself.

      Perhaps actually seeing Felicity, Leo and his new love, Sonya, together might make them realise the truth.

      ‘We can go together,’ she said to her daughter, thinking it was a small sacrifice to make Mel feel happier.

      ‘I was thinking of asking Shane to go,’ Mel said. ‘What do you think?’

      Leo even left a message on her mobile phone answering service:

      ‘I know Mel’s going to tell you, but we do all want you to be there: it wouldn’t be the same without you, Felicity.’

      At work, they talked about ex-husbands and families and how hard it was to reconcile them all.

      Zoë had an ex-husband who’d never been any sort of provider and still turned up on her doorstep from time to time, asking for money.

      ‘He’s had scores of women over the years but he still comes back to me,’ she sighed. ‘Lord knows why. He never had kids with the rest of them. I think that makes a difference. They associate you with the concept of family. Like you’re their mother or something.’

      ‘I love men, but I could never marry one,’ said Chantelle, who was known to have a complicated romantic life. ‘They are better to dip in and out of when you feel the need.’

      ‘Right now, I don’t feel the need for a man,’ said Felicity. ‘I certainly don’t feel the need to go to my ex-mother-in-law’s wedding anniversary party, but it’s being presented to me as this great family affair and they’ll all be devastated if I don’t go.’

      ‘Your ex, he is bringing his new woman?’ asked Chantelle, getting right to the heart of the matter.

      Felicity didn’t know. ‘Nobody can hope for us to get back together if he turns up with another woman, but he might not bring her in case he offends me.’

      ‘He never worried about that before,’ Zoë remarked.

      ‘True. Do you think I should ask him to bring her?’ Felicity said thoughtfully.

      The pharmacy erupted into laughter.

      ‘You’re an original, Felicity,’ said Zoë, ‘I’ll say that for you.’

      Rosalie was thrilled with news of the anniversary party and clearly saw it the way the Morgan family saw it: as an excuse to get Leo and Felicity to see the error of their ways.

      ‘Marriage is for life, Felicity, you see,’ she said, adopting the wise-woman voice that made Felicity want to kick a hole in the wall. ‘Nobody said it was easy, but some people manage to stay together through all the pain and heartache.’

      ‘What heartache did Dad put you through?’ Felicity demanded. If anything, the shoe was on the other foot. Her father should have been canonised for putting up with her mother.

      ‘I’m not saying we had heartache, but I understand it,’ Rosalie went on piously. ‘You have your children to think of.’

      ‘They’re grown up and my husband cheated on me for years,’ Felicity snapped. ‘I thought you’d be glad I’d finally stood up for myself.’

      ‘I suppose I am, but I like Leo,’ wailed her mother.

      ‘We all like him,’ roared Felicity. ‘I like him. I just didn’t like being married to him!’

      By November, Mel and Shane were deeply in love, Ryan was toying with the idea of moving to London for a year to work, and Felicity had acquired an apricot-coloured Burmese kitten called Miss Lillie.

      She’d been on a double date with Chantelle and two divorced Belgian male friends, information she had not shared with any of her family. It had been enjoyable but it had made Felicity realise something very important: she wasn’t interested in the flirtatious behaviour she remembered from her early years with Leo.

      Her date, a charming furniture importer named Michel, was lovely company but when he asked her out on her own, she had to say no.

      ‘You are not ready yet, perhaps?’ said Michel kindly, over a coffee in Chantelle’s pretty townhouse after the meal.

      Felicity treated him to some of her new-found total honesty. ‘It’s not that, Michel,’ she said. ‘I’m not still in love with my ex or hurting over the separation. I’ve spent so many years pleasing other people, I haven’t the energy to please anyone else. I want to please myself right now.’

      ‘You might change your mind,’ Chantelle said the following day.

      ‘I might,’ Felicity agreed, ‘but at this exact moment in time, I simply have no desire to dress up to excite a man or to worry over whether I have cellulite or not. Why are we all supposed to worry about cellulite, anyway? Is that what suffragettes died for?’

      ‘Sex is an important part of being a woman,’ Chantelle argued.

      ‘Michel is right, then,’ Felicity agreed. ‘I’m not ready yet. I’d prefer to wear socks in bed and watch BBC4. But when rampant desire hits me, I’ll know who to call.’

      Sonya was not going to the great Morgan family anniversary party.

      ‘She wants to go, but Dad is insisting she can’t,’ Ryan revealed.

      Felicity found herself feeling sorry for Sonya. It wasn’t easy being