Christmas Magic. Cathy Kelly

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

       Anniversary Waltz

      In the tiny staffroom of Deloitte’s Pharmacy, Felicity Barnes put her mobile phone away and returned to her coffee and her chicken wrap thoughtfully.

      Lunchtimes at Deloitte’s were fluid things and she might as well eat while she had the chance. It was Monday, the day when doctors’ surgeries were jammed with people who’d held on to their sore throats and aching backs over the weekend and had decided they needed medical attention urgently once Monday morning dawned.

      Consequently, pharmacies were like Grand Central Station all day Monday with little chance of a break, and in the two months Felicity had been working in Deloitte’s, she’d learned to take lunch when she got the opportunity.

      As she ate, she thought about her daughter’s phone call.

      Mel was twenty-two and sometimes Felicity thought she was a very young twenty-two. Casting her mind back, Felicity realised that she’d been married to Leo with a baby on the way at the same age. But then that was years ago, when things had been different. People had grown up quickly then. She and Leo had been living in London in a tiny third-floor flat with no lift and very little money. They’d had no support system when Ryan, now twenty-seven, had cried through the night and an exhausted Felicity had wondered what she was doing wrong. She could recall the relief of hearing another mother say it was ‘… just colic, love. All babies get it. Blooming nightmare, isn’t it?’ The relief at hearing those words and the realisation that Ryan’s terrible crying was normal.

      Conversely, twenty-two-year-old Melanie had no responsibility for anyone but herself and still brought bagfuls of laundry home from teacher training college at weekends for her mother to wash, dry and iron.

      Or at least, she always used to.

      Melanie had been working in Spain over the summer holidays when Felicity and Leo sold the house.

      The sale had been part of the separation arrangements. Felicity had loved the house on the quiet, tree-lined housing estate where the children had grown up. It had been the family home for over two decades, but it had to be sold and the money split between herself and Leo. There was no other option.

      Melanie had recently returned to Ireland to learn that her stuff from the house was now stored in a warehouse on a vast industrial estate, along with some of the bigger pieces of furniture that Felicity and Leo hadn’t wanted to sell. There was the piano Leo’s mother had given them and a huge wooden dining-room table from a great-aunt which was supposed to be a fabulous antique but which Felicity suspected was just an ordinary old table with carved legs. One day, Felicity said, the children might like these things but there was no room for them in her new apartment overlooking the sea. It wasn’t a box like so many apartments and it had three bedrooms – albeit two incredibly tiny ones along with the master bedroom – so her children would always have somewhere to stay, but it didn’t have room for big furniture.

      It was also, as Mel had sobbed on the phone just now, ‘not home!’

      ‘You knew we had to sell the house, Mel,’ Felicity had replied with a calmness she didn’t really feel. She had known how painful it would be for her children. She’d asked Mel to fly home from Spain to visit the house one last time, just to forestall this sadness. She’d made it plain that her new home would be Mel and Ryan’s home too. But Mel had been too busy to fly home.

      Now that she was home, Mel didn’t even want to hear about her mother’s new apartment. Having managed not to think about the family upheaval while she was working in Madrid, she’d just returned to her college digs, in time for the autumn term, and now she was thinking about it. And she was wildly upset.

      Mel was, Felicity reflected, the more emotional of her two children. Ryan had great emotional depth but was less prone to outbursts than his sister. He worked in window design for a chain of interiors stores and he was endlessly busy, but he’d still managed to be there the day Felicity had locked the door on their beloved family home for the last time. He’d taken his mother to lunch and they’d talked about the fun times they’d spent there, and about how they hoped the bones of Teddie, the family collie, would not be disinterred by the new owners digging near the roses. Somehow, Ryan managed to blame nobody for his parents’ marital discord. It wasn’t his place to judge, he said. He liked that it was all civilised and that there weren’t insults flying between Felicity and Leo.

      ‘I never got to say goodbye to the garden,’ Mel had said bitterly on the phone.

      There