Christmas Magic

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.