Christmas Magic

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.’