Christmas Magic

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 was no value to be had in pointing out that Felicity had asked her to come home to do just that. Fresh off the plane and with no cosy home to return to, Mel didn’t want to hear about financial problems, the reality of her parents needing two separate places to live, how her mother had never wanted it all to turn out like this.

‘Wherever your father and I are, there will always be a welcome for you. Our homes are always your homes,’ Felicity said in anguish, hating to hear her darling daughter so distressed.

‘Home will never be where that cow is!’

That cow was Sonya, the woman Leo had recently moved in with. Sonya, incidentally, was not the woman he’d been having an affair with for many years. With an equanimity that surprised her, Felicity felt pity for Darina, her husband’s assistant, who had been considered surplus to requirements once Leo had got his freedom. Apparently, this happened a lot.

‘The agony aunts tell women he’ll never leave his wife and, if he does, ten to one he won’t move in with you – he’ll have another woman you never knew about lined up,’ said Felicity’s sister, who was keen to disembowel Leo and was fed up with her sister’s calm handling of all this. ‘Serve Darina right. She’s getting a taste of her own medicine.’

Felicity pitied Darina as yet another woman who’d been fleeced by Leo Morgan. But she refused to be bitter about him. Bitterness hurt only oneself.

Leo had left in January when Felicity could no longer live with the knowledge that her husband was cheating. Now that they were apart, it was immaterial to her if he was living with Darina, Sonya or a cast of thousands. It was marvellously liberating to realise that Leo’s whereabouts was no longer her business. She was only sorry she hadn’t forced his hand years ago. She’d always tried to be grown-up about his infidelities and to ignore the pain because they had children. But finally, something had cracked inside her. It wasn’t the giant crack of an earthquake: it was the gentle shearing away of one piece of polar ice from another, an inevitable event which had turned out to be far less painful than being married to the other ice cap.

Ryan reported that Sonya was nice enough but his father’s new relationship probably wouldn’t last.

‘She’s sort of naïve. Too naïve for Dad, really. I don’t see it going the distance.’

Felicity wondered how her elder child had become so wise, not to mention forgiving.

And why Melanie wasn’t the same.

‘Where is this damn flat, anyway?’ Melanie had snapped down the phone. Mel always hid her fear by lashing out.

Felicity, relieved that her daughter was giving in and agreeing to come and stay, had given her directions and explained that she was in apartment 14, with the name F. Barnes on the bell.

‘Barnes? But that’s your maiden name!’

Felicity was sure her daughter’s shrieks had been heard by all in the pharmacy back room.

‘Yes,’ she had said, again using the calm voice she’d employed many times during Mel’s teenage years. She longed for Mel to understand why she’d gone back to her maiden name, that she was reclaiming part of herself that she’d lost years ago. ‘See you at half six.’

She sighed as she mulled over all this while eating her lunch.

‘Family trouble?’ Chantelle, one of the other sales assistants, had come over. She was an attractive Belgian woman, who would wear a silk scarf knotted just so, and was able to handle the most difficult customers.

‘My daughter’s home and she’s angry that we’ve sold our house,’ Felicity explained. ‘I wanted her to come home before we sold it, but she wouldn’t. She hates the idea that I’ve moved into somewhere new. I knew she’d be upset but it’s still heartbreaking.’

Felicity wouldn’t have dreamed of filling anyone in on her private details normally, but Chantelle invited confidences partly because she didn’t have the gossip gene and partly because she had such fabulous advice on all things.

‘Does your daughter not see that you were unhappy and that her father treated you badly?’ Chantelle asked.

Felicity shook her head sadly. ‘She wants it to be like it always was, no matter how hard that was for me. My mother’s the same,’ she admitted. ‘She thinks I told Leo to leave in a fit of sheer lunacy.’

In the two months she’d worked in the pharmacy, Felicity had gone to see several films with Chantelle and had been to a salsa-dancing night with the other staff members, Monica and Zoë, a fact which she had no intention of sharing with her daughter. Mel would see it as more proof of change. Previously, Felicity’s friends were all women she’d known for years or mothers she’d come to know when Ryan and Mel were at school.

Her work in Deloitte’s was part of Felicity’s new life. For most of her marriage, she’d worked one day a week as a pharmacy assistant, but now there was no reason for her not to work almost full time. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the hours, she loved it. This new chapter in her life was exciting.

Chantelle laid a gentle hand on Felicity’s arm. ‘She will come round, you’ll see,’ she said kindly.

That evening, Felicity cooked Mel’s favourite meal: broccoli and feta cheese pasta bake, although she didn’t have time to make her trademark caramel meringues and had to make do with some ordinary shop-bought meringues instead. She had fresh orange juice for Mel’s breakfast because her daughter said she loved the glorious Spanish orange juice she’d become used to in Madrid.

Felicity changed from her smart work blouse and tailored trousers into jeans and a sweater. She walked round the apartment, tidying, repositioning things and hoping that Mel would like it. The bedroom she’d assigned for Mel was tiny and had only space for a single bed, but Felicity had bought pretty, delicately sprigged bed linen and the small table beside the bed had fresh flowers on it. Nobody could find fault with the place.

‘The flat’s very small, isn’t it?’ Mel said when she arrived, stalking around.

‘Yes,’ said Felicity evenly. ‘But a four-bedroom semi doesn’t make much sense for a woman on her own.’

No need to discuss the financial implications of modern separation and divorce. Small steps, Felicity reminded herself.

Mel liked the bed linen but was shocked at the size of her bedroom.

‘We’re all downsizing now,’ said Felicity gaily.

They’d started dinner – Mel much happier now that she’d seen her mother was still cooking the same sort of comfort food – when the intercom buzzed.

‘Only me,’ shouted Felicity’s mother, Rosalie.

What fresh hell is this? thought Felicity. Her mother and Mel sang from the same hymn sheet: life was better when Leo and Felicity were together, irrespective of flings and marital disharmony. Ignoring reality was clearly a trait that had skipped a generation and had gone straight from Rosalie to Mel.

Mel and her granny hugged, sobbed a bit at the changes in the family, and were soon whispering about how upset they were as Mel finished her food and Rosalie drank some strong tea.

Felicity’s apartment was intentionally closer to her mother’s seafront bungalow, but the intent was more along the lines of being near in case of trouble, instead of being near so that Rosalie could drop in morning, noon and night.

Rosalie and Mel looked alike, both being small, birdlike and fair-haired, although Rosalie’s fairness now had help from the odd highlight. Felicity was tall and dark, like her dear departed father. He had been a calm man too, and she thought ruefully that he’d never been entirely at ease with her choice of husband. Leo had always been too edgy, too full of great plans for the future.

Rosalie wanted to hear all about Spain and the gorgeous local men. Chat about what college would be like for the next term took them through dessert and on to coffee.

Mel told them she had shared a cab from the airport with a completely fabulous guy who’d been on her flight from Madrid and they were now seeing each other. He was in college too, doing something in computers. Mel had only liked computers for the social networking sites and for doing college essays, but suddenly, she was very interested in them.