Christmas Magic. Cathy Kelly

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       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 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 СКАЧАТЬ