‘Well, you’ve got Dolores to go with,’ Sybil pointed out. ‘And you’re welcome to come with me, anytime you’d like.’
‘Really?’
Sybil drank down her spirulina, grimacing as she did so. ‘Supposed to keep you young, but it tastes awful.’ She put the glass down. ‘Are you saying you and Dolores would like to come to Italy with me?’
‘Goodness no,’ said Genevieve hastily. ‘We wouldn’t want to impose—’
‘You wouldn’t be imposing. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t mean it,’ Sybil replied.
She made it sound so simple. There were no hidden pitfalls in conversation with someone like Sybil, no chance of saying the wrong thing. Not like with Mother.
Genevieve decided to try normal conversation. ‘You see, we’ve never travelled, never been anywhere,’ she said. ‘Mother didn’t approve.’
Sybil’s look of pity nearly made her stop but she kept going.
‘I got this book by mistake during the week and it’s making me think about things.’
‘What sort of book?’ Sybil leaned forward with interest.
‘Magic for Beginners. It was a mistake, we’d never ordered it from Devine’s or anything,’ Genevieve said hastily. ‘I go to Mass and—’
‘Genevieve, I am not your mother. I am not the judge and jury, either,’ Sybil said. ‘I’d love to get a look at that book. It sounds fabulous –’ Her face broadened into a huge smile. ‘There’s Claudia, look.’
Genevieve turned to see the youngest of Sybil’s brood, a woman with wild red hair and a smiling face.
‘Sorry, Genevieve, we’re off shopping today. Claudia’s driving. Must fly. I’d love a look at that book of yours sometime.’
And she was gone.
Genevieve bought some milk and walked slowly up the hill to Primrose Cottage, wondering what her life would have been like if she’d been more like Sybil, more like the sort of person who’d buy Magic for Beginners and use it.
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.