Magic Sometimes Happens

by Margaret James

  I’d let go of her hand for just one moment and before I knew it she was kissing cousins with two ducks, would you believe it, who were bobbing on the surface of the larger pool. I grabbed her by the hood. I scooped her up and held her very tight. ‘You are not Jesus Christ!’ I cried. ‘You do not walk on water!’

  ‘Daddy, ducks!’ said Polly, pointing.

  ‘Pat, calm down,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Why are you British so careless of your children?’ I would not calm down! ‘These paving stones – they’re wet, uneven, slippery – they’re lethal for a little one. Why are there no guard rails, nothing to stop a person falling in and never being seen again?’

  ‘There are guides, attendants, and the pool’s not very deep.’

  ‘It must be deep enough.’ How many cell phones, cameras and eyeglasses could be at the bottom of that pool, that bath of Kermit-coloured water, I wondered, shuddering.

  ‘Polly, stay with Daddy, yes?’ said Rosie. ‘We would hate to lose you.’

  Yeah, understatement of the century. But Rosie had no children of her own, had never had those nightmares when your kids are trapped inside a burning building, drowning in a torrent, and you feet won’t move, your arms won’t reach, you’re paralysed.

  How could she understand?

  I held my baby in my arms, her head butting my collarbone, her thumb wedged in her mouth. She was tired and soon she would be dozing and drooling on my shoulder.

  But Joe was going crazy with excitement, dashing here and there and everywhere and hollering, even though I told him to quiet down a dozen times. I was relieved to see that Rosie held his hand real tight as he did his best to fall into a cistern full of coins.

  ‘Hey, Dad – check this out!’ he cried. ‘I never saw so many pennies, quarters, dimes!’ He loved the deep, mysterious pools of water. He coveted the coins. He adored the spooks and watched enchanted as images of walking, talking ancient Romans bloomed on Roman walls. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him they were not for real, that they were projections of actor guys in togas, playing on a loop.

  Why spoil the magic? We all need magic, don’t we?

  After going round the baths themselves, we took tea in the Pump Room, an amazing Georgian space where young, good-looking waiters and pretty college-student waitresses served us tea and perfect sandwiches and jewel-like little cakes.

  I thought the British had no time for kids. But it seemed like I was wrong because these guys all made a pet of Polly, joked and high-fived with my son.

  I thought how much my mom would love it here. I would bring her over some time, I decided, watch her sip her British tea and nibble cutesy British cakes and tiny British sandwiches served up on silver stands, while a string quartet played music from the shows she loved, and she would—

  ‘Polly, no!’ cried Rosie.

  I had been distracted for a moment, thinking of my mother. But to my relief I saw that Rosie had just moved the teapot out of Polly’s reach.

  There are always snakes in paradise.

  ROSIE

  After Polly tried to grab the teapot, Pat took her on his lap and held her there, distracting her from all the dangerous stuff with sandwiches and cake.

  The string quartet launched into something bright and jolly, possibly by Noël Coward, and Pat looked at me and shook his head. ‘I can’t believe this is for real,’ he murmured. ‘It’s like something out of Georgette Heyer.’

  ‘My goodness, you read Georgette Heyer, do you?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t. But Mom has all her novels, and I’m guessing I saw this place on one of the covers of her books.’

  ‘My mother loves those books as well.’

  ‘So if they should ever meet, they would have at least one interest in common?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps. Joe, would you like another little cake?’ The memory of my mother giving Pat her special ice queen treatment could still make me blush.

  ‘Rosie?’ whispered Joe, as Pat was cutting up some bread for Polly. ‘Did you lose any teeth?’

  ‘Well – not recently,’ I whispered back. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I lost a ton of teeth.’ Opening his mouth extremely wide, he showed me where three baby teeth were missing. ‘I put them in a box with a dead ladybug, a snail shell and a stick insect’s head.’

  ‘Joe, will you quit talking about teeth and bugs and stuff and grossing Rosie out?’ Pat told him, sighing. ‘What will she think of you?’

  I thought he was delightful.

  If I’d wanted any children – which of course I didn’t – I’d have loved to have a Joseph Riley of my own …

  The adults ate the cucumber-and-salmon, egg-mayonnaise and ham-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. We all ate the gorgeous little cakes. Pat said everything was good. He tipped the pretty waitress generously. Then I challenged him to drink some water from the fountain in the Pump Room. ‘Go on, go on,’ I urged him. ‘When you come to Bath for the first time, you have to take the waters – it’s the law.’

  ‘Go on, Dad,’ repeated Joe.

  ‘It’s absolutely free,’ I added, laughing at his frown.

  ‘It’s the stuff we saw in those green pools?’

  ‘That’s right – the very same.’

  ‘You’ll have some as well?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Spit or swallow?’

  ‘Swallow, definitely.’

  ‘I’ll have some too,’ said Joe. ‘I’ll swallow.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Pat. ‘You’ll tell your mom I gave you water the colour of Shrek’s ass and she’ll tell her attorney. You and your sister stick to juice.’

  I fetched a couple of glasses from the fountain. He saw the water wasn’t green at all and frowned at me. ‘You got this from a regular faucet, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, it’s from the sacred spring. But it’s purified and filtered so it’s safe to drink. Look over there – the girl is filling glasses for some other people now. What do you think of it?’

  ‘Not bad at all – it’s chalky, chemical, but not unpleasant – no rotten eggs, no blood.’

  ‘You can feel it doing you good, then?’

  ‘Something must be doing me good,’ he said and gave me a big smile which warmed my heart.

  PATRICK

  What a day, best time I had in years.

  I don’t know why I kvetched so much about Stonehenge. When I think about it, little guys in goatskins or whatever moving rocks the size of small apartment blocks is pretty damn amazing.

  I guess I hated the rain, the cold, the damp? I was also worried about Rosie meeting Joe and Polly, how it would all work out. But clearly Rosie gets on fine with kids, even if she’s careless of them and she talks to them as if they’re equals, which of course they’re not – they’re only kids.

  As we headed back to the hotel, I thought: you have to stop this now. Stop fooling round with Rosie. Stop wasting Rosie’s time. She should be out there looking for a husband, for the father of her children, not hooking up with you.

  But I didn’t think that I could bear to let her go.

  When we got back to Guildford, both the kids were fast asleep. I took Joe and Rosie carried Polly into the hotel. ‘Come up and have a coffee or whatever,’ I told Rosie. ‘I’ll get some stuff sent to our room.’

  ‘Dad?’ Joe stirred and yawned, opened his eyes. ‘I’m hungry, Dad. I want to get a chocolate shake and dinosaurs and fries.’

  ‘Yes, okay.’

  ‘It’s not okay,’ said Rosie, and she set her mouth the way all women do when they’re about to tell a man he’s wrong. ‘You shouldn’t always feed them chips and processed chicken, Pat.’

  She was right, of course. I shouldn’t feed my kids on junk, use Joe and Poll to make some sort of stuff-you-mate – another Britishism I kind of like – attack upon my wife. They should have a decent, balanced diet of cheese and eggs and fruit and wholemeal bread, not processed shit and shakes and branded sodas, I knew that well enough.

  I ord
ered apple juice and cheese-and-salad sandwiches on wholemeal bread, not white. Joe picked at his and grumbled that he hated dirty bread and that the salad grossed him out. Then he crawled into bed and went to sleep.

  As Joe and Polly slept, we talked in whispers.

  ‘Pat, what do you actually do?’ she asked. ‘I mean at JQA? You’ve never said.’

  ‘I work on speech-to-text and thought-to-text.’

  ‘Goodness, thought-to-text – it sounds like something out of Harry Potter.’

  ‘It’s not magic, Rosie. It’s turning brain activity into text on a computer screen. I do stuff with guys from several disciplines – neurologists, computer scientists, psychologists and physiologists. We’re developing technology which will mean that one day even people with the most severe impairments – people who can’t move, perhaps, can’t talk, can’t even blink – will be able to communicate with ease and accuracy using just their brains. It’s possible to do it fairly clumsily right now.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘You talk to your computer with your mind. Your brain makes brainwaves – yeah, they do exist – and your computer turns them into words. The other guy reads what you said on his computer screen.’

  ‘What’s your role in this?’

  ‘I write the algorithms.’

  ‘You’re going to think I’m very stupid, but what’s an algorithm?’

  ‘It’s a method, formula, procedure – whatever you want to call it – a set of rules to follow when making calculations or doing other problem-solving stuff, in my case with IT. Accuracy-wise, the thought-to-text procedures are proving just a little problematic, but we’ll get there some day, hopefully quite soon.’

  ‘It still sounds like magic.’

  ‘No, it’s science. As for magic, Rosie – that’s your specialty.’

  I met her glance and wished that she could stay with me tonight. I knew she wished it, too. We needed no computer interface.

  But – how does that poem put it – we had space enough and time.

  Or at least, we had until July.

  May

  ROSIE

  He hadn’t liked Stonehenge.

  But he thought Bath was awesome and he loved the British seaside. When we went to Brighton the following weekend, Brighton was a hit.

  He had never seen the sea – the ocean, as he called it – except from up on high, through the small windows of an aeroplane, and that was only recently. He had never paddled in salt water, never walked along a pier. He had never heard the susurration of waves dragging on pebbles, never seen the evening sun splash pink and red and gold upon these waves. As a child himself, he had done almost nothing British children take for granted.

  So he was determined to make up for it now.

  ‘Cockles, whelks, these things are gross,’ he told me. But he ate them all the same because he said he figured he ought to try them once. ‘The British can’t make cotton candy,’ he continued, chewing at it valiantly, but it proved too much even for him, and soon he tossed his candy floss into the nearest bin. ‘That was way too sweet, too sticky. It was burnt, as well.’

  ‘Do you have any other observations, grumbles or complaints?’

  ‘No, I guess that wraps it up,’ he said and grinned at me. ‘Your British chocolate is delicious and your ice cream is divine.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Pat. It’s good to know we got a few things right.’

  ‘Rosie, you got almost everything exactly right.’ He took my hand and pulled me down beside him on the pebbles. ‘We should have met in high school,’ he added wistfully. ‘Why didn’t we?’

  ‘You were destined to be Lexie’s husband and Joe’s and Polly’s father. It was written in your fate.’

  ‘You believe in fate?’ He shrugged and seemed to acquiesce, stared for some moments at the white-capped waves, but then turned back to me. He gazed into my eyes, his stare intense. ‘But I’m not Lexie’s husband any more and I’d love to have some kids with you.’

  ‘You want more children?’

  ‘Sure – I’d like a dozen. I’d love to have a big old house somewhere in upstate Minnesota, full of kids and noise and fun and laughter. But perhaps I couldn’t put a dozen kids through college, so let’s say four or five. Rosie, maybe one day—’

  ‘See that buoy?’ I said before he could go any further. I scrambled to my feet. ‘Why don’t I race you to it, eh?’

  He was surprised to learn I’d never been to Ireland.

  ‘But it’s so close,’ he said as we drove back to London. ‘Why don’t you check it out?’

  ‘Perhaps one day,’ I said. ‘But it rains there even more than it does here, you know – that’s why it’s called the Emerald Isle, because it’s green, green, green. Pat, are you curious about your Irish ancestors?’

  ‘Yes and no – yes because they were my ancestors, no because they must have led shit-awful lives and the whole Irish-British thing is pretty damn depressing. You British aren’t too popular with most Irish-Americans, you know.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You were responsible for so much pain and suffering, that’s why. A million Irish people came to the US back in the nineteenth century with nothing but the rags upon their backs, escaping the Great Famine.’

  ‘What great famine?’

  ‘Oh, come on – you must have heard of it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, the way they teach it in the USA, the choice was either leave or starve to death, as many thousands did. There were Irish Catholic people lying dead and dying in the streets and in the countryside. But the British let them die – encouraged them to die – kept on exporting Irish wheat which could have fed the people. You didn’t study history in school?’

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t learn about the Irish. We did the Plantagenets, the Tudors and the Stuarts – Cromwell, Charles I, the Restoration.’

  ‘Cromwell did bad stuff in Ireland, Rosie.’

  I didn’t want to sour what had been up to then a perfect day. So I didn’t ask him what Cromwell did in Ireland. I turned the radio on and got the shipping forecast. I let all those hypnotic, soothing names –Fitzroy, Bailey, Rockall, Malin, Dover – reassure and comfort me.

  He said he loved me. I believed him.

  But I could see he felt impatient with me sometimes, even though he did his best to hide it. I annoyed him by just being there, distracting him.

  I knew his work was very important. It would help to benefit the disadvantaged and disabled everywhere. But I was still jealous of his work, of the fact that he was so wrapped up in it, that I would never be his entire life. I’d always be a part of it, however much I willed it to be otherwise.

  Although he never said or even hinted, I got the impression he thought I was lightweight – a very silly, superficial person whose life revolved round handbags, clothes and cupcakes. I knew he was irritated by my attitude to fashion, couldn’t believe how much I was prepared to spend on what was hot. He wasn’t mean – far from it – but he wasn’t bothered about labels. He always knew exactly what he wanted and shopping bored him rigid. Once he discovered Marks & Spencer menswear, he bought nothing else.

  I love shopping – not as much as Tess loves shopping, but I do enjoy it – and of course I love a bargain, particularly a designer bargain. When I saw a rather gorgeous cardigan in a shop in Bond Street – after I had been to talk to Fanny about a new promotion that she said would make me rich – and this rather lovely garment was reduced as well, naturally I had to snap it up. But afterwards I realised I didn’t get such a bargain, after all. The girl was chatting to her mate and gave me the wrong change.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ I told Pat, when I met him later for a coffee and he noticed I was wearing something new. ‘I’d have bought it anyway, even if it hadn’t been in the sale. I did wonder if the change was right. But the discount was something per cent. So I couldn’t work out what I should pay while I was in the shop.’

  ‘Why could
n’t you?’

  ‘I don’t have that sort of mind, and anyway God gave us calculators. So I don’t need to do percentages or long division or any of that tedious stuff I had to do at school. Pat, I’m not going have a nervous breakdown over twenty quid.’

  ‘It isn’t cool to be cheated by a store. It’s just plain dumb.’ He found his pen, reached for my paper napkin. ‘Okay, here’s the simple way to figure out percentages. Rosie, are you listening?’

  Twenty minutes later, I understood percentages at last and realised it was possible to do them in my head. Or some of them, at least. I was amazed.

  ‘Why didn’t I get this before?’ I asked.

  ‘Whoever taught you math instructed you but forgot to show you how to learn. A teacher shouldn’t stand there and pontificate. It’s a teacher’s job to show his students how to learn. Then they’ll understand most anything within a range of capability and they’ll go on learning all their lives.’

  ‘I bet you couldn’t teach a frog geometry.’

  ‘As I said, we have to work within a range of capability. Rosie, twenty-five per cent of thirty-six?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy – nine.’

  ‘You find it easy now. You couldn’t have done it half an hour ago. Fifty per cent of four?’

  ‘It’s two,’ I said and kissed him. ‘Pat, it’s you and me.’

  What was our range of capability? What did we need to learn? What could we hope to learn, to have a chance of happiness?

  ‘We’re good together, aren’t we?’ I asked later when we were at my flat. He’d seemed distant and preoccupied right through the evening, going through the motions of making conversation, but making me feel like I wasn’t there.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘What don’t you know?’

  ‘You’re definitely very good for me. You make me very happy. But I’m no good for you. I think you need a younger guy.’

  ‘You could be right. I’m only twenty-nine but you’re already in your fourth decade. You’re almost geriatric. But hey, you mustn’t worry. I can steer a wheelchair.’