Magic Sometimes Happens

by Margaret James

  ‘But they still fell in love.’

  ‘They did – and stayed in love. When Grandad died, poor Granny cried for weeks. She never came to terms with being widowed. She still remembers how it feels to be in love.’

  PATRICK

  When Dad and Mom came home, I swear the temperature dropped down by ten, fifteen degrees. There were stilted British introductions – hello, hello, hello. Then we all ate dinner – spaghetti bolognaise. I guess most everybody in the world must eat spaghetti bolognaise, even if they live in seaside cottages with roses round the door?

  Dad was courteous, shook me by the hand, said he hoped we’d had a pleasant journey and how did I like Dorset? But he said it in a most reserved and very British kind of way. It didn’t sound as if he meant a word.

  Mom was just reserved.

  But Granny made me feel like I was welcome. ‘Come on, Pat, dig in,’ she said when Rosie brought dessert – a dish of raspberries from the garden and a jug of yellow cream. ‘I like to see a man with appetite.’

  Oi loike ter see a man with appetoite.

  I loved her accent.

  After we had coffee, Granny said she’d like to go to bed. So Rosie’s mother helped her up the stairs. Dad said he was going to his office. He had some work to do.

  ‘Poor Granny never moans about her aches and pains,’ said Rosie as we cleared the dinner stuff away. ‘But she gets so bored and so frustrated.’

  ‘What does she do all day?’

  ‘She reads a bit – not books, just magazines. She’s fond of crossword puzzles. She listens to the radio. Dad bought her a laptop a few years ago. She absolutely loved it. She emailed all her friends – well, all three of them who weren’t afraid of new technology – and she surfed the net. But she finds it really hard to use a keyboard now.’

  ‘Why don’t you get speech recognition software – speech-to-text?’

  ‘We tried it and she hated it. She said you had to talk so flipping slowly, like someone off the BBC Home Service – Radio 4 to you and me – for it to understand you.’

  ‘The older stuff was hard to use. You had to say the words one at a time, make sure you kept them nice and separate, or your computer wouldn’t understand you.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what she found.’

  ‘But SRS is getting better. Nowadays the user can talk normally, can run the words together. If you have an accent, chances are you’ll still be understood. If Granny used the new continuous speech recognition software, I figure they’d get on. Maybe I could – but she’s very elderly …’

  ‘Maybe you could what?’

  ‘I could enrol her in a research study?’ The more I thought about it, the more I thought that this might be a plan. ‘She could be very useful. It’s hard to keep a senior in a study. Seniors tend to get fed up or they get sick or …’

  ‘Die.’

  ‘I didn’t like to say so, but – yeah, seniors die.’

  ‘Pat, I think you’re brilliant!’ Rosie dumped the crockery on the counter then hugged me round the neck. ‘Granny Cass loves to be doing things. She’s been busy all her life, and she finds it so annoying being so disabled.’

  ‘Let’s enrol her on a study, then – and better yet, make her a pin-up.’

  ‘A pin-up?’

  ‘Yeah, why not? She could be a centrefold in Senior Computing Times and a great big inspiration to old ladies everywhere. There’ll be lines around the block to ask her out on dates.’

  ‘You are an idiot, you know.’

  ‘I thought I was a Neolithic throwback?’

  ‘Yes, that too.’

  ROSIE

  ‘Rosie, don’t be silly,’ Granny said as I did bedtime duty Friday evening, giving Mum a break. ‘I’m ninety, don’t forget. I’m no use to anybody now.’

  ‘So you don’t want to help?’

  ‘I’m sure this man can’t need my help.’

  ‘You like him, Granny. You told me he was nice.’

  ‘I think he’s very nice.’

  ‘If you think he’s nice, why won’t you help him?’

  ‘But does he really want me to – what was it – enrol in a study, is that what you said?’

  ‘You’d be an enormous help to him.’ I crossed my fingers. ‘Granny, there’s no reason older people should be cut off from everything. All they need is someone of their own age to encourage them to use computers, to use the World Wide Web – and that’s what Pat wants you to do.’

  ‘Well, if I’d be helping Pat?’

  ‘Yes, you would, and he’d be very grateful.’

  ‘He’s very handsome, isn’t he?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I always like a tall, dark man.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He looks a bit like Grandad, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, just a bit. Granny, you’ve gone very pink. I think you’ve taken quite a shine to Pat.’

  ‘Oh, go on with you. I’m well past all that kind of thing.’

  PATRICK

  We stayed three days. Rosie had appointments, meetings in the coming week, so this was all the time she had to spare. But it was time enough for me to be under the microscope, to make me feel I was some kind of parasitic bug.

  Yeah, Rosie’s granny was a charmer. But Rosie’s parents were a different story and I found it hard to talk to them. I did not speak their language. I did not know what to say.

  So when Rosie’s father talked, I listened. I tried to ask appropriate questions, tried to show an interest in his work. But he is an accountant and so it wasn’t easy, in fact it was real hard.

  I also tried to talk to Rosie’s mother. But it was a total waste of time. She didn’t want to talk to me. ‘I love your roses, Mrs Denham,’ I began on Sunday morning as Rosie, Mom and I ate breakfast in the sunny garden.

  ‘Do you, Mr Riley?’

  ‘They have a great perfume.’

  ‘Most roses do.’

  ‘What’s this pink one called?’

  ‘Jacques Cartier.’

  ‘He was a French explorer, wasn’t he, claimed Canada for France? He mapped the gulf of the St Lawrence and he found a cure for scurvy?’

  ‘Did he really?’

  ‘He also took a cargo of what he believed had to be gold and diamonds back to France. But turned out he found quartz and iron pyrites.’

  ‘My goodness, Mr Riley, you’re a mine of information. I know Jacques Cartier only as a rose.’ Then Mrs Denham got up from the table. ‘If you’ll both excuse me, I have lots of things to do.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Rosie mouthed at me as Mom went in the kitchen door.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘It’s not okay.’ Rosie grabbed a flower, started pulling it to bits and dropped the shredded petals on the grass. ‘She’s being very mean. She’s never chatty, but she’s so rude, so horrible to you.’

  ‘It’s no big deal, and anyway I kind of understand. You’re her daughter. I’m a big bad wolf, a married man who’s trying to corrupt your innocence.’

  ‘Ha – fat chance of that with Mum around.’

  Yeah, fat chance indeed. Mrs Denham put me in a bedroom as far away from Rosie’s as she could. I guess she figured if there was any sneaking down the landing in the night, she could rush out her bedroom door then whack me with a baseball bat. Or cricket bat in this part of the world.

  As if I would abuse her hospitality – my mother raised me better.

  Monday morning, Rosie’s father headed off to work while Rosie and her mother did girl stuff at the beauty salon. Rosie’s mom insisted Rosie got herself a haircut. So I drove to Dorchester, bought and then installed new speech-to-text on Granny’s laptop and showed her how to use it.

  I would have expected a ninety-year-old senior to be slow. But Granny learned real fast. She turned out to be the kind of student I like best to teach, who’s keen to figure out solutions for herself, to understand a principle, apply it.

  She asked her teacher searching questions, too.

  ‘Do you love
my granddaughter?’ she began as we took five minutes, drank the coffee I had fixed.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, I do.’

  ‘Any chance you’re going to marry Rosie? I wish somebody would.’

  ‘I’m already married. I guess I’ll soon be getting a divorce. But I don’t know if Rosie would want to marry me.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her some time and then you might find out?’ Granny looked at me with bright blue eyes which seemed to see into my soul. ‘My late mother-in-law – a lovely woman – she was Rose Denham, too. She fell for someone who was married.’

  ‘Do you know what happened?’

  ‘He left his wife, they were divorced – no easy thing to do in those days, let me tell you, it caused all sorts of ructions – and then he married Rose.’

  ‘They were happy?’

  ‘Yes, extremely happy. I don’t think I ever knew two people who were better matched.’

  ‘I guess they got lucky, then?’

  ‘You could say that, although I’d say in this life we often make our own luck, wouldn’t you?’ Granny met my gaze. ‘I was lucky, too. I married Rose’s son, a man who loved me, whom I loved, and you can’t get much luckier than that. Rosie loves you, Pat. You say you love Rosie. So—’

  ‘Mrs Denham, should you be encouraging a married man to make eyes at your granddaughter?’

  ‘Mr Riley, do you need encouragement?’ Granny’s blue eyes twinkled. ‘I have you down as a decisive sort of man, so please don’t prove me wrong.’

  ROSIE

  So summer had arrived at last.

  A British player had won Wimbledon and another Briton was about to win the Tour de France. The beaches were all packed with people trying to develop melanoma, ice cream sales had rocketed and everyone was having a good time. But, like in the Buddy Holly song from years ago, it was raining in my heart and I could hardly bear to let him go.

  I was almost sure he felt the same way about me.

  But almost isn’t certainly, and I found I couldn’t make assumptions, couldn’t quite believe it would work out between us, not with Polly, Joe and Lexie in the frame.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ he asked on his last day in London, as we stood on the concourse at Heathrow.

  ‘You could get a job in the UK?’

  ‘I think I must.’ He ran his fingers through my hair. He often said he loved my wild, electrocuted hair and for the first time in my life I loved it too. ‘I get offers all the time from industry in Europe and the USA.’

  ‘But you like working in a university.’

  ‘Yeah, I do. But it’s comparatively badly paid. I could get to like the money I would earn in industry.’

  ‘You’d sell your soul to industry?’

  ‘I’m going to think about it. Yeah, I love my work at JQA. But I sometimes feel I’d like a job that’s nine to five, something that allows me to take time off on weekends. After all, there’s more to life than work. But first, I need to sort things out with Lex.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  Alexis Riley, the mother of his children, the woman he had loved for years and who would always be a part of him.

  Do you really want me, Pat?

  I found I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. I wasn’t going to cry and beg and plead, force him to choose – how could he choose?

  ‘It’s been good this week,’ I said.

  ‘It’s been more than good – much more.’

  ‘But all good things must end.’

  ‘Yeah, so my mother always said, but I figure mothers don’t know everything.’

  ‘Let me know you got home safely?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He took my face between his hands and gazed into my eyes. ‘I’ll find a way for us to be together.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll sort something out. Rosie, you and I – it’s permanent. It’s going to last forever.’

  ‘I know what permanent means.’

  ‘That’s good.’ He kissed me once, he kissed me twice, he kissed me one more time and then he went to catch his plane.

  PATRICK

  It was just as well I had my work. It stopped me going crazy. I was glad I had a bunch of stuff for Colorado to prepare, a ton of calls to make, a dozen meetings I had to organise.

  ‘You’re hoping you’re on track to win the Nobel Prize with all this thought-to-text shit?’ Ben demanded, when he called to say he had forgotten what I looked like and to ask if we could meet up for a beer – fancy Japanese, no doubt. Like there aren’t a dozen breweries here in the Twin Cities.

  ‘No chance,’ I told him. ‘I’m just a mechanic passing spanners to the experts – neurologists, physicians, biochemists – guys who understand the bunch of neurons that make up the human brain.’

  ‘It’s a deep and devious mystery, the human brain. You can’t reduce it to a bunch of neurons, however hard you try. So, this beer, then – when and where?’

  ‘I don’t have time.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘I’m very busy.’

  ‘Nobody’s too busy to down a beer or two – not even you, Dr Obsessive and Compulsive Grader.’

  I did have time to down a beer or two. I had not seen Ben for what seemed like a century. But I didn’t have any inclination to hook up with him now.

  I didn’t know if I ever would again.

  ROSIE

  There were long, long phone calls. Pat said he was willing, more than willing, in principal at least, to work in Europe. But there were Joe and Polly to consider and of course he needed to see Joe and Polly.

  ‘Rosie, could you relocate to Minnesota?’ he suggested. ‘There must be a ton of PR opportunities here in Minneapolis-Saint Paul.’

  ‘There’s this little problem, Pat. I don’t have a green card.’

  ‘Why don’t you apply for one?’

  ‘I doubt if I would get one. I don’t have any special skills. I’m not married to a US citizen.’

  ‘Perhaps you could become a US citizen yourself?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to lose my British nationality.’

  ‘I heard you can’t do that. You could build a bonfire outside of Windsor Castle on November 5th, let off a bunch of firecrackers, call your Queen Elizabeth all sorts of dirty names, but if you’re born British, you can’t become un-British.’

  Lexie must have told him that. She must have been discussing it with Mr Wonderful then passed this information on to Pat. Maybe she was hoping her boyfriend would apply for US citizenship himself, had made a few enquiries of her own? What else had Lexie said to Pat? Did I want to know?

  ‘I must go and see a client,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah, I meant to ask you, how’s it going? Whose lives are you busy sorting now? You’re meeting interesting guys, I hope, but not too interesting?’

  ‘I’m working with a lot of authors these days. I’m organising signings, getting interviews for them in magazines and newspapers and on radio and television. I’m involved with the relaunch of someone who’s quite famous. Or he used to be.’

  ‘Oh – who’s that?’

  ‘You won’t have heard of him.’

  ‘Why don’t you try me?’

  ‘It’s Malcolm Tyndale Crawley, he writes crime and mystery fiction, used to be a spy.’

  ‘I know the guy you mean. I met him one time.’

  ‘Goodness, did you?’

  ‘I bought a book of his when he was signing in a Barnes and Noble, must have been while I was still a student. It was The Russian Cross, as I recall. I know it was a keeper, so I must still have it someplace.’

  ‘Patrick, you’re astonishing. Do you know everyone, know everything?’

  ‘Rosie, honey, it’s a little world. So you’ll think about it, will you, working over here?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I might.’

  PATRICK

  She supposed she might.

  Okay, big deal. I tried my darnedest not to get excited. But perhaps I took too much for granted? Maybe I was trying to
railroad Rosie into making a decision she didn’t want to make?

  I came into my office at JQA one evening to catch up on some paperwork and meet with a graduate student who was having problems with a project.

  I did not expect to see Ben Fairfax.

  What would he be doing here this time of night?

  But I could make a guess why he was strolling down the corridor toward me, at his side a very attractive junior female colleague, and grinning like he won the Super Bowl.

  ‘Hey, Professor! How’s it going?’ he began.

  ‘Good,’ I told him. ‘You okay? Mrs Fairfax Three – I hope she’s well?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, Tess is fine. She’s in the UK right now, she’s visiting with her folks. Pat, did you meet Adeline before?’

  ‘I see you in the line for lunch occasionally,’ I said. ‘You’re working late?’

  The female colleague glanced at Ben, and then she glanced at me, and then she said she must be going, and she scuttled off.

  ‘Cute ass,’ said Ben reflectively. ‘I always was a sucker for a callipygous woman.’

  ‘A what kind of woman?’

  ‘You illiterate mechanic – like I told you, one with a cute ass.’

  ‘Tess, will she be in Europe long?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe two or three weeks more, I guess. Hey, come in my office, will you? I got stuff to tell you.’

  ‘Oh?’ He was surely not about to tell me how he’d screwed my wife at his apartment? But I followed him into his office anyway.

  It smelled of books and sex.

  ‘Grab a seat,’ he told me, gathering up a bunch of hardback volumes – new translations of Missouri Crossing into Aramaic or Aleutian? They all had his picture on their covers, anyway.

  A new picture, too – his hair was cut and styled and gelled, and he was wearing something that looked as if it came out of an upscale store, not from a rummage sale. He had the same shirt on today.

  ‘You’ll get a coffee, yeah?’ he added, walking over to a shiny chrome machine. ‘I just got this new Italian baby and boy, she does the business.’

  ‘What do you want? I’m meeting with a graduate student later. He’s coming into town to see me, wants to talk about his project.’