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Maggie enlarged the photo. This woman didn’t look broken. There were no signs of grief or anxiety. Not a frown line. Not a silver hair. How could someone survive such a life blow and look so together? A leading American magazine had run an article on her, entitled “From Tragedy to Triumph.” Maggie read it from beginning to end, learning that Catherine Reynolds had set up the wedding business after she was widowed, turning her skills as a hostess into a commercial venture.
Dan was twenty-eight, which meant that unless she was a medical freak, Catherine had to be at least late forties.
The woman smiling back at her from the screen didn’t look forty.
Maggie fiddled with the ends of her hair. She’d had it cut at the same place for the past thirty years and had kept the style the same. In fact there was very little of her life that she’d changed.
While Catherine had been reinventing herself and starting over, filling her life with new challenges, Maggie’s life had slowly emptied. First Katie had left home, and then Rosie. Her daily calendar, once filled with a whirl of school and sporting commitments, had big gaps. She’d carried on doing what she’d always done, working at her job and tending her garden. She’d been used to cooking for four, but that had turned to three, then two and then, after the life had drained from her marriage, one. Instead of building a new life as Catherine had obviously done, Maggie had carried on living a diluted version of the life she’d always had.
She pushed her laptop to one side and looked at the file that lay open on the table next to her. It was almost full. Soon she wouldn’t be able to close it.
Reading about Catherine’s determined fight to reinvent herself made her feel pathetic and useless. Catherine had lost her husband in a tragic way. Maggie had lost hers through carelessness. Or was it apathy? She didn’t even know.
Maggie couldn’t shake off the feeling that she’d somehow wasted her marriage.
Part of the reason she hadn’t yet shared the news with the girls was that she hadn’t managed to absorb it herself.
Should she and Nick have tried harder?
Conscious that she’d wasted an hour depressing herself, Maggie closed the file and tucked it into a drawer out of sight. She didn’t want Nick to see it, or it would trigger a conversation she didn’t want to have.
Next she closed her favorite Christmas recipe book that had been open on the table for the past week and slid it back into its slot on the shelf. She wasn’t going to be needing it after all.
It was embarrassing to admit it, but she’d been planning Christmas in her mind since September and making lists since October. The first hint of winter in the air had her thinking of slow-cooked casseroles, hearty soups and roasted root vegetables. She’d been looking forward to the festive season for the comfort of its culinary rituals; stirring, simmering, baking in a warm cinnamon-scented fog. Most of all she’d been looking forward to the time she’d get to spend with her family.
She curled her hands around her mug and stared through the window into the garden while
she sipped her coffee. Frost sparkled and shimmered on the lawn and a layer of mist added an ethereal touch. At this time of year the only splash of color in her garden came from the holly bush, its berries bloodred and plump. Maggie had been hoping the birds would leave enough for her to use as decoration around the house, but it no longer mattered.
She wasn’t going to need berries. Nor was she going to need the mistletoe that grew in clusters on the ancient apple tree. She wasn’t going to be here for Christmas.
She’d already had her last Christmas in Honeysuckle Cottage and hadn’t even known.
She’d never been away for the holidays before. Never had a Christmas that she hadn’t owned. She had friends who delighted in “escaping” at Christmas so that they could avoid the craziness, but Maggie loved the craziness. What would Christmas look like without that?
And why was she worrying about Christmas, when the real issue here was Rosie’s wedding? What was wrong with her?
She checked the time.
Nick had said he’d be with her at eleven and it was now half past. Since he was invariably late for things, including their wedding, that wasn’t a surprise. In the past it had infuriated her that he was fluent in Classical Greek but couldn’t seem to communicate what time he would arrive home. He could read hieroglyphic but not, apparently, a watch or a simple text message.
To begin with it hadn’t mattered. She’d loved his passion, and the fact that he was so focused on the things he loved. What he lacked in reliability, he made up for in spontaneity. One day he’d be brandishing two tickets to a concert at the Sheldonian Theatre, the next a picnic which they’d devoured by the river watching sunlight dance over the surface of the water. Nick had uncovered the fun side of Maggie. For her that was as much of a discovery as Tutankhamen’s tomb. She was the child of older parents who took their responsibilities seriously and invested everything in her development and education. Earning their love had been exhausting, and it was an uncomfortable, stressful relationship. Having fun hadn’t been part of her life until she’d met Nick in her first few weeks at Oxford.
He’d been studying Egyptology, and she English. His reputation and academic career had bloomed. They’d stayed in Oxford, and she’d taken a job with an academic publisher and spent her days editing textbooks. If it had ever crossed her mind that she didn’t love her job the way Nick loved his, she ignored the thought.
And then Katie was born and the strength of her emotion and the power of the bond she’d felt had shocked her. Maggie had loved fiercely, and discovered that her passion was for her children, her husband, her family. For creating a home like the one she’d dreamed of living in herself.
Katie’s arrival gave her the perfect excuse to reduce her working hours. She’d ended up taking responsibility for the childcare simply because she enjoyed it more than she enjoyed working.
When Katie had started school, Maggie returned to work for the same publisher but once Rosie arrived she’d taken a second career break. Her youngest daughter had been born premature, a tiny fragile being weighing less than a bag of sugar. As a baby Rosie had suffered endless coughs and colds, and then came her first asthma attack.
Maggie had never forgotten it. After that, they’d happened regularly, and life became a series of sleepless nights and panicked journeys to the hospital.
For the first decade of Rosie’s life, Maggie had walked around in a fog of exhaustion.
They’d moved out of the center of Oxford and into Honeysuckle Cottage, hoping that the air pollution would be less than it was in the middle of the city. Tests showed dog hair to be a trigger which meant that they’d been unable to have the family dog that Nick had badly wanted.
Rosie’s childhood had been a roundabout of canceled plans and terrifying sprints to the hospital. Then she hit the teenage years and it became harder to control. It wasn’t “cool” to carry an inhaler, and denying her condition landed her in the hospital on far too many occasions. The tension of it affected all of them, as did the general ignorance from their friends and acquaintances who had always thought of asthma as being something mild and benign.
