Ordinary Miracles

by Grace Wynne-Jones

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

It only takes ordinary miracles to change your life. Jasmine Smith: forty next month and not ready for it; married to a man she likes and not prepared to give up on love; smothered by life's mundanity, and yet drawn towards its mystery.  She wants the sort of love that makes her feel more alive, she wants wild sex in stalle d lifts with film stars. She wants something else.... Jasmine Smith is in desperate need of a miracle.  And with the help of an adventurous school friend, a man called Charlie and a pig called Rosie she is about to find one. A sharp, funny, moving novel and an exhilarating invitation to step out of quiet desperation and re-discover the magic in life and in love.

Release date: January 17, 2013

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 206

Sample

Chapter 1

I CAN’T BELIEVE I’LL be forty next month.

Forty seems something you should be ready for – not something that lands smug and like-it-or not in your life – along with Gillian McKeith.

Bruce bought me one of her books to boost my morale. It’s not the kind of publication I would have purchased myself. I tend towards books with embarrassing titles such as No Need to Panic: Courageous Acts of Change in Women’s Lives. Still, it was a kind thought. One of the occasional small acts that show Bruce may still love me in his way, though there isn’t much romance left in our relationship. ‘You know what, Jasmine,’ he announced happily on our nineteenth anniversary, ‘one of the great pleasures of marriage is being with someone you can fart with.’

When he came he used to shout ‘Oh God!’ These days he just says ‘Ah’. He scarcely glances at me when I’m in the shower. When we first got married he used to love the way I squeezed spermicide around the inside of my diaphragm. I did it with such fierce concentration, he said, that I looked like I was making an airfix model. Now he likes watching me watch television. He says I make funny faces without knowing it.

I like that he likes that. And I like that he thinks he can sing when he can’t. But like doesn’t make my heart leap. Like isn’t what that woman felt when that photographer from the National Geographic landed on her doorstep in Madison County. Of course it’s nice to day-dream that exactly the same thing might happen here in Glenageary but, frankly, there aren’t enough bridges. There are lots of burned ones all right, but you can’t photograph those.

Now that my daughter Katie’s at college in Galway the mornings seem very quiet. I miss that moment when, having got her off to school, I made myself a cuppa and turned on the radio. Back then time to myself was something I snatched and savoured – now there’s a lot of it about and I must work out what to do with it.

Of course I have my animal rights and adult literacy, and then there’s the housekeeping and fantasising about the actor Mell Nichols. And there’s missing people – missing myself even – that takes up a lot of time.

Sometimes, when I feel like this, I go upstairs and open the cupboard where I keep Katie’s toys. I gave some away but I’ve kept the ones I liked. I wind up the little hen and watch her pecking her way along the carpet and falling over, and then I give Teddy a hug and tell him not to be lonely, that I still care.

You wouldn’t think to look at me that all this stuff is going on in my head. Apparently I appear very settled and cheerful – not at all wistful. The thing is I don’t think I can keep all this to myself much longer.

I think it may start leaking out.

It’s time for my morning cuppa. I plug in the kettle and turn on the radio, where a woman is talking about how her husband urinates in the bath. Then the news comes on and I remember I’m supposed to be meeting Susan and Anne at eleven. I wonder if I should change out of my jeans, but I don’t have time.

I haven’t seen Susan in years. She’s been a nurse in Africa. She’s been leading the kind of adventurous, wandering life I said I was going to lead too. I really, really, don’t want to see her.

‘Hello Susan – great to see you!’ I say as Susan opens the door of her Ballsbridge garden flat. She’s looking wonderful. She’s wearing jeans. She hasn’t changed her hair, but then she has no need to. It’s dark and luxuriant. She puts it up in a chignon from which tendrils and curls escape to frame her pretty, thoughtful face.

‘Great to see you too!’ she exclaims, and gives me a hug. ‘Anne’s already here.’ I wave a greeting to Anne who’s sitting on a calico sofa surrounded by handwoven Persian-type cushions. She’s perched there like a bewildered sparrow who’s found its way into a tropical garden.

Susan, Anne and I went to school together. After she qualified as a nurse Susan went travelling but sent letters, and of course Anne and I attended each other’s weddings. Then we went our separate ways.

And now Susan has organised a reunion, because that’s the kind of person she is. And while I know it might be therapeutic and cheering to relive the day we all skived off school and went to see Gone With the Wind in seats so close to the screen we could almost feel Rhett Butler’s breath – the first thing that comes to my mind as I sit down beside Anne on the calico sofa is the man who urinates in the bath.

‘Were either of you listening to the radio this morning?’ I say as I look around the sun-filled room which is uncluttered and spacious and painted a colour I didn’t know existed let alone would work. A room full of African artefacts and unexpected little touches. ‘Because this woman was on about her husband.’

‘Do you mean the one who’s having an affair with his chiropodist?’ asks Anne.

‘No, the one who urinates in the bath when he’s drunk.’

‘Oh yes – because it’s easier to aim at.’ Anne laughs in a hollow sort of way.

And before you know it we’re not talking about all the exciting things Susan has done in Africa, or how I got involved with adult literacy and animal rights, or how Anne became a Montessori teacher. No, we’re talking about men – their selfishness and emotional tourism. The way they so seldom know where to find the clothes pegs or the clitoris. How they fumble around all right – but you have to tell them in the end.

Anne and I talk about men while Susan, who is single, listens respectfully.

‘He keeps saying, “What do you want me to do about it?”’ Anne is talking about her husband.

‘Typical,’ I reply.

‘I just want him to listen. To try to understand.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I mean emotions aren’t like cars are they?’

‘No. No.’

‘You can’t just open up the bonnet and pump in a bit more oil.’

‘Exactly.’

Suddenly Susan jumps up from her crushed velvet cushion and says ‘Sorry to interrupt but what’s it to be – tea or coffee?’

‘Tea please,’ I say.

‘Me too,’ says Anne.

I know Susan’s been bored from the eager way she heads for the kitchen. And then a funny thing happens. I suddenly realise I’ve been bored too. Extraordinarily bored in fact. I’ve been having these conversations about men with women like Anne for years now and they never seem to get anywhere. If I have to say one more thing about men this morning my head’s going to grow terribly heavy and land, thud, on the coffee table.

I get up and start to wander round the room. ‘As I was saying,’ says Anne who’s really getting into her stride, ‘he never seems to listen.’

I go over to the mantelpiece and pick up an African carving of a woman with huge breasts. ‘Ballsbridge is a funny name isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Balls-bridge – I wonder where that came from.’

Then Susan comes back with the tea and we talk about Africa until I blurt, ‘I’ll be forty next month.’ It’s been building up inside like alcoholism at an AA meeting.

‘My goodness of course! I’m glad you reminded me,’ Susan exclaims.

I’d forgotten we’d met when we kept birthday books. When we knew the ages and birthdays of everyone, including hamsters and dogs.

‘I must get you a present,’ Susan continues.

‘Oh, there’s no need really.’ I’m embarrassed and grateful.

‘Of course there is,’ says Anne, adding, ‘you know something Jasmine, you haven’t changed a bit.’

This being the kind of stupid thing friends sometimes say to each other I smile and finger my Turkish puzzle ring. Then Susan says casually, ‘Oh, by the way, I read that Mell Nichols is doing a film here.’

‘Mell Nichols is here – here in Ireland?’ I almost spill my tea.

‘Yes – he’s filming in County Wicklow, only it’s supposed to be Yorkshire.’ Susan has always been a stickler for detail. ‘He’s playing a farmer who falls in love with the local postmistress – that’s Meryl Streep – only she disappears in mysterious circumstances. You’ve always had a soft spot for Mell, haven’t you Jasmine?’

‘Well – yes – I do think he’s rather attractive,’ I mumble, wondering if this is the moment to reveal that my soft spot has somehow turned into hard, burning passion. That in recent years Mell and I have spent sweat-soaked nights feverishly exchanging bodily juices and soul-filled intimacies. That the only small stumbling block to our perfect relationship is that Mell doesn’t know anything about it.

‘I never really got over Clark Gable’ – Anne is twisting her wedding ring dreamily. ‘I’ll never forget that day we all went to see Gone With the Wind. Never.’

And then, because it’s sunny, we all go into the garden which is gratifyingly messy but bears the first traces of care. There are small clumps of begonias and climbing nasturtiums. ‘I probably won’t stay here long but it’s nice to brighten it up a bit,’ says Susan.

And I know wherever Susan goes she’ll brighten things up a bit because that’s her way. And maybe she could brighten me up a bit too, if I could stop myself wondering where I went wrong and she went right. If I could face the mess and mystery of my own life – see that even weeds can bear small flowers as they sprout through crazy paving.

Chapter 2

AFTER LEAVING SUSAN’S I wander round Ballsbridge for a bit and think about Mell Nichols. The fact that we are actually in the same country at the same time has certainly increased the intimacy of our relationship. But it’s somehow added to its poignancy too. Because when I’m not swooning in his arms knowing he’ll love me for ever I know something else entirely. I know I am a lonely middle-aged woman who he wouldn’t even look at. I know that even though he is on the same planet and in the same country, we will probably never even meet.

But I’m not going to let myself dwell on this escapist nonsense any longer. It’s a waste of time and time is precious because one day we’re all going to die. It’s important to remember that and it’s surprisingly easy not to. So now I’m trudging down Pembroke Road and looking at people’s doors and doorbells and the windows with lined curtains and the dirty ones without lined curtains that are most likely rented. I’m trying to live in the moment – to be aware of each green leaf and footstep – but my mind keeps going back to Anne’s remark about my not having changed.

While preposterous on one level, it seems to me to have a certain ring of truth about it. To be pedantic, while change has inevitably occurred, further change seems urgently called for. I can’t keep drifting like this. I need to make some decisions. I’m glad I don’t pass a hairdresser’s because I would almost certainly go in and attempt to entirely change my persona.

My hair was styled in the ‘Gypsy Look’ when I met Bruce – a look that included long flouncy skirts and embroidered boleros. Bruce thought I was wonderful. ‘What I like about you, Jasmine,’ he used to say, ‘is that you’re so natural.’ There was just one teensy-weensy problem, he said. I couldn’t co-ordinate my colours. I got my pastels mixed up with my primaries and wore too many shades at once. This was sending out confused messages when I was not, in fact, a confused woman. Bruce is in television so he’s a visual sort of person.

I married him in cream. I’d been to a colour consultant who told me winter people can wear white and black but, as a summer person, they would drag me down. As it happened my father had to virtually drag me down the aisle anyway as I was having second thoughts – I was only twenty. I kept pausing to admire the flowers at the end of each pew, and smile at friends in their wedding best, but actually I was hoping my crazed past boyfriend Cyril would lurch drunkenly over the choir balcony and screech that I was a great screw and his for ever. In the ensuing uproar I would have fled and found my way to a monastery or ashram and pledged my life to Jesus, or Buddha, or whoever was running that particular establishment.

It’s an option I still keep open.

It’s beginning to drizzle as I take out my mobile and call Charlie about next Monday’s march. ‘I don’t want to be in charge of the pig,’ I tell him.

‘She’s called Rosie.’

‘I know she’s called Rosie and I’m not leading her down O’Connell Street.’

‘Okay.’

‘I just wanted to get that straight, Charlie.’

‘Well you have.’

Then I hang up and since the rain is now bucketing down, I go into Jurys hotel where I mingle with American tourists. I don’t say anything. I just stand near them in the shop listening to them bellow about Belleek china and Aran sweaters and pretend I’m in California.

I have actually been to California. Susan and I went there one summer when we were students. We worked in a café that had a big grand piano in it and lots of books. The café was in the hippy Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. We worked like dogs but we felt like cats – feline and free. That’s where we met the man we earmarked to take our virginity.

Doug lived in a geodesic dome in Mill Valley. The road to his dome was up a steep hill. There was a sheer drop on each side. ‘Leave everything behind – let go’ was tacked to a tree at the bottom, and when you got to the top there was another notice that said ‘And that too’.

And I suppose that’s what we did for a while – the days melted dreamily into one another like the big globs of mozzarella on our Big Sur sandwich specials.

Doug didn’t take our virginity because it turned out he was gay. This was just as well because being sexually inexperienced we’d thought we could share him. So we longed and listened to him instead and off-loaded our purity elsewhere.

One night, when we were sitting on the hill overlooking the redwoods, Doug told us about taking LSD. He said it was like getting lots of information at once but so fast it didn’t quite make sense. He knew it was important but he’d taken the shortcut and maybe you needed the long way round to get the whole message.

And then he said that some people, and he felt sure Susan and I were among them, could look at, say, a table, without taking LSD, and see that it was just a mass of moving molecules. He felt sure that if we sat and stared at it for long enough we would eventually see all the little molecules just whizzing around and know that everything, and everybody, is just energy in the end.

The silence was so strong on the hill that night you could hear it. We looked up at the huge inky sky above us and all the little golden stars and thought what an incredibly amazing, magical place the universe was.

The next day we flew home to discover the Irish nation had spent the summer discussing who should be allowed to sell condoms.

During these reminiscences I have moved to the reception area of Jurys hotel. It’s still raining outside and I’m sitting on a sofa. I’m having a quick gin and tonic and a sandwich before I go to the supermarket and wondering if life will ever feel magical again.

I’m also wondering who first decided to associate ice cream with sex and whether I’ll get away with a large tub of chocolate chip and hazelnut for dessert – some of Bruce’s colleagues are coming round to dinner. I really really wish they weren’t.

Then I look up.

I look up and I look straight into the eyes of the man I have craved hopelessly – passionately – for the past ten years. He looks at me in a bored sort of way, then turns back towards the reception desk.

Chapter 3

I’M A RATHER NERVOUS hostess. Even after months of having Bruce’s production colleagues and actors round to dinner I have still not learned how to talk about the Algarve and not burn the stuffed tomatoes. I have still not learned how, for example, to listen to Cait Carmody drone on about how her brassière burst during a particularly poignant scene at the Abbey without jumping up in the middle crying ‘Oh my God the olives!’

Of course what Cait and Bruce and the rest of them are not to know is that while they are relaxing from, though probably still discussing, things Thespian, I, with no dramatic training, have been flung onto centre stage. It’s bad enough trying to get props, such as olives or fettucine carbonara in place, I have to get the lines right too. And so much relies on improvisation.

Before Bruce left ‘national broadcasting’ he did most of his entertaining in restaurants. But now he’s formed his own production company he’s had to tighten his belt and do some entertaining at home. In a way I’m glad he’s left national broadcasting because I was getting tired of his tirades about the place. His descriptions of a day there sounded like something out of I Claudius.

When I told him this he said I Claudius was precisely the sort of quality drama he could have created if his former employers had had any guts and vision. When he starts talking like this a sort of weary look comes over his face because I know, at heart, he doesn’t think I will ever truly comprehend the entire complex saga.

National broadcasting were so sorry to see Bruce go they gave him quite a lot of money. And the speeches at his farewell were almost euphoric in their appreciation. He was, it seemed, a linchpin in their entire operation. One wondered how they would ever manage without him.

And the funny thing now is national broadcasting are making more drama again. So Bruce is getting very buddy buddy with lots of people he professed to despise. They’re really being rather nice to him and it looks like they may fund his independent film – Avril: A Woman’s Story, which is set sometime during the Second World War.

As far as I can gather, Avril lives on the west coast of Ireland with her aged uncle and collects rather a lot of seaweed. The seaweed is fertiliser for the farm she’s managing single-handedly and one day, on the beach, she meets a man who’s on the run from England for espionage, only he’s innocent. Avril somehow knows this and he becomes her lover. And then it turns into a thriller that hasn’t much to do with Avril at all.

Avril is now the ‘Other Woman’ in our marriage. Bruce is obsessed with her – what she’d wear – whether she’d take the local bus to town or walk to save the few shillings. I can’t help wishing he’d just once shown the same interest in me, and I grow rather tetchy when he asks whether a woman of her young years would wear a headscarf and whether she should lose her virginity in the hayloft or the sand-dunes.

Cait Carmody is going to play Avril and that’s why she’s coming to dinner, along with Eamon, who’s going to play her lover, and Alice, who seems to be doing just about everything else. Alice is the production co-ordinator and enormously efficient. She’s been working with Bruce for years. I once asked her why she doesn’t produce films herself and she said she couldn’t stand all the crap. I’ve always liked Alice.

So now here we all are sitting round my new distressed pine table. We are eating salad and slightly burned lasagne. As Cait asks me whether the dressing is Paul Newman’s or my own, I suddenly realise I haven’t put the ice cream in the fridge so I rush into the kitchen and bung it in the freezer. Then I pour myself a gin and tonic because the wine doesn’t seem to be calming my nerves. It goes down very quickly and so I have another and pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming about what happened in Jurys this afternoon.

When I return some minutes later I’m amazed that I have the presence of mind to explain that the ice cream is going to be a little more mushy than usual.

Naturally everyone says that’s just the way they like it and then, as we all start to tuck in, Bruce brings up Avril. He’s wondering how Avril can get f. . .