Dizzy was the exception, of course. Who could fail to be familiar with Désirée McKelpie? She was practically a brand name – her face had looked out at us for the past fifteen years from tabloid newspapers, billboards, television screens. She worked love spells for Royals and Hollywood film stars. We knew her romances, her divorces; we sighed over her frocks and speculated over her diminishing waistline.
With a frown, I considered my own. Even at school I’d never been thin; not like Anne or Dizzy or Gloria. I’d skipped puddings in vain, but in spite of my efforts, thinness had always eluded me. Twenty years later, it still did. I wondered, rather petulantly, whose stupid idea it had been to hold our twenty-year reunion at Bella Pasta anyway.
I arrived too early. The note had said twelve-thirty and it was barely ten past. For a few minutes I lingered in the draughty doorway trying to look cool and confident, but people kept pushing past me to get in and I finally decided to take a seat at the big table at the back with the RESERVED sign and the little place-cards. Two girls sniggered as I squeezed past them, and I felt my face grow red. It wasn’t my fault the aisle was so narrow. I clutched at my handbag for security and my hip brushed against a flower vase, almost knocking it over. The girls sniggered again. It was going to be a nightmare.
I found my place (the name spelt wrong). There were four bottles of wine already laid out, and four of mineral water. I poured a glass of red and drank it straightaway, then moved the bottle to the opposite side of the table, hoping no one would notice. Come to think of it, it was exactly the kind of thing a little sneak like Gloria Krone would notice, and draw attention to. I moved the bottle back.
Twenty years. Unimaginable time. I glanced at the photo again. There I was, demure in my little black uniform, holding my first broom proudly in my right hand. Of course the broom’s mainly symbolic nowadays. No adult witch would ever choose to squander their chi on making a broom fly. Why bother, when you can get pampered in Business Class? Not that I ever have, of course. Alex says it’s a waste of money. He even worked it out once: how you could buy three seats in Economy, a half-bottle of champagne, two Prêt-à-Manger sandwiches, a pashmina and a selection of toiletries and still pay less than you would for a Business Class ticket. Not that he ever does buy any of those things. He thinks they’re a waste of money, too. Come to think of it, the last time we flew anywhere was a budget trip to the Algarve in 1994, and he complained all the way because he said I was taking up too much space. Maybe a broom would have been better, after all.
I poured myself another glass of wine. It wasn’t that I was dissatisfied with my life, I told myself. Who needs magic when you can have security? Thirty-eight; housewife; married to a management consultant; house in Croydon; two boys, fifteen and twelve, and a familiar (for old times’ sake). Deliriously happy. Well, happy, anyway. Well, some of the time.
Now the bottle looked three-quarters empty. It wasn’t, of course; it’s just the way bottles are made, so narrow at the top so that the moment you pour even a small glass it looks as if you’ve drunk half of it already. Now when the others came they’d all notice, and Gloria Krone would look at me with her long blue eyes and whisper something behind her hand to Isabella Faye – always her best friend in the old days – and the two of them would watch me like Siamese cats, purring with malice and sly speculation. ‘Darling, do you think she’s hitting the bottle? How grotesque!’
So I disposed of the evidence, hiding the bottle under a chair some distance from where I was sitting. Not a moment too soon; as I emerged from under the tablecloth I saw a woman – a witch – making her way towards me, and was seized with a prickly panic. Standing up, wiping my mouth hastily with the back of my hand, I recognized Anne Wyrd.
She hadn’t changed. Tall, elegant, blonde, wearing a black trouser suit over what looked suspiciously like nothing at all. I’d never liked her; she’d been part of a sporty threesome, all very well-bred and jolly broomsticks. A second later, the other two arrived: Morwenna Hagge and Claire Corrigan, also in elegant black. I noticed in a moment’s sly satisfaction that Morwenna had begun to colour her hair; then, with disappoint-ment, that it suited her.
‘Darling,’ said Anne. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’ Her brilliant smile did not falter as she glanced down at the place-card in front of me. I mumbled something inane about how stylish she looked, and sat down again. ‘Well, one has to make an effort, sweetheart,’ said Anne, pouring herself a glass of sparkling mineral water. ‘We’re none of us eighteen any more, are we?’
The others were beginning to arrive now. In a burst of embraces and exclamations I saw Gloria and Isabella, more like Siamese cats than ever now, with matching blonde bobs and sleepy eyes, and Carole Broome, who I greeted with more warmth than I’d ever felt for her in the old days. ‘Thank God, Carole,’ I said fervently. ‘I thought I was going to be the only one of us not wearing black.’
Carole had been a studious young witch in the old days, plump and lank-haired and earnest, more interested in herb lore than pyrotechnics, always the last to be picked in a game of Brooms. She was much thinner now, her hair had been braided and coiled, and she was wearing a long purple velvet skirt with an abundance of silver jewellery. I remembered the rumour that Carole had joined some kind of a radical Welsh coven, and felt suddenly uncomfortable. I hoped she wasn’t going to bend my ear all lunchtime about pentacles and athames and going skyclad. I noticed, with a faint sinking feeling, that her place-setting was next to mine.
‘Your aura looks terrible,’ said Carole, sitting down and pouring water into her glass. ‘Ugh! This water’s carbonated! Waitress, please, some natural water, and can I talk to you about this menu?’
The waitress, a harassed-looking girl with a ponytail, approached with understandable reluctance. Carole’s voice was loud and flat and carrying. ‘I notice there isn’t a vegetarian option here,’ she said accusingly.
Uh-oh. I flinched guiltily over the menu. I’d been thinking about getting the steak.
‘Well, you could have the mushroom omelette or the fusilli—’ began the waitress.
‘I don’t eat eggs,’ snapped Carole, ‘and neither would you if you had any idea what it did to your karma. As for the fusilli –’ she peered more closely at the menu, her eyes magnified by her glasses so that they looked like big green marbles, ‘is it wheat pasta? . . . I can’t possibly eat wheat pasta,’ she explained to me as the waitress went off resentfully to talk to the chef. ‘It’s far too yin for my body type. Too much yin can cloud your aura. I think I’ll be happier with just fresh, unfluorinated water and an organic green salad.’
Rather wistfully, I pushed the menu to one side. The steak and chips seemed to be receding into the distance. Fortunately, I could see some other witches arriving, and I greeted them with ill-concealed relief. I’d always rather liked Hannah Malkin; and here was Jane Beldame, brisk and rather mannish now in a tweed skirt and jacket. ‘Terrific to see you, old girl!’ she exclaimed, engulfing me for a moment in a scent of wool and mothballs. ‘Where’s the booze?’ She plumped down in the chair next to me (it was labelled ‘Judith Weisz’) and poured a hefty slug of red wine, ignoring Carole’s squeak of disapproval. ‘After all these years, eh? What larks we had!’ Now Jane was here, I remembered them: midnight feasts in the dorm, with a glyph on the door to warn us if Matron was approaching; broom races along the Top Corridor; the time we sneaked Professor LeMage’s pornographic Tarot cards and divined everyone’s private fetishes . . . For the first time, I began to think that maybe this reunion wasn’t such a bad idea.
Judith Weisz came next, a colourless witch with bad skin who’d been less popular even than Carole, now looking much older than the rest of us, and making no protest when she found Jane occupying her place.
‘Oh no, it’s that creepy Weisz girl,’ whispered Gloria to Isabella. ‘Quick, push up so she won’t sit here.’ Although Judith must have heard, she made no comment. Instead she made her way to the free place next to Hannah and sat down quietly, ha
nds folded in her lap. I felt rather sorry for her, although we’d never been friends, and wondered why she had come.
At a quarter to one, there were still only ten of us at table. Jane had drunk three more glasses of red wine, Hannah was teaching me how to separate my astral arm from my corporeal one, Isabella was discussing body jobs with Claire Corrigan (‘it’s not black magic any more, sweetheart, absolutely everyone does it nowadays, there’s no stigma at all’), Gloria and Morwenna were comparing love charms, Anne was interpreting the future from the dregs of Jane’s wine glass, Carole was arguing with the chef (‘How would you feel, if you were a tomato?’) and Judith had just discovered a half-empty bottle of red wine under her chair when everyone fell silent as, fully conscious of the effect she was creating, Dizzy McKelpie made her entrance.
I remembered her as a small thing, pale and rather skinny, with quantities of red hair and ugly black-rimmed glasses. Now the glasses were gone, revealing huge eyes and lashes like moths’ wings, the hair was artfully sleek, and her graceful figure was barely contained in clinging black jersey above a pair of scarlet, impossible heels. She commanded attention immediately – the other diners gaped; Dizzy pretended not to notice. Across the table I heard Gloria whisper to Isabella, ‘Body job.’ From the corner of my eye I saw Carole flick her fingers in the sign against evil; even Jane was watching open-mouthed. Apparently oblivious to all the attention, Dizzy walked to our table as if she were on a catwalk, and folded herself elegantly into the chair next to Judith. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ she said sweetly. ‘I had a meeting with a very special client who’s been having the most ghastly trouble with the media.’
‘Who?’ said Gloria, wide-eyed.
‘I couldn’t possibly tell you. It’s very sensitive,’ purred Dizzy. ‘I know you’ll understand if I don’t say any more.’ She looked around the table. ‘Isn’t there someone missing?’ she asked.
Everyone scanned the table. ‘It’s Paul Wight,’ said Anne finally. ‘I forgot about him completely.’ Easy to do, I suppose; Paul had been a brilliant student, completely devoted to his work and cautious of our female exuberance. This was generally taken to be a ploy on his part to intrigue and seduce us, but in spite of many efforts to enchant him, no one had ever managed. I now suspected that he’d been genuinely ambitious; girls had played no part in his studies. I doubted he would come today.
‘Well, it’s nearly one,’ said Dizzy. ‘If he isn’t here by now, I think we should order. I’ve got a meeting at two-fifteen.’
Everyone agreed that no one should be expected to wait for Paul Wight, except Carole, who said that lunch, if taken at all, should never last more than half an hour, and Judith, who said nothing.
So we ordered. Carole had a special salad of karmically neutral vegetables (‘Roots in general are too yang, and radishes have souls’), Gloria and Isabella had the soup and ciabatta, Hannah the seafood tagliatelle, Claire, Morwenna and Anne the fusilli. Jane ordered the steak, very rare, and a double portion of chips – I looked at her enviously, wishing I was brave enough to do the same, though under Carole Broome’s excoriating gaze I finally opted for a vegetarian pizza, which, though potentially dangerous (‘Carbohydrates throw your chakras out of balance’), at least had the advantage of being karmically sound.
Only Jane had any dessert. Anne, Gloria and Isabella all seemed to be on permanent diets, Dizzy kept looking at her watch, and I suppose Carole’s disapproving comments had done the rest. Instead, we talked. Someone (I thought it was Dizzy) made sure that the wine never quite ran out (much to the waitress’s bewilderment), and conversation, hesitant at first, began to flow more freely. Perhaps a little too freely – now came what I had been dreading: the questions, the boasting, the lies. Dizzy led the conversation at first with anecdotes of media witchcraft, soon to be rivalled by Anne, who was a house expert specializing in cleansing and banishing rituals (‘Feng shui’s just so last millennium, darling, shamanism’s the thing now’); then Isabella, who worked with pyramids; Claire, who was a crystal-healer, married to an Odinist with two raven familiars and a wolf; Gloria, who had been divorced three times and was currently teaching a course on tantric sex and meditation at the University of Warwick; even Hannah, who (to everyone’s disgust but mine) had given up her job to devote herself to her husband and her little girl, already a budding witch at the age of four, whom she obviously adored.
‘You’ve been very quiet,’ observed Carole, who had been watching me. ‘How about you? Where have your studies led you?’
It was the moment I had feared. Explaining about Alex and the boys was easy enough (if uninspiring), but if she somehow discovered the real secret, the terrible, unmentionable thing . . . I said something flippant about motherhood being a full-time job, and wished Carole would choose someone else to cross-examine. But Carole was tenacious as bogwort. ‘Your aura’s very muddy,’ she insisted. ‘You haven’t been letting your magic slip, have you?’
I muttered something about being a little out of shape.
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ said Carole. ‘Let’s try a few simple exercises, shall we? How about a basic cantrip to begin with?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, horrified, wishing she would lower her voice.
‘Go on,’ insisted Carole. ‘Just a little one. No one’s going to laugh at you, for Goddess’s sake.’
Now everyone was looking at me. Gloria’s eyes were narrowed and shining. ‘Really, Carole,’ I said feebly.
‘You can manage a little one,’ urged Dizzy, joining the game. ‘How about a little levitation? Or a summoning?’ That was a laugh. If I could have summoned anything after all these years, it would have been a nice, deep hole to hide in. ‘All right then,’ she said, taking a candlestick from the table and pushing it towards me. ‘Just light this candle. Simplest trick in the world. It’s like riding a broom. You never forget how to do it.’
Easy for her to say. I’d never been much good at brooms, even when I was in practice. I began to feel sweat beading my forehead. ‘Go on,’ said Dizzy. ‘Show us how. Light the candle.’
‘Light it. Light it.’ The others continued the chant, and I felt myself beginning to shake. The terrible secret – the thing no witch can ever admit – was about to be revealed. It was Alex’s fault, I told myself, taking the candlestick in my hand and frowning hard at the cold wick. Being married to a non-witch is a bit like being married to a non-smoker; a daily clash of interests. Eventually someone has to give. And I was the one who gave; for the sake of our marriage and our children. Even the familiar – a black cat called Mr Tibbs – belongs principally to our boys (who don’t have a spark of natural magic between them, being mostly devoted to football and cyberbabes), and spends more of his time shedding hair on the carpets and torturing mice than contemplating mysteries. All the same, I thought desperately, feeling my eyes begin to water with the effort of concentration, you’d have thought there was something left – some little squib I could use now. I could hear Gloria whispering to Isabella; from the corner of my eye I saw Dizzy watching me with that hungry, amused look, like Mr Tibbs outside a mousehole.
‘Darling, I don’t think she can.’
‘She can’t have—’
‘She’s lost it.’
‘Shhh.’
Not even a cantrip – the smallest, most basic of spells. My face was scarlet; my armpits prickled with nervous heat. Not a glow, not a flame, not a spark. In desperation I looked up, hoping to see even one sympathetic pair of eyes, but Hannah was looking uncomfortable, Judith seemed half-asleep and Jane was far too occupied with her second slice of chocolate cake to take any notice of my plight. Dully I saw myself as the rest saw me: a fat, unfulfilled drone who couldn’t even light a candle.
Then, suddenly, there was a flash between my fingers, followed almost instantaneously by a smell of burning. I jerked my head away just in time; flames were streaming from the candlestick, the candle itself almost consumed in blue and green fire. Half a second later, the candle s
hot right out of the candlestick and exploded in a spray of coloured sparks over our heads. No one else seemed to notice at all – someone had cast a magical shield over the table.
Gloria, who had been leaning forward rapaciously, leapt back with an undignified squeal. Carole stared at the blackened candlestick in amazement. ‘I thought you said you were out of shape!’ she said at last.
I thought quickly and hard. Someone had helped me, that was certain; someone who didn’t want to see me humiliated. I glanced up, but could see nothing more than spite, curiosity, outrage or surprise in the faces around me. Dizzy was frantically brushing sparks out of her long hair. A cinder had fallen into Isabella’s glass, splashing her with wine. ‘Golly!’ said Jane, impressed. ‘What happened there?’
I tried to smile. ‘Joke,’ I said weakly.
‘Some joke,’ grumbled Gloria. ‘You nearly burnt my eyebrows off.’
‘More power than I thought,’ I muttered.
Relieved beyond words, I poured myself a glass of wine. For once, Carole didn’t comment. I could see she was awed in spite of herself. I spent some time evading her questions: where had I done my advanced training; had I achieved spiritual illumination; who had been my mentor. ‘You haven’t been dabbling in anything you shouldn’t, have you?’ she asked suspiciously, when I modestly declined to answer.
‘You mean Kaos? Don’t be silly.’ I almost laughed. It takes a lot of work to become a Kaos illuminata, and I’d never even understood the principles twenty years ago. Carole continued to look at me suspiciously for a while, then, to my relief, the conversation turned to other things. Old quarrels revived, small sillinesses remembered, practical jokes relived. The noise escalated gradually; at times I could hardly hear what was being said on the far side of the table. Even I, cheered by the wine and the unexpected miracle of the rocketing candle, felt my inhibitions begin to leave me. Maybe the wine was stronger than I’d thought. Or maybe it was just the company.