The Children's Hour Read Free

downstairs for her on the morning of her first wedding anniversary: a present from Liam.
    â€˜You need company,’ he’d said, watching her ecstatic reaction with amusement. ‘Working away up there, alone all day while I’m at the wine bar.’
    It was just over two years since she’d given up her job as an editor with a major publishing house in London, married Liam and moved to Truro, to live in his small terraced house not far from the wine bar that he ran with his partner, Joe Carey. It was a trendy bar, near the cathedral, not sufficiently prosperous to employ enough staff to enable her and Liam to spend many evenings alone together. Usually he was at home for what he called the ‘graveyard watch’ – the dead hours between three o’clock and seven – but this week one of the staff was away on holiday and Liam was taking his shift. It made a very long day.
    â€˜Come in as soon as you’ve finished,’ he’d said, ‘otherwise I’ll see nothing of you. Sorry, love, but it can’t be helped.’
    Oddly, she didn’t object to going to The Place; sitting at the table reserved for staff in the little snug, watching the clients and joking with Joe; eating some supper and snatching moments with Liam.
    â€˜No fertilizer like the farmer’s boots,’ Liam would say. ‘We have to be around for most of the time. The punters like it and the staff know where they are. It’s the secret of its success even if it means irregular hours.’
    She never minded, though. After the silence and concentration of a day’s copy-editing she found the buzz in The Place just what she needed. Liam’s passionate courtship had come as a delightful, confidence-boosting shock after a three-year relationship with a man who’d suddenly decided that he simply couldn’t commit to the extent of he and Lyddie buying a house together or having children, and certainly not to marriage. James had accepted the offer of a job in New York and Lyddie had continued to live alone for nearly a year, until she’d met Liam, after which her life had begun to change very rapidly. She’d missed her job and her friends, and the move had been a frightening rupture from all that she’d known, but she loved Liam far too much to question her decision – and her darling old aunts were not much more than two hours away, over on Exmoor.
    Aunt Mina’s call had caught her within ten minutes of finishing work but she’d let her believe that she was all done for the day. They were such a pair of sweeties, Mina and Nest, and so very dear to her, especially since the terrible car accident: her own parents killed outright and Aunt Nest crippled. Even now, ten years later, Lyddie felt the wrench of pain. She’d just celebrated her twenty-first birthday and been offered her first job in publishing. Struggling to learnthe work, rushing down to Oxford to see Aunt Nest in the Radcliffe, dealing with the agony of loss and misery: none of it would have been possible without Aunt Mina.
    Lyddie hunched into her jacket, pulling the collar about her chin, remembering. At weekends she’d stayed at the family home in Iffley with her older brother, Roger; but she and Roger had never been particularly close and it had needed Aunt Mina to supply the healing adhesive mix of love, sympathy and strength that bound them all together. In her own grief, Lyddie had sometimes forgotten that Aunt Mina was suffering too: her sister Henrietta dead, another sister crippled. How heavily she and Roger had leaned upon her: sunk too deeply in their own sorrow to consider hers. The small, pretty house had been left to them jointly and it was agreed that Roger, an academic like his father, should continue to live there until he could afford to buy Lyddie out. Until she’d met Liam, Lyddie had used the house as a retreat but, when Roger married Teresa, it was agreed that between them