The Children's Hour Read online

  She was passing the narrow entrance into Cathedral Lane when she saw them: Liam and Rosie, silhouetted at the other end of the passage. Liam had his hands up, rejectingly, whilst Rosie seemed to be remonstrating. Lyddie was past, actually looking in the window of Monsoon, when her mind did a kind of double take and she realized what she’d seen. Or had she? She stepped back to look into the lane just as Liam turned away, heading towards The Place, Rosie staring after him. Her stance was defeated, frustrated, and she thrust her hands into her pockets before she glanced round and saw Lyddie. She stiffened, hesitated, and then, ineluctably drawn, each walked to meet the other. They met outside Abacus.

  ‘Rosie,’ said Lyddie warmly, ‘how good to see you. I was so sorry to hear that you’d . . . left. How’s it going?’

  Rosie stared at her with that familiar intense, calculating look and then smiled wryly. ‘Is it going?’ she asked. ‘That’s the question.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Lyddie felt both sympathetic and responsible, guessing that Rosie had been asking for her job back and that Liam had refused. She wondered how much the split-up with Joe had to do with her leaving The Place and whether she was regretting the whole thing. ‘Look, I was just going to have a cup of coffee. Do you feel like joining me?’

  ‘Why not?’ Rosie seemed to be debating with herself as much as with Lyddie. ‘Yes, OK. We’ll go to The Terrace.’

  With white cane furniture and mirrors, and the ivy in its hanging baskets, The Terrace was charming – yet totally unlike The Place.

  ‘I always feel faintly guilty when I come in here,’ said Lyddie when they had their coffee in front of them on the small round table. She chuckled. ‘It’s rather like being unfaithful, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘Well, you needn’t let that worry you, need you?’ asked Rosie flippantly.

  Lyddie was puzzled, sensing some subtle challenge beneath the casually uttered question. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I mean why should you worry about being unfaithful.’ Rosie watched her, still unsmilingly, and then shrugged impatiently. ‘I mean’ – she emphasized the word as if implying that Lyddie were being unnecessarily stupid – ‘that you’re married to the expert.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’ Lyddie tried to speak lightly. ‘Sorry. Look, you seem a bit upset—’

  ‘No, you look.’ Rosie leaned forward, blocking Lyddie’s view of the other customers. ‘Open your eyes for once. It’s about time, after all. I’ve always thought that you should know . . .’ She sat back again, eyes narrowed, assessing her. ‘Perhaps you do know that Liam’s cheating on you.’

  Lyddie smiled disbelievingly. ‘Cheating . . .?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Rosie looked away for a moment, her hands clasping in an odd wringing movement, and then stared at Lyddie. ‘Joe always said you never guessed but I didn’t really believe him. Christ, Lyddie! You’ve seen him with the customers, with the women.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Lyddie carefully, ‘and I did wonder if he’d been with one or two of them before we were married—’

  ‘One or two?’ Rosie gave a short explosive laugh. ‘Jesus! And the rest.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Lyddie sounded quite calm, although an icy hand seemed to be twisting and gripping in her gut. ‘Oh, not about Liam going with some of the women in the past. He was a free man, after all, why shouldn’t he? But I think that all this is because he won’t give you your job back—’

  ‘We’re lovers, Lyddie. Me and Liam. We were lovers long before you blew into The Place on that bloody summer’s day and turned his head with your class act . . .’

  ‘All the more reason for you to be—’

  ‘Please,’ Rosie interrupted wearily, ‘oh, please, don’t let’s pretend that I’m doing the woman scorned bit. I left The Place of my own free will. Liam and I have been having it off for the last year – yes, there was a break for a while after he married you – but now there’s someone new. Oh, I haven’t been given the push, Liam’s not like that. The more the merrier where he’s concerned. He likes a harem. It lends spice, a bit of competition. Christ! Lyddie, don’t look like that. Where the hell did you think he was when he said he was going to the bank every day, or the cash and carry?’

  ‘And Joe?’

  ‘Joe?’ Rosie looked baffled at the question and then shook her head. ‘You really want some convincing, don’t you? Joe and I were never serious except for a short time after you and Liam got married. When Liam and I started to go to bed together again, Joe kept up the pretence because he didn’t want you to be hurt. He was furious but he can’t do anything about it. They’re partners and that’s that. The Place is more important to them than anyone, haven’t you found that out yet? I told Joe I was going to tell you before one of those other cows that Liam hangs out with spills the beans but he was very angry with me. That’s what we were arguing about that night when you came in out of the rain.’ She looked aside from Lyddie’s white face. ‘It’s not spite,’ she said urgently. ‘It’s just . . . You need to know before anything else happens; someone else deciding to drop him in it. He has one hell of a magnetic pull, does Liam, but one of the others might just tug free and decide to get her own back. You’re not very popular, you know, waltzing in and pinching him from under our noses.’

  Lyddie remained silent; she even drank a little coffee, although her hand trembled and the cup rattled as she replaced it in its saucer. Rosie watched her admiringly, consideringly.

  ‘I’m not sure you believe me, even now,’ she said. She leaned forward again. ‘Tell me,’ she asked casually, ‘would you agree if I said that, just these last few days, since Thursday, let’s say, Liam’s been really sparkling, right up there, know what I mean?’ She smiled. ‘Yes, I see that you would. Know why? The reason’s very close to home and she’s called Zoë. You can tell when Liam’s pulling someone new. It goes to his head like champagne and he wants everyone to share the bubbles. He was at The Place yesterday afternoon, wasn’t he? Right? And he couldn’t possibly get home. Right? I bet you haven’t seen the set-up in one of the storerooms upstairs, have you? Just in case someone’s ill or has to stay over? No, well, it’s bloody useful. And that’s where he was yesterday afternoon and I bet you had one hell of a night with him!’

  Once again she looked away from Lyddie’s shocked, vulnerable expression, biting her lips with frustration.

  ‘Look,’ she said at last, ‘don’t take my word for it. Go there now and see for yourself. He won’t be expecting you. I’m sorry, Lyddie. I am, really, because you’re a sweet person and he should have left you alone. But I love him too, and he was mine before he was ever yours.’ She stood up quickly, swinging her bag over her shoulder, staring down at Lyddie. ‘And now,’ she said bleakly, ‘you’ll never know, will you? You’ll look at them all with new eyes. The ones who smile at him and, even worse, the ones he doesn’t take too much notice of, and you’ll never know.’ She gave a tiny bitter laugh. ‘Well, join the club.’

  She whirled away, out into Boscawan Street, and Lyddie sat on, her hands still trembling, sick to the stomach. Mechanically, she finished her coffee and, presently, she found that she could stand up, pay the bill, and walk out into the sunshine. Her mind a careful blank, she crossed the road and stepped briskly through Cathedral Lane, towards The Place. She paused just inside the door. It was fairly quiet, just a few late morning shoppers having coffee, and there was nobody behind the bar. Zoë stood at the entrance to the snug, smiling down at someone hidden from sight inside. As she watched, Lyddie saw the hand that came out to draw a sensual, lingering finger round the bare space between Zoë’s jeans and short, cropped T-shirt. She leaned towards the owner of the finger, laughing now, and Lyddie drew back quickly as Liam swung himself into view and, after a swift but even more intimate touch, pushed Zoë affectionately but firmly aside and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Some people, coming in for lunch, screened Lyddie’s escape and she hurried away, her cheeks burning, her heart knock
ing in her side. Walking fast she broke every now and again into a stumbling run, until she was safely home with the door closed behind her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Overnight, the wild westerly gales, driving onshore behind the high tides, piling the sea against the rock-bound coast, had refashioned the beach and scoured the pools. Seaweed had been flung far beyond the usual high-water mark and the dogs ran excitedly amongst the brown, shiny kelp, examining the spoils. Behind them, Mina moved more slowly, collecting smooth, twisted pieces of bleached, salty wood, which later would sizzle with magical red and green and blue flames when she lit the sitting-room fire. Further down the beach, Georgie stooped over a pebble, turning it carefully in her fingers before putting it in her pocket. She was beginning to develop a fondness for inanimate things: a stone, a short length of string, an old stub of pencil. These would be placed together in odd, meaningless, still-life patterns that she would touch tenderly from time to time, or re-examine more closely with a kind of possessive affection.

  Now, as Mina watched her, Georgie’s attention was caught by something half buried in the wet sand. She crouched to dig deeper, disinterring the object from which she brushed the gritty shale.

  ‘Look!’ She straightened up, the wind whipping her voice away as she turned to look for her sister. ‘Look what I’ve found.’

  Mina hastened down the beach curiously. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a toy car.’ Georgie was delighted. ‘Do you see? The rubber wheels are gone, and all the paint, but you can see quite clearly that that’s what it is.’

  Mina peered at it, not touching it, sensing that Georgie was not ready yet to let it out of her grasp.

  ‘So it is.’ She laughed incredulously. ‘One of Timmie’s, d’you think? Fancy finding it after all this time. I wonder how long it’s been buried? Oh, of course, it might be one of Toby’s.’

  ‘No.’ Georgie shook her head at once. ‘It’s too old. No, it’s Timmie’s. I recognize it. Timothy sent it for his birthday when he was about seven, at the beginning of the war. He was quite mad with joy about it. So was Mama. Surely you remember? There was such excitement when the parcel arrived. She had a letter, of course.’

  Mina felt, quite suddenly, an odd sense of stillness. The hoarse shrieking of the gulls overhead, the pounding, rhythmical crash of the insatiable tide upon the shore, the wild barking of the foraging dogs; all these sounds seemed to recede as she looked at Georgie. Her sister’s expression was compounded of simple pleasure and a knowing, amused scornfulness as she examined the toy car. Silence stretched between them.

  ‘Did you read her letters?’ Mina asked at last. ‘Mama’s letters from Timothy, I mean. Did you, Georgie?’

  Instantly the expression changed: replaced by the shrugging, bridling motion of the shoulders, the sly, twitching face movements, as if she heard another conversation in which she was already justifying herself to an unseen accuser.

  ‘Did you, Georgie?’ insisted Mina.

  ‘Letters?’ Georgie looked up from the toy, whose silvery, sand-blasted surface gleamed dully in a shaft of wintry sunlight. Her eyes were watchful but quite sane.

  ‘She kept them in her sewing-basket, in a little, shallow, secret drawer.’ Mina turned to look out across the channel. ‘Odd how the Victorians loved secret drawers, isn’t it? I saw her by mistake, putting a letter away. I thought it was the Tinies playing in the drawing-room. Do you remember how they’d hide just before lunch-time and one of us would have to find them?’ She chuckled a little. ‘I can see them now, standing quite breathless behind the long curtains with their sandals showing at the bottom. They never could guess how I found them so quickly. Did you see Mama putting the letters away too?’

  ‘I heard something.’ Georgie was willingly drawn into the remembering game. ‘A little, sharp bang. I was lying down on the sofa and she didn’t know I was there. I was home from London for a weekend or a holiday during the war. Quite early on, I think it was. After the blitz, though.’

  ‘And you heard the drawer shut?’ Mina edged her back to the point.

  ‘Yes. I looked over the back of the chair but she was going out of the room.’ Georgie paused, thinking about it. ‘I was curious,’ she admitted, after a moment. ‘There was something, you know . . . furtive about it. It was unlike Mama. She was always so tranquil, wasn’t she? But she looked so odd, secretive but excited too, that I felt a little flutter of . . . well, a “What’s she up to?” kind of sensation.’

  ‘So you went and had a look?’ Mina’s voice invited intimacy.

  ‘Well, I did. It wasn’t difficult to find the spring-catch. Goodness, I couldn’t believe it when I saw them all stacked together. There were dozens of them, weren’t there?’

  ‘There were quite a lot,’ Mina agreed. ‘Most of them were from abroad, of course . . . Did you read them too?’

  ‘Some of them.’ Georgie’s glance crossed Mina’s and slid away. ‘Enough of them to see what had been going on between them.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell anyone?’

  ‘No.’ Georgie sounded defensive, almost as if Mina was accusing her of dereliction of a duty. ‘Of course, I was less shocked than I might have been before I went to London but, somehow, this rather old-fashioned love affair was quite in keeping with the times. Timothy off in the far-flung outposts of the Empire, doing his bit, while Mama waited for him at home.’

  A pause.

  ‘You didn’t feel that Papa should have been told?’

  ‘No, I didn’t!’ answered Georgie at once, almost indignantly. ‘It didn’t take me long to discover what had been going on for all those years with that frightful widow whilst Mama and the rest of us were shuttled off to Ottercombe. He preferred her to us, his own family. To be quite honest, I felt a sense of satisfaction that Mama had been playing him at his own game, if you want to know.’ She looked slyly at Mina. ‘Did you tell him?’

  ‘I didn’t read them until after she’d died,’ replied Mina gently. ‘And he was long dead himself, by then. He would have made a terrific row, widow or not, so I suspected that, if you’d known about them, you’d kept it to yourself. Anyway,’ she chuckled a little, ‘you like to have secrets, don’t you?’

  Georgie looked down at the toy again, hiding her own secret smile. ‘Sometimes,’ she said pertly, almost childishly. ‘Timmie loved this car, you know. He took it everywhere with him. I hid it once, just to pay him out.’ Her smile faded a little. ‘He was Mama’s favourite. And Papa’s. I was the eldest. I was their first-born but, because he was a boy, they loved him most. Sometimes he needed a lesson.’

  ‘I don’t think he was really their favourite.’ Mina was dismayed by this relapse. ‘I think they loved us all differently.’

  She spoke soothingly, trying to hide the tiny spasm of distaste at Georgie’s disclosure – a young woman of seventeen or eighteen hiding a child’s toy for spite – and her sister looked at her again, her eyes bright.

  ‘What a joke, wasn’t it? Timmie, so blond and tall. Not a bit like any of us and Papa so proud of his handsome, only son.’ She began to laugh. ‘Everyone remarking on how different he was. But all the time . . .’ her laughter was edging out of control, ‘but all the time . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Mina quickly. ‘I read the letters too, remember.’

  Georgie stared at her, tiny bursts of laughter still escaping from her lips, her eyes confused now.

  ‘It’s a secret,’ she muttered vaguely.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mina quickly, urgently. ‘Our secret. Nobody else must know.’

  Georgie turned away, smoothing the little car with her fingers, mumbling to herself.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  She set off, stumping away across the beach, and, sighing with frustration and anxiety, Mina collected her bag of firewood, called to the dogs and followed her on to the path.

  It was almost dark before Lyddie realized how cold the house was becoming. She had taken the Bosun out rather earlier than
usual, striding purposefully through the streets as though by sheer physical effort she could conquer the numbing horror that pervaded her mind. Even if she had not witnessed the telling little scene at The Place, yet she might have accepted the truth that Rosie showed her. It was so obvious, once she’d been told. Walking the lanes, her hands jammed into her pockets, the Bosun running beside her, she’d felt scorched by humiliation. She remembered, with shrinking mortification, the looks of those other women and was able to put quite a different interpretation upon them. How blind she’d been; how foolish!

  Now, as she lit the stove, crouching before it as she fed it with sticks and then larger logs, she tried to determine how much of her hurt was pride and how much damaged love. Those women – oh! how many? – like Rosie had colluded with Liam to deceive her and she had gone in and out, happy, sure in her love, despite her twinges of jealousy, whilst they laughed behind their hands. The tiny scene with Liam and Zoë was burned like pokerwork into her mind’s eye: wherever she looked she saw it, superimposed. It was the manifestation of all the pictures that Rosie had drawn for her. She knew that she would be quite unable to enter The Place again and wondered, in a moment of panic-stricken despair, where she should go and what she should do.

  She made herself some tea, just for the reassurance of doing something ordinary and normal, and drank it sitting at the table. The Bosun roused himself from his sleep and looked at her hopefully, so she fed him, talking to him as she usually did, and, afterwards, he lay down again, stretched on the floor beside her. When the telephone rang she didn’t answer it but watched it in an almost detached fashion. The answer machine and fax were in her study but she made no attempt to listen for a message, remaining where she was at the table. When it rang again an hour later she continued to ignore it but, by now, a terrible restlessness was beginning to possess her: the need to decide what she should do, accompanied by a paralysing inability to think properly.