The House of Memories Read Online Free Page A

Well-off parents were always happy to pay. A win-win-win situation.
    I stayed for a month that first time and loved every minute—his house, the tutors, the city, Lucas himself. The following year, I returned and stayed for six weeks. After that, I visited as often as I could. I’d pay my own airfare after saving every cent I could from my new, full-time job in a Melbourne publishing house, supplemented by my evening job as an English tutor. Lucas’s tutors had given me the idea. I steadily rose through the ranks at the publisher, from editorial assistant to copy editor to editor. At the age of twenty-eight, single and restless, I resigned from my job, packed up my flat, said farewell to my friends and family and flew to London yet again. I worked for Lucas as his cook and housekeeper for two months before I found a short-term job as a badly paid editor with a literary magazine in Bath. I still traveled back to London most weekends and stayed in Lucas’s house each time, going to the theater or, more often, staying in and cooking dinner for him and whichever of the tutors happened to be in the house. Which was how, where and when I first met Aidan.
    Two years later, on a sunny Canberra afternoon, Lucas was the witness at my registry-office wedding to Aidan Joseph O’Hanlon, originally of Carlow, Ireland, lately of London and now of Australia. Aidan and I had moved to Canberra a year after we met, when he was offered an interpreting and translating position with the trade commission there. He was fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and German. I’d gone freelance, able to work as an editor from anywhere.
    It was important to us both that Lucas was at our wedding. He’d brought us together, after all. My mother was vaguely friendly to Lucas, I think. Marriage to Walter had softened her or at least helped her forget how annoyed she’d once been with my dad and, by extension, Lucas. Walter made stilted conversation with him, as Walter tended to do with everyone. Jess pretty much ignored him. Aged eighteen, she was too busy flirting with the young guitarist we’d hired to provide background music at the reception.
    Charlie was living in Boston by then, happily married and soon to become a father for the fourth time. Yet he still made the long journey to our wedding, staying for just three days. That meant so much to me.
    Aidan and I didn’t go on our honeymoon until Lucas returned to England. We spent the week after our wedding playing tour guide with him, visiting the galleries and museums in Canberra, driving up to Sydney and down to Melbourne. Lucas and I had been close before my wedding. We became even closer afterward. A month after Lucas went home, Aidan and I headed off on our official honeymoon—two weeks in the US, spending several days, of course, with Charlie and his family, including his new baby son. Aidan and Charlie got on so well. They were both clever, gentle men, so I’d hoped and expected it, but I was still relieved.
    Back home in Canberra, work and everyday life took over from weddings and travel. I e-mailed Lucas as regularly as ever, about authors I was working with, or asking his advice about points of grammar. I told him about Aidan’s job. Lucas told me he had a full house—six lodgers, the most ever. More clients than he could supply tutors to, as well.
I fear for the future of this once great country, but rejoice in my rising bank account,
he said.
    Less than six months after the wedding, the news that Aidan and I were having a baby unleashed a torrent of one-line Astounding Fact e-mail from him. He continued to send them all the way through my pregnancy.
Did you know that the first sense a baby develops is hearing? That a baby is born around the world every three seconds? That a baby is born without kneecaps?
    When I e-mailed five hours after the birth (long and painful, both facts immediately forgotten) to tell him we’d decided to call our newborn son (big, healthy, so, so beautiful)