The Luck of Love – Part One

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Our story of the week is an outsider’s view of a troubled marriage from the writer Miriam Burke.

Miriam is from the West of Ireland and now lives in London. She has a PhD in Psychology and worked as a clinical psychologist before becoming a full-time writer.

Miriam has had stories published in anthologies and magazines. Some of her stories have won awards.

In The Luck of Love – Part One, the first in a three-part serial, Miriam takes a peek inside a dysfunctional family.

Enjoy!

The Hewitts live in North London, in a big old house with high ceilings, long windows and a garden that has been photographed for a magazine. The carved oak dining room table came from the refectory of a French monastery and the teak four-poster bed was made in Goa. Mrs Hewitt bid for her furniture at auctions, one piece at a time, and she had the damaged pieces restored. She went to artists’ studios with plastic bags full of cash to haggle about the price of the abstract expressionist paintings that cover the walls. Mrs Hewitt loves the house and everything in it. They bought it when it was a warren of bed-sitting rooms – she showed me the photos – and she made it beautiful. The house is her life’s work. Everything in her home looks like it costs much more than she paid for it, with the exception of her husband.

Mrs Hewitt used to work as a solicitor helping people to buy and sell their homes, which must be a terrible job: boring legal work combined with having to deal with people at their maddest. She got out as soon as she had finished renovating and furnishing the house. Mr Hewitt is a director of a management consultancy firm.

Georgina Hewitt, their daughter, is thirty years old and she lives in her bedroom. She wears a lavender one-piece suit with a fur trimmed hood and she has the face of a child on the body of a woman. When Georgina was bullied at school, her parents employed tutors to educate her at home. It is many years since she has felt the sun on her skin.Read more…

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