‘Sure,’ Bridget shrugged, good-naturedly. ‘But I’ll do it. Why ever wouldn’t I?’
Gemma’s phone rang again.
‘Oh sorry, I’d better take this, it’s Alex. Hi, darling! Yes, Lucinda says he’s definitely interested… No, I won’t get my hopes up but it’s looking good… I know, we’ll see, but I might as well be optimistic, for once. And…’ She looked at Bridget, who gave her a perky thumbs up. Gemma was infused with love for her sister and the world in general. ‘I’ve got some other news… I’ll tell you later. Do you think you can get home early tonight?’
3
It was Friday morning in the offices of the Sunday Post newspaper and Karen Drake, deputy editor of the All Woman! magazine supplement, was trying to edit an article that had just popped into her inbox about how egg-cosies were now gracing ‘the hippest dining tables’ – Kate Moss was a huge fan, apparently, while simultaneously browsing Net-a-porter and listening to Sophie, the features editor, on the phone to one of her mates.
‘I’ve decided I’ll get into jam-making during my maternity leave. As well as doing a bit of painting. And arranging all my photos in albums.’
Karen smiled. Sophie was four months pregnant, and fantasies about what motherhood would be like never failed to tickle her. Karen hadn’t the heart to correct her. She was still grinning as she picked up her ringing phone.
‘Hello?’ she said, tucking the handset under her left ear.
‘Sweetheart!’ said Phil, her husband. ‘Fantastic news.’
‘Oh?’ Phil’s definition of fantastic news was not always the same as hers, his usually concerning the fortunes of Tiger Woods or the English cricket team.
‘Scott’s just sent me details of a new house. It’s perfect. Even better than Doddington. And guess what – we can have the first viewing. Before it even goes on the market.’
‘Ah,’ said Karen. She tried to sound thrilled, but she felt as if she’d just been punched in the stomach. Talk about bad luck. Secretly she’d been delighted when Doddington had fallen through, the sellers having decided, for some bizarre reason, that they didn’t want to leave the rustic ruin, after all. She’d thought it would take months – no, maybe years – before they found a similar property. For the past couple of days she’d even been allowing herself to feel guilty as she wondered how to break the news to the Meehans, who were desperate to buy 16 Coverley Drive, that they weren’t selling after all. But goddammit if Scott, the property finder her husband had employed, wasn’t doing everything in his power to earn his fee.
‘It’s in Devon,’ Phil burbled on. ‘An Elizabethan manor house. Nine bedrooms, ten acres, needs plenty of TLC. A real opportunity to turn it into a viable business. And Scott reckons we can do a deal on the price because they want a quick sale.’
Devon. So they were talking at least a three-hour drive from London. She’d never be able to commute from there.
‘I’ll email you the details, shall I? Ideally we’d go and see it tomorrow.’
‘Bea has a birthday party,’ Karen protested.
‘She can miss it,’ said Phil, as if such a change of schedule were of no consequence, rather than life-shattering, for a nine-year-old. ‘There’ll be other parties. But there won’t be another house like this.’
‘Right,’ Karen said, already bracing herself for Bea’s freak-out. She swallowed hard, as an email pinged on to her screen. Chadlicote Manor, Little Dittonsbury, Devon, read the header. ‘I’ll call you later when I’ve read the details. It…’ she swallowed. ‘It sounds very exciting.’
Karen examined the particulars. Just as she feared. A vast ancient pile with room after room after pointless room set in acres of muddy countryside. Tons of expensive and disruptive work needed to restore it to its former glory. What was the postcode? That would be the litmus test. Karen tapped it into the Ocado website. Great. Just as she’d suspected. They didn’t deliver there. Plus the chances of Ludmila, the au pair, joining them there were as likely as Britney Spears solving the Israeli/Palestinian question.
In other words, Chadlicote signified the end of everything that kept Karen’s life on track.
Karen had never for a second believed in the rustic idyll dream peddled by media offshoots like her own, because she knew the truth. She had been born in a remote corner of Wales where it rained virtually every day of her childhood. There was nothing for miles around except sheep and trees, and the highlight of the year was when a black family stayed in the village B&B and everyone dropped round with excuses just to get a look at them.
At school she was bullied for being clever, so she put her head down and worked hard, determined to get out of that hole at the earliest opportunity. But if term times were miserable, the holidays were even worse. Weeks of boredom with nothing to do but ride her bike up and down the hills and hang out at the bus stop waiting for the twice-daily charabanc into Swansea. Drink cider in copses with her best friend Andrea, flicking through copies of J17, which they hoarded like treasure, studying the fashion shots, fantasizing about London, where high culture didn’t consist of a tractor show and Londis wasn’t rated as a shopping experience.
She was determined to get out at the earliest opportunity, and that opportunity came earlier than she’d anticipated, when she was sixteen and Mum and Dad split up. Dad disappeared to Australia, never to be heard of again. Mum had some kind of nervous breakdown and went to live in a commune. She was much better now and worked for the council in Ludlow, but Karen had never really recovered from her abandonment at that crucial stage in her life.
With no one caring and a clutch of O levels (God, that dated her), Karen had headed off to London to seek her fortune. Things didn’t quite turn out the way she’d hoped. Initially she’d stayed with a distant family friend, but after a row when she left her underwear dripping on the radiators she was kicked out.
For eighteen months Karen found herself living in a hostel for the homeless, surrounded by alcoholics and addicts. They were desperate, unpredictable people. Whenever Karen needed to count her blessings – which had been often over the past year – she looked back on that period and thanked God she hadn’t been mugged or raped. So many inmates were. She coped by detaching herself from the situation, pretending it was happening to somebody else, by making herself look as unattractive as possible and stomping around with her keys clutched between her knuckles. She earned a meagre living, waitressing and doing odd jobs. Eventually she got out of there, but things didn’t improve.
Over the next two years she managed to live in seventeen places, each more of a dive than the last. In one the landlord, who had nine convictions for offences like arson and GBH, used to bring his wife and kids to the house every day, lock them in a room and beat them up. Karen had to wear earplugs to block out the screaming. Then there was the council flat on the eighteenth floor of an east London block where people with guns and knives hid behind every pillar and the lifts also served as public toilets. She tried to treat the experience as a great adventure, but her nerves were becoming more and more frayed.
And then she met Phil. And he saved her. Cheesily, he was a customer in the restaurant. She didn’t even register him the first few times he visited; after all, what was there to notice about a man she later – objectively – summed up as ‘ish’: ‘tallish’, ‘plumpish’, ‘fairish’. But he kept coming, leaving her bigger and bigger tips, and eventually they got talking. After about a month of this, they went to the cinema together. Not on a date. Purely as friends. He was a venture capitalist, which, he explained, meant he invested in other people’s businesses in return for a large percentage of their revenue.
‘That sounds grown-up,’ she said as she climbed into his – even more grown-up – BMW so he could drive her home. ‘You don’t look old enough to be doing something like that.’ That, she realized, was why she didn’t fancy him – his cheeks were too peachy smooth, his voice a little too lispy, to take him seriously as a man. He was more like an overgrown schoolboy.
&
nbsp; ‘I’m twenty-four,’ he said. ‘And I’ve been doing this since I was eighteen.’ He put his foot on the pedal and the car gave a satisfying roar. ‘Where to, madam?’
When they stopped outside the tower block, Phil was appalled.
‘You can’t live somewhere like this.’
‘Why not?’ she shrugged.
He gestured at the ten-foot-high graffiti saying ‘Suk your father’s cock, bitch, Alisha.’
‘I can’t afford anywhere else.’ She wondered what he’d make of her bleak little box with the broken toilet and boiler she couldn’t afford to fix.
‘I’ve got a house,’ he said. ‘You can live there.’
‘I can’t live with you! I mean… I barely know you.’
‘You won’t be living with me. It’s one of my houses. I’m a landlord too on the side, you see. Come on. No strings attached. Look at me. Do I look like a pervert?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
The next day, a fifteen-year-old girl was stabbed in the lifts. She called Phil, trying hard not to cry.
‘If I could stay in your house just for a bit that would be great.’
So she stayed in his house in Kensal Rise for three years, three years during which Phil never laid a finger on her, but – thanks to his never-ending public school contacts – wangled her a job as a PA at the Daily Sentinel.
She began writing the odd article when no one else was available and within two years she’d been promoted to a reporter. In her eyes, it was pretty much a dream job. She got to travel all over the country and sometimes abroad on press trips. She knew the inside story on which politician had a lovechild with which TV presenter. She earned a salary, not loads, but enough to pay Phil’s rent and allow her London dream to finally crystallize into a reality.
She went out every night, she drank in the hottest bars – often with a complimentary tab. She saw films months before they were released. She also went out with a series of attractive, louche men who were great fun and who, one by one, broke her heart. It was after yet another humiliation from one of them, Ryan, who revealed a secret partner and two children, that Phil took her out for an expensive meal and several bottles of wine.
At the end of it, sozzled and keen to heal the heartbreak, she fell into bed with him. The next morning they were a couple. At least Phil thought they were. And Karen didn’t argue. Because she was tired. Tired of unreliable men and of having to find someone who wasn’t a cowboy to fix the plumbing and of always secretly worrying that somehow she’d wind up back in the tower block. Phil would take care of everything, make it easy for her. There was no such thing as romantic love anyway, only hormones. Her heart might not sing at the sight of Phil but that was far better than allowing primal urges to blind you. What she’d have now would be mature, sensible, adult. Safe.
They went out for two years and when she was twenty-eight, she accepted his proposal. Around the same time she was headhunted by the Sunday Post to become the magazine’s deputy. More money. More status. Lots of free meals in restaurants that wanted a mention, discounts on clothes, complimentary holidays in return for a flattering write-up. Two years later Eloise was born. It was the fairytale ending, only of course it wasn’t because with their first child came the first inkling of discord in the Drake marriage.
‘We can’t live here any more,’ Phil said, gesturing round the living room of their huge flat in a Clapham mansion block.
‘Why on earth not? I love it here.’ All those restaurants and cute shops full of fripperies that had been so important to her pre-children and that she hoped she would be able to frequent again one day without falling asleep in her miso soup or Eloise pulling over a display of tea glasses.
‘Children shouldn’t be brought up in the city. They need country air. Space to run around in.’
‘Phil! You know how I feel about the country. Everyone’s on drugs at twelve, because there’s nothing else to do. Anyway my job’s here.’ Karen couldn’t admit it but she’d been thrilled when her six months’ maternity leave ended. Her colleagues said: ‘Ah, back so soon, don’t you miss the little one?’ (Jamila, who’d now left, had said, ‘I do admire you braving it back here when everyone’s so shocked at you leaving the baby.’) She shrugged and said, ‘Yes, well, we don’t have a choice,’ even though everyone knew Phil’s money meant she could quite easily never work again. But it simply wasn’t acceptable to say you found long days with a small baby duller than watching a darts match.
It was exhausting working all week with no down-time at weekends, but Karen far preferred it that way to the alternative of coffee mornings spent comparing episiotomy stitches and standing shivering in the playground.
Work kept Karen sane. Work was what had made the compromises involved in marrying Phil bearable. It gave her her own identity outside her marriage and children, which made her feel she hadn’t completely lost all of her old self. But her work wouldn’t be possible anywhere but London, where the newspaper offices were.
But Phil still wasn’t happy. He’d always been keen on muddy walks, always yearned for a dog, for easy access to a golf course, shooting and fishing. Of course, he’d been brought up in Croydon, so he had no idea what the real country was like. The argument went on for the next two years until she became pregnant with Bea, which settled it.
‘Look, there really is no room for four of us, and even with the money I’m earning we couldn’t afford the kind of house we’d like in London. But what about this…?’
‘This’ was 16 Coverley Drive, St Albans. When Karen saw the particulars, her initial reaction had been to scream. St Albans? Could you get more suburban than that? A five-bedroom detached property with double garage. Yuk. But Phil persuaded her to go and look at it and to both their surprise she was seduced. The house was twice the size of anything they could have afforded in London, and attractive in a retro kind of way with its gabled roof, and the town, which she’d envisaged as some backwater with a Spar selling overpriced rotting vegetables and a war memorial covered in hoodies drinking cider, turned out to be lovely, with plenty of boutiques and delis.
Karen was already coming to terms with the fact that her priorities had changed. Easy access to the tube and dozens of bars were no longer top of the list. After all, she had started obsessing about the Lakeland catalogue, promising herself that one day she would treat herself to an avocado slicer and wondering what could ever make her worthy of a Remoska cooker (‘A joy to use’, ‘What a gem’). It would be nice to have some outdoor space.
So they’d moved.
And it was fine. She’d redecorated the house so it seemed less staid, with colourful objects from her travels, bright walls and ethnic rugs. They found an excellent nanny. There was a good train service, so getting to work only took about fifteen minutes longer than before.
After Bea started school there were three or four pretty much perfect years, with Karen adoring her job (even though it irked her that her boss Christine was never going to stand down and she’d be a deputy for ever), the girls in a brief valley between stroppy toddlerhood and adolescence. They didn’t need a nanny any more – an au pair was fine for drop-offs and pick-ups from school – and apart from Katerina, who totalled the car, and Liljana, who they found having sex with her sailor boyfriend on the living room sofa, it worked pretty well.
Phil’s business was going brilliantly – he’d sold off most of the houses he’d bought for thruppence ha’penny in the Nineties at a four or five hundred per cent mark-up. They went on fabulous holidays, had big lunches at weekends entertaining friends. For the first time in her life Karen felt complete. She had her family and the broken nights bit was behind her, so she also had some freedom again. She went to the cinema or theatre once a week to keep up with what was going on, and joined a book group. So her job wasn’t perfect – a lot of the stuff they published made Jordan’s memoirs look like Proust and Christine was always demanding freebies and she wasn’t paid the market rate because she was too pussy to ask for a
rise. And Phil annoyed her sometimes with the way he always watched telly with his hand down the front of his trousers and – on the rare occasions when she was enjoying something like a film – he would switch to the Teletext cricket scores without any consultation or warning. He always walked forty paces ahead of her and the girls down the street, and if she ever sent him to the supermarket he always ignored her detailed lists, coming back with sackfuls of things like potatoes because they were on special which then sat in the cupboard for weeks going off.
But no life was perfect, and no marriage. Give and take was the key. So she was surprised and somewhat miffed when one night in bed, after the twice-weekly sex which she had decided she’d compromise with, he said, ‘I’m bored. Work doesn’t offer any challenges any more. I’ve done it all, made all the money I want to make. It’s time to climb off the ladder and smell the roses.’
Another thing that annoyed Karen. Phil’s fondness for clichés. But she just said, ‘What would you like to do?’
‘Well, I know you’ve always been against it but I really do want you to think about moving to the country. The proper country. I’d like to find a wreck. Do it up. Be a bit of a squire if you like.’
Karen stiffened. ‘I couldn’t work in the country,’ she said.
‘Of course you could. They’ve got broadband there now. You could freelance.’
Karen cringed. She knew what freelancing from the country involved: writing articles about other women who’d also migrated from the city and had set up their own business making hand-embroidered high-chair slip covers. Begging nineteen-year-old work experience girls to listen to her ideas. Earning about seventy-three pounds a year. No, thank you.
‘We’ve had this discussion. I have to be in London. I really enjoy my job, Phil.’
‘But I don’t any more. I hate the commuting…’
Love Nest Page 4
