Love Nest by Julia Llewellyn Read Free Book Online

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