Christmas on Primrose Hill (7 page)

It was only half a lie.

Forty minutes later she watched them go, the three of them huddled and braced against the wind as they walked towards Stevie’s van and headed for his flat in Chalk Farm, on the other side of the railway tracks.

Dan kept turning back to see if she was still there – still OK – but she just gave him a jaunty wave, forcing him to give reluctant nods and waves back. He knew her too well to know she’d be dissuaded otherwise.

They slammed shut the van doors, Jules sitting between the two guys on the bench seat, and after several phlegmatic turns of the ignition, trundled past her with concerned expressions before turning right, out of sight. She stood alone in the cold, her black Zara puffa doing its best against the biting temperatures, knowing that she had to put one foot in front of the other and do this. There was no other way. This was simply what she did.

She began walking to the bus stop, but she was wearing leather-soled boots, for once not her beloved Puma trainers, and the cold seeped through them, chilling her bones.

She tried keeping the hood of her coat up, but the wind blew it back and off with effortless gusts, and having left her beanie at home, she resigned herself to the onset of cold, throbbing ears. For a Saturday afternoon, the streets were quiet, the bitter temperatures driving everyone inside, and only the hardiest families with young kids were venturing out onto the hill.

Just ahead of her, a striped cat trotted along the pavement, its long, plush tail hovering above the ground as it moved with silent purpose for a hundred yards before springing onto a low, ivy-covered wall and disappearing into the hunting grounds of the garden beyond.

Nettie walked quickly with the same resolve, her eyes continually drawn to the leached sky, where clouds tumbled overhead. It was beginning to grow dark already, even though it was only just after two, and she knew she wouldn’t have long today. Deep in her pockets, she dug her nails into her palms, castigating herself for having wasted so much time on her hangover this morning. It was precisely why she hadn’t wanted to go out last night.

There were a couple of people at the bus stop and she joined them, standing with an apprehensive expression as she stared along the empty road, willing the bus to appear. Every minute mattered; she was already on a countdown.

She blew out through her cheeks, impatient and increasingly agitated, stamping her feet and trying to keep the blood flowing. She’d been stupid, so
stupid
, indulging in her hangover when she had known – in the back of her mind, always – that this wouldn’t be put off.

She turned, walking towards the few shops that dotted this stretch of the road. Maybe if she didn’t look for the damned bus . . .

She stood outside the estate agent’s window and listlessly scanned the details of the brick and stuccoed Georgian and Victorian houses that had been going for a song when her parents had bought, forty years ago, and were now far out of reach for normal people like her.

It was a moment before she saw that the man inside was waving to her. She held up a reluctant hand in greeting, protesting as he motioned for her to come in and trying to indicate she was waiting for the bus. Instead, he jumped up from his desk and came to the door.

‘Hello there, Nettie,’ he smiled, holding the door wide. His hair was wiry grey, and he was wearing a brown tweed suit with brogues that looked like conkers.

‘Hi, Lee. How are you?’

‘You’re
just
the person I wanted to see,’ he said, pleased, rubbing his hands together.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I’ve got it this time, I know it. Come in and I’ll show you.’

‘Uh, well, the thing is, I’m waiting for the bus and I really can’t afford to miss it. I’ve got to stay out here, in case it comes.’

He was unfazed, his enthusiasm undimmed. ‘Just a sec, then.’ And he darted back inside the tiny office, typing something on his keyboard, before disappearing into a room at the back.

Behind her, Nettie heard the familiar low rumble of the bus. Typical!

‘Lee! The bus is coming!’ she called through.

‘Coming!’ he called back. ‘It’s just printing now.’

She turned again to find the bus pulling to a stop, the doors hissing open.

‘Lee . . .’ She saw the other passengers getting on and she began walking backwards towards the bus. She couldn’t afford to miss it.

‘Coming, coming,’ he panted, running awkwardly through the office with a sheet of paper in his hands. ‘Probate sale. Just through in the past hour. Perfect for you.’

‘But—’

He thrust the particulars into her hand just as she stepped, sideways, onto the bus. ‘I’m listing it on the market on Monday. I’m on viewings for the rest of today, but I can see you there tomorrow, about four-ish, and you can have an exclusive preview, OK? First refusal.’

‘But—’

‘I promise you, Nettie. This is the one.’ He smiled at her, his cheeks thread-veined, his bushy moustache making up for the lack of hair on his head.

‘Are you getting on or what?’ the bus driver asked, prompting her to turn.

‘Uh, yes, yes,’ she said, pulling out her Oyster card and showing it to him.

‘Not valid till it’s scanned,’ the driver said with impressive boredom, as though she’d never been on a bus before.

She turned back to Lee as she held the card to the reader. ‘Fine. I’ll see you there tomorrow, then,’ she said as it beeped.

‘Four-ish,’ Lee called as the doors immediately closed and the brakes were released. ‘Don’t worry if I’m late!’

She gave him a thumbs-up sign as the bus pulled away and she swayed her way down towards the seats at the back. The bus was less than half filled and she sank into a seat by the window and stared out, her eyes up to the sky again; a gauzy tendril of violet was beginning to inch across now, backlighting the clouds. She calculated that with fifteen minutes to get there – depending upon the traffic, of course – she’d have an hour and twenty minutes, maybe slightly more, before the light went completely.

She bit her lip as the bus stopped at the lights on Prince Albert Road and pedestrians began to cross, deliberately slowly, it seemed. Two feet below her, she watched as cyclists passed by the bus and stopped right in front of it.

The lights stayed red. She sighed and looked impatiently down the aisle, out through the windscreen at the cyclists getting in the way. They were all just standing about lackadaisically, their bikes held up at odd angles, some with the pedals stopped in the wrong position and therefore holding the bus up further.

She could feel her pulse quicken and she looked away again, taking slow, deep breaths and digging her nails into her palms once more.

She would be there soon enough.

That was the problem.

Chapter Five

Lee looked back at her with hopeful eyes.

Nettie gave a wan smile, her eyes falling to a dead, upside-down cockroach in the corner by the radiator. Yes, this was what £350,000 bought in the area now. The influx of TV and music stars, models and Hollywood actors had driven prices through the roof so that it now sat on a par, price-wise, with Notting Hill and Chelsea, but being sought out by those multi-millionaires who liked a cooler, edgier vibe to their des res. Her parents’ house – four floors including the basement, six bedrooms, decent back garden – had been bought for pennies back in the 1970s but was worth a cool £4 million now, even in its ‘unmodernized’ condition. Not that they would sell up now. Ever.

No, £350,000 scarcely bought a parking space in this neck of the London woods, but that was all she’d got – well, the deposit for that grand sum, anyway. She’d been saving up for nearly five years now, and provided the bank would green-light the mortgage their financial adviser had said she could afford, she was good to go.

There were so many reasons why it needed to happen. She was twenty-six. She was fed up with the bemused stares she got from dates when they found out going back to her place meant her parents’ place. Funnily enough, none of them were particularly keen on the idea of drinking cocoa in the kitchen with her dad, and those few who did then had to get past Dan on a Saturday morning, and he was the toughest gate-master of them all – quizzing them on their financial stability, A-level grades and whether they owned their own colander.

Yesterday morning had been yet another case in point. If she wanted to wake up to her hangover in silence and feel sorry for herself, then she was going to have to move out.

She was going to have to. And yet . . . as much as she dreamed of the freedoms that came with having her own place – the ability to take a bath with the door open, keeping the thermostat at twenty-eight degrees and stocking the fridge only with Pinot Grigio, Nutella and cheese strings (her mother never allowed them), she was going to miss the slightly tired, bohemian house that had been her only home.

From the street, it was a standout, one of the square’s ‘painted ladies’, in a bright canary yellow her mother had chosen when they’d moved in. The neighbouring houses on either side were green and pink respectively, but it was their cheery yellow one that fostered so much local affection. She could see it from the end of the street or the other side of the square and she had never, as a child, lost sight of her home.

The magnolia tree that had once dominated the tiny front garden was long gone, but the house was positioned exactly opposite the slide in the children’s playground in the square. She couldn’t see through the windows from that distance, but she always remembered standing and waving at the top of it, her mother’s face appearing like a sun at the bedroom window and waving back.

Most of her childhood had been spent within the safety of its black iron railings, the horse chestnut and birch trees within standing like giants over the kids racing round their roots, playing tag and hide-and-seek in the bushes. She and all the other local children had grown up in the square’s protective enclave – riding bikes, learning to skateboard holding on to the parked cars’ wing mirrors as they glided by, holding fiercely fought running races, before graduating over the years to playing kiss-chase and sneaking cans of beer into the rhododendrons.

Those kids had all gradually moved away over time, of course – their parents changing jobs or climbing the property ladder, others simply moving out to their own places as childhood faded, so that she was the last one standing now and a new generation of kids had claimed the playground as theirs.

The interior of the house was every bit as idiosyncratic as the outside. The hall walls were hot pink – a colour Nettie herself had chosen when she was eleven. Perhaps not the best-advised age, she thought now, for dictating interior-design policy in the family home. But her parents had never seemed to want to change it. The woodwork in the sitting room, which led through a wide arch into the kitchen, was custard yellow, and a turquoise Murano glass chandelier hung from the ceiling, galleried ranks of paintings and portraits and framed prints filling the walls. Thickly piled, brightly coloured Moroccan rugs covered the draughts that came up (along with the mice) through the gaps in the pine floorboards, and her mother had run up new sets of loose sofa covers for the different seasons – a grass-green linen for the summer, orange velvet for the winter.

Music was always blaring through the house – usually Pink Floyd or Lou Reed – and the smell of bacon and black toast fragranced the rooms in the way that gardenia wafted from scented reeds in Jules’s. The roof leaked above the landing – it had done so for eighteen years now, but not so badly that her parents had ever been impelled to get it fixed; they simply kept a saucepan in the airing cupboard and brought it out when storms were forecast. The wind also blew in through a thumb-sized gap in the spare-bedroom window, making ghostly noises, which had convinced Nettie for years that the house was haunted.

It had been a scruffy, bohemian, slightly oversized house to grow up in, which was precisely why she wasn’t thrown by the sight in front of her. When Jules had been looking to buy, she hadn’t considered anything that wasn’t newly plastered, right-angled and whitewashed, with beech worktops and a ‘damned good’ laminate floor. But Nettie wasn’t fazed by the damp patch in the bathroom or the signs of mildew on the kitchen curtains. The lino floor looked level at least and would be easy enough to rip up.

She walked over to the window, which appeared to be painted shut. She was on the second floor of three, so there was a chance she could be disturbed if the neighbours upstairs were noisy, but on the other hand, it wasn’t a basement or garden flat, which would please her father. It had been his one condition.

She looked out across Princess Road – the painted-shut windows seemed to do a good job of insulating the flat from road noise. From where she was standing, she could just glimpse Primrose Hill itself, and through the leafless canopy of beech trees, she watched the last of the day’s walkers come down it with jaunty strides, dogs and children running ahead as they enjoyed the downward momentum.

‘The view really is extraordinary,’ Lee said, ignoring the mechanic’s garage on the opposite side of the road and following her skewed eyeline to the Hill. ‘If the flat wasn’t so . . .’ he hesitated and she knew he was looking for a euphemism for ‘dilapidated’, ‘tired, this would be in the high six figures. I’ve taken you round enough properties to know this one’s a prime development opportunity. No sweat, no diamonds, am I right?’

Nettie nodded. Lee, alone, must have taken her round over thirty flats, not to mention the other estate agents in the area. Jules had thought it was fun, at first, coming with her and looking for the ‘potential’ in the starter flats they were shown, but eventually the litany of reasons why they ‘weren’t right’ meant she’d stopped coming and had asked simply to be notified by a change-of-address card.

‘And three fifty’s an
incredible
price,’ he said again. ‘If this goes onto the market, it’ll go for five, five fifty no problem. Even if you did nothing structural to it and just painted the whole thing white, you’d still be guaranteed to make a profit on this.’