Read Online Christmas on Primrose Hill by Karen Swan - Free Book Online Page A

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    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