Love Nest by Julia Llewellyn

but is now bowled over by the owners’ creative vision, their loving attention to detail. Cue credits and trailer for next week’s episode.
    Karen shivered.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said, scanning her flimsy top. ‘I turned the central heating on full this morning but it takes a while to get going. Would you like to borrow a coat?’
    ‘Oh no, I’m fine,’ Karen lied, resisting the urge to hug herself.
    They followed Grace round the house. Karen noted the creaking floorboards, disintegrating window frames with paint scattered beneath, the spiderwebs, the mould on the wooden shutters, the holes in the plasterwork that made it look as if it had been under fire from the SAS. It was all so shabbily un-chic, so depressing. Karen took in the piles of Doctor Who videos (not even DVDs!) in the tiny sitting room called the den, which Grace clearly inhabited year round in preference to the vast and draughty living room.
    Her heart tugged as they moved on to Grace’s tiny bedroom on the second floor. Sometimes Karen berated herself for having never truly appreciated her old single life of lie-ins and cocktails and weekend shopping trips to New York. But that, she realized, was the urban version of spinsterhood. If you were living in Devon, it meant four walls with drab flowery paper. A bookcase filled with ancient children’s paperbacks of The Secret Garden and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase . A mantelpiece covered in kitsch china ornaments that would have been incredibly amusing in a Hoxton living room but here just spoke of a lifetime shopping at village jumble sales and an inability to throw tat away.
    Phil peered out of the small window. ‘Look, Karen, you can see the lake.’
    ‘That’s why I stayed in this room,’ Miss Porter-Healey said. ‘I mean, it was mine as a girl and when I came back as an adult I could have moved into a bigger one, but there’s nothing like waking up in the morning and seeing the water. And besides… it reminds me of my childhood.’
    Phil nodded enthusiastically. He grew even more excited after he’d seen the master bedroom, the ‘nursery’, the six other bedrooms, the two studies and so on and so on and so on. ‘Imagine what you could do,’ he said quietly to Karen, though not so quietly Miss Porter-Healey couldn’t hear. ‘We could install a cinema. Have a games room. The heating’s knackered, we could rip it out and put in underfloor throughout.’
    Karen thought back to her own upbringing in the tiny two-bedroom cottage where they received regular visits from cousin Genette, who owned a massage parlour in Swansea, and her great-auntie Noreen, who’d turned up at Gran’s funeral with bare gums because her Dobermann cross had eaten her false teeth, and marvelled that she’d come so far. Why was she so ungrateful? Why didn’t she want to live in this mansion?
    After the tour, they inspected the dying, tangled wilderness that was the grounds. Somebody had once worked on them planting irises and roses, encircling the lawn with yew trees, but now it was all a haze of dense bramble. Still, the girls were in heaven, as if they’d been given £200 each to spend at Claire’s. Karen gazed at them in astonishment. Surely this couldn’t be her own offspring getting so excited about nature?
    ‘Look at this,’ Phil said contentedly, as they stopped for breath beside the gazebo, at the highest point in the property, with its dizzying views of rolling hills and, just there on the horizon, a slice of sea. The country light enhanced his gauntness. The weight he’d lost during his illness hadn’t even started to come back on and his hair hadn’t grown back yet – the doctors said it might never happen. His pocket started bleeping loudly.
    ‘Oh!’ Miss Porter-Healey exclaimed. ‘What on earth is that?’
    ‘My alarm,’ Phil said, digging in his pocket and pulling out an envelope marked ‘Noon’. He shook some pills out on to his palm, opened the bottle of water he always carried