Notting Hill.’
‘True, but I never thought of it as anything but a temporary arrangement, somehow. But, thanks to darling Aunt Edith, I now have a home worthy of the name. And, most important of all,Jo loves it as much as I do.’
When Kate reached Park Crescent she stayed in the car for a moment, gazing in satisfaction at her inheritance. The house was a small gem of early Victorian architecture with white walls, bay windows and a dark blue door with a fanlight and stone pediment. Mine, all mine, gloated Kate as she locked her car and went inside. She scooped up the Sunday paper on the way to the room her aunt had always referred to as the parlour, and smiled, pleased, as she examined her handiwork. The wall she’d painted the day before was the exact shade she’d been aiming for now it was dry—somewhere between cream and muted pink—or Coral Porcelain as it said on the tin. A perfect background for the white-painted 1857 fire grate.
Interior decorating was new in Kate’s life. Jo had helped choose furniture and pore over paint cards, Ben had given invaluable advice; Anna had been forthcoming, as usual, with her own opinions and Kate had been grateful to all of them. But the end result, she thought with satisfaction, was mostly her own.
She read a few pages of the Sunday paper over breakfast in the kitchen she’d had refitted before she moved in, then, rather lacking in enthusiasm after her sleepless night, went upstairs to change into jeans and sweatshirt ready for her daily session with a paintbrush. She checked her emails and then paused, as she always did, to look at the view of the lake. She jerked the curtain aside as she spotted a man running through the rain with long, ground-eating strides, a black dog loping beside him as they skirted the lake. Jack! Kate watched as he slowed down to a walk, the dog, a retriever, she noted enviously, padding obediently beside him. She dodged back in anticipation, sure Jack was making for Park Crescent. And felt like a complete fool when he unlocked a mud-splashed Cherokee Jeep near the park gate, loaded the wet dog inside and drove off. She was too busy for visitors anyway, she told herself irritably, and ran downstairs to open a tin of paint.
When Elizabeth and Robert Sutton moved to London Kate had lived with them at first. But after Joanna was born she eventually left the Sutton household to share a flat with Anna Travers. The two girls were kindred spirits from the moment Kate answered Anna’s advertisement for a flatmate, and lived together in complete accord right up to the day Anna married Ben and then moved away, at which point Kate gave in to her current boyfriend’s urging. Her feelings for David Houston were nothing like the passion she’d felt for Jack Logan, but Jack was long since married and she was long since over him, so she accepted David’s proposal and moved in with him. But eventually their relationship wound down to an amicable end, and Kate exchanged the brick walls and leather and chrome of David’s hip Thames-side loft for a small fla to of her own at last in Notting Hill.
At that stage Kate’s life was as close to ideal as she could make it. She moved swiftly up the ladder in her job, enjoyed a lively social life, spent her Sundays in her sister’s household and remained on friendly terms with David. This well-ordered phase of her life went on until she met Rupert Chance, heir to a chain of supermarkets. He singled her out at a party and instantly began a relentless pursuit she was human enough to find flattering. He soon began persuading her to share his house in Chelsea, but Kateheld back. She was attracted to the persuasive Rupert but caution prompted her to wait before burning her boats. Byronic good looks coupled with effortless charm had always won Rupert Chance anything he wanted the moment he wanted it, and he objected strongly when Kate insisted on keeping to her own flat. When they were married, he informed her,things would change.
Drastic changes came before that, in a way neither of them could have foreseen. Edith Durant, elder sister of Kate’s father, died at the age of ninety-one, and in her will left money to her niece Elizabeth and her house and contents to her younger niece, Katherine. Elizabeth and Robert Sutton celebrated