From The Heart Read Free Page B

had bought houses at the top of the market and were now firmly in negative-equity territory. Which was what they were.
    Jim and Laura’s commuter town house (the developer’s claim that you could get into the city centre in forty-five minutes was still unrealistic, despite the fact that traffic had lessened during the recession) was worth about half of what they’d paid for it and was a millstone round their necks. They’d hoped to trade up eventually and move closer to the city, but that now seemed highly unlikely. Nobody wanted to buy houses in the commuter belt when there were plenty available nearer to town at knock-down prices. Every so often someone would bring out a report saying that property prices were on the up again, but Laura and Jim had a horrible feeling that they’d rise more in the areas they wanted to buy in rather than where they lived now. They felt stupid and cheated and angry with themselves, and with the bank too. But the way they looked at it, they had to keep going. There was no point in getting depressed.
    Their bank manager had actually lost his job a few months previously, although Jim said it was through a redundancy programme and not because he’d lent them far more money than they could easily pay back. They wondered if he was struggling like them, but somehow they doubted it. They were living to the strictest budget they possibly could, in which every cent they spent was accounted for, which was why they should make a decision about spending Christmas with either Angela or Caroline and live with the consequences. The trouble was, thought Jim, that he wasn’t sure that living with the consequences would ever be worth it.
    Laura agreed with him. The whole thing about Christmas was totally doing her head in, and it seemed to her as though everything and everyone was getting out of control: her parents, his parents and, most scarily, her relationship with Jim. Neither the stress of how to spend Christmas nor his solution to it was doing them any good at all.
    Yet it was all so silly and needless! What was the point in putting pressure on them to spend Christmas in one house or the other when it was just one day in the whole year, and when they visited both sets of parents over the festive season anyway? But this year was different, because it was Kirstie’s first Christmas and both grandmothers seemed to think that it was a badge of honour to have the baby spend it in their house. As if, Laura muttered darkly to Jim, Kirstie would know anything about it. She was only six months old, after all! The problem was that Laura’s mother, Angela, and Jim’s mother, Caroline, had morphed since Kirstie’s birth from two apparently normal women into two of the most competitive grandmothers the world had ever known. The moment Laura had been allowed to have visitors in Holles Street hospital, both of them had turned up brimming with advice on the upbringing of their first grandchild.
    ‘For heaven’s sake!’ Laura had snapped at her own mother after she’d listened to a litany of do’s and don’ts. ‘It’s not an exam. I’ll learn. You did, didn’t you?’
    ‘It was different in my day,’ said Angela. ‘We weren’t expected to rush back to work. We had more help, too.’
    ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Laura, although she wasn’t entirely sure about that. She was feeling a bit sniffly and down but she didn’t want Angela to know. Angela was never down. She’d see it as a sign of weakness and use it as an opportunity to lecture her even more.
    Caroline, who came in later, put her arms around her and gave her a massive hug. Caroline had never hugged Laura before, and the experience was unnerving (Laura had always suspected that she was second choice as a daughter-in-law as far as Caroline was concerned; she was sure Jim’s mother would have preferred it if he’d married his previous girlfriend, Samantha, a successful PR executive, instead).
    ‘I’m so delighted for you!’ cried