Second Chance - Jane Green [4]
When she and Marcus found this house in Brondesbury, Holly knew that she would never leave. Five bedrooms for all the children she was convinced they would have, a large garden for barbecues and swing sets, a huge, dilapidated kitchen that Holly started mentally reorganizing as soon as they first saw it.
There is no doubt at all that it is home. Holly bought every piece of furniture herself, she trawled through dusty, fusty antique shops, spent months going to car-boot sales looking for that one special find, even buying several pieces on eBay, and getting burnt only twice. (One time it was a sofa that was supposed to be in great condition but it turned out that the picture on eBay was of a different sofa; and the other was an antique cherry sideboard that turned out to be riddled with woodworm.)
In so many ways, Holly has exactly the life she has always wanted. She still gets pleasure every time she comes home, and still, at least four times a week, she finds herself wandering around her house, leaning in doorways and looking at rooms, smiling at the home she has created.
She has her gorgeous, adorable children, Daisy, who is like a mini-me of Holly, and Oliver, who is more serious, pensive, more like her husband.
She has a career she loves – she is a freelance illustrator – and a husband who would appear to be the perfect husband. He is successful – a lawyer in one of the top family law firms, he has become the divorce lawyer of choice for several celebrities of late. He is tall and distinguished-looking in his bespoke suits and natty silk ties, the salt and pepper of his hair giving him a gravitas he only aspired to when he and Holly met. He has changed enormously, but Holly tries not to think about it, or at least tries not to dwell upon it. His old friends have even tried to gently rib him about changing his name from Mark to Marcus, but it has gone down like a lead balloon, and the few friends remaining have learnt not to tease Marcus about his past.
Did he have humour? Holly supposes so. She remembers a time when he used to make her laugh, when they used to go out with friends and she would wipe the tears of laughter away from her cheeks. She doesn’t seem to have laughed with him for a long time, Marcus working longer and longer hours as his career has continued to shoot upwards.
They haven’t seen friends either, for that matter, not for a while. Holly, who loves cooking, would regularly host dinner parties in the old days. She didn’t actually want to have dinner parties, would have preferred casual kitchen suppers, friends standing around the island with giant glasses of wine as she threw together a salad, but Marcus insisted on doing things properly.
Marcus insisted on the best crystal being out, the silver cutlery. He insisted on eating in the dining room at the mahogany pedestal table with the Chippendale chairs, but they had been a gift from a great-aunt of Holly’s whom she had always hated. They are beautiful, naturally, but they seem so formal, so out of place with the life she had envisioned for herself.
One night they had gone to the neighbours’ for dinner, and the dining room was a light, bright room, French doors leading onto a terrace, every wall a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf lined with books, the wooden floors painted a white gloss, an old round table with retro Formica chairs. It was hip and warm and fun, and Holly had loved it.
‘Wouldn’t our dining room be wonderful like that?’ she had said to Marcus as they climbed into the car at nine o’clock. (Holly had wanted to stay later, had been dying to stay later having not had that much fun in ages, but Marcus had insisted on