Free A Desirable Residence by Sophie Kinsella, Madeleine Wickham Page B

snapped open her briefcase to check everything was in order: the agenda for the day, the list of journalists who had promised they would attend, the shiny press packs. She checked the pile of photographs, fanning them out quickly to check that each attractive feature of the development was represented. The landscaped gardens. The picture windows. The built-in fireplace seats.
    Clarissa, her business partner, had been particularly scathing about the fireplace seats. She never touched modern developments, and couldn’t understand how Ginny could bear to spend a day enthusing about them to the press.
    ‘Little boxes, for little executives,’ she’d mocked, in her tiny, clipped, baby voice. ‘Full of drip-dry suits.’ But Ginny had smiled, and looked at the pictures, and immediately conjured up an image of herself, the happy wife of just such an executive, keeping the carpet hoovered and making jam tarts and even wearing a flowered pinny. A nice, cosy, unexciting sort of life.
    ‘It’s not so bad,’ she’d said to Clarissa. ‘And they’re a very good client.’
    ‘Well, I don’t know how you can,’ said Clarissa.
    ‘Neither do I,’ said Ginny.
    But Ginny did know. She knew that she had somehow a strange ability to find an attraction in almost any kind of residence, be it a tiny flat or a manor house. Confronted with the meanest little house, she was always able to construct in her own mind a charming hypothetical life there, imbuing on it a vicarious, often quite undeserved appeal. Scores of journalists would listen entranced as she stood at the gates of a dull rural development, painting a glowing picture of country family life, or in a hard hat on the site of a derelict city warehouse, enthusing about open-plan apartments and a London existence so fast-paced there was barely any need to build in a kitchen. It was really, she supposed, a gift, this ability of hers. And it made her ideally suited to a job in property PR.
    The Mozart stopped, and the pips began. Ginny came to, with a little flurry.
    ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’m off.’
    ‘Have a good one,’ said Piers.
    ‘I’ll try,’ Ginny said brightly. She’d given up asking Piers what he thought he might do during the day. He’d begun to think she was getting at him; they’d actually had a row about it. She kissed him quickly, then stood up straight, brushed down her jacket and checked her tights for ladders.
    ‘Ginny,’ Piers said suddenly, catching her offguard. He had an extraordinarily deep, resonant voice, which he used to great effect in shops and in restaurants, causing old ladies to back away nervously and waitresses to blush, and scribble more quickly.
    ‘Yes?’ she faltered. His voice still, ridiculously, could make her feel quite lightheaded, even after four years of marriage.
    ‘Tell them we’ll both be down to look at the house in Silchester.’ He grinned at her, and pushed his dark, springy hair back off his forehead. ‘I’d love to see it.’
    ‘Oh, brilliant.’ Ginny’s natural enthusiasm bubbled over. ‘It’ll be a day out. We’ll go and have lunch somewhere nice, shall we? I’ll have to go into Witherstone’s for my meeting, of course, but you’ll be able to find something to do in Silchester, won’t you?’
    ‘I bloody hope so,’ said Piers. ‘If we’re going to live there.’
    Prentice Fox Public Relations was based in a tiny office in Chelsea, just about walking distance from the flat which Ginny and Piers were currently renting. As Ginny picked her way through the sodden autumn leaves on the pavement she wondered how to break the news to Clarissa that she was looking at a house in Silchester on Tuesday. She had already warned Clarissa that she was thinking of moving out of London; that she’d had enough of the city; that she’d fallen in love with Silchester . . . but Clarissa had scoffed at her.
    ‘You’ll never move,’ she’d asserted. ‘You’d miss London too much.’
    ‘But I spend half my