The Model Wife Read Free

Perfection only slightly marred when five seconds later Luke’s mobile rang and he looked at it, frowned, switched it off and said, ‘Oh shit, I’d better be off.’
    He began pulling off his clothes for the shower he always took before heading home. Sometimes Poppy felt insulted that he had to wash off all trace of her, but tonight she didn’t mind. She sat on the edge of the bath and watched him, liquid joy coursing through her veins. He loved her. He loved her! They were going to live happily ever after.
    Only after he left in a minicab did Poppy focus again on that pesky matter of the wife. And the three children. Poppy knew they lived in North London, that there were two teenage girls and a younger boy, that the wife was called Hannah and had been a journalist but was now a full-time mother. She wondered if Hannah wondered where her husband was these late nights and for just a millisecond felt a shiver of guilt. But then she shrugged it off. Luke never talked much about his family, then only to complain, so he couldn’t care for them that much. It wasn’t Poppy’s fault if he preferred being with her. It didn’t occur to her that Hannah could stand in the way of her long-term happiness. After all, men left wives and children all the time. Look at what had happened to Mum. Poppy had met her handsome prince. And somehow or another, she would get him to the altar, because that was how all good fairy tales ended.

2
    You didn’t exactly have to be Sigmund Freud to see why Poppy might be searching for a handsome prince. Her dad had walked out on her mum, Louise, when she was only twenty-two and seven months pregnant. Poppy knew virtually nothing about him except that his name was Charles, and that Louise had met him in the South of France where she was spending a summer selling ice cream on the beaches. Poppy found the idea of her nervy mother behaving in such a carefree fashion rather hard to believe, but there was evidence in the form of a photo of her laughing on a pebbly beach in white shorts and an acid-green T-shirt that read ‘Frankie Says… Relax’, with a floppy black blow in her permed hair and a tray of ice creams round her neck.
    Anyway, Charles and Mum had had a brief fling. Then he disappeared and never responded to any of Louise’s letters telling him she was pregnant. That was all Poppy knew. If she tried to find out more about him – what he looked like, where he was from, his favourite music – her mother would snap: ‘You don’t need to know anything about that bastard, we’ve managed fine without him, haven’t we?’ So when very young, Poppy had stopped asking questions.
    And in a way, they had done fine without him, very well in fact. Obviously Louise had had to work extremely hard to support herself and her baby daughter. She’d found a job with a recruitment agency, so Poppy’s early years had been spent either in a nursery or with her gran who came to live with them when Poppy was four. A couple of years later, Gran’s arthritis got too bad to cope with a small child, but by then Louise had founded her own company and was making good money. So Elisabetta from El Salvador was drafted in to be Poppy’s surrogate mum, which worked out fabulously until the phone bill arrived sending Louise into meltdown and Elisabetta on the first plane back west.
    After that au pairs came and went in quick succession. Poppy had lost her heart to each of them. Her earliest memories were of Margarita from Colombia cuddling her when she cut her knee, of Greta from Austria applauding when she rode her bike without stabilizers for the first time, of Adalet from Turkey walking backwards in the swimming pool encouraging Poppy to splash towards her. But Louise had felt differently: the girls were too slapdash, too cheeky, stayed out too late on their nights off. Even the ones who behaved impeccably had to leave as soon as Louise noted her daughter growing too fond of them, because it wouldn’t do to get