The Model Wife Read Free Page A

too attached.
    With each departure Poppy wept bitterly. The girls all felt wretched and swore they’d keep in touch with the sweet blonde girl with Caribbean-blue eyes, but after a couple of postcards, communication slowed and eventually halted, as they found new families, boyfriends, proper jobs and got on with their lives.
    In the end, Louise decided the best thing by far for Poppy was boarding school, which, thanks to her thriving business, she could now afford. She sold the semi in St Albans, bought herself a bijou two-bedroom flat in Clapham and rung round for the prospectuses. Everyone gasped when they heard Poppy had been sent to Watershead when she was only nine, but actually it had been great. Matron was kind, the headmistress was lovely, she’d had lots of little friends and Gran came to visit every other weekend.
    It was at Brettenden House that the misery had kicked in. That was a really snobby place – all the other girls seemed to live in huge country piles and own at least four ponies and their mummies had all been to Brettenden too. Poppy was aware that behind her back most of the girls called her ‘noov’ short for ‘nouveau’, which in their limited world was one of the cruellest insults. She only had one real friend, Meena, whose dad was an accountant from Wembley by way of the Punjab, who’d slaved to send their daughter to a smart school only to find she was mercilessly dissed for being lower middle class. ‘Does your dad do my dad’s tax returns?’ landowners’ daughters would ask, sniggering. To make it worse, Meena had no interest in academia whatsoever and kept begging her parents to arrange a marriage for her to the richest man they could find.
    On Saturday nights when most of the other girls had gone home to their country estates, Poppy and Meena would curl up together in the common room and watch a DVD of their favourite film, Pretty Woman . The idea of a world where a Richard Gere type hero solved your problems with a flash of his credit card was incredibly appealing.
    ‘That’s what we want,’ Meena sighed. ‘If you were married to a man like that you wouldn’t need to worry about exams.’
    Poppy agreed. ‘Much more fun than being my mum and working all the hours God sends and always being exhausted.’
    The Richard fantasy became even more pressing when, just a month before GCSEs, Gran died. Poppy’s prospects had been poor anyway but, griefstricken, she only obtained two passes: a C in art and a Din English. Brettenden suggested that perhaps the sixth form was not the right place for her and Poppy wholeheartedly agreed. Happily, Meena was ousted too, so the pair of them found a flat together in Kilburn. Meena got a job in a Starbucks on Oxford Street and Poppy found one selling swimsuits at Harvey Nichols.
    In retrospect Poppy realized it was the happiest period of her life. Work was a laugh: there was a nice crowd available for drinks most evenings, and watching rich women squeeze themselves into five-hundred-pound bikinis every day was very entertaining. But a few months later a woman with a face like a hawk had begun quizzing her about Eres versus Missoni, then suddenly diverted into asking if Poppy had ever done any modelling and would she like to come to her office for a chat?
    And so, at eighteen, Poppy Price had found herself persuaded to hand in her notice at Harvey Nicks and set off pounding the streets of London with an A–Z and a book full of pictures of herself to be studied by hard-faced women in tiny dark offices, who turned to each other and said things like ‘Pretty face but needs to lose at least a stone’ as if she didn’t even exist. Poppy wasn’t at all sure about her new career; she was naturally a size eight, but the pressure was on to be a size six or a four. It was generally agreed that she was not edgy-looking enough to appear on the catwalk, but had a more ‘commercial look’, which meant she appeared in a couple of adverts for bathroom