The Model Wife

by Julia Llewellyn

  ‘Paper’s here, Dad!’ cried Jan Mackharven, gasping slightly from the effort of bending over in her floral dressing gown to retrieve it from the doormat.

  Sitting at the pine kitchen table, cradling her coffee, Thea Mackharven winced slightly. She loved her mother, but the way she addressed Thea’s step-father, Trevor, as ‘Dad’ still made Thea cringe, just as she shuddered at their extensive collection of Phil Collins and Level 42 CDs, their painting-by-numbers of a little boy with a hand over his mouth because he’d just wet himself, their battered orange MFI sofa and their wall of red-and-gold, leather-bound Reader’s Digest ‘classic’ books.

  Thea wished it were not so, but there was no doubt she was a snob. She blamed it on her paternal genes. Trevor Mackharven was a kind, if stodgy, man, who’d always treated her as his own, but Thea had never ever been able to shake off the knowledge that she wasn’t; that she came from a better place.

  Like Poppy, Thea had never known her father. There, however, the similarities ended. Thea was twelve years older than Poppy for a start and her father hadn’t left Jan but had died before Thea was born. Poppy had been a beautiful baby, Thea had not. Brown-toothed ladies who bent over her pram to coo backed away in shock at the sight that greeted them. Just so no one should forget this, Jan had placed a huge photo of her infant daughter in pride of place in the middle of the mantelpiece. It showed a baby with a shock of bright red hair and a face like a pug dog with worms.

  Fortunately, the photos surrounding it showed a slow improvement. There was Thea aged four at Jan’s wedding to Trevor: still a plain little girl but the red hair replaced by thick black locks that fell down her back like wires. Then there was six-year-old Thea at the christening of her first brother, Paul, her face thinner now though still blighted by NHS glasses with sickly pink frames. Thea at the christening of the twins, Edward and Nicholas, her face ravaged by the fierce acne that had endured throughout her adolescence.

  She took another sip of coffee and studied the other pictures in their tacky brass frames. There she was on her graduation day, looking embarrassed in a mortar board and gown, flanked by Trevor in a cheap suit from Burton and Jan, beaming in polyester lilac. Thea’s looks had definitely improved by this time: the specs and the spots had gone and John Frieda had invented Frizz-Ease, but her eyes were still too slanted and her mouth too wide, with nothing to be done on either count. There she was in the family line-up at Paul’s wedding: eyes closed but wearing a gorgeous green Jasper Conran suit, proof she was now earning good money. And then there was Thea in a divine cream Stella McCartney dress accepting an award for best TV news item of the year at the BAFTAs. Three years ago, the last night she and Luke had spent together.

  To her annoyance, Thea felt a pinching at the bridge of her nose as her tear ducts started to fill.

  ‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ her mother asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said briskly, getting up and heading to the door. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

  As she left the room, Trevor and Jan exchanged concerned looks over their bowls of Shredded Wheat.

  ‘Do you think she’s all right?’ Jan said, sotto voce.

  ‘Of course,’ Trevor reassured her, picking up the teapot, ‘fill this up will you, love? She’s probably still jet-lagged. Remember how it took you days to get over it after you came back from visiting her?’

  Jan liked this answer. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed eagerly, switching on the kettle. ‘She’s only been back a couple of days. Or maybe she’s got a boyfriend? She could be missing him.’

  Trevor snorted. ‘Thea with a boyfriend? I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that, Trev,’ cried Jan, stricken. ‘She’s thirty-six. I do worry, you know. I keep reading about these girls leaving it too late to have babies. I don’t want Thea to be one of those.’

  ‘Paul has children,’ Trevor pointed out, somewhat irrelevantly. ‘And Thea’s always said she doesn’t want babies. After all, sweets, she has got a great job.’

  ‘I know,’ Jan said. For a moment she was silent, reflecting on how different her daughter was to her, how – having watched Jan’s struggles to bring up four children on a limited income – Thea had always sworn she was going to devote herself to her career. And that devotion had paid off, Jan thought proudly. A producer for the Seven Thirty News, Thea had spent the past couple of years in New York. But now the programme had a new editor, and Thea had been recalled to London, just like that, as a senior producer. It was very impressive. None of Jan’s friends could believe Thea was actually on speaking terms with the likes of Luke Norton and Emma Waters and, especially, the gorgeous Marco Jensen.

  But still… Jan’s floppy face sagged.

  ‘Every woman wants to be a mother, Trev.’

  ‘Shh,’ Trevor hissed. ‘She’s coming back.’

  They both gazed into their bowls, as the subject of their conversation re-entered the room, dressed in tight jeans and a beige chunky-knit sweater. Trevor stood up.

  ‘I’m off to work now, love. Will you be here when I get back?’

  ‘No, I’m leaving in a minute.’

  Trevor gave her a diffident hug. ‘Goodbye then, my love. See you again soon, I hope.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Thea said. Irrationally, it annoyed her when Trevor called her ‘my love’, even though he had every right to. Most people didn’t even know he wasn’t her real father. After all, she had taken his surname when her mother married him. Thea’s real father, Leo Fry, had worked in an accounts office by day, but at night was a singer in a rock band. Mum had met and married him when they were both twenty-one. He’d died, only weeks before Thea was born, in a motorbike crash. Throughout her childhood, Thea had obsessed over how different her life would have been if Leo’s back wheel hadn’t hit that patch of oil. In her parallel life, she would have grown up an adored only child, touring the world with her rock-star father.

  But Leo had died, so Thea’s fate had been to grow up in this run-down semi, on the fringes of an industrial estate, littered with plastic cars, trucks, diggers and aeroplanes that belonged to her three boisterous younger brothers. It was a solitary childhood. Mum loved Thea, but the boys’ demands meant she had little time to spare for her. Thea had spent a lot of time locked in her room listening to her father’s precious Bob Dylan albums.

  The only person who actually had time to really listen to her was Leo’s mother, who lived in Guildford, a short bus ride away. Thea visited her every Sunday without fail. Mum just nodded vaguely and said, ‘That’s nice, angel’, when Thea brought home a good report. Gran would put her specs on, read it carefully and note with approval that Thea was ‘excellent’ at French and frown when she saw she hadn’t been paying attention in biology.

  ‘You’ve got to work as hard as you can, Thea,’ she’d say. ‘There are so many opportunities for girls these days. Opportunities I’d have killed for. You can get out of Dumberley and do something with your life. Don’t let me down, love.’

  ‘I won’t, Gran,’ Thea promised. And she hadn’t.

  ‘I’m going to make you some tuna sandwiches to take back to London with you,’ Jan wittered as the front door slammed. ‘They’re your favourite, aren’t they? At least, it used to be. Maybe there’s some American sandwich you like now. If you tell me, I could make it for you.’

  ‘I doubt you can buy lox and pastrami in Dumberley,’ Thea muttered.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ As always, Thea felt guilty. Her mother was only trying to look after her. The problem was Mum was always trying to look after everyone, with the result that she had neglected herself. Even now the boys had grown up and left home, she still seemed to have no time for herself, busy as she was baking for Trevor, washing Trevor’s dirty underpants, cleaning Trevor’s facial hair out of the basin, while Trevor sat in the pub with the darts team watching Sky Sports and nursing a pint.

  ‘Here, have another slice of toast,’ Jan said, shoving the rack under her daughter’s
nose. As penance for her earlier nastiness, Thea smiled.

  ‘Thanks.’ But as she continued flicking through the Daily Post, she couldn’t help another swipe. ‘I can’t believe you’re still getting this vile newspaper. It’s obsessed with Princess Diana and how Britain is being swamped with evil immigrants.’

  ‘Dad likes the football reports,’ Jan protested feebly, ‘and I like the horoscopes. I suppose we could try another paper…’

  But Thea wasn’t listening. She was opening an email that had just arrived on her BlackBerry from her best friend Rachel. ‘You’re back’ read the subject field.

  Yo, girlfriend, so glad you’re home. Def on for dinner on Tues. But no boozing, sadly now am up the duff. Can’t wait to catch up.

  Scowling, Thea pressed delete. She was getting sick of this. Having fulfilled a lifelong ambition to live in Manhattan, Thea had nonetheless been thrilled to get the call from Roxanne Fox asking her to come home.

  ‘You are exactly the kind of talent that is missing from the newsroom,’ Roxanne had said. ‘Dean and I want you at the heart of things, jazzing this programme up.’

  Within forty-eight hours Thea had packed her belongings and was on her way to JFK to catch her one-way flight to Heathrow. From the back of her kamikaze taxi, she had sent out a flurry of emails and texts announcing her return. After her lonely childhood, Thea had grown into an extremely gregarious adult who considered a night in to be a night wasted. She could quite easily go for several weeks without cooking a meal in her pristine oven or picking up the TV remote.

  Things had slowed down a bit in Manhattan. She’d made a handful of friends – mostly gay – through introductions or work, but she’d found herself having to try much harder to keep things on the boil than she had in her twenties, and she’d found the whole dating culture utterly soul destroying. By the end of two years, she couldn’t wait to come home. Three days ago, she’d disembarked at Heathrow, expecting to be deluged by messages from friends, welcoming her return. But the greetings had been discomfortingly lukewarm. There was the odd text or email, saying ‘Gr8 C U Soon I Hope’, but no one had made any firm plans to meet.

  The people she had spoken to all said how pleased they were to have her back, but were all unwilling to commit to anything definite. ‘I’d love to, but my in-laws are in town/the new nanny’s just started and I don’t dare leave her to babysit/I don’t live in London any more, didn’t you know, we’ve moved to Scotland’ were the kind of answers she received.

  Pussies. What the hell had happened to all the old party crowd? Even Rachel, who’d always laughed at women who stroked their bumps and said things like ‘we’re pregnant’, was probably playing Mozart to her foetus now and reading it Tolstoy in original Russian to improve its chances of getting into the best nursery.

  ‘So now you’re back in London, how does it work for lunch?’ Jan asked.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, what do you do? Take in sandwiches and a flask?’

  Inwardly, Thea groaned. What was it with her mother’s obsession with food? ‘No, Mum. Mostly I’ll have lunch in the canteen. Sometimes I’ll go out if there’s time.’

  ‘Go out?’ Jan was scandalized.

  ‘Yes. To a caff.’

  ‘That must be pricey. Wouldn’t you be better off taking sandwiches?’

  Thea ignored this.

  ‘I could make you some if you like? To take in on Monday.’

  ‘No, thanks, Mum.’

  ‘Are you sure? I could do you – what did you say you had in New York?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. No one takes in sandwiches.’

  ‘What? You all eat in a caff every day?’

  ‘Usually in the canteen. It’s subsidized.’

  ‘But it still must cost a bomb.’

  ‘We can afford it,’ said Thea, thanking the Lord she had to get back to London for meetings and, of course, for Dean Cutler’s dinner party on Friday night. She carried on leafing past articles about how useless the government was, what Victoria Beckham had worn to some party, the latest cure for cellulite when – wham.

  ‘Oh my word,’ said Jan, looking over her shoulder. ‘It’s Luke.’

  ‘Yes,’ Thea said. Blood was drumming so hard in her temples, she could hardly hear herself.

  ‘He is a handsome man, isn’t he? Mind you,’ continued Jan bending over her daughter and peering at a second, smaller photo, ‘that Hannah is very attractive as well. Do you know her at all?’

  ‘Mmm. Vaguely.’

  ‘I must say, I do enjoy her column. It makes me laugh. Cry sometimes too. I mean, it was a terrible thing Luke did leaving his family for a younger woman. Pretty as she is. But Hannah seems to have really pulled herself back up again. She’s becoming quite a celebrity. She was on Loose Women the other day and she did make me laugh with some of her comments.’

  ‘Don’t call them Luke and Hannah, Mum. You don’t know them.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jan said reproved. ‘You’re right. I don’t. But I feel as if I sort of do. After all, I see Luke on the telly most nights and you worked with him for years, so…’

  ‘But you don’t know him.’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t. I’d better get back to the sandwiches… Oh. Telephone. Hello? Dumberley six nine oh two seven. Oh, hello, Faye. Yes, Thea’s back. Yes, lovely… Yes, I’ll tell her Emma Waters really shouldn’t wear those Peter Pan collars. I know, it does nothing for her…’

  While her mother babbled away, Thea studied the photographs. There was Luke. Of course in New York she’d still seen him on screen virtually every day, so no big shock there, but she couldn’t stop herself from studying those high cheekbones, that firm mouth, those wide shoulders.

  But what about Hannah? Last time Thea had seen her she’d been a pretty, but worn woman with sensible hair framing a tired, round face. But the woman who smiled out at her here was a vixen with a feathery hair cut that showed off high cheekbones and sparkly eyes. So much for the woman who’d confided in Thea that when Luke left her she thought she’d die of the pain. If Hannah had died, she had quickly resurrected herself as something of a siren.

  Greedily, like a dieter left alone with a bowl of M&Ms, Thea devoured the article. Bloody hell, Hannah. It was an out-and-out attack on Poppy and all her kind. For the first time that morning, Thea’s mouth widened into a smile.

  ‘Are you going to visit your gran?’ Jan asked, as she hung up.

  ‘Very soon.’ Leo’s mother was senile now and lived in a home that Thea paid for. Guilt about not seeing her enough had been one of the main reasons she had wanted to come home.

  ‘You are a good girl.’ Jan leant over Thea’s shoulder again. ‘What are you looking at? Oh, still reading Hannah. What’s she on about this week? The Demise of the Trophy Wife. I’m sure that will be a laugh. She’s very funny, though I do think she can be a bit unkind to that new wife, calling her a trollop and a bimbo. I mean, I’m sure she played her part, but Luke’s the real villain in the case, isn’t he? I mean, in the end it was him who left his family. The Bimbo didn’t force him to go at gunpoint.’

  ‘You know exactly what happened, do you, Mum?’

  Another metaphorical slap in the face. ‘Well, no. Of course not. But—’

  ‘So Hannah’s been writing a lot of these articles for the Daily Post?’

  Relieved that her daughter no longer seemed on the attack, Jan smiled. ‘Yes. She has a weekly column. It’s called “Story of a Split Up”, but then she writes other stuff as well. Like I say, she’s been making quite a name for herself. I’m surprised you didn’t know.’

  ‘I haven’t been reading the Daily Post. I’ve been in New York, remember?’

  ‘You could read it online.’

  Thea looked up, as astonished as if her mother had revealed she and Trevor were founding members of the Dumberley devil-worship society.

  ‘Online? You read newspapers online?’

  ‘Of course. You know I know how to use Dad’s computer. How do you t
hink I send you all those emails?’ Which none of you ever respond to, Jan thought.

  ‘Yes, but reading newspapers… Anyway, I guess I could have read Hannah online, but I didn’t know she was writing for the Daily Post.’ Why didn’t you tell me, Rachel? With superhuman force of will, Thea collected herself. ‘Not that I care, anyway. Why would I? I have no interest at all in Luke Norton’s private life.’ Having uttered that enormous lie, she stood up. ‘OK, Mum. I really must be getting back to London.’

  ‘I wish you could stay longer.’

  ‘Me too,’ Thea lied again. ‘But it’s work, you know.’ It was the cast-iron excuse that got her out of everything, every time. What would she do without it?

  7

  It was just after six on Friday. In her bedroom, Poppy was poring over the copy of the Post she’d bought earlier that week, re-reading Hannah’s trophy-wife article for the twentieth time. She’d vowed to rip it up, but just as she’d loved to pick at her playground scabs until they bled, she couldn’t resist returning again and again to Hannah’s words.

  Leech. Parasite. Every phrase ripped through Poppy like a labour pain. That so wasn’t how it was. She’d married Luke for love, not money. That was why he always said he loved her. Used to say, she corrected herself sadly, realizing Luke hadn’t made any such declaration for quite a while. OK, so perhaps she neither held down a twenty-hour-a-day job in the City nor was she a brilliant hostess and cook, but she was busy – way too busy, bringing up Clara. In her articles, Hannah never mentioned that her superwoman stance had been made considerably easier thanks to the teams of au pairs she’d employed or, postdivorce, by sending all three children to boarding school, giving her plenty of time to tend the garden and reestablish her brilliant career.

  For the millionth time since the columns had begun Poppy turned her attention to Hannah’s photos. Meena insisted she’d been airbrushed, but even allowing for that,

  there was no doubt she was a really attractive woman. Perhaps not as pretty as Poppy, but certainly nothing like the frump she’d imagined on the rare occasions Luke had reluctantly referred to his wife. Much as it pained her, Poppy couldn’t help nursing a grudging respect for Hannah. She hated the way she kept attacking her in print and now – more and more – on TV, but at the same time Poppy knew the attacks were justified. Before she’d married Luke and especially before she’d had Clara, she’d had no understanding of how much a wife needed her husband, how much a child needed its father. She’d taken Luke from Hannah almost as casually as she might have finished Meena’s shampoo and it was beginning to dawn on her what a bad and selfish thing she’d done.