The Model Wife

by Julia Llewellyn

  A year later came the first of our three children. Of course, as with every relationship, life seemed a bit more humdrum now we were being woken by crying babies in the middle of the night. There were times when both of us, no doubt, felt like running for the hills. But, somehow, we continued to love each other and our children. With Luke still jetting all over the world, I soon realized the best way to maintain a happy home for my family was to abandon my beloved career to provide a stable base for everyone. I missed the buzz of the office, of foreign travel and meeting celebrities, but most of the time I was more than content to be nest-building for my ‘team’. Yet for the past few years I had had to hold my head high and ignore friends’ ‘concerned’ comments about Luke’s ‘friendships’ made on long trips away from home, or his ‘closeness’ with various girls in his office. Mostly, I’d ignored such hints, desperate to sustain a happy home. Once or twice I’d tackled Luke, but he’d laughed off my suggestions as paranoia, saying his family was his world.

  But this was different. A baby – if it was really true – was something else altogether. I felt as if someone had put a knife in my stomach and was twisting it round. I ordered Luke home. Over the next few hours we had a lot of conversations straight out of Mills & Boon along the lines of: ‘How could you do this to me?’ ‘It was a mistake. She means nothing to me.’ After an evening of this, I told him to leave. ‘Where shall I go?’ he asked. ‘To that bimbo,’ I replied. And so he left.

  For the next few days, he called, emailed and texted repeatedly begging me to have him back, but something inside me had snapped. After so many years of tolerance, the wife had turned.

  Gradually, over the weeks and months that followed fury gave way to despair. As my anger diminished, I found that – despite myself – I couldn’t help missing Luke. I loathed being a single mother. I wondered if I had been too quick to kick him out and if there was any way back. But the fact remained: the Bimbo was pregnant.

  Misery threatened to engulf me. I considered anti-depressants, but I decided the only way to get back on track long term was to start enjoying myself again. At first I didn’t feel like seeing anyone, but I forced myself. I organized dinner dates with girlfriends, started swimming at the local baths and even joined a wine-appreciation society. Slowly, I started to have fun, and every time I heard myself laugh, I knew I was one step further towards dealing with my emotions.

  Little by little, I began to see light at the end of the tunnel. Having found the courage to kick Luke out, my new confidence affected other areas. Although many of our old ‘couple’ friends drifted away, others came to the fore. What really changed things for me was resuming my writing career – the one I had abandoned to be a perfect wife and mother. Hands trembling, I lifted the phone and called a few old contacts. To my everlasting gratitude, it transpired many of them had been where I was and were happy to give me a hand restarting my career. Seeing my name in print for the first time in years gave me a buzz similar – I imagine – to the Viagra I discovered about the time Luke moved out that he had been ordering on the internet.

  Despite such moments of sunshine, there is still no denying that the break-up with Luke has been unbelievably traumatic, not only for me but – worse – for our children, who worship their father. In those first few months, Jonty got into trouble at school for hitting other children. The girls became sullen and withdrawn. They vowed never to see their father again, something that caused me both intense pain and deep satisfaction.

  My jealousy was overwhelming. I knew that Luke had moved his little strumpet into a palatial apartment overlooking the canal in one of the swishiest parts of London. How different to the start of our own married life in a poky one-bedroom flat in Willesden, where Tilly slept in a drawer and the boiler was constantly on the blink. No penury for his new trophy wife; she’d stolen my husband once he was famous and well-off. What would she know of stress and struggle?

  But much as I hate him, there are still many times when I miss Luke as I might a limb. I married him because he was a clever, funny, handsome man but I have to remind myself he was also a liar and a cad. I can’t bring myself to take down the family photos–some from our early days together before his hairstarted thinning and his paunch developed. Friends have told me this is unhealthy, that it will keep new lovers away. But I don’t feel I can adopt a scorched-earth policy. It is the children’s home, too, and why should all traces of their dad suddenly be deleted?

  Apparently he and the Bimbo have just had a baby girl. I have to swallow my vicious feelings and hope my children will learn to love their new half-sister. Some people have found themselves permanently excluded from my Christmas-card list for informing me I should count my blessings that Luke has granted me a generous divorce settlement and ‘allowed’ me to stay in the family home by paying the mortgage. The implication that I should somehow be grateful to stay in the house I have lovingly restored, cared for, brought up our babies in, sends me virtually to boiling point.

  Nonetheless, I keep telling myself, I have no choice but to move on. I must find a way of coming to terms with my new situation. Thousands of families endure this same pain every year and – though I find it near impossible to do – we have to be forgiving. If my children, and I, are to be happy, then we all need to believe in a rosy future, just rather different from the one I dreamt of when I pledged my troth.

  3

  The month after Luke arrived on Poppy’s doorstep was a whirl. They spent a week in her flat, before Luke said he couldn’t stand any more of this student lifestyle and not being able to get into the bathroom in the morning when Meena was doing her make-up. He rented a large flat in Maida Vale right next to the canal. It was in a handsome white stucco building, based over two floors. It had two bedrooms, a study for Luke, a high-ceilinged living room and a Poggenpohl kitchen/diner.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Poppy breathed, unable to believe how quickly she’d moved on from Kilburn. She’d known Luke was rich; he was obviously well paid by the network, plus he’d inherited a lot from his father who had been something in the City. Only now, however, did she begin to realize how rich. ‘Do we need such a big place?’ she added.

  ‘Well, the kids will be coming to stay,’ Luke said.

  ‘Oh,’ Poppy said. ‘Of course. I can’t wait to meet them.’

  In a weird sort of way she was quite looking forward to it – after all Luke’s daughters weren’t that much younger than her. But in the end, they never came. They said they had no desire to meet the woman who had ruined their own and their mother’s lives, so Luke was obliged to spend every other weekend taking them to Pizza Express and – they scornfully dismissed his suggestions of the zoo – on shopping trips, which he complained bankrupted him. Poppy had dreamt of spending weekends strolling hand in hand along the canal, but instead she was left all alone for forty-eight hours with a pile of DVDs and a growing bump.

  Even during the weekends he was with her, he was busy working on his book about the Balkans and spent nearly all the time secluded in his study. Poppy would bring him snacks and offer him head massages, which he gratefully accepted but then he’d wave her out again.

  No one had reacted to her news in the way she’d hoped.

  ‘You’re up the duff!’ Meena had screamed. ‘Poppy, you idiot!’ She paused and then added, ‘I mean, congratulations. I suppose it’s one way to get a ring on your finger. But, Poppy, you don’t want a baby, you’ll get all fat and then you’ll have an agonizing birth; you’ll never sleep again and spend the rest of your life covered in puke and poo.’

  ‘I love babies.’ Actually, Poppy loved the idea of babies, crooning softly to them wrapped in pink fluffy blankets. She’d never spent any time with a real one.

  ‘Then go and be a nanny. Don’t have one of your own. You’re not twenty-two yet. You’ve got the rest of your life for all that. Plus,’ Meena paused for a second, ‘plus I know Luke’s on telly, but it’s boring telly. Couldn’t you hold out for someone from Hollyoaks or somethi
ng? I mean I’d never heard of him, and you’re so pretty, Poppy, I reckon you could do better for yourself.’

  Poppy decided it was sour grapes. After all, Meena made no secret of the fact that her game plan was to bag a member of the royal family or, failing that, a Bollywood mogul and spend the rest of her life shopping. To help achieve her goal, Meena worked as a receptionist at a ludicrously swanky health club in St John’s Wood where she could get discounted manicures, facials and hair cuts, plus meet plenty of potential husbands. So the fact Poppy had managed to net a rich husband first had put her nose seriously out of joint.

  Her mother, who was in a bad mood anyway after yet another romance had fallen through, was even less delighted.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve been so stupid, Poppy. You’re making exactly the same mistake I did.’

  ‘No, Luke is standing by me,’ Poppy said, then realized too late that as usual she’d said the worst possible thing.

  ‘He may be standing by you, but he’s leaving a wife and three children. What kind of man is that? Do you really want him to be the father of your child? Poppy, you’re so pretty. I’ve always thanked God for your looks because heaven knows there isn’t much else to recommend you. I always hoped you’d marry a lovely guy, not shack up with some shit.’

  ‘He’s not a shit.’

  Louise sighed. ‘Poppy Price, how did I raise such a clueless child?’

  ‘You didn’t raise me, the au pairs and Gran did.’

  ‘I was doing my best,’ Louise hissed. ‘You have no idea how hard being a mother is. Well, you’ll soon find out.’ She put her hand to her brow. ‘Now I can feel one of my migraines coming on. I feel nauseous. I’d better lie down.’

  31

  Poppy didn’t bother saying that she felt permanently nauseous herself. After four months her ballooning belly meant she had to stop working. She greeted her new life as a stay-at-home mother-to-be with enthusiasm, but it turned out to be a lot lonelier and a lot more boring than she’d expected. She had found modelling scary, but at least it had given her something to get up for in the morning and there had been people to chat to all day. In contrast, Luke was almost never at home – sometimes she thought she’d seen him more when he was her lover. He went out early and returned often about midnight, tie askew, the smell of Chianti on his breath and his BlackBerry still buzzing.

  ‘Entertaining contacts, darling,’ he’d say, crawling into bed. ‘That’s what my job’s all about. That’s what enables us to live in this beautiful flat.’

  ‘But I don’t care about a beautiful flat. I’d rather just see more of you.’

  He shrugged. ‘This is my life. I’ve lost my family because of you. You can hardly expect me to give up my job as well.’

  In the dark, tears stung Poppy’s eyes. She was learning not to cry in front of him, because it only made him angry.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to lose your family. You left them; I didn’t make you.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ he muttered and rolled on to his back.

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘I felt the baby kick today.’

  ‘Did you? Poppy, I’m really tired. I’m going to sleep now.’ And within seconds she heard him snoring.

  32

  So Poppy spent her days and nights in front of the television, waiting to hear Luke’s key in the lock, gently stroking her growing stomach and flicking through her pregnancy book to see what her foetus was doing this week (somersaulting, kicking, possibly sucking its thumb). She did ask Luke if she could attend some of these work dinners with him, but he sighed and said he hardly thought it would be suitable.

  ‘Most of these people know Hannah from way back. I can hardly just wheel up one day with you.’

  Hannah rushed through a divorce on grounds of adultery. Poppy didn’t know many of the details, but she gathered Luke had made her a huge settlement. When Poppy was eight months pregnant, she and Luke married.

  ‘We don’t have to do this, you know,’ Poppy said as they sat in the back of the taxi en-route to Marylebone Register Office. Of course she wanted to more than anything else, but Luke looked so bleak you’d have thought he was on his way to a funeral, not his own wedding.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, trying to smile, ‘of course we do.’

  And so they plighted their troth in a small room that reeked of Pledge, with Poppy in a blue-and-white maternity dress from Topshop rather than the Princess Diana meringue she’d always envisaged. There were two witnesses: Meena and Gerry, an old war-correspondent friend of Luke’s, who had a red nose from too many nights in bars and a scar on his cheek where a melanoma had been cut out. Luke’s parents were dead.

  Louise said she would have loved to attend but she was chairing a huge conference in Glasgow that week. ‘You understand, don’t you, cherub?’ As usual, she hadn’t waited for a reply. ‘Got to go, sweets. Hope you have a lovely day.’

  Afterwards they had lunch at Orrery in Marylebone High Street. The food was probably delicious but Poppy didn’t really notice, so awkward were the vibes between the four of them. The others got very pissed until Meena eventually threw up in the loo and had to be put in a taxi and sent home. Gerry stumbled off into the afternoon. She and Luke got in their own taxi and went back to Maida Vale. To Poppy’s relief they made far more passionate love than they had for several weeks, after which Luke fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up they ordered an Indian and ate it on the bed, giggling and feeding each other bites of naan almost like in her early coffee-ad fantasies. So Poppy had gone to sleep on her wedding night reassured that now the fairy tale was about to begin.

  The Demise of the Trophy Wife

  Golddiggers who take their rich husbands for a ride are on the verge of extinction, says hannah creighton.

  Not so long ago it was a truth universally acknowledged that a man with a kick-ass job must be in want of a trophy wife. These divine, docile brood mares were the perfect addition to the mansion, the Maserati and the holidays in Mauritius.

  But how times have changed. According to recent research the earnings gap between married couples is narrowing. These days men are bored with stay-at-home parasites and are looking for high-fliers. To paraphrase Jerry Hall, whores in the bedroom, masterchefs in the kitchen – but also queens of the boardroom. Some have interpreted this as a victory for the feminists, along with burning our bras. Sadly, however, the truth says something much less appealing about our sex. Powerful men, I believe, have only just latched on to the downside of the stay-at-home wife. Either marry a woman prepared to pay her own way, or end up spliced to a spoilt, lazy, bloodsucker.

  I can feel the finger pointing at me. OK! I put my hands up. I, too, used to be one of those stay-at-home wives I am laying into. My husband, Luke Norton, was a distinguished foreign correspondent who, in the dying days of our marriage, became the anchorman for Channel 6’s Seven Thirty News and consequently a household name.

  We lived with our three children in our glorious family home in Hampstead, North London and I didn’t go out to work. But there the resemblance between me and the trophy wives ends.

  I was of a different generation, you see, the Cosmo generation who believed in ‘having it all’. We children of the 1970s were brought up to understand this meant running a home, entertaining regularly, raising charming children, keeping our husbands happy and having some sort of career to keep our brains ticking over and our bank accounts seperate.

  I confess I failed at the last hurdle. Although I had a high-flying journalism career before I met Luke, I found the challenges of three small children too difficult to combine with the logistics of a job. But, feeling guilty I had not managed to be a ball-busting career girl, I worked doubly hard to make sure I raised happy children, who lived in a beautiful house, played in a glorious garden and who sat down to eat nutritious meals every night. When my husband came home there was an equally nutritious meal waiting for him, plus a large glass of wine. I listened to his tales of office in-fighting and
Boy’s Own derring-do and told him how brave and clever he was. I never shared my own anxieties about arguments with builders or changes to the school run. I thought this was part of the pact: I kept the home fires burning while he earned a wage.

  How naive I was. When the last of the children were finally old enough not to need me full-time and I began to explore plans for some kind of part-time work, my husband announced he was leaving me. For a 22-year-old model. Who was pregnant with his fourth child. The years I had put into creating a stable home environment counted for nothing. The story of my anger and my recovery have been documented. Suffice to say, I was devastated but I got over it, and today I am happier than I have ever been.

  But what interests me is the trophy wife my husband seemed to think it was his right to acquire, much as a man of his position might crave a chauffeur-driven Bentley or membership of the Garrick Club. Of course I can’t speak for the second Mrs Norton, but what I have observed in general, is a fascinating new breed of trophy wives, women who seem to think their whole function is to be provided for, while giving their husbands nothing in return.

  If they are rich enough, they employ a chef; if not, the poor husband must make do with TV dinners. Ditto a cleaner. If they can’t afford one, then the husband must simply live in squalor. The children are dumped in nurseries or looked after by nannies. This does not stop the new breed from constantly complaining how exhausted they are and demanding the husband spends every moment of the weekend taking the brats to the park, so they can enjoy their ‘me time’.

  More and more I bump into men my age who are bitter and disappointed at the non-working wives they have acquired. ‘I wouldn’t mind providing for her and my daughter if she just occasionally did something for me,’ whispered a shattered husband to me recently. ‘But she doesn’t clean, she can’t cook and she can’t even seem to get our child potty-trained. I thought relationships were meant to be about give and take, but I do all the giving and she does all the receiving. I’d divorce her, but I’ve already lost one wife and I just can’t face doing it again.’ ‘My wife’s so vacant, not only does she never throw dinner parties, she never wants to meet anyone outside her little circle of other pampered wives,’ said another. ‘She’s boring and completely self-obsessed.’