The Personal Shopper by Carmen Reid Read Free Book Online

laugh.
    ‘Well, er . . .’ Annie began, but to her relief, Billie had already moved on.
    ‘Mummy?’ she asked next. ‘You know the pink fish we eat . . . is that a real fish? The same as the ones you catch? Do we eat real fish?’
    ‘I’m leaving that answer to you,’ Annie smiled, suddenly recalling Owen’s devoutly vegetarian phase, aged four.
     
    Back at Annie’s flat, there was an overwhelming smell of nail polish. Lana and her friends Greta and Suzie were giving each other lavish, diamanté-studded manicures and trying to eat toast at the same time with the wet talons.
    Annie made the girls and Billie sit down at the kitchen table where she spread butter and jam and cut toast into   manageable pieces for the manicurists, while Dinah went in search of Owen, who was in his room reading and hiding from the teen excitement in the kitchen.
    Annie’s children had managed to jumble up their parents’ looks and features so thoroughly that they looked very like both their mother and father, but completely unlike each other.
    Lana had Roddy’s thick, straight black hair, blue eyes and pale skin, as well as Annie’s fine mouth, nose and long limbs. Owen had Roddy’s face but coloured with Annie’s brown eyes, rumpled mousy hair and a tawnier skin. Although he might one day fill out to be muscular and sturdy like his dad, at the moment Owen was a lanky, slouchy, skinny boy.
    ‘Ask him to come through, will you?’ Annie had said to Dinah. ‘At least for a croissant.’
    Owen eventually sloped in, blushed deepest pink at the sight of Lana’s two teen invaders and picked a chair as far away from them as he could.
    Greta and Suzie, being two of Lana’s closest friends, knew not to speak to Owen or even look in his direction, which was easy enough as he was far too young to be of any interest.
    After a while, he would usually calm down and chip into conversations with a few words of his own, but direct questions from non-family members were too stressful. When Annie brought his croissant over on a plate, she didn’t say anything to cajole him into talking, but just massaged his slight shoulders for a few minutes, hoping to help him relax.
    Sunday mornings were a problem in the Valentine household. There had once been lavish Sunday brunches with the most astonishing, homemade, thick and fluffy pancakes.
    To Annie, it didn’t seem so long ago that brunch had never   begun before 9.30 a.m. because she and Roddy had always insisted on a Sunday morning lie-in after Saturday’s weekly ‘date night’ when a rota of three babysitters took charge of Lana and Owen while their parents went out. Didn’t matter where they went out, the   important thing was being out and having time together: for dinner somewhere smart if they were feeling flush, to see friends or to the cinema, or even for fish and chips on a park bench if they were skint, Roddy whispering in her ear: ‘Can we go home yet? I want to do filthy things with you.’
    Back at home, the ideal end to the evening was to lock the bedroom door and get close in the way only people who’ve been happily together for a long time can: ‘I know just what you want and I’m so going to make you wait . . . and then wait . . . and wait some more . . . before I finally give it to you.’
    Roddy had never liked life to be boring and he certainly didn’t like love to be boring, so an evening in with him came with premeditation . . . with blindfolds or honey or ice cubes, maybe silky scarves, music and always surprises.
    She had loved him, through and through and inside out, every completely thoroughly explored square inch   of him. From his soft white shoulders, to his solid buttocks to his quirky toes. No part of him had been untouched by her, unloved by her or out of bounds for her. They had once been completely and totally intimate.
    ‘We’ll always have each other,’ he’d told her so many times.
    The liar.
    The rule for the children on Sunday mornings had once