The Perfect Retreat (39 page)

Thank you to Fiona Michel and Emma Assaad for being my first readers and giving me their precious time and their friendship. ‘You complete me.’

Thank you to my clever friends Jacquie Byron, Kylie Miller, Jonah Klein and Stef Boscutti who all have helped me professionally and personally. You’re the tops, the lot of you.

Thank you to good friend Pippa Lambiase who guided me on speech disorders and treatment for children. You’re a good egg Lipsy.

And to lovely David, and gorgeous Tansy and Spike – thank you for everything.

Which outfit would be more appropriate for Kerr’s return? Willow Carruthers couldn’t decide. The Isabel Marant top and jeans worn with bare feet definitely gave her that sexy Mother Earth vibe. On the other hand, the Victoria Beckham crepe wool dress sent a strong message that, sure, she might look uptight, but she was ready and willing to be unbuttoned the minute her husband arrived home. Willow was struggling with this dilemma when a small blonde head peeked through the VIP change room curtains at Harvey Nichols.

‘I is hungry,’ moaned two-year-old Poppy, her pixie face crumpling.

‘Poppy, please, you just ate a banana and some rice crackers! Give me a minute. Go and sit down,’ Willow hissed, silently cursing the powers that be who had decreed that padlocking a child into their pram – or designer pusher, in this case – was bad parenting. She poked her head out of the curtain and saw her angelic-looking son Lucian pulling at a thread in his navy J. Crew jumper. It had slowly unravelled as he walked around the store, as if Luce had planned on leaving a yarn trail, a crafty Hansel without his Gretel.

Willow sighed and turned back to the mirror. Without conceit, she approved of what she saw there. She was often described as a classic beauty. Willow’s body was trim and toned from a relentless regime of Pilates, a strictly no-carb diet and from running around after her two children with no help whatsoever – something pretty much unheard of in her circles. Most of the women she knew employed not one but two nannies for each child. One for the day and one for the night. But not Oscar-winning actress Willow Carruthers. In fact, her passionate belief in the importance of raising her own children had been widely reported.

Right now, though, as she watched Lucian walking off, lost in his own thoughts and his yarn-pulling fervour, and Poppy rolling around the carpet tangled in a dusty-pink cashmere wrap worth hundreds of pounds, Willow questioned the strength of her conviction.

‘Is there anything else I can help you with today, Ms Carruthers?’ asked the pert personal shopper from the other side of the curtain. ‘There’s a lovely Lanvin leather coat here that would look marvellous on you.’

‘No thank you to the leather coat, but do you mind taking my children away?’ Willow spoke through a small gap in the curtain, wincing as she caught sight of Lucian attempting to tug the cashmere wrap off the head of a now screeching Poppy. ‘A long way away.’

The girl laughed. Willow put her head right out, using the curtain as a makeshift toga, and flashed her a dazzling smile.

‘Really, it’s terribly important that I have some space to think about my outfit. Surely there must be someone here who can keep them amused?’

The girl looked Willow in the eye. She was used to dealing with the demands of the rich and famous. Just the day before she had helped a future mother-of-the-bride from Texas into three pairs of Spanx. It was so traumatic that she had renamed the underwear Sp-angst and had required an emergency manicure to fix her broken nails.

‘I’m so sorry, Ms Carruthers, but we don’t offer childcare,’ she murmured, keeping her eyes locked on Willow’s.

The private shopping area of Harvey Nichols could offer Willow a five-star meal from the restaurant upstairs, champagne or coffee, even a manicure while she reclined upon a sofa in the viewing area as the assistants dazzled her with the latest, and most expensive, fashions. But, yet, there was no one to help her on the childcare front. Luxury was bullshit sometimes, thought Willow. Luxury would have been Maria Von Trapp arriving with songs, strudel and the skills to tame the kids.

Willow’s mega-watt smile vanished, but she shrugged and ducked back behind the curtain to dress. Moments later she emerged seemingly unruffled. She snapped off the thread from Lucian’s now ruined jumper, and left the tangle of navy wool for the girl to deal with.

‘I’ll take both,’ she said coolly, walking past the girl to scoop up Poppy, who was still screaming at the injustice of a world set on separating her from the overpriced cashmere wrap. ‘And we’ll take this also.’

The girl nodded, unsurprised. She was used to seeing such extravagance, where a cashmere wrap could become a proxy security blanket.

Willow tried not to sigh with impatience as the girl wrapped each item carefully in tissue. Clearly she had no idea what it was like to shop with children. Willow handed over her credit card and signed the receipt with the rapid scrawl of a woman who’d had plenty of practise signing her name. It wasn’t just on credit card receipts either. Five years after her last film, Willow Carruthers was still regularly pursued for autographs, and when she and Kerr had got together, her profile had risen even higher. Being married to a rock-star will do that for you.

‘Go on, hop in the pusher, Pops,’ she cajoled, but Poppy just laughed at her with a mischievous look on her face that reminded Willow of Kerr, and ran off from the personal shopping area into the general womenswear department, dragging the cashmere wrap behind her.

Willow didn’t know whether to be charmed or annoyed, but before she could decide, she was hit by a tidal wave of nausea.

‘Poppy, stop! Come back here,’ she cried weakly, but it was too late. Poppy collided with a mannequin that toppled and fell on her, plaster limbs snapping as it crashed onto the cold marble floor.

Poppy’s roar reminded Willow of the sound of the crowd at Wembley during Kerr’s stadium tours. She rushed to the tangle of limbs, both real and manufactured, trying to swallow the bile in her mouth, and hauled Poppy up by the arm. Willow was aware of the eyes of other shoppers upon her and sent a quick prayer to a God she had never believed in that no paparazzi were in the store.

‘I told you not to rush away from me, young lady,’ she admonished in hushed tones.

Poppy gave up and allowed her mother to put her into the pusher while Lucian stood by patiently.

‘You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Luce?’ Willow said to her silent son as they headed downstairs to the exit. He was three now and still not speaking, but she had read that Albert Einstein didn’t speak till he was four; perhaps Lucian was going to be a genius.

Outside the store, some local paparazzi were lurking, trying to catch a celebrity out on a shopping spree. Willow adjusted her sunglasses, holding Lucian’s hand tightly as she pushed Poppy’s stroller through the little mob.

‘Willow, Willow, been shopping, is it? How are you then? How’s the kids?’ the paps called, all fake-friendly as they snapped away, hoping to catch her at an unflattering angle.

‘Fine, thanks.’ She smiled, cool but polite. It wasn’t smart to rile the paps, much better to have them on your side. But she wouldn’t be stopping. She might be in the public eye, but there was no way she wanted her children exposed to the bullshit circus of celebrity gossip.

This was part of the reason she had stayed in London. Her children weren’t all over the ‘Hollywood babies’ blogs, and they didn’t make regular appearances in the Out and About pages of People either. The fact that Kerr refused to be photographed as a family made the children even less interesting to the magazines. They were generally left alone now that Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller had fought back to make the paparazzi calm the hell down, especially since the News of the World scandal had broken.

Willow knew she was being followed by some of the paps. She turned and called to the one closest.

‘You know Tamara Ecclestone was in there shopping, don’t you? I think she has a new lover.’

The photographers ran back towards the shop and Willow smiled as she walked away. She had few illusions. Willow and the kids might make a small piece in the Daily Mail, but a shot of Tamara, the current It Girl in London, with a new lover – that would make the front cover of every glossy in the country.

As they walked up Kensington High Street Willow saw a small café and had an overwhelming urge for a coffee, though she wasn’t usually a coffee drinker. She found she wanted, no, needed, one now. She pushed open the door and ordered a coffee and babychinos for the children.

She unstrapped Poppy and let her sit on a chair. When the drinks were delivered, Poppy greedily spooned the froth into her little mouth, while Lucian nibbled on the marshmallow that came with his drink.

Willow stirred a sugar into her coffee, another abnormality, and took a sip. The warm liquid filled her empty stomach and allayed the queasiness inside her.

A heavily pregnant woman edged into the seat at the next table and Willow smiled at her swollen belly.

‘How long to go?’ she asked.

‘Three weeks,’ the woman said wearily.

‘Your first?’ Willow had adored being pregnant, and Kerr had seemed to like it too. He’d told her he had never found her sexier than with her heavy breasts and constant demands to be touched.

‘Yes,’ said the woman as she took a sip of water. ‘It’s horrifying to think this will have to come out, it seems technically impossible.’

Willow laughed. ‘I know but somehow we manage it. The power of women, huh?’

‘Or epidurals,’ she said as another woman approached her table and sat down, glancing over at Willow before doing a double take.

Willow could feel her brief moment of anonymity, of being just another mum, disappearing as the pregnant woman learned from her friend who Willow actually was. They both turned to stare, examining her from head to toe with frank curiosity. Willow finished her coffee quickly and stood up, putting a thankfully unprotesting Poppy back into the stroller and helping Lucian off the wooden chair.

‘Good luck,’ she said to pregnant woman, who looked up to thank her, turning bright red now that she knew who Willow was.

As Willow left the café she realised most of the patrons would now be humming with the news of who had just been in. She sighed. Sometimes she thought it would be nice to be just another ordinary mum going about her business in London. Then again, she reflected, as she pulled out her mobile phone from her oversized Gucci tote and dialled her driver to come and pick them up, she had a rock-star husband and a life most women could only dream of.

Poppy had fallen asleep in the pusher. Willow gently transferred her into her cot, made Lucian his favourite lunch – a cheese sandwich – and parked him in front of Thomas the Tank Engine while she went upstairs to prepare for her reunion with Kerr.

Kerr had been on the road with the band for months. Since they’d had the children Willow rarely went to visit him on tour, but six weeks ago she’d flown out with Lucian and Poppy to meet Kerr in Italy. She was worried. He had been avoiding her calls, and though he said he was busy and tired, she sensed something more was going on and she needed to see him. Willow was determined not to let her marriage become just another failed celebrity union.

Willow might not be on screen any more, but she was in the gossip magazines regularly and she knew she had a reputation to uphold. She was the perfect stay-at-home mother, always looked amazing, and refused to give up on her marriage or appearance just because she got the rock-star husband.

What the people who read those trashy magazines didn’t understand, Willow thought, was that you had to work harder when you and your husband were famous. Being apart so much of the time, the girls constantly throwing themselves at Kerr, the endless comparisons people made between the wives in the band and which wife was the hottest – it was all so stressful that sometimes Willow wished she could just go away for a while to a place where she didn’t have to worry so much about what people thought.

She had heard the rumours that Kerr was cheating on her, but there was nothing concrete, so Willow tried to ignore the growing slivers of discontent she felt when she was around him. When she remembered that all-consuming passion she and Kerr had felt when they met, how they had declared their love and she had fallen pregnant with Lucian so quickly, it felt like an amazing dream. Like most dreams, though, such passion had proved difficult to sustain in reality.

Willow stood in her huge dressing room with its powder-blue carpet and white walls. So many clothes, she thought as she hung her new items up in the wardrobe. Her hand lingered on the butter yellow sundress she’d bought in Rome with Kerr. It wasn’t a designer piece, but wearing it made her feel sexy, and Kerr had seemed to think so too, pushing her up against the hotel window ledge and fucking her from behind as they gazed out over the city of Rome one long, lazy afternoon.

As Willow peeled off her clothes and unhooked her bra, she noticed the veins on her breasts and how tender they were to touch. She remembered her earlier nausea and her inexplicable desire for a coffee – suddenly she knew. She felt a rush of delight as she pulled the gauzy sundress down over her head. The dress was the perfect thing to wear when she told Kerr the news. Now she was even more excited about him coming home.

Just thinking of him now made her skin tingle and she pulled her immaculate blonde hair out of its sensible ponytail and let it fall loose over her smooth bare shoulders. She stared at herself in the mirror and knew she had never looked better. She smiled at her secret. Even though Kerr had told her he didn’t want any more children, Willow was convinced she could persuade him to change his mind.

Humming, she went into the bathroom to apply make-up to her already flawless face.

Kitty Middlemist sat on a bench in Hyde Park and watched the people passing. She liked to watch things. People, television, movies, the birds in the sky, a spider making a web. Kitty could spend hours sitting back and observing her world.