The Personal Shopper Read Online Free

she was preparing to sell for maximum profit in the spring and move on to the next doer-upper, even though she’d be really sorry to say goodbye to the shower. Well . . . in fact, she’d be really sorry to say goodbye to this flat, for many reasons, and she suspected it was going to be hard to convince the children it was a good idea . . . but, like it or not, she needed the money.
    Heels clacking on the pavement, she headed from   Highgate underground station, not in the direction of her home, but towards St Vincent’s, the excellent, although totally exclusive and smug, private day school her two children attended.
    Sending her children to St Vincent’s at a cost of over £2,000 a month was what kept Annie focused and motivated through her long days of wheeling, dealing, advising and selling. She’d been brought up, the oldest of three girls, in a much less inviting corner of London by a single, non-stop-working mother who had sent her   girls to the local primary and then the local comprehensive until one by one they’d hit the critical age of 14. Then, chiropodist (although she preferred ‘podiatrist’) Fern had used her overtime, her savings and their natural intelligence to secure them places at the   extraordinarily upmarket Francis Holland School for Girls to ‘get their exams’ and ‘a bit of polish’.
    For Annie, Francis Holland had been the Promised Land, the Holy Grail: a fantasy school for the rich and glamorous which, in a slightly limited way, she’d been allowed to join. Yes, she’d suffered a degree of taunting for living in the wrong part of tow n and having the wrong kind of accent . But mainly she’d attracted a big friend and fan base because she was street smart, savvy and cool and because she knew so many, many boys.
    Annie had left four years later with several defining attributes: the qualifications necessary for art school (not medical school, much to Fern’s disappointment), the firm conviction that if she ever had children they’d go to a school like that from day one, no matter what the cost, and finally, perhaps most importantly, she’d learned that even if you didn’t fit in, you had to be yourself, because people responded so much better to down-to-earth reality than to nervous, put-on airs and graces.
     
    ‘Ah, Mrs Valentine, lovely to see you. And how are we doing?’
    The headmaster, Mr Ketteringham-Smith, ramrod straight and severely smart in his light grey meet-the-parents suit, was greeting at the main door in person with a charming-verging-on-the-smarming smile.
    ‘Top form, headmaster,’ she assured him with her best smile. ‘And how about you? You’re looking fit.’
    ‘Oh, well . . . am I?’ He was flustered by the compliment.
    ‘Definitely, you look like y ou’ve been coaching the rugby single-handed.’ This, admittedly, was going a tad far, but at least Lana was not around to be humiliated to death by her mother flirting with the head.
    ‘Well . . . erm . . . like to keep my hand in, now and again,’ came his reply.
    She restrained herself from the cheeky answer to this becaus e although there were many interesting men to be found wandering the corridors of St Vincent’s on a parents’ evening, slightly balding Mr Ketteringham-Smith was not one of them.
    Annie, perhaps understandably, had a thing about dads. Well, first of all, she’d never had much of one. Who had Fern chosen to give her heart to? Fern had picked a cargo ship captain. What an obvious mistake! Cargo ship captain? The warning was in the title. Mick Mitchell was always away. Not just at work, an hour’s commute away, but on the other side of the world away: places like Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. The brief times he was home, he still liked to be captain, which infuriated Fern, who was used to doing everything for herself and by herself when she was without him. But it   was the all-too-regular medical evidence (requiring hefty doses of antibiotics) of the other women in the