A Question of Love (18 page)

‘Not till the end of March—there’s usually six weeks between recording a show and broadcasting it. Did you tell Magda about it?’ I asked as he poured me a beer.

‘No, because I want it to be a huge surprise for Jess. I can’t wait to see her face. I’ll make sure she’s with me that night.’

We sat happily on the sofa, Luke shouting out the answers. During the commercial break, Magda phoned.

‘I can’t chat—I’m just watching something,’ Luke explained. ‘Oh…this new quiz on Channel Four…You’re watching it too are you?’ My eyes widened. ‘Yes, it
is
good…’ I stifled a snort. ‘No—
I
didn’t know that Kilimanjaro was the world’s largest volcano either. Yes—the presenter
is
excellent isn’t she?’ I emitted a squeak, and he grinned at me. ‘No, Magda…I’m on my own. Oh, it’s just starting again. Okay, Magda…yes…fine, Magda. Speak to you tomorrow then. Byeeee.’ He hung up with a sigh of relief.

‘She’s in a good mood at the moment,’ he explained. ‘She’s
almost
being reasonable.
Schoenberg
! I get the impression things are going well with her man. He clearly hasn’t realized that she’s nuts yet.
Wallace and Gromit
!’

‘How long have they been seeing each other?’

‘Six months. She’s obviously been careful, but he’ll twig soon.
Albert Einstein
!’

‘Luke…why did you say you were alone?’

‘Because she asked me if someone was there—
Wolverhampton Wanderers
!
-
and I didn’t want to tell her.’

‘Why
not
?’

‘Because I don’t want to rub her nose in our relationship.
Anagram
! I mean,
palindrome
!
‘

‘But why should she care?’

‘
Sharon Stone
!’

‘She
left
you, Luke.’

‘I know, but that doesn’t mean she’ll like it.
Frankenstein
!’

‘I see. So she doesn’t want you to be with anyone else.’

‘I guess that’s right. I
will
tell her about you, but I’ll have to break it to her carefully.
Deoxyribonucleic acid
! Do you understand that?’

‘In the circumstances—
no
.’

But as things turned out, it wasn’t Luke who broke it to Magda at all.

His fridge was empty after the weekend, so we went round the corner to have supper at Café 206, and he told me all about his preparations for the forthcoming Craig Davie retrospective. And we were just walking out of the door at about ten thirty, feeling happy and relaxed, when a young man in a dark hooded top and baggy trousers suddenly loomed in front of us. For a moment I thought we were going to be mugged.

‘Laura?’ he said. I looked at him. There was a flash. ‘Laura!’ Then another. Oh
shit.
‘This way Laura!’ I put my hand up to my face. Then there was another flash. ‘C’mon Laura!’

‘Go
away
!’ I yelled.

‘
Don’t
!’ Luke whispered as we walked away, fast, running now, the photographer in hot pursuit—I could hear his steps thudding behind. ‘
Don’t
look at him and don’t
say
anything.’

‘One more, Laura!’ we heard. ‘There’s a good girl! C’mon…’

I wanted to turn round and tell him to get lost, but Luke was propelling me down the street.

‘Just
run
!’

We were unable to sleep, so getting up at six was easy. We went to the newspaper kiosk and bought all eleven dailies. We hoped the photo would be in one that no-one we knew ever read, like the
Mirror
. It wasn’t. It was on page three of the
Daily News.

There was a huge picture of us looking startled—and shifty—as we emerged, hand in hand, from Café 206. The piecewas headed
QUICK WORK!
and was subtitled,
TV LAURA’S SECRET TRYSTS WITH MARRIED ART DEALER! EXCLUSIVE!
There was another shot of me trying to cover my face, a third one of me looking angry, then a smaller shot of us running away.

‘Oh…’ I said. I was too shocked to articulate anything more complex. For, in the hands of the
Daily News
‘s mythmakers, I was
Troubled Quizmistress Laura Quick
…nursing a
secret heartache
over my
hero husband Nick’s disappearance
. There was a ‘quote’ from a conveniently anonymous ‘friend’ of Nick’s saying,
‘Nick simply couldn’t take
any more…he’d tried his best with Laura…she’s clever, but she can be so difficult and demanding.
‘

‘It’s like reading about someone else,’ Luke said.

There was an old photo of Nick looking serious—which was his natural expression—captioned
Haunted.
By now I was struggling to breathe. There was also an old snap of Luke and me smooching at a May Ball—God knows how they’d got hold of that.
Quick is now conducting an affair with her old flame from Cambridge—Luke North, a married father of one
, the piece continued. How had they found
that
out so fast? They’d done some pretty Quick Work themselves.

‘It
isn’t
an “affair”,’ I shouted. ‘That’s outrageous! We’re both
single
.’

‘Magda will go crazy,’ Luke breathed.

I felt a stab of anger—he was thinking about
her
feelings, not mine. He was absolutely right though. She did. She phoned at ten past seven, having been alerted to the story by her mother who, apparently, rises early, and who has the
Daily News
delivered every day.

‘It’s a pack of lies,’ I heard Luke say as I poured myself some strong coffee. ‘That reporter should be writing airport novels.’

‘Are you denyink that you’re seeink her then?’ Luke had the handset on speaker so that I could hear what he was up against. She sounded like the B side of Zsa Zsa Gabor.

‘I’m not denying it, Magda—no. But I do deny that we’re doing anything wrong. “Secret trysts”!’ he spat. ‘Laura’s unattached, and so am I.’ I gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up.

‘Yes,’ she conceded coldly. ‘You are…But
only
because you
left
me.’

Luke’s jaw hit the floor. ‘N-o Magda,’ he said slowly, as though talking to a recalcitrant five-year-old. ‘
You
left
me
—rem-
em
-ber?’

There was a momentary silence. I could almost hear her synapses firing as she tried to counter this inconvenient fact.

‘Well…ok-
ay.
But…only because I
had
to. Because you were so
awful.
So, so…
ghastly. DOWN
HEIDI!
OFF
THE TABLE!!’

‘That’s rubbish! I was perfectly nice. You left me, Magda, because you were fed up with me and because I’d fulfilled my function as your sperm donor, and because you preferred your bloody
goats
!’

‘You leave my goats
out
of this Luke! What have the poor darlinks ever done to
you
?’ I nodded at him. She was right. ‘I hope you’re not blamink Phoebe and Sweetie for our separation.’

‘No’, said Luke, backtracking. ‘I’m not.’

‘It’s been a
very
stressful time for them too. Yogi, in particular, has found it
very
hard adjustink. He’s been exhibitink a
lot
of negativity and aggression lately.’

‘Okay,’ Luke said soothingly. ‘I withdraw that.’

‘And they were very…
fond
of you actually.’ Her voice had cracked on ‘fond’.

‘I know, Magda.’ Now he was looking upset.

‘And I must say you were very
kind
to them, Luke.’ I heard her sniff. ‘I have
very
happy memories of you feeding them vanilla cream cookies.’

‘Well,’ he shrugged. ‘I knew they liked them.’

‘The way you used to scrape the icink out of the middles for them was rather…
touchink.
‘ I heard her swallow, and realized, to my surprise and disgust, that my own eyes were slightly damp. ‘We had some
lovely
times,’ she added tearfully. ‘Didn’t we?’ Treacly sentiment was clearly her alternative strategy to naked aggression.

‘We did have some nice times. Don’t cry. Don’t cry, Magda. Please
don’t.
I can’t
stand
it when you cry.
‘

‘We were a
family
,’ she wept. ‘A sweet—uh-uh—little family—
uh-uh—
weren’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Luke conceded. ‘We were.’ He must have been thinking about Jessica. He ran his left hand through his hair.

‘I don’t know what
happened
,’ wailed Magda. ‘Why did it all—
uh-uh
—go
wrong
?’

At this Luke suddenly seemed to come to. ‘
I’ll
tell you why it went wrong, Magda. It went wrong because you were
awful
to me for a long time, and then you
left
me and started seeing someone
else
.’

‘That’s not…tr-u-
u—uh
—ue.’ She was in full flow now. The phone was practically dripping.

‘It
is
true, Magda. And I don’t know why you’re so upset about me having recently started dating someone, when you’ve been with this bloody Steve of yours for six months!’

‘I’m upset about it because—’ we heard a wet sniff—‘I didn’t know that this, this…this…Laura, was your girlfriend at Cambridge.’

‘Yes,’ Luke replied wearily. ‘That
one
sentence, at least, is true.’

‘But you never mentioned her to me.’

‘Didn’t I?’ he said vaguely.

‘Not once, in all the time I’ve known you. Which can only
mean
—’ I heard her voice fracture again—‘that she must have been very
special
to you.’

‘No…I—’ He shot me a guilty look. I shrugged.

‘And that you’ve been
obsessed
with her all these
years
.’

‘For God’s sake, Magda.’

‘Which means that
our
relationship meant
nothink
,’ she steamed on. ‘No-
uh-uh
-th-
uh-uh
-ink!’ She was sobbing loudly now. I visualized her red eyes and puckered chin.

‘That’s simply not true, Magda.’

‘I was just—
uh-uh
—second best!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said wearily.

‘No more than a consolation—
uh-uh—
prize.’ She was hysterical now. She
is
crazy, I thought calmly. She’s the genuine article. A true loon. ‘How—
uh-uh
—could you marry me so
dishonestly
?’ she wailed.

At this Luke emitted a burst of dark laughter. ‘I married you very
honestly
actually Magda, because, if you remember, you’d got yourself
pregnant
, after only four months,
without
prior reference to
me
!’

There was a sharp intake of breath. Then silence.

‘You. Heartless.
Bastard
! So you regret it do you? You regard your beautiful daughter as a mere “slip-up”, I suppose!’

Luke’s face was twisted with rage. ‘Of
course
not, Magda. I’m just saying that I did the right thing.’

‘How can you feel like that about your own
child
?’

‘You are
so
twisted, Magda—Jessica’s the most important thing in my life, as you
very
well know. I adore her. I would die to save her without a second’s hesitation. And she is, may I say, the one,
wonderful
compensation for the mostly
miserable
eight years I spent with
you
!’

There was a shocked silence. Then a quiet sniff. ‘You will live to regret that remark, Luke North,’ Magda croaked. ‘You. Will. Live. To. Re.
Grrrret
. It. Because you will not hear from me—or see your beautiful daughter—
ever
again.’ She slammed down the phone. Then, seconds later, Luke’s rang.

‘Hello?’

‘
Never
again, Luke! Do you hear?’

SIX

‘I don’t know
how
you put up with it,’ said Hope a few weeks later. She’d come to meet me at Julie’s wine bar because Luke had had to rush over to Chiswick mid-starter, and she lives nearby in Clarendon Road. She stared at Luke’s soup. ‘Is this gazpacho?’

I nodded. ‘He only had a bit.’

‘I see. So he’s gone Hungary,’ she added drily.

I handed her a clean spoon. ‘Afraid so. Or you can have my salmon mousse if you’d rather. Look, I’ve only had this corner.’

‘Awfully tempting I’m sure, but I’ll pass on both, thanks.’ She tapped the wineglass. ‘And what’s this?’

‘Californian Chablis. He’d only had a couple of sips.’

‘Hmmm…I’m not crazy about New World whites.’ As she perused the wine list I told her about Magda’s recent behaviour.

Hope’s beautifully lip-glossed mouth hardened into a disapproving line. ‘How awful.’

‘She is. She’s the Buda Pest.’

‘I wouldn’t be able to
stand
it,’ Hope said. Normally slow to pass judgement, she was being unusually direct. I could see she was in a sharp, rather truculent mood. ‘And poor Luke, having to live with all those threats.’

‘They’re mostly idle,’ I said. In fact Magda’s threats were bone idle. They were disgustingly lazy. They’d sit on their fat backsides all day, not lifting a finger. They’d want to be driven everywhere. For, as I told Hope, not only did Luke continue to hear from Magda as normal—‘normal’ being, on average, every eight minutes—he now heard from her even more. He attributed this to the fact that she was determined to punish him for having a girlfriend, and to prove that she still ‘owned’ him, with her excessive demands.

‘So the deal seems to be,’ said Hope, ‘that Magda leaves Luke and finds someone else, but that he must remain single so that he’s at her disposal.’