by Isabel Wolff
‘At least the photo’s nice,’ Luke said consolingly when he phoned me at five.
‘Although it gives me the creeps to think it was taken without my knowledge.’ I imagined the camera trained on me, from a distance, like a sniper’s rifle. ‘And the piece was a farrago of lies and spite.’
‘Well you’ve had loads of good publicity, so one nasty bit is hardly going to matter is it? Anyway, when can I see you again?’ My mood instantly lifted. ‘How about tomorrow? Why don’t you come round and I’ll cook supper.’
‘Tomorrow would be fine—but do you mind if we watch the show? I’m not being vain—it’s just part of the job.’
He said he didn’t mind at all—he loves quizzes, whether or not presented by me…
‘I enjoy releasing my inner nerd,’ he explained as he turned on the TV the following night. ‘And when’s the one I was in being screened? I mustn’t miss it.’
‘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,’ h
e 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.’
‘Precisely.’ I rested my knife on my plate. ‘And that’s why so many of her things are still in his house. She didn’t forget them, she left them there, deliberately.’
‘Like a feral cat,’ Hope observed. ‘Spraying everywhere, to mark its territory.’ I remembered that aggressive gleam in Magda’s eyes.
Now, as Hope sipped her Semillon, I told her how Magda’s favourite trick was to manufacture some sort of ‘crisis’—a gas leak, a faulty microwave, Martians in the back garden—which invariably required Luke’s help.
‘Once she managed to get Luke to go over there because she’d broken a saucepan,’ I said. ‘And last week she demanded his presence because Ophelia and Yogi were fighting. When he refused, she threatened to call the police.’
‘Whose role would have been what? To arrest Luke for non-compliance, or the goats for violence?’
‘We weren’t entirely sure. But what I can’t stand is the way she shreds his nerves about Jessica, claiming that she’s got “suspected meningitis” when it’s just a headache, or an “abscess” when she’s cutting a tooth.’ I had come to loathe the sound of Luke’s mobile. Its jaunty little tune would invariably herald a twenty-minute barrage of false alarms, threats and demands. But he couldn’t ever turn it off in case of a real emergency. I tried to imagine the intoxicating sense of power Magda must have.
‘I don’t know how you put up with it,’ Hope repeated, shaking her perfectly-coiffed head. She looked, as usual, as though she’d just walked out of the hairdresser.
‘Well, I put up with it, because…’ I thought of what Mike had once said to Fliss. ‘It’s a question of love. I love Luke, so that’s the answer. But if I hadn’t known him before, then, yes, I admit it would be hard. If it was a new relationship…’
‘But it is,’ Hope interrupted. ‘You’ve only been seeing him for—what—six weeks?’
‘Yes, but it’s actually longer than that.’
‘Why? Are you living in a parallel universe or something?’
‘No. It’s because we were together before. We’ve already settled into a comfortable routine because we have a history. Can’t you see that?’
‘No.’ Hope was starting to annoy me in the way only my sisters can. They give me ‘sistitis’—it can be very uncomfortable. ‘I just think it’s convenient for Luke. It means that after less than two months he knows you well enough to aba
ndon you mid-date because his ex snaps her fingers.’
‘Luke’s life isn’t easy,’ I said firmly, ‘and you have to be very understanding when someone’s got kids.’ I didn’t add that, as Hope had never wanted them, she might not appreciate that.
‘I’m sure that’s true,’ she replied, fiddling with the Tiffany gold teardrop earrings that Mike had got for her for her last birthday. ‘All I’m saying is, don’t let Luke put you in the comfort zone too early. He’s got to woo the new Laura, not just take the old one for granted. You’re a different person now—and so is he.’
‘Well, yes. We are different in many ways—but our previous time together provides a firm foundation.’
She poured me some Evian. ‘Does it?’
‘Magda knows I matter to Luke. She can’t dismiss me as some passing fancy. Plus she’s furious that I knew him before she did. That’s why she’s being so vile.’
‘She’s being vile because she’s being vile,’ said Hope matter-of-factly, ‘and because she’s clearly slightly deranged.’ This was true. I now realized that my anxieties over whether Magda would try and get Luke back were ludicrous. A reconciliation was not on the cards. ‘What main course did he choose by the way?’ she added.
‘Lamb.’
‘Not too rare I hope?’
‘Medium.’
She nodded approvingly. ‘Side order?’
‘Spinach and mash. Luke’s just being cautious, that’s all. He doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardize his position with Jessica, given how tricky Magda’s being at the moment.’ ‘So he has Jessica on Saturdays. But presumably you spend Sundays together.’
‘Well…not at the moment.’ I fiddled with my napkin.
‘Why not?’
‘Erm…because…he tends…to go there.’
Hope looked at me as though I were mad. ‘Are you saying he spends Saturday with Jessica, then Sunday with Jessica and Magda?’
I sighed patiently. ‘Well, ye-es. Because ever since she found out about me, Magda’s been inviting Luke over for Sunday lunch on the basis that they should spend family time together for Jessica’s sake.’
‘If she was so keen on them having family time together then she shouldn’t have left him,’ said Hope acidly. ‘But that’s a powerful weapon she’s got there—roast goulash and all the trimmings.’