“What kind of situations?” I ask lightly.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Luke is squeezing toothpaste onto his brush. “Divorce proceedings…some scandal with a senior doctor at the hospital where she worked…There was an injunction in LA….” He frowns at the tube. “We’re nearly out of this stuff.”
Divorce proceedings? Injunctions? Scandals?
I can’t reply. My mouth is opening and shutting like a goldfish. Every instinct in my body is on red alert.
She’s after Luke.
I watch Luke cleaning his teeth as though with Venetia’s eyes. He’s wearing only pajama bottoms, and he’s still tanned from the summer, and the muscles of his shoulders are rippling faintly as he brushes. Oh God, oh God. Of course she’s after him. He’s good-looking and he owns a multimillion-pound company and they had a romance when they were much younger. Maybe he was her first love and she’s never given her heart to anyone else.
Maybe she was his first love.
There’s a hollow kind of feeling in my stomach. Which is ridiculous, bearing in mind how much is in my stomach right now.
“So!” I try to sound confident and lighthearted. “Do I need to be worried?”
Luke’s splashing water on his face. “What do you mean?”
“I…” I can’t bring myself to say it. What am I implying, that I don’t trust him? “She could maybe try going after single men!” I change tack. “Then life wouldn’t be so complicated for her!” I give a small laugh, but as Luke turns, he’s frowning.
“Venetia’s made some…unwise choices. But none of them were deliberate or out of malice. She’s just a hopeless romantic.”
He’s defending her. I feel totally wrong-footed.
A bleep suddenly comes from Luke’s jacket. He comes out of the bathroom, drying his face, and takes his phone out of his pocket.
“It’s a text from Venetia.” He looks at it and smiles. “Look. It’s a picture of this evening.”
I take the phone from him and study the display. There’s Venetia, dressed for off duty in long, rangy jeans, a leather jacket, and high, spiky boots. She’s gazing at the camera with a confident smile, her arm round Luke like she owns him.
Home-wrecker flashes through my brain before I can stop it.
Well, she’s not wrecking this home. No way. Luke and I have been through a lot over the years, and it’ll take more than some swishy-haired, spiky-heeled doctor to break us up. I’m 110 percent confident.
INTERNATIONAL OMBUDSMAN
BANKING AUTHORITY
Floors 16–18 Percival House Commercial Road London EC1 4UL
Mrs R Brandon 37 Maida Vale Mansions Maida Vale
London NW6 0YF
10 September 2003
Dear Mrs. Brandon,
I regret to inform you that your application to found an online bank, “Becky’s Online Bank for Girls,” has been turned down by the committee.
There were many grounds for the decision, in particular your statement that to run an online bank “you just need a computer and somewhere to put all the money.”
I wish you success in any further ventures, but suggest that banking is not one of them.
Yours sincerely,
John Franklin
Internet Business Committee
TEN
MAYBE I’M NOT 110 percent confident. Maybe just 100 percent.
Or even…95.
It’s a few weeks since Luke went out for that evening with Venetia, and my confidence has wobbled ever so slightly. It’s not that anything has happened, exactly. On the surface, Luke and I are as happy as ever and nothing’s wrong. It’s just that…
Well, OK. Here is my evidence so far:
1) Luke keeps getting texts and smiling and sending replies straight back. And I know they’re from her. And he never shows them to me.
2) He’s been out with her three more times. Without me. One time when I’d already arranged to meet Suze, he said he might as well use the evening to see some friends, and it turned out the “friends” was Venetia. Once with all the Cambridge gang at some big fancy dinner with their old tutor, where partners weren’t invited. And once for lunch, which was apparently because she was going to be “right by his office.” Yeah, right. Delivering a baby in an office block?
That was when we had our teeny row, where I said (very lightly), that wow, he was spending a lot of time with Venetia — maybe too much? Whereupon Luke replied that she was feeling low right now and needed an old friend to talk to. So I said, “Well, I feel low too when you go off partying without me!” And Luke said that meeting up with his old university friends had been the highlight of his year, and it was his chance to switch off and if I came along too, I’d understand. So I said, “I’d come if you’d invite me.” And he said he had invited me, and I said—
Anyway. We said a few things.
That’s all the evidence I have. I don’t even know why I’m calling it evidence — it’s not like I think something’s actually going on. I mean…it’s a ludicrous idea. This is Luke I’m talking about. My husband.
“I can’t believe anything’s happening, Bex.” Suze shakes her head and stirs her raspberry and apricot smoothie. She’s come over for the morning so we can do the gender predictor test, but so far all we’ve done is talk about Luke. Luckily the children are all in the living room, eating sandwiches and watching Teletubbies in a total trance (which Suze let them do only after I swore an oath never, ever to tell Lulu).
“I can’t believe it either!” I spread my arms wide. “But they see each other all the time, and she’s always texting him, and I have no idea what they talk about….”