A Question of Love by Isabel Wolff

Author:Isabel Wolff
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780007775965
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2006-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

The next day most of the tabloids had photos of Luke’s quiz triumph, with typically inane captions. LUKE WHO’S WON! announced the Daily Post on page 9 beneath his smiling photo. QUICK’S MARRIED LOVER WINS QUIZ! announced the News. It knew about Luke’s abandoned attempt to Turn the Tables during the recording. Well, we’d like to Turn the Tables too. And the question WE’D like to ask Laura is—why did your husband go missing? I felt sick. Charity supremo Nick Little disappeared three years ago, but tragic TV Laura is being comforted by old flame, contemporary art dealer Luke North. However, North remains married to his wife of nine years, Hungarian interpreter, Magda de Laszlo…See pages 7, 8 and 15.

‘This is horrible,’ I said to Tom as I read the piece again. We were in the tiny, windowless edit suite at the back of the building. He was editing yesterday’s show. He used to be a film editor so he prefers to do the first offline cut himself. Sara usually does it with him, but she’d gone early for Easter. I watched myself hop-scotch across the screen, in a series of freeze frames. As he did the mixing, I sounded like the Voice of the Mysterons one moment, then the next moment like Minnie Mouse.

‘Triton is the l-a-r-g-e-s-t ofwhichplanet’s m-o-o-n-s…? N—e-p-t-u-n-e…i-s- c-o-r-r-e-c-t. Neptuneiscorrect…is correct, is correct, is correct.’

‘I am not being “comforted”—nudge nudge—by Luke. I’m going out with him. And how dare they say that Luke’s still married to Magda—she left him almost a year ago.’

‘It’s because you’ve refused to talk to them,’ Tom said as he tracked back and forth, digitising the tape. He glanced at the timelines on the adjacent monitor, then tapped some numbers on to his keyboard. ‘They didn’t get their “My Heartache” story out of you so now they’re trying to imply that you’re a marriage-wrecker.’

‘Out of revenge?’

‘No—it’s just a different angle—however misconceived. They want to write about you, and they’re not going to let the fact that they couldn’t get an interview with you stand in their way.’

‘But why do they want to write about me?

Tom shrugged. ‘Because there’s this mystery in your background about Nick—and I suppose because they just…do. It’s odd, but some celebrities are completely ignored by the tabloids—however risky their behaviour—while others get a pasting day after day. Plus the News and the Post have this rivalry, so they’re like a pair of dogs fighting over a bone, and I’m afraid that, for the moment, that bone is you.’

‘Nerys was right,’ I said bleakly. ‘She said I should give them just one interview, so that they’d leave me alone.’

‘Nerys is very annoying, but she does, sometimes, just put her finger on things. The fact that you wouldn’t talk to them seems to have made them more determined.’

I read the piece again. It was like looking at myself in one of those grotesquely distorting fairground mirrors. Bile bubbled at the back of my throat. I’d been wrong in assuming that if I didn’t speak to them, they didn’t have a story.

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