Luke’s Women

When Luke left me for Millie, I wanted to kill her. I fantasised about putting a petrol bomb through her letterbox, only I didn’t know how to make one and I was afraid of getting caught. That’s always one of the big problems of revenge. There was also the chance it might kill Luke and I hadn’t come around to that idea yet. He was too beautiful to hurt, I thought then, and he’d had a terrible childhood, and I’d always known he was easily tempted. (Besides, oh, shameful secret thought, he might yet come back to me, if I played my cards right.) But I’d expected better things of Millie because she was a woman and a neighbour and (I’d thought) a friend. The idea of injuring Millie was terribly attractive.

Instead, I wrote their phone number in all the public lavatories I could find. I had a lot of fun composing variations on Miss Stern/French Lessons/Big Stud. Nothing sexist about me: I believe in equal opportunities. It seemed a while since I had had fun. Sometimes I got quite obscene and surprised myself. It gave me a sense of purpose while the children were at school. As a revenge it’s pretty near perfect: easy, harmless, anonymous, but very annoying. The beauty of it was, Millie had just moved house, so at first it looked as if they’d inherited a dubious phone number, and however much they thought it might be me, they couldn’t prove it. Better yet, even when they changed their phone number they still had to give it to me because of the children.

Don’t let anyone tell you revenge doesn’t help. It’s very soothing, like calomine lotion on sunburn, and it stops you feeling small and helpless. You grow to your proper adult size again, like Alice if she’d found the correct ‘Drink Me’ bottle. Many a night when I still had a pain like an open wound at the thought of Luke and Millie together, I managed to go to sleep with a smile on my face because I knew they were getting calls day and night from a whole bunch of lustful strangers. Better for me than lying awake crying, I thought, which clogs up your nose till you can’t breathe and you just know that no one will ever love you again because you’re a snuffling, snivelling wreck with puffy eyes, like some old punch-drunk boxer. It was better than being a brave little soldier, too, all frightfully civilised, pretending it was just one of those things and nobody’s fault.

Eventually I gave up, of course, but not until I was ready. After two or three changes of number it became too much effort and besides, I was beginning to feel better, going back to nursing, having the occasional lover. But I felt proud of myself. At least I hadn’t meekly put up with being kicked in the teeth.

When Luke left Millie for Barbara, she scratched his car. She just went out one night and dragged a rusty nail the whole length of his beautiful new convertible parked outside Barbara’s flat. I heard about it all from Luke. We were quite friendly by then. At first we’d had to keep in touch because of the children (plus my absurd fantasy that he might come back to me) and by the time they’d grown up and gone off to college he’d got in the habit of ringing me or dropping in to talk about himself, the way men like to do. When he left Millie, the last splinter of pain came out of my heart and I felt washed clean, vindicated. She was suffering as I had suffered and Luke had proved himself no good to either of us. I laughed when he told me about her revenge. And I thought how much I had missed her over the years. A woman after my own heart, you might say.

Luke sprawled on my sofa and stared at me with that attentive soft-focused look that so many women find beguiling but which really means he hasn’t got his contact lenses in.

‘Barbara’s thrown me out,’ he said. ‘She’s afraid it might be her car next. She thinks I’m a liability.’

‘Barbara sounds like a sensible woman,’ I said.

Luke wasn’t ageing well. He’d put on weight and he was going grey and bald at the same time. Looking at him dispassionately, I thought I’d had the best of him. But there was still the charm and the smile and the look. And he was the girls’ father; there’d always be that bond.

‘I don’t like living on my own,’ he said, stroking the back of my neck. ‘It’s not good for me.’

‘Now’s your chance to practise what you preach,’ I said, removing the hand. ‘Aren’t you always urging your patients to find inner tranquillity without a partner?’

‘That’s why I need one,’ said Luke. ‘To replenish me. I give out so much of myself each day. You know, I really miss family life.’

I thought of all the times he had failed to visit the girls and I had tried to make up excuses for him so they wouldn’t be too disappointed.

‘You may miss it,’ I said, ‘but are you really suited to it?’

‘I made a mess of it last time,’ he said calmly. ‘I’d like a chance to get it right.’

The next time I saw Millie in Sainsbury’s I smiled at her and we ended up going for a long boozy lunch. Her five years with Luke had aged her, I thought, more than my fifteen had aged me, but perhaps having the girls had kept me young. Millie couldn’t have children and Luke had got to her at a time when she was feeling particularly vulnerable because her husband had just died after a long illness. The more we talked and drank, the more forgiving I felt. It was a new sensation, warm and benevolent. I liked it.

‘Scratching the car was a masterstroke,’ I said. It would be nice to be friends again with a woman who displayed such initiative.

‘I wanted to break into the flat and turn all the taps on,’ she said miserably, ‘but I hadn’t the guts.’

‘That would have been magnificent. I wanted to burn down your house.’

‘Those phone calls were amazing.’

We smiled at each other. It all seemed a long time ago. What a lot of fuss about Luke, I thought, ordering another bottle of wine. How flattering for him.

One thing led to another, the way it does, Time the Great Healer did his usual stuff, and after a while I went to work with Millie in her executive catering business. I’d had enough of the NHS and this was much easier work and far better paid.

We had a lovely secretary called Sophie, who charmed all the clients. Our food was pretty good, as it happens, but I think they’d have eaten lukewarm cardboard if Sophie had delivered it. She was twenty-three, with long legs in short skirts, and tousled dark hair, as if she had just got out of bed; she had big dark eyes, and a large mouth with well-developed lips, as if she had been practising French all her life, though her accent was pure Sloane. She was punctual, her typing was good, she put a smile in her voice on the phone, and she never parked the van on a yellow line. In short, she was a paragon and we adored her. Millie even gave her one of Samantha’s kittens. We enjoyed hearing about her various boyfriends in our coffee breaks, too, until one day she came in all starry-eyed and started talking about someone called Luke.

‘Surely not our Luke?’ I said to Millie after Sophie had gone home.

‘I’m afraid so. He’s got an accountant since he went into private practice and we’ve been catering for the accountant. It’s rotten luck.’

This was serious news. This was incest. If Sophie found out, horror of horrors, she might be so embarrassed she’d leave. And if she didn’t find out, Luke might live happily ever after. A dilemma for all of us.

‘I haven’t told her yet,’ Luke admitted. ‘I don’t want to put her off me.’

‘Thanks a lot, Luke,’ I said. ‘Are you ashamed of us?’

‘I think I’m in love,’ said Luke, sounding dreamy and smug.

So for a little while we all colluded to keep Sophie ignorant. But of course it had to come out eventually and when it did her reaction surprised us all. We had reckoned without the habits of Sophie’s class. She thought it was funny. Or, to use her exact words, ‘a hoot’. It reminded her of a sitcom on television. Apparently Sophie’s parents and step-parents had divorced and remarried so many times she thought having an extended family was the natural way to live. To Sophie the fact that we had both loved Luke and remained friends was additional proof that he was the wonderful person she knew him to be. The fact that he had left us belonged to the past. When she met him he was alone and that was all that mattered. She hadn’t had to steal him from anyone.

Luke starts talking about marriage and children. I wonder how long it will last this time. Will it be five years, ten years, fifteen years before he does another runner, or is Sophie the true love he seems to think she is? He talks about her tenderly, in poetic phrases, but I have heard it all before, about me, about Millie, about Barbara. I should stop listening. I should tell him to go away. Instead I watch his mouth. Is it possible I am something as ordinary and humiliating as jealous? I don’t want him back so why don’t I want him to be happy? Am I really thinking of Sophie’s welfare and her future as a single parent? Maybe I’m wrong and Luke has actually changed. But I believe a philandering man only comes to rest when he runs out of steam, whichever woman he happens to be with at the time. My father, for instance, stayed with his third wife mainly because he was eighty-two. Luke is only forty-three. He looks to me as if he has a lot of mileage left.

Luke’s mouth goes on moving in praise of Sophie. I wonder if I would feel more charitable if I had remarried, if Millie had remarried. I wonder why balding greying middle-aged overweight rich charming selfish men are so much in demand while thin glamorous middle-aged solvent embittered women are not. I think I know but that doesn’t mean I have to like it or that nothing can be done about it. Sophie is scarcely older than my daughters. Luke’s daughters. They like Sophie but they are startled at the idea of her as their step-mother.

Luke books one of those ritzy package holidays to Barbados. A sort of pre-wedding honeymoon. Sophie looks up catteries in the yellow pages.

‘This is a crisis,’ I say to Millie. ‘Desperate measures are called for.’

So Millie and I park outside Sophie’s flat, waiting for the kitten to emerge. Millie has her doubts about the plan and keeps making feeble objections. But I am adamant. A little healthy shared anxiety will be good for Luke and Sophie. It will test their love. Why wait till they reach the labour ward? Why wait till they reach the Caribbean?

The kitten eventually comes out of the cat flap. It’s quite big by now, nearly an adult cat, with wonderful black and orange markings. It roams in the garden, teasing us, climbs trees, stalks birds, strolls along the top of the fence, jumps down on to the pavement beside us. Millie tries to grab it but it skitters away from her.

‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ Millie says.

‘Go away, Millie,’ I say. ‘Go and mind the store. Make sure Sophie doesn’t come home early. You’re too softhearted for this kind of work.’

It takes me several days and a parking ticket to capture the cat, but eventually it gets used to me and makes the mistake of rolling around in the sun and letting me tickle its tummy. I have it in the cat basket so fast it hardly has time to scratch me it’s so surprised, and I zoom off home to imprison it in the spare room two floors up where there’s no chance of Luke hearing it mewing if he drops in unexpectedly, where it leads an indolent pampered life like a concubine in a harem with me a devoted handmaid bringing it food and milk and litter trays. It miaows a bit but on the whole it accepts the privileges of imprisonment graciously. It sleeps a lot. It plays with ping-pong balls. It rips up the carpet. I get quite fond of it. At night, secure from interruptions, I even let it curl up on my bed.

Tension is mounting, as the newspapers say. Sophie talks about her loss to Millie, who nearly weakens at the sight of her tear-stained face, and Luke talks to me, quite immune to tears. He can’t believe that Sophie would cancel a holiday because of a missing cat: it either comes back or it doesn’t, regardless of Sophie’s whereabouts. Let’s be logical about this, he says: if it never returns, God forbid, is Sophie never to go on holiday? How can waiting around for a cat be more important than going away with him? Sophie on the other hand can’t believe he would expect her to go away not knowing what has happened to the cat: how could she enjoy herself unsure if Tabitha is alive or dead? What if she came back during the holiday and found nobody there? She might go away for ever. Each is beginning to question the depth of the other’s love. They are seeing each other with new eyes.

The holiday is cancelled. The money would not be refundable: the ritzy travel agents don’t consider a missing cat sufficient reason for an insurance claim, but Luke of course is well placed for a fake medical certificate so all is well financially. They can always book another holiday. But they don’t. Something has changed. Something has been spoilt.

Millie is stricken with guilt. ‘We shouldn’t have done it,’ she says.

‘Nonsense,’ I say. ‘One day she’ll be grateful. Did you want Sophie to end up with Luke?’

Millie says no, but we should have let her find out for herself. I say nothing. I release the cat into Sophie’s garden and it bolts through the cat flap. Next day Sophie comes to the office with a radiant face.

Time passes. There is a curious atmosphere, too amorphous to dissect, a message in the ether, that somehow Luke and Sophie suspect we had something to do with the cat’s disappearance and yet they can’t or won’t accuse us. It is too improbable, too unseemly. Or perhaps they are embarrassed by their own behaviour. Sophie’s manner in the office is reserved; Luke’s voice on the telephone is cool.

After a while Luke and Sophie separate. Sophie gives in her notice: she says she is going to live in the country near her assorted relatives. Millie and I feel sad. We know we have come to the end of something important and the office will not be the same without her. Presently we decide perhaps we should not go on in business together. I think I shall take up agency nursing for a change.

More time passes. Difficult time. The girls go to visit Luke. They like his new wife. Apparently she is very pretty and great fun. They go to her twenty-first birthday party and they say the baby is gorgeous. They keep in touch with Sophie, too. They tell me she is very happy; she has married a vet.

Luke doesn’t visit me any more. It’s probably all for the best.