Page 76 of The Trouble With Love

‘He’s there somewhere. Emily said she saw him . . . oh!’ Vivienne collapsed onto the stool that Eve had vacated in order to rummage through the biscuits. ‘He’s there.’ Her eyes widened. ‘There. Not the audience. He’s a contestant.’

The camera came to rest on a nondescript middle-aged man, chunky round the jowls, wearing a hand-knitted sweater and looking a bit shame-faced. ‘Bastard?’ Eve said, experimentally.

‘No, he . . . oh, turn it up, Megan, please.’ Vivienne straightened on her perch and we all watched in silence as Richard Bentley was introduced to an audience which seemed to be made up of pensioners on acid, judging by the gales of laughter raised by the presenter’s feeble attempts at humour.

‘Oh, Holly,’ Vivienne turned to me, her eyes shining. ‘The charm worked. It really worked! He’s all right!’

‘Must have been some sex,’ Meg muttered, but everyone shushed her.

And then the quiz began. Fairly straightforward in format, it consisted of Richard being given money for each correctly answered question, and losing it for wrong answers. The cash, and forfeits, rose as the level of difficulty went up and I found that I was hugging a cushion as I watched, biting the careful piping around its edges to stop myself crying out in frustration.

But eventually Richard came to the final question. He could choose to answer — trebling his current winnings and scoring himself a massive financial prize, losing it all if he was wrong — or to take what he’d got so far and run.

‘Take the money!’ Vivienne pounded the screen with a slipper. ‘You lunatic!’

‘Gamble!’ shouted Megan, and I had to stand quite firmly on her foot to shut her up. Vivienne’s eyes were nearly popping out and I hoped she didn’t have a history of high blood pressure, because the studio clock was ticking down to Richard’s decision in a way guaranteed to cause a coronary in susceptible viewers.

‘I’ll gamble,’ he said, into our collective intake of breath. The camera closed in on his face. ‘But first I want to apologise.’ The slick presenter knew good TV when he participated in it, and stood back, allowing Richard full access to the camera banks. ‘Vivienne, if you’re watching, I did it all for you. I had to leave, to stop you getting dragged into the God-awful mess that my life became. I thought you might have known . . . worked it out from the fact that I’d put everything into your name just before the bank foreclosed on the business loan. But if I win here tonight then so many of my troubles will be over. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me the pain I caused you, and that we could at least try to be together again.’

‘Questioned good and hard and then put out of his misery.’ I’d half-whispered it, but Vivienne heard and whipped her head around towards me. Her eyes were fixed, over-bright, as though she was holding tears under her lids.

‘Oh . . . He loved me. All the time, he loved me.’ Red-clawed fingers raked at her hair. ‘He wasn’t finding himself, he was protecting me.’

‘I wouldn’t want to find myself wearing a jumper like that,’ Megan said, matter-of-factly.

‘I knitted it. Three years ago. He’s wearing it as a sign that everything he says is true, he really does want me to take him back.’

‘If he wins.’ I felt a bit of an old sourpuss. ‘Then he can pay off a lot of his debts. Buy himself out of bankruptcy.’

‘It’s like that film, Slumdog Millionaire,’ Isobel added. ‘Winning the quiz gets him the girl!’

‘He hasn’t won yet,’ Eve reminded us.

‘But I’d take him back anyway, the old fool.’ The tears were there now, spreading onto Vivienne’s make-up like flooding pools. ‘Win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He never needed to protect me, he should have just told me the truth! I would have been there for him, no matter what.’

The final question came, dropped into a hushed audience. ‘For the final gamble, Richard Bentley, can you tell me — who, or what, is Messier 81?’

A sudden sound beside me. Vivienne was sobbing quietly into cupped hands. I patted her shoulder awkwardly. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Bankruptcy gets paid off eventually. And you might not have any money, but you’ll have each other.’

She raised her head and I was surprised to see no trace of tears now. In fact, she was laughing gently. ‘He knows the answer, Holly,’ she whispered. ‘He knows.’

Megan and I raised eyebrows at each other. Faith was one thing, but . . .

‘It’s a galaxy. A very distant galaxy.’ Richard answered firmly, decisively, and the audience cheered wildly as the big red tick that signified a correct answer flashed up onto the screen.

‘When we first married, Richard was studying astronomy. He wrote a dissertation on spiral galaxies, I remember having the notes lying around the place for weeks! I used to tidy them up, and he’d just go and get them straight out again, said he knew exactly where everything was, even when it was piled up on the floor . . . Messier 81 was one of his favourites. He gave up astronomy because he had a family to support.’ Vivienne couldn’t stifle the laughter any longer. ‘He thought there was no money in it.’

As we watched the huge numbers racking up on the winnings readout, we all started to laugh.

I cleared away the teacups, pouring stagnant tea down the kitchen sink, listening to the atmosphere in the living room becoming more relaxed by the second. Vivienne had broken out the plum wine and I suspected I was the only person who was going to be fit to drive soon, and I only had one operable eye.

Oh, and Isobel, who came into the kitchen with me, elbowing the door closed, but helping me with the dishes without speaking. When we’d washed and dried the final crockery, I turned to face her. ‘Okay, now you can spit it out. What is it that you feel you have to tell me?’

Isobel let her hair hang over her face. ‘I don’t know if I can, now.’

‘Is it anything to do with the spell?’

A pause and then a slight nod. ‘I think so. At least . . . I don’t know.’

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