The Proposal Plan (12 page)

Lucy opened the oven and removed the mess inside. She’d put the cakes in before Gabriel arrived and had forgotten about them. They
were burnt and rock hard. A total disaster. She hoped that wasn’t a reflection on her life. She felt emotionally drained and exhausted. She did her best to try and think clearly but her mind felt groggy and slow. What she needed was fresh air and she longed for a run by the river to clear her mind. She wasn’t sure of what she wanted to do, of where to go from here. So Gabriel didn’t want her to propose to Ed. But he didn’t seem sure how he wanted things to proceed between them. He seemed afraid to commit to anything more than ‘giving it a try’. Was she not worth more than that? Surely gambling their friendship meant more to him than that.

She had no idea whether she and Ed could work things out, but, even if he could forgive her behaviour, would it be right for her to stay with him after this? Could she live with the lack of passion that came so easily to her with Gabriel as long as she had the settled security that Ed had always given her and that was so important to her?

Or did she risk everything, literally everything, on Gabriel? Her stable relationship with Ed, her friendship with Gabriel, which was more like a family tie really, her home because if something went wrong with Gabriel
she couldn’t live here, not any more. Heart or head? Which way should she jump? When it came right down to it she was scared. Scared of everything she had to lose.

Gabriel sat in silence in his house. He was deep in thought. Ed’s message on his answering machine had been blinking away when he’d got back from the swift visit he’d made to his family home. Still unable to shake the sense of unease that had descended on him when Lucy hadn’t simply fallen instantly into his arms, he was immediately put on edge at the sound of Ed’s voice. Had Lucy spoken to him? Already? He began to frown as he listened to the short message.

‘Er, right… Gabriel?’ A pause. ‘Not there, then?’ Gabriel raised exasperated eyes skyward. For all his business aspirations Ed had yet to master the art of the slick answering machine message.

‘Ed here. Lucy’s Ed.’

The way Ed spoke, as if he somehow belonged to Lucy, made Gabriel bridle with jealousy. He might not hold Ed in particularly high regard but there was no getting away from how
much Ed had meant to Lucy for a considerable time. He would be a fool to underestimate that.

‘Just wondering if you can make it to The Abbey tonight. Half-seven-ish. Bit of an evening planned and I’m sure Lucy would like you to be there. Bye, then.’

The machine clicked off. What the hell did this mean? She couldn’t have told Ed about them, then, as she’d said she was going to. Was she having second thoughts? Or was this some kind of ruse on Ed’s part to get him in the same room, have it out with him? Gabriel had no feelings of guilt. In his opinion Ed didn’t deserve Lucy; it was as simple as that. If he’d been up to the challenge she would never have been tempted to look at anyone else. It was Ed’s own fault if she found what she needed elsewhere. He knew in his bones that he, Gabriel, was what she needed—it was just convincing her of that fact that was the problem. Lucy felt guilty enough for the both of them, it seemed.

He picked up the square velvet box that rested on the table in front of him. It opened with an almost inaudible squeak. Nestled inside was an ornate emerald ring in a Victorian setting. He took it out and twisted it between
his finger and thumb, studying it. The green was the colour of Lucy’s eyes. It had been his grandmother’s. After Lucy’s reaction today he had known he had to find a way to convince her that he could offer the lifelong security and love she craved. Maybe this ring, a piece of his family, to which she’d always dreamed of belonging when she was a child, could help him do that. He snapped the box shut. Whatever this evening was, whatever happened, he intended to be there. He intended to fight for her now in any way he could.

The Abbey was a popular bar showing a mixture of live music and televised sport. Somewhere in the course of her relationship with Ed it had come to belong to them in the way bars and pubs sometimes did when you visited them often enough. As she walked down the steps and through the door into the mellow darkness, dotted with flickering hurricane lamps on tables, Lucy’s stomach was a knot of nerves. Perhaps by the end of the evening she would have some clarity about her feelings. About what she wanted to do.

She needed to talk things through with Ed. If everything had been right with their relationship
she would never have looked to Gabriel for more than friendship. Yet the moment she had begun to think about pushing for commitment from Ed, her long-buried feelings for Gabe had begun to resurface. Slowly at first but gathering momentum until at the dance she had been unable to exert the self control she always believed she had when it came to principles like infidelity. The physical and emotional way Gabe touched her transcended all rational thought.

She was clear about one thing. She had to be totally honest with Ed about what she had done, how she had let him down. She wasn’t sure Ed would still want to talk to her, or even look at her after that. She couldn’t let herself think about Gabriel until she’d gone through with this.

She glanced automatically towards the table halfway down the room. Years of sitting at it had given it the tag ‘our table’ whenever they attended together and both of them felt irrationally aggrieved if anyone else dared to sit at it. She stopped and stared. There was no sign of Ed but Yabba, Suzy and Kate were sitting there, drinks in hand. Digger was standing at the bar and raised a hand in her direction as
he caught sight of her. And was that Joanna sitting with her back to the door?

She felt a surge of exasperation. So much for an evening of in-depth soul-searching with Ed. After their argument he’d obviously decided that the perfect way to get things back on track was a night out with all their friends. As if on cue she noticed Ed himself striding across the room from the stage area where the live music, a jaunty-looking man with a synthesizer and backing track, was setting up. So not only an evening with their friends but an evening of shouting all conversation over blaring music. She tried not to tense up as Ed swept her into a hug.

‘Great, you made it! Come on, let’s get you a drink.’ He pulled her by the hand towards the bar as the jaunty man kicked off with a loud sixties track. Ed raised his voice to compensate. ‘Orange juice?’ he shouted.

She nodded. ‘Ed.’ She tugged at his sleeve to get his attention. ‘Ed!’

He looked round.

‘I thought we were going to talk,’ she half yelled. ‘You know. After yesterday. Straighten some things out.’ She could see Digger standing
behind Ed, very deliberately not listening, and she frowned at him. He looked away.

‘We will, we will! No harm in having a good evening out though, eh?’

He gave her waist a squeeze and she felt an odd sense of unease at his enthusiastic manner. Ed was behaving weirdly. She wondered for a moment if she’d got it wrong on the phone and if he really had somehow found out about her kiss with Gabriel. Was he going to make some kind of scene? She dismissed the thought immediately. Ed was a straight-down-the-line kind of guy. He didn’t have hidden agendas; they weren’t his style. She was just on edge because of the weight of her conscience. And the way the evening was going there was no way she’d be able to do anything about that here.

They made their way to the table and she reluctantly took the vacant seat between Ed and Joanna.

‘How’s Gabriel?’ Joanna asked her at the first opportunity.

Oh, for heaven’s sake
. ‘He’s well, as far as I know,’ she said shortly. How could she be expected to put Gabriel out of her mind when people kept mentioning him at every turn?

‘Ask him yourself, Jo,’ Ed said, raising a
hand in greeting towards the door. He kept his other arm clamped firmly around Lucy’s shoulders in a gesture of possessiveness that didn’t escape her notice.

Lucy’s heart felt as if it had been jumpstarted; she felt her pulse begin to race. Not a gradual climb in heart rate but an uncontrollable leap. She turned to look. The bar might as well have been empty. For her there was no one else here. The irritating music faded to a background hum. Her green eyes met his grey ones and she was home.

Why didn’t Ed make her feel like this? Not just now, but ever. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d looked at Ed and thought that the world could end right there and then and she wouldn’t give a damn as long as she was with him. Gabriel crossed the room and sat down opposite her. Every cell in her body was in a heightened sense of awareness. Her desire for him was so acute that she worried the others would guess her innermost thoughts, and she tried hard to avoid looking at him.

As Ed kissed her cheek and stood up to speak to someone her rational mind kicked in with another twist of unease. What was Gabe doing here? This wasn’t one of his haunts; he
preferred the trendier wine bars and nightclubs closer to the city centre. She felt a sudden prickling of worry that maybe he intended to confront Ed with what had happened between them, force the issue despite all they’d said that afternoon. She couldn’t do that to Ed. For heaven’s sake, all she wanted was the chance to come clean to Ed, to treat him with the decency he deserved, and yet all people and circumstances seemed to be thwarting that.

As soon as Joanna had finished her effusive greeting of Gabe—did she need to kiss him on
both
cheeks?—Lucy leaned in across the table towards him, fighting the urge to reach out and touch him.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she asked in an awkward stage whisper, trying not to draw attention from the others. Especially Joanna, who looked none too pleased at having Gabriel diverted.

‘Ed invited me.’

Her heart felt like a brick in her chest. ‘Why would he do that? He never calls you up, invites you anywhere. He leaves all that to me, if we ever see you socially. Which we hardly ever do.’ She looked at him urgently. ‘What is going on?’

‘Well, I did wonder, to be honest. I actually thought you might have told him about us. I was almost ready for a showdown even though he said you’d be here, too.’

‘Of course I haven’t told him. I can hardly talk things through with him in front of this lot, can I? Not that I can hear myself think anyway!’ She sat back in her seat and cast a nasty look at the entertainer, who was continuing with his hideous set of sixties and seventies music, singing along to an awful backing track. Just at that moment Yabba brayed a loud guffaw two seats away from her that wouldn’t have sounded amiss on a donkey. The place was bedlam. And then the last straw: the music suddenly changed to the booming introduction of an Elvis Presley number.

‘Oh, you can’t be serious! This bar has the worst live music in Bath!’ she shouted. She grabbed her orange juice angrily. Nothing was going to be resolved tonight and she might as well get used to it.

‘Is that Ed?’ Joanna said suddenly to no one in particular.

The hand clutching her orange juice froze en route to her lips. The table fell gradually still as one face after another turned towards the
stage. Lucy followed Gabriel’s shocked gaze to the pool of light in which Ed stood, holding a microphone attached to a stand. Her eyes took in every detail against her will in glorious sharp colour. Ed was wearing a silver jumpsuit—
a jumpsuit!
—encrusted with coloured plastic gemstones that caught the light. Even as she watched he struck a pose, opened his mouth and burst into a heavily exaggerated Elvis impression. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in an uncomprehending grimace. An enormous Elvis quiff perched on top of his head. He had even blackened his blond sideburns to match the awful wig. Her eyes refused to leave out the slightest grisly detail as he threw himself with gusto into murdering ‘The Wonder Of You’.

Gabriel was motionless opposite her, an expression of dumbstruck amazement on his face.

‘I didn’t know Ed could sing,’ Joanna said.

Ed’s voice built to a warbling crescendo, his authentically trembling lip visible even from across the room. He seemed to be working on the policy that loudness would counteract lack of tune. As Lucy watched him through stunned eyes he struck another pose to end the first
verse, one hand plastered to a jewel-encrusted hip, the other stabbing the air above his head with a pointed finger.

‘Well, let’s be honest about it. He can’t sing, can he?’ Yabba said as Ed’s voice took on a screechy pitch.

Mercifully one verse seemed to be enough for him. It was certainly enough for everyone else as a stunned silence fell for an excruciating moment before scattered clapping kicked in. Lucy was transfixed as Ed took the microphone from the stand and began to make his way across the room towards her. The spotlight followed him. He spoke into the mike as he walked.

‘That was for mah Lucy.’

She realised with horror that he was staying in character.

‘I love ya, little lady.’

‘I had no idea you were an Elvis fan, Lucy,’ Joanna leaned in and said to her as Ed progressed between the tables, the spotlight taking in his every move.

‘I’m not,’ Lucy heard herself say. Her mind and eyes didn’t seem to be engaged with each other properly. Was that really Ed? What the hell was he doing? ‘Not really. Ed’s a massive
fan, though. Always trying to indoctrinate me…’

Her voice trailed into nothing as Ed finally reached her table. Beads of sweat hung on his face. Was he really wearing fake tan? She was vaguely aware that the spotlight was taking her in, too, now and she knew just from the way her face burned that she was a bright tomato red.

She had no time to think, no time to collect herself. Whatever she’d been expecting from the evening it certainly hadn’t been this. It was like some surreal dream and she half expected to wake up and find herself in bed at home.

Ed flung himself theatrically onto his knees at her feet. Looking up at her and still in character, he crooned in a deep-voiced southern drawl, ‘Will ya marry me, baby?’

Opposite them, in the darkness outside the spotlight, Gabriel was choking on his drink. Joanna stood up and thumped him artlessly on the back. Lucy didn’t notice. Too late, the penny had finally dropped. Silence fell around her. She was suddenly unaware of anything except for the stares of everyone in the room boring into her, taking in the pair of them bathed in the light. Ed gazed up at her, a silly
grin plastered across his orange tinted face, an expectant look in his eyes. And before she knew what she was saying, before she even knew what she was thinking, panic and confusion spoke for her and the word was out of her mouth.