Chapter Four

‘No, I’m sorry, Luke. I can’t make it tonight. I have a very important meeting to go to. Perhaps some other time?’

‘What’cha muttering about? You goin’ bloody loony on us then, Will, or what?’

I looked up from my computer screen to see Neil and Clive, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the front office, hanging over my desk. ‘What?’

‘All this chuntering away to yerself, soundin’ like you’re as barmy as’ – a gesture – ‘the Lady of the Lake down there.’

The lady in question, namely Katie, could be heard singing a Killers track from the filing room, which was meant to be soundproof but wasn’t because the boys hosted farting competitions in there and the tiles had fallen off. ‘No, I was just …’

But Neil and Clive had lost interest in me and my amusing foibles and were taking themselves off to annoy Katie. She gave much better value in the irritation stakes since she had a far wider vocabulary of expletives and, because of the twins, was always slightly sleep deprived.

‘No, really, Luke,’ I continued to myself as I absentmindedly typed in the wording for a badly written advertisement. ‘I am so terribly busy. Maybe next month, sometime.’ And then the telephone rang, making me jump. ‘Hello, York Echo, how can I help you?’

‘You can let me take you out for dinner tonight.’

‘Luke?’

‘Sorry, yes. But if it makes it any better, I’m covering for Brad Pitt.’

I laughed out loud without thinking, and the rumpus from the filing room stopped. ‘Bloody ’ell, that’s it. She’s laughing to ’erself now,’ I heard Clive mutter.

‘Tonight? Are you sure?’ I lowered my voice to a semi-whisper.

‘Now, let me see, if I move Fearne Cotton to Thursday and put Cat Deeley on hold until next week – yes, Willow, I’m sure. I’ll pick you up at seven thirty, okay? I mean, will that be all right?’

I agreed, I must have done, because the next thing I knew the tiny office was full of Neil and Clive and their body odour, with Katie elbowing her way past the lot of them shrieking, ‘Have you got a date?’

Neil shook his head. ‘Fuck me, about time.’ Neil and Clive didn’t know about my little problem with men, you see. Oddly enough, I was never troubled in the digestive department by either of them, my tastes running to men whose neck measurements are a fraction of their IQs rather than double it. ‘Tasty bit like you shouldn’t be moping about on ’er own. Tell ’er, Clive.’

‘Yer. ’S right.’

Morecambe and Wise they weren’t. When they left, I brought Katie up to speed on the current Luke situation. Obviously she’d had a blow-by-blow breakdown the other night when I’d got in, plus a military-style debriefing over the coffee machine, but I was always up for another round.

‘Whoa, out on a Saturday night, and now he wants to see you again? So soon? Jeez, I just heard myself, sorry, didn’t mean to make it sound like he should have run for the hills, there. He must be keen.’ Katie sounded almost wistful. ‘He didn’t, um, he didn’t remember me at all, did he, Will?’

‘We didn’t really talk about university much,’ I lied. Luke had failed to remember anything about Katie apart from the fact that she’d been my friend, until I’d half-jokingly reminded him that he’d asked her out once.

Katie carried on. ‘I mean, he didn’t seem shy. Not when he chatted me up. Seemed perfectly at ease, actually. You know, cocksure, like he knew exactly what he was doing.’

I loved Katie dearly. As she always said, we had far too much dirt on each other to ever be enemies. So I didn’t tell her what Luke had told me. He’d been part of a group of science students who looked down on us arts-and-humanities types and he was too shy to go against peer pressure by chatting me up. One night, however, he’d got raving drunk and had somehow ended up asking Katie out in the hopes that she’d introduce us. Telling Katie he’d only talked to her because he was drunk would go against the whole spirit of sisterhood. Plus, she might hit me.

‘Where’s he taking you?’ Definitely wistful now. Poor Katie. Since the birth of the twins, she and Dan regarded putting the wheelie bin into the driveway as an evening out.

‘No idea. He didn’t say. I’d better not wear the red dress again.’

Katie and I looked at each other. ‘This might be a case,’ she said portentously.

‘For the black chiffon!’ I finished. Demure at the front, but low cut at the back, it somehow managed to say ‘I’m pure and untouched’ and yet growl ‘come and get me, big boy’. ‘As long as he wants to take me somewhere reasonably grand. I really can’t go into Burger King, not without knickers.’

‘Well, he’s got cash, hasn’t he? What was it you said he did, something to do with classic cars?’

‘Yes, he and his brother have got a car-import business, bringing classic cars from all over the world. Luke’s been in the States for the last year, setting up a franchise in Boston. His brother’s out there now sorting it out. They’ve got another one in Milan and Luke wants to open one up here in York. He’s come to check out the competition, look at the market, plus he wants to buy a house here in the city.’ The words ‘and settle down’ hung in the air, large enough to bang your head on.

‘Sounds perfect.’ Katie picked up another armful of potential filing. ‘But make sure he takes you somewhere really nice. You deserve it, Will, you really do.’

‘Thanks.’ I turned back to my screen with a coy smile to myself. Yes, I did deserve it. I deserved Luke Fry and his sexy violet eyes, his beautiful hands and his lovely pert bum. I felt as though I’d been on hold for the last ten years, marking time with nearly-good-enough boyfriends, as if I knew that one day Luke would come back and claim me.

The illusion of perfection continued into the evening. Luke picked me up in a black BMW at seven thirty on the dot, drove me confidently down a confusing maze of streets whilst telling me how good I looked, and pulled up outside a country house which could have made a living doubling for Windsor Castle.

‘Through here, Willow.’ Luke placed his hand on the small of my back to guide me into a crystal-and-candelabra-filled room. For a moment his hand lingered almost imperceptibly on my pantless buttock and I was sure that it shook slightly. His hand, I mean, not my buttock.

Luke ordered for both of us, in very good French, although I did hear him ‘tu’ the waiter, rather than the formal ‘vous’, which made me wonder just how good his French really was. And then I found myself wondering whether he’d brushed up some schoolboy French to impress me, and had a moment of hot pride that I was worth doing that for. While we waited for the food he raised his glass in a toast.

‘To starting again; it may have taken me ten years to get you here, but I’m bloody glad I made it at last.’ We’d just taken a first sip when there was an outburst of something that sounded like the latest rap sensation to hit the charts. I stared around me, this didn’t look like the sort of place to have background music, let alone the sort of music that tells the listener all about the singer’s bitches and hoes.

‘Bugger.’ Luke fished in his pockets. ‘I know it’s bad form to leave it switched on, but I’m half expecting a business call so I thought – ah.’ He extricated the phone and, without even looking at the screen, disconnected the call. ‘But they can wait, can’t they? Rather spend time talking to you.’

I stared at the tablecloth, tracing the damask pattern with a fingernail. ‘It’s fine, Luke. I really don’t mind if you want to return the call. Our food won’t be here for a bit anyhow.’

People were looking in our direction, clearly the music hadn’t been anything they’d expected to hear either. Luke ignored them and smiled at me across the table. Into my eyes. I felt the black dress get a size too small when he looked at me like that. ‘It’s not important.’

‘I don’t want to come between you and your job, Luke.’

He laughed, pocketed the phone and reached out across the table to take both my hands. ‘Willow, my sweetheart, tonight there is nothing and no one more important than you. This –’ and he let go to indicate the restaurant ‘– is all for you. You deserve it. Business is all very well, but it has to know when to take second place.’ He ramped the smile up a notch and raised his eyebrows at me. ‘And it most certainly is not coming between me and my date with the woman I’ve been thinking about for the last ten years.’

‘Have you? Really?’

‘Really.’ He turned my hand over on the tabletop, tracing my lifeline with his index finger. ‘Willow, I—’

‘Mr Fry, sir.’ Over Luke’s left shoulder appeared a man so generically waiter that I couldn’t have picked him out of a line-up, even if all the other linees had been seven-feet tall, dreadlocked and covered in tattoos. ‘You have a telephone call, sir.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, sir. In the foyer, sir, if you would like to follow me.’

Luke flicked me an apologetic glance as he followed, offering me a shrug and comedy-raised eyebrows. I used his absence to give the menu a quick once-over. This was one of those places where they look as though they’ll demand your first-born if you can’t pay the bill. I thought that I must recommend it to Katie. She’d gladly hand over both her first-borns for a meal she didn’t have to wash-up after. The waiter topped up my wine again and shortly afterwards Luke was back.

‘I am so sorry, Willow.’ He genuinely looked it. His mouth was drawn down into a tight line, his skin furrowed across his forehead. ‘It was just James being a complete pillock about some figures, that’s all. It could have waited until tomorrow, but he’s a bit of an old woman when it comes to the accounts.’

‘Well, it must be hard when you’re running on different time zones. Must be, what, early afternoon in Boston?’

Luke flashed me an odd look, then shook his hair back and took my hand again across the table. ‘Anyway. Where were we? I believe I was telling you how great it is to have met up with you, having spent the last decade running through all those conversations we should have had, if only I’d had the guts to ask you out.’

As the evening continued, we fell into many of those conversations. Life stories were exchanged, or at least, edited highlights were bandied around. I might have talked up my English degree a trifle, and I didn’t let on that I knew Luke was skating over the surface of the truth when he told me his mother had died and left his father to bring up James and himself. As I think I told you earlier, I knew an enormous amount about the young Luke Fry, and the whisper had been that his mother had run off to Amsterdam with the man she’d been having an affair with.

And, do you know the best part? I was only sick once. Between starter and main course, which was even better because I would have hated to have wasted those scallops – they were delicious. I made it to the Ladies in decorous time, pretending I needed to check my make-up. God, could things get any better?

‘Goodnight, Willow. I hope you don’t mind me not coming in or anything, but I really ought to go and call James, make sure he’s over his panic.’ The BMW pulled up outside my house and Luke leaned across me to open the door.

‘No, of course.’ I went to slide off the leather seat, but he stopped me with one hand on my shoulder.

‘I wanted to …’ Long fingers tipped my face towards him, lips shaped like the most delectable dessert descended on mine. I closed my eyes and lost myself totally in the elastic kiss. ‘See you tomorrow, Will,’ he whispered.

Did I say things couldn’t get any better?