Page 5 of The Price of Love
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Later that evening when Katie rang me, having hog-wrestled the twins to bed and sent Dan out with his mates for a Friday night restorative, I was knee-deep in my wardrobe looking for a suitable date dress.
‘I don’t want to look too tarty,’ I explained with the telephone clamped under my chin, both hands busy rattling through the rails. ‘But then I don’t want to look as though I’ve got librarians in my ancestry either.’
‘What about your red dress?’
‘Too much cleavage.’
‘The purple one?’
‘Not enough.’ I sighed heavily and sluiced an armful of clothing onto the bed. ‘Honestly, Katie, my going-out clothes make me look like a cut-price hooker and my work clothes make me look like a geography teacher. Why has no one ever pointed this out to me before?’
Katie coughed. ‘Um, Will, you don’t think you might be reading a bit too much into all this, do you? I mean, perhaps he reallydoeswant to chat about the old days.’
‘Listen, I would dress up to hear Luke Fry read the frigging weather forecast. I don’t carewhyhe wants me there, the fact is he wants to talk to me, and I owe it to my past self to at least feel not like a complete minger while he’s doing it. Now. What about the white dress?’
‘Bit bridal. You don’t want to scare the bejesus out of the poor guy. And don’t you think it’s all a bit sudden? When he, ahem, I mean, you have to admit, Wills, he wasn’t exactly receptive to your charms while we were at uni, was he?’
‘Well, no, but I have changed quite a bit, Katie.’ You should have seen me back then. I was a dead ringer for an Afghan Hound after a tumble-dry. And so shy, some days I could hardly bear to talk to myself.
‘He recognised you though.’
Yes, he had. After Katie hung up to go and have a long, uninterrupted piss, as she put it, I rooted through some of my memorabilia until I found the photograph. It had been taken by my then-boyfriend, a gangly streak of spots called Tom who I’d gone out with because he roadied for Fresh Fingers now and again. He’d been nice enough, quite pretty, too, but the spots had ensured that any attractive tendencies were submerged beneath layers of concealer. So my stomach contents had remained safely content and not avant-garde wall decoration.
The photograph showed Fresh Fingers, posing outside York Minster. The three other lads were sitting on the steps, but Lukehad draped himself over the stonework of the south entrance, arm around a carved saint, and was glowering at the camera from under hair which must have made up half his bodyweight. On the farfarleft stood the figure of a girl, almost out of shot. She was wearing a gypsy skirt, a loose tartan top, hiking boots and an overlarge black duster coat. An unruly frizzle of blondish hair obscured her face but, yes, you’ve guessed it. Looking like an explosion in a charity shop, with split ends in need of extensive welding treatment, and so hopelessly, helplessly, heartbreakingly in love with Luke that a negative aura seemed to surround me, even in a photograph. I was like a black hole with bad hair.
I sighed and shoved the photo away. I was no longer that gauche, slightly podgy, badly assembled girl. No, I was a completely different gauche, badly assembled girl and the podge had transformed into curves, the bad hair into a reasonably sleek shoulder-length style. I waltzed in front of the mirror, embracing a scarlet hook-and-eye-bodiced dress which made me look like a surgical incision, but was, at least, neither tarty nor sternly practical. It was therefore my choice of dress for Luke.
Katie had to be pessimistic. She stood as the voice of reason to Jazz and my enthusiastic overreactions. But there was no escaping that not only had Luke recognised me, he’d rung almost straight away. In my book, that meant interest of a more than catching-up kind.
I yelled a ‘goodnight’ to Flint and went to bed, hanging the dress up on my wardrobe door so that I would see it if I woke during the night, and remember that this Saturday night was going to be different.
Chapter Three
Saturday evening saw me ready at least three times. I kept making vital errors of judgement, firstly on the make-up front (when I put on so much that if I’d turned round suddenly my expression would have remained where it was), then the shoes (the red dress demanded heels, the distance I had to walk demanded flats). Then, just before I left I realised that the slim skirt made my underwear visible from four counties, and had to discard my big pants for a thong. Which, combined with the heels (put comfort over appearance? Are youmad?), made me walk into the bar with a strange sort of wiggle, which I suppose might have been construed as alluring, but only by someone who’d never actually met a woman in real life.
Several people looked up at my entrance. None of them was Luke. I ordered myself a grapefruit juice and sat down by the windows overlooking the river, to give me something to gaze moodily at. I was working on a nice case of stood-up paranoia when there was a touch on my arm.
‘Willow? Hello, sorry I’m a bit late.’
He was tucking away his mobile as he spoke and I noticed what beautifully casual trousers he was wearing, and that his shirt looked freshly pressed. Anything rather than look at his face. Even so my stomach was doing its warm-up exercises.
‘Oh, hello, Luke.’
I managed to keep my eyes below neck-level, but any moment now I was going to have to look up, or be thought terminally rude. I flipped a peek up and straight back down again, hoping he wouldn’t think I was fixated with his groin. Despite the supersonic speed of my glance, I noticed that he was smiling at me, holding a chair slightly away from the table. My heart was beating so hard that I could see the front of my dress moving.
‘Is it all right?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry, yes, do. Sit. Yes. Down,’ I burbled, moving my jacket, bag, the menu, rearranging my glass on the table, anything but look directly at him. ‘Have you had far to come?’ Despite myself, my gaze treacherously slithered upwards and rested on the bridge of his exquisite nose. Oh dear God, but he was gorgeous.
‘Not really. I’m staying in the Moat House across the river until I can find a place to buy.’ He indicated the ridiculously pricey and ugly pile which loomed over the river like a concrete frown. ‘How about you? You said you live in York now?’
I struggled to reply coherently. All the while the windmills of my stomach ground and turned, and I fought that grapefruit juice to an internal standstill. We chatted a little more, about university life, the very few mutual friends we had had, including Tom who was now, apparently, a well-regarded glamour photographer. I hoped his spots had finally cleared up.
‘I really fancied you back then, you know.’ I half-raised my hand to cover my mouth then realised that I didn’t have to. Amazingly enough, the words had been spoken by Luke.
‘You what?’
