The Wedding Proposal

by Sue Moorcroft

  ‘You don’t like it?’ Carmelo sat upright in indignation.

  Elle shook her head apologetically. ‘I’m probably being too English but it’s odd for something red to taste like an orange. If you like it, will you eat it for me? I’ll move on to the pomegranate.’ She jumped up to borrow a small knife from Maria so that she could cut the pomegranate in half, and a teaspoon with which to ease out its jewel-like seeds. Returning to the table, she gave an inner cheer to see Carmelo tucking into the blood orange, juice pink on his chin.

  Mindful not to be judgemental, she acknowledged inwardly that he could have lunch awaiting him and had chosen to come to the centre rather than go home to eat it. But if he had, then an orange was unlikely to spoil his appetite.

  Nor would half a pomegranate, should she find herself unable to eat a whole one.

  At two-thirty, Elle presented herself in Joseph’s office.

  Lucas was already seated on one of the eclectic collection of chairs: grey, with a ladder in the fabric on the arm like a run in a woolly sock. A white T-shirt made his hair and eyes look particularly dark. He greeted her casually but she found herself blushing as she took her seat, glad that Joseph was scrabbling through his paper-heaped desk for a pad and pen.

  ‘So,’ Joseph began, settling his glasses. ‘Elle tells me that you would like to discuss doing something for the children?’

  Lucas crossed his ankle over the other knee and ran briefly through the details of his job and where he worked. ‘I’ve spoken to Vern, the owner of Dive Meddi, and we wonder if you’d like us to put on a Bubblemaker Session? A Bubblemaker session’s for under-twelves and it gives them a taste of using scuba equipment in an enclosed, safe environment. It’s all about fun and enjoyment but, of course, safety is paramount.’

  He spent some time describing the facilities at Dive Meddi and what the ratios would need to be of child to instructor in the water. ‘The first step would be for Vern and I to visit the centre with a fun presentation on diving, including slides showing the equipment and some of the aquatic life that inhabits the waters around Malta.’

  As Lucas and Joseph discussed parental consent necessary for children to take part in the pool session, transport, on-shore supervision, equipment, insurance and Joseph visiting the dive school and meeting Vern, Elle watched Lucas’s lips, enjoying his quick intelligence as he poured out information in a way that was interesting, comprehensive and comprehensible. Her eyes dropped to his hands as he borrowed Joseph’s pad to augment an explanation with a sketch.

  Presently, it was agreed that Joseph would check out Dive Meddi late that afternoon, when the diving groups were back, with a view to the presentation happening late Friday afternoon.

  Joseph asked Elle to devise and print posters for the noticeboard in the lounge and for the doors in the activity rooms.

  ‘Fine,’ she agreed, promptly. ‘Lucas, do you have time to run up to the computer room with me to help me get the blurb right?’

  ‘I’m happy to be in your hands,’ he said easily, making Elle blush again.

  They left Joseph to whichever of the million-and-one admin tasks had risen to the top of his ‘to do’ list and stepped out into the hall. At the foot of the stairs they had to pause to let Oscar come cantering down.

  He pulled up with a broad grin and a loud and over-effusive greeting. Then he checked the corridor in both directions and lowered his voice. ‘So, boyfriend-not boyfriend-boyfriend. Maybe it’s with you she had the big sexual night, yes? She told me about it.’

  Horror shot through Elle’s chest. ‘Oscar!’ she hissed, her cheeks on fire. ‘That is so not appropriate.’

  Oscar laughed. ‘Then you should not tell me.’

  She turned to Lucas. ‘I was trying to stop him h-hitting on me. I didn’t go in to detail—’

  But Lucas was grinning. ‘You went public that we spent the night together?’ he drawled. ‘That’s the best news I’ve had all day.’

  ‘Oh!’ Elle laughed, reluctantly. ‘Yes, I suppose I can see how that would work for you.’ Relieved that Oscar’s poison dart had turned out to be so easily deflected, she couldn’t resist sending the Dutchman a triumphant smile. It got her a glower in return.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Elle arranged her Friday so that she could whisk through Seadancer in the morning.

  ‘You’re very chirpy, young lady!’ commented Loz.

  Elle hugged her and laughed. ‘A sister at Bettsbrough General Hospital says my mother’s doing better and it looks as if she might be able to move back to The Briars some time.’ Joanna would need a higher level of care than before but it was too early to plan. Out of her limited choices, it seemed the most desirable.

  But of course it wasn’t her mother’s health that was making Elle dance through her day. It was Lucas. She couldn’t believe how the wariness that she’d thought graven on his face had vanished and that the suspicion in his eyes had gone. Last night they’d talked for hours. Talked and laughed and teased and made love.

  They’d talked about only happy things, hopeful things. Summer in Malta. Making children laugh. Travel. Charlie obviously being nuts about Kayleigh – as opposed to his usual state of simply being nuts. The pleasure of a cool shower after an overheated day; what the surface of the sea looked like from beneath; why bed was positively the only place to share Marsovin wine.

  After everything that had happened, it was bliss.

  But once Lucas had fallen into the sleep of the physically replete she’d remained awake, battling with the spectre of Ricky, worrying whether Lucas’s parents would hate her all over again if or when they learned of the current situation. Had Lucas made the right decision? She didn’t know. Should she insist on full disclosure? She shied away, too relieved and too scared of losing Lucas again to be that noble.

  But now, in daylight, Elle had returned joyfully to wallowing in the bliss. Everything looked worse at night. It was a well-known fact.

  In the afternoon, Elle went up to Nicholas Centre, where Vern would give the Dive Meddi presentation and Lucas, according to him, would press the buttons for the slide show and laugh in the right places.

  The setting out of chairs began an hour before the presentation and many of the kids had already congregated noisily in the big salon by the time Elle heard Lucas’s voice coming up the stairs. Elle instantly abandoned the computer room, where she’d been whiling away the time helping Carmelo set up a Nicholas Centre Twitter account. Carmelo was even faster.

  ‘Lucas!’ Carmelo beamed, intercepting Lucas as he reached the landing, hand raised expectantly.

  ‘Hey, Carmelo.’ With a big grin, Lucas dropped one of the black bags he carried to whip out an enthusiastic high five. If he noticed that Carmelo was dressed in cut-offs and a T-shirt just like Lucas’s cut-offs and T-shirt, he didn’t betray it. ‘This is my boss, Vern.’

  Vern high fived Carmelo, too, and then shook hands with Elle. ‘Great to meet you.’ His hand was like a paw around Elle’s.

  Elle took to Vern immediately. His thinning hair was coppery and curly and his eyebrows were set in a permanent arch, making him look like an oversized, faintly exasperated cherub.

  In the big salon, leaving Lucas to set up a laptop and pop-up screen out of one of the capacious bags, Vern addressed the children with a brief and easy, ‘I’m Vern and this is Lucas.’ To Elle it seemed a casual opening, used as she was to the business world. But Vern seemed to have the knack of connecting instantly with everybody in the room and there was no sign in the audience of the kind of teen Aileen had warned Elle of, those who attended events solely to tut and roll their eyes.

  As Vern talked, Lucas put up an underwater shot on the screen.

  Vern glanced at it. ‘Anyone know what that is?’

  ‘Starfish!’

  ‘You’re too good.’ The slide changed. ‘And this
?’

  ‘Sea urchin! Rizzi.’

  Another change. ‘Octopus! Qarnita.’

  Vern made an enlightened face. ‘I can see that I’m going to learn the Maltese names for lots of things that live in the sea, this afternoon.’ For several minutes the kids oohed and aahed over marine life with Vern and Lucas.

  Then came cartoons of a bony-looking man holding a snorkel and scratching his head. ‘This is Scooter the Scuba-nut,’ explained Vern. ‘I wonder if you can help him? He wants to swim under the water but he knows he’s missing some things—’

  ‘Fins!’

  ‘Air!’ the children called.

  ‘You obviously know a lot already.’ Vern glanced around at the kids with a congratulatory grin. ‘Yes, he’s not a fish so he needs air. “Scuba” stands for “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus” but you don’t need to worry about that. What does Scooter need over his eyes so that he can see underwater?’

  ‘Mask!’

  Lucas put up an image of Scooter wearing a mask, his eyes magnified to fish-like proportions behind the glass. The audience laughed.

  Elle’s attention was on Lucas as he took his cues from his boss, moving through what was obviously a well-organised presentation, however nonchalantly it was rolled out. As if becoming aware of her regard, he shifted his gaze straight to where she sat on the end of a row close to the back.

  Swiftly, she winked.

  One corner of his mouth quirked up, before he transferred his attention back to Vern.

  Once Scooter the Scuba-nut had been seen through the entire process of equipping, learning technique in enclosed water and then in more open water in the company of shoals of fish, Vern began to unpack and discuss various pieces of scuba equipment from the big black bags and soon a couple of the children were trying things on and everyone was giggling at how they looked in fins and masks and BCDs.

  It was right at the end of the ‘show’ when Vern demanded, ‘OK, hands up everyone who thinks they want to try scuba in our pool at St Julian’s?’ About half of the children waved enthusiastically; the others shook their heads or pulled nervous faces. ‘OK, those of you who think you might like a go, Joseph has some letters to go to your parents. They have to sign a form to say it’s OK for you to visit Dive Meddi and take part in the Bubblemaker session. It’s very important that we do that.’ Vern went through what happened at a Bubblemaker, calling on Lucas for corroboration, talking about safety and following instructions, putting up slides of the instructors working with learner divers in and around a pool cut from rock.

  ‘And’—Vern grinned around conspiratorially—‘I think we need some of the adults from the centre, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’ shouted the children.

  Elle waved both hands. ‘I’d love to!’

  ‘And me also,’ said Oscar, immediately.

  Joseph nodded. ‘I’ll drive the minibus and stand on shore to watch everyone in the pool.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Vern. ‘Two in the water and one on the side is exactly what we need.’

  That evening, Elle and Lucas went out with Charlie and Kayleigh. Charlie was grouchy because Kayleigh was moving on to her convention on Sunday and she’d no longer have a hotel room for him to share. He’d spent three hours in a cyber cafe hunting for accommodation, but nothing he could afford was available this far into the summer season. He wasn’t sure he had the cheek to try and invite himself on board Seadancer.

  Kayleigh was equally glum at the prospect of him flying back to the UK.

  Elle touched the back of Lucas’s neck. The zing that shot down his spine got his attention. ‘If I moved in with you, Charlie could have the guest cabin,’ she mused nonchalantly.

  Lucas glared at her in mock exasperation. ‘I thought I’d get to tell Charlie.’

  Charlie and Kayleigh’s reciprocal grouchiness paused. Charlie looked from his brother to Elle and back again. ‘Move in with …? Are you two … um?’

  Elle made a contrite face at Lucas. ‘Sorry. Please could you tell Charlie that yes, we are “um”, but he can only have the cabin on condition that he doesn’t tell anyone else. It’s too—’ She scrabbled for a word.

  ‘Scary,’ Lucas supplied. ‘And certain people are going to demand a whole lot of explanations.’

  ‘I’m not scared!’ she protested stoutly. ‘I just want to enjoy it as it is, for now.’ Then she pulled a face. ‘And try not to think about the explanations.’

  Lucas pulled her close, hooking his hand comfortably around her waist. ‘Let’s go with enjoying it.’ Because he sure as hell didn’t want to get into the likely reaction of his parents. He’d leave a long fuse on that time bomb.

  They celebrated with plentiful prosecco and were the butt of Charlie’s and Kayleigh’s teasing all evening. Lucas couldn’t remember ever having a better time. Especially when the party broke up and he got to stroll home under a starry sky, take Elle to his – their – cabin and slowly undress her.

  Finally, he fell asleep feeling as he assumed lottery winners must feel: floating a foot above the ground, hardly able to believe what had happened, wearing a grin that felt as if it might look stupid.

  Equally euphoric was to wake with Elle beside him, her grin every bit as stupid as his own, the sunlight that streamed through the skylights turning her hair into molten gold. She shone like the Elle he first knew, the one whose eyes had blazed with indignation when he literally bowled her over, the one who had teased him when he’d asked for a date, as if she’d already understood that he always knew what he wanted and that it wouldn’t work well for either of them if he got it too easily.

  The Elle he’d fallen in love with.

  On Tuesday, Joseph, Elle, Oscar and eight children who had managed to get their consent forms signed in time – including Carmelo – piled into a minibus that Joseph got cheaply from a local hire company, with Joseph driving.

  Elle made certain to grab the vacant seat next to Carmelo, so that she could be sure not to have to sit with Oscar. Carmelo rewarded her with a huge grin.

  With all the windows open, they made the twenty-minute drive from Gżira to St Julian’s, pulling up at a gateway marked by a tall blue sign with ‘Dive Meddi’ dancing across it in yellow lettering, fizzing with bubbles. The noise the children made as they poured out of the minibus and down the pathway towards the pool had to be heard to be believed. Elle wasn’t surprised to find a grinning Lucas already emerging from the Dive Meddi building to meet them.

  ‘So who’s for a Bubblemaker?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ The volume of noise actually rose.

  Vern ambled out and had to raise both his hands before they quietened enough for him to speak. ‘One thing we all have to do very well on a Bubblemaker,’ he said, ‘is listen.’ He pulled his ears out from the side of his head, making the children burst into giggles. ‘So that means you need to be quiet when I, or any of the instructors or divemasters, ask you to be.’

  He talked on, cracking jokes but getting over a lot of information, making certain that the children understood that they would be safe. Not only were Joseph and Vern to watch from the poolside but in the water would be Lucas, Brett, Polly – who Elle recognised as the driver of the green truck that sometimes came for Lucas – and Lars, a serious Swedish man. With so many observant eyes and trained bodies, Elle felt cocooned.

  Then it was time to shuck off clothes to reveal swimming gear underneath. Carmelo’s trunks and those of one bigger boy looked a lot like ordinary shorts, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to anyone.

  Elle had opted for her plain one-piece but she still didn’t like the way that Oscar looked at her. And she was pretty certain it was no coincidence that her wetsuit, black with blue flashes, was the first that Lucas handed out, so that she could drag the unwilling neoprene up to cover her exposed fle
sh.

  She’d never fought her way into a wetsuit before. It was like squashing her way into a onesie that was two sizes too small and ten times too thick. The thing seemed unwilling to have her inside it and she was out of breath by the time she managed to zip it up.

  The time flew by as equipment was selected and tried on, and each person had the opportunity to see how it felt to breathe through a regulator, unfamiliar and cumbersome in the mouth. Buoyancy control devices were fitted, and Elle recognised child safeguarding at work as instructors and divemasters turned each child towards Joseph and Vern and provided a running commentary on what they were doing. ‘I’m tightening the shoulder straps by pulling here. I’m fastening the BCD here, here and here.’

  The first four children and Oscar were soon, under Polly and Brett’s supervision, dipping their faces into the water to check that, yes, they really could still breathe through a regulator once it was submerged. Before long, all she could see of them was bubbles and heads moving under the surface as Polly got them all to kneel down and practice hand signals.

  Carmelo had managed to get himself into Lars’s group with Lucas and Elle. ‘What will happen if I can’t breathe underwater?’ he demanded, as Lucas showed him how to adjust his mask so that none of his hair intruded and broke the seal.

  ‘You will be able to. But if you couldn’t, you’d just stand up and breathe normally. I won’t let you go out of your depth.’

  Carmelo didn’t look quite convinced. ‘Could I die?’

  ‘No,’ said Lucas, calmly. ‘Because I’m here looking after you, and so are Lars and Elle.’

  For Elle, it was a golden afternoon. She loved seeing Lucas doing his job. Calmly confident, making everything fun, yet always making sure the group he was helping felt safe and secure. The children, eyes excited behind their masks, mouths distended by their regulators, learned how to shuffle backwards in their fins, to control their buoyancy by letting air in or out of the BCD, and how to ‘pop’ their ears to equalise pressure – which didn’t seem too big a problem in a few feet of water. They ended their fifty-minute session with a game of underwater frisbee, swishing around one another in the cool salty water like mermaids and mermen in their fins.