by Melissa Hill
Tara was an absolute genius.
The second date was even better. They did go to TGI Friday’s for Saturday lunch (apparently there was a waiting list for the Hard Rock Café, something Jay found hilarious) and again spent the entire time taking the piss out of the menu, while trying to speak over The Best of Bon Jovi blasting out over the speakers.
“Lunch is good,” Tara had declared approvingly, during their last coaching session. “It means he wants to spend time getting to know you, instead of simply wanting to jump your bones.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” Natalie murmured. “He’s gorgeous, successful, good fun – why hasn’t anybody snapped him up yet?”
“You’re gorgeous, successful and good fun too – why hasn’t anyone snapped you up yet?” Tara retorted before launching into another diatribe on how Natalie really should think of herself as the prize catch, instead of the other way round.
She was unbelievably bossy when she wanted to be.
Now, sitting in TGIF’s staring at the remains of her “boeuf” burger and listening to Jay recite funny anecdotes from Labyrinth’s most recent event, she wondered why she had ever bothered with a loser like Steve, whose idea of interesting conversation was how Chelsea’s latest signing had turned out to be the greatest load of bollocks.
When they’d finished, Jay once again insisting on paying the bill, Natalie wondered what on earth they were going to do next. It was the middle of the afternoon, for goodness sake – it wasn’t like they could spend the rest of the time wandering around the shops.
Still, she supposed they could go for one or two quiet drinks somewhere. No, on second thoughts, she’d better not suggest that. Tara would not be impressed if Natalie ended up getting sloshed in some pub and then launched herself on Jay, which is exactly what would happen if they went for “a quiet drink”.
She looked across the table at Jay, who was busily signing his credit card slip.
“So, are you heading away somewhere now – back to the office, perhaps?” she asked, when they got up to leave.
He frowned. “Why on earth would I do that?”
Recalling how Steve often used to abandon her for the office at weekends, Natalie was just about to say something about him being very busy and all that, when she remembered Tara’s words about being too simpering. She shouldn’t let him think that she believed his work was more important than their time together – that was laying the groundwork for bad habits in the future, she reminded herself.
Instead she smiled. “Well, I’m glad to hear it. I’d no intention of being brought out to lunch, and then dropped like a hot potato in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Believe me, there will be no hot-potato-dropping today – with luck there won’t be anything dropping,” he said, raising a cryptic eyebrow at her.
“What?”
He smiled but ignored her question.
Outside, on the street, she watched, confused but intrigued, as he hailed a black cab.
When they got in, she heard him ask for Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank.
“What’s going on, Jay?” she asked, not too thrilled at the idea of having to duck and dive through one of London’s busiest tourist spots. “Why are we going there?”
“I want to do something different,” he said, his dark eyes twinkling. “Have you ever been on the London Eye?”
Natalie groaned inwardly, her initial anticipation rapidly deflating. This wasn’t her ideal way of spending a Saturday afternoon. With the capacity to handle hundreds of visitors every hour, a trip on the London Eye wouldn’t exactly be relaxing. For one thing, they’d be queuing for up to an hour just to get a ticket for the wheel, and then another queuing to get onto the bloody thing! Not to mention eventually being packed inside a tiny capsule with fifty-odd other sardines of various nationalities!
“Well, no – I know it’s strange, the thing has been there for six years, but I’ve just never got round to it. Probably because there are so many bloody queues. Are you sure you want to do this? We’ll be there for a while.”
Jay nodded. “So what – it’ll be a laugh, won’t it?”
Wonderful! Natalie thought, as she slunk back down on the backseat of the cab. Now, if Tara were here, she’d probably advise her to put her foot down and inform Jay that she had no intention of standing in the freezing cold for up to three hours in Prada heels waiting to get onto a bloody tourist attraction!
But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Jay was almost childlike in his enthusiasm for this and seemed to think it would be a great way to spend the afternoon. And because he had at least made the effort to do something fun and different, Natalie thought she shouldn’t really complain. Well, wait until he realised just how bad the queues really were. Then he might change his mind pretty fast!
“Here you go, mate – seven quid please.”
As she got out of the taxi and stood on the bridge waiting for Jay, Natalie looked down at the crowds gathered along the bank of the river and tried to establish how busy it was. Again, she groaned inwardly.
People were swarming around in their hundreds, all of them no doubt heading towards the London Eye. Almost instinctively, the soles of her feet began to throb, probably in protest at the notion of having to stand in impossibly high heels for a couple of hours. This was crazy – she’d have to say something. Effort or no effort . . .
“Jay, are you sure you want to do this today? It looks frightfully busy.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” he said, lightly holding her elbow as she tentatively negotiated the stone steps down to the pier. “But we’re not in any rush, are we?”
“Well, no, not really, but . . .” Natalie grimaced as he wandered on ahead of her towards the attraction’s entrance, seemingly oblivious to the crowds and the fact that he’d bypassed the ticket office and instead was heading directly to the boarding area. She shook her head. Evidently, he didn’t realise the extent of the wait, and she hoped fervently that he’d change his mind pretty smart when one of the security guys told him where to go.
“Natalie – over here!”
But strangely enough, she noticed, as Jay beckoned her to follow him, the staff surrounding the metal detector hadn’t told him off. Instead they were holding back the crowds in order to let them through.
“What’s going on?” she asked, pink-cheeked with embarrassment, as a couple of tourists who’d been just about to go through the gate muttered profanities at them.
“Why are we skipping the queue?”
“If you could just wait until the capsule comes round, Mr Murray,” a security guy was saying, and Jay nodded his head politely, a self-satisfied look on his face.
“Jay?” she asked again.
“I knew you probably wouldn’t want to wait around . . . especially in those shoes,” he said with a grin. “So I made some alternative arrangements.”
“Alternative . . . what?”
“Here we are, mate!”
Natalie stared as an empty capsule stopped at the boarding gate and the security people ushered them inside.
No, she corrected herself as she stepped into the capsule, it wasn’t quite empty. To one side stood a small table and perched upon it was a bottle of Cristal cooling alongside a pair of tall champagne flutes. She’d only just about managed to take in this surprising sight when she realised that the doors had closed behind them, leaving Jay and her on their own inside.
Natalie looked at him, open-mouthed. “How did you . . . where did you?”
Jay looked sheepish. “I wanted to do something different. I know the guys here – we’ve booked private capsules for a number of different events over the last few years – so it wasn’t too difficult. I thought it might be nicer with just the two of us, rather than being crammed into another one full of tourists.”
“Nicer – it’s fantastic!” she cried.
As she looked around the empty capsule, at the champagne and everything else, Natalie didn’t
know what to say. And just then, she felt tears prick at the corner of her eyes. No one had ever done anything like this before – something so special and thoughtful and . . . romantic.
It felt . . . strange.
“Oh shit, have I seriously fucked up?” Jay asked, looking concerned. He reached across and cautiously laid a hand on her arm. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you? Because if you are, I can try and get them to let us out before we move up any further and –”
“No,” Natalie sniffed and shook her head from side to side, unable to speak for a couple of seconds. Then she straightened up, telling herself that she must not make an idiot of herself over this. She looked at Jay. “It’s such a lovely surprise. I . . . never expected anything –”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” Jay interjected, his shoulders visibly relaxing. Then walking over to the other side of the capsule, he took the uncorked champagne out of its cooler and went to fill a glass. He glanced hesitantly at the bottle and then again at Natalie. “I wasn’t sure what you’d like, so I went for –”
“Are you mad?” she cried, practically snatching the glass of bubbly from him. “Who doesn’t like Cristal?”
“Well, seeing as you seem to have such strong opinions on things like this,” Jay laughed, as he filled his own glass, “I’d hate to get it wrong.”
“No chance of that today,” Natalie replied with a smile.
He joined her at the front of the capsule as the wheel moved slowly upwards.
Then, as they lightly clinked glasses and continued to stare at the panoramic view of the city of London beneath them, Natalie suspected that Jay Murray was a man who very rarely got things wrong.
Chapter 21
“He’s just too easy-going sometimes,” Tara grumbled to Liz.
The two were in The Coffee Bean in the village, and Tara was grumbling about the way Glenn had run around looking after Emma when she’d stayed the previous weekend.
“I mean – it’s not that I mind Emma coming to stay, of course I don’t, but I hate the way she just drops in unannounced and expects to be entertained! And I wouldn’t mind, but Glenn was nice as pie to her all weekend, and then as soon as she’s gone, he goes back to leaving dirty dishes all over the place for me to clean up! I mean, honestly!”
Liz said nothing, and too late Tara realised that the last person she should be complaining to about Emma was Liz. But unfortunately, old habits died hard. Liz had spent years listening to Tara moaning about her sister and knew well what she was like. But that was no excuse and just then Tara felt like an insensitive idiot. But of course she couldn’t let on to Liz that she had her suspicions about Eric and Emma too, could she?
She took a sip of her coffee. “So, you and Eric didn’t get much of a chance to talk while in Belfast?” she queried. It was obvious by Liz’s demeanour that nothing had changed.
“No, we didn’t get much of a chance to talk about anything, other than Toby or the house or the dogs. He was just so distant, Tara.” Tears prickled at Liz’s eyes. “And I just wish I had the courage to ask him straight out if he was seeing someone. That’s what any normal self-respecting woman would do, isn’t it?”
“It’s not always that straightforward,” Tara replied, thanking her lucky stars once again that she’d stuck with Glenn. Between Liz and Natalie (although admittedly things were starting to look positive there), she wondered if men were really worth all the hassle.
Liz was still talking. “I’m praying that it’s just my imagination going into overdrive, that I’m seeing things that aren’t really there. But yet, deep down I know that something isn’t right. Why else would he be spending so much time away from me and Toby? Why else does he go out in the evenings for no particular reason?” Then she looked at Tara and blurted quickly. “I think it might be someone from Castlegate.”
Tara held her breath. “Do you?”
Reading between the lines, she knew that Liz was trying to broach the subject of Emma, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. And Tara couldn’t do it either, because she knew that once it was out in the open, their friendship would be fractured forever. Even though Tara had no control over Emma’s (or indeed Eric’s) behaviour, whatever way you looked at it there was a clear clash of loyalties. The problem was that Tara wasn’t exactly sure where her loyalties lay. Yes, Emma was her sister but, if she was carrying on with Tara’s best friend’s husband, that would be very difficult to forgive.
“Tara,” Liz said then, glancing sadly at Toby, who was sitting in his buggy alongside the table, “would you have any idea, any idea at all, who it might be? Who Eric might be seeing?”
Tara could see that Liz was steeling herself for the worst, steeling herself for the fact that she could very well be the last to know what the rest of the village already did, and her heart bled for her friend.
“Do you honestly think, if I knew for definite that Eric was fooling around with someone here, that I wouldn’t tell you? Of course I would! After I’d given him a punch in the nose!” she added vehemently, meaning it.
Liz gave a half-hearted smile.
“Who’s punching who?” Colm magically appeared at the table, bearing a tray of freshly prepared cheesecake.
“No one,” Tara said abruptly.
“Well, I hope it’s not you punching poor Glenn!” he joked as he unloaded the cheesecake, but by the look on Tara’s face he quickly wished he hadn’t. “Jeez, aren’t you two a couple of rays of sunshine?” he said, rolling his eyes at them both before sidling off in the other direction.
Liz raised a smile. “I think you might have been a bit hard on him there.”
“Serves him right for listening to other people’s conversations,” Tara muttered, and a brief silence fell upon the table as the two women made inroads into their respective plates of cheesecake.
“I hate this,” Liz said eventually.
Tara looked up. “What?”
“This. The two of us sitting here depressed and miserable, and me moaning again about bloody Eric! I feel bad you coming all the way down here to visit me and all I do is whinge, whinge, whinge.”
Tara didn’t mind at all, but the whinging (as she called it) certainly wasn’t doing Liz any good. She took a deep breath. Maybe it was time for drastic action.
She set down her fork. “All right then. Let’s do something fun – something that’ll cheer us both up.”
“What – now?” Liz said, taken aback.
“I don’t mean now – I mean tonight or tomorrow night – soon. Can you even remember the last time the two of us went out somewhere?”
Liz looked guilty. “I know, and I’d love to but –”
“But nothing. Eric is off nights this week, yes?”
Liz nodded.
“Well, you’ve put up with enough of his disappearances over the last few weeks – let him put up with one of yours. Come out with me tonight, and let Eric look after Toby and the dogs for a change.”
Liz looked at her son doubtfully. “I don’t know . . .”
“Why not? Surely you deserve a night out too? Let Eric take the responsibility for once. I’m sure he’d jump at the chance to have a boys’ night in with his son. You said yourself he doesn’t get enough time with him. And I’m sure Glenn won’t mind – it just means he’ll be free to get lost in cyberspace without feeling as though he has to sit downstairs watching telly with me.” Tara squeezed her friend’s hand. “Come on, Liz, we’ll have a ball!”
Later that evening, Liz was getting ready to go out and hit the hotspots of Castlegate village.
To her surprise, Eric had readily agreed to look after Toby and hadn’t batted an eyelid when she’d informed him that she and Tara were thinking of going out for drinks.
Liz, who’d been expecting some kind of argument, or at least a barrage of questions about her plans, was relieved, but also a little uneasy. Eric didn’t seem to give a damn about her life lately. It was almost as though they were beginning to live separate lives,
with Toby as their one remaining connection. She wondered how much longer this could go on.
But she wasn’t going to think about it now, she told herself, as she stood in her bedroom and tried to decide what to wear. Tara was right: there was no point in trying to second-guess what was going on in her husband’s head; she’d drive herself crazy. No, tonight was about having some long overdue fun with her best friend, and knowing Tara, it was bound to be a good night – never mind that Castlegate wasn’t exactly hot and happening and the bars were more The Quiet Man than Sex and The City.
She searched through her wardrobe, trying to find something decent to wear, something that at least wouldn’t make her look such an overweight frump alongside Tara. To her dismay, she realised that all her clothes were dark, dowdy and downright depressing and mostly consisted of shapeless tops and too-big jeans, a throwback to her post-pregnancy days.
Before she became pregnant with Toby she wouldn’t have been seen dead in block colours, and had a selection of vibrant, multicoloured tops and dresses that showed off a pair of legs that back then would have made Liz Hurley jealous.
And of course in those days she’d had the figure to wear them, whereas now she was still carrying the extra stone and a half she’d gained while pregnant. Which was also the main reason she hadn’t gone clothes shopping in ages – all those gorgeous flimsy tops and clingy dresses she loved, but now hadn’t a hope of fitting into, mocking her into hiding. Hence the uninspiring wardrobe better suited to a convent than even Castlegate’s finest.
Liz sighed. How had she so easily let herself go? Since she’d had the baby, moved to Castlegate and started working with the dogs (who, in fairness, couldn’t care less what Liz wore as long as they were fed and watered), she hadn’t given her appearance much thought. Despite her energetic walks with the dogs, she’d made no real effort to shift the weight, and of course with Eric away most evenings it was all too easy to sit in front of the telly with a four-stone bag of Minstrels and a gallon of Coke. No wonder Eric had gone off her, she thought as she examined herself in the mirror. She was turning into Jabba the Hutt!
