Forget Me Knot (4 page)

“I’m sure she will,” Abby said. “And it all sounds absolutely lovely.” She decided not to tell her mum what Toby had said about his mother’s personality. Nor was she about to confess to her doubts about whether Lady P would take kindly to her son’s wedding reception being held in a tent in a Croydon back garden, where she would be expected to drink Waitrose Fizz and queue up with all the other guests for a plate of Aunty Gwen’s tiramisu.

When Abby told Soph that she was going to marry Toby, her friend had hugged and congratulated her and then broken into a chorus of “My Sweet Lord.”

AS THE
Edgware Road train finally pulled in, Abby stood up and her thoughts returned to her present anxieties. Even though Toby would be there to defend her against Lady Penelope, Abby was certain that tonight’s dinner with her ladyship was going to be something akin to being hauled up
before her old headmistress, the formidable Miss Raffan. She imagined Lady Penelope catching her using the wrong glass or fork. “Abigail Crompton,” she would boom across her vast and noble bosom, “you have let your school down. You have let your house down, but most of all you have let yourself down.”

The train doors hissed open and Abby stepped inside. There was barely any standing room, let alone a spare seat. She found some space for her hand on one of the metal poles and felt the train lurch out of the station.

On the bench seat opposite, a young couple with backpacks at their feet were studying an Italian guidebook to London. The young woman’s head was resting on her boyfriend’s chest. Every so often he would stroke her hair. She kept trying to pronounce names in the book and getting them hopelessly wrong. His English was better than hers and he tried to correct her. She would repeat the names after him, but when she still got them wrong, the two of them would start giggling.

As Abby observed the pair, she felt an unexpected wave of emotion. She couldn’t quite put a name to the feeling. It wasn’t jealousy exactly, more sadness and disappointment. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Toby had been giggly and affectionate together. Not that it was anybody’s fault. She worked six days a week at the shop, and Toby put in such long hours at the office that he was permanently exhausted. Corporate lawyers—particularly ones as anxious to make their mark as Toby—couldn’t pack up and go home at six. More often than not he was still at his desk at eight or nine in the evening. Usually he would come to her place for supper, but afterward all he wanted to do was watch
Newsnight
and fall into bed.

It wasn’t as if Toby hadn’t tried to get time off so that the two of them could spend more time together. For half of the eight months they’d been going out, he’d been promising that they would take a romantic break. But every time they got close to booking something, another case would come up or another major deal would be on the verge of collapse, which only he could rescue.

Last month they had finally made it to Paris. By way of apology for all the aborted trips, Toby’s law firm had paid and booked them into the Georges Cinq for an entire week.

On the first night, they went to bed early with a bottle of Cristal. Abby lay there in her brand-new La Perla satin negligee, waiting for Toby to ravish her. When he tried but failed to rise to the occasion—despite vigorous and inventive encouragement on her part—they put it down to his exhaustion. “You’ll be fine tomorrow, just you see,” Abby soothed, stroking his hair. But the following night was no different. Toby said it was like trying to force jelly into a slot machine. Again she held him and comforted him and did her best to convince him that getting anxious would only make the situation worse.

They had just fallen asleep on the second night when the phone rang.

“Leave it,” Abby said. “Whoever it is can leave a message.”

“No, I must take it,” Toby said, reaching out to pick up the receiver. “It could be the office.”

It was. A moment later, Toby was looking taut and running his fingers through his hair. “Yep. OK, fine. I’ll be there. Leave it to me.” He put down the phone and turned back to Abby. “The MSP merger is about to go tits up. I have to go to Brussels tomorrow to try and rescue it.”

“Oh, come on, Toby, this was meant to be our romantic break. We really need this time together; surely they can send somebody else.”

“No, they can’t. This is my case. My responsibility.”

She didn’t mean to lie there looking sullen, but she couldn’t help it.

“Abby, what do you suggest I do, tell my bosses to take a running jump? I am paid a fortune to do this job.”

“That doesn’t mean they own you.”

“You know what, Abs? Actually it does.”

In many ways she admired Toby’s work ethic. After all, he received money from a family trust fund and had no real need to earn a living. He maintained that the importance of working hard and contributing to the world was something his mother had instilled in him. Apart from the occasional meeting with the managers employed to run the Kenwood estate, his late father had never worked. The man had been a drunk and a gambler. By the time he died of cirrhosis of the liver at age fifty-six, he had boozed and gambled away hundreds of thousands of pounds—not that this had left much more than a slight dent in the family fortune. “Eventually my mother came to despise the pathetic wretch he had turned into,” Toby had confided to Abby. “After he died, she became a local magistrate, hospital governor and master of the hunt. She also threw herself into charity work. She worked nonstop, and with my father gone, she became my role model.”

Now Toby reached out and took Abby’s hand. “Look, I will make this up to you, I promise. I’ll make sure I’m back by six tomorrow—seven at the latest.” He suggested she spend the day at the Louvre—where she had never been. “And afterward we’ll meet up for dinner. I’ll book somewhere really special.”

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “OK. Deal,” she said.

The next morning, Abby woke to see Toby standing in front of the mirror.

“Mornin’,” she said through a yawn.

“Thank heavens I changed my mind and packed a suit,” he said by way of greeting. “I almost didn’t. But then I thought it might be nice to wear one if we went out for a posh dinner.” He lifted his shirt collar and draped a gray-and-purple-striped silk tie around his neck.

When he’d finished adjusting his tie, Toby came over to the bed to say good-bye. “I’m really sorry things keep turning out like this.”

She kissed him and told him it was OK.

“You know what I think?” he said.

“What?” she said from under the covers.

“I think we should get married. That way we can take a month’s honeymoon and be sure of no interruptions.”

She pushed back the sheets and blankets. “Hang on. You want to get married just to get a holiday?”

“No. I want to get married because I love you. As a bonus, it would be a chance for us to get away. What do you say?”

“That this isn’t exactly the most romantic proposal I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, come on, Abs—we’re not romantic types. You’d have hated it if I’d gone down on one knee at the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

“I would?”

“Of course. It’s the most appalling cliché.”

“I suppose… But you could have proposed tonight over dinner.”

“Yes, and I could also have hidden a diamond engagement ring at the bottom of your champagne glass. Tacky or what? Besides, you know you want to choose your own ring. And the firm gets a massive discount at this place in Hatton Garden.”

“This proposal is getting more romantic by the second.”

He shrugged. “I’m being practical, that’s all. No sense in wasting money if you don’t have to.”

“I guess.”

“So, what do you say?” he said, sitting himself down on the bed and taking her hand. “Will you have me?”

She didn’t have to think. Even though she would always have to share Toby with the firm, she was in no doubt that he would always love and care for her.

She beamed up at him. “Of course I’ll have you, you dope.”

“Brilliant! Absolutely wonderful.” With that he took her in his arms and kissed her on the lips with such passion that she found herself begging him to come back to bed. “Come on,” she giggled, reaching for his belt buckle. “Just for five minutes. I bet you anything you could do it this time.”

“Behave.” He smiled, gently removing her hand. “I’ve got to run or I’ll miss my train.”

He rang her at six to say the meeting was running on and could she change the dinner reservation he’d made from eight to nine. An hour later he was on the phone again to say negotiations had reached a stalemate and he was going to spend the night in Brussels. “Abby, I am so, so sorry. I will make this up to you. Somehow.”

“Right,” she said, making no attempt to hide her hurt.

“Oh, Abs, don’t be like that.”

But she couldn’t help it.

He stayed in Brussels two more days.

“You know, Toby, this really has got to stop,” she said during one of their late-night phone calls. “Not just for me, but for you, as well. They’re working you far too hard. You’re going to get ill.”

“I know. I know. When this case is over I’ll talk to one of the partners.”

Abby decided not to go home. She wasn’t about to give up five nights in a suite at the Georges Cinq. Instead, she played tourist and shopped.

Toby made it back to Paris on the fifth night, full of apologies and promises that he would never allow anything like this to happen again. After presenting her with the biggest bottle of Chanel No. 5 she had ever seen, he announced that he had booked them a table at L’Orangerie. With its three Michelin stars, people waited weeks for a table, but Toby had a friend who worked on the Paris stock exchange and knew the maître d’. The man had managed to pull a few strings.

“So, can you forgive me for treating you so badly?” he asked over dinner.

She took another bite of heavenly, melt-in-the mouth duck confit with orange compote and grinned. “Oh, I think I can probably find a way.”

SHE PICKED
up the Piccadilly Line at King’s Cross. It was only as she sat down and counted the stops to Covent Garden that she remembered—to her horror—that the station had no escalator. Covent Garden station was so deep
that it had an elevator. Suddenly her pulse sped up and she started to feel sick. Abby didn’t ride in elevators. The last time she had been in one was the summer of 1984.

She had been on holiday in Corfu with her parents. One evening, while Hugh and Jean were having a drink in the bar, Abby and another English girl who was staying at the hotel decided to play in the elevator.

They rode it up and down for twenty minutes or more. Then, without warning, the elevator stopped between floors and the light went out, leaving the two nine-year-olds in complete darkness. Terrified, they screamed for help, but it was several minutes before anybody heard them and an hour on top of that before the elevator engineer managed to get the thing moving again.

From that day on, the fear of being trapped in an elevator had never left Abby. When she told people that she would rather take the stairs to their office on the tenth floor because it was good exercise, they looked at her as if she had a screw loose.

There were stairs at Covent Garden, of course, but since Abby had waited ages for a train at King’s Cross, she was now running seriously late. Trudging up all those stairs would add at least another ten minutes.

Her choice was stark. She could give in to her phobia by taking the stairs and thereby suffer the wrath of the fearsome Lady Penelope, or she could close her eyes, hold her breath and do what the rest of the world did and take the elevator.

There was no choice. Lady P’s wrath was infinitely preferable to the grizzly, suffocating, heart-stopping panic she would experience the second she set foot in the elevator. Her mind was totally and absolutely made up.

She felt the train slow down and pull into the station. Abby stood up and headed toward the doors. On the other hand, she was desperate to make a good impression on Lady P. If she arrived late, the woman would interpret it as a snub and hold it against her forever. Their relationship would be over before it had begun. It went without saying that Toby would be livid as well and probably wouldn’t speak to her for days.

As she thought about taking the elevator, beads of sweat began to break through her foundation. She couldn’t do it. She simply couldn’t. Then she tried to convince herself that, unlike the rickety contraption in Corfu, the Covent Garden elevator was large, air-conditioned and modern. On top of that, the journey couldn’t possibly take more than a few seconds. And she would be surrounded by loads of people.

It didn’t matter. There was still no way she was about to set foot in the elevator.

The train doors slid back. Abby got out of the car along with two or three other passengers. She stood on the platform and stared at the sign pointing toward the elevator. Her heart started to race. By now the platform was filling with other people who had gotten off the train. She looked for the sign to the staircase but couldn’t see it. The crowd was moving toward the elevator, and she was trapped in the middle. Knees trembling, feeling that she was somehow detached from reality and walking through porridge, she found herself unable to break free. She was aware of her breathing becoming shallow and rapid.

At one point, she stepped aside to let through a party of boisterous French schoolchildren who had been on her train. The kids charged toward the row of elevators. Almost
immediately, a set of doors opened and they piled in, along with the other passengers who had been waiting. Abby, her eyes firmly shut to block out the terror, tried to squeeze in, as well, but there wasn’t quite enough room. She and another traveler had to get out and wait for the next elevator.

It arrived straightaway. “After you.” Her young male companion smiled, gesturing toward the entrance.

Abby hesitated. The impulse to run for the stairs— wherever they might be—was overwhelming.

“Thank you,” she said, returning his smile. She stepped into the elevator and waited for the doors to close.