One Hundred Proposals (12 page)

I stared at the van in confusion as we joined the back of the queue.

‘Don’t look like that, you ice cream snob.’ Harry nudged me as he saw my face.

‘There was no look.’

‘Oh there was. It looked like this.’

Harry sucked in his cheeks and scowled like he was sucking on a bitter lemon.

I laughed. ‘I like a ninety-nine as much as the next person.’

‘Well you’re going to be disappointed, Roberto doesn’t do ninety-nines. But he does do the best ice creams for miles around.’

We shuffled up the queue, but I remained unconvinced.

I took another call whilst we waited, this one wanted candy floss and fairground rides in his back garden. Now that was sweet. I promised to email him back as soon as I could check the prices of the things he wanted.

Then we were next in the queue.

‘Banana ok?’ Harry asked. ‘Or the chocolate orange is to die for.’

‘Banana’s fine.’

Roberto was not the Italian looking man I was expecting. There was no curly Mario moustache or dark eyes. I sort of expected him to be wearing a red and white stripy apron and have a big chef’s hat, I’m not sure why. I was even more disappointed when instead of greeting Harry in Italian, he grunted to us in a thick Yorkshire accent as he swapped money for two pots of ice cream. Harry’s was so dark it looked almost black.

We went and sat on benches overlooking the Thames to watch the boats that always seemed to go up and down it, no matter what time of day it was.

I dug into my ice cream and took a big mouthful.

‘Oh my God.’ I closed my eyes as the tastes exploded on my tongue. ‘This is amazing.’

Harry grinned. ‘I told you so.’

‘It tastes so bananery.’

‘Well it is banana ice cream.’

‘Yes but banana flavoured things taste like powdered banana. Most banana things have never even seen a banana in their whole lives. This actually has banana bits in it.’

‘Here, try mine.’

Harry scooped up a large lump of the black ice cream and fed it to me. The dark chocolate was complemented perfectly by the coffee and walnut.

‘We need to come back here again and try the other flavours.’

‘He only does ten with the occasional special, no toppings, no sauce, but he makes an absolute fortune.’

‘I bet he does. And what a pitch too, with the tourists visiting the Tower and the bridge.’

I curled my legs up to my chest as I carried on eating.

I wanted to talk to him about what he had said before, that he had taken a year off from women so he could be there for me when I needed him most.

As I licked the last of the ice cream from my spoon, I reached down and held his hand, entwining my fingers with his. Although he gently squeezed my hand, he barely seemed to notice as he busily typed an email on his phone.

Suddenly he leapt up as if he had been burnt. My hand fell from his and back onto the bench.

‘Crap, I better go, I have that meeting with Silver Linings, the magazine that wants to feature my blog. You ok to get back on your own?’

I nodded.

Harry passed me his half eaten pot of ice cream, kissed me fleetingly on the cheek and took off at a run, smashing into a tall, beautiful redhead as he went. She toppled and nearly hit the floor but Harry’s reflexes were fast and he caught her, pulling her back to her feet with ease and gentleness.

I couldn’t hear what was said as they stood there talking, Harry’s hands still on her arms, but as she twirled her hair round her finger and threw her head back laughing, it was obvious he was working his charm again. Sure enough, within thirty seconds of them meeting, the redhead was handing over her number.

Samantha’s words rung in my head. If he wanted to be with me, he would be. Watching him so effortlessly charm this woman without any reticence cemented that in my brain. He just didn’t see me that way, never had, never would.

Harry threw me two big inane thumbs up as the girl fumbled in her bag and I threw two sarcastic ones back. As the swap was made, Harry kissed her on the cheek, just as he’d done to me seconds before, and ran off again.

The redhead and I watched him go and then we locked eyes as he disappeared from view. Her face was a picture of smug happiness. I’m not sure what mine was, but obviously not anything good as she recoiled slightly from me as she walked away.

*

I was standing naked in my bedroom when the front door crashed open. After Harry’s departure hours before, I’d treated myself to a bit of retail therapy – buying a wildly inappropriate dress and ridiculously high heeled shoes. I’d just been trying them on, realised the underwear that I was wearing was not suitable and had just taken them off to replace them with something else when Harry’s feet thundered up the stairs.

‘Suzie!’ Harry roared.

I launched myself across the bed and slammed the door just as he reached the top.

‘Where are you?’

‘Bedroom. I’m naked. Hang on a sec.’

To my great surprise, Harry burst in, with his hand clamped over his eyes.

‘Harry!’

‘This can’t wait.’

‘Yes it bloody well can.’

Harry turned and grabbed my robe from the back of the door. With his eyes tightly closed he offered it out and I quickly pulled it on.

‘Ok, what the hell was so urgent?’

Harry opened one eye and then, seeing I was safely covered up, he opened both. He reached out and grabbed my arms, his smile so big, his eyes so wide, I wasn’t sure if he’d taken some hallucinogenic drug.

‘Suzie, shit, I don’t know where to start.’

Oh please don’t let this be another woman story. Seeing him with that redhead this morning was bad enough.

‘The beginning.’ I wrapped my hands around his arms as he didn’t seem likely to let me go any time soon.

‘The video of my cow proposal has over two million hits on Youtube.’

I stared at him whilst the weight of those words sunk in.

‘Holy shit!’ I whispered.

‘That’s just the start. We now have close to thirty thousand followers on the blog.’

That at least explained the increase in calls today.

‘You need to sit down for the next bit.’ He pushed me down gently onto the bed, with his hands on my shoulders. Then he changed his mind. ‘No, stand up. I think.’ He pulled me to my feet.

‘Just tell me.’

‘I had a chat with the magazine people today.’

The bottom dropped out of my world. ‘You’re leaving, aren’t you? The magazine wants you to go and work for them instead.’

He stopped with his excitement for a moment and kissed my forehead so sweetly that my heart leapt into my mouth.

‘No. It’s not that. They’ve offered us a deal. You won’t believe this. I can’t believe it myself. I can’t believe that I actually managed to talk them into it.’

‘Harry, for the love of God, what?’

‘They asked me where I foresaw this proposal thing going and I told them I wanted to show you the world – I wanted to take you to every tiny little pocket of it and propose to you in the most beautiful, most barren, most extreme places. They were keen, very keen, I could see that. Suddenly I found myself telling them that I had a meeting with The Daily Mail later this afternoon, that they were interested in making it a daily article. I don’t know why I said it, but it worked. The next thing they did was offer me this.’

He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and passed it to me. I read it, and read it again. The words danced in front of my eyes.

I looked at Harry. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

He swallowed. ‘Two round-the-world tickets. We leave on Friday.’

I sat down heavily on the bed as I read the words again.

‘This is a joke.’

‘No joke. They want exclusivity. I’m allowed to blog one more time on our website to tell our followers where to catch me next, after that I’ll be writing for Silver Linings. They will feature my daily blog on their website and the best bits will be featured in their weekly magazine. We can post pictures and stuff as well. I made a deal too, that every blog will have links back to our website and our contact details et cetera, so you’ll gain good exposure for your company out of this too.’

‘Our company.’

He waved it away.

‘Harry we can’t leave, our company is just starting to take off. We’ve worked so hard to get where we are. We need to be here to help our clients.’

‘You need a holiday, and it’s just three months – ninety days. We can handle emails on our mobiles, take our laptops with us. I’ve had a word with Jules and, as she’s at home with Bella, she was happy to take all our calls and then she can email over the main details to us. We can go through it with her before we go and Badger says he’d be happy to help too.’

I stared at him and read the contract again.

‘Suzie, you have to say yes.’

‘Then yes.’

Harry whooped like a big kid, yanked me to my feet and swung me round so fast I could barely breathe. I laughed and giggled against him. Around the world. Apart from a couple of family driving holidays to Spain and France, I’d never been out of Britain. I’d never even been on a plane.

The phone rang in the office but for once I ignored it.

‘Harry, wait, wait, stop swinging me round, you’re making me dizzy.’

Harry slowed and stopped, holding me steady as I wobbled a bit.

‘Where are we going first? Do you have a plan? What do I need to pack?’

‘I need to thrash a lot of this out with Sunlounger, the holiday company that the magazine are working with to run this feature. I have a meeting with them tomorrow. There will be a rough plan but also room for improvisation too. We’re going to Australia - ’

My heart roared in my chest. ‘Harry I’ve always wanted to go there. It’s so beautiful.’

He grinned. ‘I know. I was quite insistent that was on our list. We fly to The Galapagos Islands first.’

‘But this is all so expensive.’

‘I would love to take credit for that, but Silver Linings and Sunlounger are paying for everything. A lot of it will be freebies or heavily discounted from the hotels and flight companies, knowing that they will get good coverage in the magazine.’

‘But why?’

‘Two million reasons why. Two million people and counting have watched our cow proposal, that’s potentially two million people that will go and buy Silver Linings to follow our story.’

None of this made any sense.

‘Harry, are we seriously doing this?’

He nodded

I squealed and launched myself at him, throwing my arms round his neck.

‘Now that was the reaction I was hoping for,’ he said, holding me tight against him.

Chapter Eight

Proposer’s Blog

Day 7: The Blue Plaque Proposal. Location: Hyde Park.

I love history
–
the interesting snippets, the gossip, the intrigue, the filth and the glamour. Who was sleeping with who. Delving into the past is like reading a copy of Hello, there was so much backstabbing, treason, murder and sordid affairs. Suzie loves it too
–
she insists she doesn’t, but with every little bit of history I tell her, her eyes light up like a kid in a sweet shop.

London is filled with so much history. I love how you can be walking the streets alongside men and women in their power suits, amongst red buses, black cabs and high rise office buildings, and suddenly you round a corner and
–
beyond the vision of the office workers who walk past it every day
–
there’s this tiny corner of the city wall built nearly two thousand years before.

The blue plaques are great for this, just wander around London and you might unexpectedly come across the place where Samuel Pepys lived, where he wrote those famous diaries hundreds of years before.

I was with Suzie the other day when we stumbled across one for Ian Fleming. She’s a huge James Bond fan, read all the books many times. She got very excited to have found where he lived.

This gave me an idea.

So, after work, I gave her a map with some of the more interesting blue plaques marked on it. Suzie lapped it up. We strolled through the streets with Suzie almost yelling with excitement as we found Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale and Winston Churchill. The funny ones are good too, Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street and my favourite, and now Suzie’s favourite too, simply reads: ‘Jacob von Hogflume 1864-1909 Inventor of time travel. Lived here in 2189.

So after our little treasure hunt, we ‘found’ ourselves in Hyde Park, one of our favourite places. As we walked through the naked trees, amongst the snowdrops and crocuses that indicate the start of new life, we found a bench we regularly sit on and on it was a new blue plaque that Suzie had never noticed before. It read:

‘It was here, on this bench, on February 17
^th
, that Harry proposed to Suzie.’

I love seeing Suzie smile, it’s one of my all-time favourite things in the world.

This is my last blog on this page. Next time you visit here, you’ll be automatically redirected to my new blog page at Silver Linings magazine. You will still be notified as normal of new updates. As most of you will be aware, from our news page, our One Hundred Proposals is about to go international. We fly to The Galapagos Islands in three days.

Proposer’s Blog

Day 9: The Underwear Proposal. Location: Suzie’s Bedroom

We leave for The Galapagos Islands tomorrow, and then we’ll spend ninety days travelling around the world. There is so much to see and not enough time to see it in. But we have to pack for every eventuality too.

We packed together as the amount Suzie wanted to take would fit in five suitcases rather than one
–
so I decided to help limit the intake.

I came up with a strict rule. I said one of everything. I thought that was fair.

One pair of jeans, one smart top, one pair of smart trousers, one pair of combats, one pair of hiking trainers, one pair of black flat sparkly sandals
–
they’ll go with everything
–
one dress, one pair of shorts, one vest, one T-shirt, one long sleeved T-shirt, one hoodie, one cardigan, one hat, one scarf, one pair of gloves, one swimming costume, one bikini – because apparently a bikini doesn’t count as a swimming costume, as it’s so tiny I let that one slide. Every time I turned my back, she sneaked things into the corners of the case, or hid them underneath already allowed clothes. She thought I didn’t know. I turned my back a lot.