Page 69 of The Wedding Proposal
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 Gzira to StJulian’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 flesh.
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.
Elle, getting accustomed to her own Darth Vader-like underwater breathing noises, knelt on the matting at the bottom of the pool, waiting for the neon-pink frisbee to slow-motion-slice through the water in her direction. If things worked out with Lucas, she decided, as she flipped off her knees and caught the frisbee, she’d learn to dive. She pictured them together, encountering crabs and rays, and the shining fish like flitting light that she’d seen projected onto the screen at the Nicholas Centre.
Daring to even think that she might stay with Lucas temporarily deprived her muscles of all function and she let the frisbee game go on without her. Lucas put himself in her eyeline and circled his finger and thumb to signal to her, Are you OK?
She returned the signal to reassure him that she was fine. In fact, she did it with both hands to show that she was bloody marvellous.
The feeling extended to when the Bubblemaker session was over, tanks turned off, equipment rinsed and hung to dry. Vern brought out ice lollies and bottles of cold water while the children wrapped themselves in towels to talk about their Bubblemaker session, to explain how they’d felt and what they’d liked or disliked. How what they’d experienced had matched up to their expectations. Every child was engaged, the outlines of masks still showing on beaming faces as their laughter rang out in the late afternoon sun.
