When Harold meets Lucy, she’s just a conquest, just a pretty woman he can have fun with. It’s nothing serious -- it never is -- and, when he takes her out for coffee, he doesn’t think it’ll mean anything. Yeah, she’s gorgeous, and yeah, she’s surprisingly clever, for a woman, but this won’t mean anything. Except that he wants to see her again, outside of work (who’d have thought that publishing a book about your civil service career would be so boring, and take so much time?) and he actually wants to hear what she has to say.
He asks her opinions on things, which he’s never done before, unless he’s taking the piss. He wants to know. And she’s not just pretty, he realises -- she smiles brightly, widely, like him. She knows about stuff outside of her job. She used to be a charity worker, which sounds god-awful, but not when Lucy talks about it. When she talks, he wants to listen to something besides the constant echoing drumming inside his head. He wants to listen to her.
And he can overlook the fact that she contradicts him a little too much, and she doesn’t always agree with him. Because she calls him Harry, and laughs at his silly antics, and listens avidly when he tells her about his time working for the M.O.D., and travelling around the country. So, he looks past the things he doesn’t like, and focuses on what he does.
At least, at first.
At first, it’s all roses and chocolate and wine and fancy jewellery. He wants to make her happy, to make her smile. They’re drinking in a bar one night, and there’s some guy playing Strangers in the Night on the piano, so Harold grabs her hand and pulls her into an empty space, in front of everyone, not caring who’s watching. “It’s our song,” he tells her, grinning.
“We don’t have a song?”
“We do now,” he says, spinning around, completely out of time with the music, humming along, singing every few lines. And Lucy goes along with it, giggling.
Later, she’ll go along to get along, to stay safe, to stop his flashes of anger. He’s not stupid. He knows that. But at first, she went along out of love.
Looking back, he’s not even sure when he decided to marry her. It just comes to him one day, that he doesn’t want her to leave when she went home after a date. He wants her to stick around every day. He wants to wake up next to her, and have breakfast with her, and do all those normal couple-y things. Lucy Saxon. Has a nice ring to it.
Speaking of rings, he gives her her engagement ring in a restaurant. In a move that is completely, wildly, out of character, Harold Saxon gets down on one knee for her, and pulls out the dark blue ring box, and holds it up. And he pulls a face, and starts talking all in one breath, rambling on and on without giving her a second to reply.
“Sorry, I know it's a bit cliche, but it was between this and hiring one of those planes that write messages in the sky. But then I kind of wanted to go for dinner as well, and the message wouldn't show up at night, and Will you marry me, Lucy? could be mistaken for some other Lucy, and writing your whole name isn't very romantic. So. Anyway.”
He gives her his perfected, pleasant, smile. “Will you?”
Of course, she says yes. And, in the years that follow, they both will struggle to remember why.
