Five weeks earlier had been Luke’s father’s birthday. He’d dropped in on his mother in the morning and they’d shared poached eggs with white bread and fried tomatoes, neither mentioning that this had been his father’s favourite, nor that through this ritual they were marking anything in particular. And he’d walked with her to the high street where she’d pretended she wasn’t going into the art shop to buy paints she never showed him, and he’d pretended he wasn’t going to weave back past the graveyard. But of course they both had. And it was that afternoon, by his father’s headstone, that Luke had imagined a good old chinwag with his long-deceased father who had never met Vera but would, he was almost sure, approve. Philip would have told him to buy the ring in secret. He would have urged him to be romantic. He would have asked him to make sure that Vera shared his passions and principles, which, it occurred to Luke, were the same thing.
He didn’t tell his father about Vera’s smile, or her tenderheartedness, or the heaviness in her eyes that sometimes made her seem so far away, so in need of rescue. Or the way that sometimes, when he was around her, he felt immeasurably flushed with hope.
Luke bought the bible before the ring. He bought the card in which to write his message before designing his proposal, using it for inspiration. He imagined the children they would have before the kind of wedding. If they had a son, he would name him Philip.