All Inclusive (10 page)

‘Oh Mom, please don't keep on . . .'

‘Don't keep on what? I don't want to get these folks thinking I'm their new best friend and then have them spoil their holiday with mourning.' Dolly glared at her daughter. ‘In fact you better just stop with the introducing and friend-making, Gina, it isn't fair on anyone. Hand me a cigarette, girl, and you can put yours out
right now
. Are you trying to be the only American in the world who still smokes?' She turned away and leaned confidingly towards Ned. ‘It's only when you got no health left that you can risk playing chicken with it. Isn't that right Ned?'

Beth remembered questions like this from Latin at school: questions framed in such a way that the expected answer had to be ‘yes'. Of course it would have been impossible to disagree, however mad a proposition Dolly had come up with. With an air of nothing-to-lose lack of inhibition she wasn't likely to
let day-to-day conversational etiquette get in the way of her opinions.

‘I'm not sure it's OK to tempt fate about your health at any age,' Ned told her, bravely, in Beth's view, for this was one autocratic, opinionated lady: very Bette Davis at her peak. Then Ned added, ‘I always try not to, anyway.' Beth felt her eyebrows raising themselves at this: from where, exactly, had come this po-faced factor?

‘Piffle,' Dolly snorted, pointing to his beer. ‘You're doing it right now. You drink alcohol, don't you? You drive and you cross roads and travel by plane? You do as you choose and to hell with the consequences. The difference is that at my time of life – or death – you can take risks that are as crazy as you like. I wish I'd taken more over the last year or two.' She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and coughed. ‘I should have slept around and tried heroin and pulled off a bank heist just for the hell of it.'

Beside Beth, Gina groaned quietly and drummed her fingers up and down on the table. Something told Beth that Gina had heard her mother performing this particular party piece many, many times before. Possibly this ‘I'm going to die, any minute' scenario had been going on for years, a sure-fire emotional blackmail into getting your own way. Poor old Gina if that was the case – no wonder she went over the top, putting it about a bit on holiday. She tried to imagine Dolly disguised in a joke-shop George Dubya mask and wielding a sawn-off shotgun, ordering the customers of the Guildford Barclays to lie on the floor and freeze. Not easy, but not impossible. Dolly would make a formidable bank robber; keen as she was on a risk-filled life, you wouldn't want to argue with her, armed or not.

‘It's called “doing things as a family”,' Ned explained to Delilah as the three of them waited beneath the reception archway for their taxi, ‘and besides, you're the one who wants the new snorkel mask. You'll need to try it on.'

‘Yes but . . . Carlos told me he'd take me and Sadie out on a boat this afternoon,' Delilah complained.

‘We won't be out long,' Beth told her. ‘I need to be back by three – Lesley and I want to give the t'ai chi class a go.'

‘Ugh, how can you? It's right on the beach in front of everyone! You've never done it before – everyone will laugh!' Delilah put her hands over her face as if she was already being forced to be a spectator at the world's most mortifying event: her mother in gym kit, making slow, strange body shapes and looking mad in front of a crowd.

‘Of course they won't!' Beth laughed. ‘Why would anyone be watching us? They've better things to do; you for one, you'll be sailing.'

Lordy it was hot. Beth fanned herself with her hand as she waited. A tiny hummingbird flitted past, then hovered beside them as it sucked nectar from the pink hibiscus flowers.

‘Amazing little things, aren't they?' Beth turned round at the sound of a non-family voice. It was Michael, father of the bride, ex-husband of the feisty, fraught Angela. Amazing how much you could know about people in this place, she thought, in only twenty-four hours. He was dressed for town rather than beach, in cream linen and carrying a beaten-up panama hat.

‘The speed of those tiny wings,' he went on. ‘You wonder how they get enough food going in to turn it into so much power.'

‘Doesn't take much to keep a titchy bird in the air,' Delilah chipped in. ‘I mean it's only like a big dragonfly, no-one thinks that's much of a miracle.'

‘Delilah!' Ned warned.

Delilah shrugged. ‘Sorry. Didn't mean to sound rude, I just thought, well you know . . . I suppose they've got bigger bodies than dragonflies though.'

‘Conceded generously.' Michael was laughing at her, something that Beth felt she should warn him was like playing chase-the-string with a tiger.

‘We're going down into Teignmouth for a snorkel mask,' Ned told him. ‘Would you like to share our cab, if you're going that way?'

‘Oh. Are you sure? How kind – yes I would. No point in taking two, is there?'

The cab was a minibus, which was just as well, as at the last minute they were joined by Angela.

‘You won't mind me tagging along,' she announced, hauling herself awkwardly into the seat beside the driver just as they'd all got settled. ‘Sadie wants me to get her some Dream Curl lotion and then I thought I'd go to meet my brother at the airport. I know they've got transfers included but it might be a coach and they go all round the houses, don't they? He and his wife are arriving for Sadie's wedding.' She beamed round at Beth and Ned in the row behind her, her smile fading to something close to a snarl as she looked at Michael, who sat with Delilah in the back seats.

‘And Mark's,' Michael added.

‘What?'

‘Mark's wedding. Chap our daughter's marrying. Remember him?'

‘I know who he is,' Angela said.

‘I could have got the hair stuff for Sadie,' Michael told her.

‘No you couldn't,' Angela snapped. ‘You've never come back from the shops with the right thing before, why should I trust you to start now?'

Delilah caught Michael's eye and the two of them started giggling like small infants, covering their mouths in fear of being heard.

‘Naughty me,' he whispered into her hair. ‘Never get anything right. Just as well I'm already sitting at the back of the class or she'd stop the cab and send me there.'

‘I can hear you, you know,' Angela said.

‘And we can all hear you too, my one true ex-love,' Michael said. Delilah shook with squashed-down laughter and a sense of having learned something new: grown-ups could be the most absurdly childish beings. Peculiar, that. How come they were the ones always telling you to grow up?

Much later, Ned wasn't quite sure how it came about that he was on his way to the airport, alone in another eight-seater taxi with the fearsome Angela. It had happened entirely by chance. There he was having a beer outside a gallery on the road beside the marina after pottering contentedly by himself in the town. Beth and Delilah had stayed only until the snorkel mask (Delilah) and a pair of bead-trimmed espadrilles (Beth) had been bought, and then they'd returned to the Mango for their various appointments with sport. Ned had stayed on alone to go to the bank and mooch around the harbour, having a look on the board outside the chandlery at the photos and details of boats for sale. Who knew? One day when (if ever) the kids had flown the coop he might cash in the pension fund, buy a yacht and spend a few years sailing around the Windward Islands with Beth, joining the ever-growing
throng of middle-aged ocean-dwelling dropouts. Michael had gone for a wander round the town and said he'd take a local bus back later, after a look at the museum and cathedral.

‘You make sure you get to see all the island while you're here,' he'd said to Delilah just before setting off in his battered old hat. ‘Make the most of the trip, get to know how the place works.'

‘You sound like my geography teacher,' she'd teased. Ned had been surprised, she'd said it almost fondly – quite unusual when mentioning anything to do with school.

‘Good,' Michael had replied. ‘That means I can set you a test on what you've learned.'

If he, Ned, her own father, had said that, how would she have reacted, he wondered as the cab containing himself and Angela sped eastward to the airport; would she have thought it just about the funniest thing she'd ever heard? No. Of course she wouldn't. It took a stranger to drag hilarity out of a teenager. He'd be willing to bet that Michael's daughter Sadie would have given her father the classic teenage ‘you think you're
so
funny' look that Delilah would have given him. Perhaps all parents of the young should swap round now and then, get themselves a quick fix of that feeling they can still amuse.

Angela had pounced while Ned had been dreaming away, watching a couple of about the same age as him and Beth, loading supplies onto their catamaran. They had cases of Carib beer, a box of bananas, basics like loo rolls and groceries. He found himself envying the string of pennants hanging from the mast – small flags of countries they must have visited. He recognized Grenada, Barbados and Antigua among them. This was a lot more than one up, it seemed, on being a
caravanner, trundling down the A30, your stickered back window boasting trips to Woolacombe and Bridlington.

And then suddenly Angela had landed, bang-flop in the seat opposite him, as if she'd been there all the time, waiting till his thinking was done to accost him with her suggestion.

‘I mean it makes sense, doesn't it,' Angela was now saying, as she'd already said twice during this journey. ‘No point forking out for two taxis when you're both going in roughly the same direction.'

He nodded vaguely. There really wasn't anything to add to the last time he'd replied to the same comment, apart from something obviously rather impolite such as that actually, it was only in the direction of the Mango Sport 'n' Spa if you didn't mind a six-mile detour to the east. Still, what was to race back for? He'd only feel obliged to join in the 5 p.m. beach-volleyball game. Len would insist on him being in his team and then trample all over him. Bulky sort, Len, bigger than ever this year but still a swift, if clumsy, demon on the sand.

‘Nearly there now,' Angela said. ‘Can't wait to see them. And Mark of course.'

Ned had gathered from the earlier ride into town that this was the bridegroom, a young man who might well have been happier to travel to the hotel in the tour company's minibus rather than, exhausted by a long flight in the back of the plane, have to make polite chit-chat with his scary future mother-in-law.

‘Oooh look, the plane's in! They've landed!' Angela was practically bouncing in her seat now as the cab drew in alongside the runway where a British Airways 777 was parked, all doors and hatches gaping open like a huge gutted fish.

They pulled up outside the arrivals terminal and Ned climbed quickly out of the cab, just to savour the humid air after the taxi's fierce air conditioning. He'd never felt cold before on the island. For much of the time on these holidays he was close to gasping in the damp heat. Presumably drivers here considered motoring in a near-frost something of a treat.

‘Oh look! Here they are! Over here!' Angela was on the pavement, shrieking in the direction of the open-air arrivals hall, causing at least thirty bemused-looking newly landed passengers to turn and stare at her.

And so here they were. Ned stared at Angela's approaching brother and his wife and blinked, then blinked again, hoping and hoping they'd change into someone, anyone else. Posh and Becks, Tony and Cherie Blair, the late Kray twins, anybody. But now Angela was hugging her sister-in-law fondly, while Ned stood beside her digging his nails into his messily sweating palms, wishing he was back home – even working would be better than this, possibly even searching the Horsham B&Q for Rawlplugs would be, on a frantic Bank Holiday morning.

‘Cyn!' Angela's voice, who would have thought it possible, notched up yet another decibel. ‘Lovely to see you! Good flight?'

Ned remembered his manners and shook Bradley's hand. ‘Great to see you!' Brad said. ‘Are you still up for the diving? Cyn was saying on the way over that she hoped you and Beth would be back this year.'

Like she didn't know. Ned wished
he
had. What kind of trick was this to pull? Whatever happened to ‘somewhere out east'?

And then there she was with her body against his and her arms around his neck, still deliciously scented
with that slight vanilla tang, giving him a social little hug and whispering close into his ear, ‘Ned darling! How
sweet
of you to come and meet me! It was going to be a surprise!'

Oh it was, Cynthia, it was.

3 measures Guinness

3 measures champagne

Beth very much admired the colour of the paint on the walls of the Haven's treatment room no. 6 (Rosemary). The pale reddish-oxide was, and she filed this away for future useful reference, almost exactly the shade of a newly ploughed field she'd noticed the summer before on the borders of Devon and Cornwall while driving Nick down to look at Falmouth art college. Of course it wasn't quite the same now that Petallia had turned off the overhead lamps and lit the three chunky scented candles in their individual cube alcoves high on the wall, but even in the half-gloom Beth could appreciate its earthy, restful quality.

The colour was definitely a contender for the spare bedroom back home that was so dismal and dated (hydrangea pattern curtains, walls painted a chilly Diamond Blue) that it would qualify perfectly as a ‘before' room for any extreme makeover show. Perhaps she could ring Nick and have him pop down to Homebase for sample pots of Farrow and Ball's range
of historic russets. The old silver-grey carpet in there could go as well; it was decidedly moth-eaten around the edges and beneath it lurked an old but possibly decent quality woodblock floor. Or would that, combined with the terracotta walls, result in too much of a cardboard-box effect, colour-wise? Decisions, decisions. And they shouldn't be made now; Beth was in the middle of her Sensuous Aromatherapy Experience and was supposed to be paying attention to her inner serenity, not to the interior décor of her guest room. By this stage – front almost done – her brain should be barely functioning. In mind and body alike, she should be as floppy and malleable as a jelly.