All Inclusive (14 page)

Would the travel company fly her back home early if the worst happened? It wouldn't be easy, not when you'd got to arrange for a body as well. There weren't exactly daily flights to Britain and of those there were, some were sure to be to Manchester and Glasgow. Just so long as he didn't go off swimming by himself, it might be all right. When she got him home he was going straight to the doctor, no question. He needed telling. She'd take him a cup of tea now, she decided, show him an example.

‘They don't let you starve here, do they?' Michael appeared beside her and looked at the tempting array of cakes. He lifted a gauze cover from a plate and, deftly manipulating the tongs provided, took a small square of almond slice and a miniature chocolate éclair which he laid beside a pile of crustless triangular sandwiches on his plate. Lesley's taste buds prickled agonizingly. ‘Are you having some?' he asked, still holding the plate cover.

‘Er . . . no, not today, ta. Got a figure to watch,' Lesley told him, patting the tyre that she could swear had expanded since the holiday began. Must be the heat. Liquid expanded in high temperatures, she recalled from school. Every drop of wet stuff that her body contained, all the blood, lymph, digestive fluids, pee, must have plumped up and doubled in quantity. And weight.

‘And it's worth watching,' Michael said, ‘if you don't mind me saying.'

Lesley wasn't sure whether she minded or not. It depended on what he'd meant, exactly. Did he mean it was a good thing she was keeping an eye on it, seeing as it was so clearly running way out of control, or did
he, and how very unlikely this seemed, mean that she was worth looking at? She knew she was starting to blush and felt flustered.

‘Um . . . I might just get a small sandwich. For Len, not for me,' she said, turning away to the plates on the adjacent table. She wouldn't eat them, she reminded herself as she picked out a couple of tuna and cucumber and added a ham and tomato one to go with them, she really wouldn't. She spotted a plateful of egg and cress on wholemeal and took three of those, plus a miniature sausage roll, then walked across towards the jacuzzi, conscious that Michael, should he choose, could watch her large backside showing it had a life of its own beneath her sundress.

‘Len, you coming out of there for tea? I've got you some.'

‘Tea?' he called, waving his glass at her. ‘Only if it's eighty per cent proof, darling!'

‘A sandwich then?' she tried again, looking at what seemed to be, mysteriously, rather a large plateful. Well he could do with it, mop up some of that alcohol.

‘No thanks, you go ahead. Indulge yourself – that's what we're here for!'

Oh well, she supposed he'd saved himself a few calories there, by not eating. No way was she going to the bar to get him a boozy refill, though. The amount he got through – he was the sort of guest who must make the management think twice about their all-inclusive policy.

Lesley climbed back onto her lounger with the tea and put the food on the table beside her. The hotel's ancient, scruffy, white cat sauntered up and sat next to her chair, gazing up at her with its cool blue eyes. ‘OK puss, you can help me out with this little lot. We'll go sharesies.' She put a tuna sandwich on the ground and
the cat wolfed it down almost in one, not even hesitating over the crusts.

‘You'll make yourself sick. Slow down,' she told him, reaching out to stroke his grubby ears. The cat tolerated the attention, but all the time with his eyes keenly focused on the plate, so she gave him the rest of the tuna and the ham. ‘And the egg ones are mine,' she said. ‘It's only a bit of protein, isn't it, cat? It'll do me good.' The cat ignored her and started washing his paws. Quite likely, Lesley thought, he heard plump women from all round the world whingeing versions of the same weight issues, week in week out. If he heard anything at all, that is. From some bizarre memory of that sad week back in March, she recalled poor Mrs Benson talking about her husband's own beloved white cat, and saying that the blue-eyed ones were all stone deaf.

‘I'm starving. Shall we get some tea? Or are we too late?' Beth asked Ned as the two of them went back to the pool terrace from their room.

Beth felt quite deliciously elated and energized as well as hungry – afternoon passion sessions didn't often feature in their Surrey life. Perhaps they should, although where the necessary element of spontaneity would come into it she didn't know. She'd have to make sure it wasn't a day when the window cleaner was due, when Delilah wasn't likely to bunk off games and come home early, when she hadn't got one of Wendy's weirder experiments bubbling unpredictably on the hob.

‘We could have stayed in the room and had a bottle of fizz sent up. Let's go back.' Ned tugged her hand, pulling her towards him. ‘I don't much want to see anyone else right now.'

‘Too late – Delilah's waving at us.'

‘Where've you two been?' she called from the jacuzzi. ‘Ugh! You're looking all loved up.'

‘Ah, look at Ned and Beth, everyone! How sweet!' Len waved his glass at them. ‘And they say romance is dead.'

Cyn, lying face down on a nearby lounger, raised her head and smiled at Beth. Conspiratorial. The word leapt straight into Beth's head as she met Cynthia's cool eye. Ned's grip tightened on her hand.

‘Listen, I just need to go to the dive shop and talk to Ellis about my regulator. See you later for a drink?'

Beth nodded. ‘No problem. I might go and have a quick splash in the sea. It'll wake me up.'

Ned hugged her close to him quickly. ‘Love you, don't forget that.' And paced off fast towards the dive shop. Cyn sat up on her lounger, and grinned at Beth. ‘You two look very lovey-dovey,' she said as Beth came to sit on the seat beside her.

‘It's just the sea air and enforced relaxation.' Beth yawned. ‘We had a short siesta.' She felt faintly embarrassed. The expression on Cynthia's face was a determinedly inquisitive one. Any minute now she half-expected her to blurt out, ‘Had a good shag, did you?' loudly enough to render everyone in the jacuzzi silent and to have Nick and Delilah disappearing under the water in mortification. No wonder Ned had beaten a canny retreat. She wished she'd gone with him.

‘A
siesta
?' Cyn snorted. ‘Is that what you call it?'

A burst of raucous laughter came from the occupants of the jacuzzi.

‘They're having fun, aren't they?' Beth said, in a feeble bid to distract Cynthia. ‘Lovely to see all the young ones getting together. I was worried Delilah might be bored.'

‘Your Nick certainly doesn't look bored,' Cyn commented wryly, glancing at the noisy party in the bubbling water.

Beth watched her son. His right arm was draped round Sadie's shoulder and he was using that hand to pour, very carefully, sparkling wine into Sadie's glass, a difficult manoeuvre that seemed to require her to giggle a lot as she leaned in very close to him, squashing her breasts against his chest. Nick, trying to steady the bottle so it lined up with the plastic glass, kept spilling wine into the water.

‘He'd have better luck using the other hand,' Beth commented, hoping he wasn't stirring up trouble. Mark seemed pretty much oblivious at the moment, chatting amiably to Len about football, but things could easily turn nasty if he was the jealous type.

‘From where I'm sitting he looks as if he's having all the luck he wants,' Cynthia said, giving Beth a sly glance. ‘Must run in your family, that.'

One of sour (lime juice)

Two of sweet (sugar syrup)

Three of strong (dark rum)

Four of weak (pineapple juice or water)

On each Tuesday at 6.30 p.m. at the Mango Experience (Sport 'n' Spa), come rain, wind, thunderbolt or mosquito swarm, the Manager's Cocktail Party was held. Every guest was invited, by way of a stiff white gold-edged card pushed under their room door, to the pool terrace at dusk for syrup-sweet punch and spicy savouries guzzled down to the sound of an energetic steel band. The event, was, to most, a welcome opportunity to dress up in something smarter than average in order to mingle with fellow guests, along with members of the hotel staff chosen for their sociable savoir faire with clients and an ability to fend off potential complainers. Ned, on the other hand, considered the whole palaver irritatingly anachronistic and entirely pointless.

‘We do our own perfectly good mingling all day – hanging out by the pool and in the bar, getting stuck
into the various sports,' he grumbled to Beth as he came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel and dripping water across the tiled floor. ‘This is just more of the same but in poncier clothes. You stand around feeling daft, trying to balance a drink you don't like and a plate of deep-fried plantain nibbles, and you end up talking to people you've just spent the entire day with.'

‘You said that last year,' Beth reminded him. ‘And then you met that bloke from Somerset who was in the market for a big white house in Notting Hill. Paid off, didn't it, that bit of social chit-chat?'

‘OK, in
that
case I suppose it did,' he conceded. ‘But I didn't come all the way here to talk house sales. Nobody in real life actually has cocktail parties any more, do they?' Ned said, ‘except in hotels like this one. I wonder why they still call it cocktails? It sounds so 1950s. They could just have put “Drinks” on the invitation.'

‘I expect it's to make people think they're staying somewhere tremendously elegant, and it's an excuse for women to wear something over-glittery which didn't look so OTT at home. Something they'd otherwise only wear if they're invited to some Masonic event.'

‘And that's another bloody hangover from bygone days. Bloody Masons – just don't get me started on those.'

Beth smiled at Ned by way of the mirror where she was doing her make-up. He required no more than quiet humouring in this kind of mood. It wasn't a bad one, more a state of enjoying a bout of grouching. No question, he was, with middle age, turning into a grumpy old man. It was close to qualifying as a new hobby. The minute they got home he'd start moaning
about the mail containing endless invitations to link the electricity bill to Nectar Points, how badly thought-out was the five-year roadworks plan for the M25, and the fact that, due to global warming, the grass would need cutting all through January. By the time he hit pension age he would be one of those growly old buggers who carried a walking stick entirely for the purpose of shoving teenagers out of his way off the pavements and into fast traffic.

On the plus side, just now Ned looked very tanned and fit. Having something good to look at was always a help if you'd got to converse with a fault-finding misery-guts, in Beth's opinion. The ripples across his stomach even seemed close to that male Holy Grail of a six-pack. He was diving every morning and then something sporty – sailing, volleyball or tennis – in the afternoons. Back home, he ticked over physically on one not particularly strenuous visit to the gym per week. It was highly unfair, Beth reflected, that a mere couple of weeks' holiday activity could make so much difference to a man's physique, but with women it took months and months of exhausting, constant effort to stop gravity and excess poundage in their inexorable tracks.

‘So do we have to go?' Ned asked her now, sounding like a child reluctant to go to a birthday party. ‘Why don't we give it a miss and just grab a drink in the Frangipani bar instead? It's always the same – shake hands with the management, reassure them that, yes, we're having an excellent holiday thank you, then drink enough vile sweet punch to put us off dinner.'

‘But what about
my
over-glittery frock?' Beth protested. ‘I've put it on now. It's looking forward to its outing. And anyway, there's Nick and Delilah to consider. Some new younger people might have arrived
and it could be a chance for them to meet someone to hang out with.'

‘OK, OK, if it helps get them off our hands. Though why they can't just go on their own . . .' Ned pulled on a sky-blue linen shirt. ‘It's just that it makes me think of cruise ships, all this glad-handing and small talk.'

‘Heavens, you're so unsociable!' she laughed. ‘If you're not out diving, all silent under the sea, you're away with the fairies in a world of your own. Another time, perhaps we should rent a villa miles from anywhere, then you can be as moody and isolated as you want. Now . . .' She fluffed out her hair and did a twirl. ‘Do I look all right?'

‘All right? You look gorgeous!' Ned told her, coming over to her and kissing the side of her neck.

And so I should, Beth thought as she fastened her lilac strappy kitten-heeled shoes. The dress was a silk Matthew Williamson number, blue drifting through purple to hibiscus pink. It might have been from Harvey Nick's sale but still represented a meteorite-wallop dent in her bank account. She'd bought it back in August, as an ‘I deserve this' gesture to get the last of the Other Woman Blues out of her head. She looked terrific in it, even according to her own overcritical gaze. The fabric seemed to know exactly which places on her body to cling to and which to drift around in a tactful and sensitive manner. Now all she had to do to live up to it was to forget about why she'd bought it in the first place.

‘Mum?' Delilah knocked on the door. ‘Can I come in?'

‘Of course you can.' Ned opened the door. ‘Oh and don't you look like a princess!'

‘Dad! Pur-lease, I'm sixteen, not
six
!' Delilah slunk into the room wearing a short scarlet skirt slung almost criminally low on her hips and comprising no more
than ten inches of a double row of frills, no bigger than would be needed to trim a cushion. On her top half, or rather, Beth calculated, her
quarter
, she wore a very much cropped-off matching sleeveless vest. It crossed Beth's mind that the chunky silver necklace and bracelets she was wearing made up about as much in square inches as her skimpy outfit, but the girl did look fabulous. Just so long as she hadn't got plans to go out on the town, dressed like that.