All Inclusive (17 page)

‘Oh. Have I got it all wrong?' He frowned. ‘Didn't you say Lesley would only go snorkelling if there were other people with her? I thought if we made up a big enough party and she changed her mind, there'd be someone for her to sit on the beach with.'

‘She said she was nervous swimming in deeper water. But it isn't so very deep out there and there's all
of us to be with her – Delilah and Nick want to come too. We didn't need to round up Gina and Cyn as well.'

Ned gave her a sharp look. ‘Why? What's Cynthia done?'

Beth laughed nervously. ‘Cyn? No, why? Has she said something to you?'

‘What would she say to me?'

‘Who knows? What
could
she say to you?'

Ned shrugged and concentrated on his bacon. They made it very crisp at the Mango. He cut into it rather too hard and shards scattered all over his plate and onto the tablecloth. ‘Nothing to tell,' he said to Beth, as he collected up the bits. ‘Do you think Gina's mother will want to come?'

‘She might just for the boat trip, though I can't see her being up for the snorkelling bit. But if she is, we mustn't let her drown. I can imagine her ghost hovering over the Sundown bar saying “I told you so”.'

It was the tricky thing about holidaying as a group, however loosely assembled they were. You didn't want to do absolutely everything together, but at the same time you didn't want to offend anyone by leaving them out if there was anything going on. Beth would prefer not to spend the afternoon with Cynthia – not until she'd got her on her own and made it clear that she wasn't the one who'd been enjoying extra-marital larks. Cyn kept looking at her now from across the restaurant, waving her fingers and smiling in a gleeful ‘your secret is safe with me' sort of way which told Beth exactly the opposite.

Cyn adored gossip and intrigue. The year before when Gina had been seen late at night getting into a taxi with the Frangipani restaurant's maître d', it had been all round the hotel by the time the breakfast chef had fried the first egg the next morning. Beth would
have to put Cyn right, and soon, but she intended to do it without telling her about Ned. That had been a near thing, brought on by the rum punch, but if she'd managed not to talk about it to close friends at home she certainly didn't want to drag it all up again to entertain Cyn. She'd make something up – say she was talking about a friend of hers maybe, or just say she was generalizing and mention footballers or some silly young tabloid soap star.

‘What's the matter with Cynthia?' Lesley, on her way to claim a lounger, slid into a vacant chair beside Beth. ‘She keeps staring over here and grinning like a loon. She's practically wriggling in her seat like a toddler needing a pee.'

‘Is she?' Ned's voice registered at least two octaves in as many words. ‘Is she still doing it? If I turn round now it'll look obvious.'

‘So turn round! What's wrong with obvious?' Lesley laughed and prodded him in the ribs. He winced, pained.

‘Perhaps she knows where Gina disappeared to so suddenly last night,' Beth ventured, deflecting gossip.

‘Or perhaps she got on the right side of Brad, if you get my drift! He's not a bad looker, that Brad. And you're not so bad yourself, darling, even on a morning after.' Lesley winked at Ned and would have nudged him again, but he had managed to be out of his chair and halfway to the door in one swift avoiding movement.

‘Must go – got to check equipment at the dive shop. See you later!' he called as he vanished into the searing sunlight.

‘Something I said?' Lesley asked. ‘You know me, I was only messing about!'

‘Oh he's fine. The divers are off to see the sharks this
morning. I expect he's a bit nervous, wondering if he's going to be fish food.'

‘Ugh!' Lesley shuddered. ‘Sharks! They eat anything, sharks. Dead bodies, dolphins, gulls, you name it.'

‘The goats of the ocean,' Beth said. ‘I must admit I always feel a bit nervous when Ned goes on that particular dive. I wonder what would happen if . . .'

‘No don't.' Lesley put her hand on Beth's wrist and gripped it tight. ‘Stop right there. Don't think about it, don't talk about it. Just . . . give him a specially nice goodbye kiss before he gets in the dive-boat.'

‘Would that be a just-in-case type of thing? It's hard to get close to him when he's got all the kit on!'

‘Just do it. Do it for me, OK?' Lesley gripped Beth even tighter.

‘OK, OK. I'll do it for you. I'll give him one for you.'

‘Oooh naughty, yes I'll have one of those as well!'

‘A goodbye kiss, I meant! Does no-one round here think about anything but sex?' Beth laughed as she started gathering her book and her bag together, preparing for an hour in the early sun before seeing whether Nick and Delilah (when they finally emerged from sleep) fancied a trip into the town or to the wildlife park.

‘What are you two laughing about? Can we all share the joke?' Cynthia, carrying a tennis racquet and a white visor, appeared across the table.

‘Oh it's just sex! Always plenty to laugh at there!' Lesley told her.

‘Ah well, sex. That age-old hobby.' Cynthia gave them a weary smile. ‘Beth been regaling you with her adventures? You must share them with the rest of us, Beth. Let's all have a giggle!'

Without waiting for a reply, Cynthia turned and
stalked off, swinging her tennis racket. Beth watched her back view as she strode towards the tennis courts. She was wearing a demure little tennis outfit – such a cute white dress with pert pleats from her skinny hips, towelling wristbands and her hair pulled back with a white scrunchie. She looked like a sixth-former about to win the inter-schools challenge cup. Beth could imagine Cynthia regretted the passing of frilled tennis knickers. How dull and sexless she must think the current fashion for wearing plain Lycra shorts instead.

‘What's up with her?' Lesley asked. ‘She's a bit antsy this morning, isn't she?'

‘I've no idea. Maybe Angela's getting on her nerves. I wouldn't be too thrilled to have her as a sister-in-law myself. She must be a hoot at family parties. Do you think she often drops her clothes like she did last night?'

‘Horrible thought! It was Cyn who wanted to come to Sadie's wedding, though. You can't say she didn't know what she was letting herself in for.'

‘True – maybe she thought things would be different away from home.'

‘Never is though, not really, is it?' Lesley sighed. ‘So much for getting away from it all.'

Ned was the first one on the dive-boat. He waded out from the shore as fast as he could, hauled himself up the boat's stern ladder and carried his oxygen tank to the front so he could sit under the canopy in the shade and out of view from the shore. He looked back at the hotel, feeling safe from Cynthia at last, although who knew where she might be watching from? Was she still on the tennis court (if that was where she'd gone – maybe she'd just fancied slinking about in front of him in her tennis kit and had now gone to change)?
She was everywhere he went except out here, on and under the sea.

The night before, after she'd grabbed him for a dance in the Frangipani bar when Beth had gone off to the loo, she'd run her hands so thoroughly over his body it had only been just this side of decency. She'd then crushed herself close against him, checking to see if the hand-running had had its intended effect. And of course it had. No good explaining to her that it was virtually nothing but reflex. He'd defy any man's penis to stay 100 per cent limp against such a skilful mauling. And where had Bradley been then? Oh, only a few metres away at the bar, that's where, chatting to Len and all oblivious. If he'd bothered to turn round and distract himself from cricket talk, he'd have had a prime view of his wife desperately attempting to relight the cold dead embers of her affair. Cyn was one woman who just didn't give up, even when Ned had actually been quite rude, telling her that the words ‘flogging' and ‘dead horse' were appropriate. Except she'd been able to point out that the horse was clearly not quite as dead as he'd claimed. Which bit of ‘it's over' did she not understand? But then she always did like the risk factor.

What had she really expected last night? That he'd agree to meet her round the back of the Haven spa and give her a fast seeing-to against the bougainvillea-covered wall? The dire truth, he thought, as half a dozen more divers climbed aboard and Carlos began carefully steering the boat out beyond the reef towards the south of the island, the truth was that she'd expected exactly that. The thrill of the unplanned, that was what she'd adored, except that during those few short springtime months there came a point where he realized that Cynthia's ‘unplanned' escapades
were about as spontaneous as a US military invasion.

One of Cyn's favourite tricks had involved catching the train into London on the slightest whim – a libido-raising sultry day perhaps, or a quest for non-rural shoes – and ‘surprising' Ned outside the office, usually just as he was about to get into his car to show a client of potentially stonking profitability around a Holland Park mansion. Regardless of colleagues or clients, Cyn would purr erotic suggestions down her mobile phone and promise to wait in Starbucks round the corner till he was free. It was too distracting as well as being mildly terrifying, and he was unnervingly guilty of giving less than full attention to the job in hand. Sometimes she would have to hang about waiting for him for hours, yet he'd race back from his meeting to find her slowly turning the pages of a glossy gossip mag and sipping a skinny latte as if she was having a quick reviver mid-shopping. She must have got through countless cups of coffee. He suspected it was what made her so hyper. That or the slimming pills that she'd bought in bulk over the Internet and was considering selling on to the stout dowager ladies of her village.

‘I don't need diet help any more,' she'd gushed into his ear one torrid afternoon as he rolled off her snaky naked body in the starkly (and Starckly) minimalist third-floor room at Chelsea's latest hip hotel shag venue.

‘I'm achieving corporeal perfection by more natural means. Sheer sleekness through sex,' she breathed as she twirled herself into the crisp linen (2,000 thread count) sheet.

It had been the tiny but dangerous fireworks she'd lit that had led to the end of the affair. Only a couple of weeks in and she'd softly thrown the odd post-coital
sizzler: ‘Bradley and I, well it's almost dead, our marriage. And the house echoes and rattles now that Simon's grown up and left home.'

A little more scorching had been: ‘That first meeting in Harrods, don't you feel it was more than coincidence, more
meant
to
be
?'

And then the almighty rocket explosion: ‘You and I, Ned, we're at that all or nothing stage. We must pack our bags, slam the doors and run from our old dull lives before it's too late!'

This last had been on a very warm May night. Ned had lain with Cyn on a picnic rug on a patch of scrappy grass close to the perimeter fence at Fairford airbase. Ned was uncomfortable, feeling conscious that he was getting too old for all this. Back home, Beth had been testing an unseasonal Canadian recipe for goose stuffed with prunes and apples. The house was filled with a deliciously warm celebratory scent and he'd hated leaving it, lying all the way out of the door to keep a date for something he could get far more comfortably – and perfectly happily – at home. The ground beneath the rug was stonier than he had expected, and he feared there could be airbase security lights that would catch the two of them in eerie greenish brilliance. Cyn, giving it her all on top of him, might well trigger it off by sheer exuberance and she wouldn't, he knew, be in the least put off by the spotlight effect. She'd probably love it, play up to it and suggest a repeat performance to entertain the troops. This all had to stop, Ned had decided there and then. He had no intention of leaving Beth. It had never crossed his mind that he would run out on her and Nick and Delilah for the sake of Cyn's energetic flesh.

Now, as the boat sped past the end of Dragon Island, the hotel grounds were far behind, and even if she was
watching through binoculars, Cyn would find it hard to pick Ned out among the various bodies in wetsuits. Perhaps she would, from a safe distance, select someone else to be her plaything. Just a pity it didn't seem likely to be her easy-going, good-natured husband Bradley.

It would be only too easy never to venture outside the hotel grounds. Beth wanted Nick and Delilah to see as much as possible of the island – its rain forest, magical hidden waterfalls, the bustling, colourful capital with its twice-weekly spice market and east-coast beaches with the mountainous rolling surf, but she had to admit that the Mango's facilities were stiff competition for outside attractions. From the Wake Up and Stretch class, you could start after breakfast with a reviving lie-down on a lounger with a book, then when the sun took a hold for the morning you could join an archery lesson, join the Aquasplash workout in the pool or wander off to the Peace pavilion for the yoga class, meditation or the stress-release session. Beth liked this one – it required no more effort than the letting-go of inner turmoil under the guidance of Louella. She lay there now, drifting away into dreamland, stretched out on a mat staring up at the pale green painted roof slats with their overhanging thatch of plaited palm leaves, and feeling the gentle wind wafting in between the balcony railings. It was like being on a giant Balinese bed, open to the sea breeze and scented with the surrounding jasmine and tamarind.

‘And . . . release.' Louella almost whispered her instructions. Beth was sure she'd been recruited entirely for the calming tones of her voice. Deep exhalations followed from her twenty class members. Beth had let go so deeply she could barely feel her
limbs. It would be a huge effort simply to lift a hand. Her body was as limp as a sleeping kitten and she was only vaguely conscious of the floor supporting every ounce of her weight.