All Inclusive (2 page)

Beth evicted such unhelpful thoughts. More useful thinking was in order here. And of course she'd be the one to come up with the answer – wasn't she always? Wasn't she the one would could always be relied on to find a bright side to look on and a solution to everything? It was like being bloody Pollyanna – as if they needed a cheerleader to keep them hyped up and fully functioning. Sometimes she wondered what they'd all do in the event of her sudden death. Would any of them have the nous to phone an undertaker? Choose hymns? Would they browse carefully through the coffin catalogue, knowing she would absolutely hate to be sent to the eternal flames in a faux-mahogany box with a relief carving of The Raising of Lazarus tactlessly etched on its side? Probably not.

‘I've no idea.' Her brain raced to sort this hitch, coming up with nothing immediately promising but plenty that
wouldn't
work. ‘We can't inflict Delilah on someone else – it wouldn't be fair on her or them.' Beth trailed a limp piece of tepid asparagus around in the remains of her tarragon sauce as she thought aloud. ‘And we can't leave her here with just Nick, she'll only get worse again.'

And she'd starve. Delilah's gap-year brother Nick spent every daylight hour taking the bets behind the
counter at William Hill and stashing his wages away for the big Australia trip. His night-time hours were spent in ostentatiously noisy sexual activity with a sleek foxy sort called Felicity. If he ate anything at all, it intended to arrive late in the evening by bike, lukewarm and rubbery in flat, square boxes. It was either that or something he'd inadequately defrosted in the microwave between bouts of humping. Not ideal for a convalescing girl in need of building up.

‘If we left her behind, she might decide she's feeling much better and have parties,' Ned warned. ‘She could fill the place with pissed-up teenagers who'll throw up on the carpets and have sex in our bed. Or the other way round.' He chuckled.

Thank you Ned, so helpful. That didn't get said either. Sarcasm was another item on Beth's new list of don't-dos. Hard work it was turning out to be, this business of Saving Your Marriage. So many times in these months since Ned's heart-stopping revelation she'd kept her mouth clam-shut when her instinct had been to snap something at him, remind him of what a prize pain he'd been. Not that he didn't know, she conceded. No-one could have been more miserably contrite than Ned, the day he'd come clean about the mysterious silent midnight phone calls and the Tiffany key tag (engraved simply, tackily, with the single word ‘Darling'. Ugh!) that he'd blushed to unwrap over his birthday breakfast. She'd given it three months now and sometimes she felt
she
was the one on last-chance behaviour, not Ned. How had that come about? Still, like the idea of Ned let loose alone in the Caribbean, it was not to be thought of now. Delilah and the holiday needed to be sorted.

‘There is one solution,' Beth considered slowly, reluctantly.

‘Hmmm. Bit late to cancel.' Ned second-guessed her. ‘I doubt the insurance people would give us a refund on the grounds of a missing granny. And it's only six weeks 'til we go.'

‘No, I didn't mean that. I meant we could . . . um . . . take her with us?' The suggestion came out almost as a whisper. Being in charge of a lone teenager at the Mango Experience (Sport 'n' Spa) was not a prospect that could be seen as a bonus to a holiday. Even with Delilah's energy level at its lowest, it would be like taking a loose-pinned hand grenade.

‘Take her
with
us?' Ned looked terrified. Beth imagined she did as well.

I must be a very shallow person, Beth mused a week later as she rummaged through the bottom drawer in the spare room wardrobe. It was where she kept her instant holiday kit – swimwear, flip-flops, sunhats (two), sarongs (several), beach bag, snorkel and so on. She was taking out all her swimsuits, lining them up on the bed before trying each one on to decide which were still wearable and which – according to whether she had mysteriously outgrown them or whether the Lycra content was terminally decayed – should be consigned to the bin. This activity, on a dank and miserably dark autumn afternoon, was lifting her spirits enormously. The sight of these gaudy handfuls of patterned cloth, the splashes of unseasonal colour against the slate-blue satin throw on the bed, cheered her far more than, say, looking round an exhibition of worthy art in a pale, cool gallery.

What was so shallow about that, the voice of her supportive inner sister asked. Was anything wrong with the cheap thrill of vivid pattern, or the satisfying certainty that possession of the right swimsuit was an
essential (possibly
the
essential) ingredient of a beach holiday? Isn't it OK to relish the deep, perfect pleasure of owning a delicious pink and lilac floral La Perla number with matching wrap-around? And better yet, the pleasure of the thing still fitting flatteringly two years after purchase and a certain amount of midlife weight gain?

Shallow was, Beth replied to the voice as she untangled a couple of sarongs that were caught in the strap of her snorkel mask, shallow was choosing to be up here sorting out swimwear a good month before she needed to pack, when she should have been cooking up a test batch of Endive Flemish-style (
Witloof op Zijn Vlaams
) to Wendy's newly adjusted salt level. Shallow was, in a spirit of anticipatory excitement, already having made that booking at Salon Aphrodite for preliminary vacation groundwork in the form of a Fake Bake tan plus manicure, pedicure, bikini wax and pre-flight de-stress massage. Worst of all, shallow was relishing the prospect of escape from the dank atmosphere of illness that surrounded Delilah downstairs and was somehow making the entire house feel as if it was going slowly mouldy. Unless, as was possible, that was something one of the cats had brought in and secreted in the dark distant reaches under the sink.

‘Mum?' You'd think she'd been specially cued up for it, Beth thought, hearing her daughter's virus-enfeebled little voice wafting up the stairs just as she was taking off her knickers to check if the peach striped low-back number had one final sunny fortnight in it.

‘What is it, sweetie? I'm a bit tied up.' Pants were hurled into the landing laundry basket, swimsuit was hauled up thighs. Not a seductive sight, she thought,
catching a glimpse of squeezed flesh in the full-length mirror.

‘Oh . . . nothing. I can't find the remote . . .' The voice trailed away, pathetically. Bloody hell, Beth thought, if the girl's alert enough to be fretting about changing channels . . .

‘Have you looked down the back of the sofa?' she yelled down the stairs, pulling the stripy swimsuit over her bottom. It wasn't
too
much of a struggle – which might not all be due to clinging to the right side of size 12. Fabric goes flaccid as well as flesh – when she took it off she'd have a good look to see if the Lycra was starting to perish – if you weren't careful you could end up wearing something dangerously close to see-through and emerge from the sea feeling like Ursula Andress but wondering what everyone was smirking at. She looked in the mirror and tweaked her bottom upwards a bit. ‘I'm sure it's sort of dropped,' she murmured to herself. ‘Why is gravity suddenly something to be reckoned with? Where will it all have plummeted to, five years from now?'

‘Muuum!'

Heavens, now what? Beth took off the swimsuit and folded it back in the drawer. It, and the others, would more or less do for this holiday, though she might run up to Selfridges and treat herself to a new black one – a low V-front would be good, possibly with a halter neck – which would be very flattering to the bustline before that, too, headed irretrievably south. She flung on just enough clothes to be decent and ran down the stairs.

Delilah's glandular fever seemed to have taken over the entire house. It was an affliction that drained not only the sufferer of all energy but also, Beth now knew, those who had to undertake the nursing. Or at
least it did in this case; it might just be that the reason the demands of the patient were excessive was that Delilah was sixteen years old and making the most of having the household running round after her with cups of camomile tea and freshly squeezed orange juice and a constantly topped-up biscuit supply.

On the old donkey-grey crackled-leather sofa in the kitchen the elongated skinny form of Delilah lay stretched out beneath a blue fleecy blanket – and a pair of dozy, overfed cats – watching daytime trash TV and alternately flinging herself about, steaming with fever, or huddled up, shivering. It was progress, Ned, Beth and Delilah's brother Nick agreed, that she had made it down the stairs at all. As decreed by the doctor, who warned of long-term, immovable chest infection resulting from staying too long on the horizontal, they encouraged her to try to be up and about now that she was past the worst of it.

‘I can't get up Mum! I'm still too ill!' she'd wailed to Beth that morning, turning over and sighing and picking off another shred of wallpaper.

‘If you stay in bed much longer, this whole room will need redecorating,' Beth had told her, feeling her sympathy being pushed to its limit as she watched a long slender paper slice (silver stars on purple background, only up two years and Delilah's own choice) being peeled back like an old scab from skin. ‘The minute you're better you can strip the whole lot off, seeing as you're so keen to get rid of it.'

‘I hate you. You don't care about me,' Delilah grumbled into her squashed old toy panda. ‘I might relapse and then it'll be your fault.'

‘Sounds to me like you're definitely feeling better,' Beth had said, recognizing the almost-welcome return of her daughter's usual grumbly teenage nature after a
couple of weeks of troubling and unfamiliar near-silence.

Beth had often wished that her mother's favourite childhood reading hadn't been the complete works of Louisa M. Alcott. Given that it was, she'd have preferred not to have been named after the feeble runt of the four March girls who had died in her teens. Sharing a name with clever Jo, or glamorous Amy would have been decidedly more inspiring. There had been several teachers in her schooldays who, considering diminutives overfamiliar, bordering on the vulgar, had tried to call her ‘Elizabeth'. Every single one, on being put right by Beth, had said, ‘Oh I see – Beth as in . . .' and then faltered, recalling the drawn-out, maudlin death of the eponymous girl, a child as sickly with inner goodness as with TB.

Each February, noticing the snowdrops in flower on the bank outside the sitting-room window, Beth's mother Helena used to look wistful and say, ‘Look Beth, new life from the old.'

‘It's only spring, Mum.' Beth would be dismissive, turning away from the window and from her mother, who, reminded of this fictional anniversary of the Death of Beth, would at any moment start feeling her daughter's forehead and ask her if she was sure she was all right, just as she herself had had to do with the acutely stricken Delilah over the past weeks. Perhaps there was some sort of bizarre karma involved here.

I must have been a huge disappointment, being so robust, Beth thought now as she switched on the kettle and slid a couple of crumpets into the toaster: one for her – the pre-holiday diet could wait a bit, the dour day needed a cheer-up – one for Delilah. But just in case and to ward off the fate of her namesake, at thirteen Beth had been at the front of the queue to have
her BCG vaccination. Other girls who were lined up for the school nurse and her dreaded syringe were wide-eyed and weepy with foreboding, claiming they would faint or die from terror. This, after all, was the Big One. They'd all heard horror stories from older pupils about how the vaccine made your skin bubble up into an agonizing, suppurating blister with a scab that must not be touched if you wanted to avoid half an arm's worth of deep-scar tissue. Beth didn't care about all that. With that one simple inoculation she was free of all her Beth March early-death-by-tuberculosis terrors. Better still, she could be sure she had cheated her mother of the chance to have her laid up for months on a daybed in the sitting room, feebly coughing blood into a lace hanky. For this was a fate that Helena considered inevitable, given that Beth spent her weekend nights watching punk rock bands and came home covered in the potentially lethal spit of a thousand strangers. Delilah, on the other hand, had caught what was known as the Kissing Disease. More attractive, surely, than something acquired via anonymous hurtled saliva, but really there were some details of your resident teenager's life that you'd rather not have shoved, as it were, down your throat.

‘When's Gran back from Rome?' Delilah asked, now that
Countdown
had finished.

‘Some time after the weekend I think. And then she's away again just before we go. Madeira I think. Or possibly Cyprus. I can't remember which. I expect she'll send us a postcard.'

‘She's always going off somewhere,' Delilah commented, sounding mildly offended that a woman in her seventies should want to venture further than a WI meeting at the local village hall.

‘How true,' Beth murmured, how bloody true. She
slathered a fat layer of butter onto the crumpets and handed one to Delilah.

‘She said she'll pop in and see us for a day or so before she leaves.'

‘I wanted her to come and stay like she usually does,' Delilah moaned, snuggling into the nearest cat. ‘She lets me have Heinz tomato soup and she makes us proper puddings every day.
You
never do.'

‘You don't want to come with us then? I thought you'd come round to the idea,' Beth said quickly, wondering, even at this late stage, if there was a magic, unthought-of other solution. It wasn't that she and Ned didn't enjoy holidays with their own children. They did those in summer. This year they'd rented a villa on Fuerteventura and barely seen either Nick or Delilah all fortnight. Perfect. Everybody happy.