All Inclusive (3 page)

‘ 'S not that.' Delilah hesitated for a telling second, then came clean. ‘Well it is. There won't be anyone my age. You and your mates are all, like . . . you know . . .'

‘Old?' Beth laughed. ‘Is that the word you're groping for? Hardly! We're not even close to ancient; Lesley is younger than me.' Delilah made a face – Beth might as well have offered her a couple of pensioners to play with. She tried again. ‘And Gina definitely doesn't count as old. She always travels by herself and makes friends with everyone.' This was true. This was also something of a euphemism. Gina slept on a lounger beneath a palm tree all day, conserving her strength to go out clubbing nightly with the various fitness instructors from the Mango Experience. Like a cat successfully satiated by hunting, she slunk back in the small hours to (they assumed) her single room and yet always managed to be up in time for the Early Stretch class, down at the front, close to the mirror (and to the instructor, especially if it was the gorgeous Sam), as
fresh and supple as if she'd had a reviving twelve hours of sleep. If she had a family back home in Connecticut she certainly didn't let on about them.

Delilah gave her mother a look. It said a lot. It said that anyone over twenty, or even, to be on the generous side, twenty-five, absolutely
sooo
didn't count as a person to have a conversation with, let alone spend two weeks keeping close company with.

‘Hey – don't be so ageist! I'm sure everyone will be really thrilled to see you. You've met Cynthia, remember? That time she and Bradley called in on their way to Devon back in July? She's one of those people who could be any age – you'll get on well with her. And there are always quite a lot of younger people. It's not just us creaking elderly folks.'

This was almost true. The hotel had an age policy of over-sixteens only, in the hope that by then they could be trusted not to go wild with the price-included alcohol or throw up in the pool in the small hours after hurling all the sun loungers into the sea. Delilah only just scraped in under the wire, plus all the world over it was termtime for schools. There really wasn't likely to be anyone else under mid-twenties at the very least. The youngest guests tended to be in fond loved-up honeymoon couples, practically welded together in a post-coital stupor, holding hands, and, over candlelit dinners, spoon-feeding each other choice bits from their plates. Next up on the age scale were the thirty-something office women on a cheap-season break, smoking on the beach over fat bonkbuster novels or trit-trotting between the Haven Spa's treatment rooms on wedge-heeled ankle-tied espadrilles. They were always up for a giggle, joshing with the bar staff and cackling over just-missed possibilities at the local nightclubs. But they wouldn't want, as they poured
into their night-time taxis, a teenager still in need of supervision tagging along with them.

‘Plenty of reading matter, that's what you need. We'll go mad at the Gatwick Waterstone's. Or,' Beth suggested slyly, ‘you could pack some of your A-level texts . . . get ahead a bit.'

‘Yeah, right, whatever.' Delilah yawned and snuggled back down under her blanket. Her hair needed a wash, Beth thought, and a good cut. She would offer to pay for her up at the local Toni & Guy before they went away. Whatever it took, Beth was willing to pay to edge the girl towards a good mood and a positive outlook. Otherwise a dire time would be had by all.

No-one would ever know. Cyn had promised and she meant it. She didn't want her own comfortable domestic boat rocked, let alone Ned's. All the same, sometimes you just had to talk to someone, get your pain shaken out and soothed. So now she confided in her best gym-friend, a sisterly sort (she'd thought), who'd panted and giggled alongside her through their weekly Bodypump contortions for a good two years now, a woman who had very sweetly not laughed at her near-drowning efforts in the Aquasplash class and who was never likely to cross either Bradley or Ned's paths.

It wasn't turning out like the others, Cyn now admitted. (Ned was not, she didn't expect to shock with this, by any means the first). Rather amazed at herself, Cyn then came out with the classic, ‘You can't help who you fall in love with,' to this post-Pilates companion in the coffee shop.

There was a bit of a silence and Cyn was starting to wonder if she'd been heard, when, ‘Well actually,
Cynthia, you can,' came Gym-friend's tart and unsympathetic response. ‘You can, if you really, really try, exercise a certain amount of moral judgement, unfashionable as that might be.' She was tapping a sharp silver-painted nail on the table, emphasizing her certainty of her words' truth. ‘If you can manage to give up carbohydrates, Cynthia, you shouldn't have any problem deciding that some men are no-go areas.'

Cyn looked at her, trusting she'd suddenly break into laughter, say something to let her off the hook such as, ‘Cyn! Your face! Like you thought I
meant
it!'

But nothing happened. Gym-friend continued looking stern. Friend? Too late, Cyn now questioned this. Surely to qualify as ‘friend' you had at least to pretend to agree on issues like this. She
had
meant it – there wasn't so much as a flicker of a smile. Perhaps Cyn should have chosen someone whose sympathies were better known to her, someone who'd be ready with the tissues and hugs if she sobbed, rather than looking down her pert little nose as if Cyn had just admitted to listing ‘picking up kerb-crawlers' under hobbies.

‘You're judging me!' Cyn rallied. ‘You just wait till it happens to you!'

‘It
won't
happen to me. I wouldn't let it! And it doesn't just “happen”. It was something you did, a route that you chose. And now it's a not-unexpected disaster and it's over. End of story.'

Ooh, said with such feeling. Cyn should have realized: Gym-friend, now she came to think of it, had ‘adultery victim' written all over her; those little bitter lines at the corners of her mouth that would challenge any amount of Botox to shift, that glittery hardness in the eyes. Bet she was feeling well smug now – seeing a detested mistress-type crushed and defeated.

Cyn sighed so deeply she thought her lungs would
refuse to reflate. She fiddled with the fat diamond on her engagement ring and felt her guilty (but slim, perfectly toned) bottom squirming on the burnt-orange leather banquette.

‘But, you know, I truly didn't think it would turn out like that.' She wasn't used to disapproval, it was disturbing, uncomfortable. ‘I was so completely sure it was just going to be a bit of fun, nobody getting hurt, both of us able to walk away.'

‘Well one of you
did
get hurt, didn't they? And surely
more
than one if you count his family. Not that women like you give
them
any thought.'

Another low shot. Come on, was she supposed to feel responsible for
everybody
? Don't spare the bile, will you? Cyn thought, almost feeling sorry for her. Some people! Had they never done the love-thing? Tasted the forbidden-fruit thrill? No they hadn't. Not if they were the sort of person who considered – and she suddenly remembered a revealing changing-room discussion – that thongs were ‘unseemly', and had drawn up dinner-party-menu plans for their silver wedding celebrations ten years hence. What a ridiculous thing to have done, to have chosen this unlikely woman for her confiding, purely on the grounds that she was never going to run into any of the other ‘participants'. Where was the support she was pleading for? Gym-exfriend was gathering up her bag, her
Daily Mail
and her coat and already putting a bit of contamination-free distance between them.

‘Yes, they did get hurt,' Cyn agreed, with unaccustomed humility. And worse than that, now that she and Bradley were going east this November, she'd probably never see either Ned or Beth again. Or Len and Lesley, or Gina, or mad old Valerie (though there had been that mishap during the archery session) and
her golf-crazed husband Aubrey, or all those lovely, cheery Mango staff. She was now out of that particular comfortable little loop, thanks to Brad's niece picking the Seychelles over St George.

Cyn felt tears of loss and self-pity pricking at the back of her perfect eyelids and hoped they wouldn't overflow and take her mascara cascading down her cheeks. And once tears started flowing, they were so hard to stop – she could be in for a long session of it, possibly all the way to Waitrose and as far as the chilled-goods section. She took a tissue out of her bag and dabbed softly at her eyes. It was horribly, regrettably true: people certainly had got hurt.

‘Well, more to the point,' Cyn murmured in the direction of the rigid back of the departing woman who was now well out of range, ‘
I
got hurt.'

56 ml whisky (Canadian Club)

28 ml red vermouth

28 ml grenadine

Beth eased the Audi down the sliproad onto the M26 heading for Gatwick. She counted to ten. Counted to ten
slowly
while remembering to breathe. Often, these last few tense months, she'd been surprised to find she was holding her breath, unconsciously making herself weak and tense. In – hold it for a count of five, then out – all the way down to the last bit of air at the bottom of her lungs. And again, in 'til they were full enough to float her into space. That's better.
Calm
. Everything was going to be fine. Delilah had recovered enough to travel, Ned had not changed his mind and left her for the slender charms (well she wasn't going to be a lardy sort, was she?) of his springtime mistress. The tickets were in her bag, the plane would not (please God) fall out of the sky, the luggage would (fingers crossed) turn up on the baggage carousel at the other end. The car had not run over a fatal nail (and time had been allowed in case it did), nor had Ned left
one of the suitcases sitting on the doorstep at home. That last one she'd checked herself, stopping the car in the gateway, getting out and opening the boot to count the carefully labelled bags.

It wasn't as if this was a new and alarming adventure either – as this was their fourth visit to the Mango Experience, the journey should cause her no more stress than a trip on the train to Waterloo. It was only, Beth admitted to herself as she whizzed past a line of lumbering cargo trucks, that she was looking forward to this holiday the way a small child looks forward to Santa. After this tricky year – no, that was an understatement, after this close-to-disastrous year – both she and Ned needed this time away. It was to be a reviver, a renewal – although she had a suspicion that no relationship counsellor worth their fee would have advised anyone with a floundering marriage that having a reluctant sixteen-year-old tagging along was the ideal route to recovery.

Delilah was fidgeting in the seat behind, keeping up a low, complaining growl like a cat in a basket on its way to the vet. How mortifying, at her age, how dire, how just
not
cool was a holiday with her parents and their mad bunch of weird once-a-year friends? Even though it was the fabulous, sunny Caribbean, even though it was an unexpected escape from bleak, dank, late-November England and the too-glittery, too-long, run-up to Christmas, she was a long, long way from suitably grateful.

There wasn't going to be anyone her age. The hotel would be full of star-gazy honeymooners and crinkly-skinned menopausal trouts. She'd be stuck among all these olds, listening to them showing off about their families back home and handing round photos of their kids. They'd want to go out on long, slow trips to
look round plantation houses and steamy gardens full of giant plants with big, sweaty leaves. They'd spend their evenings all dressed up for cocktails and sophisticated dinners before getting wrecked and having embarrassing drunken limbo contests in the bar. There'd be no-one to go clubbing with, no-one to smoke spliffs with on the beach in the dark and no-one to mess about with, getting out of it on cheap rum and paddling in the sea in the middle of the night. It could be
sooo
good . . . but it wouldn't be.

Ned dozed in the front passenger seat, oblivious to both his grouchy back-seat daughter and the vapours of pre-travel tension emanating from his wife. He sat silently, as properly penitent and meek as befitted a recovering adulterer who has been forgiven and shriven and generously granted another chance. There was a lot riding on this holiday – it was their first time away together since the awful truth had come out back in August. Fuerteventura hadn't counted. The Cynfling had been over for a couple of months by then and he'd assumed that was that, line drawn under and normal domestic service resumed. Certainly he'd had huge and painful twinges of guilt, but in the end he'd come out of it more or less unscathed and been freshly delighted with (and frankly grateful for) Beth's company.

Ned could vividly recall his own deep sigh of relief that the ending with Cyn had been such a civilized one. He'd almost skipped down the Green Park tube steps, like a child on school's last day of term, as he'd left Cyn that final time. They'd had an early evening drink in the bar at the Wolseley on Piccadilly, during which they'd come to an easy agreement that parting was for the best. It had been wonderful, he'd told her, but they must both think of their families. Cyn had
nodded brightly, smiled a lot, said oh yes, it was the same for her, back to real life and all that, time to move on.

‘No hard feelings,' she'd said and they'd giggled at that. It was entirely painless. Or so he'd thought. It turned out Cyn had thought otherwise. How could he not have read the signs? The overbright glitter in her eyes, that loud clunk as she placed her glass a bit too hard down on the table.

Looking back, it had been a falsely secure lull. After a couple of weeks the phone calls had started: ‘Just to see how you are.' Then she'd wanted to meet, ‘Just as friends', then, when he'd quietly suggested that a complete break might be best, she had started on the late-night calls with nobody speaking. A quick check with 1471 had shown up her mobile number, as she knew it would, but he hadn't called back. Finally there'd been the birthday fiasco when he'd opened the mystery parcel in front of Beth, who had sat at the table holding her piece of toast halfway to her mouth, suddenly rigid as a statue and her wide, unblinking eyes full of new and painful knowledge she absolutely didn't want.