Excess Baggage (3 page)

Colette tugged at Lucy’s sleeve, pulling her a couple of steps back. ‘Is she going to be all snobby like this all the time?’ she whispered.

Lucy grinned at her. ‘Yes she is. By the end of the flight she’ll have mentioned at least six times that we should all have gone to Tuscany and complained that the airline food isn’t organic. We’re going to have a wonderful time.’

‘A cocktail party! That’s the last thing I feel like!’ Theresa sat on the edge of the bed, prodding the mattress to check it wasn’t too soft. She rather liked the room, which was large and light and furnished with bleached wood and blond cane fittings. The bathroom had no suspicious stains, leaks or creeping wildlife either, which was more than could be said for the last holiday they’d taken, where all the creepy-crawlies in the Dordogne seemed to have homed in on their particular
gîte
.

‘It’s just the management handing out a welcoming drink.’ Mark propped the invitation up by the television set and opened a couple of cupboards, looking for the minibar. ‘You’ve got time for a bath.’

‘So I should hope. Though I don’t know what I’ll wear, everything will be creased.’

‘I expect you could have a drink, Becky, but make it just the one, OK, otherwise your dad will blame me.’ Lucy watched as Becky selected the largest glass of rum punch from the waiter’s tray. With any luck she wouldn’t actually like it and wouldn’t sneak several more when she thought Simon wasn’t looking. In fact Simon
shouldn’t
look. If he could try to avoid catching her out for the whole two weeks, they would all have more fun and less hassle.

It was sunset, still steamingly hot and the terrace was crowded with slightly subdued holidaymakers, many of whom Lucy recognized from hanging around the airport’s baggage carousel. The new arrivals were easily identifiable by a pallor that made them look ill and by their air of exhaustion. An exception was a woman she’d seen alone with a young son, buying hectically covered paperbacks in the bookshop at
Gatwick
, who was now dressed in full-scale cocktail rig of chiffon-layered yellow dress and enough gold bracelets to melt down into a doorstop-sized ingot. Talking to the hotel entertainments manager was an arm-in-arm young couple who might well be on their honeymoon. Lucy could see the back of them. The man was fondling the girl’s bottom, shoving at it gently like a tentative cook kneading dough. The girl’s hand was pushed just inside the top of his trousers, as if she couldn’t bear to have fabric between her fingers and his flesh. There were several of these couples: pretty young pairs who looked as if the only sights they intended to gaze on were those in each other’s eyes. Lucy thought of Ross and worked out that now, at almost England’s midnight, he was probably mid-coitus with her successor. She smiled at the thought: the girl might well be at the stage of gritting her teeth as he got up to full speed, anticipating the supremely irritating (laughable, actually) habit he had of barking like a starving sea lion at the climactical moment. What a prat – whyever had she stayed with him all those months? She went and looked down at the darkening beach from the terrace, conscious that she was being watched by half a dozen of what appeared to be an outing from a computer company’s middle management, standing around in a group close to the source of the drink. They looked uncomfortable, fingering the chestfront area of their polo shirts where their ties would normally be.

‘Steve,’ a voice announced in her ear. She turned. The bravest had peeled off from the others and was standing beside her with his smile ready and his hand out.

‘I’m Lucy,’ she said, shaking his hand.

He looked nervous. Behind him, still at the bar, she
could
see his companions nudging each other, possibly even taking bets. They weren’t Lucy’s type. Too clean, too neat-haired, too executive. She couldn’t imagine she was their type either, too spiky-haired, too skinny, and, in her fringed skirt, too much of a hippy. But this was holiday territory and the pulling rules, she assumed, in the pursuit of uncomplicated leg-over, were probably more flexible.

‘You on holiday?’ he ventured at last.

‘Well yes, isn’t everyone here? Or are you here for some kind of conference?’

‘Er, well, we’re on a corporate sales jolly, reward for ongoing achievement. We’re the six who most actively processed Phonetech’s mission statement over the last sales period.’ So a Caribbean freebie was what you got if you sold a vast number of mobile phones. It was almost worth considering selling her ladders and brushes. He shuffled a bit closer. ‘You here on your own?’ She smiled past him, indicating Colette running up the steps from the beach. ‘Not exactly. There are fourteen of us altogether. And this is my daughter, Colette.’ His grin wavered but he persevered. ‘And your husband?’

‘I don’t have one,’ she said, adding, in case he got the wrong idea, ‘but I keep looking.’ That should see him off.

SOMEONE WAS SINGING
beyond Lucy’s window, out on the beach. She rolled over in bed and squinted at the hands of her watch glowing in the dark. Nearly six o’clock. An hour till the hotel started serving breakfast on the semicircular open-sided verandah above the beach. She was starving already and glad she’d done as Simon had suggested and kept the little packet of custard creams that had been handed out on the plane with tea just before they’d started the descent. It was the sort of thing he would think of – small practical solutions to problems no-one else would waste time anticipating. If he was a woman he’d be the sort who sent in handy domestic tips to the staider magazines and won the odd tenner for suggesting a wedge of lemon down the waste disposal kept the sink drain smelling sweet. She’d seen Mark smirking at him from across the aisle, read his mind as he condemned Simon as a fussy old hen. Mark’s idea of a useful hint would be something like ‘always drive at least fifty miles per hour over the speed limit: that way your attention really can’t wander.’

At home it would be midmorning and the populace, apart from students and shift workers, would be starting to think about lunch. Lucy hadn’t slept this late
since
before Colette was born, when she was living with Jack who had thought it intellectually sexy to sit propped up against the fraying cane bedhead smoking spliffs and talking very slow and muddled politics till the early hours. At the point where she’d allow herself to collapse properly into sleep he’d pounce and pull and shove at her flesh as if trying to bring her back from the dead. Sandy had once told her that some men’s preferred idea of sex was for women to be completely unconscious so that they wouldn’t have to please anyone but themselves, an observation that was certainly true in Jack’s case. Still, for someone who was so slow to get revved up in bed, he’d certainly picked up speed the moment she’d told him she was pregnant. She’d never seen anyone pack and run so fast.

The song outside wasn’t particularly melodious. It sounded like a leisured and contented soul crooning to himself in a bath, snatches of something half-remembered and only half-consciously voiced. It was still dark. In the other bed Colette was sprawled out under the sheet like a starfish, with one pale tender foot hanging out at the side. Lucy climbed out of bed, pulled back the curtain and unlatched the window. She’d never liked living on the ground floor, being nervous of making life too easy for passing crazed murderers and opportunist burglars, but here it was bliss just to be able to slide the window aside and step out onto a terrace surrounded by fronds of bougainvillea, pink papery flowers tickling against the glass. The sky had a yellow-grey tinge to it as the sun began pushing its way up on the east side of the island, and the air was softly warm and humid. She could hear the sea washing lazily over the sand, and the singing was coming from somewhere in one of the low-growing trees along the beach. Lucy peered in the darkness but
couldn’t
see anyone. Suddenly the song stopped and there was a sharp blast of what sounded like a hunting horn.

‘Hey, early-up there!’ The singer was calling from the branches of the closest tree. Lucy stepped over the balcony rail and padded across the fat-bladed, spiky grass to where the sand started, wondering if the horn-blower gave any kind of toss that he was probably waking the whole hotel. It was possible he was drunk, winding down after a long rowdy night. In London, Lucy never gave unexpected pre-dawn sounds close investigation; she left that to naive fools or other drunks seeking trouble. Here she felt the invulnerability of an outsider.

‘Jet lag, huh?’ a cheery voice called down to her. The man was sprawled comfortably in the tree as if it was a snug sofa, reclining backwards on a forked branch. ‘Where’re you from?’

‘London,’ Lucy said to the figure. There was a scuffle and a clatter and the singer landed on the sand next to her clutching a giant conch shell, the source, she assumed, of the peace-shattering noise. He was younger than she’d expected, close to her own age. Somehow she’d assumed only the generations way beyond hers liked to sing to themselves – her own tended to hum tunelessly along with their personal stereos. He had streaky short dreadlocks, a mixture of black and fairish, that reminded her of Ruud Gullit in his Chelsea-playing days, and skin the colour of cappuccino, rippling over sinewy well-muscled limbs. His shoulders were as broad as a gangster’s jacket. He beamed back at her. His teeth were so perfectly even that Lucy almost wished Simon was there to admire such an example of either nature’s generosity or a rival orthodontist’s skill. He didn’t seem to be drunk, just
happy
. Perhaps being up a tree, singing, was how he started every day. Perhaps it was a local custom.

‘London, huh? My pa was an islander but my mother, Glenda, she’s from Chiswick, but not since way back. She sent me back over there to her family for schooling. I didn’t stay long, hated the cold, and I learned a lot more back here too.’ He chuckled, deep and throaty, and Lucy felt suddenly conscious that all she was wearing was a T-shirt and pink lacy knickers. She shoved her fingers through her hair, forgetting she’d had it cut so short and wispy and could no longer hide in it. The man was inspecting her, looking her up and down with interest. She wrapped her arms across her body.

‘You into diving? Scuba?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t tried it. I like snorkelling, I thought I’d do some of that.’

‘You come to see me at the dive shop later on the morning, down right along the beach there. I run all the water sports for the hotel,’ he said, and then held out a hand. ‘And welcome to St George.’ He bowed slightly as she shook his hand. ‘Come to the shop, ask for me, I’m Henry.’

‘Lucy,’ she told him. He grinned again and then strolled off, barefoot and whistling, along the sand.

‘And you went out and
spoke
to him?’ Over breakfast at the big table Theresa was wide-eyed with outraged incredulity. ‘But anything could have … he might have …’ She seemed at a loss to select the direst possible fate for Lucy that could result from talking to a dark stranger on a pre-dawn beach.

‘He was fine, really friendly.’ Lucy shrugged. She picked up a slice of pawpaw and sucked the flesh away from its skin. Juice dripped down her chin and
she
scooped it away with her fist then licked it. Theresa frowned, cutting up her own fruit (grapefruit, mango and melon) neatly with a knife and fork. Lucy smiled: Theresa looked so exactly as if she was at a dinner party, doing her very best etiquette-eating with scrupulously correct cutlery. She’d been the same the day before on the plane, carefully inspecting the plastic knives and forks and lining them up in size order between the hot foil carton containing the surprisingly tasty turkey and rice in mushroom sauce and the miniature starter of prawn and tomato salad.

‘Right. What are we all doing today? Everyone sleep OK?’ Simon bustled into the dining area and stood by the table rubbing his hands like a jolly scoutmaster. ‘Terrific arrangement this,’ he said, approving of the way the hotel had put together a table large enough to accommodate all fourteen of them. Theresa gave him a dubious look. ‘I didn’t think communal eating was going to be compulsory,’ she commented. She glanced across to where Marisa was coaxing bits of banana and croissant into the twins. The girls were pulling the bread into tiny pieces to share with the bold greedy black birds that swooped in from the trees below the balcony. Sebastian was eating Rice Crispies with the kind of pondering expression that Theresa could tell would soon result in the conclusion that the milk wasn’t exactly the same as he got at home, after which it would be judged untouchable. A separate table, possibly even a room, for small messy children and their minders would have been a bonus.

‘Nice for Mum and Dad though, Tess.’

‘Well, I’m sure it would be, Simon, but they’re poshing it up having breakfast in that natty little villa along the beach that they’ve got all to themselves, and besides, half of us don’t seem to have actually got up yet.’

‘Colette’s had hers, she’s out on the sand.’ Lucy hoped Theresa wasn’t going to keep her waspish tone going for the entire fortnight – how hard could it be to enjoy herself in such a beautiful place? Mark’s absence from the table might have something to do with it, she thought, wondering which of them had had to get up at three a.m. and entertain the jet-lagged infants.

‘Plum’s swimming before the pool fills with kids. And Becky and Luke, well, they’ll be along when they’re hungry. Talking of which …’ Simon wandered off to help himself to food from the vast buffet area in the centre of the room. Long tables held huge steel dishes of bacon, hash browns, grilled tomatoes and sausages as well as selections of hams and cheeses. Staff were cooking eggs to order and there were trays of grapefruit, pawpaw, pineapple, watermelon, figs, bananas and dried fruits – everything a far bigger and more lush version of the puny, underripe average greengrocery produce back home. He joined a line for fried eggs and wondered if it would be pushing his luck, cholesterol-wise, to have two. He also wondered what Shirley and Perry were having, across at the end of the little bay, tucked away in one of the hotel’s five top-of-the-range villas. As his own eggs fizzled and spat in the pan, he imagined his father indulging in a full-scale fry-up, complete with brown sauce and an array of ulcer pills, indigestion potions and any other medication he might keep out of sight of anyone who was still suspicious about the reason for this sudden holiday.