The Holiday (7 page)

Between her and her husband — a man of zero conversational skills but a fine comb-over: you could almost count the strands clinging to his pate — they had bought enough booze from the drinks trolley to ensure that Messrs Gordon and Johnnie Walker would be rubbing their hands with delight.

‘You know what, darlin’, I was told I’d have an important encounter with a fair-haired man today,‘ she had said, once they were pushing through the thick bank of clouds that were raining on a miserably wet Manchester below, ‘but she didn’t mention about him having such a sexy voice. You got a cold?’

‘Sorry?’ he had said, knowing that he would be. He was sorrier still that he had decided to fly from Manchester instead of Newcastle. Why the hell had he agreed to be a guest speaker for that dinner Waterstone’s had put on? If he had said no, as he normally did, he wouldn’t have changed his flight arrangements at the last minute and be sitting here next to this wretched woman.

With an irritating jingle-jangle of silver bangles on her skinny wrist, she leaned into him. ‘My tarot companion said I’d meet a man who fits your description exactly. Tall, fair-haired and wearing jeans. It’s you.’

It could also have been any number of other men on board the plane, but he kept this piece of information to himself, discretion invariably being the better part of valour.

‘I hate flying,’ she went on, undeterred by his silence, ‘so last night I gave my tarot reader a quick tinkle. Just to put my mind at rest. If it’s my turn to go, I told her, I want some warning. Like enough to book a later flight! But you’re going to bring me luck. You’re going to change my life.’

She believed it too. Every last gibbering word of pound-a-minute make-believe. But then she would, wouldn’t she? She was probably barking mad. Had to be.

His thoughts were interrupted again as she decided, since he was going to be playing such an important part in her life, that it was time they were properly introduced. Unscrewing the metal cap of one of the miniature bottles she had stashed in her vanity case, she told him her name was Liberty-Raquel Fitzgerald. After raising the bottle of crème-de-menthe to her lips and draining half in one well-practised swig, she added, ‘This is my husband, Bob. He doesn’t say much. Say hello, Bob.’ Silent Bob obviously knew the score and did as he was told. He then got back to his book; a book Mark recognised only too well.

With nothing else for it, he knew that if he was going to get any peace he would have to lose himself in the inflight movie: a soft-focus costume drama. He was just reaching for his headphones when she told him where she and Silent Bob would be staying.

His brain, which had thus far been lying dormant with boredom, did a double-take. ‘Where did you say?’

‘Áyios Nikólaos,’ she repeated. Then, seeing what she mistook for well-I-never astonishment on his face, but which was actually horror, she said, ‘No! Don’t tell me, darlin’, that’s where you’re staying! Whereabouts?’

He told her, not so much to provide her with the information but to clarify exactly where she would be in relation to him. Was, it possible that there was more than one Áyios Nikólaos? No, he couldn’t be that lucky.

The exchanging of geographical details confirmed what he foolishly thought were his worst fears, but then she said, ‘We’re there for most of the summer. Bob’s looking to invest in property on the island. Isn’t that right, Bob?’ A nod indicated that she was correct. ‘How about you? How long are you on holiday for?’

‘It’s a flexible arrangement,’ he said evasively. ‘When I’ve had enough I’ll be going home.’ At this rate, some time tomorrow.

She rattled her jewellery at him again and pressed a long red nail into the flesh of his forearm. ‘But you know that you won’t be leaving before you’ve fulfilled your obligation to me, don’t you?’

His dumb expression made her go on.

She pressed the nails further into his skin. ‘You know, to change my life. It’s written in the stars. It’s going to happen. I just know it is. I’ve got a really good feeling about you.’

He wished he could say the same of her.

The view from Izzy’s bedroom window was enchanting, and with nobody else up on the first morning of her holiday, she was taking advantage of being able to absorb the magical beauty without interruption.

Despite the threat of mosquitoes, she had slept the night with only the shutters across her window, and the gauzy white muslin drapes had billowed gently as a cooling breeze had filled the room. She had fallen asleep to the rhythmic sound of the sea lapping at the shore below and had woken to the same. Now, as she sat on the small balcony that faced the sea, she could hear the muted clang of a church bell, and a second-shift cockerel crowing. Coming from the nearby eucalyptus trees was the motorised tone of chirruping cicadas.

It was such a heavenly morning she wished she had the talent to capture its essence. She glanced down at the sketchpad on her lap and looked at what she had achieved so far. Even to her self-critical eye, it didn’t look too bad. She waggled her paintbrush in the jar of water on the table at her side, dabbed it into her tray of watercolours and resumed work again on the hazy lilac sky that was washed with a soft, pearly opalescence.

When Max and Laura had invited Izzy to spend the summer with them, her first thought had been to rush out and treat herself to a new set of paints and sketchpads. From then on she had been counting the days until the holiday, imagining the sheer bliss of being surrounded by so much beauty and having time to try to capture it on paper. It was perhaps an exaggeration, but it felt as though she was being given the chance to let her creativity have some fun. Normally constrained by the nature of her job, it was being given a moment of freedom in which to indulge itself.

At times, an art teacher’s job was the most frustrating on earth. Or maybe it was just her. Perhaps the nurturing of creative young minds through rolling out Plasticine and making coil pots wasn’t what she was cut out to do. Occasionally the children she taught were responsive to what she was trying to share with them, but too often they saw the lessons as an excuse to let off steam after the rigidity of too much formal teaching too early in their lives. Now and then a child responded to what she was trying to show them, but invariably she spent a large proportion of the lessons preventing paint fights, or washing glue off expensive school uniform. There were days when she fantasised that she could line up the worst of the troublemakers and fire a hose of red paint at them. This was after she had smothered them in glue and feathers. And also after she had locked them in the art cupboard overnight with nothing to eat but pasta tubes and sugar paper.

It didn’t take an Ofsted inspector to tell her she was in the wrong job. She knew that she wasn’t a particularly good teacher — not in the modern sense: her crowd-control technique was not all that it might be, and these days that seemed to be what mattered. But she had a genuine love of her subject and wished that she could instil just a fraction of it into her pupils. Oh, to have a budding Van Gogh in the class who, with just a few dabs of a brush, could portray the depths of a man’s soul. Or a child who could draw with the rhythmic, spiritual intensity of William Blake. Surely it had to happen one day. The great artists of tomorrow had to go to school, didn’t they? So why couldn’t just one pass through her hands?

Because, as her mother had frequently told her, she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing. It would be just her luck that a future Picasso attended one of the neighbouring schools while she got lumbered with a fraud like Damien Hurst or that woman with the disgusting bed.

It had definitely been a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when she had met Alan.

She had moved up to Cheshire in the summer, and by the end of her first term in her new school she was suffering daily headaches and had found herself squinting late at night in bed as she tried to read. She became worried that something was seriously wrong with her. A tumour, for instance. A tumour that, if she played her cards right, would only be the size of a pea and would merely cause her to go blind. More likely it would be the size of a tangerine, pressing on a crucial bit of her brain, waiting to kill her when she was least expecting it. Ingrid Boardman, head of maths at school and the full-time wearer of bifocals — the person who had loaned her
One Hundred Ways To Be A Thoroughly Modern Woman —
had suggested that before she started writing out a will, Izzy might consider getting her eyes tested. She gave Izzy the address of her own optician and the next day she made an appointment. But when she turned up for her appointment and gave her name to the young receptionist she was informed that there was no record of a Miss Jordan booked in for that afternoon. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right day?’ the cheeky youngster asked her. ‘Today is Saturday.’

Annoyed that her ability to make an appointment was being queried, she said, ‘Of course I’m certain. And I also know that tomorrow is Sunday.’

Giving Izzy a surly teenage pout, the girl got up from her swivel chair. ‘I’ll go and see what Mr Leigh says about this,’ she said, and with such menace Izzy half expected Mr Leigh, whoever he was, to come and box her ears. While she waited, she tried on a selection of spectacle frames. It was extraordinary how many different styles there were to choose from. Just for a laugh she put on a pair of thick-rimmed Jarvis Cocker frames. She looked hideous: a cross between Nana Mouskouri and Michael Caine. She gave the mirror a dead-pan expression and mouthed in her best Cockney, ‘Not a lot of people know I’m a transvestite.’

‘I think you’ll find they’re a touch heavy for a face with features as delicate as yours,’ said a voice from behind her.

She spun round. It was the dreaded Mr Leigh. Except he didn’t look so very dreadful. His hair was dark and springy, and like the rest of him — eyes quickly surveying her, hands slipping a pen into his breast pocket, mouth breaking into a wide smile and body bouncing energetically across the carpet as he came towards her — it gave the impression of only just being under control. He was a lot younger than she had expected — only a little older than herself, in fact. She snatched off the ugly frames, embarrassed, and fumbled to get them back on to the rack. He came over, took them from her, and slipped them easily on to the appropriate hooks. He wasn’t very tall, but what he lacked in height he made up for with his shoulders: they were massively broad. He had rugby prop forward written all over him, and if he hadn’t been dressed in a white jacket she might have thought his profession was hanging around seedy nightclubs pitching drunken undesirables on to the streets. She decided, there and then, that she would go quietly.

‘My receptionist says there seems to be some kind of mix-up,’ he said, smoothly interrupting her flustered thoughts. ‘According to the diary you don’t have an appointment, but you’re in luck, I’ve a free slot so I could fit you in now.’

‘Oh, well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble,’ she said.

After the receptionist had taken the necessary details from her, she was shown through to a room where the lights were romantically dimmed. ‘What made you think you needed to have your eyes tested?’ he asked, indicating for her to sit in a raised black chair.

She told him about the squinting and the headaches.

‘What work do you do?’

‘I’m a teacher.’

‘Under a lot of stress, are you?’

‘Not really.’

‘Stress,’ he said. ‘It’s a real killer. Marriage, divorce, bereavement, moving house, they’re the big four that wreak havoc on the body. Especially the eyes. Have you experienced any of these things in the last few months?’

‘I’ve moved house and changed my job,’ she admitted. She wondered whether it was worth mentioning her mother too. Perhaps not.

‘Moved house
and
changed your job,’ he repeated, shaking his head and whistling through his teeth, not unlike a garage mechanic diagnosing a terminally sick car. ‘Well, Miss Jordan, let’s take a look, shall we?’ He reached into a drawer, pulled out a strange-looking piece of equipment, then lunged into her face and pressed it against her right eye. ‘Don’t look into the light,’ he said too late. He smelt of aftershave and Polo mints and she wondered if the latter was to cover up the smell of tobacco. I could never go out with anyone who smoked, she found herself thinking. But his hands don’t smell of cigarettes, she pointed out, and he is quite good-looking. In fact, he’s rather nice. The old Abba song,
‘Look into his angel eyes and you’ll be hypnotised,’
popped into her mind.

When he finished, he pronounced her to be in possession of near-perfect vision. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about other than slightly lazy eye muscles.’ He explained some eye exercises to do twice a day that would help, then asked if she would have a drink with him that night.

‘Oh, um isn’t that rather unethical?’ she asked, taken aback by his directness.

He grinned mischievously. ‘Only if you tell anyone.’

It was when he had shown her to the door and she was crossing the road to call in at the chemist, before going back to her car, that she had noticed another optician’s further along the row of shops. With an awful sinking feeling she knew that this was where she should have been for the last hour. Skulking guiltily past the shop window, she contented herself with the thought that had she gone there she wouldn’t now be considering what to wear for her date that evening.

It’s Fate, she told herself, with cheery smugness.

But it was a long time before she realised the extent of her foolishness. Before that happened, Alan had thoroughly charmed her, he had fully absorbed her into his life, had made her his own. And she had loved it. There had been walks in the country, picnics by the river, trips to the theatre and thrilling white knuckle rides at a theme park. There had been candle-lit dinners, roses, chocolates and the best champagne. There had even been a surprise weekend in the Cotswolds where he had told her he loved her and asked her to move in with him. As lavish and as clichéd as it all was, it was impossible to resist. Having only recently moved to the area and not knowing anybody beyond the school gates of her new job — this was before she had met Max and Laura — a relationship with somebody as self-assured and fun-seeking as Alan was just what she thought she needed. She was only too willing to fall in love with a man who treated her with such a flourish of generosity, even if at times it felt as though he was being a little possessive. But given the circumstances, what girl wouldn’t have been blinded by the amount of false glitter being showered upon her?