All Inclusive (13 page)

Ned found the ball at last, sitting like a sad, abandoned egg in a clump of spiny aloes. He quickly bashed away at it without even looking at where it should be going. Who cared? What kind of grown-up game was this where you patted a small sphere of stuffed plastic at a hole in the ground?

‘Shot!' Len was standing with his hands on his hips, staring at him in amused amazement. ‘You been practising, mate?'

‘Eh?' Ned scratched his head. He should have worn
a hat – the day was already blazing and he hadn't had breakfast yet.

‘You've only gone and holed it, you plonker! Didn't you realize?' Len was pointing at the flag. It looked an awful long way away, tiny like the sort of thing that should be on top of a child's sandcastle.

‘Are you sure?' Ned didn't believe him and squinted into the distance.

‘Sure I'm sure!' Len came over and thumped him hard on the back, right in the middle of the sun-seared painful patch on his right shoulder blade. ‘Come on – we've earned our breakfast. Let's go. I fancy some of that fried plantain and bacon with a bit of scrambled egg. All on toast. Loooverly!'

Ned flinched at the very idea. His appetite seemed to have gone on the blink along with a large chunk of holiday spirit, missing and presumed dead since the moment he clapped eyes on Cyn at the airport. On the whole he hadn't proved very adept at this adultery business and would certainly not be going in for it again. Maybe that was why so many men of his age took up golf. It was a far safer displacement activity than midlife carnal thoughts and deeds. Maybe, he considered as he retrieved his ball from the hole and acknowledged he felt rather chuffed with his fluke shot, he should give the daft, dull game another go after all.

An excellent idea this, Beth thought as the taxi-driver picked his route very carefully down a steep and deeply pitted track, a visit to the Water's Edge restaurant along the coast for a family lunch. The Mango's communal buffet (today's theme: Mexican) was all very good and tasty, but today Beth wanted to touch base with her family without the presence of the others. She didn't want to be surrounded by the Angel
of Death in the form of Gina's mother, Len and his constant ‘Anyone fancy a top-up?' and Lesley picking over the afternoon activity schedule and calculating whether Intermediate Fencing or the Lithe 'n' Limbo class would use up more calories.

She also wanted to get Nick away from an audience and find out what he was up to. He'd stage-managed his arrival unseen for maximum surprise impact. Having checked in and unpacked, he'd sauntered casually up to their usual table in the Sundown bar the night before, beer already in hand, and pulled out a chair between Delilah and Lesley without having so much as phoned from the airport to let them know he was on his way. His typically laconic, student-type excuse for joining them, ‘Because I was cold', had made everyone laugh but there must be more to it than that, and he wasn't going to tell them with Lesley and Len and Cyn and her warring wedding-party in-laws in the vicinity.

Beth climbed out of the taxi and followed Ned into the restaurant, which was a low-built, palm-thatched wooden pavilion open to the sea and painted in bright Caribbean shades of turquoise. A fat brown Labrador dozed in the shade of the beachfront verandah, and three young children in maroon and white school uniforms swung on a rope hung from a bent palm. She could see sand between the rough treacle-dark floorboards and, as she sat at a table overlooking the water, she watched a pair of small pink crabs scuttle beneath her feet and disappear, corkscrewing into sand holes beneath the slats.

‘Beers all round? Coke for you, Delilah?' Beth asked, opening the menu.

‘No thanks, I'd like a Virgin Mary please,' Delilah said. ‘With lots of Tabasco.'

‘I suppose that's seasonal, anyway,' Ned commented, nodding in the direction of two more children twining tinsel round a pillar. ‘It's always a bit of a jolt to see Christmas decorations going up in this place. By the time we go home the island airport will have a Santa centrepiece and piped music about sleighbells ringing.'

‘Please! I've only just got here!' Nick groaned. ‘Do you have to mention the “going home” word?'

‘
Words
,' Delilah cut in. ‘There's two of them.'

‘There
are
two of them, dumbo,' Nick flashed back. ‘Anyway, whatever, don't mention them. I want to forget about home.'

‘Hmm. And perhaps you'd like to give us a clue what you were running away from?' Ned opened the case for the prosecution. ‘Women? Hitmen? Did you get fired?'

‘I wasn't running away!' Nick was on the defensive. ‘I just felt like a break. And the job was . . . well it was coming to a natural end anyway – the maternity-leave woman was coming back, so I just thought . . . you know, come and join the folks.'

‘And what about Felicity?' Beth asked. Well, someone had to. After all, the girl had been in and out of their home (mostly in) for the past year. It was only polite to ask after someone whose underwear you'd discovered more than once among the family laundry.

Nick shrugged and gazed out towards a vast cruise ship making its way across the horizon. ‘I expect we'll still see each other as friends.'

‘Hah! You mean she dumped you!' Delilah could, Beth decided, be brutal on occasion.

‘Del, it doesn't necessarily follow.'

‘No, she's right.' Nick nodded. ‘Felicity wanted . . . more. Different. Something else anyway. So I'm single
now and it's great. Glad I came. And such a great view.'

As he said this, he was actually, Beth noticed, grinning at the waitress, a tall and curvy early-twenties girl with her hair piled up in a complicated arrangement of tiny plaits. Beth hoped he wasn't going to be trouble. He had clearly left England in a frame of mind geared up for spontaneous and possibly reckless behaviour, and was likely to be on a go-for-it kind of high. For someone who usually needed a good three days of preparatory nagging to change his bedlinen in time for the laundry man's weekly visit, he'd quit his job, got the cats into kennels, and himself over to St George in record time.

But really, all in all, what could be better? Beth sipped her beer and felt a wave of something like utter contentment wash over her. Her family was all here just as she'd been silently wishing, in this beautiful place. Her mother had always said you had to be careful what you wished for, which was a bit much coming from a woman who'd named her daughter after a child-mortality statistic, but Beth refused to let any fears of a celestial payback spoil this moment. Not every silver lining had a corresponding cloud. She reached across the table and took Ned's hand and he smiled back at her, a smile full of seductive suggestion, as he laced his fingers between hers. Later that afternoon, between her t'ai chi and Ned's Salt Loofah Rub, she might suggest they go back to their room for a bit of a siesta.

‘Mum, Dad, you're like, holding
hands
?' Delilah fanned her hand in front of her face in teen disgust.

‘Yes, stop that at once. No PDAs in front of the children,' Nick added.

‘PDAs? Interpret please?' Beth asked.

‘Public Displays of Affection. Unseemly in anyone over eighteen,' Nick explained.

‘Oh, I get it,' Ned said. ‘So it's all right for teenagers to grope and snog and shove their tongues down each other's throats, but we oldies . . .'

‘Dad! No! Stop right there!' Delilah giggled. She'd gone scarlet and covered her outraged face with her hands.

‘They know nothing, do they, the youth of today,' Ned teased, stroking the palm of Beth's right hand with his thumb.

‘I do,' Nick declared.

‘Yes we all know what
you
know. We've heard the sound effects, don't forget,' Ned laughed.

‘Dad!
No!
This is so
wrong
!' Poor Delilah was bouncing in her chair with mortification.

‘OK, enough now. Let's get some food.' Ned relented as the waitress returned.

Delilah ordered spare ribs and a jacket potato, Beth and Ned went for the spiced crab cakes and Nick ordered a burger with fries. His eyes followed the slinkily swaying rear end of the waitress as she returned to the kitchen.

Was Nick attractive? Beth tried to look at her son objectively – not easy, as his highly biased mother. She decided that on balance, he probably was, very. He seemed to be entirely comfortable in his body and neither stooped around with the apologetic, awkward stance that some boys took years to grow out of, nor strutted cockily or sprawled when he sat, open-thighed and crass. He was quite tall, built for cricket rather than rugby, she'd say if asked to pick a field sport to suit him, and his skin was not disastrous. He had hair like Ned's – light brown and rather flat like an Ancient Roman – though in Nick's case the front was
gelled up into a bit of a lift as if a rill of wind had caught it. Why did boys do that, she wondered. Was it a cuteness thing, something to do with adding height or just a lazy lad's touch of texture? She could ask Delilah, who would be sure to have an opinion.

Felicity had obviously found Nick highly attractive, even if she had now abandoned him. He didn't seem too cut up about it. Beth wondered if he'd confide in her if he was – probably not. Probably already he had that male thing about shying away from discussing feelings, especially with women. Ned was the same: after the affair he'd had in the spring, she'd made attempts to find out how he'd felt about the woman and he'd practically raced out of the room in panic. ‘It wasn't a
feelings
sort of thing,' he'd managed to mumble before, in a desperate change of subject, asking her if she'd seen the black-handled screwdriver as the door handle in the downstairs loo was coming loose.

Their food arrived at the same time as a large party of smart island women dressed in business suits and high heels, each one clutching an elegantly wrapped Christmas gift.

‘Office Christmas party,' Ned commented, as the women took their seats at a long table on the other side of the restaurant.

‘No escape,' Beth sighed. ‘There won't be much time to organize presents when we get home. It'll be all last minute, as usual. Not that I'm complaining. I'd much rather be here than fighting my way round Kingston in the crowds and the cold.'

‘I'm going to buy Christmas things here in the town,' Delilah said. ‘Fun tacky stuff like mugs with “A Present from St George” on them.'

Presents. The sight of the women passing around
their gifts started Beth thinking, and there was something she needed to know. As soon as they'd finished eating, Delilah and Nick went outside to sit on the sand and Beth had Ned to herself.

‘Ned, I know we're long over this but I'm just curious about one small thing.'

‘What thing?' He looked nervous, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms defensively. His eyes were hostile and she now wished she hadn't said anything. Talk about spoiling the moment. She tried to lighten the mood. ‘Hey, no big deal. I just wondered, you know that Tiffany key ring thing that arrived in the mail on your birthday? Have you still got it?'

He grinned. ‘Why? Have
you
got a secret someone you want to send it to?'

She clouted him hard on the arm. ‘No! Definitely not. I couldn't cope with the hassle! No, I suppose it was just idle curiosity. Am I likely to come across it at the back of the kitchen-dresser drawer?'

‘Actually I mailed it straight back. It seemed the only thing to do.' He took hold of Beth's hand again. ‘The whole thing had been over for ages by then. Really over. You do believe me, don't you?' He looked almost as anxious as he had all those months ago. She shouldn't have brought it up again, it was messy, like an exhumation.

‘Well, I believed you back then,' she reassured him. ‘So why wouldn't I now?'

‘Um . . . no reason. Just don't change your mind. There's absolutely no cause to. No reason at all.'

Lesley had finished with Jilly Cooper and donated her to the hotel's library shelves, then picked up Bill Bryson from the pile of books she'd hauled along from Guernsey. There was a good hour's reading time 'til
her Indian Head Massage appointment over in the Haven, and it was also time for tea, which was laid out far too temptingly for guests to help themselves on lace-covered tables in the Sundown bar. She wandered over to collect a cup of camomile tea and to check out the cakes and sandwiches, lining up behind the super-sized American family that she'd overheard Nick and Delilah talking about. The Flintstones, they'd nicknamed them. She wouldn't actually eat anything, she decided, not today; her own decision, nothing to do with the presence of the massive Mr Flintstone as a dire warning. She'd just have a look at what was on offer. She would feast her eyes rather than her body.

And where, she wondered was Len? Right on cue there was a loud burst of laugher and she saw him, over in the big jacuzzi where the pool terrace met the beach. From where she stood he looked the complete Brit-on-holiday lardy slob, lying back in the steaming bubbles and laughing his head off at some joke she wasn't in on. And oh yes, she noted, there was the inevitable drink in his hand. It might be the colour of Coke but there'd be a whopping great triple measure of rum in there too, you could count on it. He'd got the young folk with him: Sadie and her boyfriend Mark and Beth's young Delilah and Nick, all lying back in the sploshing bubbles sipping lurid-coloured drinks.

What was Len doing with that lot? She'd be willing to bet he thought he was being the bloody life and soul. If he went on like this much longer, all that drinking and overdoing the sport, ‘soul' would be all that was left. She'd be stuck there at the Mango wondering, like poor Mr Benson's widow back in the Guernsey spring, what to do with his golf clubs and baggage and should she take them home or find a charity shop and save the bother. And everyone would
feel sorry for her but not want to talk to her, in case her misery contaminated their holiday.