Excess Baggage

A Proper Family Holiday was the last thing Lucy was expecting to have. But as a penniless and partnerless house-painter with an expired lease on her flat and a twelve-year-old daughter, she could hardly turn down her parents’ offer to take them on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. She’d just have to put up with her sister Theresa (making no secret of preferring Tuscany as a holiday destination) and brother Simon (worrying that there might be some sinister agenda behind their parents’ wish to take them all away) with their various spouses, teenagers, young children and au pair.

In a luxury hotel, with bright sunshine, swimming, diving, glorious food and friendly locals, any family tensions should have melted away in the fabulous heat. The children should have been angelic, the teenagers cheerful, the adults relaxed and happy. But…some problems just refuse to be left at home.

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

About the Author

Also by Judy Astley

Copyright

THE CLOCK RADIO
woke Lucy Morgan with ‘Here Comes the Sun’. It was too blearily early in the morning for her to sing along with the Beatles but she let the lyrics dip into her mind a few times over the next hour, like pebbles skimmed pleasingly over a smooth whispering sea. She was ready for the sun after a long soggy summer in which radio DJs had played ‘It might as well rain until September’ until the joke wore as thin as the flimsy strappy holiday frocks that disappointed women had shivered in all around the British coast.

Lucy’s holdall (hideous puce nylon, part of a three-for-two bargain) was crammed with swimwear and sarongs and loose light clothes for a reliably un-English climate, with no space allowed for the usual cautious cover-up for evenings. You didn’t fly three thousand miles (in economy, on a charter) and turn down two lucrative weeks’ work (repainting Aline Charter-Todd’s kitchen yet again, Ocean Blue being so
last year
) just to have to cater for a chill breeze and the possibility of showers. In her hand were keys, two passports and a Sainsbury’s bag full of cat food to leave outside Sandy’s basement flat. Sandy was also custodian of her ladders and brushes, which were locked safely away in her garage.

Lucy’s daughter Colette was impatient by the door, giggly and overexcited. Just now she looked a lot younger than twelve, much more like a very small child who doesn’t yet doubt the existence of Santa Claus and good fairies. Lucy smiled at her, hoping a hint of her own disappointment didn’t show in her eyes. Ross wasn’t coming with them.

‘Passport’s expired, sweetie. Sorry, should’ve checked,’ he’d drawled, with not even the pretence of real regret, down the phone the night before. She’d heard him slurp some wine, heard the clink of glass and the unmistakable click-clicking of high heels across his pale new Augusta oak floor in the background as he spoke. The clicking had been Lucy’s replacement, presumably, checking out the lie of the land and the route to Ross’s bedroom. With luck those spiny heels would have gouged ugly pitted holes in the immaculate wood and ever after remind him that for this he’d dumped a woman whose idea of a perfect shoe was something innocently flat with a harmless soft sole.

‘We’ve got to go! It’s nearly seven!’ Colette’s fingers were clumsy as she hurriedly unfastened the safety chain, then bent to wrestle with the stiff bolt at the bottom. ‘I must oil that, when we get back,’ Lucy muttered as she picked up her bag and followed Colette out into the shabby communal hallway that no-one felt driven to clean.

‘Why? We’ll only be here till Christmas. Then we’ll be living somewhere new.’

More enviable youthful innocence, Lucy thought as she slammed the main front door behind them and sent Colette down the basement steps with the fortnight’s worth of cat food for Sandy to feed to the cat. ‘Somewhere new’ at the right rent, in the right
area
, and the right size had yet to turn up and the expiry date of her current lease wasn’t negotiable. She’d do serious flat-searching after this holiday. For now, all she had to think about was getting the two of them to Gatwick and praying her rusting resentful heap of a van wouldn’t choose this drizzly early morning to spring a leak from its radiator or split a vital hose.

‘Why have we got this?’ Colette’s bag was on the pavement next to the van and she was pointing at the big square of paper stuck to the windscreen. ‘Mum, it’s been clamped! But we’re residents!’

Lucy read the notice. ‘Residents without road tax,’ she said, her heart thumping as she frantically thought out a potential plan B for getting to Gatwick.

‘Sod it, bugger it. We’ll have to get the train. Is that bag too heavy for you to carry as far as the station?’ Without a word, or even a glance, Colette hauled it over her shoulder and started marching ahead of Lucy, her rigid back and over-fast walk proclaiming ‘blame’ with every step. Lucy kicked the van’s nearside back tyre as she passed and was surprised when it didn’t cave in and deflate miserably. She thought hard as she walked. Mortlake to Clapham, trains every what, twenty or thirty minutes? Clapham to Gatwick, every couple of seconds if you believed the adverts. They’d have plenty of time to spare, it was just a pain, that was all. In her head she could hear her older, hyper-organized sister Theresa tutting and muttering ‘typical’, and she hoped Colette would forget to mention the van and its lack of tax.

Ahead of her, Colette’s stroppy pace slowed and she swung the bag awkwardly onto her other shoulder. Lucy caught up and gently pulled it off her. ‘We’ll take a handle each, it’ll be easier for you,’ she coaxed.
Colette
smiled, her pink face clearly showing a threat of anxious tears.

‘We’ve got hours,’ Lucy assured her. ‘And just think, two weeks of wonderful Caribbean sun, palm trees and turquoise sea, your cousins and aunts and uncles, Gran and Grandad and no school when you should be at school. The Government wouldn’t approve.’

‘And no Ross.’ There was deep satisfaction in the girl’s voice and if Lucy had chosen that moment to look at her closely she’d have seen a face smug with secret worldly wisdom. Colette knew well enough that a man who worked for an airline and spent half his life travelling didn’t carelessly let his passport lapse. He was another enemy vanquished, another suitor seen off.

It was very satisfactory having exactly the right car for once. Theresa Bosworth was more used to feeling acutely the lack of a gleaming Mercedes. The Honda Previa was perfectly suitable for the daytime use of a largish family, but she would have liked something less functional for evening events. Swishing up the gravelled Surrey driveways in the huge Previa (which Mark unamusingly referred to as the van, as if it was a clapped-out rotting old heap like Lucy’s), out for supper or drinks, reminded her of when she was little and her mother had made her put her old school mac over her pink organdie party dress. That coat had crushed her spirits along with her frills and she’d craved a velvet sapphire-blue cape, tied at the neck with silk tasselled cord, preferably scarlet. Not much had changed about Theresa since then. Just now, though, watching the au pair shepherding the three children into the Previa, while she adjusted the seats to accommodate their mountain of luggage, she felt the rare
satisfaction
of form corresponding with function.

‘Marisa, don’t put Sebbie in the middle, just in case,’ she reminded her. The dough-skinned Swiss girl gazed back at her blankly. ‘You know,
just in case
,’ Theresa repeated, hissing out the hint of appalling consequences. Still nothing. ‘
Quoi?
Say in French maybe?’ Marisa pouted, not terribly prettily.

‘Jesus.
Malade, mal de voyage
,’ Theresa explained. ‘But just don’t say anyth—’

‘Ah! I understand!’ Marisa interrupted. She hugged the stocky-four-year-old and cooed at him, ‘’S’OK, Sebbie,
petit
, you won’t get sick, will you? Not today?’ Each side of him, his six-year-old sisters giggled and wriggled and made retching noises across him to each other.

‘Oh bugger,’ Theresa muttered, ‘exactly what I didn’t want. Just the mention of it and he’ll be off.’

She strode back into the house for some just-in-case plastic bags and caught Mark sitting on the stairs reading the
Times
financial pages. He was ready to go, expensively casual in his navy linen jacket and beige chinos, his puppy-soft leather bag showing the outline of a tennis racquet.
He
was ready, that was all that mattered to him: the preparation of the rest of them was simply not his job, for this was a holiday with his wife’s entire family; it was their show, at their expense and he had bagged for himself the conveniently unproductive role of being merely along for the ride.

‘Sorry, darling, did you want me for something? I was just checking shares.’

‘That’s yesterday’s. I cancelled the papers,’ Theresa snapped. He should be more useful. He should be like Daddy back in the Devon days, packing luggage into the car as meticulously as a well-stocked picnic hamper.

‘You could turn off the gas,’ Theresa suggested, still recalling her father’s long-ago duties.

‘Lord, could I? Do we usually?’

Theresa sighed, a long-drawn-out, hard-done-by sound. ‘No I suppose not. The Aga would go out.’

‘Right, and then your Mrs Thing would phone all the way to St George and report the disaster.’

Teresa picked up the nearest suitcase and glared at him. ‘She’s not just
my
Mrs Thing. She cleans
our
house and she’s called Gwen.’ She’d have swept out with justified haughtiness if the bag hadn’t been so heavy.

‘Here, let me.’ Mark took the case from her, just in time to stop her bursting into overwrought tears. If only he knew, had even the smallest clue, how much organization it took to sort and pack clothes for herself and three small children. And most of theirs were new, because they’d so thoughtlessly grown since their last kitting-out. Summer clothes had had to be tracked down like rare relics at ridiculous expense now the shops were full of winter and back-to-school, and of course they wouldn’t fit again by next year so it was all an exorbitant waste. At last sensing tension, he put the case down, leaned across and kissed her cheek and then stroked her hair, his hand encountering the inevitable black velvet Alice band, an item he loathed.

‘You’re not wearing that hair-thing, are you? To the Caribbean? Awfully hot I’d have thought.’ And suburban and matronly and dull. Her fine honey-coloured hair had a permanent dent across it like a rabbit track worn through a wheat field.

‘Well, what else can I …’ Theresa looked at herself in the hall mirror, seeing a tall angular streak of pent-up worry. She ripped the band out of her hair and shook her head hard, fluffing out the layers and taking
years
off. Now she looked more like her wacky free-spirit sister Lucy and less like her uptight edgy brother Simon.

‘That’s better. Sexy.’ Mark smiled, the sideways sort he always did when he was thinking about bed. Theresa allowed him a small grin in return, left the hairband on the hall table and carried the children’s three small rucksacks full of journey-entertainment out to the car. Mark, before he set the burglar alarm and shut the door, dashed through to the kitchen and shoved the hated velvet item in the bin. It could be Mrs Thing’s (OK,
Gwen’s
) fault.