Excess Baggage (16 page)

The water felt colder as she moved out deeper, and jolted her senses. Theresa didn’t at all want to drown. She didn’t want Mark to think that for the sake of his bit of tacky off-limits sex she would go to the trouble of destroying herself and her family. She was determined,
suddenly
, not even to let him see her sulk. She wouldn’t give it the importance it didn’t deserve. How hard that would be she didn’t yet know. What she did know was that it was getting hard to reach the shore. There were lights everywhere: at the hotel, on the end of the pontoon, in the villas on the far headland where her parents were staying, lights out to sea on tankers and cruise ships and lamps swaying high on the rigging of moored yachts in the bay. Further away the town of Teignmouth blazed the night away. She swam in a circle, tired now but warmer and strangely elated. Her head drifted beneath the water and she didn’t fight hard to come back up. When she did surface, there was someone beside her, a girl with flowing yellow hair. She thought of mermaids and smiled. Mermaids never drown. She’d read that on a Cornish gravestone and felt sad about the grave’s occupant, who presumably had. Perhaps the sea was heaven.

‘Come
on
, you thick dumb tart! Swim with us, don’t just give up!’ There was a man as well. Mer-man, mer-bloke? What? Theresa thought. He was pulling at her arm, the girl had the other one and they’d taken her over, towing her towards somewhere safe. She let go and trusted them, floating in her unsuitable, but clean blue dress towards the hotel lights.

‘You’ll be all right now.’ The girl sounded kind, as if she felt gently sorry for Theresa.

‘When she’s sober,’ she heard the man mutter.

Theresa giggled. ‘I’m glad I wasn’t skinny-dipping,’ she said, pulling her dress down over her thighs as she staggered out of the shallow water onto the beach.

‘Aren’t we bloody all?’ said the girl.

The return of the blazing sun that all the guests felt entitled to made breakfast a slightly overexcited time,
shrill
with the voices of the bossiest planning the day’s structure for the meeker or lazier. Simon was pleased with himself for having got up early and been busy making arrangements. The family were to go out, for the whole day, on a trip around the island on a catamaran. A barbecue lunch on a deserted beach was included and he was as certain as he could be that no-one would object.

‘Not all
day
!’ Becky screeched. ‘I’m supposed to be—’

‘What? Supposed to be what?’ Plum was quick to ask. She’d seen the hunky young jewellery-seller close to Becky on the beach, the two of them giggling with their heads together. He was too old for her, Simon had said, and for once she’d been inclined to agree. The tawdry reputation of some British girls on holiday was common knowledge at exotic destinations all across the world, and Plum was well aware that Becky in her skimpy bikinis and sexy little midriff-baring tops looked exactly like a sweet and tempting piece of easy meat. Plum herself was pretty sure that Becky was still a virgin, though she certainly wasn’t going to ask her. After all, what could she do with a worrying answer?

‘I just said I might see someone, that’s all.’ Becky quietened as fast as she’d flared up. For once they were tempting her with something that she might actually mind missing out on and she wasn’t going to argue, and it still rankled that her gran had called her spoilt. ‘I’ll maybe see them later.’ Plum smiled to herself, recognizing the skill with which Becky managed to avoid giving away even the sex of her appointee. Such crafty teenage tricks would be handy to keep for use later in life.

Simon was relieved to be escaping the environment
of
the hotel. He’d become highly nervous of accidentally meeting the maid he’d so stupidly (and clumsily) goosed in the bedroom and was sure that behind every staff member’s polite smile was the powerful and terrible knowledge that He was The One. The worst thing was, he couldn’t, hand on heart, swear it wouldn’t happen again. Those high swaying bottoms, the leisurely, provocative walks and the glistening intricacy of the black multi-plaited hair aroused him quite extraordinarily. The pale feeble flicker of a tan that the European women lying slab-like on poolside loungers were so pleased with themselves for acquiring simply didn’t bring even the smallest glow of lust to his loins. Plum, bless her, assumed he was simply drinking too much to be capable. A couple of times he’d made a courteous sexual effort and constructed for himself a rather smutty but pretty effective fantasy that involved the room maid, a bottle of baby oil and a locked laundry store, but he could tell that Plum was glad enough to get back to the book she was reading.

‘You’ll be coming, won’t you? Not going off diving with your new friend?’ Simon asked Lucy. After she’d stormed out of the restaurant the night before, and with Theresa not even turning up for dinner at all (migraine; since when had she suffered from migraines?), he wondered if he was the only one in the family with a suitable sense of team spirit.

‘Yes I’ll come,’ Lucy told him. ‘Though if Mum thinks that by getting me for a full day on a boat she’s got me captive for another dose of nagging about settling for Mr Take-What-You-Can-Get-at-Your-Age then I swear I’ll dive overboard and swim to shore, even if there’s sharks.’

‘I don’t think she’ll dare.’ He grinned. ‘Colette told her off after you’d run away. Announced loud and
clear
something like “Mum’s decided she doesn’t actually like men very much.” That shut her up, you could see the cogs turning while she started wondering if you’d turned into a lesbian.’

‘I knew those painting overalls were good for something. By the way, how’s Theresa’s headache? Is she coming?’

‘Theresa’s fine. And yes, I’m coming.’ Theresa looked slightly bizarre, Lucy thought, out in the bright morning air with full eye make-up and glossy lipstick. The words ‘brave face’ came straight into her mind. Mark must have told her, but Lucy knew she was the last one her sister would confide in. She rather wished Mark hadn’t either, some things you’d just rather not know.

The smallest children weren’t coming with them. Sebastian’s unreliable digestion when it came to travelling was given as the reason, but Mark had admitted to Perry that he felt abject terror at the thought of being responsible for making sure three such small children didn’t fall off the catamaran. Marisa was taking them to see a puppet show at a hotel further along the beach and had found a friendly Norland nanny in charge of one small baby to share her gripes about her employers with.

They were all assembled on the pontoon with supplies of bottled water, sunhats and plenty of high-factor suntan lotion. Luke and Colette sat on the edge, dangling their feet into the water and watching the fish. The boat was on its way; Mark had spotted it rounding the furthest headland. Shirley felt apprehensive: she was sure she could hear music coming from the boat’s direction and trusted that it would be switched off once they were on board so they could have a calm, peaceful trip.

‘Theresa! Have you recovered?’

‘Lord, it’s the Gropers,’ Simon muttered to Lucy.

Theresa scuttled quickly away from her family group and tried to head off the young couple further along the pontoon. She almost hurled herself at them in her eagerness to keep them out of the family’s collective sharp earshot, but Plum and Lucy, perhaps slyly suspecting entertainment value, were beside her.

‘After last night – we were worried about leaving you to go back to your room all alone like that.’ The girl’s voice, unfortunately for Theresa, was a vibrant and carrying one. She touched Plum on the arm, a friendly, confiding gesture. ‘State of her, had more than a few, but then don’t we all now and then? Only human! Thought she’d drown though.’

‘Leave it, Cathy,’ the man mumbled at her, ‘you’re being mouthy.’

‘Sorry Paul,’ Cathy said, then turned back to Theresa. ‘But next time you go for a midnight swim, take a friend just for safety. Hope your dress was OK. You going on the boat trip?’

Theresa’s smile was a tight, fraught one and her reply was a clipped ‘Yes’, which Lucy thought rather inadequate and rude in the circumstances, as it seemed serious thanks for the saving of life might be more to the point. Lucy looked at Mark but he was gazing out to sea, studying the approaching boat. So he’d definitely confessed all to Theresa, then. Whatever alcohol-soaked trouble Theresa had been rescued from the night before just had to be a reaction to his news. Unless, of course, Theresa had a secret double life as the night-wandering gin-monster of Esher.

The catamaran was enormous, with decks on each hull, a full-scale bar and small galley below in the centre. Lucy held Shirley’s arm as she climbed aboard
and
found her somewhere to sit on the deck as far as she could get from the booming effects of the pounding reggae music. Cathy and Paul clambered across the deck and made straight for the bar area and there were several passengers already settled aboard, which didn’t please Perry. He said to Simon, ‘I thought you’d booked a whole boat, not just seats on some kind of disco ferry.’

‘That would have cost a fortune, Dad. These things take up to thirty people.’

‘I keep telling you, Simon, money’s not a problem. If we’d had the boat to ourselves we could have got the bloody music turned down.’

Lucy felt sorry for Simon, who’d simply been doing his best to get things right. He sat near the back of the boat with his shoulders slumped, reminding Lucy of when she was little and he decided that the role of Middle Child was a hard one to have been dealt. He must have been close to fifteen, growing so fast that she, at five, thought he looked like a pale skinny ghost. She remembered him nagging at Shirley to let down the hem on his grey school trousers and how she’d kept saying she’d get round to it. In the end, mortified by the constant sight of the top of his grey school socks, he’d had a go at doing it himself, hacking at the stubborn stitches with Shirley’s stitch-ripper and managing to slice a massive hole in the fabric. ‘I was only trying to help,’ he’d claimed, justifiably, hunching miserably on their big maroon Dralon sofa with the unwearable trousers hanging like the lifeless legs of a ventriloquist’s abandoned dummy across his lap.

The sun was scorching, reflecting off the sea and doubling its damage potential. There was no shade on the boat, but the breeze was cool, deceptive in making the passengers feel that the sun wasn’t doing its worst.
Lucy
could see Cathy and Paul settling to put away as many bottles of Carib beer as they could manage, and Becky drifted off to chat to them and sneak a couple of bottles for herself at the same time. Shirley sat watching the palm-fringed coastline as they sped past craggy hillside villages, small fields of brown and white goats and curly-horned thin cows that were tethered singly under shade close to brightly painted homesteads.

‘If this was English coastline it would be nothing but horrible off-white bungalows,’ Plum commented, admiring the hot, vivid colours of the houses dotted around on the hillsides. ‘And I’ve never understood the dreary British obsession with net curtains.’

‘You need them for privacy.’ Shirley was a great believer in nets and felt they were a tradition that deserved defending.

‘Even when you put them on the Velux windows when you had the roof space converted, and the only people who could see in would have to be in a passing helicopter?’ Lucy teased.

Shirley gave her one of the Looks. ‘We haven’t come all the way to this beautiful place to argue about net curtains,’ she said. ‘We can do that at home.’

‘What
have
we come here for, actually?’ Simon asked. Lucy looked at him. He was staring at the sea as if he wished he hadn’t, at least not yet, released this particular bull into the ring for Shirley to fight with.

‘We’ve come to be together, as a family, Simon. To remind ourselves of what that means. That’s all,’ she said. ‘I know you, I know you’ve been angling for a deep dark motive since the day we told you we were making the booking. Just relax, just enjoy yourself.’

It was on the way back later that afternoon that Shirley started to tremble. Amazingly, it wasn’t Simon who first noticed, because he was occupied being
seasick
over the back of the catamaran. The Atlantic side of the island didn’t have the placid leisurely waves of the western, Caribbean side. Here the sea rolled and heaved and fat rollers crashed to the shore and spumed high off the rocks. Only Plum remained completely unperturbed, absorbed in the final chapter of Ruth Rendell. Cathy and Paul huddled together for warmth in this much cooler wind. Mark and Theresa, sitting silently on separate hulls like a pair of seagulls, focused against nausea on the horizon. Becky, Luke and Perry were in a row holding tightly to the deck ropes, with Colette in front of them and Perry praying she wouldn’t feel sick and be put off boat trips for ever.

Shirley and Lucy were comfortable on proper seats up by the galley. Music was still booming out, but they were too tired now to be anything but oblivious to it. Shirley had done a lot of swimming, during the lunchtime stop on the shore. The beach had been stunning, a stretch of deserted, pale sand that glinted as if diamond shavings had been grated over it. More shelter would have been good – wherever she sat beneath the young and wispy palms she hadn’t managed to get the whole of her in the shade at any one time. She’d taken refuge under the sea. She’d never tried snorkelling before and had enjoyed the strange sensation of being among, not above, fish as they went about doing whatever fish do. She hadn’t seen the dolphin, which she rather regretted, though it was nice that it had let Becky swim along with it, stroke it even, because that seemed to be what the younger ones liked to do. She couldn’t imagine wanting to stroke one herself, sure that it would be a slimy, greasy-skinned thing and also that, really, it wouldn’t like it. They might bite. You couldn’t trust just everything (or everyone) that smiled.

When she started to shiver, Shirley at first thought she was getting chilled. The sea was rougher now, but as she’d never been on any kind of British boat trip that had involved anything less than a force five cross-Channel wind she didn’t feel queasy. She worried mildly about Simon, though, who had once managed to get seasick in a canoe on Lake Windermere, and who had eaten a vast amount of the barbecued prawns with chilli sauce at lunchtime.