Excess Baggage (22 page)

‘Apart from the whole beach.’ Oliver grinned at Lucy.

Denied her request for bathroom facilities, Ella, still
sobbing
, finally squatted on the sand and sat for some moments concentrating hard while Theresa watched her and smiled gently, sure that she’d won the kind of battle Marisa never seemed to have to put up with. Lucy turned round and could see Marisa and the Norland girl smirking over their magazines at the little scene. There was a sudden appalled shriek from Theresa, who came dashing out of the sea. ‘You should have said! Oh, you
dreadful
girl, why didn’t you say you needed a
poo
?’

Ella’s roar of protest, an infant’s version of ‘Well, you didn’t ask’ was almost drowned out by the delighted cackles from the two nannies. Theresa glared. Lucy tried to keep her face straight, glad it wasn’t down to her either to clean up the sand or to warn Marisa that back in England, a cheap flight to Switzerland for the au pair might be Theresa’s next Amex purchase.

Lucy wondered if it was her imagination that the air that afternoon seemed just that touch more sultry than before. The canvas roof of the Jeep was stowed behind the back seat, but the speeding wind that flicked Colette’s hair across her face wasn’t making her feel any cooler.

‘It’s sticking to my skin,’ Colette complained, pushing snaky tendrils of it behind her ears.

‘Tie it back then. Haven’t you got a scrunchie with you?’ Lucy was concentrating on avoiding ruts and potholes in the road.

‘Yeah, somewhere.’ Colette delved into Lucy’s basket in front of her, rummaged around and pulled out a green baseball cap. ‘There’s only this.’ She crammed it on her head, shoving her hair up inside it, then moved the rear-view mirror and pulling a face at her reflection. ‘Whose is it? Did you buy it?’

‘Oh that? No it’s Oliver’s, I think. I must have picked it up on the beach.’

Colette giggled. ‘Good excuse to see Henry again then, to give it back.’

‘We’re seeing him tomorrow,’ Lucy told her. They’d arrived at the east shore now and she pulled up beneath a clump of trees close to the sandy edge of the beach. The sea was much rougher here, crashing up the beach and ebbing back, leaving angrily bursting bubbles of foam burying themselves into soaking sand. She could hardly hear her own thoughts. She switched off the engine and turned to Colette. ‘We’ve been invited to Henry’s house, to have supper. Is that OK?’

Colette looked at her, puzzled. ‘Well of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?’

Lucy climbed out of the car. ‘No reason,’ she said, ‘I just thought you’d like to be consulted.’

‘That’s because it matters,’ Colette muttered, jumping over the side of the Jeep. Then, louder, she said, ‘You like him.’

Lucy waited for Colette to come round to her side of the car and then she put her arm round her. ‘Of course I like him. Don’t you?’

‘You’ve liked men before.’ Colette was looking worried, fearful.

‘Well, this time we’re only on holiday.’

‘Yeah, shame.’ She glanced up suddenly and grinned. ‘Look! Out there by the rocks!’

About twenty pelicans sat in a row on a rocky promontory, just above the reach of the spray, like a gathering of ancient ragged witches. Their huge beaks preened now and then into their feathers and they stretched their great wings, flapping lazily but going nowhere.

‘They look like they’re waiting to pick over a dead man’s bones,’ Colette said.

Lucy laughed. ‘If your gran heard you say that, she’d say you’d been over-imagining.’

Colette frowned. ‘How can you
over
-imagine?’

‘Don’t ask me! It’s a Gran thing. Though I do think it’s possible to do too much imagining the worst.’ They both laughed and then said together, ‘Like Simon.’

They were the only people on the great wide beach. Lucy looked in the guidebook and read that tourist hotels weren’t built on this side of the island because of the sea’s roughness and the tides in early winter, which shifted the sands around and brought in great troughs of seaweed. Holidaymakers liked things reliably clean and calm and comfortable. This wasn’t the kind of sea that you could trust with a pedalo or a jet ski and a group of teenagers overexcited by rum punch and too much sun. As she watched the pelicans swooping to the sea, scooping out fish, Lucy caught herself thinking that this would be such a perfect spot to come to at the end of a working day, just to sit and collect her thoughts before the evening. They had four days left of their holiday. She couldn’t remember being in any other place where she’d felt so reluctant to go home.

‘What do you miss most from home?’ she asked Colette.

‘Nothing.’ Colette didn’t even hesitate.

‘No-one from school?’

‘School? No!’ Colette pulled a face. ‘I haven’t even sent anyone a postcard.’

‘Not even Isabelle?’

‘No.’ Lucy waited but Colette went on staring out to the sea. She clearly wasn’t going to say any more but Lucy could tell that this kind of silence was covering
something
that troubled her. Colette did this sometimes, keeping her problems to herself as if she was making sure she didn’t load them onto Lucy. Was it, Lucy wondered, something that lone-parent children, or even just lone children did? Or was it because Lucy tended to be pretty vocal when things in her own life went wrong, sharing her problems as if Colette was more of a best friend than a young daughter. Colette was probably protecting her from having to deal with a double set of unhappinesses, which was far more unselfish than
she’d
ever been. At least she hadn’t told Colette how hard it was getting, trying to find them a new flat. She would make sure she kept that one under wraps. It wasn’t fair to expect a girl of her age to have to think about anything more serious than problematical homework and finding the right kind of trainers in a size five.

A car pulled up under the trees, yards from where they were sitting. ‘Never alone for long,’ Lucy sighed. ‘Even here.’

‘It’s OK, there’s plenty of room,’ Colette, ever grownup and reasonable, told her.

There was the sound of laughter and a young couple ran from the car towards the sea. They hadn’t seemed to notice that anyone else was there. The girl was young, blonde, slim and pretty. She wore a bizarre outfit consisting of a bright pink bikini, a short and sassy bridal veil, long white gloves and white high-heeled shoes. Lucy and Colette watched as she kicked off the shoes into the sea and splashed in after them, giggling. Her new husband was wearing swimming shorts and a dark grey morning-suit jacket, nothing else. He was carrying a camera.

‘Do you think they got married in just that?’ Colette stared at them, grinning. ‘I think that’s just so cool.’

‘Maybe. Or there might be a dress packed away back in its bag.’

‘I’m going to think there isn’t a dress. It’s more fun.’

The couple strolled up and down the beach, paddling and splashing about in the shallow water, jumping the bigger of the foamy waves which pounded up the wet sand. The bridegroom took photos of his new wife as she posed sexily, hands crossed, Marilyn Monroe-style, across her tanned thighs, and then with her perky veil pulled half across her face. Lucy started to feel uncomfortable about their position as unseen watchers when the girl lay down on her front in the surf and posed with her chin resting on the white-gloved hands. She had put her shoes back on for the shot, and her crossed ankles waved up behind her head. There was something vaguely pornographic about the whole scene, Lucy thought, and it became even more so when she rolled over, arched her back and let the veil and her hands trail through the water. The bridegroom stood over the girl, one foot each side of her body, photographing her face as her body snaked beneath him.

‘We’d better go,’ Lucy said, pulling Colette up from the sand. ‘We’ll go into the town on the way back, see if we can get a
Telegraph
for your gran.’ It felt important to keep talking, saying ordinary, even boring things. Colette, who could be just too perceptive, mustn’t pick up any clue that about this couple on the beach, Lucy felt, deep inside, an absolutely crushing boulder of envy.

The Celebrity had arrived when no-one was looking, slipping in with no fuss and no recognition. Becky and Luke were furious – he or she must have sneaked in by a back gate. They, along with Tom, had hung around
the
reception area since lunchtime, waiting for the exiles to arrive from the nearby island of Coranna. There, the New York-based owners of an astoundingly upmarket hotel, an internationally renowned last word in hedonistic luxury, had decided not to risk having their guests see the place at even one roof-tile short of perfection and had closed the place down till any hurricane damage was put right.

‘It might not even hit Coranna. It’s barely the size of a small field,’ the gold lady had complained as the hotel staff dealt brusquely with their current guests’ enquiries, which interrupted the intense concentration needed while the staff huddled together over computer print-outs and clipboards, allocating suitably luxurious rooms to the new arrivals. The gold lady had waited at the reception desk for twenty minutes, just to ask for an extra bin liner to put her suitcase into on the night of the storm. ‘I’ve got a lot of baggage,’ she’d explained, ‘I need more bags.’

The deputy manager, a woman of usually textbook politeness, had frowned at her and dismissed her with a glare, snapping, ‘We’re busy right now. You can buy them at the store across the street.’

‘Oh ho, the strain’s beginning to tell,’ Perry commented, overhearing.

The new arrivals came from the airport in small groups. ‘Private planes,’ Luke had a go at impressing Tom, ‘they can only take a few at a time.’ The three teenagers stood around in the lobby, pretending to check out the noticeboards and looking at the postcards. Shirley, reluctant to admit to an almost equal curiosity, found she was dropping into the hotel’s gift shop more than once and spending a lot of time making up her mind between a hibiscus-flowered sarong and a pink straw hat, neither of which she would ever
wear
. A flurry of activity out by the reception desk had all of them peering round at a trio of American women, all well past sixty but clearly keeping up the glamour quotient.

‘Jesus, what is she like?’ Becky whispered to Shirley as they took in the sight of a blonde woman with a round chunky body and spindly bare legs, wearing turquoise shorts, high silver sandals and a tight translucent black top with the word ‘Star’ emblazoned across the front in silver rhinestones.

‘Do you think that’s her? The big celeb?’ Tom said.

‘It’s no-one I’ve seen before,’ Becky told him.

Shirley giggled. ‘It certainly isn’t Madeleine Albright,’ she said.

‘It’s not even Elton John,’ Luke spluttered.

Becky lost interest. ‘Oh well, I’m not hanging about all day for some superstar to show up.’

It was only a couple of hours later that Becky, with Luke and Tom visiting Shirley’s villa in the hope of getting all the Snickers bars out of her fridge, noticed a sleek silver Mercedes with black windows parked on the path where no cars had previously been seen.

‘Bloody nerve.’ Perry came out and stared at the offending vehicle. ‘Rest of us humble peasants have to leave our hire cars up in the car park. You can’t even say it’s one law for the rich. I’m paying just as much through-the-nose cash for my top-of-the-range room as whoever this bloke is.’

‘And the storm’s going to make him just as wet and scared as us.’ Shirley tried to pacify Perry. Perry ambled up to the car, hands in his pockets, giving it a professional look-over. ‘Nice model this,’ he commented to Luke, ‘I’ve sold a good few of these to the Manchester football lads.’ He put his hand out to stroke the car’s bonnet but found his wrist suddenly
clasped
by a huge hand. Luke took a step back, terrified. The man looked exactly like a bouncer from a London club that he and his friends had wanted to go to but, having seen what was guarding the door, hadn’t even tried to enter.

‘Sorry, sir. The car is alarmed.’

‘It isn’t the only one.’ Perry rubbed at his wrist and looked into the impenetrable mirror lenses of the man’s sunglasses. ‘So, whose is it then?’ Perry went on.

‘Sorry, sir. It’s a real huge star, but who it is is privileged information.’ The guard smiled, surprising Luke by showing ordinary white teeth and not an array of metal prongs like Jaws in James Bond films.

‘Privileged my arse,’ Perry growled. Luke laughed, delighted. ‘Tell you what, lad,’ Perry put his hand on Luke’s shoulder and led him back into his villa’s garden, ‘if you want to know who we’ve got holed up in next door, you should pop round and ask if you can borrow a cup of sugar.’

‘Perhaps it’s not somebody famous,’ Tom suggested. ‘Perhaps it’s a hostage. Some real rich person kidnapped.’ Luke stared at him, trying to decide whether to tell him not to be so stupid or to admit to thinking that was quite a cool suggestion.

‘Well, I expect we’ll find out some day very soon,’ Perry said, settling himself onto his cushioned steamer chair out on the villa’s broad terrace. ‘After all, everyone’s equal under the stars when the roof’s blown away and the rain’s got in.’

On the drive into the town Lucy and Colette could see people busy shoring up their houses. There were no longer any tubs of flowers on porches, no toys lying around beneath the decking and even the dogs seemed to have disappeared. Some of the homes looked so
flimsy
, already patched together with corrugated iron and planks of painted wood that looked as if they might once have been floorboards, that Lucy could only cross her fingers for the occupants and offer prayers to all available gods for their survival. In the town itself, there was an overriding sound of the banging of nails into protective hoardings. With no cruise ships in, the marketplace was quiet and many of the stallholders had already packed up their stock and taken it into safe storage. Restaurants had notices outside offering half-price menus for the final night before the great shoring-up, and Lucy watched a woman unhooking coloured lamps from above her doorway and taking them inside her gift shop.

‘It feels like the whole world’s closing down,’ Colette said. ‘It’s really sad.’