Excess Baggage (31 page)

‘They are. So that’s all of us. Hey! We’re OK!’ He put his arms round her and crushed her against him. Over his shoulder she caught sight of her mother. Shirley was smiling across at them, looking, surely not … looking happy. Approving, even. Could one night really make such a difference?

IT WAS THE
last day of the holiday. There still wasn’t any news about whether the airport was functioning, and Simon was fretting because he couldn’t plan the timings for leaving the hotel later that afternoon. It was important, he felt, to be able to give each of them a different time for congregating in the lobby, cases packed, passports and tickets at the ready, according to their accustomed reputations for tardiness. For Becky and Luke, who would go wandering off somewhere unless closely watched and constantly reminded, he would allow an extra half-hour, possibly a whole hour to be on the safe side. For Theresa he’d have to allow the same, not because her punctuality was suspect but because she had the complication of small children who would all need to go to the loo at the last minute. His parents would be there on the dot of whatever time he gave them with no fuss but as for Lucy, well, Lucy didn’t show any signs of going anywhere at the moment.

‘What do you think?’ he’d asked her after breakfast. ‘Do you think we’ll get away today? There’ll probably be a delay of course, but if we get to the airport good and early …’

‘Oh Simon, who cares?’ she’d interrupted, grinning
in
a peculiarly vague and absent way, almost as if she’d, well, as if she’d
taken
something. She wouldn’t do that, he was pretty sure. There must be something odd going on inside her head.

‘Why worry about everything, Simon?’ Plum said as they went to have a final hour or two of toasting themselves on the beach before the crazy wedding that seemed to be going ahead just before lunch. ‘We’ll hear soon enough about the airport. There’ll be a notice up. But anyway, even if it isn’t open, how much can it matter whether we’re a day or two late home or not?’

‘You sound like Lucy,’ he grumbled, ‘all laid-back and don’t-care. It’s all right for her, I’ve got patients booked in and a reputation to think of.’

‘I think she’s got work to go back to as well, actually. You don’t have the monopoly on professional integrity. And I’ve got classes to run and students to deal with too.’

Plum’s words sounded like a thorough telling-off. Simon felt rather comforted by this. At least she still cared enough to put him back in his place now and then. He wouldn’t say it reminded him (fondly) of his mother, because he didn’t want to have to consider the psychological ramifications of that, but the evidence of continuing nurture from his wife made him feel that at least, as a couple, they hadn’t yet sunk into mutual apathy. Sharp words could go too far though, he also thought, as with Mark and Theresa. He couldn’t actually recall, during the entire fortnight, a single moment when those two had looked or sounded like a properly devoted couple. There was a tense undercurrent there. Nothing he could put his finger on, but when Theresa called Mark ‘darling’ the teeth-gritting insincerity chilled the blood. If he was a betting man he’d put odds on those two separating within six months. It
made
him quite sad. It had been so hard for them to get those lovely children. He wouldn’t point that out if and when the time came. He’d leave it to his mother – it would come so much better from her, and come it surely would.

Becky didn’t expect to see Ethan again. Nor did she want to. In spite of the mild humiliation of having to return home still as virginal as when she’d left Gatwick (and at
seventeen
now, too, double horror) she’d rather not have to look into his leery eyes again. She assumed that after the storm he’d have clearing up of his own to do, wherever it was he lived. He surely wouldn’t think the hotel’s guests would be interested in purchasing souvenir knick-knacks on the beach as if there was nothing in the world to think about but making sure they’d bought enough presents for those back home.

Becky lay flat out on her sunlounger, switched on her Walkman and closed her eyes. Just as she could feel herself drifting off into a blissful sun-sodden doze, a shadow fell across her face. She opened her eyes, expecting to have to shout abuse at Luke. ‘Ganja to take home?’ Ethan shoved impolitely at her bare tummy so that she had to move over and then he plonked himself down beside her without even asking. She could feel her thigh squashed against his and didn’t like it one bit. She sighed. It was such a shame. Only a few short days ago such contact would have had her panting like a corgi in a hot car. Now it made her cringe.

‘Do you think I’m completely stupid?’ she said. ‘Do you really think I’m going to risk going to gaol carrying a titchy bag of grass through the British customs? I can get all that stuff down the local pub.’

‘But this is cheaper, better! And it’s no problem man, you girls got places you can hide stuff.’ His hand
snaked
up her leg and she grabbed it at upper-thigh level before it could reach its goal.

‘Ugh! Sod off!’ Becky pushed him away. It was all Mark’s fault. If he hadn’t said all that about Ethan’s girl-rota she’d have … well, on balance she was glad now that she hadn’t.

‘OK man, no worries.’ He leaned forward so that his breath tickled her face. ‘But you know I’ll give you all the stuff you want, for free, if you just come and …’

‘No. I don’t want to, thank you for asking. Now please go away.’ Becky turned up the volume of her Walkman and closed her eyes again. Ethan drifted away and was replaced by the cheeky small black birds dipping for crumbs and insects in the sand beneath her lounger. She could sense their flapping and squabbling. ‘Is there no bloody peace?’ she said to herself. She ripped the headphones off, stalked down to the sea and splashed out into the waves. The sea was a peculiar colour, with the sand beneath still churned up from the storm. It was as if a brilliant translucent sheen of turquoise had been spread over a caramel base. Becky lay on her back staring at the sky. There was no sign up there that the hurricane had ever happened. Someone had said that it had moved on towards the east coast of America. She imagined the frantic population of Florida boarding up their homes or moving further inland away from the damage, a long traffic jam of cars heading out of the state. With millions of square miles of America to drive off to in search of shelter, she wondered how any of them could understand how it felt to be trapped like they’d been on a tiny little island.

‘You know you don’t have to go. You can stay with us,’ Henry told Lucy for the fourteenth time that morning.
They
were sitting on the sand outside the dive shop. The boarding had all been removed, leaving ugly nail-holes in the wood. Lucy itched to fill them in and repaint.

‘I know.’ She didn’t list any excuses or reasons why she absolutely had to leave. There weren’t any. If she didn’t want to go, then she didn’t have to. What was difficult was trusting any decision she came up with. She couldn’t stay just because of Henry. But then she couldn’t leave just because of Colette’s school. She couldn’t stay just because the weather was better and she liked the particular shade of blue the sky happened to be over this island. And she couldn’t go home just because Aline Charter-Todd was desperate for a kitchen in the Paint Library’s Bittermint.

‘Are you going because of your job? Because you can work here. Especially now.’ Henry was still persuading.

‘I like my job,’ Lucy told him. ‘But there are aspects of it I don’t like. Money’s one.’

‘Money’s always one!’ Henry agreed.

‘The problem with being the painter is that you’re the last one down the chain. The client has already been stuffed by the plumbers, the carpenter, the electrician and the kitchen-fitters, so the pockets are empty. The other thing is that as a woman you have all the other craftsmen looking at you in that
doubtful
way, like you might be all right for a spot of gentle rag-rolling but will you need them to carry your ladders for you, all that.’

‘Same everywhere. At least here you get the sun.’

Lucy laughed. ‘You don’t give up, do you, Henry?’

He leaned across and kissed the tender skin at the back of her neck. ‘Not when there’s something I really, really want.’

Theresa and Marisa had finally got the girls dressed in their bridesmaids’ frocks. They’d wriggled and jiggled and complained while they were washed in a few inches of tepid bathwater (the guests had been asked to economize with it – supplies were still a long way from back to normal), but now Amy and Ella had their long fair hair up in high bunches tied with big clumps of orange and bright pink ribbon. They did look awfully cute, though Theresa wasn’t sure that dresses decorated with cannabis leaves would go down too well in a Surrey summer. Though, she thought with a smile, who among the velvet-headband brigade would dare admit to knowing enough about marijuana to comment? Perhaps it would be rather fun, next spring, to send the girls to snotty Lizzie Twilley’s daughter’s birthday party dressed like this. She could imagine the arched eyebrows, the hesitation and then the ‘Oh! Oh, how
sweet
!’ After about half an hour of sidelong glances and half-begun sentences, Lizzie, on the outside of a couple of spritzers, would finally ask, ‘Exactly what
sort
of leaves are they supposed to be?’ The pre-Caribbean Theresa would have bluffed and lied that they were maple. The post-storm version, glad to be alive and ready to face the demons with Mark, would tell the truth and not care.

‘Are we ready?’ Cathy’s face appeared round the door. ‘Oh, your room’s hardly damaged at all, is it? And you’ve still got your telly. Ours got full of rain and had to go.’

‘Cathy, you look stunning.’ Theresa pulled Cathy further into the room for a better look. She was wearing a sleek and simple spaghetti-strapped bias-cut white silk dress. Her blonde hair was loosely piled up and held in place with a slide covered in pale blue plumbago flowers.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ Theresa admired her dress, ‘just like a 1930s nightie.’

Cathy did a twirl in front of the mirror, frowning. ‘Ugh, do you think so?’ Then she giggled, ‘Well, I’ll just have to keep it on for bedtime, won’t I?’

‘Have you got something borrowed?’

‘Only the money to get here, courtesy of NatWest Bank.’

‘Here you are, wear these.’ Theresa opened her bag and pulled out a tiny velvet pouch which contained her diamond stud earrings. ‘Mark gave them to me when Sebastian was born.’

Cathy gave her a quick hug. ‘Thanks, Tess. If Paul and me can be like you and Mark, well, we’ll be OK, won’t we?’

Theresa bent to adjust the ribbons on Ella’s hair. ‘You’ll be a lot better than that, I’m sure.’

It wasn’t goodbye yet. Henry was only just along the beach, sorting the jet skis out and checking out the damage to the pedalos. As she walked back towards her room to sort her luggage Lucy noticed that outside the villa next to her parents, the mysterious Celebrity’s black-windowed Mercedes had reappeared, along with its ever-present besuited driver with his wraparound mirrored sunglasses. She smiled to herself. Who on earth would want to go to the trouble of keeping so many staff on hold and then never come out? It was like having people to do all your living for you. Hotel staff, possibly sworn to eternal (and surely pointless) secrecy, had been seen entering the building with mops and buckets and screwdrivers and spanners, so presumably the villa was more or less back to its former luxurious habitable condition. Perhaps he or she was allergic to sunlight. Lucy certainly wasn’t. She
thought
about the dismal prospect of the short grey days of winter, those miserable late November afternoons that her mother always loved for their closed-curtain cosiness.

‘We’ll just shut the world out,’ she used to say, pulling the heavy green velvet drapes across the window. Lucy had hated that, feeling as if she was being denied access to that world, imprisoned by the cold and dark that pressed against the far side of the walls. She remembered after-school toasted crumpets when she was little, mugs of hot chocolate, oxtail soup. You needed so much comforting against the damp-nosed chill of late autumn. With the extended time-scale of children, winter had seemed to go on for ever till she’d imagined with a terrified dread that they were stuck for ever and ever in this one gloomy season. Her mother had pointed out the daffodil spikes pushing through the earth, the hyacinths blooming, to reassure her. But the days were still chilled and night came too early so she hadn’t trusted these flowers as signs of spring, more as evidence that the cold and dark really were for always and that people, like the plants, were all going to have to adjust to it. Now, when they got back to England, people would be starting to mention Christmas and making plans to get everything done
really early
this year. Lucy always felt that was like wishing half the year away, the best, the warm and sunny half, as if they’d raced too carelessly through the precious long hot days of summer and that the bleak cold was something like getting back to normal.

‘Your mother’s worried about you.’ Perry appeared by her side. Lucy wondered if he’d been following her, waiting to choose his moment.

‘When did she ever
not
worry about me?’ She grinned at him.

‘No, but seriously, Lucy love, about this money. I want to give the three of you twenty thousand apiece. Your mother’s worried you won’t take it. She thinks perhaps you could put a deposit on a little place for you and Colette. Get settled at least with somewhere to live, seeing as you don’t seem to be settling with some
one
.’

‘OK. Thanks,’ Lucy said simply. She hugged him.

‘OK? You mean you’ll take it?’ Perry looked astounded.

‘Hey, there’s always a first time! There’s just one condition though.’

‘Oh. I thought there might be. What is it?’ he asked warily. She took his arm and led him to sit with her on the low wall beside the children’s playground. The swingboat was still standing, but the climbing frame was buckled and broken and the roundabout that looked like a little train was crushed by a fallen section of palm tree.