Never Too Late (57 page)

and studied it intently. She barely lowered it when a

beautiful blonde woman wearing what looked like a

Gucci jumpsuit entertained the whole table by telling

them the restaurant’s specials for the night, switching

from English to perfectly accented Italian when she

named Italian dishes, and to Spanish when she named

Spanish dishes.

There are more specials than dishes on the menu,’

chuckled Max, as he went back to his. ‘You pick something

then they tell you about fifteen other gorgeous things you

immediately decide to have instead.’

Despite all the exotic-sounding courses on the menu,

Evie didn’t feel in the slightest bit hungry any more.

Peering around her, she spotted one elegant brunette in a

grape-coloured silk sheath reaching for her pre-dinner

drink: something in a pretty triangular glass with a couple

of olives in it.

That was it - she’d have a Martini. They were classy and

elegant, Evie sniffed. Nobody would think she was a bog

woman when she was sipping a Martini.

‘Vodka or gin?’ inquired the waiter politely when she

asked for it.

‘Vodka,’ Evie said recklessly, knowing that a moment’s

hesitation would let everyone know she’d assumed Martini

came straight out of the Martini bottle. Did they put vodka

in as well? Of course, they must, she realised, thinking that

James Bond always wanted a vodka one.

‘Olives or a twist?’ inquired the waiter.

‘Olives,’ she smiled, since she wasn’t sure what a twist

was. When the drinks came Vida was regaling everyone

with stories of her first time abroad with her first husband

and how she’d drunk the tap water in her tiny Greek hotel

room and been sick for three days. Acting nonchalantly,

Evie took one confident sip of her elegant Martini and

nearly choked. Christ! It tasted like neat vodka.

‘I never had you down as a Vodka Martini woman,’ Max

murmured under his breath.

‘Just love them,’ said Evie gaily, taking another throat

burning gulp. The fiery liquid was doing its work: hitting

her stomach like molten fire and spreading its heady

warmth throughout her entire body. Halfway down the glass already, Evie, who practically never drank more than a couple of weak G & Ts, decided she’d have another.

If Max was surprised, he didn’t say anything. Cara wasn’t

so reticent. ‘Evie, you never drink Martinis,’ she pointed

out.

‘Yes, I do,’ she replied loftily. ‘Maybe I’ll borrow your

hangover shirt tomorrow!’ Going off into a fit of giggles,

she finished her first drink, swallowed her olives and

started on the next one.

Not even the delicious risotto she had for a starter could

compete with the neat vodka swilling around inside her

and Evie was soon well on the way to being plastered. No

longer caring that she looked drab and uninteresting, she

winked at her Martini waiter and waggled her empty glass

at him.

‘You sure you want another?’ asked Max gently. He put

an arm around her shoulders and she practically purred at

his touch. ‘Maybe you should have a glass of wine instead.’

Evie raised her eyebrows haughtily. “I can decide for

myself, you know. No man tells me what to do. I fancy a

drink, that’s all.’

Max grabbed the finger she’d been pointing at him. ‘Fair

enough, Ms Fraser, I don’t want you to batter me. I simply

don’t want you to have a hangover in the morning.’

Smiling delightedly, Evie screwed up her eyes at him.

‘Why?’ she demanded coquettishly. ‘Have you exciting

plans for me?’

For a moment, Max dropped his guard and the laughing

expression left his face. ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘If you let me.’

The waiter set her third Martini in front of Evie. Feeling

suddenly sobered up, nervous and excited all at the same

time, she took a sip, anything to gain a moment’s respite

from the intense expression on Max’s face.

This was dangerous, so dangerous. She’d said she wasn’t

a gambling person and yet here she was gambling with her

heart, her future and with the affections of two men as if

she was a high roller in Monte Carlo.

‘Not having another, Evie?’ called Andrew across the

table, shattering the intimate moment.

‘Oh, Dad,’ groaned Evie, ‘not you too. Anyone would

swear I was a teenager with her first shandy to listen to

you lot!’

‘Tell me about it,’ muttered Rosie, who’d had terrible

trouble persuading her grandfather to let her have one

glass of wine.

‘I thought we could drive to Ronda tomorrow,’ Vida

said, changing the subject because she sensed arguments

looming. ‘We can flop out by the pool in the afternoon but

it’d be lovely to do some sightseeing in the cool of the

morning.’

‘Sounds brill,’ said Cara, who got bored lying by the pool

and was never too bothered about getting a tan. ‘Doesn’t

it?’ she said to Rosie.

‘Yeah,’ said Rosie, who longed to be mahogany immediately

and had planned to stay glued to a sun lounger with

her head in a book for hours each day.

Vida and Andrew began discussing what they’d read

from their guide book about the region.

‘Ronda is in a beautiful, mountainous position, and

involves a nerve-racking road trip,’ Max said, not looking at

Evie. ‘Not the sort of drive to take when you’re hangover.’

She raised her glass defiantly and sank her third Martini,

by now used to the fiery taste. ‘Really?’ she said cheerfully.

Bright lights hit Evie’s head like the headlamps of an

oncoming truck. They burned into her closed eyes,

making her aware of the red hot needles being jammed

into her skull.

‘Go ‘way,’ she croaked, vainly trying to get hold of the

sheet and cover her head with it to block out the agonisingly

painful light.

‘Mum, you have to get up,’ Rosie shouted. At least, it

sounded as if she was shouting.

‘Don’t yell,’ Evie said weakly.

‘I’m not,’ yelled Rosie, opening the other curtain to let

daylight pierce the gloom of the bedroom.

She sat on the bed beside her mother’s inert form and

looked at the grey face on the pillow. ‘I’ve got some orange

juice for you. I’m sure you’re dead thirsty.’

Quite how her seventeen-year-old daughter knew that a

hangover made you thirsty Evie didn’t know, but she

stored the information at the back of her head and decided

she’d deal with that later. Right now, she had to cope with

what was obviously either a brain haemorrhage or the

worst hangover she’d ever had in her life. Lying prone, she

felt as if the whole bed was vibrating, her body was bathed

in a cold sweat and her skull was being Kangohammered

from the inside.

‘We’re going to Ronda in about half an hour, if you’re up

to it,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s half-nine now. Vida and Grandpops

got the most amazing little rolls and honey for breakfast

and we had it on the verandah. I’d love to sunbathe,’ she

added, ‘but Grandpops and Vida have their heart set on a

sightseeing trip. Will you come?’

Evie moved a fraction in the bed and the Kangohammer

went into overdrive. ‘God, no,’ she moaned. ‘I’m

dying, Rosie. I can’t go anywhere.’

‘That’s what Cara said,’ her daughter replied prosaically.

‘I’ve never seen you drunk before, Mum. You were very

funny.’

Funny? Evie feebly tried to remember the night before.

She could remember the Martinis and something funny

about shrimps … oh, yes, feeding Max garlicky shrimps as

if he was a seal, insisting he eat them as she dangled them

over his mouth. And did she bang into the door on her way

out? Or was it a person …

‘It’s just as well Max was here, otherwise we’d have

never got you up the stairs,’ Rosie explained, blithely

unaware of how devastating her words were to her

mortally embarrassed mother. ‘Cara said she could probably

manage to give you a fireman’s lift but Max just

picked you up as easily as if you were Sasha.’ In her

tangled sheets, Evie burned with shame. Max picking her

up when she had passed out, after she’d been force

feeding him shrimps and bashing drunkenly into people

and doors on the way out. What must he think of her?

He’d taken them all to that beautiful restaurant to celebrate

their holiday and she’d got plastered and made a

holy show of herself. Evie burrowed deeper into the bed

with the disgrace of it all. She felt humiliated, demeaned

and utterly mortified. She’d just remembered passing out

once they got back to the villa.

‘Are you dying?’ asked Cara, loudly and irritatingly

goodhumouredly, plonking herself on the bed and jarring

Evie’s painful head.

‘Yes,’ she moaned. She lifted her head an inch from the

pillow, opened her glued-up eyes again and asked: ‘Was I

dreadful? What did I do?’

‘You were fine,’ Cara said, ‘apart from when you got up

on top of the coffee table downstairs when you tried to

pull up your dress to show us your appendectomy scar . . ,’

‘Oh, no,’ Evie wailed before she realised she didn’t have

an appendectomy scar.

‘Only kidding!’ chuckled Cara. ‘Listen, Evie, you got

drunk, you passed out, you were fine. Big deal. We all do it.’

“I don’t,’ she said tearfully.

‘Well, you obviously needed to or you wouldn’t have,’

Cara said with irrefutable logic.

‘You were fine, Mum,’ Rosie piped up. ‘You had a big

conversation with Vida about how you were sorry you

were such a bitch to her before and that you didn’t mind

if, er …’ Rosie hesitated, ‘… you didn’t mind what she

and Grandpops did.’

Not caring if her head fell off or not, Evie sat up shakily

in bed and stared at her daughter. An appalling feeling that

some part of this conversation was familiar crept over her.

‘What were you going to add, Rosie?’ she asked. ‘What

did I really say? Tell me.’ Her voice was shrill with horror.

Rosie looked away cagily.

‘Please,’ begged Evie. It mightn’t be as bad as she

thought …

‘What you actually said,’ began Cara, ‘was that you

didn’t give a fiddler’s toss if they broke the bed and the

wardrobe bouncing from one to the other having sex, so

long as they were happy together.’

Evie’s feverish hangover faded into an icy sweat and she

lay down in the bed in shock. Being drunk obviously

meant you parrotted things you’d thought earlier but

would never have said aloud in a million years. If she’d said that to Vida, who knew what she’d said to Max under the truth drug effect of half a litre of vodka? Probably that she

wanted him to take her to bed and make mad passionate

love to her.

The fact that it was true was immaterial. That made it

worse. In vino veritas, people always said. Now Max

would know she was crazily in love with him, Vida would

know she’d hated her for ages and the inhabitants of

Puerto Banus would know she was Ireland’s Bog Woman

of the Year, incapable of going anywhere even vaguely

sophisticated without carrying on like some dopey heifer

who’d never been out of Bally-go-backwards before. That

was it: she wanted to die. Now, as soon as possible, before

she had to face Vida her father or most especially Max,

ever again.

‘Is Evie coming with us?’ called Andrew from the

bottom of the stairs.

‘No,’ Cara yelled back. She got off the bed and kissed

her sister on the forehead. ‘We’ll see you later, sis.’

Evie wished everyone would stop yelling. Didn’t they

know she had a hangover?

‘Are you sure you’re all right on your own?’ asked Rosie

anxiously, perching beside her. ‘I’ll stay with you, Mum.

You look as if you need cheering up.’

Evie managed a weak smile. She’d feel a complete

failure as a mother if her drunken behaviour meant Rosie

had to miss a sightseeing trip on the first day of her

holiday. ‘I’m fine, darling, really. I just need some sleep and I’ll be right as rain when you get back, I promise.’

Rosie left reluctantly, after making sure Evie had a big

glass of orange juice beside her and some fruit by the bed

in case she got hungry. Some hope, Evie thought, eyeing

the basket of grapes, apricots and peaches. Just looking at a

peach could make her projectile vomit like the kid from The Exorcist.

When she heard the front door slam, Evie sank back into

her pillows with relief She needed to be on her own to

cope with the embarrassment and her hangover.

She drank her orange juice thirstily, barely tasting the

just-squeezed juice as it rushed down her throat, slaking

the hangover thirst. No sooner had she finished the last

drop than she became aware that orange juice wasn’t the

right thing to drink with an acidic stomach.

Feeling the bile rise in her throat, she dragged herself out

of the bed, staggered into the bathroom and was sick over and over again. Her stomach hurt and her throat was raw from puking. She was so tired, she sat clutching the toilet

bowl for support, wondering if she’d ever get the energy to