The Holiday (19 page)

‘You have had a good week?’ he asked Mark, breaking the comfortable silence between them. ‘The writing went well?’

‘Not bad. How about you? Made yourself another bag of gold?’

‘Several,’ he said noncommittally, keeping to himself that he would sell on the decrepit office block he had just acquired for a handsome profit after he had had it restored and refurbished into luxurious apartments. ‘And were you left alone,’ he asked Mark, ‘or did the determined Dolly-Babe pay a call as she threatened?’

‘Thankfully I’ve seen no one, other than Angelos and Sophia, and Nicos up at the shop. It’s been very quiet. Just how I like it. Though I did have a call from my publisher or, more accurately, the fool of a new publicist who’s been appointed to take care of me.’

Theo tried to keep the smile from his face. He knew of old what a lousy self-promoter Mark was, and how he despised anyone else’s attempts to do it for him. ‘And what did that poor lamb to the slaughter want of you?’

‘Oh, the usual, a bit more of my soul.’

‘Any bit in particular?’

‘Yes, the part I’d rather keep to myself.’

‘Ah, I see it all. They want you to agree to be interviewed, is that it?’ Theo still had the video tape of one of Mark’s rare TV appearances in which he had presented the inexperienced interviewer with, possibly, her worst moment. She had innocently asked him if he ever thought he would get married again, only to have flung back at her, ‘That’s none of your goddamn business!’

Mark nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s a familiar tale — sell the personal story to sell the book. Sod the product, let’s hit ’em with brand definition. And while they’re doing that they’ll turn me into some kind of bloody media tart.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I should imagine that the line was sizzling with your hot-tempered response.’

Running his fingers through his hair, then leaning forward to flick them at the moth, Mark took a moment to think about what Theo had just said. His response had, indeed, been hot-tempered, and had resulted in a stunned silence from the girl. She hadn’t known what to say in the face of his adamant refusal to be swept along with her plans for hyping his book.

‘You’ve had such an interesting and colourful life,’ she had twittered. ‘It would be a fabulous hook on which to hang the publicity campaign.’

Hell on wheels!

Was the whole nightmare experience that he had lived through, and been lucky to survive, to be labelled as nothing more than an
interesting and colourful
episode?

Well, they could all go to hell. Goddamnit, the books had sold well in the past without him having to prostitute himself, which meant there was no good reason why he should have to start doing so now.

It was at times like this that he regretted ever writing under the name Mark St James. With hindsight he should have used a pseudonym and kept his anonymity, but in the early days of his recovery he had needed to reaffirm who he really was. It had been a mistake. He had realised that as soon as his private life suddenly became public property. With the overnight success of his first book, which went straight into the bestseller lists — in the UK, the States and Germany — and was then televised, press interviews had been expected of him. Once it was known that he had been an alcoholic and substance abuser, journalists only wanted to know how many bottles of vodka he had got through a day, or how much his cocaine habit had cost him. That it had very nearly cost him his life was of no real significance to them. He was a story in himself. He was a ready-made package of saleable interest.

When he had finished his third novel he stopped playing ball. He gave them the finger and retreated behind a wall of silence. No more interviews. No more days-of-hell-and-road-to-recovery stories. He had had enough. Disappointed, his publishers had had to find a new way to promote him. Working off the slipstream of his previous bestsellers, they came up with the Enigmatic Reclusive Mark St James, an angle, cloying as it was, that had worked just fine.

Until now, when some slip of a girl had proposed to resurrect the old approach. ‘I’ve been going through the press cuttings from way back,’ she’d said, ‘and it strikes me that you never once told anyone why you’d been an alcoholic. And I’m wondering if this isn’t a line we could follow now. What do you think?’

Struggling to control his anger, he had said, ‘I think you’re wasting your time as well as mine. The answer’s no. Goodbye.’

For all that, she had hit on a point that many before her had missed. Or perhaps they had deliberately overlooked it. The reason behind another person’s misery is usually so uninteresting that it’s invariably pushed aside. People only want to know about the seedy details of an addict’s decline into the underworld, to know just how low someone could fall, smug in the knowledge that it could never be them. Addiction is always somebody else’s problem, somebody else’s destructive weakness. There are those who slip into it without realising and others, like him, who throw themselves in head first, wanting to drown in the bittersweet nirvana it offers.

Seeing that Theo was watching him and waiting for him to speak, he said, ‘I probably wasn’t as polite as I should have been, but I needed to make her understand that I have no intention of doing any more interviews. Besides, you know as well as I do, you live and die by the stuff you’re reported to have said.’

Pouring more wine into his glass, Theo said, ‘Please, Mark, this is me you are talking to. You do not have to justify yourself with simple old Theo. I know better than anyone that you see yourself as an artist and not a performing dog. Perish the thought that anyone would ever confuse the two with you.’

‘Bastard! Now you’re just trying to make me sound pretentious.’

Theo smiled. ‘And with so little effort.’

‘Can I help it that I don’t have anything of great worth to say? If I thought I had some deep emotional philosophy to pass on to mankind, then I’d be the first to pontificate.’

‘But that’s just the point. You do have something worthwhile to say. Your books are full of dire warnings of man’s failings.’

‘Now who’s sounding pretentious?’

 

The next day, and with Albania lost behind early-morning cloud, Theo went for a swim in the sea. Floating on his back he glanced up the hillside and saw Laura staring down at him. He waved and gestured for her to join him. Within minutes she was on the beach and easing herself into the cool, refreshing water.

‘We got your message from Angelos,’ she said, swimming out to him. ‘How was Athens?’

‘Hotter than the devil’s breath, though slightly more fragrant. But only just. I hear from Mark, who has been my ears and eyes in my absence, that you have guests. Does that mean you and Max are too busy to join me for dinner tonight?’

She groaned. ‘By this afternoon I’ll be fit for bed and little else.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Really, Laura, you must stop putting such outrageous thoughts into my head.’

She splashed water at him. ‘I meant that I’ll be too tired for anything other than sleep. We’ve got Max’s parents here, along with Francesca and her friend Sally.’

‘Aha, yes, I recall now. Sally is the girl Max was so keen to see again. Is she behaving herself?’

‘More or less. Two lads arrived on the same plane as they did yesterday — they’re staying in the house over there.’ She pointed in the direction of the faded pink villa further along the bay. ‘I think she and Francesca are waiting to see what they have to offer. If anything.’

There was a pause, but not an insignificant one.

‘And how is Izzy?’

‘She’s very well.’

They swam out towards the raft and climbed up on to it. Keeping his voice as neutral as he could, as he stared up at the soft blue sky, Theo said, ‘Tell me, Laura, has Izzy spoken to you about me?’

Squeezing the water out of her hair, Laura said, ‘Why? Should she have?’

He kept his face turned upwards. ‘I think that just before I went away I might have inadvertently upset her. Did she mention it to you? Only I would hate to be responsible for annoying the sweet girl.’

There was another pause while Laura thought what to say. She had already run into trouble with Izzy over discussing her with Theo and she was reluctant to upset her friend again, but seeing the amount of effort that Theo was putting into his apparently casual interest in Izzy’s welfare, she decided it wouldn’t do any harm for him to be told the truth. Perhaps he was being serious for once.

‘So what you are saying,’ he said, when she had finished, ‘is that I reminded her of this dreadful Alan?’

‘That’s about the height of it. You must have come on too strong with her. But why the concern, Theo? This can’t be the first time you’ve upset a member of the opposite sex. Or is it just that you can’t cope with being turned down?’

Laura’s words were uncomfortably similar to those that Mark had uttered a short while ago and Theo didn’t like the sound of them. Why was it that everyone made such unjust assumptions about him? Would it shock them to know that he, too, had feelings? That he could genuinely feel something for a woman? Mark had accused him of using women to fill a void, which Theo had wanted to refute vigorously at the time, but last week when he was lying in bed with one of his more regular companions — a woman he knew to be actively seeking a ring for her finger — he had pondered on Mark’s theory and had not liked the conclusion he had reached.

Without answering Laura’s question, he touched her shoulder lightly and said, ‘Come, despite the early hour of the day, you are already turning pink in the sun. It’s time to swim back to the beach and return you safely to Max.’

When they reached the shore, Laura said, ‘We’re all off to Paleokastrítsa for the day, but why don’t you join us for a drink tonight? Bring your friend, Mark, if he’ll come. You know how anxious Max is to meet him.’

‘Thank you, that would be nice.
Ti óra?’

Laura smiled, took a moment to think, and counted on her fingers.
‘Enyá i óra.’

‘Bravo! Nine o’clock it is, then. Have fun today in Paleokastritsa. Take care in the sun, though — it is going to be very hot, I fear.’

Theo was right. The day was proving to be one of the hottest of the summer so far, and Paleokastritsa had been awarded a rating of HT4 — Hats, Trainers and four litres of water. ‘A cracking-the-flagstones scorcher of a day,’ Corky had called it, as the sun blazed down on them. However, while Laura was finding that the heat was getting to her, Max’s parents were showing no sign of tiring. They had led the way in hiring a boat to explore the small coves and grottoes; they had swum in water the colour of pure turquoise; they had skipped like mountain goats up the steep path to the monastery; they had rattled off several rolls of film and bought a dozen or so postcards. And now, as Laura lay dozing on the crowded beach in the shade of an umbrella, they were off with Max inspecting the local shops. She turned to Izzy and said, ‘You see what I mean about Corky and Olivia? They’re exhausting, aren’t they?’

‘I think they’re wonderful.’

‘Oh, they’re wonderful, all right, and I love them to pieces. It’s just that I wish I had half their energy. They make me feel so inadequate when they’re around. All I feel good for is a long, long sleep. I should have done what the girls opted to do — stayed at home and relaxed.’

Izzy laughed. ‘I’m not sure that relaxing was entirely what Francesca and Sally had on their minds.’ Sitting on her balcony first thing that morning, she had heard them in the room next to hers discussing their plans for the day. It seemed to involve an awful lot of hard work, namely being as visible as they could manage, yet maintaining an air of distant allure. Izzy hadn’t yet seen the two young men whose presence in the bay warranted such meticulous scheming, but Olivia had mentioned them yesterday afternoon when the girls had come up to the house after their swim and declared them both to be of above-average appearance. ‘Aren’t they the two good-looking boys who were on the plane with us?’ she had asked her granddaughter, as the girls stood staring down on to the beach. ‘It might be nice for you to get to know one another.’ Francesca’s casual, ‘Mm ... were they on the plane with us? I don’t recall,’ had amused Izzy and she had been tempted to tiptoe across the veranda and take a peek at them.

A yawn from Laura prompted her to say, ‘What you need is an early night.’

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Laura. ‘Just as well Theo and Mark are joining us this evening. At least Max’s parents won’t be able to get the cards out and keep us up into the wee small hours.’

‘They’re not into bridge, are they?’ asked Izzy, with a sinking heart. It was one of those games that terrified her. Alan and his parents had played it. They would sit around the little felt-topped card table and stare at one another in deadly combative silence, which in turn made her uptight and nervous and caused her mind to wander from her cards. It had to be the most boring pastime ever invented.

‘Bridge? Good Lord, no,’ said Laura. ‘Canasta’s their game. I’ll warn you now, though, they like nothing more than a convert, and once they’ve roped you in you’ll never be the same again. They’ll fill you up with wine and thrash you senseless. You won’t see your bed before three in the morning. Some of the worst hangovers Max and I have ever had have been inflicted on us by his own parents at one of their curry-and-Canasta evenings.’

Izzy thought it sounded a lot more fun than bridge. She closed her eyes and sank into a happy state of pre-sleep contentment. She listened to what was going on around her on the crowded beach: the crying of a small fractious child; the bickering of a couple with a strong Brummy accent, each blaming the other for having forgotten to pack the camera; the insistent voice of a German, who was reading aloud from his newspaper; and the flirtatious laughter of a group of young Italian girls, who were as stunningly pretty as they were vain.