An Almost Perfect Holiday

by Lucy Diamond

  Now then – she had the beds to finish stripping, and afterwards she would head over to Briar and Parr, and hope that nobody else cancelled on her. As long as she kept busy she would survive the next few days. ‘Come on, Lorna,’ she said to herself, striding back upstairs. ‘You’ve got work to do.’

  Two hundred and fifty or so miles east, Maggie Laine was in her living room, ticking items off a neatly written list. Geological hand-lenses and maps, her wildflower guide, the books that Paul had lent her, one about Cornish tin mines, another about Arthurian legends: all packed. Binoculars. Waterproofs. Notepad. Backgammon set. Marmite. Underwear. Jumpers . . .

  Amelia walked in just then and threw herself on the sofa with a loud groan, joggling Maggie’s hand and sending the pen shooting over the list. ‘Careful,’ Maggie scolded, but her daughter was busily scooping her long dark hair over the arm of the sofa so that it fell like a shiny waterfall towards the carpet and took no notice. Amelia was fourteen and had recently started communicating with all kinds of new melodramatic noises: exasperated sighs, moans of complaint, deep huffs of frustration. As a secondary-school teacher, Maggie recognized these sounds from the classroom, from other people’s teenagers, but it was still kind of unsettling to have your own child making them at you. Your own child who, until a few months ago, had always seemed pleased to see you and wanted nothing more than to spend time with you and share all your hobbies. ‘Thick as thieves, the pair of you,’ her own mum had often commented, seeing them both with their heads bent over a map, or poring over some rock samples Maggie had brought home from school.

  But that had all changed when Tara appeared on the scene.

  ‘All ready to go?’ Maggie asked now, trying to block Tara from her head. They were heading off on holiday after all, away from the wretched girl, and she wasn’t willing to give her any mental space whatsoever for the next fortnight.

  Amelia lifted a shoulder, which might have signalled yes or no, Maggie wasn’t sure.

  ‘You’ve shut your window, haven’t you?’ she added, going over to the television and switching off the power at the wall. ‘Packed your toothbrush? Knickers?’

  ‘Mum!’ groaned Amelia. ‘I’m not five years old. I do know how to put a few things in a suitcase. Christ on a bike!’

  Maggie stiffened. ‘Can you not say that, please.’

  ‘Why? You’re not religious. What do you care?’ Amelia retorted.

  ‘Other people are religious, though. Like Grandma. Think how—’

  ‘She’s not here, though, is she? Hey, Grandma, are you there?’ Amelia pretended to listen, one hand curved around her ear. ‘Nope. We’re okay. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!’

  Maggie ignored the sarcasm. ‘Have you packed plenty of warm tops?’ she asked, trying to keep her tone even. ‘Pyjamas? I’m not sure how cold it’s going to get there at night.’ She’d packed some thermal socks herself, just in case the nights proved nippy. It was wise, in her experience, not to gamble on other people’s ideas of comfort, especially when it came to insulation and a proper tog duvet. Maggie always felt the cold, particularly in her feet. Her ex, Will, had often complained that it was like sleeping with a couple of ice-blocks in the bed. (‘Better cold feet than a cold heart,’ Maggie should have said to him. If only she’d thought of it before he’d gone and walked out.)

  ‘I’m sure they’ll have blankets there. Not to mention brick walls,’ Amelia replied. ‘If we’re really lucky, a roof too.’

  Maggie pressed her lips together, trying not to show how much she disliked her daughter’s smart-alec remarks. This is just normal teenage behaviour, she told herself. This is just boundary-testing and button-pushing. All the same, she was surprised how much it hurt each time. How their tight little partnership of two seemed to be encountering unprecedented stress-points. ‘Here’s hoping,’ she said, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘Although there’s something to be said for sleeping under the stars. Remember that time we stayed on the dig in France, and it was so hot that everyone slept in hammocks outside?’

  ‘Yeah, and there were loads of gross bugs and weird noises – it was horrible,’ Amelia said, seeming to disregard the fact that, going home from this particular trip, she had told Maggie, shiny-eyed, that it had been her best holiday ever.

  Maggie decided not to remind her of that now. Amelia was apparently so set on forging this cool new image for herself that she would rather rewrite any parts of her history that might be viewed by others as dorky or strange. And so archaeology was now ‘really boring’. Historical ruins were ‘totally lame’. Geological investigations were for weirdos. Instead, thanks to the influence of wretched Tara Webster and the rest of her gang, Amelia was now mostly interested in applying flicky eyeliner and clumpy mascara, the latest banal YouTuber and obsessed with social media.

  But Maggie was not thinking about Tara Webster, she reminded herself. ‘Let’s get going anyway, before the Friday traffic becomes too heinous,’ she said instead. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Suppose so,’ grunted Amelia with all the reluctance of someone facing several hours of root-canal work at the dentist. She forced herself off the sofa and upright, a weary If I have to expression on her face.

  ‘Great,’ said Maggie, feeling her voice becoming tighter with each word, in her desperation to remain cheerful. ‘In that case, the holiday starts here!’

  Amelia had been a sickly little thing as a baby: sallow and small, suffering terribly from eczema until she was five, when Maggie had finally discovered the precise combination of washing-powder brand, medication and non-dairy products that seemed to help. Those early years now felt like a blur of despair and exhaustion: all the dreadful nights they’d shared weeping together, Amelia’s sheets covered in specks of blood where she’d been unable to stop scratching, however much emollient cream Maggie slathered on her, however many scratch-mitts and soothing baths they tried. It had bonded them, though, such horror, forging a deep primal alliance between the two of them, partners in combat. When Will had walked out seven months after Amelia’s birth, claiming he couldn’t cope, the bond between mother and daughter only strengthened.

  Maggie had never forgiven Will for leaving them in their darkest hour. She despised him for caring so little about their child that he could leave like that, with barely any contact over the ensuing years. He was a photographer, footloose and fancy-free, and she would occasionally see his work pop up in glossy magazines, immediately feeling a rush of anger at the sight of his name. For years she had been unable to help comparing whatever exciting thing Will might be doing at any given moment with her own humdrum life.

  He is crouching in a warzone right now, she would think dully, with heavy gunfire shattering the air around him, seeing men die through a camera lens. I, meanwhile, am raking the nit comb through our daughter’s hair and examining the white teeth for telltale dark specks.

  He is having lunch in an expensive hushed hotel with a magazine editor who wants to commission a reportage special. Over in suburbia, however, I am cajoling our toddler to eat peas and sweetcorn.

  His world was big, bristling with danger around each corner, boundless in its scope and urgency. Hers was as small as a held hand, a pinecone on the ground, a storybook pored over on a lap.

  Not that Maggie begrudged her daughter their shared domestic world at all. Not for a moment. She had tried to shower Amelia with so much love and attention that there simply wasn’t space for her to feel as if she’d missed out by having an absent dad. Maggie had retrained from geologist to geography teacher, so that she could be around for every school holiday. She’d turned down countless invitations to book clubs, parties, dinner, drinks – most evening things, in fact, because she would rather spend time with her wonderful, sparky girl.

  And for fourteen years Amelia had gazed lovingly back at her with those faithful dark eyes and been glad of her mother’s company. They’d moulded a comfortable life together, full of rituals and favourite things and in-jokes. Series they binge-watched together. Rec
ipes they both enjoyed making. It had been delightful for Maggie – enriching and plentiful. Yet all of a sudden their relationship was no longer enough for Amelia, it seemed. Worse, it had apparently become an embarrassment.

  The trouble with you, Maggie, Will had said to her once – and truly, was there any way in which this sentence didn’t end badly? – is that you’re too bloody intense. You’re needy. You consume people with your need. And I can’t live like this.

  Maggie had never been able to forget those damning words. They had buzzed and circled around in her head like wasps in a jar. She knew she shouldn’t take anything to heart from Will, of all people, Mr Terrified of Commitment, but all the same, the sentiment smarted. He made her sound as if she was some monstrous parasite, leeching off her loved ones. When she’d only ever tried to do her best!

  She glanced across at Amelia, her adored girl, slumped in the passenger seat beside her, earphones unsociably attached. It was her worst fear that one day her daughter would reject her in the same way that Will had. The trouble with you, Mum – oh God, she couldn’t even bear to imagine the rest of the sentence. It would kill her. It would break her heart clean through.

  She must have let out an involuntary moan at the thought because Amelia turned, yanking out an earbud, and gave her mother a suspicious sideways look. ‘You all right?’ she asked grudgingly.

  Maggie blinked away her doom-laden thoughts and smiled brightly. ‘Absolutely fine,’ she said, starting the engine and carefully pulling out of her parking space. Tara might have taken Amelia by the hand lately and led her down a terrible new path of alcopops, short skirts and sarcasm, but Maggie was determined to win her back over the next two weeks, or at least die trying. The bond between them would be repaired, made good as new. ‘Cornwall here we come!’ she cried, with all the valour of King Arthur himself.

  Chapter Three

  There was something about going on holiday, Em thought, unpacking provisions in Briar Cottage’s kitchen, that allowed you to reinvent yourself, just for two weeks at a time. You could snip yourself out of your usual real-life frieze like a paper doll and position yourself in new, exotic surroundings. With a bit of luck you might even become a new, exotic person in the process. It was a beguiling thought.

  Not that all of her holidays in the past had been exotic occasions, obviously. Her childhood holidays had been a succession of damp and drizzly campsites, all welly boots, tinned meatballs and petty squabbles. She could picture her mum now, wearing two jumpers and an anorak on the beach, pouring coffee from a Thermos flask with a rigid jaw as the clouds huddled threateningly in the sky. The gritty texture of sand at the bottom of a sleeping bag. Vanilla ice-cream dribbling stickily down a cone onto her fingers.

  The holidays she’d spent as a teenager were best forgotten, frankly, especially the summer they’d camped at the Gower when she was fifteen. The tent had leaked and she’d had back-to-back arguments with her parents, including one particularly explosive row over the wearing (or the non-wearing, rather) of her hated orange cagoule in a freezing downpour. ‘I’d sooner catch pneumonia and die’ had been her passionate, if grandiose declaration. ‘At least that would give us all a break from having to listen to you shouting,’ her dad had replied mildly. As for the trouble she and Jenny got into the next morning, having sneaked off to the campsite bar with some boys they’d met and ending up violently sick, her ears rang even now to recall the thunderous recriminations. She’d never been able to stomach cider and black since.

  Holidays with mates had been more fun at least: easy-going, sun-drenched weeks in cheap European resorts where flirting with the sloe-eyed waiters became an art form. Pounding nightclubs, tiny dresses, shots of ouzo thrown back with abandon, and the worst sunburn of her life, thanks to falling asleep on the beach hungover at midday, once and once only. Ah, to be young and stupid. Those were the days.

  Sexy, romantic holidays with Dom had followed in her late twenties, back when he was still Dom the Bomb rather than Dom the shitty ex-husband. Holidays where she’d packed seven bikinis, a few strappy dresses and scented body lotion. Very little else. Dreamy nights beneath a rotating ceiling fan, rubbing after-sun into each other’s tanned bodies. Not that she’d want to do such things with Dom now, mind, especially with the paunch he’d developed in recent years, but at the time it had felt like paradise.

  Hard on the heels of the romantic holidays and then the honeymoon had come the summer breaks with their young children, when there was no longer anything remotely holidayish or relaxing about the experience. In fact those weeks away turned out to mean exactly the same old exhaustion and drudgery in a different place, where the babies wouldn’t sleep and developed prickly heat and they were all packed into a one-bedroom apartment, and it was hell. Then, once Izzie and Jack had grown up into small, toddling wrecking-machines, she would spend the entire time away worrying that they were going to topple off a balcony or plunge head-first into the nearest pool, if she took her eyes off them for a second. Over the years she had assembled an impressive line of foreign phrases, namely ‘My child is drowning!’, ‘I need a doctor!’ and ‘Help!’ in various languages, ready to scream the appropriate words at any given moment.

  It was always such a relief to come home after these ‘holidays’, even if she did then find herself yearning, quite ferociously, for a week on her own in a hotel somewhere to recover, with room service, silence and a well-stocked minibar.

  Still, if she’d thought those years were tough, then the first summer as a single mum had been the worst yet. Izzie was eleven and Jack ten, and Em had been so determined to give them a brilliant time and show the world she could manage just fine without Dom that the three of them had gone to Florida for the so-called holiday of a lifetime. Yes, so the photos might show the kids beaming with Bart Simpson and Goofy, and dive-bombing each other in a turquoise pool, but they sure as hell didn’t show Em accidentally rear-ending the hire car and bursting into tears, or Izzie picking up a vomiting bug on the second day, or Jack getting stung by a wasp and having an allergic reaction that had seen them racing for the nearest hospital in a heart-pounding adrenalin dash. She had returned to the UK a complete wreck beneath her mahogany tan; jet-lagged, skint and vowing ‘never a-bloody-gain’.

  Forget all that, though. This year’s holiday was going to be great. Without the day-to-day hassles of work, school and domestic chores grinding her down, she would be a new Em, albeit one in several different variations. She’d be the easy-going, non-nagging mum for Izzie and Jack. She’d be the fun-loving girlfriend without a care in the world for George. For Seren, she’d be kind and considerate and infinitely patient. For Charlotte, she’d be the gracious hostess, relaxed and at home in her beautiful surroundings. Ha! See, maybe this would be okay after all. In fact, in many ways it was probably better for Charlotte to see her here in the gorgeous cottage, rather than in her scruffy, messy Cheltenham home, which almost always had somebody’s sports socks or work tights drying on a radiator, and rude messages chalked up on the kitchen blackboard.

  ‘They’re here,’ Jack called just then, from where he was perched on the windowsill of the living room.

  Em had had to contend with various scathing complaints from the teens about Briar Cottage’s dodgy Wi-Fi and the even worse phone signal since they had arrived twenty minutes ago, but apparently her son had now discovered the best place in the house in which to keep up with his social life, which was a relief to everyone. What was more, the spot seemed to double as a lookout post.

  ‘Hooray,’ she replied, unloading her last carrier bag in the kitchen. You never knew, with these holiday cottages, if they were going to welcome you with a bottle of wine in the fridge and assorted tasty goodies, or if they would be the stingy type of place that didn’t so much as leave you a single toilet roll. She well remembered the horror of having slogged all the way up to the Lake District one summer to a house in the middle of nowhere, to be greeted in the latter way, and had almost burst into tears at the realizat
ion she’d have to get back into the hot sweatbox of a car once more, before being able to make herself a much-needed cup of tea with milk.

  Since then she’d always travelled as if preparing for siege conditions, squeezing bags of bread, fruit and tinned beans into the boot of the car, packing toilet rolls and pasta packets around the children as if rearranging Tetris pieces. Wouldn’t you know it, this was the more generous kind of holiday cottage, and she had been gratified to discover paper bags containing a loaf of fresh bread and some sultana scones awaiting them on the table, along with milk, butter, eggs, jam and a decent-looking Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge. There, see! she’d thought, with a slightly pathetic stab of triumph. She might have been drunk when she’d booked this holiday, but her instincts had guided her to a good place at least.

  And it did, on first appearances, seem very nice there. The three stone-built barn conversions must once have formed the edges of a stable yard, she guessed, but were now set up as a trio of holiday homes around a swimming pool, which also boasted a small lawned area with deckchairs and sun loungers arranged in clusters. There was a fourth, smaller building set further back from the pool, which housed the games room, according to Izzie’s investigations, alongside a communal barbecue area. To the left of their cottage stretched rounded green hills, and if you peered out of the bedrooms at the front, you could just about see a sliver of petrol-blue sea down below.

  Inside, the cottage was clean and tasteful: big stone hearths and beamed ceilings, neutral paint shades with bright pops of colour here and there. Huge beds and monsoon showers awaited them upstairs, with deep soft sofas and shelves of paperbacks down in the living area. ‘The girl done good,’ she had thought to herself with a smile, heaving her suitcase up to the master bedroom, where she stood for a few moments to admire the cherrywood fitted wardrobes, the spotless white bed-linen and the vintage washstand in the en-suite. Just the place, she’d thought, flopping backwards on the bed, for a romantic getaway for two. Plus their three assorted children, of course. She found herself casting a wary eye over the bed, hoping that Seren wouldn’t end up squeezed in between her and George too many times.