An Almost Perfect Holiday

by Lucy Diamond

  ‘They are. That man is,’ said Seren, pointing. ‘Please?’

  ‘Go on then,’ he’d said with an apologetic glance back at Em. ‘Just for a few minutes.’

  Em managed a gracious smile. ‘Have fun!’ she’d cried to them both as they took their shoes off and plunged in. Of course Izzie and Jack had always had each other as company, she reasoned, and Seren just wanted someone to play with too. Fair enough. No problem! This was all part and parcel of holidaying with kids, she supposed. And if Seren was happy, then so was she.

  Her phone started ringing just then, with Izzie’s name on the screen.

  ‘Hello, love,’ Em said. ‘How’s it going? Are you in Falmouth now?’

  ‘Yeah. But, um . . .’

  Izzie sounded very far away. Was that trepidation in her daughter’s voice? Em hunched over her phone, trying to block out the cacophony around her. ‘What is it? Everything okay?’

  ‘Mum? Something’s happened.’

  ‘What?’ Instantly her blood ran cold. Her heart accelerated straight into fifth. Shit. ‘What’s up? Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s Jack. He . . .’ There was a pause and Em’s imagination rushed helplessly to fill it with all manner of dreadful endings. ‘He’s in a bit of trouble,’ Izzie went on, with a maddening lack of detail. ‘Can you come?’

  So there it was: proof, if anyone needed it, that she was a dreadful mother. An optimistic fool who should have known better. She had sent off her children – and someone else’s daughter too! – to Falmouth by themselves, with a few quid and a bottle of water, and assumed they’d have a lovely time and manage perfectly well. Hadn’t she and her cousins all gone off similarly at that age? Her parents had barely turned a hair at the thought of them cycling around the countryside, and that was before there was any such thing as a mobile phone. And yet if she’d bothered to think about it longer than five seconds that morning, she’d have remembered all the scrapes she’d got into herself as a teenager: dodgy blokes leering at her and Jenny in their shorts and bare legs; straying onto farmland and being threatened by shotgun-wielding farmers; and how her cousin Neil’s habit of setting fire to things, aged fourteen, had almost resulted in a hay-barn inferno. Hardly the stuff of ginger beer and innocence, really, when she foraged a little further past her hazy gilded memories.

  It turned out that not much changed, from teenager to teenager over the decades, either. Because on arrival in Falmouth, having caught a hair-raisingly pricy cab there alone (‘You two stay here! Have fun! I’m sure I won’t be long,’ she had trilled to George, on the verge of hysteria), she discovered exactly what the ‘bit of trouble’ Izzie had referred to, so cagily, actually entailed. For a start, when she tracked them down in a small gift shop, the three teenagers were all chewing minty gum with suspiciously glassy eyes (booze? cannabis? Em speculated, narrowing her own eyes to slits). The second item of note was that there was a large balding, rather angry-looking man standing alongside them, with a meaty hand clamped on Jack’s shoulder.

  ‘This your lad, is it?’ the man said when Em burst breathlessly onto the scene, still shoving her purse back in her bag from paying the cab driver.

  ‘Yes,’ Em said, blinking rapidly as she tried to take in her surroundings. Watercolour seascapes on the walls. Jewellery in glass boxes. Small clay birds on a white shelf. Postcards and prints and cards. And the three kids huddled together, heads down, guilt written all over their faces. ‘It is. What’s happened? What’s he done?’

  ‘It was just a stupid dare, I wasn’t going to nick it,’ Jack protested without preamble, and Em’s heart sank into her sandals.

  ‘Yeah, but you did, mate,’ the man pointed out. ‘You stuffed it in your pocket and left my shop. Without paying. Which, I think you’ll find, definitely counts as “nicking it”.’

  A blonde woman browsing at the rack of postcards turned her head in interest just then, although she turned it straight back again, upon encountering Em’s eyeball-blistering scowl.

  ‘What a stupid thing to do, Jack,’ Em said. ‘Especially in a shop like this, where everything has been hand-made by artists, rather than mass-produced in a factory for some faceless corporation or—’ She broke off, aware this might be the wrong thing to say. ‘Not that it’s okay to steal anywhere, obviously,’ she added in her most severe voice, for the benefit of the shopkeeper, plus the eavesdropping woman, who didn’t seem in any great hurry to move on. ‘Honestly, Jack, I thought I’d brought you up better than this. I’m ashamed. What have you got to say for yourself?’

  ‘She said the thirteenth shop, and this was the thirteenth shop, so I had to—’

  ‘JACK!’ Em said loudly. ‘I didn’t mean in terms of making more excuses. I meant, what do you have to say to the shopkeeper? To this man whose family depends on his shop, whose mortgage probably does as well. How about apologizing and seeing if there’s any way you can make it up? For all we know,’ she added, getting into her stride, ‘he might want to call the police.’ She eyed the shopkeeper anxiously. Please don’t call the police, she begged him, with her best stab at telepathy. You wouldn’t, would you?

  ‘Sorry,’ Jack mumbled.

  He’d tanned during the last month, from all the tennis and cricket he’d been playing, but he seemed to have paled under the shop’s bright lights. He was actually kind of nauseous-looking, now that Em scrutinized him closer. Oh, Christ. He wasn’t about to throw up, was he? What on earth had they been drinking? Thank goodness George wasn’t here to see what reprobates her children were.

  ‘Anything else?’ she prompted sternly, when this turned out to be the extent of his apology. ‘Jack?’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, a little louder this time and with more sincerity. His green eyes were troubled as he raised them to the angry shopkeeper. ‘It was a stupid game – a dare. I shouldn’t have done it.’

  He glanced sideways just a fraction towards Amelia, and something flashed across his face – reproach perhaps or irritation, Em couldn’t tell. Then realization dawned: this whole little drama had been about impressing the girl, she was sure of it. Showing off. Oh, Jack. Trust him to go too far and get caught. Typical!

  ‘Well . . .’ the shopkeeper said, his eyebrows furrowing as he considered his next move, and Em, spotting his hesitation, leapt in.

  ‘Can I buy something lovely from your shop to make up for it?’ she blurted out, on impulse. ‘And have my son promise never to set foot in here again? He really is sorry. We’ve all done daft things as teenagers, right?’

  The item that Jack had pocketed and attempted to steal turned out to be one of the carved stone birds, and for a moment she thought about buying it to leave on their mantelpiece at home, as a reminder to him: crime doesn’t pay. But then the shopkeeper said, ‘Or, of course, if you wanted something a bit special . . .’ before gesturing to a rather beautiful oil painting of the harbour, with a definite hint of threat about his body language.

  Em was not an idiot and sensed very clearly how she was being directed, and so she ended up buying the beautiful oil painting. There was two hundred quid she’d never see again, she thought waspishly, giving Jack a cross look, as the shopkeeper taped bubble-wrap around it for her. Talk about blood money. With a final gritted-teeth apology, she marched the three out into the street, where she dumped the bubble-wrapped picture down by her feet so that she could put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Right,’ she said, eyes like lasers as she gave them all her hardest stare, one after another. So much for happy blended families on holiday, she thought. So much for George getting to know and love her fantastic special children! Thank God she’d had the foresight to leave him safely in the soft-play hellhole while she dealt with this. ‘Let’s hear it then. Exactly what have you three been up to?’

  Chapter Seven

  This was the life, Maggie told herself, albeit with a certain grim determination. Here she was, draped on a sun lounger by a pool, enjoying the gentle plash of water as a light breeze drove ripples
across it. There were birds singing in the trees behind the cottage, the air was warm and soft, and there was a nearby shrub festooned with pink flowers that smelled deliciously of honey. This is what other people longed for on holiday, wasn’t it?: complete rest and relaxation in beautiful surroundings. Nothing whatsoever to do except admire the scenery, pick up a tan and get lost in the pages of a good book. Bliss!

  Except . . . well, she was struggling to feel very blissful, unfortunately. She had sent Amelia off with strict instructions to be careful on the road but still felt compelled to keep checking her watch and phone, wondering where Amelia was now and if she was all right. Instead of settling into her novel, her mind insisted on raking relentlessly over the events of the morning, all those sharp words they’d hurled at one another. Also, she felt horribly public, sitting there on her own, as if showing to the world that no, she didn’t have anyone to spend time with right now. No, even her own daughter didn’t want to be with her! Who would? It was the fortune-cookie moment all over again.

  Her thoughts turned with dismal predictability to a scene from several weeks earlier, a scene that kept coming back to jab her whenever she was feeling inadequate. It had been her brother Ross’s birthday and Helena, his wife, had organized a celebratory family dinner at their Berkshire home: a catered Chinese buffet served in the wood-panelled dining room.

  ‘Fortune cookies!’ Helena cried at the end of the meal, holding up a plate as if it was some kind of oracle. Maggie didn’t have any truck with that sort of nonsense – a load of superstitious rubbish, she thought privately – but gamely took a cookie when the plate came her way. When they broke them open, it seemed as if everyone else had rather oblique fortunes: You will find light amidst darkness was Amelia’s, for instance, which could have meant anything (‘Turn your bedroom lamp on tonight,’ Maggie joked at the time); and Helena’s said Life moves like a serpent, which she seemed to be interpreting in a smutty way (‘Hear that, Ross? Snakehips are go!’)

  Then someone said, ‘Go on then, Maggie, what’s yours?’

  Maggie opened the piece of paper and read aloud, ‘True passion awaits’, only to be greeted by a gale of laughter. Honestly – a gale. ‘Yeah, right!’ Helena had shrieked. ‘Well, they got that wrong, didn’t they? Ha-ha!’

  ‘True passion – brilliant,’ Ross had chuckled, as if it was the most hilariously unlikely thing he’d ever heard.

  Maggie had turned hot all over and she’d crumpled the paper in her fist. Was that how everyone saw her – as a passionless old spinster? A dried-up old stick? Was that how Amelia saw her too? she wondered miserably now, gazing out at her perfect surroundings and feeling nothing but dismay. Poor old Maggie, the laughing stock of the family. No wonder Amelia had been so keen to escape with some new mates.

  A bird was flying high overhead, gliding on a thermal; she watched it soar away into the blue. The night of the fortune-cookie debacle she had felt so alone in the world. Her mum, at least, seemed to have noticed her humiliation and spoke to her about it later on, as the two of them stacked the dishwasher (Maggie and her mum always seemed to end up doing this in Ross’s house, as if they were the natural skivvies of the pecking order). ‘Come on, they were only having a bit of a fun, don’t take it so personally,’ she soothed.

  Maggie had felt like a small child again, needing comfort from a sympathetic parent after having been teased. She was an adult, she should be able to let these things glide off her, but they always snagged on her prickles. Besides, it hurt to have been laughed at like that. ‘Is it so outlandish, though, that I might fall in love?’ she asked quietly. ‘Am I such a figure of ridicule that it’s an impossible thought?’

  ‘No! Of course not. They were only joking,’ her mum said, scraping slithery chow-mein noodles into the compost bin. ‘Everyone’s been teasing Ross all night about his so-called advanced age, haven’t they, but he laughs along with it. Water off a duck’s back!’

  Maggie said nothing. She didn’t seem to have been born with that duck’s-back gene. But nobody liked a sulker, so she said, ‘I know’ and tried to think of a way to change the subject. Her mum beat her to it, though.

  ‘Although if it’s passion you’re after, you should head out to Zennor while you’re in Cornwall,’ she went on. ‘You know it’s where your dad proposed to me, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ Maggie slotted cutlery into the plastic holder, grimacing as a stray piece of beansprout landed on her hand. It wasn’t passion she was after, and her mum knew that full well. ‘Tell me the story,’ she added. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh! Well, we were down there as a group – there must have been fifteen or sixteen of us. We had our bikes and tents, we were there for a fortnight.’ There was a faraway smile on her mum’s face and Maggie felt a pang inside. Her dad had died ten years ago and they both still missed him hugely. ‘Your father and I, we had been dating for a few months by then and we were very much in love.’ She clapped a hand to her heart and sighed. ‘I can see him now, all young and handsome, freewheeling down the hills on his bike as if he were king of the land.’

  Maggie tried to smile, but she felt a twist of pain at the same time. Her dad had loved being out on a bike, but had been a reckless, over-confident cyclist who thought cycling helmets and reflective clothing were for sissies. Who knew if such things would have saved him when he was clipped by the van driver at fifty miles per hour, but his head injuries had been so catastrophic that he had died before the ambulance even reached the hospital. ‘At least he went doing something he loved,’ people had said, imagining these words to be comforting, as if it was all right for a fit and healthy man to die suddenly because he was too macho to slow down and act responsibly, too vain to put a protective helmet on his head.

  ‘Go on,’ she said to her mum after a moment, stacking tumblers upside down on the top shelf of the dishwasher.

  ‘We went to Zennor for the day, just the two of us, and heard the legend about the mermaid – such a romantic story – you know, how a local man was entranced by the unearthly singing of a mysterious young woman who appeared every week in the church, and how they fell in love and disappeared, presumably to live in the sea together . . .’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Maggie, whose idea of happy-ever-after did not involve a watery grave.

  ‘Anyway, there’s a chair carved with a mermaid design in the church there – hundreds of years old, it is, and we went to see it. Perhaps your dad was caught up in the romance of the story, because that was where he asked me to marry him. Down on one knee and everything, once we were outside – he made a right spectacle of himself.’ Her mum straightened up, her face soft. She’d always enjoyed scolding her husband for one misdemeanour or another. No doubt at the moment of proposal she’d said, ‘Get off your knee, you daft chump, you’ll get grass stains!’ as if that was the most important consideration.

  ‘Maybe you could visit while you’re down there, anyway,’ she went on, folding a tea-towel. ‘Take some photographs of the place for me, so that I can see it again.’

  ‘I’m sure there are pictures online,’ Maggie said, posting a dishwasher tablet into its compartment and setting the machine running. ‘Do you want me to look on my phone for you?’

  ‘You could pay your respects while you were there,’ her mum went on, as if she hadn’t heard Maggie. ‘I’d go myself, but with my hip, I’m not so mobile these days. Go on, I would really appreciate it. And you never know, you might be overcome by romance and passion yourself.’ She’d nudged Maggie, who promptly scowled. ‘Just like that fortune cookie said, eh?’

  ‘What, prompted by an old chair?’ Maggie scoffed. Romance and passion had not been on her agenda since Will had walked out on her fourteen years earlier, but she allowed her mother’s remark to pass without further comment nevertheless. That said, she rather liked the thought of her young, handsome father dropping impulsively to one knee and proposing, to hell with any grass stains, so she elbowed her natural scepticism aside for once. ‘I’ll see what I c
an do,’ she promised.

  Lorna was leafing through her scrapbook. Is that you? It’s me, Aidan said in her head as she turned the pages. There he was, in a newspaper clipping, aged eleven as he collected his chess trophy from the south-west finals, looking up through those long dark lashes of his with a shy smile.

  There he was, suited and booted with Roy, in a photo from his baby cousin’s christening. Sixteen he must have been there, but already taller than Roy by a good inch. How he’d loved that! How he’d milked it too, resting an elbow on Roy’s shoulder with a big grin, as if he wasn’t the young whippersnapper!

  There he was as a baby, with such round chubby cheeks you couldn’t help but chuck them between your thumb and forefinger. Those bonny black curls too. Had there been a more beautiful baby?

  And there was the last Mother’s Day card he’d sent her, with ‘Love you, Mum’ written inside; a splodgy painting brought home from his infant class; the school report he’d had aged fifteen, where one of the teachers had written, If Aidan Brearley doesn’t become a very successful engineer or physicist in years to come, I will eat my hat!

  It always gave her a lump in her throat, that line. She turned the page quickly.

  When Lorna reached the first page with an empty space, she glued in the piece of paper where she’d written down the memory that had occurred to her that morning. Every little detail concerning Aidan that floated into her head, however trivial or inconsequential, she tried to jot down and stick in the book, along with all the other pictures and memorabilia. Just so that she had as much of him as it was possible to have. Just to try and keep him from drifting away from her altogether.

  I remembered the party he and his friends had after their GCSEs, at Jason Fisher’s house. How they’d started playing football with a melon in Jason’s garden, and after a few kicks it had ended up splattered all over the roses. Mr and Mrs F were so cross they banned Jason from having friends round – and melons in the house! – for the whole summer.