by Judy Astley
Lesley climbed back onto her lounger with the tea and put the food on the table beside her. The hotel’s ancient, scruffy, white cat sauntered up and sat next to her chair, gazing up at her with its cool blue eyes. ‘OK puss, you can help me out with this little lot. We’ll go sharesies.’ She put a tuna sandwich on the ground and the cat wolfed it down almost in one, not even hesitating over the crusts.
‘You’ll make yourself sick. Slow down,’ she told him, reaching out to stroke his grubby ears. The cat tolerated the attention, but all the time with his eyes keenly focused on the plate, so she gave him the rest of the tuna and the ham. ‘And the egg ones are mine,’ she said. ‘It’s only a bit of protein, isn’t it, cat? It’ll do me good.’ The cat ignored her and started washing his paws. Quite likely, Lesley thought, he heard plump women from all round the world whingeing versions of the same weight issues, week in week out. If he heard anything at all, that is. From some bizarre memory of that sad week back in March, she recalled poor Mrs Benson talking about her husband’s own beloved white cat, and saying that the blue-eyed ones were all stone deaf.
‘I’m starving. Shall we get some tea? Or are we too late?’ Beth asked Ned as the two of them went back to the pool terrace from their room.
Beth felt quite deliciously elated and energized as well as hungry – afternoon passion sessions didn’t often feature in their Surrey life. Perhaps they should, although where the necessary element of spontaneity would come into it she didn’t know. She’d have to make sure it wasn’t a day when the window cleaner was due, when Delilah wasn’t likely to bunk off games and come home early, when she hadn’t got one of Wendy’s weirder experiments bubbling unpredictably on the hob.
‘We could have stayed in the room and had a bottle of fizz sent up. Let’s go back.’ Ned tugged her hand, pulling her towards him. ‘I don’t much want to see anyone else right now.’
‘Too late – Delilah’s waving at us.’
‘Where’ve you two been?’ she called from the jacuzzi. ‘Ugh! You’re looking all loved up.’
‘Ah, look at Ned and Beth, everyone! How sweet!’ Len waved his glass at them. ‘And they say romance is dead.’
Cyn, lying face down on a nearby lounger, raised her head and smiled at Beth. Conspiratorial. The word leapt straight into Beth’s head as she met Cynthia’s cool eye. Ned’s grip tightened on her hand.
‘Listen, I just need to go to the dive shop and talk to Ellis about my regulator. See you later for a drink?’
Beth nodded. ‘No problem. I might go and have a quick splash in the sea. It’ll wake me up.’
Ned hugged her close to him quickly. ‘Love you, don’t forget that.’ And paced off fast towards the dive shop. Cyn sat up on her lounger, and grinned at Beth. ‘You two look very lovey-dovey,’ she said as Beth came to sit on the seat beside her.
‘It’s just the sea air and enforced relaxation.’ Beth yawned. ‘We had a short siesta.’ She felt faintly embarrassed. The expression on Cynthia’s face was a determinedly inquisitive one. Any minute now she half-expected her to blurt out, ‘Had a good shag, did you?’ loudly enough to render everyone in the jacuzzi silent and to have Nick and Delilah disappearing under the water in mortification. No wonder Ned had beaten a canny retreat. She wished she’d gone with him.
‘A siesta?’ Cyn snorted. ‘Is that what you call it?’
A burst of raucous laughter came from the occupants of the jacuzzi.
‘They’re having fun, aren’t they?’ Beth said, in a feeble bid to distract Cynthia. ‘Lovely to see all the young ones getting together. I was worried Delilah might be bored.’
‘Your Nick certainly doesn’t look bored,’ Cyn commented wryly, glancing at the noisy party in the bubbling water.
Beth watched her son. His right arm was draped round Sadie’s shoulder and he was using that hand to pour, very carefully, sparkling wine into Sadie’s glass, a difficult manoeuvre that seemed to require her to giggle a lot as she leaned in very close to him, squashing her breasts against his chest. Nick, trying to steady the bottle so it lined up with the plastic glass, kept spilling wine into the water.
‘He’d have better luck using the other hand,’ Beth commented, hoping he wasn’t stirring up trouble. Mark seemed pretty much oblivious at the moment, chatting amiably to Len about football, but things could easily turn nasty if he was the jealous type.
‘From where I’m sitting he looks as if he’s having all the luck he wants,’ Cynthia said, giving Beth a sly glance. ‘Must run in your family, that.’
9
Rum Punch
One of sour (lime juice)
Two of sweet (sugar syrup)
Three of strong (dark rum)
Four of weak (pineapple juice or water)
On each Tuesday at 6.30 p.m. at the Mango Experience (Sport ’n’ Spa), come rain, wind, thunderbolt or mosquito swarm, the Manager’s Cocktail Party was held. Every guest was invited, by way of a stiff white gold-edged card pushed under their room door, to the pool terrace at dusk for syrup-sweet punch and spicy savouries guzzled down to the sound of an energetic steel band. The event, was, to most, a welcome opportunity to dress up in something smarter than average in order to mingle with fellow guests, along with members of the hotel staff chosen for their sociable savoir faire with clients and an ability to fend off potential complainers. Ned, on the other hand, considered the whole palaver irritatingly anachronistic and entirely pointless.
‘We do our own perfectly good mingling all day – hanging out by the pool and in the bar, getting stuck into the various sports,’ he grumbled to Beth as he came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel and dripping water across the tiled floor. ‘This is just more of the same but in poncier clothes. You stand around feeling daft, trying to balance a drink you don’t like and a plate of deep-fried plantain nibbles, and you end up talking to people you’ve just spent the entire day with.’
‘You said that last year,’ Beth reminded him. ‘And then you met that bloke from Somerset who was in the market for a big white house in Notting Hill. Paid off, didn’t it, that bit of social chit-chat?’
‘OK, in that case I suppose it did,’ he conceded. ‘But I didn’t come all the way here to talk house sales. Nobody in real life actually has cocktail parties any more, do they?’ Ned said, ‘except in hotels like this one. I wonder why they still call it cocktails? It sounds so 1950s. They could just have put “Drinks” on the invitation.’
‘I expect it’s to make people think they’re staying somewhere tremendously elegant, and it’s an excuse for women to wear something over-glittery which didn’t look so OTT at home. Something they’d otherwise only wear if they’re invited to some Masonic event.’
‘And that’s another bloody hangover from bygone days. Bloody Masons – just don’t get me started on those.’
Beth smiled at Ned by way of the mirror where she was doing her make-up. He required no more than quiet humouring in this kind of mood. It wasn’t a bad one, more a state of enjoying a bout of grouching. No question, he was, with middle age, turning into a grumpy old man. It was close to qualifying as a new hobby. The minute they got home he’d start moaning about the mail containing endless invitations to link the electricity bill to Nectar Points, how badly thought-out was the five-year roadworks plan for the M25, and the fact that, due to global warming, the grass would need cutting all through January. By the time he hit pension age he would be one of those growly old buggers who carried a walking stick entirely for the purpose of shoving teenagers out of his way off the pavements and into fast traffic.
On the plus side, just now Ned looked very tanned and fit. Having something good to look at was always a help if you’d got to converse with a fault-finding misery-guts, in Beth’s opinion. The ripples across his stomach even seemed close to that male Holy Grail of a six-pack. He was diving every morning and then something sporty – sailing, volleyball or tennis – in the afternoons. Back home, he ticked over physically on one not particularly strenuous visi
t to the gym per week. It was highly unfair, Beth reflected, that a mere couple of weeks’ holiday activity could make so much difference to a man’s physique, but with women it took months and months of exhausting, constant effort to stop gravity and excess poundage in their inexorable tracks.
‘So do we have to go?’ Ned asked her now, sounding like a child reluctant to go to a birthday party. ‘Why don’t we give it a miss and just grab a drink in the Frangipani bar instead? It’s always the same – shake hands with the management, reassure them that, yes, we’re having an excellent holiday thank you, then drink enough vile sweet punch to put us off dinner.’
‘But what about my over-glittery frock?’ Beth protested. ‘I’ve put it on now. It’s looking forward to its outing. And anyway, there’s Nick and Delilah to consider. Some new younger people might have arrived and it could be a chance for them to meet someone to hang out with.’
‘OK, OK, if it helps get them off our hands. Though why they can’t just go on their own . . .’ Ned pulled on a sky-blue linen shirt. ‘It’s just that it makes me think of cruise ships, all this glad-handing and small talk.’
‘Heavens, you’re so unsociable!’ she laughed. ‘If you’re not out diving, all silent under the sea, you’re away with the fairies in a world of your own. Another time, perhaps we should rent a villa miles from anywhere, then you can be as moody and isolated as you want. Now . . .’ She fluffed out her hair and did a twirl. ‘Do I look all right?’
‘All right? You look gorgeous!’ Ned told her, coming over to her and kissing the side of her neck.
And so I should, Beth thought as she fastened her lilac strappy kitten-heeled shoes. The dress was a silk Matthew Williamson number, blue drifting through purple to hibiscus pink. It might have been from Harvey Nick’s sale but still represented a meteorite-wallop dent in her bank account. She’d bought it back in August, as an ‘I deserve this’ gesture to get the last of the Other Woman Blues out of her head. She looked terrific in it, even according to her own overcritical gaze. The fabric seemed to know exactly which places on her body to cling to and which to drift around in a tactful and sensitive manner. Now all she had to do to live up to it was to forget about why she’d bought it in the first place.
‘Mum?’ Delilah knocked on the door. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course you can.’ Ned opened the door. ‘Oh and don’t you look like a princess!’
‘Dad! Pur-lease, I’m sixteen, not six!’ Delilah slunk into the room wearing a short scarlet skirt slung almost criminally low on her hips and comprising no more than ten inches of a double row of frills, no bigger than would be needed to trim a cushion. On her top half, or rather, Beth calculated, her quarter, she wore a very much cropped-off matching sleeveless vest. It crossed Beth’s mind that the chunky silver necklace and bracelets she was wearing made up about as much in square inches as her skimpy outfit, but the girl did look fabulous. Just so long as she hadn’t got plans to go out on the town, dressed like that.
‘You look lovely darling,’ Beth told her. ‘But aren’t you . . . shouldn’t you . . .’
‘What? Am I what?’ Delilah challenged. ‘Cold? Isn’t that what you usually say when you think I’m showing too much body? Er, like no? It’s about ninety degrees out there?’
‘OK, fine.’ Beth backed away a step, her hands up in surrender. She didn’t want to drag a cloud over the evening. Whatever Delilah was wearing, there’d be others wearing less – Gina for one, she was willing to bet. And they wouldn’t look anything like as good as Delilah. You needed to be under twenty, for your skin to be at its show-off, glowing best, if you planned to reveal that much acreage of it.
‘You look fantastic,’ Beth laughed. ‘There’s just this clucky habit you get when you’re a mum – something to do with keeping your baby chicks safe from preying foxes. You wait till it’s your turn. Come on then, let’s go and grab some of that horrible sticky punch.’
And talking of preying foxes, she thought . . . ‘Where’s Nick? Did you knock on his door on your way, Del?’ she asked.
Delilah slip-slopped out of the door in her wedge-heeled shoes, calling back, ‘I did but he wasn’t there. He’s probably gone on ahead. He played badminton with Sadie after you’d gone for your bath.’
‘What about Mark?’ Beth asked, quickly, hoping her son wasn’t up to no good. ‘Didn’t he feel like joining them?’
‘Oh, Sadie told Nick that Mark didn’t do ball games and that he’d gone off to have a sauna. I think he was a bit . . .’
‘Bit what?’ Beth asked as Delilah’s voice trailed away and she started walking faster, getting well ahead of her parents.
‘A bit what, Delilah? You didn’t finish the sentence!’
‘Nothing!’ Delilah called, now a good ten yards in front of Beth and Ned. ‘Mark’s fine! You’re walking really slowly and it drives me nuts so I’ll see you there!’
Beth watched Delilah disappear round the corner of the Haven spa, towards the pool and the bar terrace. The dark path was lit by festive flares every few feet, brought in for the occasion. The trees were now decorated with swirls of tiny white lights, ready for the Christmas visitors a few weeks away. The festive season was creeping up on them. By the end of the week a Christmas tree would have appeared overnight in the Frangipani restaurant, gold baubles and glittering stars would be hanging from the rafters in the Sundown bar. A pale, skinny cat slunk by, carrying a wriggling rodent in its mouth, and vanished into a clump of hibiscus, and she could hear the steel band strike up a bouncy version of Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’.
‘OK, unto the breach we go,’ Ned muttered as they approached the terrace, which was crowded already with party-dressed women and clean-scrubbed linen-clad men. ‘Looks like a Home Counties cricket club social,’ he added as his last-ditch attempt to persuade Beth into the comparative peace of the Frangipani bar, so handily placed beside the restaurant.
‘Except that in December they wouldn’t be outside under palm trees by the sea and wearing strappy little dresses or have gorgeous gleaming tans,’ she said through gritted teeth, as she approached the outstretched hand of the Mango Manager.
‘Or reek of mosquito repellent,’ he countered in a feeble bid for game, set and match.
Ned caught sight of Cynthia just along the pool terrace by the diving board, chatting to Sam, the dread-locked fitness instructor, and Miriam, the receptionist from the Haven. You could hardly miss Cyn: she was in shocking pink with something beaded and feathery in her loosely piled-up hair. She wasn’t concentrating. Ned could see that she was looking for someone from the way her head darted from side to side and her eyes checked out new arrivals. He more than suspected he was the quarry, but luckily the Mango’s Manager was a very bulky man so Ned attempted, awkwardly, to place himself so that he wasn’t directly in Cyn’s eyeline.
Keeping his head low and feeling like a schoolboy playing at spies, he accepted a cherry-pink drink, lavishly bedecked with fruit, from a tray offered by a waitress, and then exchanged, as he’d predicted, a few words about enjoying the holiday and confirming that yes, he was making the most of the lavish facilities. He even found himself agreeing that they could definitely put him down for the staff versus guests volleyball game, a brutal, no-holds-barred event he’d sworn he’d never take part in again after collecting too many bruises to the ribs from sharp elbows.
‘Hey Ned, Beth, come over and sit with us!’ Bradley was with his sister Angela, who seemed to have bagged a large table and an entire trayful of various savoury nibbles for herself. She was chomping busily and another delicious-looking morsel was in her hand, already on its way to her mouth. ‘Try one of these mini-kebabs,’ she encouraged Beth, ‘they’ll blast your head off.’
‘Thanks, I will in a minute. I was just wondering where our daughter had vanished to.’ Beth peered through the crowd as she sipped her gluey drink. It was pretty strong – she hoped that Delilah, if she’d taken one of these instead of the alternative fruit punch, would decide she didn
’t like it and swap it for something else. There was no immediate sign of her, or of Nick. Nick had probably lain down on his bed for a few minutes and fallen fast asleep. She’d give him a call from the bar phone, as soon as she’d located Delilah. She didn’t want to fuss, but in an outfit that minuscule the girl ought to be kept within parental viewing distance. She didn’t remember it being so tiny when Delilah had worn it in Fuerteventura that summer – another sign of a growth spurt during her illness.
‘Oh you don’t want to worry about your Delilah,’ Angela shouted across the table, even though Beth was only a few feet away. ‘She can take care of herself!’
Oh really? And you know that for sure do you? Beth thought but managed not to say. What an irritating woman.
‘She’s gone down to the beach with my ex,’ Angela went on, waving her glass in the direction of the shore and splashing much of her drink across the table. She didn’t seem to have noticed. ‘Gone to look at the stars, they said. Stars my arse!’
‘Sorry, what are you talking about?’ Ned joined in. ‘Who is Delilah with?’
‘She’s with Michael.’ Angela leaned forward and beckoned him closer, breathing fierce rum fumes at him. ‘Michael is taking care of her. On the beach over there.’ She pointed a fuchsia-pink fingernail, adding, ‘In the dark.’
‘Ned, perhaps I should go and find her.’ Beth started to move away from the table and peered out towards the sea. She wasn’t at all concerned now she knew Delilah was with Michael, but she didn’t want to stay at this table with Angela. The woman was at the mean-and-feisty stage of drunk.
Several people had overflowed from the terrace to the beach. Some were perched on loungers, chatting, some wandering about, drinks in hand, enjoying the sultry warmth. There was a full moon and a clear sky and the stars were well worth a viewing. Whatever Angela had hinted, it was barely even what you’d call dark.