Excess Baggage

by Judy Astley

  ‘I don’t much care, to tell you the truth. Though Cathy and Paul are really rather sweet,’ she conceded. ‘I just think it will do Mark good. I intend to make him come along to watch. He needs a bloody good reminder about what those vows were.’

  ‘Ah. A wasp in paradise,’ Lucy said.

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ Theresa rounded on her. ‘Has he said something to you?’

  Lucy hesitated but quickly made her choice. ‘No, nothing at all,’ she said. ‘But talking of things being said, what was all that last night? Now I’ve had time to think about it, you were making out I was some kind of serial man-killer, working my way through the population of south-west London. I don’t do that. Actually, you were a complete bitch. I want to know why.’

  Theresa sighed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you were right, perhaps I am a bit envious of you. You’ve got Colette and you’ve got your freedom. You might not have someone to curl up with on a cold night, but then you haven’t got someone to hurt you either.’

  ‘No? Well, after last night I reckon I’ve got you for that.’

  Theresa covered her face with her hands and began to cry. ‘Lucy, I’m so sorry.’ Lucy put her arms round her, which felt very strange. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d hugged her sister – probably in the hospital after the birth of Sebastian, though even then Theresa had backed off with a brief bit of two-sided air-kissing.

  ‘It’s just that you’ve got away with it all your life,’ Theresa wept. ‘I do all the things I’m supposed to and Mum and Dad think Mark’s so bloody perfect and that I’m so lucky to have him!’ She was dripping tears on Lucy’s shoulder. ‘Why do they never say he’s lucky to have me?’

  Lucy laughed. ‘If I knew the answer to that one …’ she began. ‘Theresa, you surely can’t have missed the way Mum’s forever on at me to find a nice man and be transformed into the perfect woman, just like you. I’ve had more digs than Alan Titchmarsh’s garden.’

  Theresa raised her tear-streaked face ‘Hell, she’s got no idea, has she?’

  ‘No,’ Lucy agreed. ‘But we’re grown-ups. Let it pass.’

  The morning turned into a mammoth session of clearing up. Simon and the Steves found their natural levels as team leaders, organizing groups of guests into the clearing of branches, the sweeping of glass and rainwater from rooms and the refilling of 100 cisterns with sea water. There were a lot of remarks about the gritty British and why weren’t the Americans joining in.

  The manager called a meeting for all the guests after a scratch lunch of grilled chicken and last night’s fried-up potatoes, and before anything else was said, the Star woman raised her hand and demanded, ‘Who do I sue?’

  From the assembled guests there was a chorus of jeers and groans. ‘Bloody typical American,’ was muttered by almost every Briton.

  ‘What do you want to sue for? Have all the safety measures deprived you of a nasty death?’ Mark called across the room. There was a round of applause and one of the Steves called to her, ‘I expect we could still arrange something for you …’

  Still in shock at the hurricane’s effects on his buildings and business, the manager announced that the hotel was too badly damaged to continue functioning properly and would be closed as soon as possible. Guests who were due to stay longer than two more days would be transferred to Antigua, to continue their holiday at another hotel.

  ‘If we can get the accommodation,’ the manager said, ‘and when the airport is opened again. Just now the damage there is being attended to as a matter of priority. But right now, most roads are blocked by fallen trees, wrecked vehicles and fallen power cables.’

  Lucy felt a wave of sadness for the island’s losses. Farm animals had died in their fields, killed by flood water or hit by trees and debris. Homes had been devastated, one hamlet north of Teignmouth had been completely flattened and the occupants had spent the night sheltering in terror in a banana plantation.

  ‘We got off lightly, really,’ she said to Shirley as they returned to clearing-up duties.

  ‘It’ll soon get back to normal,’ Shirley said. ‘Things do. They did in the war, they do in weather.’

  ‘And what about us?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Us? Well tomorrow evening we catch the plane home and then we get back to normal. What else is there?’

  Late in the afternoon there were still no telephones working. Lucy was mildly worried about Henry: she knew that if he possibly could he’d want to come down to the beach to check on the damage to the dive shop. She wished there was some way she could contact him, tell him it wasn’t so bad. The fact that he hadn’t arrived by four o’clock had to mean that he simply couldn’t get there. She sent in a request to all the immortal powers for the reason to be merely road damage, not home-and-family damage. She pictured him in his sea-green kitchen, laughing with Oliver as they cooked up rice and prawns together, and she hoped that the roof, which had looked sturdy enough, hadn’t let in rain to destroy the colours, to dull them and spoil their brilliance. She thought of Glenda’s paintings and tried hard not to let her imagination picture them smashed among broken glass, in a room swamped with leaf-stained rain water.

  Gradually, as the rain drifted away and the hot sun shone down on the soft fresh new sand, the hotel’s guests gravitated back to the beach.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Simon commented, ‘how little it really takes to keep a Brit happy on holiday.’ Sunloungers had been trawled out of the devastated swimming pool and regrouped to dry out on the sand. The sad skeletal frames of the bald beach umbrellas were draped with wet towels to provide shade, and those whose books had survived on the drier side of sodden were settling themselves once more to laze away the rest of their bizarre holiday. The mysterious Celebrity did not send any minders out to plunder the best spaces on the beach but kept to him or herself in whatever was left of their own villa. As Theresa had predicted, the water there had been swiftly reconnected and, with Perry and Lucy wielding brooms, their own rooms were reasonably habitable again. Plum and Shirley and the gold lady walked along the sand, picking up fallen leaves and bits of branch and strange tangles of twine washed up from the sea and stuffed it into bin bags. ‘They look like council litter-pickers,’ Perry said to Lucy, but he was smiling at the time and she could detect a certain amount of pride in his voice.

  Amazingly, the hotel’s chef had managed to come up with a birthday cake for Becky. It was a wonderfully gaudy one, with white icing topped with swirls of turquoise and orange. The family assembled on the terrace above the pool and Plum hugged the chef in amazed and close to tearful gratitude that he could have remembered to make this cake when he was up against the sheer logistics of feeding a hotel’s-worth of people three times a day with food stocks running low and half the kitchen flooded out.

  ‘It was no problem,’ he told her, ‘I made it yesterday and kept it in the cold oven overnight for safety! You can’t disappoint a girl on her birthday.’

  The gold lady and Tom joined them for tea and cake, along with two of the Steves, Cathy and Paul, the hotel’s severely stressed manager (fraught from a day of dealing with difficult guests, each one convinced they were the ones entitled to priority when it came to any available flight out) and several of the staff. Lucy took a last look around for Henry. There was no sign of him. She shouldn’t even have hoped for him to turn up. He must have a million more important things to do.

  ‘Happy birthday to you …’ they all started to sing. Lucy gave up hoping to see Henry and joined in. Becky blew out all her candles in one and a voice behind Lucy shouted, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

  Henry was right there. Just as she turned she felt his hand on hers.

  ‘Are you all OK?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re all OK. Are you and Oliver and Glenda OK?’

  ‘They are. So that’s all of us. Hey! We’re OK!’ He put his arms round her and crushed her against him. Over his shoulder she caught sight of her mother. Shirley was smiling across at them, looking, surely no
t … looking happy. Approving, even. Could one night really make such a difference?

  Sixteen

  IT WAS THE last day of the holiday. There still wasn’t any news about whether the airport was functioning, and Simon was fretting because he couldn’t plan the timings for leaving the hotel later that afternoon. It was important, he felt, to be able to give each of them a different time for congregating in the lobby, cases packed, passports and tickets at the ready, according to their accustomed reputations for tardiness. For Becky and Luke, who would go wandering off somewhere unless closely watched and constantly reminded, he would allow an extra half-hour, possibly a whole hour to be on the safe side. For Theresa he’d have to allow the same, not because her punctuality was suspect but because she had the complication of small children who would all need to go to the loo at the last minute. His parents would be there on the dot of whatever time he gave them with no fuss but as for Lucy, well, Lucy didn’t show any signs of going anywhere at the moment.

  ‘What do you think?’ he’d asked her after breakfast. ‘Do you think we’ll get away today? There’ll probably be a delay of course, but if we get to the airport good and early …’

  ‘Oh Simon, who cares?’ she’d interrupted, grinning in a peculiarly vague and absent way, almost as if she’d, well, as if she’d taken something. She wouldn’t do that, he was pretty sure. There must be something odd going on inside her head.

  ‘Why worry about everything, Simon?’ Plum said as they went to have a final hour or two of toasting themselves on the beach before the crazy wedding that seemed to be going ahead just before lunch. ‘We’ll hear soon enough about the airport. There’ll be a notice up. But anyway, even if it isn’t open, how much can it matter whether we’re a day or two late home or not?’

  ‘You sound like Lucy,’ he grumbled, ‘all laid-back and don’t-care. It’s all right for her, I’ve got patients booked in and a reputation to think of.’

  ‘I think she’s got work to go back to as well, actually. You don’t have the monopoly on professional integrity. And I’ve got classes to run and students to deal with too.’

  Plum’s words sounded like a thorough telling-off. Simon felt rather comforted by this. At least she still cared enough to put him back in his place now and then. He wouldn’t say it reminded him (fondly) of his mother, because he didn’t want to have to consider the psychological ramifications of that, but the evidence of continuing nurture from his wife made him feel that at least, as a couple, they hadn’t yet sunk into mutual apathy. Sharp words could go too far though, he also thought, as with Mark and Theresa. He couldn’t actually recall, during the entire fortnight, a single moment when those two had looked or sounded like a properly devoted couple. There was a tense undercurrent there. Nothing he could put his finger on, but when Theresa called Mark ‘darling’ the teeth-gritting insincerity chilled the blood. If he was a betting man he’d put odds on those two separating within six months. It made him quite sad. It had been so hard for them to get those lovely children. He wouldn’t point that out if and when the time came. He’d leave it to his mother – it would come so much better from her, and come it surely would.

  Becky didn’t expect to see Ethan again. Nor did she want to. In spite of the mild humiliation of having to return home still as virginal as when she’d left Gatwick (and at seventeen now, too, double horror) she’d rather not have to look into his leery eyes again. She assumed that after the storm he’d have clearing up of his own to do, wherever it was he lived. He surely wouldn’t think the hotel’s guests would be interested in purchasing souvenir knick-knacks on the beach as if there was nothing in the world to think about but making sure they’d bought enough presents for those back home.

  Becky lay flat out on her sunlounger, switched on her Walkman and closed her eyes. Just as she could feel herself drifting off into a blissful sun-sodden doze, a shadow fell across her face. She opened her eyes, expecting to have to shout abuse at Luke. ‘Ganja to take home?’ Ethan shoved impolitely at her bare tummy so that she had to move over and then he plonked himself down beside her without even asking. She could feel her thigh squashed against his and didn’t like it one bit. She sighed. It was such a shame. Only a few short days ago such contact would have had her panting like a corgi in a hot car. Now it made her cringe.

  ‘Do you think I’m completely stupid?’ she said. ‘Do you really think I’m going to risk going to gaol carrying a titchy bag of grass through the British customs? I can get all that stuff down the local pub.’

  ‘But this is cheaper, better! And it’s no problem man, you girls got places you can hide stuff.’ His hand snaked up her leg and she grabbed it at upper-thigh level before it could reach its goal.

  ‘Ugh! Sod off!’ Becky pushed him away. It was all Mark’s fault. If he hadn’t said all that about Ethan’s girl-rota she’d have … well, on balance she was glad now that she hadn’t.

  ‘OK man, no worries.’ He leaned forward so that his breath tickled her face. ‘But you know I’ll give you all the stuff you want, for free, if you just come and …’

  ‘No. I don’t want to, thank you for asking. Now please go away.’ Becky turned up the volume of her Walkman and closed her eyes again. Ethan drifted away and was replaced by the cheeky small black birds dipping for crumbs and insects in the sand beneath her lounger. She could sense their flapping and squabbling. ‘Is there no bloody peace?’ she said to herself. She ripped the headphones off, stalked down to the sea and splashed out into the waves. The sea was a peculiar colour, with the sand beneath still churned up from the storm. It was as if a brilliant translucent sheen of turquoise had been spread over a caramel base. Becky lay on her back staring at the sky. There was no sign up there that the hurricane had ever happened. Someone had said that it had moved on towards the east coast of America. She imagined the frantic population of Florida boarding up their homes or moving further inland away from the damage, a long traffic jam of cars heading out of the state. With millions of square miles of America to drive off to in search of shelter, she wondered how any of them could understand how it felt to be trapped like they’d been on a tiny little island.

  ‘You know you don’t have to go. You can stay with us,’ Henry told Lucy for the fourteenth time that morning. They were sitting on the sand outside the dive shop. The boarding had all been removed, leaving ugly nail-holes in the wood. Lucy itched to fill them in and repaint.

  ‘I know.’ She didn’t list any excuses or reasons why she absolutely had to leave. There weren’t any. If she didn’t want to go, then she didn’t have to. What was difficult was trusting any decision she came up with. She couldn’t stay just because of Henry. But then she couldn’t leave just because of Colette’s school. She couldn’t stay just because the weather was better and she liked the particular shade of blue the sky happened to be over this island. And she couldn’t go home just because Aline Charter-Todd was desperate for a kitchen in the Paint Library’s Bittermint.

  ‘Are you going because of your job? Because you can work here. Especially now.’ Henry was still persuading.

  ‘I like my job,’ Lucy told him. ‘But there are aspects of it I don’t like. Money’s one.’

  ‘Money’s always one!’ Henry agreed.

  ‘The problem with being the painter is that you’re the last one down the chain. The client has already been stuffed by the plumbers, the carpenter, the electrician and the kitchen-fitters, so the pockets are empty. The other thing is that as a woman you have all the other craftsmen looking at you in that doubtful way, like you might be all right for a spot of gentle rag-rolling but will you need them to carry your ladders for you, all that.’

  ‘Same everywhere. At least here you get the sun.’

  Lucy laughed. ‘You don’t give up, do you, Henry?’

  He leaned across and kissed the tender skin at the back of her neck. ‘Not when there’s something I really, really want.’

  * * *

  Theresa and Marisa had finally got the girls d
ressed in their bridesmaids’ frocks. They’d wriggled and jiggled and complained while they were washed in a few inches of tepid bathwater (the guests had been asked to economize with it – supplies were still a long way from back to normal), but now Amy and Ella had their long fair hair up in high bunches tied with big clumps of orange and bright pink ribbon. They did look awfully cute, though Theresa wasn’t sure that dresses decorated with cannabis leaves would go down too well in a Surrey summer. Though, she thought with a smile, who among the velvet-headband brigade would dare admit to knowing enough about marijuana to comment? Perhaps it would be rather fun, next spring, to send the girls to snotty Lizzie Twilley’s daughter’s birthday party dressed like this. She could imagine the arched eyebrows, the hesitation and then the ‘Oh! Oh, how sweet!’ After about half an hour of sidelong glances and half-begun sentences, Lizzie, on the outside of a couple of spritzers, would finally ask, ‘Exactly what sort of leaves are they supposed to be?’ The pre-Caribbean Theresa would have bluffed and lied that they were maple. The post-storm version, glad to be alive and ready to face the demons with Mark, would tell the truth and not care.

  ‘Are we ready?’ Cathy’s face appeared round the door. ‘Oh, your room’s hardly damaged at all, is it? And you’ve still got your telly. Ours got full of rain and had to go.’

  ‘Cathy, you look stunning.’ Theresa pulled Cathy further into the room for a better look. She was wearing a sleek and simple spaghetti-strapped bias-cut white silk dress. Her blonde hair was loosely piled up and held in place with a slide covered in pale blue plumbago flowers.

  ‘It’s gorgeous,’ Theresa admired her dress, ‘just like a 1930s nightie.’

  Cathy did a twirl in front of the mirror, frowning. ‘Ugh, do you think so?’ Then she giggled, ‘Well, I’ll just have to keep it on for bedtime, won’t I?’

  ‘Have you got something borrowed?’