Excess Baggage (30 page)

Lucy went to get food from the buffet. She felt as if she wasn’t real. It was partly lack of sleep and partly amazement that everyone in the hotel had escaped a messy death in spite of the massive damage. When the gold lady tapped her on the arm and said, ‘You OK?’
Lucy
was horrified to find herself in tears. The gold lady hugged her and said, ‘It’s OK, it’s not just you. Everyone’s feeling like this.’ Only Shirley, Perry and the other older guests seemed unaffected.

‘At our age, it’s on to the next day and be glad you’re there to see it. You don’t dwell on things,’ Perry told Lucy as she returned to the table with her toast.

Plum ambled in for breakfast after the others and was pounced on by Becky. ‘OK, now you can tell me about my present,’ she demanded.

‘It isn’t just you older ones who move on fast,’ Lucy said to Perry.

‘Well? Let me guess …’ Becky was eager. ‘Is it something that there’s more than one of and you need a provisional licence to do it?’

‘Well, you’ve been hinting long enough … so here you are.’ Plum grinned and handed over an envelope. Becky ripped it open.

‘Oh, great! A driving-school voucher! For a
serious
amount of money!’ She frowned. ‘Don’t you expect me to pass, then?’

‘We just want you to be competent. Not rush at it,’ Simon said.

‘Very sensible,’ Shirley approved. ‘You’ve always been thoughtful that way, Simon.’ He looked at her, puzzled.

‘You were always the one with a puncture-repair kit in your bike saddlebag. Don’t you remember?’ Lucy reminded him. ‘I bet you’ve got a cast-iron pension scheme too.’

‘Well of course,’ he told her. ‘Haven’t you?’

Lucy laughed ‘Oh, Simon, you haven’t a clue, have you?’

Theresa wanted quite desperately to have a bath and unpack something else to wear. She felt as if she’d worn the same blue linen dress for weeks, though in reality it was only on its second day. It had been the one she’d worn during the evening of the drunken swim (both seawater and alcohol drenched away in the shower) and, what with that and the horrendous storm, she now decided that it was a bad-luck garment and would have to go. Perhaps Lucy would like it. Theresa bit her lip and felt herself tingling with guilt. She’d been horrid to Lucy, really awful. The dress would hardly start to make up for it. And, too, would she be passing on the bad luck with it?

As soon as the children had finished breakfast, she intended investigating whether her room was habitable, dragging all her clothes out of the bloody wardrobe and soaking away all the night-time fear and sweat and mud in a deep and scented bath. In a big block building like that, surely there wouldn’t have been any damage to the water supply. And if there was, perhaps the high-paying guests in the villas would be priority to have their accommodation repaired, so she could use Shirley’s bathroom, once the muddy water had been swept out.

What she didn’t intend to do, she thought as she sipped her coffee on the dining terrace, was wander about aimlessly in the rain gawping at the damage like so many of the other guests were doing, clad in enormous white plastic bags with holes cut out for arms and legs, that the management had provided. It was rather late, she thought, those would have been handy the night before to protect the sofas and beds. One or two people seemed to find it amusing to attempt some kind of design statement with the bags, fashioning hoods, belting them and showing off childishly to
others
too exhausted to tell them to go away. At least Marisa was on the kind of form they were paying her to be on this morning. She was being wonderful with the children, cheerful and chatty and almost delirious with the joy of being alive. In contrast, Theresa could see Cathy and Paul slumped in a corner, arms around each other and Cathy clearly sobbing inconsolably. Paul caught her eye and she felt she had no option but to go and talk to them.

‘Cathy, what’s wrong? You didn’t get hurt or anything did you?’

Cathy blew her nose loudly and Theresa stepped back a little.

‘My wedding! How can I have my wedding?’

‘Why can’t you?’ Theresa was puzzled.

‘It’s all ruined! The white thingy’s all broken and the tree’s in the pool and everything’s
spoiled
,’ she wailed. Theresa looked round, feeling embarrassed and at a loss. Lucy was across the room and Theresa beckoned to her.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. She looked at Theresa nervously, as if expecting a new set of long-held grudges to be unleashed.

‘Cathy says she can’t get married because the marrying place by the pool is all ruined. What do you think?’

Lucy thought for a moment. ‘Well, first of all, is your dress still OK? And how’s your room?’

‘The dress is fine, the room’s not too bad, it just needs sweeping out and stuff,’ Paul said.

‘Couldn’t you get married on the beach? With everyone from the hotel? We could all do with some celebration. And the one thing hotels don’t run short of is booze.’

Cathy sniffed heavily but the sobbing had stopped at last. ‘It was supposed to be this morning.’

Theresa took hold of her hand, which surprised Lucy. Theresa had never been the tactile sort, never comfortable with people who hugged at random and pulling herself in when trapped next to anyone who tended to emphasize conversational points with nudges and touches.

‘So, OK, today’s not really on. But if you go ahead tomorrow,’ she told Cathy, ‘just think about it: you’ll have one hell of a story to tell. “My hurricane wedding nightmare”. It’s almost sellable.’

Paul’s expression perked up enormously ‘Perhaps it
is
sellable. We could get some great pictures …’

‘There you are then. So much better than some ordinary dull old wedding.’ Theresa smiled. Lucy was suspicious. Theresa sounded mildly patronizing and manipulative, as if she was successfully getting her own way with a grizzly child. She couldn’t work out what she was up to. As they headed back to join the others she pulled Theresa out into the lobby where no-one could hear them. She had to ask.

‘Theresa, why do you care so much whether they get married or not? I didn’t think you even really wanted the girls to be bridesmaids.’

‘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?’