A Proper Family Holiday (10 page)

Chelsea brought her focus back to the table just in time to hear, ‘Well, I’m sure that’s how they do it in London, but they’ve got much more money than we have. We can’t all have Chanel tea towels like auntie Chelsea.’

‘Chanel tea towels,’ said Chelsea. ‘I know several people who would buy one.’

It was the closest Chelsea would come to making a joke that night.

‘Well, if you’ve got money to burn,’ Ronnie sniped, ‘you could use some of your old Prada vests for dusters. Or rather, get your cleaner to use them. Don’t want to ruin your manicure, eh?’

Chelsea didn’t bother to protest her lack of domestic staff. Or her lack of manicure, for that matter.

Chelsea had known this would happen. When she was away from her family, in London, she could kid herself she was doing OK. Now that she was back with them, she felt just as she had done at the age of sixteen. Perhaps how Sophie was feeling right now.

Chelsea thought she had escaped when she went to university, but sitting here now, she realised she hadn’t made it far. She’d swapped a council house in Coventry for a studio flat with chronic damp in Stockwell. Every night she ran the gauntlet of drug dealers and drop-outs on her way home from the Tube. She had an ancient fridge that shook the whole house when it rattled. She had no car. The fabulous wardrobe her sister was now belittling was the only thing she had to show for her hard work, and most of that was borrowed. Chelsea’s family had no idea that the remuneration at
Society
reflected the title’s ‘prestige’ and thus was little more than the minimum wage. It was pin money for the heiresses who worked there while they waited to marry well, pop out two kids and get a Labrador. Heiresses like her ex-boyfriend Colin’s new fiancée, because of course he’d had to pick an heiress.

The Polish waitress reappeared to clear away the plates.

‘Grassy-arse,’ said Bill. Again.

The waitress’s smile said, ‘If I didn’t need this job, I would kill you all.’

‘Put me out of my misery while you’re at it,’ said Chelsea’s smile in return.

‘I will never escape,’ said Chelsea’s inner teenage self, still alive and kicking beneath her new accent and the London polish her family found so funny. ‘These people who have come all the way to a Spanish island off the coast of North Africa to eat exactly the same food they eat at home will always define me.’

With her Louis Vuitton bag tucked between her feet, Chelsea had never in her life wanted less to be a Benson.

Chapter Twelve

Bill

Tired from a long day of travelling and the horror of her first family dinner in two years, before long Chelsea was yawning. Sophie and Jacqui quickly followed suit. Jack snuggled up against his grandmother as he ate a huge ice-cream sundae. He was soon struggling to keep his eyes open.

‘Time for bed,’ Jacqui announced as the clock struck ten. Both her daughters greeted her words with silent relief. They had been waiting for Jacqui, as the family matriarch, to make the first move to end the excruciating evening. Ronnie and Chelsea had hardly addressed a word to each other for the past hour, not since the ‘Prada dusters’ wisecrack. Sophie couldn’t wait to get to her room to text her best friend, despite the fact they had been texting each other all evening already. Mark said he’d carry Jack upstairs. Only Bill wanted to party on.

Unfortunately, like Jack, Bill could not be left on his own. Dave had to keep Bill company while the old man had a nightcap. Jacqui insisted her husband stay with his father. The last thing they needed was for Bill to drink until he fell off a barstool. He was in that kind of mood, Jacqui could tell.

Thankfully, the bar was relatively quiet. Most of the hotel’s guests retired to their rooms straight after dinner to put the children to bed. Hotel Volcan was very much a family establishment. It prided itself on being such. Nevertheless, along the bar from Dave and Bill, two distinctly un-motherly women shared a bottle of rosé wine. Dave didn’t really notice them until Bill commented that the blonder of the two had a ‘cleavage like the flippin’ Grand Canyon’.

‘Look, look.’ Bill nudged Dave with all the subtlety of a Benny Hill sketch. ‘You could park a bicycle…’

Dave studied the bottom of his glass. His father had made his comment loudly enough for the whole hotel to hear. The two women at the bar had definitely heard it.

‘Give it a rest, Dad. Please.’

Unfortunately, there was no chance of that.

‘I haven’t seen a cleavage of that quality since Carol Roberts moved in next door.’

Dave nodded in agreement at the memory of his father’s former neighbour and hoped that would be the end of the conversation.

But worse was to come.

‘That’s a beautiful dress you’re almost wearing,’ said Bill, in an attempt to strike up a direct conversation with his fellow bar-fly. Unsurprisingly, the blonde woman looked affronted by Bill’s cack-handed compliment. She screwed up her nose as though she had smelt something bad and turned back towards her companion with an audible tut.

‘Dad, I think those ladies want to keep themselves to themselves.’

Bill had become a liability where women were concerned. Once upon a time, he had been the perfect gentleman: opening doors, carrying shopping, unfailingly correct and polite. Jacqui had read something somewhere that said certain types of dementia were accompanied by a lowering of inhibitions. Dave suggested that Bill had just decided he was too old to be polite, but that evening in particular – after what seemed like three hours of ‘grassy-arse’ – Dave knew his wife was right. Bill wasn’t himself any more. They were losing him.

‘I was only saying that—’

‘You can’t say that sort of thing, Dad,’ Dave interrupted him before he could get the words out.

‘Bloody PC brigade,’ said Bill. ‘If you can’t tell a woman she’s got a lovely chest—’

‘Right. That’s it.’ Dave took the glass from Bill’s hand. ‘Time for bed.’

‘But I haven’t finished my drink yet.’

Dave stood up and started helping – or rather man-handling – his father down from his stool. Old age had left Bill too frail to struggle.

‘Come on, son. Just one more pint.’

‘We’ll have another one tomorrow, Dad. I promise.’

In his hurry to get out of there, Dave accidentally left a fifty-euro note instead of a five for the barman.

With Bill and Dave gone, Gloria Smith, the woman with the ‘lovely chest’, felt free to vent her outrage. Her holiday companion, Lesley Beard, a woman without such obvious charms as Gloria’s blonde locks and magnificent cleavage, nodded in disgusted agreement as Gloria complained to the barman that a woman should be able to have a drink without facing such harassment, no matter what she was wearing. The barman agreed that a proper gentleman would be able to focus on a woman’s personality rather than her body. The barman was fishing for tips.

‘Who does that disgraceful old man think he is?’ Gloria asked no one in particular.

‘He’s a lottery winner,’ said the barman.

‘What?’

Their interest suddenly piqued, Gloria and Lesley leant over the bar to hear more.

‘I hear him say it,’ the barman confirmed. ‘He say it all the time. Every time I talk to him, he say he win the lottery.’

‘
Never
,’ Gloria breathed.

Gloria and Lesley shared a look.

‘Oh yes. That’s why he bring his whole family here. They have whole floor in the hotel for themselves.’

‘Well, I don’t believe it,’ said Lesley. ‘I’d never have guessed. He’s obviously not spent his winnings on his wardrobe. But he’s brought his whole family here, you say?’

‘Oh yes. They take eight rooms,’ said the barman erroneously. ‘And that old man, he pay for everything. Everything. All the rooms. All the beers. Everything they like. And they drink all the day. Believe me. I have to serve them. And look at this. Fifty euros tip on an eight-euro bill.’

‘It must be true,’ said Gloria. ‘I wonder how much he won?’

‘One of the granddaughters,’ the barman continued, ‘she is carrying a
Louis Vuitton
handbag. I know. My brother, he work in Louis Vuitton in Marbella. That bag, he tell me, it cost as much as my house.’

‘I did see that bag,’ said Lesley. ‘It was in my magazine. Madonna’s got one. I assumed that girl was carrying a fake.’

‘No, it’s real,’ the barman confirmed. ‘She put it on the bar earlier on. I had real close look. I know all the signs of the designer. Is no mistake.’

‘Well, well, well,’ said Gloria. ‘A genuine lottery winner here in Hotel Volcan. And he said I looked good in my dress …’

‘He might at least have offered to buy you a drink,’ Lesley pointed out.

‘He don’t just want to splash his cash around. That way, you get gold-diggers,’ said the barman wisely.

‘A good point,’ said Gloria. ‘A man like that has got to be very careful. He needs to know a woman likes him for himself, not just for the money. He’s obviously a simple man of classic tastes and he must find it hard dealing with the unwanted attention such unexpected wealth brings. Poor chap.’

From disgusting old man to an object of empathy in a matter of moments. Gloria did not seem in the least bit uncomfortable with her sudden and dramatic change of heart.

‘How long’s he staying here?’ Gloria asked the barman. ‘Do you know?’

‘I think he’s staying for the whole summer,’ said the barman. In reality, he didn’t have a clue, but in Gloria’s eyes the idea of such a long stay added yet more weight to the compelling picture of Bill Benson as bona fide lottery winner. How else could his entire family afford to take so much time off work? If they ever had worked, thought Gloria unkindly. Apart from the one with the Louis Vuitton handbag, they looked like a right bunch of benefit scroungers.

‘The whole summer? Plenty of time to get to know him properly, then,’ Gloria concluded. Lesley gawped. The disgusting old man had suddenly become a most eligible catch indeed.

Chapter Thirteen

Ronnie

While Bill was terrorising the ladies in the bar, Ronnie lay awake in bed. Though she had felt so tired towards the end of dinner she could barely keep her head out of her plate, now she could not sleep at all. The events of the past two days were buzzing round in her head. Sophie’s stroppiness about the food and the palaver over the bedrooms. Mark starting drinking at eleven in the morning. Granddad Bill’s embarrassing behaviour. Her own humiliation when it was time to put her swimming costume on. Chelsea’s arrival …

Ronnie might have known what it would be like when Chelsea finally deigned to show up, wafting in like she was Jackie Kennedy with her ballet flats and her big sunglasses and her posh designer handbag dangling from her elbow. She was the prodigal daughter. Josephine in a Technicolor sundress. Ronnie knew from Jacqui that Chelsea hadn’t been to Coventry in over a year but having finally shown her face, she was the favourite child once more and Ronnie was left on the sidelines, feeling and looking like the fatted calf.

How aloof Chelsea had been. She had looked pained from the moment Ronnie first saw her standing in the lobby, regarding the other holidaymakers as though they were on day release from prison. Ronnie half expected Chelsea to clutch a handkerchief to her nose to avoid breathing in their chavvy germs. The way she tried to shake hands with Jack was excruciating. Any normal woman would have given the poor boy a cuddle. It didn’t get any better. It had broken Ronnie’s heart to see Jack try and fail to engage Chelsea in conversation all afternoon and evening. She hadn’t even looked up from her iPhone to see him do his ‘best ever’ dive. And how about the way she had just raised an eyebrow when Sophie went into meltdown over the menu in the Jolly Pirate? Any caring aunt would have backed Ronnie up when she insisted Sophie had to eat more than just chips. Not that Chelsea was much better than Sophie. She had picked at her food as though it was poison. Ronnie knew their mother had noticed and would take it personally. The food at the Hotel Volcan was not good enough for someone like Chelsea, whose body wasn’t just a temple; it was the fricking Taj Mahal.

As Ronnie had feared, Chelsea did not look as though she had just turned thirty. Chelsea was as slim as a breadstick. Her hair looked expensively coloured. Her skin was perfectly smooth and entirely unlined, though maybe that was down to Botox. In the edition of
Society
Ronnie had flicked through in the doctor’s waiting room, she’d found an article written by her sister saying you should start doing Botox in your mid-twenties to ensure that lines never formed in the first place. Ronnie had no doubt that Chelsea would be taking her own advice. Perhaps that was why she couldn’t raise a smile for poor Jack. And how about Chelsea’s holiday wardrobe? In that blue bikini, Chelsea knew she had a better body than any other guest at the hotel. There was absolutely no chance Ronnie would take her sarong off once Chelsea had arrived.

It was agony to sit by that pool and be unable to jump in, but it wasn’t just Chelsea that Ronnie felt like hiding from. Ronnie had heard two young guys in the bar talking about a ‘whale’ who had almost emptied the pool of water when she dived in. She did not want them to say the same about her. She just wanted to stay out of their line of sight. Under the radar. Safe.

Did Mark fancy Chelsea? Earlier that evening, when Ronnie had commented that her sister was in ‘good shape’, Mark had said, ‘She’s a bit thin,’ but did he really mean that? It wasn’t possible to be too thin, was it? Whatever he thought of Chelsea, Mark certainly didn’t seem to fancy Ronnie any more. Within minutes of getting back to their room that night he was asleep. Or pretending to be. Ronnie had forgotten the last time he had cuddled up to her in bed. There had been times when he couldn’t seem to get enough of her. Increasingly of late, however, Ronnie felt as though they were just lodgers in the same house. Ronnie worried that Mark would get fed up and start to look elsewhere, but she herself would never initiate sex any more for fear of being actively rejected. She couldn’t bear that on top of everything else.

Mark rolled onto his back. In just a few moments he would start to snore. Tonight would be worse than usual because he had had at least four pints of lager with dinner and those were just the ones Ronnie had counted. He’d been drinking by the pool since eleven. Ronnie had told him before that his snoring got worse the more he drank, and she was the one who had to suffer – he slept through it, after all – but he still had not tried to cut down his intake in any way. If it didn’t matter to him that she lay awake all night, then why should she be surprised that he didn’t seem to want to make love to her any more?