Excess Baggage (29 page)

‘If you’re there.’ Theresa’s voice was heavy with concealed meaning.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Well you’ve got your new boyfriend here, haven’t you? Aren’t you tempted to shack up here in paradise with him?’

Lucy looked hard at her. ‘Yes I am, actually, Tess, how clever of you to guess.’ It hadn’t seriously crossed her mind. How childish they could all still become when pushed.

‘Now, Theresa, you made her say that. Stop getting at her.’ Shirley tried some gentle refereeing. ‘And Lucy, don’t rise to it. You know you’ll be on that plane.’

‘Oh it’s OK, I know Lucy.’ Theresa’s face was contorted with spite. ‘They’re always Mr Right for a fortnight or so. I’m surprised she hasn’t got at least twenty children.’

‘Now Tess …’ Perry started.

‘Theresa, why are you being so nasty to me? I can’t believe this, you sound as if you almost
envy
me!’

Theresa glared. ‘Oh well, you’ve got all the choices, haven’t you? You’ve always had it easy, having Colette just when you felt like it, and then
not
having more because you didn’t. All that casual fertility was wasted on you. I should have had it. You don’t know how hard it was for me, all those years of not being able to have them. And …’ Theresa was getting seriously steamed up now, ‘and you could never do anything wrong. Always Daddy’s little favourite. He’s always worrying about whether you’ve got enough money, he’s even paying your kid’s school fees.’

‘That’s all I do pay. She won’t take any more,’ Perry interrupted.

‘Oh God, Tess, have you really grudged me having Colette all these years? She’s about the only thing I
have
got. I know it was hard for you but you’ve got your children
now
. And that whopping great house. And Mark.’

‘Oh well,
Mark
…’

‘You’re being horrible. And Henry’s really nice,’ Colette told Theresa.

‘He is, dear,’ Shirley agreed. ‘But he’s only a holiday romance.’

‘Actually he’s not even that.’ No-one took any notice of Lucy.

Shirley went on, ‘Holiday romances are nice to have, but Henry’s from a different culture. They don’t mix.’

‘His parents were from different cultures, too, one black, one white; one from here, one from England. They mixed,’ Colette pointed out.

‘Yes but …’

‘Yes but … not in our family? Is that what you mean?’ Lucy said quietly.

‘No, I don’t mean that, of course I don’t,’ Shirley insisted, smiling to lighten the mood. ‘Actually, it’s just me being purely selfish. We’re looking forward to seeing a lot more of you, help you get your life-sorted a bit. It’s not the colour thing, of course it’s not.’

‘Funny that,’ Lucy said. ‘But when people say that it’s like when they’re saying “It’s not the money, it’s the principle.” You can tell immediately it’s the money.’

‘Listen. The wind’s dropped right down,’ Mark interrupted. Perversely, the small children at last started to stir and wake.

‘You’re right, it’s almost gone,’ Simon said. ‘And we’ve survived.’

‘Have we, Simon?’ Lucy said. ‘I’m glad you think so.’

LUCY WAS AWAKE
again as soon the night sky faded to a sulky grey. The rain was still falling, but more gently now, as if the sky was exhausted, and the wind had calmed to a brisk warm breeze no worse than on any English beach in July. Her body was aching and stiff from lying on the hard stone floor and there seemed no point in trying to get any more rest. If her own room had survived the storm, perhaps later she could catch up on sleep.

In the bathroom, the loo flushed successfully but she couldn’t hear the tank filling. She turned on the basin taps, but only a sad trickle emerged. She was reluctant to open the villa doors, afraid she would find that most of the hotel was lying flat beneath sand and rubble and fallen trees. There might be bodies out there, people caught running from tumbling buildings and then struck down by falling trees. She smiled, recognizing in herself a streak of Simon’s doom predictions, and padded back into the drenched sitting room. The towels that had once been so plump and white were lying crumpled on the floor, filthy and soaked with mopped-up rain. The room was steamy and hot now that the fan couldn’t work, and mournful drops of rain were still plopping from the ceiling onto the table. One
of
the sofas, for which they hadn’t been able to find a large enough section of dry roof, was sodden and stained with reddish-grey patches from where the rain had soaked through the remaining roof tiles.

‘Have you looked outside yet?’ Simon unrolled himself from the dry sofa.

‘No. Too scared. I had this awful half-dream that this is the only building still standing and that we’re the only people left alive.’

‘Oh it can’t be that bad, surely. We’d definitely have heard if the other villas had collapsed into the sea. Come on, let’s look together.’

Simon unlocked the front door and they took their first look across the bay towards the rest of the hotel.

‘Oh those poor trees,’ was Lucy’s first reaction. Not one of the magnificent palm trees had its leaves intact. All that was left on each was a pitiful stubby plume of tattered, broken stems. The remaining leaves hung miserably, as if they were clinging desperately to the trunk. The grass and the beach beneath were carpeted with shattered foliage, coconuts and shards of twisted fronds.

‘The hotel looks as if it’s still standing, or at least it does from here.’ Simon peered across the bay to the hotel’s three main blocks. The big stone sugar mill bar was still in its place on the far headland, where it must have faced a good couple of centuries of storms. It had probably seen far worse than this in its time.

‘We can’t see much from here. What I
can
see though,’ Lucy pointed to the grass a few yards away, ‘is our water tank. It must have been wrenched off the roof.’

The ground beneath was sodden with lakes of rain that had nowhere to drain to, and mud had swept down from the hillside behind the beach, depositing
an
oozy slick across the ground, but the sea had retreated, leaving a new covering of fresh wet sand across the first ten yards of grass at the top of the beach. Huge boulders and pebbles now lay scattered on the foreshore where only smooth silvery sand had been the day before.

‘Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me!’ Becky sang, joining Simon and Lucy at the doorway. ‘Where are my presents then?’

‘Happy birthday Becks.’ Lucy kissed her. ‘I have got you one actually. It’s in my emergency bag.’ Lucy went back into the bedroom to find her basket and returned with a small package. ‘It’ll remind you of being here – though you might not think that’s a good thing.’

Becky ripped the paper off and scattered it on the floor, pulling out wind chimes made of blue ceramic fish. ‘Oh, it’s so pretty!’ she said, ‘I love it, thanks! I’ll hang it at my bedroom window and think about last night’s ultimate wind.’

‘Henry’s mother made it. She’s a painter really, but she does these too.’

‘An all-round talented family!’ Becky gave her a suggestive nudge and Simon frowned. ‘Becky, no smut please …’

‘Hey, I’m seventeen, I know about these things.’

‘I sincerely hope you don’t.’ Becky and Lucy looked at each other and laughed.

‘I’m
seventeen
, Dad.’ Becky hugged Simon. ‘Now isn’t seventeen a very significant age? Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be able to do at
seventeen
? And I’m not talking “smut” as you put it.’ Simon extricated himself and grinned at her. ‘Wait till your mother wakes up. I’m saying nothing about your present till she’s here, so don’t ask me.’

Only the small children had slept properly. The
others
woke after too little sleep and grumbled about aching backs and necks and feeling like wrecks. Perry reminded them that they could be feeling a lot worse.

‘I’m starving. Shall we get breakfast?’ Luke suggested as soon as he was awake.

‘If there is any.’ Mark felt as if he had a hangover but couldn’t remember whether this was likely to be true. A part of his barely functioning brain told him that if he really couldn’t remember, then the hangover was a probability.

Lucy and Colette set off with Simon ahead of the others, making a detour, at Lucy’s request, to check on the damage to the dive shop. The shop itself seemed to be intact, with only a small piece of the boarding ripped away from the door. ‘Probably one of the bits you did, Mum,’ Colette teased. The pedalos and jet skis had fared less well: the tarpaulin that had covered them had ripped away, taking with it a couple of canoes and one of the jet skis, which lay on its side nearby pinned down by a fallen almond tree. Lucy could see a bright pink pedalo floating upside down on the churning sea about fifty yards from the shore.

As they walked along the path above the beach the extent of the hotel’s damage became clearer.

‘Look at the games room!’ Colette yelled as she got close to it. Sand had been washed up the beach and in through its open sides, far enough to half-bury the football table. Next to it, the beach bar’s semicircular roof had completely disappeared. ‘Jesus,’ Simon said, ‘what kind of strength did it take to blow it clean away? There’s no sign of it.’

‘It’s probably in the middle of the ocean by now,’ Lucy told him. The sea had swept through, easily pushing aside the carefully laid sandbags that had
proved
so inadequate a barrier. A dead fish lay by the bar, a sad, poignant casualty. ‘Red mullet, I’d say,’ Simon said, looking at it.

‘You don’t
really
know,’ Colette teased him. ‘You just think you should pretend you do because you’re a man.’

Simon sighed and gave her a woeful smile. ‘You’re too young to be such a cynic,’ he told her. ‘Though, OK, I don’t know for sure, but it does
look
like a red mullet.’

Closer to the central building, Lucy tried to work out what was missing, what had changed. The whole landscape seemed different in ways that were confusing. At first it was hard to tell whether there was a huge gap in the view or whether the pool terrace had always been so open. She had to think, to refamiliarize. Then she realized: the huge tamarind tree that had stood beside the pool had gone. Most of the tree, they could now see, was upended in the pool, which was muddied and full of leaves and sand. Flagstones on the terrace had been ripped out and cracked apart as the tree’s massive roots, which were now almost obscenely exposed to the air, had been hauled out of the earth. The white gazebo was another casualty, crushed to useless sad scrap beneath a slab of corrugated iron that must have flown from a roof nearby. The small speedboat that was used for water-skiing and which had been tethered to the turpentine tree was upside down, the branch it had been tied to stabbed through its windscreen.

Other guests wandered in the drizzle, staring about them, dazed like people in shock who’d stepped unscathed from a dreadful car accident. No-one spoke: there was too much damage to take in, as well as growing amazement at their own survival. The more Lucy – looked around her, the more awe-stricken she felt at
the
power of the elements. She gazed up at the terrace. Most of the dining-area roof was still there, though there were a few gaps and holes. Staff were already up ladders, fixing palm fronds back into place and improvising with thick polythene to keep the worst of the rain out.

‘We should check our rooms,’ Simon murmured to her. Lucy nodded.

The worst of the damage to their block was visible from just past the terrace. Lucy stopped and gasped at the scale of it: that mere moving air could do so much. The whole end section of their two-storey building was missing, leaving the corner rooms, upstairs and down, open to the air. The lower one was Simon and Plum’s room, wrecked as if by a bomb. Chunks of plasterboard were strewn across the floor. The chest of drawers was on its side and the minibar had been flung into the middle of the soaking wet bed. Light fittings dangled from the walls. The manager had been right about the louvres in the windows: there was glass everywhere and the balcony from the room above had fallen through the overhanging terrace shelter which was now crushed beneath concrete. A slice of the tiled roof had landed in the centre of the room above and Lucy could only pray that there was no-one beneath it. Simon went as close as he dared, feeling acutely distressed about the little green finch’s nest which could only have been destroyed. There was no sign of the birds, and the creeper where the intricate nest had been was flattened to the ground. Absurdly, he somehow felt it was all his fault. If only he hadn’t lured the lovely Tula in …

‘The wardrobe doors are still on.’ Simon’s voice was shaky. ‘Our stuff should be OK.’

‘It’s being on the corner, this bit must have taken the
worst
. I expect it’s the same the other end, from when the wind changed direction.’

There were several holes in the building’s roof, from where pieces of tree had crashed through. A branch, with a gouged pale rip along the edge where it had been torn from the tree’s trunk, was lodged through one of the upstairs windows as if someone had picked it up like a javelin and hurled it. The floor in Lucy and Colette’s room was rain-soaked, with broken glass everywhere and sand and leaves blown in, but otherwise the room seemed to have got off lightly. She checked the beds and tested them for dampness. They seemed more or less all right. Perhaps at least Colette could sleep for a while. It looked like the rest of them would be involved in major clearing up.

‘I can’t believe the staff have managed to organize food like this,’ Shirley said, astounded that tables had been set out, with fresh cloths, in rows like the night before. Smiling staff, relieved as the rest of them to be alive, came round to the weary guests with comforting pots of coffee and tea.

‘Did any of you get any sleep?’ Perry asked Tula.

‘No, sir,’ she smiled at him, ‘it was too exciting!’

‘Not the sort of exciting I’d want to do again in a hurry,’ he told her. ‘Still, as long as everyone’s OK.’

They were. Miraculously, no-one had been hurt except one of the Steves who had cut his hand in a drunken fall through his door, landing on broken glass.