Outside the terminal was a perfect summer’s day. We shrugged off our jackets and put on our sunglasses as the sunshine wrapped us in glorious Mediterranean warmth.
‘That’s better,’ Clare sighed.
I agreed wholeheartedly.
We boarded the hotel transfer coach with a half-dozen other smiling tourists, eager to swap city life for a week of Balearic ease. Now that Clare and I were really on holiday, I knew what a poor substitute a week in my apartment had been. Just five minutes standing in the sunshine in the airport car park and it was as though the previous seven days had been a bad dream.
The journey to the hotel on the island’s north coast didn’t take long, but in any case I enjoyed watching the landscape slip by. The centre of the island was largely flat and undistinguished, compared with the mountains I had read about in the guidebook, but all the same it was interesting to see something different. From time to time we caught glimpses of old farmhouses, turned into holiday villas. Their glittering turquoise pools filled us with excitement about an afternoon next to the pool at the Hotel Mirabossa.
‘I’ve been there before,’ said a woman sitting across the aisle. ‘Best hotel I’ve ever been to. That’s why we’ve come again this year. We wouldn’t normally go back to the same place twice.’
It was a good recommendation.
And so we finally arrived at the hotel where we had supposedly spent the entire week: the Hotel Mirabossa on the outskirts of Puerto Bona. I was strangely surprised to find that it was so much like the hotel I had been describing in my Facebook updates and texts to Hannah.
‘I’ve got déjà vu,’ said Clare, summing up the weird sensation we were both feeling as we clambered off the hotel bus and followed our holiday rep into the lobby.
Everything seemed so familiar. The whitewashed walls. The bougainvillea that tumbled down the front of the building. The tiled courtyard with the tinkling fountain in the centre. Water droplets sparkled like crystals in the mid-morning sun. I couldn’t resist slicing my hand through the glittering jets.
Clare squeezed my arm as we waited to be given our room key.
‘Isn’t this wonderful?’
It was.
Our room – the room I had booked for me and Callum – had a sea view. It wasn’t the exact sea view that Clare had photographed from the website, but it was close enough, we decided. If Callum had taken any notice of the photograph that Mum had tweeted, he would have to be pretty geeky to notice that we were slightly further to the right of the pool bar and the geranium planters were marginally smaller.
‘We can always say we changed rooms, if he asks,’ said Clare.
As I took in the perfect vista from the balcony, Clare set about making the room look lived in. The moment she took the safety strap off her case, it exploded like a jack-in-a-box, spewing clothes all over the floor and giving the room what I thought was an instant ‘lived-in’ feel. Clare wasn’t so convinced. She art-directed the scene as carefully as she had created my birthday beach with Ted and Jason. She draped items of clothing all over the room like bunting. She dampened a bikini in the washbasin and hung it over the rail around the balcony, as though it had been worn and washed the day before. Her attention to detail was quite impressive.
‘Let’s do the same with your stuff,’ she suggested.
I reminded Clare that compared to her I had a reputation for a frightening level of tidiness and organisation. Callum would think it very odd if he saw a single sock of mine on the floor.
‘Whatever you say,’ said Clare, rearranging a pair of shorts that didn’t look quite realistically discarded enough. She arranged her pharmacy’s worth of toiletries in the bathroom.
With our unpacking finished, we still had the best part of a day before Callum arrived and we were going to make the most of it. After a week cooped up in my flat, the sea air was the best thing I had ever smelled. Our makeshift beach may have been fun, but it was no substitute for the real beach and the sound of the waves. We decided to take a walk to orient ourselves in our surroundings. I had a small moment of panic when I noticed that the sand on this beach was shingly, rather than the fine sand we’d had in the garden, but Clare assured me that was a detail that Callum would not notice at all.
‘You’re here in Majorca, large as life. Why should he question whether or not you were really here last week as well? He’s not going to think twice about the sand.’
We wandered around the town, matching the real restaurants and shops to the virtual images we had worked with for the past week. There was the tiny bar where we had pretended to stop for lunch. There was the grocery shop where we had stocked up on bottled water when Evan suggested that it might not be safe to drink straight from the taps and it would certainly be too expensive to buy bottled water at the hotel. And there, at last, was the Palacio Blanco, the nightclub we had made our local.
‘Looks much smaller in real life,’ said Clare. We pressed our faces against the wrought-iron gate that led onto the courtyard full of tables we felt we knew so well. ‘I’m looking forward to going there tonight, though.’
I agreed. I could already imagine persuading Callum onto the dance floor, wrapping my arms round his neck and luxuriating in his kisses as we whirled round to some slow tune.
‘Shall we go back to the hotel?’ Clare asked. ‘See if we can’t get ourselves a cup of tea?’
‘I’m sure you can’t get a decent cup of tea in Majorca,’ I responded. At last the idea made me smile. And I was right. At least, I was right that you couldn’t get a decent cup of tea at our hotel. There’s something about tea made with anything but hard old British water that isn’t quite proper. The UHT milk didn’t help. But I didn’t really care. The sunshine more than made up for it.
I was about to upload a real photograph of the poolside to my Facebook account, but Clare stopped me.
‘I think it’s for the best that we don’t give anyone the opportunity to make comparisons.’
‘Good idea.’
After lunch, we settled ourselves by the pool and ordered cocktails. The hotel’s sangria was almost as good as Henry and Tabby’s lethal brew. It was certainly strong enough to make me feel a little less anxious about the evening ahead, because I was feeling anxious now. After yesterday’s flurry of communication, it struck me that Callum hadn’t actually texted me since the text he sent to let me know which flight he’d be on.
‘What if he was bluffing?’ I asked my sister.
‘It’s one hell of a complicated bluff.’
‘Compared to what we did last week? Maybe he knows we were at home all the time and he’s been taking the mickey, pretending he’s coming to join us. He won’t show up.’
‘He will show up,’ Clare assured me. ‘But so what if he doesn’t?’ she added. ‘You’re on holiday. You’re by the pool. The sun is shining. Everything is right with the world.’
And as if Clare’s words had prompted it, Callum chose that moment to text to let me know that he was on his way to the airport and, as far as he could tell from the airline website, the flight was on schedule. My shoulders loosened with relief. He would be by my side in less than six hours.
But then Clare’s iPhone buzzed to let her know that she had a message too. She leaned across to pick it out of her beach bag, checked her phone and suddenly her smile disappeared from her face as though someone had switched her happy holiday mood off like a light.
‘What is it?’ I asked. She suddenly looked so very unhappy that I could only assume the worst. Had we been rumbled? While Clare studied her phone, I looked about us, scanning the crowds at the poolside for a familiar face. Had someone who thought we had already been in Majorca for a week spotted us arriving and sent a text to find out what we were doing? I could see no one I knew, but when I next looked at Clare, she seemed to be struggling to hold back tears.
‘Is everything OK?’ I asked. Was it news from home? I wondered aloud. Had something terrible happened while we were in the air or wandering happily
around the resort? Had someone died?
Clare shook her head. ‘It’s worse than that,’ she managed at last. ‘Evan says he’s coming to Majorca too.’
Evidently, Evan had decided that a whole five days without his fiancée was quite long enough. If she really was going to stay in Majorca for another seven days, then he would just have to take a week out of his annual leave, which he had been saving so he could oversee the fitting of their new kitchen in August, and fly out to Majorca to join her.
‘As you know,’ he said over the course of three lengthy texts, ‘I hadn’t planned on us taking a holiday at all this year. We’ve got far too much to do at home, and of course we should be saving for the wedding, but since you insist on staying with your sister for another week, I suppose I will have to come and join you. It isn’t right for us to spend so much time apart.’
And that was that. Evan had booked himself on to the same flight as Callum (though he didn’t yet know that Callum was flying out too). He would be arriving in Palma that evening. He would get a hire car from the airport (another expense he hadn’t planned for) and expect Clare to be waiting for him at the hotel at around nine o’clock.
‘Don’t go out,’ he said. ‘I want to see you as soon as I arrive.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Clare. ‘This is a disaster.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ I said. I had thought, having spoken a little about it on the flight, that Clare was feeling mellower about her relationship that day. ‘Evan will be company for you when Callum gets here and—’
Clare interrupted me. ‘All I wanted was another week to myself! Just seven more days before I go back to London and a boring summer of DIY, and then next year we get married and I’ll never be allowed to go anywhere on my own ever again. But now he’s coming here and that means I’ll have to spend the week doing what he wants, which will not be the same as the holiday I was planning at all. He won’t want to go clubbing. He won’t want to eat out except at the very cheapest places. He’ll probably insist we go to the local supermarket and buy bread and marg and have sandwiches for dinner every day. And he won’t let me read by the pool because he won’t have wanted to waste any money on a book of his own, so he’ll expect me to talk to him all day long. This is going to be my worst holiday ever.’
‘You might be surprised,’ I tried.
‘When has Evan ever surprised me?’
Clare threw her phone into her beach bag.
‘Maybe a holiday together might bring back some of the magic,’ I dared to suggest. ‘He’s bound to relax once he’s been here for a couple of days. You’ve had nice holidays together before.’
‘Give it a rest.’ Clare fumed beneath her sun hat.
I felt a little guilty that I was still looking forward to the week ahead immensely. I couldn’t wait to be reunited with Callum and have at least half the adventures I had been planning before our shocking break-up. While Clare calculated that she had just five hours of freedom left, I was wishing every minute of those hours away. I just wanted to be back with my boyfriend.
‘I only wanted to try out a little taste of freedom again,’ Clare continued. ‘Just a week. If I miss him, then I’ll know that we’re right for each other. If I don’t . . .’
‘Oh, Clare,’ I said, ‘at least let’s try to enjoy this afternoon.’
But as far as Clare was concerned, her dream holiday was already over. She seemed to have decided that she wasn’t going to be able to enjoy a single minute more. She didn’t want to swim. She didn’t want to read. She sat under the sun umbrella with a face like thunder, scowling at her sudden change in fortune. She even turned down my suggestion that we have another cocktail.
‘I’d better not have any more,’ said Clare. ‘Evan hates it when I get tipsy.’
As the afternoon progressed, Clare and I were like the two little people on a weatherhouse. The more excited I became about Callum’s impending arrival, the quieter Clare grew. I went up to the room to get a cardigan to throw around my shoulders. When I came back down, I caught her staring off into space with a distinctly sad look on her face.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Look at the time.’
‘The boys’ plane will be landing in twenty minutes,’ I said. ‘How long do you think it will take them to get here?’
‘Not long enough.’
‘Clare, you’ve got to try and make the most of Evan being here too. Just think, you could be having a romantic dinner overlooking the sea tonight. How can you fail to have a good time doing that?’
‘Yeah,’ said Clare, taking another sip of her drink. ‘I’d rather have dinner with you.’
That was flattering, but I knew I would rather have dinner with Callum. The next hour and a half couldn’t pass quickly enough for me.
Chapter Thirty-Four
When she found out that Callum and Evan would be arriving in Majorca on the same plane, Clare had texted Evan to let him know, since she knew he would be pleased at the possibility of saving a few quid on a shared hire car.
‘Good thinking,’ he texted back. In the light of her recent unauthorised holiday spending spree, Clare was glad to be able to score at least one brownie point for thrift. Evan confirmed that he had already spotted Callum across the departure lounge and was on his way to let him know that from now on they would be travelling together.
I wasn’t so sure that Callum would be pleased with the idea. He and Evan had met before, of course, but though I had hoped that one day the men would be brothers-in-law, they definitely weren’t natural buddies. Callum thought Evan was uptight and priggish. A square. Evan thought Callum was an unbearable show-off in his designer jeans and Gucci sunglasses. He disapproved of the amount of booze Callum could sink on a night out. I wondered how they would fare on the drive north together. The disagreements would probably start at the rental-car desk.
I amused myself by imagining the scene at the airport. Evan and Callum would share a hire car, of course. They were both too tight to do anything else. But who would drive? I knew from the few times we had been out as a foursome that Callum thought Evan drove like an old man. Evan thought Callum was unreasonably reckless and drove too fast. I suppose it would come down to whoever wielded the credit card. That too would be an amusing scene. Whose plastic would they use? Which one of them would buckle first? I tried to engage Clare about it. I suggested we should take bets on who got to pay and who got to go behind the wheel. She didn’t care. She said she didn’t care about anything any more. My sister was nothing if not a drama queen.
When the boys finally arrived, I could tell at once that Evan had won that battle. He marched in ahead of Callum with a driver’s swagger.
Still Evan wasn’t pleased with his victory. After giving Clare a perfunctory sort of kiss ‘hello’, he was off.
‘Bloody stupid Micra. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I ended up with deep-vein thrombosis. Ridiculous, the amount of leg room in that thing. Just asking for a clot. If anything goes wrong, I will sue Europcar for my medical treatment.’
‘But why did you hire such a small car?’ Clare asked him. ‘They must have bigger cars than that.’
‘Clare,’ said Evan with a sigh, ‘do I really need to remind you that we’re supposed to be saving money, not spending it like water? This trip to Majorca is a major unseen expense, which has thrown out all my calculations for the whole year. That’s why I spent the least amount possible on a hire car. That’s why I drove all the way across the island in a position that cut off my circulation and has probably caused lasting damage.’
‘You could have taken the hotel bus,’ said Clare. ‘Plenty of leg room on that.’
‘What, and put myself in the hands of a driver who probably hasn’t even passed his test? Who certainly hasn’t passed a British test? You don’t know what standards, or lack of standards, these local bus drivers are held to. No, thanks. I would rather be in control of my own destiny.’
‘And drive us into a ditch all by
himself,’ Callum commented. It was the first time he had spoken. He had yet to say ‘hello’ to me.
‘That was entirely the other driver’s fault,’ said Evan. ‘She was all over the road.’
‘Ah well,’ said Clare, trying to avert an argument, ‘at least you’re both here now. Shall we have a celebratory cocktail?’
Evan picked up the cocktail menu and sucked his teeth at the prices. He shook his head.
‘I’ve got some duty-free brandy in my bag,’ he said.
‘But I hate brandy,’ said Clare. ‘And if you want to drink your duty-free, you’ll have to do it in the room. You’re not allowed to bring your own drinks to the communal areas. Can’t we just have a bottle of rosé here by the pool?’
‘You can have as many bottles of rosé as you like,’ said Evan, ‘as long as you don’t mind sitting on an old Ikea sofa for the whole of our married life.’
‘Christ. OK,’ said Clare, ‘I get it. I’ve spent too much money already. Let’s go to the bloody room.’
What a great start. Clare and Evan were soon gone. We heard them grumbling their way up the stairs. Callum and I looked at each other and shared a smile. Still he remained awkwardly on the other side of the table.
‘I’m glad you came,’ I told him.
And I really was so glad to see him there. For the two hours before he was due to arrive, I had been unable to concentrate on anything but the thought of his arrival. I had ripped a cardboard cocktail mat to shreds in my nervousness. I had not been so nervous to see him since the very early days of our relationship. As I waited, I was reminded of our first proper date. Though by then we had known each other for months through the office, I was sick with nerves as I crossed Covent Garden to the French restaurant he had chosen for our first official rendezvous after the Stockwell Lifts Christmas party. Callum had always had the ability to unnerve me. That first date, I had been convinced he was only doing it for a dare. Likewise, there was still a little part of me that didn’t believe this moment was for real.
What I Did On My Holidays Page 20
