On first sight, her impression of him had been that he looked like either James or Edward Fox, a notion she in time revised to conclude that he resembled both of them plus at least a good half-dozen other male relatives they might have. Other than that, he was an extremely difficult man to get a measure of. He was no taller than she (five-six at the most), and appeared as slight of frame as he was light of foot, yet up-close his arms struck her as taut rather than skinny. There was restless, mercurial energy about his aristocratic features, a mischievous, almost incongruous geniality to his face, which possibly took years off an accurate estimate of his age. At the same time, his skin had a deeply sun-weathered tint and texture that suggested greater exposure than an annual fortnight on the Med, which possibly stuck a few years back on. She guessed if you went for a number between 55 and 70, you’d be wrong, but you’d get marks for your working.
‘Oh, don’t torment me with thoughts of what I’m missing,’ he chided. ‘The glorious twelfth, grouse in season, clear skies on the moors, country-house cooking, open fires, single malts …’ He sighed, smiling ruefully as they climbed the stairs. ‘And let me assure you, my good lady,’ he continued, ‘there’s nothing piques the tastebuds for a meal and a dram quite like a long day blasting defenceless creatures out of the skies.’
Simone laughed. ‘So why are you still here?’
He produced a compact disc like a conjuring card. ‘This is why,’ he said. ‘Beta version of our surveillance program, hopefully with one or two fewer bugs than the alpha release, which had more than Doctor Fleming’s celebrated cheese sandwich. It arrived yesterday, more than a fortnight late, but that it arrived at all is reason for tearful gratitude when you’re dealing with software engineers. The sooner I’ve given it a full run-through, the sooner I can be out taking pot-shots at your native birdlife.’
‘If it works,’ Simone cautioned, showing him crossed fingers.
‘Oh good God no, my dear, it won’t work,’ he said with a grin and a shake of his wispy fair hair. ‘But once I’ve listed everything that’s wrong with this version, they can get on with fixing it while I’m off doing my bit for the distillery trade.’
Vale and his company had been contracted as security consultants shortly after a Delta marketing focus group uncovered ‘certain misgivings’ (Simone had seen Gavin personally Tippex the word ‘baulked’ from the report) about the consequences of assembling hundreds of strangers in a confined space with several miles of water between themselves and police intervention. Vale’s task was to assess all the ways in which the paying guests could harass, rob, assault, rape, kill or eat each other, then implement the means to minimise the risks of them doing so. He was charged with designing and installing a state-of-the-art surveillance system, as well as devising control and containment procedures, all of which had to be operable by whichever dopes Gavin hired locally once Vale signed off.
Simone had first met him in the spring at an outdoor afternoon reception Gavin hosted for the project’s many and various contractors. Such social functions were normally held indoors after dark, meaning she had to stay home with the twins and thus not cramp her husband’s dynamically virile image. However, on that occasion, Gavin had been playing the casual-sweater family-man card, intended to convey a sturdy responsibility to businessmen who might have reservations about their chances of ever getting paid for their involvement in such a radical project. Simone suspected Gavin was also half hoping the wife-and-weans, cherished-dependants bit would appeal to his contractors’ own paternal instincts and get them to knock the odd zero off their tenders. It was a desperate ploy she’d seen attempted by car salesmen: you went into their office and there was a photo of the missus and the adored offspring on Daddy’s desk, except it was facing away from Daddy’s chair, so the prospective customer would notice it. Simone had often wanted to ask these guys whether the picture was turned the wrong way because they found their kids too ugly to look at.
Vale had ‘materialised’ beside her that day too, with a spare glass of champagne, while Gavin was off wearing Rachel and Patricia. It was an act of attentiveness her husband had neglected throughout the afternoon, something Vale had unquestionably noticed. Noticing things was, after all, his business. His solicitude might, in anyone else, have seemed clumsy or ulterior, but the sense of observed propriety about the man put her immediately at ease.
Soon enough there came moments when she fleetingly wished his conduct and his motives not so proper; but only moments, only fleeting. The truth, she understood, was not that she fancied Vale (he could be twice her age, for God’s sake), but that she liked the idea of him fancying her. Of someone fancying her. Christ knows Gavin didn’t.
‘Anyway, enough about me. How are you, Mrs Hutchison?’ Vale asked, pivoting on the landing to ascend the next flight.
Simone stopped the word ‘fine’ in her throat. She was sick of pretending, of suffering in dignified silence – whose dignity was it preserving anyway?
‘Well, not at my best, I have to admit,’ she said. ‘I understand from my brief exchange with the lad downstairs that my husband’s been skewering his latest tart in the room I’m about to spend the night in. But then, you probably knew that, didn’t you?’
Vale said nothing, but gave her an apologetic look. She appreciated the honesty.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. ‘I’m not having a go. Besides, this place has only been functional a few weeks and he’s been banging her longer than that, so it’s not as if you knew before me or anything.’
‘No,’ he assured. ‘But now I know you know before he knows you know. You know?’
She couldn’t help laughing. Vale’s gentle humour had an irresistibly calming influence. Nonetheless, one thought did trouble her as they reached the door to the suite.
‘Mr Vale, I appreciate that you’re sort of working for Gavin, and in surveillance even, but can I trust you to keep—’
‘My dear Mrs Hutchison, I should remind you that while I have been contracted to install a surveillance system, I am not being paid to actually survey anything. Therefore neither your husband’s unconscionable behaviour nor my evaluation of him as a self-deluded buffoon are matters for my professional concern.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, sliding the plastic keycard into its slot.
Vale followed her into the spacious suite and placed her bag delicately down on the luggage rack. ‘Now, are there any more courtesies I can offer today, ma’am?’ he asked, standing with his back to the open door.
‘Not unless you stretch to professional killing.’
‘Ehm, I’m afraid that’s not a service I offer here in the private sector, no.’ He smiled.
‘Oh, that’s all right. I’ll just have to divorce him instead.’
‘Are you serious?’ Vale asked, the levity temporarily vanished from his voice.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘Very much so.’
‘Good for you,’ he told her.
Simone took off her jacket and placed it carefully on the king-size bed. When she turned around again, Vale was gone.
She closed the door and sat down at the suite’s bureau, looking around the opulently decorated quarters. She had to hand that much to Gavin – he might not have any taste himself, but he did know to hire people who did.
There was a rumbling, grinding noise from somewhere below, heralding the return of the Laguna’s electricity. The bureau’s angle-poise came on, as did the ceiling lights and one of the bedside lamps: the one on the right. Gavin slept on the left. She pictured the scene and smiled acidly to herself. He might be playing on a different instrument, but he wasn’t making any better music. The last time they were here, the poor girl was doubtless reading to pass the time while Gav took his scarcely earned post-coital snooze.
His last request to her, regarding the twins, drifted irritatingly to mind, and she cursed herself for allowing it to bully her into reaching for the phone. However, the tone went dead every time she dialled for an outside line, an
d a call to the still-stammering receptionist confirmed that the resort’s landline telecom links were temporarily down. She retrieved her Motorola from her jacket, flipping it open to be told, familiarly, that the battery power was too low to support a signal. Gavin was always nagging her about recharging it, which was precisely why she made a point of letting it run down. She could have lived without the thing altogether, as its principal function was to allow him to satisfy himself from a remote distance that she was at all times attending to her motherly duties.
Simone tucked the mobile back into her jacket and hung up the garment inside the spacious walk-in wardrobe, then she began unpacking the overnight bag, unfastening the hooks and unfolding the canvas lengthwise. She removed Gavin’s shirt and suit first, holding them up on their plastic hanger and eyeing a fountain pen on the bureau with calculated malice. No, she decided. Maximum self-inflation for a maximum bang when he burst. Then she took out her own evening wear and surveyed it with a smile. It had suffered a few minor creases in transit, so she hung it up in the bathroom rather than the wardrobe: an old travel technique. Leave it there while you steamed the place up and it had roughly the same effect as an iron.
Grabbing a bottle of fizzy water from the mini-bar, she noticed a small strand of orange foil snagged just inside the door. Veuve Clicquot, she identified, presumably the bimbo’s purchase, in which case Simone had to admit she shared her taste. Gavin always went for Moe¨t, on the assumption that if it was the one Freddie Mercury sang about, it must be the most famous and therefore the best. The fact that the average supermarket Cava tasted better was not a consideration that troubled him.
She poured the water into a tall glass and dropped the empty bottle into the nearby bin, wondering at the absurdity of the little fridge being stocked as though the hotel was open for business. It was the same in all the guests’ rooms tonight, Gavin going the whole nine yards to convey what the place would be like when it was finished. Perhaps he’d argue that it was effectively a test-run ahead of forthcoming similar events for investors and travel journalists, but Simone knew which party he was most keen to impress. Still, at least it meant that the suite’s sheets had been changed since its last adulterous occupation.
Simone slid open the door to the private terrace and walked outside. There were still remnants of transparent polythene where the edges of the sunken jacuzzi abutted the terrace’s tiles. A smattering of plasterdust betrayed that the tub had never been filled; nor was it likely to be until the whole monstrous hulk was ultimately towed somewhere a damn sight warmer. On either side, shallow channels cut in the floor optimistically awaited earth and pot-plants. Simone walked to the end of the balcony and swept the dust from its rail with a paper hanky from her pocket. She leaned forward on her elbow and sipped from her glass, looking down upon the absurd sprawl that was the Floating Island Paradise Resort.
Hutchison’s Folly.
It was the consummation of Gavin’s ambitions, and one rare thing they both agreed on was that there could be no more appropriate monument to the achievements of his career. Their perspectives upon said monument and said career were where they diverged.
The history of tourism was replete with horrible ideas, most of which had unfortunately been horrible enough to succeed. In his time, Gavin had implemented just about all of the established ones and contributed a few stinkers of his own. But now he had come up with possibly the most horrible idea yet conceived in an industry that had made a sacrament of vulgarity.
When the technology allowed, Simone believed, we would one day see rotund Glaswegians in garments bearing the legend: ‘My pal went to the second moon of Jupiter and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ – these being gifts from their radiation-blistered neighbours, who will have at length regaled them of where to get the best full English breakfast on Neptune, while complaining that the Martians still haven’t learned to do a decent fish supper.
‘Make the world England’ had been the motto of imperialist ambition. Where invasion and colonisation had failed, tourism was rampantly succeeding. The poet Hugh McDiarmid once said that England destroyed nations not by conquest but by pretending they didn’t exist, words which went a long way towards explaining, for instance, why centuries of Spanish culinary heritage had been wiped off menus to make way for ‘bubble and squeak’.
Meanwhile Scotland had neither alibi nor mitigation for the charge of complicity. It might offer its usual excuse for absolutely everything – ‘a big boy done it and ran away’ – except that too many witnesses had seen it helping the aforementioned big boy, and not just on this occasion either. For every Balearic bar-pump dispensing Watney’s Red Barrel or Tetley Bitter, there was one spewing McEwan’s Lager or Tartan Special; nor were the locals going to flog the Jocks much paella until they’d sussed a way to batter and deep-fry the stuff.
Gavin appreciated this, although he’d phrased it differently: ‘People don’t like anything foreign at the best of times; they certainly don’t want to be bothered with it while they’re away their holidays.’ He had built a career on pandering to the great British sense of unadventure. The success of Flyaway Holidays was propelled by his uncompromising belief in giving people what they wanted when they travelled abroad, viz: exactly the same things they got at home, but with better weather.
While the major holiday firms attempted to improve their market share through price wars, brochure redesigns and expensive TV campaigns, the smaller Flyaway carved out a steadily increasing slice for itself through the widening cycle of customer satisfaction and word of mouth. People who don’t like anything different aren’t going to risk a different holiday firm if they trust yours to deliver what they want; and what’s more they’ll have lots of friends who think the same way.
Flyaway had been dawdling myopically towards bankruptcy before Gavin arrived, or at least that was how he liked to tell it. Certainly Simone remembered he’d been advised against taking the post – even though it was the first he’d been offered – because the company wasn’t expected to be around much longer. As it turned out, he wasn’t so much their new graduate recruit as their last roll of the dice, but he came up double-sixes. On Gavin’s advice, they pulled out of everywhere but Spain, and even there abandoned destinations deemed too small or ‘too ethnic’, with the rule of thumb being that if there was a fishing village still surviving in the vicinity, forget it. They concentrated activities on the big resorts, and further focused their market by booking up a larger number of rooms in a smaller number of hotels. There was no point, Gavin reasoned, in buying up a few slots in a complex where Thomsons had half the joint to themselves, because not only could they undercut you in the brochures, but they would always have bigger clout with the hotelier.
Gavin’s strategy was to monopolise the premises Flyaway booked into, so that they could then tell the locals exactly how they wanted the place run: no point endeavouring to make the punters feel at home if some dago’s going to offer them huevos con chorizo when they wanted sausage and eggs. The Flyaway brochure consequently became the first to offer ‘guaranteed British menus’ in its hotels, but it was perhaps some of the smaller touches that cemented the firm’s reputation, such as always supplying sachets of Nescafé (or even better, Mellow Birds) at breakfast as an alternative to freshly brewed coffee, which everyone knew the continentals couldn’t get right.
It wasn’t a recipe for overnight success. Gavin’s scaling-down and focusing policies kept the company afloat that first sticky summer; growing back up again was going to take a while, but this time they were building on stronger foundations. Within five years Flyaway were setting new records for repeat visits to the same hotels, and their customer-loyalty figures were becoming the envy of the industry.
They expanded slowly but successfully in Spain, then had an initially cautious go at repeating the formula elsewhere. Cyprus was first, an obvious choice given its established British connections and the helpful fact that most of the natives spoke English. Malta followed, for similar obvi
ous reasons. Then they had taken a leap of faith in having a crack at the more developed Greek islands. This had necessarily seen the company invest in its first purpose-built ‘resort hotels’, the extant local accommodation having proven unsuitable. There had been a great deal of nervousness at Flyaway about broaching this more developmental aspect of the industry, but it wasn’t shared by Gavin, who saw it as a natural progression. They had been knocking hotels into shape all along, so building them from scratch presented nothing but opportunity. His own reservations were about the destination, as despite all the bars, discos and reinforced concrete that had sprung up on Aegean shores, he feared the Greek islands might have too many connotations of rusticity in the minds of his target market. Even on Corfu, the fishing-village factor was still worryingly high.
As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about. The company name carried enough trust to fill the first hotels on their debut summer, then the crucial second-year figures bore out that word-of-mouth had been good and the Flyaway formula had prevailed even in Greece. With confidence soaring, a larger-scale strategy was planned, with the Black Sea outlined as the next area of expansion.
However, in Gavin’s view there was still one major obstacle to providing the perfect foreign holiday: foreigners. Flyaway’s brochures might be able to guarantee British food, but one thing they couldn’t guarantee was that when you went down to the beach after eating it, there wouldn’t be German towels draped imperialistically over all the sun-loungers.
Wasn’t it possible, he’d wondered aloud, to somehow harness the benefits of a foreign climate without the inconvenience of foreign living? Cruise liners had always aspired to this, but in Gavin’s experience they’d never quite managed it, as they traded the inconveniences of foreign living for the inconveniences of maritime living. No matter how big they built them, however many casinos and restaurants they incorporated, the whole affair tended to have an inescapable ‘indoors’ feel to it, like one big building that happened to have a swimming pool on the roof.
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Page 9
