Read Excess Baggage for Free Online Page A

and the curtain fabric was the same large patterned flowers the bold shades of a bowl of mixed citrus fruits. But here the ceilings were high and vaulted, lined with bleached wood slats, and instead of rather industrial air conditioning there were elegant brass ceiling fans whirring gently. It was a mock-colonial heaven. Lucy peeped into one of the bedrooms and saw mosquito nets draped from the ceiling round a four-poster bed. The bathroom was marble-lined and equipped with towels twice the size of those in the hotel’s main rooms. Her parents were certainly getting a treat and a half.
    ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, coming out to the terrace.
    ‘You know, it’s plenty big enough for you and Colette as well if you’d rather join us in here,’ Perry suggested.
    ‘Oh, well actually …’
    ‘I expect she’d rather be over there in the main block with the others. And I’m sure Colette wouldn’t want to be away from her cousins.’ Shirley was giving her husband what Lucy and Simon used to call The Look. Lucy grinned, grateful for once that her mother had accidentally got it right. She’d always found it hard to say no to her father. He’d always looked so anxious offering her anything, even small things like extra potatoes at supper or a lift to school, as if by refusing she was turning down the offer of his soul.
    ‘Mum’s right,’ she told him, ‘the others would be none too pleased if I came and played Queen Bee up here with you two.’ She gave Simon her own version of The Look before he could argue, and went to the edge of the terrace to survey the beach. A tall rangy man was hauling out yellow canoes from a wooden shack and arranging them on the sand below them, and further along by the water’s edge she could see a couple climbing aboard a jet ski. ‘That must be the dive shop the man I met was telling me about. I think I’ll go and check it out, see how much snorkelling equipment is to hire. I could teach Colette.’
    ‘Anything you want, Lucy love, just charge it to the bill,’ Perry said quietly. She kissed his cheek. It felt dry, like warm cardboard, and she wondered for a second or two if Simon might be right to worry. And the attitude to money was new too: they’d been generous parents, but keen on value for money and being careful not to splash it around. Now they talked about not being able to take it with you. Only the year before, Perry had joked about being way past the threescore years and ten. ‘Well into extra time now,’ he’d said. They’d all laughed but Lucy had looked around for wood to touch.
    Lucy ran down the steps to the shore and found Mark at the water-sports shop, pale, tired-looking and unmistakably English in beige linen shorts with a rigidly ironed crease down the front. She imagined Theresa back home in her cream and old-rose bedroom, packing as if she’d learned it, like her table manners, from a manual – tissue paper between each fold. Mark was inspecting a price list pinned to a wall of the ramshackle shop which was decorated with a flaking sea scene – badly in need of repainting – of vivid, cartoon-like pink and brown divers splashing in a turquoise fish-filled sea wearing scarlet flippers and outsize snorkels.
    ‘Hey, it’s the early one!’ Henry greeted Lucy from a hammock under another low tree in front of the dive shop, shaded from the strengthening sun by lines of ropes from which hung souvenir sarongs and T-shirts for sale. Lucy wondered if there was any of his time that he didn’t spend horizontal. He slid to the ground and stood with his hands on his hips, inspecting Mark. ‘This your husband?’ He put on an expression of brazen mock-disappointment. Lucy laughed. ‘No, this is my sister’s husband. Mark, this is Henry.’ Solemnly Henry and Mark shook hands like a pair of new business associates.
    ‘Come in the dive shop, let me do my job and talk you into parting with money. You got your PADI?’ Henry asked Mark. Henry, Lucy noticed, had