Read Holiday for Free Online Page A

status, there pulled his shirt off to sunbathe, and lay back.
    Finding this unsatisfactory, he sat up, looked about. The young family from the next table already busied themselves behind a red and blue wind-break. Father on his knees dug furiously in the soft sand, while the boys trotted up and down, interfering, constantly commenting. Their father’s energy seemed expended so that their little forays elsewhere had a point of return; they circled, then dropped to knees, poked a finger into an already collapsing sand pie, laughed, denounced or questioned, staggered up and away. The mother busied herself in an unhurried persistence, unpacking or arranging her bags and carriers, laying articles out for the children. She wore an unattractive bikini and as she knelt up Fisher noticed the red scar of the elastic pants or tights around her waist. Her belly was slightly slack, un-young, not recovered from her last childbearing. The bright face was serious as if the whole success of the day depended on her.
    Fisher waved; they did not notice.
    The sun warmed him, as he slipped in and out of his shirt, now that the wind had dropped. Once he nodded off, but woke comfortably, with plenty to occupy himself with. The little boys licked ice-cream cornets, after which their mother scrubbed mouths with a flannel. Father loped down to the sea, but did not stay in long. When he returned his hair stood on end.
    An elderly couple parked their deckchairs at the side of Fisher’s. There was no need for the beach was far from crowded but perhaps they’d chosen him as a suitable companion. He remembered his father pontificating. ‘The best thing about a holiday is that you meet interesting people. New places have something to be said for ’em, but it’s the new faces.’
    ‘Nature is fine,’ young Fisher had chimed in, ‘but human nature finer. Keats.’
    ‘That’s right.’ Arthur’s false teeth demonstrated his pleasure. And the old man set out for them, sorted them out, butted into conversations, was snubbed now and then, but generally ended with a catch of three or four ‘persons of learning’. Where he’d come across that expression Fisher did not know but by it his father meant able to dispense information that he considered cultural. There was one retired pharmacist who talked about poisons, but tried to keep young Edwin out of earshot; another, a schoolmaster, explained Roman burial rites, while another, a military-looking gentleman, was an expert on fossils and produced a handful of belemnites from his pocket, beautiful as bullets.
    True enough, the elderly man after struggling with a mound of kit, remarked to Fisher that the wind had dropped. Within five minutes he confided that they had only just returned from a holiday in Greece.
    ‘And we’re here to get over that,’ the wife interrupted.
    They had educated north-country voices, Manchester perhaps, and sounded honest, robustly so. Their knowledge of Greece impressed; the man had been there during the war, and laced his accounts with Modern Greek phrases.
    ‘We go every year,’ he said. ‘We’ve a daughter living in Athens. But it’s getting just a bit much for me. We’re not sure about next summer.’
    ‘Doesn’t your daughter visit you, then?’
    The woman continued. Every May without fail; she was married to a high civil servant, but they had no children. It was a great disappointment. There followed the story of Phyllis’s courtship, she’d met her husband at Oxford, and ménage in high society. She spoke the language like a native, was often mistaken for a Greek.
    ‘Did she learn it at the university?’ Fisher asked.
    ‘No. She knew Daddy was keen on Greece. Perhaps that’s why she took notice of Eleutherios in the first place.’
    They needed no prompting, these two; insisted that he join them in a cup of coffee, even seemed to have carried down spare cups for suitable strangers. While they talked, he considered these two decent people. At this moment