The Holiday Read online

  THE HOLIDAY

  Guy Bellamy

  First published by Simon & Schuster Ltd in 1995

  Copyright © Guy Bellamy 1995

  This edition published in 2020 by Lume Books

  30 Great Guildford Street,

  Borough, SE1 0HS

  The right of Guy Bellamy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  For KATE BELLAMY

  Table of Contents

  WEEK 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Week 2

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Week 3

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  I am indebted to Elaine Lewis, who sacrificed valuable holiday time in the higher cause of literary research. And my thanks to Tessa Grellier and Sir Cyril Pitts who told me things I needed to know but didn’t.

  G. B.

  WEEK 1

  Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

  Francis Bacon

  1

  High over the Languedoc, a Boeing 737 belonging to Air France is scorching a solitary path through a sky that has become, in the last ten miles, completely cloudless. The view from the windows is no longer of endless white fluff but of the Cévennes, old granite mountains thickly wooded with oaks and pines and interspersed with steep-sided valleys and clear mountain streams. As the pilot makes a slight adjustment directing the aircraft to the south-east, those on the left of the plane find themselves gazing down at the wildest and least-explored region of France.

  It is a view which holds no interest for one man in the first-class compartment whose immediate needs are adequately catered for. He has a large gin on the tray in front of him, a copy of The Times, and a beautiful girl in the next seat. It is the opinion of some of his fellow passengers in this privileged corner of the plane that the girl is too young to be his wife, and too old to be his daughter. It is possible that she is his secretary, but this is not an option that appeals to the bored passengers in the first-class compartment who did not get where they are today without exercising a little imagination. As the plane heads south, the bare brown hills below are replaced by olive and cypress trees, but this transition passes unnoticed by the first-class customers of Air France who, with the arrival of smoked salmon, have more immediate consolations to attend to.

  Andrew Marner is sipping his gin and wondering what else he has to do to get a knighthood. The path to honours and recognition had always seemed clear enough: an exemplary life, a little charity work and copious donation to the Conservative Party. Andrew Marner has not only completed this hat-trick, but he is also a magazine publisher, and frightened politicians traditionally shower publishers with honours in the hope of sympathetic publicity. That Andrew Marner has so far been ignored by the mysterious men in Whitehall is a continuing source of grievance in a world which has usually bent to his will. He picks up The Times again and studies a new explanation of the economic malaise which afflicts Western civilisation.

  The ambitions of Andrew Marner are but idle whims compared with the demons which drive the girl who sits beside him. Kimberley Neal, a tall, leggy blonde of thirty, is twenty years younger than her handsome, silver-haired travelling companion. She has never paid for a first-class air ticket in her life but is evidently at home here.

  There is no gin on the tray in front of her, which she is using as a desk. On an unruled A4 pad she is scribbling sentence after sentence with a gold Cross biro. Occasionally she pauses and looks thoughtfully at the other passengers but mostly the words are pouring out as if this is a conversation which she is monopolising.

  Kimberley Neal writes a page in one of the weekly magazines owned by Andrew Marner. She is hoping that someone from a national newspaper will spot her column and offer her far more money than she now earns to write for them, so that she will be read by millions instead of thousands, and earn thousands instead of hundreds. It is a column of comment, hyperbole and venom, but what Kimberley is really selling is her opinion. She has opinions on everything – Princess Di, children’s television, Salman Rushdie, the modern man, designer clothes, the morals of politicians and the politics of morality. No subject has drifted into her sights that she couldn’t pass a 200-word judgement on within half an hour.

  She picks her pad off the tray, sits back in her seat and reads what she has written: ‘The arrival of the ten-year-old murderer is a chastening moment for the so-called civilised community known as Great Britain. What do you do with a ten-year-old murderer?

  ‘But the real question is: who has created this monster? Who has produced it, moulded it, trained it? Whose handiwork is it?

  ‘And the answer, naturally, is the parents. The dismal phenomenon of juvenile evil will continue until we deal with its root cause.

  ‘I’d have the parents in the dock along with their poorly-reared offspring. And if a child is convicted of murder, I’d give Mummy and Daddy not less than five years each.’

  Kimberley Neal reads over these words with a satisfied smile. Bringing up children is not a dilemma that she has faced, having meticulously avoided the horrors of motherhood while cheerfully pursuing a sex-life that makes a rabbit seem ascetic. She offers the pad to Andrew Marner who lowers his newspaper to take it.

  ‘Splendid, Kim,’ he says, fondling her knee. ‘It takes you four paragraphs to say something that would take anyone else four pages.’

  ‘Any ideas?’ she asks. ‘I’ve got to fax this column by tomorrow.’

  Andrew Marner drinks his gin. He pays other people to have ideas and often wonders where they get them from.

  ‘Why don’t you wait until we arrive?’ he says eventually. ‘I should have thought that the south of France will provide you with plenty of material. The food, the mores, the Gallic charm.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ says Kimberley Neal. ‘If I dateline it “the Côte d’Azur”, everybody will know that I’m here with you.’

  The remark gives Andrew Marner a jolt. He is so comfortably ensconced here with this girl that he has completely forgotten that deceit is built into the programme. He glances round the first-class compartment, half-expecting to see a familiar face gleefully recognising him.

  He is flying to Nice for a series of business meetings with a French publisher; wrapping a three-week holiday around these tedious discussions was not difficult. Nor was it hard to persuade Kimberley Neal to accompany him, or to convince his wife that she would be less bored at home. In fact, everything has been so easy that he has forgotten the dangers. He beckons a stewardess and asks for another gin, and then reaches between his knees for his code-locked executive briefcase. The documents that he draws from this wrinkle his brow. Too many words are in French, and his staff have failed to provide him with a translation. He stares at the sheaf of papers but, making no sense to him, they fail to hold his attention.

  Instead he contemplates life in a five-star hotel with Kimberley Neal. The sexual athletics which had once been a central part of his life have been circumscribed by recent depressing developments, and he wistfully recalls the magic years that began with the acceptance of the Pill and skidded to a panic-stricken halt with the arrival of Aids – twenty years of spontaneous sex without fear of descendants or disease. Caution was now the fashion, but when he met Kimberley Neal on a felucca on the Nile, she volunteered the information quite early on that she had been tested for Aids (for an article that she was writing, she said) and suddenly it was just like the sexy Seventies again.

  He returns the documents to his case and picks up his Times. He reads about transputer microprocessors, fibre optic telephone systems and video CDs. He marvels at the progress the human race is making, but what really grabs his attention as he turns the pages of his newspaper is the high proportion of knighthoods that have been awarded to the people mentioned in it.

  Twenty rows behind him where the knee-room is harder to find and the cutlery is white plastic, sit a silent couple who are immersed in such literature as they can find in the seat pocket in front. They ignore the occasional information that the pilot feels obliged to pass along about the progress of the flight, and decline the offer of duty-free baubles from the hyperactive cabin staff.

  Bruce Kerwin, forty, freshly redundant and confronting a future that horrifies him, finds it impossible to relax on a plane. His routine is to stay belted in his seat, never visit the toilets or stand up, and to listen with a morbid intensity to the sound of the aircraft’s engines, monitoring and worrying over every change of tone. He is aware that this concern would make him an object of ridicule among today’s hordes who use planes as carelessly as their parents once used buses, and so he suffers in silence, holding himself in a state of nervous tension until that delicious moment when he will feel the wheels bump on to the reassuring concrete of an endless runway. Only then will he allow himself the indulgence of a smile, as if the triumph of this safe arrival is all his.

  A neurosis like this is infectious, and beside him his wife Frances betrays few sig
ns that she is enjoying the journey. She is reading an article about Italian fashion designers in an airline magazine but is distracted by her husband’s laconic precis of the realities of air travel, delivered tactlessly at the airport.

  ‘You’ve got a machine that’s seventy metres long,’ he had said, ‘and you pour two hundred thousand litres of flammable liquid into it, sit four hundred people on top, light the fuel in several places and go rocketing into the air at over two hundred miles an hour. Does that seem sensible to you?’

  This close to take-off her response is less confident than it might have been.

  ‘People do it,’ she said.

  ‘People climb mountains,’ he had said. ‘Their bleached bones are everywhere.’

  Bruce Kerwin is a man who has run into a mid-life crisis rather earlier than he had expected. The career which was supposed to carry him in comparative comfort until retirement or death has evaporated in the recession. It was a double blow because of the surprise. He wasn’t working in one of those vulnerable jobs like building or manufacturing, where the first winds of economic disturbance blow thousands into the dole queue. He was the manager of a Legal & General branch office, dealing in insurance and mortgages; it was a job where you could smell the money. But one morning there was no job and he left the firm their car and walked home.

  In the days that follow, he discovers that all those stories about the shortage of jobs is not just stuff they used to fill up the news bulletins on television. It turns out to be an accurate picture of how things are today. Nobody wants to employ anybody.

  This is not a setback that Bruce Kerwin is temperamentally equipped to handle, and as he sits tensely in the sky over France he wonders whether he is genetically gloomy, whether pessimism is bred in his bones. He has watched other men throw themselves into the demands of four-children families while doing nightwork and earning little, and yet managing to offer the rest of the world a smile and a joke. Bruce Kerwin cannot do that. Even when the times are good he seems to bring a depressed expression to the party.

  He spots this flaw in himself but he can’t explain it except by heredity. Like begats like. Footballers have sons who play football, actors have sons who act, politicians have sons who go into politics. His father was not a happy man.

  Frances Kerwin, at thirty-eight, is an attractive woman, with black shoulder-length hair and sparkling eyes. She is wearing a sleeveless red dress and white cotton jacket bought, on one of her many shopping trips, specially for this holiday, which was her idea.

  ‘You’re out of work, you can’t get a job, we’ll have a holiday,’ she had told her husband. ‘Think of all the times when you couldn’t take a holiday because of the demands of the job. Well, now you can. It’ll give you a chance to consider your future.’

  ‘I haven’t got a future,’ said Bruce Kerwin, but his wife ignored this and headed for the nearest travel agent.

  Now, as the Boeing edges them ever nearer to the red rocks, the golden sand and the blue sea of the Riviera, she is determined to forget the uncertain prospects of the Kerwin family and make this a holiday to remember.

  She turns to her husband who is staring expressionlessly through a window. With his short hair and his little moustache, he reminds her of the ailing star of an Aids documentary, but his manifold vices do not run to sodomy, a solace she clings to in these difficult times.

  ‘What was the name of the girl who sang “Little Things Mean A Lot”?’ she asks. ‘Do you remember the record?’

  ‘Was it Brenda Lee?’

  ‘No,’ she says impatiently. ‘Not Brenda Lee.’

  Bruce Kerwin turns back to the window and looks down at wild mountain terrain and hilltop villages. Why do they call this a crowded planet? he wonders. There seems to be room in France for another billion people.

  Frances Kerwin hums the tune to herself but the singer’s name won’t come. She must either remember the singer or forget the problem, or it will nag at her for days. She picks up her magazine and tries to concentrate on Italian designers.

  Sunlight pours into the cabin, hitting their faces at an unnatural angle. An aged couple struggle up the aisle in the direction of the toilets and Bruce Kerwin frowns at them as if their selfish journey will interfere with the equilibrium of the plane. He glances at his watch and then remembers to wind it on one hour. This seems to bring his arrival time much nearer and he sits back feeling that his ordeal is almost over.

  ‘What are we going to do on this holiday, anyway?’ he asks.

  Frances Kerwin puts down her magazine with its pictures of chiffon tops and satin trouser suits, and says: ‘Think of it as a second honeymoon.’

  ‘A second honeymoon?’ says her husband. The idea disturbs him. Recent setbacks have mysteriously drained his energy.

  ‘Think of appetites,’ says Frances, smiling flirtatiously. ‘Food, drink, love. We’re going to satisfy ’em.’

  ‘What about sunbathing and sightseeing?’ asks her husband. ‘Any time for that?’

  ‘We’ll try to fit it in,’ says Frances, ‘but we’ve got to concentrate on the essentials first.’

  Bruce Kerwin tries to remember his first honeymoon, twenty years ago when marriage was still fashionable. A cheap hotel beneath a grey Cornish sky, a windy beach. Life was full of promise, laughter and hope because he didn’t realise then how hard it could become. Food, drink and love? There had been fish and chips, beer and sex, and they had never been so happy. It seemed inconceivable that all that lovemaking should not have produced a baby, but no child appeared then or later. It was the first blemish on their life plan.

  The years have sobered him now – the years with their dashed hopes, unfulfilled ambitions and sorry disappointments. He has learned to adjust, to water down his hopes, to lower his expectations. Until the bombshell of redundancy came flying through the window, he had learned to accept – but now he is beginning to wonder whether the world has been entirely fair with him. A sense of grievance is beginning to gnaw.

  Thirty thousand feet beneath them, threading its way between olive groves and fields of lavender, a grey Ford Granada is doggedly heading south. It has forsaken the autoroute in search of wild, untamed countryside – wooden mountains and limestone gorges – but is slowing now in the hope of enjoying the more certain pleasures of French liquor.

  At the wheel, contemplating a rare spell of leisure, is Roger Blake, a lean man of about thirty whose handsome features are beginning to look a little worn. He has calculated that it is just under 800 miles from Calais to Toulon and he is wondering where he is going to break this journey and spend the night. He follows a small Italian car off the main road and drives behind it into a village. A notice in the back window of the Italian car says bimbo a bordo, and there is, indeed, a small child in the back waving a soft toy that has one arm.

  The Ford Granada pulls into a brown, tree-filled square where a man on stilts is playing a violin.

  ‘What we want,’ says Roger Blake, ‘is a proper French bar with a zinc counter.’

  The girl to whom this remark is addressed is studying a Michelin map of southern France which, so far as she can tell, they have not yet reached. She is a slim, pretty girl with short, brown, wavy hair. For the purpose of reading the map she is wearing a pair of cheap, wire-framed glasses.

  ‘Oh yes?’ she says. ‘And what’s the French for breathalyser?’

  Roger Blake ignores this and parks the car in front of a small bar next to a patisserie. He climbs out and stretches his long legs and then he looks up at the cloudless sky in which a lonely Boeing 737 seems, from this distance, to be hardly moving at all.

  ‘Abroad’s better,’ he says. ‘The climate, the food, the wine, the scenery. Also, people don’t talk to you.’

  ‘You like that, do you?’ asks the girl, whose name is Esme. ‘People not talking to you?’

  ‘Reticence is a much undervalued quality,’ says Roger Blake, pushing the bar’s door open. ‘Think of the nonsense that people talk when they do open their mouths.’