The Mini Break Page 4

  He returns my call three and a half minutes later to say the answer is no.

  ‘I can sell my car, and downgrade it to something cheaper,’ I tell Dan, stifling the urge to weep.

  ‘You could downgrade to the bus like me.’

  ‘We need one car in the household, it wouldn’t be practical otherwise,’ I insist, attempting to conceal my alarm.

  I phone Rich back to add five grand to our offer and wait for his return call as I drive us back to Liverpool, savouring the beautiful interior of my automobile while I can. The clock ticks painfully towards 5 p.m.

  ‘I can’t bear this. He said he’d come back to me today and it’s now six minutes to five. They close then.’

  ‘So there’s still six minutes,’ Dan says calmly. Dan is always calm. It drives me mad sometimes, but mostly I’ve found this to be a positive quality in a boyfriend – particularly, in my experience, following hairdressing crises.

  ‘Listen, Gemma,’ he goes on, ‘try not to be devastated if we can’t make this work. There’ll be other houses.’

  ‘Not on the evidence of what we’ve seen so far. I’d be uncheer-upable if it’s a no.’

  ‘Oh, I’d think of a way to cheer you up.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Bugger off,’ I tut, ‘I’m being serious.’ The ‘will you marry me’ quip has been trotted out regularly ever since I confided in Dan that I’d rather chew off my own arm than end up like my parents – just for the sake of a big dress. He laughs as we turn into Liverpool city centre and the phone rings. I pull over to answer.

  ‘Rich?’

  ‘Nope, Spiderman.’ I hesitate. ‘Pah, gotcha! No, you were actually right first time. It is Rich. Rich Cummins. From Pritchards estate agents.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Dan reaches over and clutches my hand. He feels warm and safe and I know that, whatever happens, the house of our dreams or not, as long as we’re together we’re always going to be all right.

  ‘Before we get onto the offer, might I ask whether one of you had a go on that rocking horse while you were there?’

  I hold my breath. ‘Oh Rich, I’m so sorry – I meant to say earlier that I’d pay for the damage.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s okay. It was actually already broken. I was just meant to warn you about it, that’s all – everyone seems to want to have a go. Anyway, the offer . . .’

  A glint of light sparkles in Dan’s eyes as Rich delivers the verdict.

  ‘Sorry, Gem. Not even close. It’s time to look for another house.’

  Prologue

  Manchester Airport, July 2006

  There is a universal rule of travel that applies to any holiday destination on the planet: the sunnier the resort you’ve visited, the more ferociously it will piss down when you land back in the UK.

  And Zante was sunny. So sunny that, as my friends and I step onto British tarmac, shivering in the drizzle, it feels as though the only thing in the world that isn’t grey is my nose, which is an alarming shade of red. Oh, and possibly my toes, which, courtesy of the flip-flops that seemed like a good idea when I set off, are now as blue and frozen as radioactive ice pops.

  Still, I can’t complain about the weather, which was the one element of the holiday that was excellent. That qualifies it as a rarity.

  ‘How are your bowels today, Imogen?’ enquires Meredith cheerfully as we step onto the travelator.

  The family of four in front spin round to get a good look at me.

  ‘Better,’ I whisper. ‘Though that’s not saying much.’ Twenty-four hours ago, I was gripped by the sort of cramps normally associated with unanaesthetised intestinal surgery, prompted – according to resort gossip – by a recurrent swimming-pool superbug for which our two and a half star hotel was rewarded a modest role on Watchdog last year.

  Meredith hadn’t mentioned that detail when she persuaded Nicola and me to book this two-night trip to celebrate her hen night. That is, her third hen night. She and her boyfriend, Nathan, have one of those on-off relationships – one that’s so on-off that if you try to keep up it makes your head spin. At the moment it’s on, but that guarantees nothing: by the end of the week, she could well have cancelled the 350-seat wedding marquee in Hampshire, fired the string quartet and sent her mother nose-diving to her third nervous breakdown.

  ‘I don’t know about you two, but I had a whale of a time,’ Meredith declares, apparently confident that we’ll answer in the affirmative. ‘I know it wasn’t luxurious, but you got used to those crawly things after a while, don’t you think?’

  I still have no idea what those ‘crawly things’ were – David Attenborough would have struggled to identify them – but I do know that I didn’t get used to them. Or the shower, with a choice of two heat settings (arctic and lava); or the hair I found in my food every meal (collectively, they’d have produced an entire toupee); or the walls that shook when the couple next door were throwing up, singing or shagging, the latter of which, judging by the speed and noise, involved a variety of moves that could have won them a part in Riverdance.

  I didn’t get used to any of it, and neither, judging by her heavy eyelids, did Nicola. ‘It was great, Meredith,’ she replies heroically. ‘I’m just glad you had a good time. That’s the most important thing.’

  Neither Nicola or I are flashy types by nature; we didn’t grow up surrounded by luxury of any description. In fact, we both grew up in the distinctly unpretentious surroundings of suburban south Liverpool, where we met at secondary school. But even we have standards.

  Which is why Meredith, my neighbour in London until recently, is an enigma. Her family appears to own half of the south coast, her father was a major in the British Army and all her other friends have names that belong in a P. G. Wodehouse novel. So my only explanation for her infinite tolerance of the hellhole we’ve just visited is that she sees it as a novelty.

  ‘You know, if you’d wanted to go somewhere a bit posher, I would’ve treated you both,’ she says merrily, as we arrive at the luggage carousel. ‘I really wouldn’t have minded.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you to offer, but we would’ve minded,’ insists Nic. ‘We’ll just have to save up for next time.’

  I look up and, with a sinking heart, realise the bag approaching us ominously on the carousel is mine. Unlike the chic weekend bag I checked in, this heap of canvas looks like an angry hippopotamus has used it as a prop for practising tae kwon do moves: a strap is missing; there is a yawning hole in one side; and my washbag is spilling out, revealing half a pack of Microgynon, enough make-up to put Clinique out of business and a burst tube of athlete’s-foot cream that’s now smeared on several surfaces.

  I haul it off the carousel as two women I recognise from our flight glide past. They look to be in their mid-thirties and are unfeasibly glamorous – all lustrous hair, French-manicured nails and foreheads that, from a certain angle, look as though they’ve been soaked in formaldehyde. I feel a stab of something unbecoming of me; I fear it may be envy. Not, I hasten to add, because of their appearance, gorgeous as they undeniably are. But because of where I know they were sitting on the flight: in business class.

  Nicola follows my gaze. ‘I’m sure business class is overrated.’

  ‘A ridiculous extravagance,’ I concur. ‘I’m sure No Frills is just as good.’

  Meredith shakes her head. ‘You’re wrong, you know.’

  We head for the gargantuan queue at the customer-services desk to report my luggage as damaged. After ten minutes of the line remaining resolutely static, I find the tattered copy of Hello! I bought for the flight and glance through its now-familiar pages.

  Flicking through pictures of minor European royals and Jane Seymour posing by the pool in a palace in Kuala Lumpur might not have been a good idea after spending two nights in an establishment with more wildlife than a Tanzanian nature reserve.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of luxury next time, I must admit,’ I confess,
though I’m not sure when the next time will be. It’s not that I don’t enjoy going away with my friends – their company was the single highlight of an otherwise very challenging trip – but I’m currently in year one of a new job, not exactly rolling in money and, cheap and not-so-cheerful as it was, Zante has eaten into the funds for the main holiday I intend to take with my boyfriend, Roberto.

  My heart flutters to my throat at the thought that he’s on the other side of the Arrivals-lounge door, waiting for me to slide into his arms.

  My friends can’t really get their heads around Roberto and me, and the extent to which, after two years together, I still adore him.

  I don’t wish to sound schmaltzy, not least because I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that we’re perfect – we’ve had some positively operatic rows in the past (inevitable, really, when a feisty Italian falls for a girl determined to give as good as she gets) – but, two years on, I’ve come to realise something about why we were made for each other.

  He isn’t just the man I love: he’s the man who made me realise that I’m not all that bad myself. Despite the half-stone I’ve failed to lose over the course of the ten years. Despite my hair permanently refusing to do as it’s told. Despite the fact that I couldn’t keep a secret to save my life, grind my teeth in my sleep, find it difficult to say ‘I’m sorry’ and have a tattoo of a spider on my bum, from when I was life-guarding for Camp America, that now looks like a malignant melanoma.

  Despite these faults and a million others, he brings out the best in me and, even at my worst, I know he’ll still love me.

  ‘Maybe we should start saving up for something more special one day,’ suggests Nicola. ‘We could put a bit away each month. Then after . . . I don’t know, three years or so, we could have a proper holiday. A luxury one.’

  ‘Nicola, you’re a genius. Let’s do it!’ Meredith beams. ‘Top flights. Gorgeous hotel. Champagne all the way. It’d be amazing.’

  Obviously, she’s right. Although after the last two days, somewhere with a flushing toilet would be a bonus.

  Chapter 1

  Wandsworth, London, July 2012

  My make-up bag doesn’t look like that of a woman who’ll be checking into one of the world’s most glamorous hotels the day after tomorrow. Even I know that, with my stunted enthusiasm for these things. There are lots of lipsticks – the only cosmetics I ever seem to buy (intermittently in a bid to ‘make an effort’) – plus a Rimmel concealer, dehydrated mascara and something called a ‘chubby stick’ donated by Meredith. That’s pretty much it.

  It strikes me how bad I’ve become at the things girls are meant to be good at.

  I never used to be. Once upon a time, I was into this sort of thing. But for someone who takes their job as seriously as I do, flaunting your assets is not a good idea. Part of me thinks that if any boss has an issue with glamour and femininity in the workplace, then it should be the patriarchy’s look out, but the reality is it rarely works like that. If I turned up at the office all pouty lips and filigree undies, my reputation would never recover – and not just because letting my boobs off the leash of their control bra would be such a hideous distraction that I might as well go the whole hog and stick two Mr Whippy cornets on each one.

  But, if I’m honest, wanting to be taken seriously at work isn’t the whole story. The whole story is a long and complicated one, and can probably be summarised thus: I have other priorities now.

  Still, this trip will be good for me, as everyone keeps saying.

  Part of me can’t believe I’ve never been on a holiday as luxurious as this. Although, to be fair, I’ve had hardly any holidays in the last four and a half years, unless you count

  Center Parcs.

  ‘Mummy!’ my four-year-old daughter, Florence, cries from her bedroom. ‘Something’s . . . happened. But it was only an accident.’

  Florence, who was named after her father’s birthplace, might have the voice of an angel but there are few sentences capable of making my heart sink faster.

  I optimistically interpret her tone as being insufficiently urgent to qualify as a true emergency.

  ‘What kind of accident?’ I ask lightly, piling my clothes into the bag, deliberately stalling before I face whatever disaster has befallen her.

  ‘Well . . . will you be cross?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘I don’t know – what have you done?’

  ‘It wasn’t me. And, anyway, it’s okay because it was only an accident.’

  I abandon my packing and head across the hall to her tiny bedroom.

  We moved here last year because it’s in the catchment area of the exceptionally good state school where Florence will start in September. This monumental date in my daughter’s diary unfortunately coincides with our company’s most important day of the decade – a headache I have put off tackling because it involves an impossible choice: get my friend and neighbour Debbie to take her to school on her first day there, or face being burned at the stake by my boss – or something like that.

  Apart from location, the flat is unsuitable for our circumstances in every conceivable way: it’s too small, the garden consists of four potted gerberas, there’s an unshakeable smell of damp and it’s nowhere near as convenient for work as our old place in Clapham. This means my frenetic daily commute resembles a scene from Chariots of Fire, and our regular childminder is permanently threatening me with the sack, apparently unconcerned that it’s supposed to be the other way around.

  It’s also ludicrously expensive, not helped by the fact that the pay rise for which I’ve been holding out over the last six months has not yet materialised.

  Oh yes, and we have a dog. I don’t make life easy for myself. But it was only when Spud’s owner, Mary – our landlady – died recently that I discovered, to my abject horror, that she’d bequeathed him to Florence in her will. Her son, James – our new landlord – couldn’t have him because he’s allergic, and has his golfing holidays to consider. Spud’s a lovely little thing but, practically speaking, not what I need in my life right now. So I briefly considered packing him off to a rescue home, but didn’t have it in me, particularly as if Florence had found out, she’d have held it against me for the rest of her life. Plus, to Mary’s infinite credit, she also left us the funds for a dog-walker each day I’m at work for the next five years. Which goes to show what an optimist she was, given that Spud is already knocking on fourteen.

  Despite this chaos we do, just about, cope. I can’t claim to be mother of the year – there have been one or two low points, the most recent being Florence’s nursery’s Harvest Festival when, last-minute, the only items I could find in the kitchen cupboards as an offering were a tub of bicarbonate of soda, some cocktail sticks and three bottles of WKD.

  That doesn’t, of course, stop my mother from telling me every time we speak that things would be much easier if I’d just move back to Liverpool. Which I’ll never do – and not only because she lives there.

  The fact is, I love Liverpool and I’m proud to call it home – it’s the city that made me. But it’s London that will forever be the mad, glorious place I can’t ever imagine leaving, not when so many memories live here with me.

  I push open the door to Florence’s room with trepidation.

  It is in every way an offence to feminist sensibilities. A haven of pink, it has a glittery dressing table (a present from Grandma), a fairytale bed (also Grandma’s work) and more Disney Princesses paraphernalia than you’d find in all the store cupboards of the Magic Kingdom.

  But she adores it. And, given that I’ve brought my daughter up to know her own mind, I can hardly complain when she asserts it – even if I wish she’d find something to replace the subject of her current obsession: a pink vacuum cleaner. I refuse to buy it, despite her tearing out a picture of it from an Argos catalogue and sticking it on her wall, like some sort of shrine to domestic servitude.

  It’s her big eyes I see first. You can’t miss them, even when part-hidde
n behind her wild, dark ringlets. Then I’m diverted.

  ‘I’ve done my nails. But I smudged a bit,’ she declares, holding out her hands.

  Courtesy of a bottle of cherry-red polish (again, my mother’s work), her fingers look like she’s fed them into an office shredder. And, yes, she has smudged them. All over her duvet.

  ‘Florence!’ I gasp, diving across the room.

  It’s only when I’m halfway there that I realise my movement has prompted Spud to stir from one of his lengthy snoozes. He bounds towards me to give me a kiss, knocks over the nail polish and proceeds to leap around until there are bright red doggy footprints all over the carpet.

  Barely pausing for breath, I grab the bottle and race to my room to locate some nail polish remover, which I proceed to sprinkle about the place in a futile bid to clean up.

  ‘If only I had that pink Hoover to help,’ Florence sighs.

  Then my phone rings. I press ‘Answer’ and wedge it under my ear. It’s my boss, David.

  ‘Imogen, you asked me to call. Don’t you know it’s Saturday?’

  David is a dream boss on many levels, and I owe him for reasons that go beyond my recent, scarily stratospheric, promotion. He’s the chief executive of one of the UK’s foremost food-manufacturing companies, Peebles Ltd. You might not recognise the name, but we are an omnipresent force, producing some of the world’s best-known brands of biscuits, crackers, breakfast cereals and confectionary. Basically, if there’s wheat and sugar in whatever you’re eating, it’s very likely that we’ve made it, something we do in no less than twenty-one other countries.

  Unfeasible as it might seem for a 29-year-old single mother, I am its UK marketing director. Or, at least, acting UK marketing director, which effectively means I’ve got the job but not the salary, for the moment at least. It’s a position for which David plucked me from relative obscurity after my two predecessors went off with stress.