A Proper Family Christmas (41 page)

‘No!’ She was suddenly very wide-awake indeed. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s twenty-five past six on a Saturday morning!’

‘Sorry, Pete. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.’

She closed the door as quickly as she could without causing offence, then raced for her bedroom, turning off the alarm clock with a slam to its button while simultaneously working out her next move. Her brand-new wheelie case, still empty and bearing its shop tags, was on the floor by the wardrobe. The pile of holiday ironing she had meant to tackle the previous night was still resolutely wrinkled. No time to fix that. Her passport was … Where on earth was her passport?

Now Chelsea’s mobile phone was vibrating on the dressing table.

I hope U R on yr way 2 Gatwick.

It was a message from her sister, Ronnie, who, together with her partner, Mark, and their two children, Jack and Sophie, was already well on her way from her home in Coventry to Birmingham Airport. There was no time to respond.

Chelsea chewed on her electric toothbrush as she threw clothes in the general direction of the suitcase. She hopped into the dress she’d been wearing the previous evening and dragged a wide-toothed comb through her wavy brown hair. The undeniably gorgeous dress at least made her look a little more put-together, and looking more put-together always made her
feel
more put-together, which was useful. Despite the hurry, Chelsea paused for a moment and looked more carefully at the clothes she was planning to pack. Her favourite Chloé tunic? Check. Hepburn-style capris by Michael Kors? Check. Three new designer kaftans that were very Talitha Getty circa 1965? Check. Chelsea wasn’t sure it was the perfect holiday capsule wardrobe, but it was certainly getting there.

‘Passport?’ Chelsea muttered.

She spotted her passport on the table by the front door with her keys. Of course. She’d put it there so she wouldn’t forget it. Six forty-five. She could still do this. She could still be on time and looking pretty stylish too, she thought, as she glanced in the mirror. The beautiful dress was made perfect for travelling with ballet flats and a fitted denim jacket. She stuck her bug-eyed Oliver Peoples sunglasses in her hair and gave herself a quick pout. Yes. Looking all right, considering.

It was only as she got to the tube station at Stockwell that Chelsea realised her passport was still in the very place she had put it to make certain it was not left behind.

‘Aaaaaaagh!’

Seven fifteen. Chelsea was back at the tube station with her passport.

‘There are slight delays on the Victoria line …’

Eight thirty-five. Chelsea stumbled off the train at Gatwick Airport. Her new wheelie case was more unwieldy than the average shopping trolley. It had gone totally rogue. Which terminal? North or south? She didn’t have a clue.

We’re checking in now,
said her sister’s latest text message.
Are you even at your airport?

Chelsea found her airline. North Terminal. She made a run for it.

The girl on the check-in desk agreed it seemed cruel that she could not allow Chelsea to board her scheduled flight even though the delayed nine o’clock to Lanzarote would be on the stand for at least another forty minutes as it waited for a take-off slot.

‘But I can put you on a flight for tomorrow,’ the girl suggested. ‘I’m amazed there’s space, to be honest. It is the school holidays.’

‘Of course,’ Chelsea sighed. Everybody was going away. The airport was absolutely heaving with new wheelie cases and their amateur drivers. Chelsea especially hated those stupid bloody Trunkis. Even as she stood at the check-in desk, a four-year-old boy was ramming a green one designed to look like a frog into the backs of her ankles.

‘Is tomorrow the best you can do?’ Chelsea asked the check-in girl again.

‘Unless you want to swim there,’ the girl joked. ‘Sorry. There are no more flights today.’

Had she any choice in the matter, at this point Chelsea would have given up on the whole idea of a week away, cut her losses and headed home. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any choice in the matter at all. ‘Stick me on tomorrow’s flight,’ she said.

The girl put out her hand expectantly. ‘I’ll need your credit card. Your old ticket isn’t exchangeable.’

‘You’re kidding me?’

‘Oh.’ Having done some more tapping on her keyboard, the girl winced as though feeling the pain of what she was to say next. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to buy a different flight home as well. Because the return portion of this ticket is dependent on your having flown out there today.’

‘That can’t be right.’

‘It’s in the conditions of your fare. The only available return flight is next Sunday, so a day later. The total cost is three hundred and sixty-five pounds forty. Unless you also want to check in some luggage? That’s another twenty-five pounds per item.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Chelsea cried. She gave her credit card to the girl on the check-in desk, then turned and glared at the child with the ankle-bashing Trunki. He glared right back at her and gave her one more bash on the heels for luck.

It wasn’t as though Chelsea wanted to go to Lanzarote anyway. Lanza-
grotty
, as the girls in her office all called it, had never featured high on Chelsea’s list of places to see before she died. Chelsea was sure she knew everything there was to know about the tiny island. It was a volcanic dust bowl with nothing but slate-grey beaches. It was overrun with Brits. Every once passably beautiful bay or romantic cove now sported a burger bar and an Irish pub with an enormous flat-screen TV showing non-stop Sky Sports. The airlines that flew to Arrecife Airport said it all, as far as Chelsea was concerned. British Airways didn’t go there. Serena, Chelsea’s colleague at
Society
, the monthly fashion and gossip magazine where Chelsea was assistant features editor, said one should never fly to an airport that isn’t served by British Airways. With the exception of Mustique.

Chelsea hadn’t even told Serena she was going to Lanzarote. She just said ‘Spain’ and let Serena and the other uber-posh girls in the
Society
office imagine a carefully refurbished
finca
in an orange grove just outside Cadiz. Serena would have recoiled in horror at the very idea of the Hotel Volcan in Playa Brava, with its sports bar, mini-golf and ‘Kidz Klub’. Its functional bedrooms with their wipe-clean walls would never feature in a coffee-table book by Mr and Mrs Smith, that’s for sure. The moment Chelsea clicked on the hotel website and looked at a depressing shot of an en-suite bathroom, she fancied she could actually smell the tiny bars of cheap white soap and feel the scratchy pink toilet paper that must not, under any circumstances, be flushed down the loo. Nothing turned Chelsea’s stomach faster than the thought of a holiday resort without adequate plumbing. But what could Chelsea have said when her mother, Jacqui, called so full of excitement to confirm that the Lanzarote trip was on?

‘We’re going to the Hotel Volcan. They can put us all on the same floor with disabled access,’ said Jacqui.

Same floor and disabled access. Such considerations were extremely important when your party included, at one end of the scale, an adventurous six-year-old and, at the other end, an eighty-five-year-old who was about as steady on his feet as a newborn wildebeest suckled on Guinness. Five rooms had to be booked in all, for this was to be a ‘proper family holiday’ involving the entire Benson clan – six adults and two children. No one was to be left out. No matter how much they might wish to be.

This proper family holiday was Jacqui Benson’s idea of the perfect way to celebrate her upcoming sixtieth birthday. It was Chelsea’s idea of pure hell.

Ronnie Benson, Chelsea’s big sister, was altogether more excited by the idea of a week in Playa Brava. After the year she’d had, she needed a week in the sun.

When Ronnie asked her mother what she would like as a gift for her milestone birthday, she had expected Jacqui to suggest her daughters chip in for a new watch or some more charms for her Pandora bracelet. Never in a million years did Ronnie think her mother might suggest a family gathering, much less a week-long family gathering in
Lanzarote
.

‘You want to go
abroad
?’

‘Your father and I have been planning this trip for years,’ Jacqui told her.

‘You never said.’ After a second of delighted astonishment, Ronnie’s thoughts immediately turned towards cost.

‘We wanted it to be a surprise,’ said Jacqui. ‘And I know it sounds over the top, but you’re not to worry – your dad and me are paying for everything. We just want you all to be there – you and Mark and the children. I can think of no better birthday gift than to have all my family around me. Especially …’

They were standing in the kitchen. Jacqui nodded through the open sitting-room door towards her father-in-law, Bill, Ronnie’s beloved granddad, who was asleep in his special chair. At eighty-five, having had just about every internal organ in his body replaced with a plastic valve, Bill was constantly threatening to shuffle off this mortal coil.

‘He’s always said he’d like to go to Lanzarote,’ said Jacqui.

‘Mum, are you sure?’ Ronnie asked.

‘Oh yes. He’s always going on about it.’

‘I mean, are you sure you and Dad want to pay for us all? We’d love to go, we really would, but it’s going to be expensive. You’re talking at least four rooms. More if Chelsea’s coming.’

‘Of course your sister’s coming.’

‘Really?’ Ronnie fought the urge to voice her scepticism. Chelsea on a package trip to Lanzarote seemed as likely as the Duchess of Cambridge rocking up at Nando’s.

‘Really.’

‘It’ll cost a fortune. Mark and me will at least chip in for our lot.’

Even as Ronnie said it, she wondered how on earth she and Mark could afford even four easyJet flights to the island. Their finances were more overstretched than Donatella Versace’s facelift. Mark worked as a kitchen fitter. It wasn’t a badly paid job, but once the recession hit, his hours had been cut from full time to just three days a week. Ronnie had picked up the slack with a part-time admin job at a funeral director’s (the credit crunch could not stop people dying), but still they had had to cut back. A holiday had not been on the agenda for that financial year, not when there were school uniforms to buy. A washing machine on its last legs. Gas bills. Council tax. A car that needed servicing … Every time Ronnie thought she had the family finances under control, they were beset by some new disaster. To Ronnie’s shame, she’d even considered having Fishy, the family cat, put down rather than pay for an expensive operation to fix her leg when the poor thing got run over. Things were that bad. (In the end, she’d stuck the op on her credit card). A holiday in Lanzarote was exactly what Ronnie needed and precisely what she couldn’t afford.

‘I know you’ve had a tough couple of years and that’s why we’re paying for you,’ her mother insisted. ‘I just want you all to be there.’

‘But—’

‘No buts, Veronica Benson. This is important to me. The money’s already in the bank and I want to take you all away. If I don’t spend it on this holiday, I’ll only spend it in Per Una.’

‘All right, Mum. Anything but more tat from Per Una.’

How could Ronnie refuse?

When he heard the news, Mark also expressed concern, but underneath his polite protestations that Ronnie’s parents were being too generous as usual, he seemed delighted, as did the children. A free holiday was not to be sniffed at – especially a holiday in the sun – and, unusually, Mark actually enjoyed hanging out with his almost in-laws. Sophie, who was fifteen and a half, tried to play it cool, of course, but Ronnie knew her daughter was secretly pleased and relieved to be able to tell the girls at school she would be going on a proper foreign holiday that summer after all. Meanwhile, Jack, aged six, was still at an age when the idea of a family gathering appealed to him enormously. Ronnie was sure Jack would have been equally thrilled to spend a week in a Travelodge near Wolverhampton so long as he had his family around him. His grandparents doted on him, but it was the thought of a week with Auntie Chelsea that seemed to tickle Jack most of all.

‘Auntie Chelsea!’ he squealed. ‘Is she really coming?
Really
really? She can play cricket with me,’ he added, remembering the last time he had seen his aunt, almost two years earlier, at a family barbecue. Chelsea had thrown a few balls for Jack that afternoon, in between turning her nose up at Mark’s burgers and moaning to Ronnie about how hard she found her job at that posh magazine. She’d really hardly paid Jack any attention at all, but for some reason she’d left an indelible impression.

‘I can’t wait to see her,’ said Jack.

‘If she can be bothered to come,’ Ronnie muttered to Mark. ‘I can’t imagine Miss Hoity-Toity is terribly excited by the idea of a package holiday in the Canaries. What will she say to the people at
Society
? I suppose she could always write a
hilarious
article about slumming it with the working classes.’

Mark just nodded. He knew better than to disagree with Ronnie where Chelsea was concerned.

From time to time you hear people refer to their siblings as their ‘best friends’. Well, Ronnie and Chelsea definitely didn’t have that sort of relationship. They hadn’t spoken in nearly two years.

It hadn’t always been like that. Born just eighteen months apart, the Benson sisters had once been inseparable. Ronnie had doted on her sweet younger sister Chelsea and Chelsea had considered big sister Ronnie the ultimate heroine and role model. As teenagers, in their shared bedroom in the terraced house where they grew up, they had talked late into the night about their plans to escape their boring hometown and make their way together in London. They’d go to university, become successful businesswomen and travel the world first class. Chelsea was going to work in fashion. Ronnie was going to have her own recruitment company by the time she was twenty-five. The sisters were each other’s cheerleaders. No way were they going to get stuck like their parents had.