A Proper Family Holiday Read Free Page B

family holiday’.
    ‘The best birthday present you could ever give me is for you girls to be friends again, like you used to be.’
    As though to emphasise her point, Jacqui looked towards that ancient photo of the sisters building a sandcastle on Littlehampton beach.
    ‘All right,’ said Ronnie. ‘But Chelsea has to make an effort too.’
    ‘I’m sure she will,’ said Jacqui.
    If only Ronnie could believe that. As it was, about a month before the trip, when Ronnie picked up the phone to offer the olive branch so that their first face-to-face meeting would not be too strange, Chelsea acted as though those two years of radio silence hadn’t even happened. She just went straight into a story about some fancy cocktail party she had attended for work. As Chelsea twittered on about the guest list, Ronnie was mortified to realise that while she had been nursing the mother of all grudges, Chelsea had carried on regardless, not questioning her sister’s absence because her swanky London life and career were just so fulfilling. She simply hadn’t noticed she and Ronnie were not on speaking terms.
    Reading Chelsea’s text from Gatwick, as she stood in the check-in queue in Birmingham, Ronnie fumed. She was certain that her snooty sister had missed her flight deliberately. Next thing, Chelsea would claim she couldn’t get another flight. Ronnie would have put money on Chelsea not coming to Lanzarote at all.

Chapter Three
    Chelsea
    Of course, Chelsea hadn’t missed the flight deliberately. Here’s what led up to her oversleeping and forgetting her passport.
    On Friday – her last day at work before the flight to Lanzarote – Chelsea made careful plans to ensure she would be at the airport on time come Saturday morning. She arrived at the Society office a whole hour before the rest of the team to finish off all those jobs she could not safely leave to someone else in her absence. She worked through her lunch break with the intention of leaving the office at five on the dot, giving herself plenty of time to pack and prepare and get a reasonably early night in anticipation of the painfully early morning ahead. Getting to Gatwick in time to check in would mean leaving her flat at six thirty at the latest. Why did charter flights always leave so early?
    By five o’clock on Friday afternoon, Chelsea was feeling quite pleased with herself. She was almost looking forward to getting back to her flat and starting the packing. Perhaps this week in Lanzarote would not be so bad after all. The weather had to be better than it was in London, and a sneaky Web search suggested there were cultural depths to the island that would give Chelsea a break from non-stop beer and karaoke at her parents’ chosen resort. She was just looking at some pictures of an idyllic naturally turquoise lagoon worthy of a fashion mag swimwear shoot when Davina, Society ’s editor, poked her head out of her office door and barked that Chelsea should join her pronto .
    There had been a catastrophe. Eugenia Lapkiss, the actress who was to adorn the cover of the next issue, was upset about the article written to accompany the sumptuous photo shoot that would fill ten pages of the magazine. She was furious, in fact, and her PR was threatening to rescind permission for the article altogether if it wasn’t rewritten in a more flattering light. Unfortunately, the piece had been written at great expense by a famously difficult artist who could not be asked to make the edits himself because a) he was on holiday and b) he would almost certainly refuse to do them anyway. No one touched his work.
    ‘You’ll have to do it,’ said Davina. ‘And you’ll have to do it now.’
    ‘I’m going on holiday first thing tomorrow and I’ve still got to go home and pack,’ Chelsea tried.
    ‘Oh, darling. I’d consider it a personal favour. We’re going to lose the cover if you don’t help.’
    Chelsea didn’t even bother to protest further. She knew that there wasn’t