The Sunshine Cruise Company Read Free Page A

the fire-escape door. It was only a second or two before the door scraped open, but that was enough time for Ethel to deftly peg the smouldering butt over the ledge with one hand while, with the other, she reholstered the hip flask like a gunslinger who’d just blown someone away. They found themselves facing the hulking form of Miss Kendal. Kendal was in her mid-thirties, florid of complexion, her hair hanging in a loose greasy fringe. She was crammed into a business suit slightly too small for her and carried her ever-present clipboard. She looked to Ethel like someone who consumed her meal-for-one alone every night and who masturbated joylessly twice a year. She looked like someone who crapped out in the early rounds of
The Apprentice
.
    ‘What’s going on out here?’ Kendal asked, already – always – suspicious.
    ‘Papers please!’ Ethel said in a heavily Germanic accent. Kendal ignored her.
    ‘Just took Ethel out for some fresh air, Miss Kendal.’
    Kendal sniffed nicotine-tainted air, eyes narrowing.
    ‘Miss Wickham, as you’re leaving us early today, I’m sure there must be some duties you can be attending to?’
    ‘Yes, Miss Kendal.’
    ‘Right. Well then.’
    The door banged behind her. Instantly Ethel had both sets of V-signs aloft and was blowing the world’s biggest raspberry.
    ‘Oh, grow up, Ethel,’ Julie said.

FOUR
    SUSAN SAT ALONE at the table in La Taverna, the best Italian restaurant in Wroxham, and sipped her mineral water. She glanced at her watch again. Julie was a
little
late. (Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham – with the names they had Susan sometimes thought that the only place they could ever have existed was in some dreary soap opera about Middle England.) The gift-wrapped box nestled beside her and Susan felt the warm, anticipatory tingle of someone who knows they have bought the perfect gift. She’d lied to Barry that morning – she’d spent a
lot
more on Julie than she’d meant to.
    And it did cross Susan’s mind – was there vanity involved in the gift giving, the lunching, with Julie? Was there pride?
I can do this
,
see?
Was there even
cruelty
? Because there had been a time, and it wasn’t even so long ago, when it looked like Julie’s life was going to outstrip her own. She’d travelled a lot, Julie, in her twenties and thirties. London, Europe, America, Australia even. Then she’d come back home at the end of the eighties and there had been the salon, then the boutique, then the second boutique over in Axminster. Running about town in her little SLK. The string of boyfriends, some from London, some of them impossibly glamorous, older than her, younger than her, Julie didn’t care what people thought.
    She’d finally settled on Thomas, a debonair colt ten years her junior, and it seemed, for a moment, caught there at the apex of her flight, that Julie ‘had it all’: her own business, handsome young lover, flash car. And there was Susan – still married to boring Barry whom she’d known since school. Pottering about with her roses and her bread-making and her am-dram.
    And then it all came crashing down: the tax problem, the business slump, and, finally, young Thomas disappearing one night with the company chequebook, never to be seen again.
    It would be unfair to say that Susan had taken comfort in Julie’s fall because it allowed her to be alpha female on deck. Grossly unfair. She
did
love Julie. But lifelong friendships are curious things – the yardsticks by which we often measure ourselves. They were deep pools where there were tensions, currents and strange eddies that it was best to steer clear of. But, at the end of the day and all that, here they were, both turning sixty this year. It looked like the results were in and Susan was the one with her nose across the finishing line.
    And here was her yardstick coming through the door now, already mouthing ‘Sorry!’ Susan’s face broke into a smile as she rose to greet her.
    ‘Happy birthday,