I laughed and watched as the foursome at the next table accepted their meals. The chaps had ordered steak frites, the girls had salads. Naturally. The chaps messed about with salt and mayonnaise while the girls looked at their fries, mesmerised as though they were radioactive. Perhaps there were some disadvantages to being a size six.
And then one of the noisy, souped-up cars roared past, glittering with chrome, a heavy bass beat throbbing out of the windows, and the two young men stood up, practically drooling to look. The girls did a bit of irritated eye rolling and one of them pinched a couple of fries from her companion’s plate while he wasn’t looking. Perhaps things hadn’t really changed that much after all.
Anna came back looking very excited and almost giggling.
‘Gosh, the loos weren’t that good were they?’ I asked.
‘Listen, I have just done something marvellous and very clever. You know this place sounded slightly familiar to us? Well, when I went in I found out why. It belongs to the same people who own Café Albert. The place we had dinner last night. And there is lots of great news. Firstly, we already have a 20 per cent discount if we stay here. Remember the vouchers that the waitress gave us? So if we stay here tomorrow night before we go to Venice, we get a great deal.’
‘You mean it will cost us one kidney instead of two?’ I said, and Harriet laughed.
Anna flapped her hands. ‘Listen will you. Because there is more. Remember the karaoke evening we saw advertised at Café Albert? Well, that’s here tomorrow night too. It’s the first one they have ever done and if we fill in an entry form, we get another 5 per cent off the price of a room here. That’s 25 per cent off. Bargain!’
‘It’s only a bargain if we can afford it in the first place, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘After all, 25 per cent off a million pounds is still – well, a lot of money, isn’t it?’
‘I took an executive decision,’ Anna said, ‘and I’ve paid for it already. You can thank me later.’
‘Oh no,’ Harriet murmured.
Anna’s enthusiasm was not to be quashed.
‘I’ve booked us a room here for tomorrow night. It was the last one available so I’m afraid it really is a triple this time. I know we didn’t really want to share a room but it’s only one night, 25 per cent off, and it has a balcony and a sea view, and the following day the hotel will arrange a taxi for us to take us to the train station so we won’t have to walk. And then we just have a few hours on the train. And voilà, off for our little cruise, and then everything will be taken care of.’
A thought struck me, quite forcibly.
‘Hang on, you said something about the karaoke evening. Please don’t tell me you have entered yourself for that?’
‘No of course not,’ Anna chuckled, ‘I’ve entered all three of us!’
9
Anna’s announcement had quite an effect on us and it wasn’t a good one.
I had never done karaoke in my life and I had never wanted to.
Harriet admitted she had once tried to sing ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window’ in a bar in Leamington Spa and been booed off the stage. But Anna insisted she knew what she was doing because she had once won a karaoke competition on a cross-channel ferry with her rendition of ‘I am Sailing’. As suitability for the job in hand went, it didn’t go far.
‘We were all in the choir at school,’ Anna said, trying to be persuasive, ‘we know we can sing perfectly well. Miss Townsend told my mother I had a perfect pitch.’
‘So does Manchester United,’ I said, ‘but you’re not thinking of playing for them, are you?’
‘And what song could we possibly sing?’ Harriet said. ‘Without the music or time to practise? Unless you want us to sing the school hymn, and I don’t think “Praise my Soul the King of Heaven” will go down at all well. People take these things very seriously. We don’t have costumes or – well, anything.’
‘Leave everything to me,’ Anna said, ‘I have a really good idea.’
‘I’m beginning to hate it when you say that,’ Harriet said. ‘My poor knee still hasn’t fully recovered from your last really good idea.’
Not at all comforted by Anna’s optimism, particularly as she was treating the whole things as fun, which, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t, we finished our late lunch and then went off to browse in the local shops. Some of them were so exclusive that they were locked and had burly doormen standing inside, glaring. Others were filled with the usual tourist things. T-shirts, fake designer sunglasses and bags, snow globes with models of the Eiffel tower or the pyramids inside, fridge magnets and garish pottery bowls.
But eventually we did find some establishments that sold reasonable-looking dresses, even if they were a bit more flouncy and glitterier that I was used to. I wasn’t very receptive at first, but then Harriet reminded me of Fred’s nasty comment about my Christmas party dress and a kind of madness took over and I bought two. One was floor length and yellow, with a sort of handkerchief hem and spaghetti straps which no woman over forty should wear in my opinion, except it came with a matching shrug to cover my upper arms; the other was pale green and white and was uncrushable and very comfortable so I was convinced. If nothing else it would be a good dress to travel in. They were nothing like the sort of thing I would normally have chosen, but in my defence this was nothing like the sort of holiday I normally went on. I was entitled to a bit of random excitement, surely?
We decided it was time to go back to our hotel and decide where to have dinner, thus proving my theory that holiday brain was different from normal, everyday brain. Considering the breakfast we had enjoyed, plus the lunch, an ice cream, coffee, wine and bread, there was no way we should have been thinking about yet more food. And yet somehow we were, and none of us actually said,Hold on a minute…
We returned to Hôtel Gloria just before five o’clock and went thankfully to our rooms for a little rest and the agreement that we would meet up downstairs in a couple of hours and – yes – go out for dinner.
I kicked off my shoes, which almost felt as though they had welded to the soles of my feet what with all the walking and the heat, and flopped down onto my bed. Should I send off a couple of photos to my friends to reassure them I was still okay?
Perhaps I would do that later. After all, no one had messaged me to tell me whether it was still raining or not in Worcestershire, and my son hadn’t responded at all to my text asking him about the recycling bin.
