Penny Smith - Summer Holiday

To Rob, Hilary, the man from the Danish biscuit commercial and the wife of my dentist.

Chapter One

When Miranda Frayn was little, she’d wanted to be a…

Chapter Two

On Saturday, having told nobody about her new career as…

Chapter Three

It felt very politically incorrect to get into a Jaguar…

Chapter Four

While he was at his minor public school, Nigel had…

Chapter Five

The theatre was rammed with people drinking bottles of beer…

Chapter Six

The newspapers were full of the freak heatwave that the…

Chapter Seven

It was the weekend, and Miranda decided it was time…

Chapter Eight

The text said eight o’clock for dinner, Somewhere small –…

Chapter Nine

There were days when Miranda felt that nowhere could be…

Chapter Ten

It was as though Walt Disney had decided to turn…

Chapter Eleven

Driving to his house in the country, Alex had one…

Chapter Twelve

The Mediterranean Sea is almost completely enclosed by land and…

Chapter Thirteen

The days unfurled in glorious azure and yellow, with Becky…

Chapter Fourteen

The yacht La Maritana was twinkling like the Orion constellation…

Chapter Fifteen

‘And then, as if my week ’adn’t been bad enough,…

Chapter Sixteen

The atmosphere on board La Maritana was at mercury-bursting-out-of-the-thermometer point.

Chapter Seventeen

For many of those holidaying on the Costa del Sol,…

Chapter Eighteen

Some pieces of music are unhelpful when you’re in a…

Chapter Nineteen

Swimming-pool attire differs depending on what country you’re in. Katie…

Chapter Twenty

Normally on a drizzly Sunday evening, Lucy would have been…

Chapter Twenty-One

There are a number of sights guaranteed to strike fear…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Heat in another country is subtly different. The temperature can…

Chapter Twenty-Three

There are days you can pinpoint as being pivotal days…

Chapter Twenty-Four

At the age of eight and three-quarters – when every…

Chapter Twenty-Five

‘They’ve got your age wrong, Mum,’ said Lucy, as she…

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About the Author

Other Books by Penny Smith

Copyright

About the Publisher

When Miranda Frayn was little, she’d wanted to be a vet, an astronaut or someone who got lots of free stickers and felt-tip pens.

At around twelve years old, she decided that being a vet was not a good job, since it seemed that all they did was put down hamsters, massage Minty, her Jack Russell, up her bottom, and get scratched by cats. Astronauts did not spend their days bouncing round the moon and far-flung planets, but instead did tedious experiments with seeds and rubbishy-looking rocks. She no longer wanted free stickers and felt-tip pens, but instead yearned to be famous and get married to Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.

With that in mind, she put her name forward for every school play and, by dint of hard work and the non-stop badgering of the drama teacher, managed, the year before she left, to achieve the giddy heights of Maria in The Sound of Music. The boy who wrote the review in the school magazine described her as radiant, moving – a star in the making. Miranda had discovered early that if you wanted something badly enough, you had to be prepared to kiss really unattractive people – sometimes more than once. If she had not virtually sucked his head off at the back of the cinema, he would have written a very different critique. He would have said that as a nun she was unconvincing, and as a singer she’d made his ears bleed. He would have said that she should take up any other career but acting.

But, once caught, the performing bug is difficult to shake off, and there are any number of people willing to take your money for everything from head shots to acting lessons.

Luckily for the viewing public, fledgling starlet Miranda Frayn fell in love and decided that what she really, really wanted to do was get married and have babies. In her dreams, she imagined combining a career in film with bringing up children, but MGM failed to come knocking at the house in Oxfordshire, and instead she trod the boards in amateur plays, where the costumes were creaky, the sets were wobbly, and there was always a sweaty man playing fourth lead who wanted to have an affair with her.

It was all so dispiriting that, eventually, Miranda settled on acting the part of the devoted wife and became a passionate advocate of scarf knitting. She would have liked to create something a little more advanced but, frankly, with two small children and a man who wore Savile Row suits and cashmere from Brora, that was never going to happen.

Nigel Blake, her husband, was everything she had wanted: smart, funny, handsome and rich. She hadn’t realised she wanted rich but, increasingly, it was the only thing he still was. When she divorced him after two decades, having discovered his long standing shag-fest, as she called it, with his secretary, she would have described him as fat, boorish and rich. Or Knobhead, for short. But he was the father of her two children, so she reserved such comments for evenings when she was out with friends and for phone calls with the man himself.

Meanwhile, she was living in London, back on the dating scene and hating it. It was like constantly seeing bad films. She had started off excited about the prospect and then, over two years, a sort of malaise had crept over the whole thing and she had stopped worrying about matching underwear – or even matching outerwear. And as for her friends’ view of what constituted handsome …

Here she was, for example, on yet another night out with an allegedly suitable man. Passers-by glancing into the little restaurant would have seen a couple who had probably been married for an eternity – they weren’t speaking.

Miranda was bored again. She imagined her date as an icon on her computer that she was deleting.

And while she was at it, she might delete some of her friends’ numbers. How on earth they could think that this pompous tit was her cup of tea … And her steak was tough. Still, at least it was giving her teeth a workout.

‘Sorry?’ She raised her eyebrows at her dining partner.

‘I asked if you wanted more wine.’

‘No,’ she responded baldly. ‘Thank you,’ she added. No point in adding rudeness to the patronising she had already been. Mind you, he deserved it. Right-wing. Fascist. Fat. Twat. She smiled as she thought it.

‘What?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Nothing. I was just thinking silly words. Rhyming words. How much better they are than when they’re on their ownsome.’

‘As in?’ he queried, trying to get on to her wavelength, although he had almost given up. He was not a man who struggled to get women. He was rich and lived at a very expensive address in Mayfair.