A Proper Family Holiday by Chrissie Manby Read Free Book Online Page A

obviously hadn’t registered the fact that it was a Saturday, or that Chelsea was technically on annual leave. When another email from Davina titled ‘Just one more thing’ appeared on Chelsea’s iPhone, she almost responded by pointing out that she was on holiday, but she didn’t. Until she could find the time and energy to apply for a new post, she still needed her job at Society , so instead she responded with her usual efficiency and ended her email by wishing Davina the lovely weekend she didn’t deserve.
    As soon as it seemed decent, Chelsea treated herself to a couple of glasses of wine in the hotel bar. Two glasses of wine turned into three. They were big glasses and so, without even really noticing, Chelsea had soon drunk the equivalent of a whole bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. Rough Sauvignon Blanc with extra sulphites, at that. No wonder she felt like something the cat had sicked up when she was woken by her alarm the following morning. Sunday. Still half asleep, she climbed back into the outfit she had been wearing since Friday night and headed for the shuttle bus.
    When Chelsea had been buying her replacement ticket, the check-in girl had offered her the chance to have ‘priority boarding’ for an extra £50 on top of the eye-watering fee. ‘It’ll save you having to scramble in the queue,’ the girl had said. ‘There are three hundred people on the flight, but we only sell sixty of these passes.’ Chelsea had declined.
    Standing at the gate with her fellow passengers, however, Chelsea wished she’d forked out the extra money. Though she could be pretty damn sharp-elbowed on the first day of the Harvey Nichols sale, Chelsea didn’t fancy her chances with this gang. They were, to a man, woman and child, the most horrible bunch of people she had ever laid eyes on. Nearly all of them were dressed in football shirts. How different they were from the Boden-clad queue waiting to board the flight to Pisa, which departed from the gate next door.
    As the crowd shuffled towards the desk, Chelsea found herself behind a hen party, all wearing pink T-shirts saying, ‘Lanzarote 2014. Lock up your sons.’ They handed round two large plastic cups filled with cava from the terminal bar. It wasn’t long before they started singing. Worried that it was just a matter of time before one of those plastic cups of cava was spilt in the direction of her borrowed dress, Chelsea decided her best strategy was to wait until everyone else had boarded. She stepped out of the queue and sat back down on a bench, trying to block out the horror of her flight-mates by starting From Booty Call to Bride (carefully tucked inside a copy of the weekend FT magazine). She had her boarding pass, so there would definitely be a seat for her, right?
    ‘There’s room at the back of the plane,’ the steward explained when Chelsea finally boarded.
    ‘Where?’ Chelsea looked down the cabin. She couldn’t see a single empty spot.
    ‘By the toilets.’
    Of course. But at least the whole row was empty. That was much more than Chelsea could have hoped for. She wriggled her way down the length of the aisle and squeezed herself into the window seat. There was no room for her luggage in the overhead locker, so she dragged her wheelie case into the row alongside her, risking the wrath of the steward and. Still, Chelsea told herself, as soon as the plane took off, she would be able to put her bag on the empty seat beside her as a kind of barrier against the people queuing for the loo. All she wanted now was to get this flight over with.
    But Chelsea was not to have a whole row to herself after all. Just as she was settling in, a final passenger was hustled on board.
    Chelsea felt slightly better when she noticed that the man walking down the aisle towards her was a dead ringer for Hugh Jackman. He was over six feet tall and looked as though he was no stranger to the gym, so he wasn’t going to spill over the armrest. He was dressed pretty well, in a