yellow-and-red label you might imagine you could end up in a wildlife park!’ Mrs Franks’ speech came hurriedly from her, the words tumbling over one another, gushing through her teeth. ‘But of course,’ she added soothingly, ‘that couldn’t happen in a million years.’
‘We’re not meant to be in Switzerland,’ Keith doggedly persisted.
‘Well, let’s just see, shall we?’
Unexpectedly, Mrs Franks turned and went away, leaving them standing. The receptionist was no longer behind the reception desk. The sound of typing could be heard.
‘She seems quite kind,’ Dawne whispered, ‘that woman.’
To Keith it seemed unnecessary to say that. Any consideration of Mrs Franks was, in the circumstances, as irrelevant as a description of the man in the travel agent’s. He tried to go over in his mind every single thing that had occurred: handing the girl the tickets, sitting down to wait, and then the girl leading the way to the plane, and then the pilot’s voice welcoming them aboard, and the air hostess with the smooth black hair going round to see that everyone’s seat-belt was fastened.
‘Snaith his name was,’ Dawne was saying. ‘It said
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The man in the travel place was called Snaith. G.
‘The man was just a clerk.’
‘He booked us wrong, though. That man’s responsible, Keith.’
‘Be that as it may.’
Sooner or later, Dawne had guessed, he’d say ‘Be that as it may’. He put her in her place with the phrase; he always had. You’d make an innocent remark, doing your best to be helpful, and out he’d come with ‘Be that as it may’. You expected him to go on, to finish the sentence, but he never did. The phrase just hung there, making him sound uneducated.
‘Are you going to phone up that man, Keith?’
‘Which man is this?’
She didn’t reply. He knew perfectly well which man she meant. All he had to do was to get through to Directory Inquiries and find out the number of the travel agency. It was no good complaining to a hotel receptionist who had nothing to do with it, nor to a woman in charge of a totally different package tour. No good putting the blame where it didn’t belong.
‘Nice to have some young people along,’ an elderly man said. ‘Nottage the name is.’
Dawne smiled, the way she did in the shop when someone was trying to be agreeable, but Keith didn’t acknowledge the greeting because he didn’t want to become involved.
‘Seen the ducks, ’ave you? Right champion them ducks are.’
The old man’s wife was with him, both of them looking as if they were in their eighties. She nodded when he said the ducks were right champion. They’d slept like logs, she said, best night’s sleep they’d had for years, which of course would be due to the lakeside air.
‘That’s nice,’ Dawne said.
Keith walked out of the reception area and Dawne followed him. On the gravel forecourt of the hotel they didn’t say to one another that there was an irony in the catastrophe that had occurred. On their first holiday since their honeymoon they’d landed themselves in a package tour of elderly people when the whole point of the holiday was to escape the needs and demands of the elderly. In his bossy way Uncle had said so himself when they’d tried to persuade him to accompany them.
‘You’ll have to phone up Snaith,’ Dawne repeated, irritating Keith further. What she did not understand was that if the error had occurred with the man she spoke of it would since have become compounded to such a degree that the man would claim to be able to do nothing about their immediate predicament. Keith, who sold insurance over the counter for, the General Accident insurance company, knew something of the complications that followed when even the slightest uncertainty in a requirement was passed into the programme of a computer. Somewhere along the line that was what had happened, but to explain it to Dawne would take a very long time. Dawne could work a till as well as anyone; in the shop she knew by heart the price of Mars bars and the different kinds of cigarettes and tobacco, and the prices of all the newspapers and magazines, but otherwise Keith considered her slow on the uptake, often unable to follow simple argument.
‘Hi, there!’ Mrs Franks called out, and they turned and saw her picking her way across the gravel towards them. She had a piece of pink paper in her hand. ‘I’ve been doing my homework!’ she cried when she was a little closer. She waved the pink paper. ‘Take a look at this.’
It was a list of names, a computer print-out, each name a series of tiny dots.
‘The thing is,’ Dawne began, and Keith looked away. His wife’s voice quietly continued, telling Mrs Franks that their holiday had been very kindly paid for by the old man whom they lived with, who had been her employer before they ever moved in to live with him, who still was. They called him Uncle but he wasn’t a relation, a friend really – well, more than that. The thing was, he would be angry because they were not in Venice, he having said it should be Venice. He’d be angry because they were in a package for the elderly when he wanted them to have a rest from the elderly, not that she minded looking after Uncle herself, not that she ever would. The person in the travel agency had said the Windsor people were quite young. ‘I always remember things like that,’ Dawne finished up. ‘Snaith he was called. G. Snaith.’
‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ Mrs Franks commented, and added after a pause: ‘As a matter of fact, Dawne, Mr Franks and myself are still in our fifties.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Keith said. ‘At no time did we book a holiday in Switzerland.’
‘Well, there you are, you see. The ticket you handed to me at Gatwick is as clear as daylight, exactly the same
