Cash and Carry, the endless maintenance, not to mention the more awkward guests who had to be placated. He was good at appeasement – Mr Congeniality, Rhoda called him sometimes, although it didn’t always seem to be a compliment. Conflict resolution was not Rhoda’s forte. She was more likely to start a fight than to end one.
Andy’s travel agency – the eponymous Andy’s Travel – had gone bust some time ago and now he ran his reincarnated business from home, with Rhoda’s name on the company documents, under the anonymous epithet of Exotic Travel.
He’d been in travel longer than he cared to remember. After serving an apprenticeship with Thomas Cook he started his own business, with a desk in someone else’s agency – he was in Bridlington at the time – until he scraped together enough money for his own storefront further up the coast. In those days it was still mostly packages – two weeks in Lanzarote, the Algarve or the Costa Brava, clutching your travellers’ cheques in one hand and a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic in the other.
Life was simple then. People needed travel agents. Now they were dead in the water, killed by the internet. It had been dog eat dog out there for a long time and you could only survive if you evolved. So Andy had evolved, focussing on the more niche aspects of the business – ‘a bespoke service catering for individual taste’ was how he had described his approach. Sex tourism, basically. Trips for blokes to Thailand, Bali, Sri Lanka, where they could pick up girls in bars, boys on beaches, even find a wife if that was what they were after. Now that, too, had gone the way of all flesh, as it were. The blokes were doing it for themselves and Exotic Travel didn’t exist in much more than name only. Andy’s business had gone underground. These days it was all about import rather than export. Rhoda took no interest in Andy’s business, which was just as well, considering.
It was a slippery slope. You started off selling Club Med packages to eighteen-year-olds who wanted a bit of fun and sun, and you ended up on the end of a pitchfork being toasted like a pikelet. Sins of commission. Andy knew what was waiting for him. He’d been brought up a strict Catholic, his mother was ferocious in her faith. It was going to take more than a few Hail Marys to wipe his slate clean.
The Seashell was in a village, or what passed for a village, although it was mostly holiday rental properties nowadays, strung out along the road or, in the case of the more expensive ones, hiding up the valley. There was none of the tacky carnival atmosphere you found further down the coast, no arcades or fish-and-chip shops or amusements. The air wasn’t polluted by the stench of frying fat and sugar. This was where dog-walkers came – middle-aged retirees, day-trippers (unfortunately) and young couples with small children who wanted old-fashioned bucket-and-spade holidays. ‘Staycations’ (he hated that word). None of them were the ideal clientele for the Seashell. They were licensed though and did ‘light lunches’, which helped, but he supposed that Airbnb would be the death of them eventually. It wouldn’t matter, it wasn’t as if there wasn’t plenty of money, he was swilling in cash, it was just unfortunate that he couldn’t find a way of explaining any of it to Rhoda.
Rhoda had made a feature of the shell thing. Big conches in the en suites, scallop shells for soap dishes, wind chimes made of periwinkles and slipper shells. Andy didn’t know a winkle from a mussel. The table mats in the dining room were expensive with a classical-style painting of shells on each one. They wouldn’t have looked out of place in Pompeii. A large shell adorned the centre of every table. Rhoda had personally glued seashells on to the Ikea lamp bases. Andy thought that she had taken the theme too far, but she was like a woman possessed. In TK Maxx in the MetroCentre in Gateshead she’d seen shower curtains with seashells on them (there was a tongue-twister if ever there was) and was now contemplating custom-made towels, embroidered with the hotel’s logo – a seashell above a pair of entwined ‘S’s. Andy worried about the Nazi connotations. Rhoda, a bit of a Stormtrooper herself, thought he was being oversensitive – not something Andy was usually accused of.