Peacock Emporium (11 page)

When they came in the little house was cold: Suzanna had forgotten to set the timer on the heating again. She was still surprised by how much colder it was in the country. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, as Neil whistled and blew on his hands, and was grateful when he didn’t say anything about it. Neil was still enthusiastic about all aspects of country living, persuading himself that their move was about quality of life, rather than downsizing, choosing only to see the advantages of chocolate-box cottages and rolling green acres, rather than the reality as experienced by his wife: of people who knew, or thought they knew, everything about you, the claustrophobia of years of shared history, the subtle policing of women with too much money and too little time.

The answerphone was flashing, and Suzanna fought a guilty thrill of hope that it might be one of her London friends. They were ringing less often now, her lack of availability for coffee or early evening drinks in wine bars slowly fraying what she now knew must have been pretty tenuous threads of friendship. It didn’t stop her missing them, the easy camaraderie, the unselfconsciousness that had built over years. She was tired of having to think about what she said before she said it; frequently she found it easier, as she had this evening, to say almost nothing at all.

‘Hello, darlings. I hope you’re both out having fun somewhere. I just wondered whether you’d had a think about Lucy’s birthday lunch on the sixteenth. Daddy and I would so love it if you could make it, although we quite understand if you’ve got something else on. Let me know.’

Always so careful not to suggest any obligation or imposition. That cheerful, yet slightly apologetic tone. The subtlest hint of ‘We know you’re having problems, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed for you.’ Suzanna sighed, knowing that, having missed several Christmases and numerous other family gatherings, there were few excuses to avoid her family now that they were, geographically at least, so close.

‘We should go.’ Neil had taken off his coat and was pouring himself a drink.

‘I know we should.’

‘Your dad will probably find some reason to go out anyway. You two are pretty good at avoiding each other.’

‘I know.’

He liked being part of her family. He had little of his own, one seldom-visited and not-much-missed mother now several hundred miles away. It was one of the reasons he took such a conciliatory approach with hers.

Neil put down his glass and walked over to her. He put his arms round her and pulled her to him gently. She felt herself concede to him, unable entirely to shake off her natural rigidity. ‘It would mean so much to your mum.’

‘I know, I know.’ She placed her hands on his waist, unsure whether she was holding him or just holding him away. ‘And I know it’s childish. It’s just the thought of everyone wittering on about how fantastic Lucy is, and what a marvellous job she’s got and look how beautiful and blah blah, and everyone making out we’re this super-happy family.’

‘Listen, it’s not exactly easy for me to listen to that stuff either. Doesn’t make me feel like the superstar son-in-law.’

‘I’m sorry. Maybe we just shouldn’t go.’

Suzanna was the decorative one of the family. Its genetic mythology had ascribed to her beauty and financial haplessness, to her younger brother, Ben, a countryman’s wisdom beyond his years, while Lucy had been the brainy one, able at the age of three to recite great swathes of poetry, or ask in all seriousness why such and such a book was not as good as The author’s last? Then, slowly, some kind of metamorphosis had taken place, and while Ben became, as everyone had expected, a kind of younger, merrier echo of their straightforward, stoic, occasionally pompous father, Lucy, far from becoming the predicted bespectacled recluse, had blossomed, become frighteningly assertive, and now, in her late twenties, headed up the Internet section of some foreign media conglomerate.

Suzanna, meanwhile, had gradually realised that decorative-ness was no longer enough when one reached one’s thirties, that her lifestyle, her lack of financial acumen had ceased to be endearing and now seemed simply self-indulgent. She didn’t want to think about her family.

‘We could go and look at shops tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen a place in town that’s up for rent. Used to be a bookshop.’

‘You don’t waste any time.’

‘There’s no point in hanging around. Not if I’ve only got a year.’

He was evidently relishing this unusual intimacy, enjoying holding her close. She would have liked to sit down, but he seemed unwilling to let her go.

‘It’s in one of those little lanes, the cobbled ones off the square. And it’s got a Georgian window at the front. Like the Olde Curiosity Shoppe.’

‘You don’t want something like that. If you’re going to do it, do it properly, with a great big plate-glass window. Something people can see your stock through.’

‘But it’s not going to be that sort of shop. I told you before. Look, come and see it before you say anything. I’ve got the estate agents’ number in my bag.’

‘Now, there’s a surprise.’

‘I might ring them now. Leave a message. Just to let them know I’m interested.’ She could hear the excitement in her voice. It sounded strange to her, as if it came from somewhere else.

‘Ring in the morning. It’s not going to go at eleven thirty at night.’

‘I just don’t want to miss it.’

‘And you don’t want to decide anything in a hurry. We’ve got to be careful, Suze. They might want too much money. They might want an extra long rental period. They might have all sorts of penalties in the lease. You need to slow down and ask some questions first.’

‘I just want to get on with it.’

He squeezed her. He smelt of soap powder, and the slightly stale yet inoffensive human scent of the end of the day. ‘You know, Suze, we should go to this lunch. We’re fine. We’re earning again. You can tell them about your shop.’

‘But not the baby stuff.’

‘Not the baby stuff.’

‘I don’t want to tell any of them about it. They’ll start going on about it, and Mum will get all excited and try to hide it, and then, if nothing happens, they’ll all be treading on eggs, wondering whether they can say anything. So, no baby stuff.’

He spoke into her hair. ‘I bet Lucy hasn’t got baby stuff.’

‘Neil, no.’

‘I’m only joking. Look, ring them in the morning. We’ll go, and we’ll be bloody cheerful and have a nice day.’

‘We’ll pretend to have a nice day.’

‘You might surprise yourself.’

She snorted. ‘I’d certainly do that.’

Surprisingly, considering it had been nearly eight months, that night they made love. Afterwards Neil had become almost tearful and told her that he really loved her, that he knew this meant everything was going to be all right.

Suzanna, lying in the dark, just able to make out the beamed ceiling she hated, had felt none of his sense of emotional release. Just a mild relief that they had done it. And a sneaking hope, which she was reluctant to admit even to herself, that this meant she had earned herself a couple of months’ grace before she had to do it again.

Seven

Dere Hampton was usually described in its tourist literature as ‘Suffolk’s most beautiful market town’, its Grade II listed buildings, Norman church and antiques shops providing a lure for ambling tourists throughout the summer months, and the occasional stoic walkers in winter. By its older inhabitants, it was described simply as ‘Dere’, and by its younger folk, those who could most usually be found on Friday nights drinking cheap cider and catcalling at each other in its market square, as ‘an effing dump, with nothing to do’. They were not being unreasonable. It was fair to say it was a town more in love with its history than its future, and even more so since it had filled with commuter families pushed out from London and the green belt by spiralling property prices and a hope of ‘somewhere nice to bring up the children’. Its tall, elegant, pastel-coloured Georgian buildings stood dovetailed by Tudor houses, with tiny windows and beams, that lurched over the pavement like ships in high seas, all arranged in a haphazard network of narrow cobbled lanes and small courtyards that branched out from the square. It held at least two of nearly all the shops one might need – butcher, baker, newsagent, hardware store – and an increasing proliferation of those, stuffed with aromatherapy oils, magical crystals, overpriced cushions and scented soaps, that one might not.

It had been almost two months before Suzanna realised what most bothered her about the town: that during working hours it was almost exclusively female. There were headscarved matrons in green waistcoats picking up joints from butchers with whom they were on first-name terms, young mothers pushing prams, carefully coiffed women of a certain age seemingly doing nothing much more than killing time. But apart from those who worked in the shops, or tradesmen, or schoolboys, there were almost no men. They were presumably off on the pre-dawn trains to the City, returning to cooked meals and long-lit houses after dark. It was, she muttered crossly to herself, as if she’d been transported back to the 1950s. She had lost count of the number of times she had been asked what her husband did and, almost a year on, was still waiting for that question to be directed to herself.

Although she would have protested initially that she had nothing in common with those women, she could see herself in some: it was the way they shopped, wandering around the town’s only department store with the measured gait of someone who had both money and time; it was the way it was impossible to get an appointment with either of the town’s two beauty salons; it was the way that crystals and scented candles and food-allergy testing had become not so much an ‘alternative’ as a way of life.

Suzanna was not sure what category her shop would fall into. As she sat, surrounded by boxes of stock, conscious that not only was her till still not working but that the electrician had failed to tell her what lightbulbs she needed for the spotlights, she was not sure that it was going to be a shop at all. Neil had rung twice, wanting to know whether she was certain she needed to buy quite so much stock in advance, while the water board had sent several letters demanding money even before she had opened.

For someone so recently haunted by debt, Suzanna was unworried by any of this. For the weeks that she had held the keys, she had just enjoyed being there, slowly turning the image she had held for the past months into a reality. She had loved travelling around to investigate possible suppliers, at trade exhibitions or tiny backrooms behind London’s Oxford Street, meeting young designers eager to showcase their works, or more established ones who could talk her through years of trade. She loved having a purpose, being able to talk about ‘my shop’, to make decisions based upon her own taste, choosing only what she thought beautiful and unusual.

And then there was the shop itself. The exterior had been given a fresh lick of white paint and the interior was slowly taking shape, nudged along by visits from local plumbers, carpenters and her own amateur ability with a paintbrush. She knew they thought her picky and over-deliberate, but the decisions as to where things should go were complicated because it was not going to be a conventional shop. It was, instead, a mixture of things: a coffee room, for which the back wall held an old church pew, several tables and chairs and a reconditioned Italian coffee machine. It was a second-hand shop, offering a few disparate items simply because she liked the look of them. It had some clothes, some jewellery, some pictures, some ornaments. It had some modern things. And that was about as specific as it got.

She had begun to place a variety of objects in the window. Initially, to make it look inhabited, she had put some of the more beautiful things she had bought during her ‘shopping’ phase and never been able to use: brightly beaded bags, oversized glass rings, an antique picture frame with a modern abstract print. When the stock came, she had felt unwilling to alter her arrangement so she had simply added to it: beautiful concentric circles of Indian bangles, old dresser drawers full of glowing metallic pens, spice bottles with silver lids in a variety of colours.

‘It’s like a sort of doll’s house. Maybe an Aladdin’s cave,’ Neil had said, when he had dropped by at the weekend. ‘It looks very – erm – pretty. But are you sure people are going to understand what it is you’re about?’

‘What does it have to be about?’

‘Well, what kind of shop is it going to be?’

‘My kind of shop,’ she said, and enjoyed his look of confusion.

Because Suzanna was creating something beautiful, something that was entirely her vision, diluted by no husband or partner. Free to do whatever she wanted, she found herself stringing bargain fairy-lights around the shelves, putting up little painted signs in her own intricate handwriting, colouring the floorboards a pale violet because the colour had taken her fancy. She arranged the tables and chairs, bought cheap from a house-clearance shop and painted with tester pots, into the kind of arrangements she would have liked when she had had coffee with her girlfriends. It was the chairs that had made her see it: she was, she realised, looking at them, making herself a little corner of something magical, perhaps a little cosmopolitan, a place where she could once again feel at home, separate from the provincial eyes and attitudes that now surrounded her.

‘So, what kind of shop are you?’ one of the antiques dealers had said, after eyeing the frame in her window. His voice had held just the faintest note of derision.

‘I’m . . . I’m an emporium,’ she had said, and ignored his raised eyebrows as he left to return to his own shop. And that’s what she had called it, The Peacock Emporium, the sign painted in chalk blue and white, a stencilled drawing of a peacock feather beside it. Neil had looked at it with a mixture of pride and fearfulness; he confessed later that he had wondered whether, with his name on the door, he might face bankruptcy again if it folded.

‘It’s not going to fold,’ said Suzanna, firmly. ‘Don’t be so negative.’

‘You’re going to have to work bloody hard,’ he said.