Peacock Emporium (25 page)

I was six when they first left me with my grandmother. They used to work in the city: a place not fit for a child, I was told repeatedly. They took a variety of jobs, often linked to the lower end of the entertainment business, but never seemed to make much money – or, at least, any more than they needed to maintain their own beauty. They sent back envelopes of
lire
for my upkeep – not enough to keep the hens in corn, my grandfather said dismissively. He grew or raised almost all our food – the only way, he would say, slapping my back, that he was going to grow himself a fine young man.

They would come back every six months or so to see me. At first I would hide behind my grandmother’s skirts, hardly knowing them, and my father would tut and then pull faces at me behind her back. My mother would croon to me, smoothing my hair and scolding my grandmother for dressing me like a peasant, while I lay against her chest, breathing in her perfume, and wondering how two such exotic creatures could have created a lumpen animal like myself. That was how my father used to describe me, pinching at my stomach, exclaiming at my chins, and my mother would scold him, smiling, but not at me. Some years I didn’t know whether I loved or hated them. I knew only that I could never live up to what they had wanted of a son, that possibly even I was the reason they kept going away.

‘You mustn’t mind them,’ my grandmother would say. ‘The city has made them sharp as knives.’

Then, the year I turned fourteen, they returned with nothing for my grandmother, nothing for my upkeep. It was apparently the fifth time in a row. I was not meant to know this, and was sent to my room, where I peered through the door, straining to hear correctly the rapidly raised voices. My grandfather, losing his temper, accused my father of being a wastrel, my mother a prostitute. ‘You still have enough money to put this shit on your faces, the shine on your new shoes. Yet you are good for nothing,’ he said.

‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ said my father, lighting a cigarette.

‘Yes, you do. Call yourself a father? You could not even kill a chicken to feed your own son.’

‘You think I could not kill a chicken?’ said my father, and I could just make out him pulling himself up to his full height in his pin-striped suit.

‘You are good for nothing, except tarting yourself up like a fairy.’

The parlour door slammed. As I ran to the window, I could see my father striding out into the yard. After several attempts, and much squawking, he managed to grab Carmela, one of the older hens, who had long since stopped laying. Facing my grandfather, he snapped her neck, and casually threw her body across the yard towards him.

A silence descended, and suddenly I felt my father’s gesture had been almost a threat. I saw in him something I hadn’t seen before, something mean and impulsive. My grandmother had seen it too: she wrung her hands, imploring everyone to come inside, to drink some
grappa.

My mother glanced nervously from her father to her husband, unsure who to try to placate first.

The very air seemed to grow still.

Then with a strangulated squawking sound, Carmela appeared at my father’s foot, her head a little tilted, her expression malevolent. She hesitated, wobbled, and then made her way unsteadily past him, across the yard and into the chicken-house. No one said anything.

Then my grandmother pointed. ‘She has crapped on your suit,’ she said.

My father looked down and found his sharply pressed trousers polluted by what he might have assumed to be Carmela’s last protest.

My mother, her hand pressed to her lips, began to giggle.

My grandfather, his head raised high, turned on his heel and walked back into the house, his dismissive ‘Huh!’ hanging in the still air behind him. ‘Even your son can wring the neck of a chicken,’ he muttered.

After that my father returned very seldom. I didn’t care. My grandfather taught me about meat, about the differences between pancetta and prosciutto, between Dolcelatte and
panna cotta
, how to make pâté studded with figs and sealed in goose fat. He never once mentioned my appearance. Ten years later I opened my first shop, and from that day it was my turn to feed him, which I did, with pleasure, until he died.

Carmela was the one chicken we never ate.

Liliane stuck the key in the door of the Unique Boutique at almost twenty minutes to ten. She glanced down and, having wedged open the door with her foot, bent and picked up the small box of gold-wrapped chocolates on the step. She looked closely at them, twice turned them over in her hands, then lifted her head and looked left and right down the lane, her long coat billowing in the brisk breeze. Then she took two steps back, letting the door go, so she could just make out the frontage of Arturro’s Deli. She waited a moment more, and then, holding the chocolates, with her handbag, close to her chest, she pushed her way into her shop.

Across the road, from their vantage-point behind Arturro’s display, Suzanna and Jessie looked at each other. Then, as if one of them at least were a good twenty years younger, they burst into a fit of childish giggles.

It was the fourth gift they had left on the steps of the Unique Boutique: once a week was what they had decided. Any more would look obvious, any less and it might appear accidental. But it had not been one-way traffic; perhaps infected by the onset of hot weather, by the primeval urges that persuaded girls to reveal bare legs and shoulders, that left Dere’s young men cruising aimlessly up and down the narrow streets in booming, souped-up cars (while the town’s elder residents pursed their lips in disapproval), Suzanna and Jessie had developed all sorts of ploys to draw Liliane and Arturro into each other’s company. When Liliane’s handbag shelf fell down, they persuaded Arturro to pop round to mend it, telling him that she had so admired the work he had done on his own shelves. They had dropped hints about oil being good for arthritis, so that Liliane popped into the deli to pick up a bottle for her mother. They manufactured reasons – suddenly scrubbing tables, or whipping away chairs to be ‘fixed’, why the two should be seated together when they came in for coffee. And occasionally they were rewarded: they would catch them glancing at each other with a kind of shy pleasure, or being startled if they dropped in at the Peacock Emporium and found the other already present (which seemed to be an increasingly frequent occurrence). It was working, they told each other in gleeful whispers, when the shop was empty. And placed behind the counter another box of something sweet.

At Dere House, Vivi was preoccupied with culinary matters of her own: she had become haunted by Rosemary’s fridge. Over recent weeks, when she had come in for her twice weekly bin-emptying (Rosemary had difficulty getting the liners out without ripping them) she had discovered in it, among the liquefying vegetables and old medicine bottles, several discarded yoghurts beside open packs of bacon, and raw chicken on plates, dripping blood into the open milk carton below. The words ‘listeria’ and ‘salmonella’ took on a horrible resonance, and Vivi found herself jumping anxiously when Rosemary talked of making herself ‘a little sandwich’ or having a snack.

She had wanted to talk to Douglas about it, but he had been rather dour and uncommunicative since the thing with Suzanna, and with the hay-making he was out often till nine in the evening. She had considered whether any of her friends from the village might help, but she wasn’t close enough to anyone for that level of confidence: she had never been one of those women who surrounded themselves with a ‘circle’, and with the Fairley-Hulme name being what it was around here, any admission of difficulties at home seemed a kind of disloyalty. Vivi would watch the morning talk shows, with young people who thought nothing of revealing the most intimate details of their sex lives, or their problems with drugs or alcohol, and marvel. How, in the space of a generation, could we have been transported from an age in which everything had to stay within one’s four walls to a point at which that attitude is now considered unhealthy? In the end, she called Lucy, who listened with the analytical detachment that had made her such a success in her job, then told her that, as far as she could make out, Rosemary was getting to the age when she needed to go into a home.

‘I wouldn’t even suggest that to your father,’ said Vivi, in hushed tones, as if from the distance of the forty-acre field Douglas could somehow hear her treachery.

‘You’re going to have to do something,’ said Lucy. ‘Salmon-ella’s a killer. A home help?’

Vivi didn’t like to confess the little matter of the Incontinence Lady. ‘It’s just that she’s so stubborn. She doesn’t even like it when I go into her kitchen. I have to make up all sorts of excuses for why I’ve replaced her food.’

‘She should be grateful.’

‘Well, yes, darling, but you know that word’s not in Rosemary’s vocabulary.’

‘It’s a tough one. Can you not just put clingfilm over everything?’

‘I tried that, but she decided to re-use it. She put the stuff from the chicken round a big lump of Cheddar and I had to throw the whole thing out.’

‘Just tell her she’s causing a health hazard.’

‘I did try, darling. Really. But she gets so cross, and won’t listen. She just waves her hand at me and storms off.’

‘She probably knows,’ said Lucy, ruminatively. ‘That she’s losing her marbles, I mean.’

Vivi sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she does.’

‘It would make me angry. And Granny’s never been exactly a . . . benign character.’

‘No.’

‘D’you want me to have a word?’

‘With whom?’

‘I don’t know. Granny? Dad? It sometimes comes easier when there’s a gap between generations.’

‘You could try, dear, but I don’t know what good it will do. Your father’s a bit . . . well, I think he’s had enough of dealing with family problems at the moment.’

‘What do you mean?’

Vivi paused, feeling disloyal again. ‘Oh. You know. This silly thing with Suzanna.’

‘You’re joking. They’re not still harping on about that?’

‘She’s really rather hurt. And I’m afraid they’ve got to that awful stage where they can’t say anything without making it worse.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, I can’t believe they haven’t sorted things out. Hold on a minute.’ Vivi heard the sound of muffled conversation, and a rapid agreement. Then her daughter’s voice was back on the line. ‘Come on, Mum. You’ve got to put an end to this. They’re behaving like a pair of idiots. They’re as stubborn as each other.’

‘But what can I do?’

‘I don’t know. Bang their heads together. You can’t let this drag on. You’re going to have to make the first move. Look, Mum, I’ve got to go. I’m due in a meeting. Ring me tonight, okay? Let me know what you decide about Granny.’

She was gone before Vivi had a chance to whisper her love. She sat, staring at the distantly humming receiver, and felt the familiar swell of inadequacy. So, why is this my responsibility? Vivi thought crossly. Why do I have to sort everybody out, or suffer the consequences? What is it exactly that I ever did?

Nadine and Alistair Palmer were splitting up. As the evenings grew lighter, Suzanna’s quiet hours between closing the shop and before Neil came home, the time when she habitually pored over receipts at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of wine, had been increasingly interrupted by Nadine’s telephone calls: ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this to me . . . If he thinks I’m letting the children go for a whole weekend he’s gone quite mad . . . You know, the lawyer thinks I should go for the holiday home too . . . I did decorate it, even if it is shared with his brother . . .’

At first she had been flattered to hear from her – for some time she had thought that Nadine, who still lived in London, had forgotten her. Several weeks later, she was exhausted by the calls, by the never-ending tales of post-marital injustice, the myriad examples of pettiness to which once-loving couples could sink in their desire to punish each other.

‘I can’t tell you how lonely it is at night . . . I hear all sorts of noises . . . My mother thinks I should get a dog, but who’s going to walk it now that I have to go to work?’

Nadine and Alistair had been the first among their circle to marry, only six weeks before Suzanna and Neil. They had honeymooned in the same part of France. Recently Nadine had asked three times whether she and Neil were okay, as if desperate for reassurance that she wasn’t alone in her misery. Suzanna never said much more than ‘Fine.’ At first she had been rather shaken, but Nadine and Alistair were now the fourth couple among their old friends to have divorced, and she was less disturbed – perhaps less surprised – each time. Sometimes, after putting down the receiver, she pondered on the inevitability of the path her generation’s unions seemed to follow: the initial flush of enthusiasm segued into a more stable relationship, with perhaps a bit less sex, then marriage, building a home, sexual hunger replaced by a passion for soft furnishings. Then came the baby, from which point women became besotted, fulfilled, exasperated, sex disappeared, and women and men seemed to end up on different routes – she made joking but pointed references to the uselessness of husbands and fathers and he withdrew, to spend as much time at the office as possible until he ended up with someone younger, more enthusiastic about sex and less disappointed with life.

‘He says he doesn’t fancy me any more. Not since the children. I told him, frankly, I haven’t fancied him for years, but that’s not what marriage is all about, is it? Twenty-two years old . . . What does he think he’s doing? For God’s sake, Suzanna, she wasn’t even born when Charles and Di got married.’

Of course, on her better days Suzanna knew this wasn’t the case for everybody, that there were marriages where children cemented things and were a source of joy. In fact, she was never sure whether her friends had emphasised to her all the bad things about motherhood – the sleepless nights, the ruined bodies, the plastic toys and puke – out of a kind of misplaced sympathy that she hadn’t yet embarked upon it. But, perversely, this pessimistic litany of grief had begun to change the way she felt. Listening to Nadine weep about the prospect of her two young children spending time with Daddy’s girlfriend, at the silence of a house on waking up without them, made her keenly aware that among the domestic trivia, the mundanity and pettiness, there was a deep and jealous passion. And something about that passion – even in the depths of Nadine’s grief – set against her own carefully constructed lukewarm life, had begun to appeal.