Peacock Emporium (26 page)

The first time Neil met Suzanna, she had served him sushi. She had been working in a restaurant in Soho, and, having discovered that the mixture of raw fish and rice was almost fat free, was subsisting on it and Marlboro Lights in an attempt to drop from a size ten to a size eight (these days, she wondered why instead of fretting about non-existent cellulite, she hadn’t spent her twenties wandering around in a bikini). Neil had come in with clients. Having grown up in Cheam, with the uncomplicated rugby-club diet of the public-school boy, he had gamely tried everything she suggested, and only confessed to Suzanna afterwards that if anyone else had tried to make him eat raw sea urchin he would have put them in a headlock.

He was tall, broad and handsome, just a few years older than her, and bore the kind of sheen on his skin that said a City salary, and frequent trips abroad, could be used to combat the sallowness and boredom of office life. He had tipped her almost thirty per cent of the bill, and she had acknowledged that this gesture was not for the benefit of his companions. She had observed him across the table, listened to his whispered confession, conscious that a willingness to experiment in matters of appetite might suggest an open-mindedness in other areas.

Neil, she discovered, over successive months, was focused, uncomplicated and, unlike her previous, occasionally faithful boyfriends, utterly reliable. He bought her the things a boyfriend theoretically should – regular flowers, perfume after trips abroad, occasional weekends away and, at appropriate intervals, impressively sized engagement, wedding and eternity rings. Her parents loved him. Her friends eyed him speculatively, several with a sly persistence that told her he would never be alone for long. His flat had french windows that overlooked Barnes Bridge. He slotted into her life with an ease that convinced her they were meant to be together.

They had married young. Too young, her parents had worried, knowing nothing of her busy romantic history. She had batted away their concerns with the certainty of someone who knew themselves to be adored, who knew of no gaps for doubt to nestle in. She looked stunning in her cream silk dress.

If, later, she wondered whether she would ever again feel that first flush of excitement, that tingling anticipation for the sexual attention of another, she could usually rationalise it away. With someone who had shopped around as much as she had, it was inevitable that one would wish occasionally for a taste of the exotic. With a man who now frequently felt more like an irritating older brother than a lover, it was obvious that she would cast the odd covetous glance elsewhere. She, of all people, knew that shopping around could be addictive.

Ever since the row about the shooting, Neil had been withdrawn, nothing obvious, just a cooling in their domestic climate. In some ways, Suzanna realised, it was the best thing he could have done. She was always better when she had to work for attention. To be a little unsure of him induced in her the belief that she did not want to lose him. Listening to Nadine talk about the horrors of being ‘matchmade’ at dinner parties, of how other couples had taken sides, as if it were too much mental effort for them to retain friendships with both, of how she had been forced into a ‘starter home’ in an unfashionable suburb had left her with the same prescient chill as when she had first heard Liliane talking about life with her mother. So, although Neil might initially have thought otherwise, things for them had been improving, even if only in increments. She had achieved some sort of equilibrium. She had no desire – or even energy – to claw her way up again.

Perhaps Neil knew it too. Perhaps that was why, for her birthday, he had brought her to London for sushi.

‘I’ll eat anything you throw at me,’ Neil was saying, ‘as long as you don’t make me eat one of those puddings.’

‘The pink testicles?’

‘That’s the one.’ Neil wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘D’you remember when you made me eat one in Chinatown, and I had to spit it out in my gym bag?’

She smiled, pleased that the memory didn’t carry with it any revulsion or irritation.

‘It’s the texture. I fail to understand how anyone can eat something the consistency of a pillow.’

‘But you eat marshmallows.’

‘Different. I don’t know why, but they are.’

It had been the first evening she could remember when they had talked freely, without self-consciousness, without a second, silent conversation full of recrimination running under the surface. She had wondered, privately, whether it was just the pleasure of being in Central London, before deciding that most of her troubles were to do with analysing things too much. A short memory and a sense of humour, that was what her grandmother had said were necessary for a successful marriage. Even if she herself had never displayed the evidence of either.

‘You look nice,’ he had said, watching her over the green tea. And she had been able to forgive him the use of such a vapid word.

At ten fifteen, as they walked through a balmy, bustling Leicester Square, he had told her that they were not returning to Dere Hampton that night. ‘Why?’ she had said, shouting to be heard, as the Hare Krishnas skipped gamely past with their tambourines. ‘Where are we going?’

‘A surprise,’ he said. ‘Because we’re doing better financially. Because you work so hard. And because my wife deserves a treat.’ And he had walked her to a discreetly luxurious hotel in Covent Garden, where the very window-boxes spoke of good taste and the kind of attention that would guarantee a good night’s stay, even if Suzanna had not already been brimming with pleasure at the way her evening was turning out. And in their room was an overnight bag that he had apparently packed that morning and spirited away. He had only forgotten her moisturiser.

Passion, in marriage, ebbed and flowed. Everyone said it. If, for a change, she gave him her full attention, if she tried to push aside all the things that annoyed her, that persisted in creeping in and polluting her finer feelings, if she tried to focus on the things that were good, then it wasn’t impossible that they could recover it. ‘I love you,’ she had said, and felt a huge relief that, even after everything, she still meant it.

He had held her tightly then and, unusually for him, stayed silent.

At eleven fifteen, as they sipped room-service champagne, he had turned to face her, the coverlet slipping down his bare skin. It was pale, she noted. Their first year without a foreign holiday. In fifteen months he was going to be forty, he said.

And?

He had always wanted to be a dad before he was forty.

She said nothing.

And, he was thinking, if it took an average eighteen months to get pregnant, shouldn’t they start trying now? Just to give themselves a little extra chance? He just wanted to be a dad, he said quietly. To have a family of his own. He had put down his glass, held her face between two warm hands, looking a little apprehensive, as if he were aware that broaching it like this might breach the terms of their deal, that he might fracture the fragile peace that had made the evening magical.

But then he hadn’t known he was asking her something she had already decided. She had said nothing, but lay back, placing her own glass on the opposite table.

‘You don’t have to be afraid,’ he said, softly.

In the blur of the champagne, she felt a little like a landed fish. Breathing, gasping, but somehow, finally, accepting of her fate.

Vivi walked up the hallway, puffing under the combined and unevenly distributed weight of her carrier-bags, musing that her son was never in when she needed him. Reaching the kitchen, she allowed them to drop and held up her hands in the fading light to examine the red welts the handles had carved into her fleshy palms.

Normally she wouldn’t have visited the supermarket at this time of the week, but Vivi had felt obliged to replace the food she had that morning ejected from Rosemary’s fridge. It had become an almost twice-weekly event. On this occasion, she had also braved the upper cupboards, finding in them not just several cans of luncheon meat that were almost three years out of date but, more worryingly, among the crockery, several plates that appeared to have been placed back in the stack without having passed through the dishwasher. Vivi had soaked the plates in bleach for half an hour, just to be on the safe side. Then, fearful of what might be mouldering unseen, she had climbed on to a chair and scrubbed out all four cupboards before replacing their contents.

All this had meant that she had had to cancel her weekly helping session with the ladies from Riding for the Disabled up at Walstock, but they had been very nice about it. Lynn Gardner, who ran the scheme, had just put her father in a home, and Vivi, still traumatised by her morning’s travails, had taken the rare step of confessing the reason why she had felt unable to come.

‘Oh, Gawd, poor you. Better check the drawer under the oven. The one you heat plates in,’ she had boomed down the telephone. ‘We found a bucketload of maggots in ours. He’d been putting dirty crockery in there as if it were the dishwasher.’

Vivi glanced at the oven in horror.

‘You getting the sleepwalking?’

‘What?’

‘Oh, they start rambling around the house at night. Quite unnerving, I can tell you. We had Daddy on pills in the end – I was so worried that he’d find his way outside and end up in with the sheep.’

The men had failed to move their empty tea mugs from the table to the sink, so Vivi, who no longer sighed in resignation at the sight of them, did it for them. She swept up the crumby souvenirs of their lunch, stuck the plates in the dishwasher, and tidied scattered papers into piles. When she was unpacking the groceries on the kitchen table, she made out Rosemary’s imperious tones in the drawing room, where she was in muffled conversation with Douglas. She was far too opinionated, too vital, Vivi thought, to resemble Lynn’s father, a ghostly wraith, silently roaming in his pyjamas, and Vivi was briefly unsure whether this made her glad, or something else. She considered popping her head round the door to say hello, but realised, guiltily, that she would rather have the extra five minutes by herself. She glanced up at the clock and noted, with a small stab of pleasure, that she could still catch the last few minutes of
The Archers.
‘We’ll just enjoy a bit of peace, won’t we, Mungo?’

The terrier, hearing its name, trembled in stillness as it gazed intently at her, waiting in a state of permanent anticipation for some culinary scrap to fall.

‘No luck, darling boy,’ said Vivi, placing the various meat products in the freezer. ‘I happen to know you’ve had yours.’

She laid several lamb chops on a tray, carefully trimming the fat from Rosemary’s. Rosemary did complain about untrimmed meat. Then she put the new potatoes to boil with a few mint leaves, and began to make a salad. They would probably remark that supper was on the light side, but she had bought a summer pudding to compensate. If she removed it from its packaging Rosemary wouldn’t comment on the superiority of home-made.

When
The Archers
finished, Vivi stood for a moment, gazing out of the window as she had while she listened. The kitchen garden was at its best at this time of year, the herbs sending dusty waves of fragrance into the house, the lavender, campanula and lobelia bulging from the old raised-brick beds, the creepers and climbers, dead brown skeletons in winter, now a riot of vigorous green. Rosemary had built this garden when she was first married: it was one of the few things for which Vivi felt uncomplicatedly grateful to her. For a while, she had thought Suzanna would take an interest in it: she had the same eye as Rosemary, a skill at arranging things so they were at their most beautiful.

She was inhaling the scent of the evening primrose and listening to the lazy drone of the bees when she detected that, over the gentle sounds of approaching evening, Rosemary’s voice had taken on an unusually combative note. Douglas’s was softer, as if he were reasoning with her. Vivi wondered, in vague discomfort, whether it was her they were discussing. Perhaps Rosemary had taken offence at the wholesale cleansing of her shelves. Or perhaps she had still not been forgiven for the aborted visit of the Incontinence Lady.

She turned from the window and placed the chops on top of the Aga. She rubbed her hands on her apron and, with a heavy heart, walked towards the door.

‘I can’t believe you’re even considering it.’

Rosemary was seated on the nursing chair, even though she often had trouble getting out of it. Her hands were folded stiffly in her lap, and her face, set in anger, was turned away from her son as if she was refusing physically to acknowledge what he had to say. As she closed the door behind her, Vivi noted that her mother-in-law had buttoned her blouse lopsidedly, and was grieved that she could not mention it.

Douglas was standing by the piano, a tumbler of whisky in his hand. To the left of him, the grandfather clock that had been in the family since Cyril Fairley-Hulme’s birth, offered up a discreetly regular quarter-chime. ‘I have given this plenty of thought, Mother.’

‘That may well be, Douglas, but I’ve said this to you before, you do not necessarily know what’s best for this estate.’

A faint smile played about his lips. ‘The last time we had this conversation, Mother, I was twenty-seven years old.’

‘I’m well aware of that. And you had a head full of foolish ideas then too.’

I just don’t think it makes financial sense for Ben to inherit the entire estate. It’s not just about tradition, it’s about finance.’

‘Would somebody like to fill me in as to what’s going on?’ Vivi’s gaze flicked from her husband to her mother-in-law, who was still gazing mulishly towards the french windows. She tried to smile, but stopped when she realised no one else was.

‘I had a few ideas I thought I should discuss with Mother—’

‘And while I’m alive, Douglas, and I have a say in the running of this estate, then things will stay exactly as they are.’

‘I’m only suggesting that some—’

‘I know very well what you’re suggesting. You’ve said it enough times. And I’m telling you the answer is no.’