Peacock Emporium (31 page)

He touched her hand, so lightly that afterwards she found herself staring at the spot where their skin had met, as if unsure that it had happened. ‘For not being your mother?’

Suzanna’s eyes had filled inexplicably with tears. She chewed at her lip, trying to quell them. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ She half laughed, made awkward by this show of emotion.

‘Suzanna.’

‘For . . . for being responsible. For her death. I was the reason she died, after all.’ Her voice had become hard, brittle, her face strained under the smile. ‘She died in childbirth, you see. No one talks about it, but there it is. She’d still be here if it wasn’t for me.’ She rubbed dismissively at her nose.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, briskly. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Because you’re a midwife, I suppose. You’ll have seen it happen . . . Anyway. It doesn’t usually get to me like this.’

The lane was empty, the sun bouncing metallically off the cobbles. She turned back to him, her smile brave and bright. ‘Some inheritance, huh?’

For reasons she didn’t understand, he took her hand gently between his, bent his head low on their clasped fingers, and rested it there, as if in supplication. She felt the skin of his forehead, the electric hardness of the bone beneath, and her tears evaporated at the strangeness of what he was doing.

When he eventually looked up, she thought he might apologise. But instead he nodded, almost imperceptibly, as if this had been something he had already known, had been waiting all this time for her to say.

Suzanna, politeness forgotten, pulled away her hand, holding it to her chest as if it had been burnt. ‘I – I’ll just get some more tea,’ she said, and ran for the safety of her shop.

Alejandro walked back to the hospital, as if he was wading through treacle. It was almost a mile and a half, and he was now so tired that he felt nauseous. He took the short-cut, through the Dere estate, his feet moving automatically on the hot pavements. She had shouted his name three times before he heard her.

‘God, you look knackered.’ Jessie and her daughter held hands, their faces bright and open as the sun. He felt relieved to see them, so uncomplicated and good.

‘We’ve been making outfits for the end-of-term play. Mrs Creek has been helping us.’

Emma held up a plastic bag.

‘Now we’re going to the park. You can come if you want. Push Emma on the swings. I’m not good at pushing at the moment,’ Jessie said. ‘Bashed my arm.’

He might have been tempted to say something – he had thought about it often – but his brain was not clear and he did not trust himself to say what he meant. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear you very well.’

Her hair had glinted blue-black in the afternoon sun. Her aquamarine eyes, when she had looked up at him, had been angry, as if she was scolding him for some previous transgression. He could still feel her skin against his, the cool translucency of it like dew.

‘You can hardly stand up, you poor thing.’ Jessie placed her arm on his. ‘Look at him, Ems. Asleep on his feet. Why don’t you go home?’

‘Your chin is all bristly.’ The child swung herself round a pillar, her legs kicking up with the restless exuberance of youth, straining towards the brightly coloured equipment of the playpark, just visible beyond the trees.

I have never met her before, he thought. I know I can never have met her before. So, then, why . . . ?

‘What babies came out today?’

Jess stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘Leave him, Ems. He’s too tired to talk babies today. Go on, Ale. Go home. Get some sleep.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ he muttered under his breath, so quiet that, as she later told her mother, she wasn’t sure till afterwards what it was he had said. And even then she was not sure of his meaning. ‘I don’t think I know where home is.’

She got home long after Neil, just as the shadows started to lengthen, the light summer evening having stretched almost indecently late. The cottage, despite her lack of effort, looked idyllic, clematis tumbling in bursts over the beamed porch, the burnt sunlight tipping the perennials that had persisted in forcing their way out of the flower-beds, pulsatilla, alchemilla, digitalis, bright purple, pink and blue, unchastened by lack of weeding or fertiliser.

She saw none of it. She let herself in, found him, feet resting on the coffee-table, eyes fixed on the television.

‘I was about to ring you,’ he said, lifting the remote control. ‘Are you (a) stuck in traffic, (b) having an early Christmas sale that you haven’t told me about, or (c) stuck under a heavy piece of furniture and unable to reach your phone?’ He tore his eyes from the television and grinned at her, blowing a kiss. ‘There’s some dinner in the oven. I thought you might be hungry. Sorry, I ate mine earlier.’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing exciting. Spagbol from a jar. I wasn’t feeling very inspired.’

‘Actually, I’m not terribly hungry.’ She began to pull off her shoes, wondering what it said about her that the sight of him sitting there so contentedly could irritate her, even when he had prepared her a meal. ‘Isn’t he good?’ she could hear her parents exclaiming to each other. ‘He cooks for her as well. I don’t think she realises how lucky she is.’ She stood in the kitchen for a moment or two, leaning on the sideboard, willing herself to be nice, scolding herself for noticing, as she always did, the crumbs from breakfast, the flowered curtains she hated yet could not bring herself to replace (because that would mean making an emotional investment in the place), the smeared and splattered pans and surfaces that told of Neil’s culinary adventures. Am I always going to be this awful? she asked herself. Am I always going to be so dissatisfied?

‘If you want to get yourself a glass,’ he called, from the other room, ‘there’s a bottle of wine open.’

She opened a cupboard, pulled one out by the stem, and walked into the sitting room. She sat next to him on the sofa, and he patted her thigh. ‘Good day?’ he said, his eyes still on the television.

‘All right.’

‘What was the weather like here? It was gorgeous in London. In the hour I was able to go out, anyway.’

‘Fine. Pretty hot.’

‘Beautiful here when I got back. Look at this guy. He’s hysterical.’ Neil laughed. He had caught the sun, she realised. His freckles had emerged.

She sat, impervious to the comedian on the screen, sipping the wine he had poured for her. ‘Neil,’ she said, eventually, ‘do you ever worry about us?’

He turned his face from the screen after the faintest of delay, as if understanding reluctantly that they were about to have One of Those Conversations, and secretly wishing that he didn’t have to be part of it. ‘Not any more. Why? Should I?’

‘No.’

‘Not about to run off with the farmer from down the road?’

‘I meant this. Don’t you ever wonder . . . if this is it? If this is as much as we get?’

‘As much what?’

‘I don’t know. Happiness? Adventure? Passion?’ She said the last word conscious that he might read into it some kind of invitation.

She could see him fighting to suppress a sigh. Or perhaps it was a yawn. His eyes kept sneaking back to the television. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Look at us, Neil, it’s like we’re middle-aged, and I don’t feel like we got to do the exciting bit first.’ She waited, monitoring his reaction, daring him to look again at the television.

‘Are you saying you’re unhappy?’

‘I’m not saying anything. I just – I just wondered what you thought about this. About us. Whether you were happy.’

He lifted up the remote control and turned off the television. ‘Am I happy? I dunno. I’m happier than I was.’

‘Is that good enough?’

He shook his head slightly, a movement born of exasperation. ‘I don’t think I know what kind of answer you’re after.’

She grimaced, unsure herself.

‘Do you not think, ever, Suze, that you can make yourself happy? Or unhappy?’

‘What?’

‘All this questioning. All this analysing yourself. Am I happy? Am I sad? Is this enough? Don’t you think you can worry it all to death? It’s like . . . you’re always looking for things to worry about, always judging yourself by everyone else’s standards.’

‘I am not.’

‘Is this about Nadine and Alistair?’

‘No.’

‘They’ve been an accident waiting to happen for years. You can’t say you didn’t notice whenever we went round. At one point they were only communicating through the au pair.’

‘It’s not about them.’

‘Can’t we just enjoy the moment? The fact that, for the first time in ages, we’re solvent, we’re both employed, we have somewhere nice to live? I mean, no one’s ill, Suzanna. There’s nothing bad on the horizon, just good stuff, your shop, the baby, our future. I think we should be counting our blessings.’

‘I do.’

‘Then can’t we focus on that and stop looking for problems? Just for once?’

Suzanna gazed steadily at her husband, until, reassured, he turned back towards the television and flicked it into life with the remote control.

‘Sure,’ she said, stood up and walked softly into the kitchen.

Seventeen

Summer had descended fully on the little town, easing Dere Hampton gently into its sweltering embrace by a last few degrees. Its narrow streets sweated and baked, cars drove lazily around the market square, their tyres sticky on the molten Tarmac. American tourists in sore-footed clusters stopped and stared at pargeted frontages, exclaiming into their guidebooks. On the square, market traders sat under canopies, gulping at canned drinks, while elderly dogs lay in the middle of pavements, their tongues hanging pink and rude against the dust.

The shop was quiet: the better-heeled had taken off for summer holidays in other quiet towns, others spent their time shepherding children half crazed with liberation for six weeks from intensive schooling. Suzanna and Jessie, moving at a leisurely pace, cleaned shelves and windows, rearranged displays, chatted to tourists, and made jugs of iced tea, which became increasingly diluted with melted ice cubes as the afternoons wore on.

Increasingly, Suzanna had felt dissatisfied with the layout of the shop, and furious with herself that she could not work out what was wrong. One morning they stuck up the ‘closed’ sign, moved all the tables and chairs to the other end, and employed a handyman known to Father Lenny to move the shelving units to the opposite side. It had not looked as Suzanna had envisaged, and she paid the man the same amount – to Neil’s despair, as he went through the books – to move it all back again. She had decided not to do jewellery any more (one piece too many had ‘gone missing’, small enough to slip into a pocket when she was busy making coffee) and put the display downstairs in the cellar. As soon as she had done this, no less than three women came in separately asking for vintage necklaces. She papered over the wills, and replaced them with coloured maps of north Africa. Then she painted the back wall a pale turquoise and immediately regretted the colour. Through all this, Athene had sat in her frame on the cellar steps, her smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s, suitable neither for the shop wall nor to be taken home, a constant reminder of Suzanna’s inability to shape her world in a way that could be considered satisfactory.

Eventually, infected by a kind of madness, she took one Saturday off to go to London. She had originally meant to meet Nadine but, on a whim, pleaded a family emergency and went to Bond Street where, diving in and out of shops at a speed unusual in those temperatures, she bought two pairs of summer sandals, only one of which could truly be said to fit, a short-sleeved grey shirt, some earrings, a new pair of designer sunglasses and a pale blue linen suit that might come in handy should she have to go to a wedding. She also bought a bottle of her favourite scent, some painfully expensive moisturiser and a new lipstick in a colour she had seen in some celebrity magazine. She put all but the shirt on the credit card that Neil thought she had cut up. She would pay for it gradually, she rationalised, and had to stop herself crying on the train home.

Alejandro stayed away for three days, then came every day. Sometimes she would emerge from the cellar and find him seated, his dark, aquiline face expectant as if he had been waiting, and she would blush and cover her confusion under some too-loud remark about the weather, the level of coffee in the machines, the
mess
of everything in here! Then she would become self-consciously silent, furiously rerunning her inappropriate responses in her imagination, making herself sound ever more foolish.

If Jessie was around, Suzanna said little, content to listen to their exchanges, to store the snippets of information Jessie was able to prise out of him: that his father had written, that he had cooked an English meal, that in the maternity ward a ‘mother’ had been admitted the previous evening with nothing more gestational than a pillow under her nightdress. Sometimes Suzanna felt that, through Jessie, he was telling her things about himself, laying himself out in front of her in little pieces. Sometimes she found herself doing the same, being unusually forthcoming, simply because there were parts of her that she wanted him to see: the better parts, someone more attractive, more together, than the person she felt he usually saw.

Several times now he had arrived when Jessie was out at lunch and Suzanna had found herself almost incapacitated by awkwardness. Even if other customers were present, she felt peculiarly alone with him, and she would stammer and find things to busy herself with so that she could hardly find time to talk to him, then curse abjectly when he left. Occasionally, perhaps when he appeared engrossed in a newspaper or book, she was able to compose herself and then, gradually, they would begin to talk. Sometimes for the whole hour until Jessie came back.

Once he had told her he wanted to visit the town’s museum, a series of overcrowded rooms that detailed Dere’s rather grisly medieval history, and she had gone with him, had closed the shop for a whole hour while they dawdled round the dusty exhibits, and he had told her about his own history, and that of Buenos Aires. It was probably not the best business practice, but it was good to get a fresh perspective from someone. To remind yourself that there were other ways of being, other places to be.