Peacock Emporium (54 page)

‘A peacock butterfly. The plant too.’

‘I didn’t understand,’ she said. ‘About the butterfly, I mean. We only looked up its Latin name.’

‘Then it’s lucky I didn’t catch you a
cichlid.’

They sat for a moment in silence, Suzanna wondering at how, having spent years existing in a kind of low-grade nothingness, her emotions could swing so dramatically from despair to elation and then to something less clear-cut and infinitely more confusing. A group of young girls was peering in at the window, making exaggerated expressions of sentimentality when they read Emma’s words.

‘It’s beautiful, what you did,’ he said, nodding at the display.

‘She would have done it better.’

Suzanna struggled with the things she had wanted to say, things that now felt awkward, overblown. ‘I thought you were in Argentina,’ she said, trying to sound noncommittal. Now he was here, she felt suddenly complicated, as if the urgency of the previous day had been an overreaction, had given too much away. ‘You didn’t come to give evidence. I thought you’d already gone.’

‘I was going to go. But . . . I decided to wait.’ He leant against the door, as if he was holding it shut. When she looked up, he was gazing at her intently, and that, combined with the slowly settling meaning of his words, made her blush again.

She stood up and began to sweep the floor, conscious of the need to do something, to stay focused. ‘Right,’ she said, unsure why she had. ‘Right.’ Her hands tightened on the broom. She pushed it along in short strokes, the heat of his gaze still on her. ‘Look, you probably know I’ve left Neil, but I need you to know that I didn’t leave him for you. I mean, not that you didn’t mean anything to me – don’t mean anything to me . . .’ She was conscious that she was rambling already. ‘I just left him to be on my own.’

He nodded, still leaning against the door.

‘It’s not that I’m not flattered by what you said. Because I am. But so much has happened over the past days – stuff that even you don’t know about. To do with my family. And I’ve only just started to work things out. Things about me, about how I’m going to live.’

He was looking over at the display – or possibly out of the window. It was impossible to tell.

‘So I just want you to know that you are – will always be – really important to me. In ways you probably don’t realise. But I think it’s time for me to grow up a little. Stand on my own two feet.’

She stopped sweeping. ‘Do you understand?’

‘You can’t run away from this, Suzanna,’ he said.

She was shocked by his certainty, by the absence of his previous reticence. Reticence she had always felt fuelled by her own.

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘Because I’m happy?’

She made a sound of exasperation. ‘Look, I’m trying to explain something here. I’m trying, for once in my life, to be adult.’

He tilted his head to one side, as if he were party to some private joke. ‘Did you cut your hair like that to punish yourself?’

At first she didn’t trust what she had heard. ‘What? Who do you think you are?’

His smile told her.

Suzanna’s heart was thumping uncomfortably, and now, at his bizarre reaction, all the rage of the previous weeks, all the emotion she had been forced to contain, came spilling out. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Really! Have you lost your mind?’

He began to laugh.

‘God, you arrogant – you arrogant . . .’

‘It’s not so bad.’ He moved forward, lifted his hand as if to touch it. ‘I still think you look beautiful.’

‘This is ridiculous!’ She ducked away from him. ‘You’re ridiculous! I don’t know what’s happened to you, Alejandro, but you don’t understand. You don’t understand even half of what I’ve been working through. I’ve tried to tell you nicely. I’ve tried to make you understand, but I’m not going to save your feelings if you’re going to be too obstinate to listen to them.’

‘
I
’m not listening to my feelings?’ He was laughing properly now, and the unfamiliar sound enraged her more than ever. Almost unaware of what she was doing, she began to shove him, to physically manhandle him out of the shop, knowing only that she had to be away from him, that she needed him far from her to restore her peace of mind.

‘What are you doing, Suzanna Peacock?’ he said, as she forced him through the door.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Go back to bloody Argentina. And just leave me alone. I don’t need this, okay? I don’t need this on top of everything else.’

‘You do—’

‘Just
go:

‘You do need me.’

She closed the door on him, her gasping breaths veering dangerously towards sobs. Now he was actually here, a reality, she wasn’t ready for it. She needed him to be like he was before. She needed things to move slowly, so that she could be sure of what she felt, that she wasn’t getting it all wrong. Nothing in her life felt secure any more: its elements swooped and fell under her like the decks of a storm-ridden ship, threatening to overwhelm her.

‘I can’t just – I can’t just be like you. I can’t let go of it all.’

She wasn’t sure he had heard her. She leant against the door, feeling his voice vibrate through it. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ He was shouting, apparently unafraid of being heard. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Suzanna Peacock.’

The shop seemed to have shrunk. She sat down as it diminished around her, the sound of his muffled voice echoing through her, filling up the remaining space.

‘I will haunt you, Suzanna,’ he yelled. ‘I will haunt you worse than they ever did. Because they are not your ghosts. They are your mother’s and father’s and Jason’s and poor Emma’s. But they are not your ghosts. I am.’

He paused.

‘You hear me? I am.’

Eventually she stood, and moved to the window. Through the small frames of curved glass, she could see him, a foot away from the door, addressing it with a kind of evangelical determination, his face relaxed as if he was already sure of the outcome. Behind him, she made out the distant figures of Arturro and Liliane, watching, bewildered, from the door of the Unique Boutique.

‘Can you hear me? I will haunt you, Suzanna.’

His voice echoed down the cobbled lane, bounced off the flint walls, the water fountain. She leant against the window frame, feeling the fight seep out of her and something give inside her.

‘You are a ridiculous man,’ she said. She wiped her eyes, and he caught sight of her. ‘A ridiculous man,’ she said, louder, so that he could hear. ‘You sound like a lunatic’

He looked right at her and raised his eyebrows.

‘A
lunatic,’
she yelled.

‘So let me in,’ he said, and gave a distinctly Latin shrug.

The sheer unAlejandroness of that movement sent a shiver through her. She moved to the door and opened it.

He looked back at her, this foreign man from a million miles away, more strange yet more familiar than anything she could have imagined. And as he stood, a broad, uninhibited smile spread slowly across his face, a smile that told of freedom and uncomplicated pleasure, a smile that held promises it didn’t have to explain. A smile that was finally matched by her own. ‘You get it now?’ he said quietly.

She began to nod, and then laugh, feeling a great bubble of emotion forcing its way out of her in short, breathless bursts. And for some time, they stood in the door of the shop that used to be the Peacock Emporium, talked about in dismissive and curious whispers for weeks after by those who knew them in the small town and those who didn’t. Barely touching each other, watched by the few people who had once been its customers, the too-dark man, and the woman with the short black hair, a woman who, considering all that had happened, should have been a little less elated, perhaps a little more discreet. Throwing back her head and laughing, the image of her mother.

Much, much later, Suzanna stood on the painted step of the shop, locked the door for the final time, and looked around. He was seated, fiddling with the paper butterfly, waiting as, for the seventeenth time, she checked that everything she needed was there. ‘You know I’m meant to be going to Australia. In about an hour. I’ve got the ticket and everything.’

He reached over and put his arm round her legs as she came to him, a gently proprietorial gesture. ‘Argentina is closer.’

‘I don’t want to rush into anything, Ale.’

He smiled at the paper butterfly.

‘I mean it. Even if I do come to Argentina, I’m not sure whether we’re going to be together, not yet anyway. I’ve just come out of a marriage. I want to go somewhere for a while where my history doesn’t count.’

‘History always counts.’

‘Not to you. Not for us.’

She sat beside him and told him about her mother, that she had run away. ‘I should hate her, I suppose,’ she said, feeling the warmth of his hand around hers, savouring the fact that it could now linger there. ‘But I don’t. I just feel relief that I didn’t cause her death.’

‘Well. You have a mother who loves you.’

‘Oh, I know. And Athene Forster,’ she looked at the photograph Vivi had given her, which was sitting on top of a cardboard box, ‘I look like her, I know, but she feels like nothing to do with me. I can’t mourn someone who left me without a backward glance.’

Alejandro’s smile faded as he thought of a baby in a Buenos Aires maternity ward, spirited away by a blonde woman determinedly oblivious to someone else’s pain. ‘Perhaps she never wanted to leave you,’ he murmured. ‘You may never know the whole story.’

‘Oh, I know enough.’ She was surprised at her lack of animosity. ‘I had her down as this glamorous, doomed figure. I think perhaps I was half in love with the idea of being the same. Now I just think Athene Forster was probably rather a stupid, spoilt little girl. Someone who just wasn’t meant to be a mother.’

He stood up and held out his hand to her. ‘It’s time to be happy, Suzanna Peacock,’ he announced. He tried to make his face solemn. ‘With me or without me.’

She smiled back, accepting the truth in this. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Your gifts were way off the mark. Because there is no Suzanna Peacock. Not any more.’

She paused. ‘Just so you know. My name is Suzanna Fairley-Hulme.’

Twenty-Eight

The girl in the blue bouclé suit descended backwards from the train, struggling with the huge pram, whose wheels had stuck on some ledge. It was a cumbersome thing, dating from the 1940s, and as she nodded her thanks to the guard who had helped wrestle it on to the platform, she thought of her landlady, who had complained for weeks about its presence in her narrow hall. Twice she had attempted to demand its removal, but the girl knew the old woman was intimidated by her accent, and had used it to devastating effect. Just as she did now to the guard, who grinned at her, checking that she had no accompanying bags that also required carrying, and gave her long, slim legs an appreciative glance as she walked away.

It was a blustery day, and outside the station she leant forward and tucked the blankets more securely into the sides of the pram. Then she smoothed her hair and pulled up her collar, watching wistfully as the latest of several taxi cabs roared past. It was at least a mile and a half to the restaurant and she had only enough money for her return ticket. And a packet of cigarettes.

She was going to need those cigarettes.

As she reached Piccadilly, perhaps predictably it began to rain. She flipped the hood up on the pram, and walked faster, her head down against the wind. Because she had not worn stockings, her ridiculous shoes were rubbing her heels. He had told her not to wear them, that she would be better with the other pair. But some vestige of vanity had meant she didn’t want to be seen in a pair of cheap plimsolls. Not today.

The restaurant was in a side-street behind a theatre, its dark green exterior and stained-glass windows advertising its discreet quality, its desirability as a lunching haunt of the well-heeled and discerning. She slowed as she approached, as if she were reluctant to reach her destination, and stood outside, staring at the menu, as if trying to decide whether to go in. A row of builders were leaning against the scaffolding above her, temporarily taking shelter from the light rain, one whistling to Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk On By’, which issued furrily from a transistor radio. They watched with unconcealed interest as she attempted to repin her hair, sabotaged by the wind and the lack of a mirror, then peered into a nearby window in an attempt to see whether her makeup had smudged.

She lit a cigarette and smoked it in short, urgent gasps, shifting on her feet and peering distractedly down the street, as if she had not yet decided where she wanted to be. Finally she turned to the pram beside her, and glanced inside at the sleeping baby. Suddenly she stood immobile, the intent look on her face still and strange, oblivious to the builders, to the foul weather. It was a look quite unlike the casual, fond glances of other mothers. She reached in, as if to touch the child’s face, her other hand gripping the pram handle tightly, as if to steady herself. Then she leant under the hood, stooping so that her face couldn’t be seen.

Some time later, she straightened up, let out a slow, shaky sigh and muttered something under her breath. Then, she wheeled her pram slowly towards the door of the restaurant.

‘Cheer up, love,’ called a voice from above her, as she entered. ‘It might never happen.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured, not loud enough for anyone to hear, ‘that’s where you’re quite, quite wrong.’

The fat girl with the permanent wave had been rather difficult about taking temporary charge of the pram, huffing and puffing about restaurant policy, so Athene, using her most determinedly cut-glass accent, had been forced to tip her the cigarette money, and promise that she would be no longer than half an hour. ‘She’s asleep, darling,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘You won’t have to do a thing. And I’ll be just over there if you need me.’ Faced with the full wattage of her determined charm, the girl had not been brave enough to refuse, but she had given her the kind of looking over that suggested she knew Athene was not all she seemed: that anyone wearing a suit from two seasons ago and ferrying a pram into a restaurant like this was not all that her accent might suggest.