Peacock Emporium (55 page)

She had sat in the ladies’ room for almost ten minutes before she had control over her breath.

It had been fun at first. She had never lived like that, hand to mouth, unsure where she was going to sleep, even what town she was going to be in: it had been an adventure. And she, cocooned from the less pleasant bits – the crummy rooms, the appalling food – by the first flush of passion, had revelled in the sheer naughtiness of it all. She had laughed at the thought of her mother, trying desperately to explain her absence at her Wednesday bridge session, of her father, harrumphing over his newspaper as he considered her latest outrage, of Rosemary, sour-faced, disapproving Rosemary, who had always been so blatant in her judgement, who had told Athene with her first look that she knew quite what kind of a girl she was, even when Athene had decided that she wasn’t.

She had tried not to think about Douglas. She and Tony were like peas in a pod. She had known, from the moment he had stood at her door and smirked as she opened it, as if she should have known very well she was in the wrong place. Because she had been, hadn’t she?

She finished her cigarette, and made her way slowly out of the ladies’ room and into the clamorous noise of the restaurant to where he sat, staring into his newspaper.

He had always looked handsome in a good suit, this one’s cut and colour an uncomfortable echo of their wedding day. Now as he turned, she saw that new lines of experience (or pain?) had given his face a handsome maturity.

‘Douglas?’ she had said, and he had flinched, as if the very word wounded him.

‘Don’t you look smart?’ she said, desperate to fill the silence, to alter the burning intensity of his gaze. She sat down: she was desperate for a drink.

The waiter, when he had brought it, had nudged her leg.

‘Are you . . . are you well?’ he said, and she winced at the pain in his voice. She had uttered some meaningless reply, and they had stuttered into a dreadful dinner-party conversation. She was amazed that she could issue any words at all.

‘Do you come up to London much?’

She wondered, distantly, whether he was mocking her. But, then, Douglas had never been smart, like that. Not like Tony.

‘Oh, you know me, Douglas. Theatre, the odd nightclub. Can’t keep me away from the old Smoke.’ Her head hurt. Her ears strained, as they had since she had sat down, for Suzanna’s cry, the signal that she had woken up.

He had ordered for her: sole. She had been starving on the train, not having eaten since the previous day. Now she found she couldn’t contemplate it: the congealing butter, the rich, fishy smell, made her feel ill. He was trying to talk to her, but she was having trouble hearing what he said. She thought, briefly, watching his mouth move, that she didn’t have to go through with this. That she could simply sit down, eat a meal with Douglas, and travel home again. No one was forcing her to do anything. It would all work out in the end, wouldn’t it? Then she thought of the telephone conversation she had had with her parents earlier that week, the day before she had phoned him. ‘You’ve made your bed, Athene,’ her mother had said. ‘You can jolly well lie in it.’ She’d not get a penny out of them. Her father had been even less forgiving: she had disgraced the family, he said, and she needn’t bother thinking she could return. As if he hadn’t, by his actions, done twice as much damage. She hadn’t bothered to tell them about the baby.

She thought about the bottom drawer of the rather horrid pine chest that Suzanna had as her cot, the drying nappies draped around their room, the landlady’s repeated threats of eviction. Of Tony’s despair at his inability to find another job.

It was better this way.

‘Douglas, you wouldn’t be a darling and order me some more ciggies, would you?’ she said, mustering a smile. ‘I seem to be out of change.’

When the waiter had returned with them, he had left Douglas’s change on the table, and she had stared at it, conscious that she could keep them fed with that money for several days. Or pay for a bath. A really hot bath, with a few bubbles thrown in. She stared at the money, thinking of a time, not so long ago, when she would not have noticed it, when that small amount would have been irrelevant. Just like her coat, her shoes, a new hat would have been irrelevant: easy come, easily replaceable. She stared at it, and then at Douglas, realising that there was another answer to her problems, which she had not yet considered. He was a handsome man, after all. And it was obvious he still cared for her – even their short telephone conversation had told her that. Tony would survive without her. He would survive without anyone.

‘Why did you call?’

‘Aren’t I allowed to speak to you any more?’ she said gaily.

She had looked – really looked – at him then, at the hurt and desperation on his face. At the love. Even after everything she had done. And she knew why she could never do the thing that would solve everything at a stroke.

‘Don’t “darling” me, Athene. I can’t do this. I really can’t. I need to know why you’re here.’

He was angry now, his face colouring. She tried to focus on what he was saying, but she had become aware of a jangling vibration within her, tuned to some invisible maternal frequency. And she lost the thread of the conversation.

‘You know, it’s lovely to see you looking so well,’ she said bravely, wondering whether she should just get up and go. She could run now, snatch Suzanna from the horrid old pram and disappear. Nobody would have to know. They could go to Brighton, perhaps. Borrow the money and go abroad. To Italy. They loved babies in Italy. Her voice emerged from her mouth, as if it belonged to someone else, as her thoughts scrambled in her head: ‘You always did look marvellous in that suit.’

She could hear Suzanna now, in the distance, making everything else irrelevant.

‘Athene!’ he protested.

And then the fat girl was there, standing in front of her with her insolent face, taking in the lack of a wedding ring, the untouched meal in front of her. ‘I’m sorry, madam,’ she said, ‘but your baby’s crying. You’ll have to come and get her.’

Afterwards, she found she could remember little of the next minutes. She vaguely remembered Douglas’s shocked face, the colour draining from it almost as she watched; she remembered being handed Suzanna and realising as she held her, for what she knew to be the last time, that she could no longer look at her face. Suzanna, perhaps with some terrible foreboding of her own, had been fretting, and Athene had been glad of the need to jiggle her – it disguised the compulsive trembling of her own hands.

Then the bit that she wished she could forget, the bit that would haunt her waking moments, her dreams, that would leave her arms empty, a child-sized hole next to her heart.

Almost unable to believe she was doing it, Athene Fairley-Hulme took the child she loved with a pure uncomplicated passion of which she had not believed herself capable, and thrust her small, soft weight, her blanket-wrapped limbs, at the man opposite.

‘Athene, I can’t believe you—’

‘Please, please, Douglas, dear. I can’t explain. Really.’ Her words were like lead in her mouth, her now-empty hands a poisonous betrayal.

‘You can’t just leave me with a baby—’

‘You’ll love her.’ He held her carefully, she noted, with a faint, piercing gratitude. She had known he would. Oh, God, forgive me for this, she said silently, and wondered, briefly, if she might faint.

‘Athene, I can’t just—’

She felt the dim panic then, that he might refuse. There was no alternative. Tony had told her so, many times.

She had made her bed.

She placed her hand on his arm, trying to convey everything in one pleading look. ‘Douglas, darling, have I ever asked you for anything? Really?’

He had gazed back at her then, his faltering confusion, the brief nakedness of his expression telling her she had him. That he would care for her. Love her, as he, in his own childhood, had been loved. It’s better this way, she told herself silently. It’s better this way. As if by saying it enough times she could make herself believe it. She forced herself to stand then, and began to walk, trying to stop herself falling over, trying to keep her head up. Trying to keep her mind blank so that she didn’t have to think about what was behind her, just focusing on making one foot move in front of the other, as the sounds of the restaurant receded into nothingness. She had wanted to leave her something, anything. A small sign that she had been loved. But they had nothing. Everything had been sold for the simple necessity of eating.

Bye-bye, darling, she said silently, as the restaurant door loomed closer, her heels echoing on the tiled floor. I will come back for you, when things are better. Promise.

It was better this way.

‘Don’t you even want to say goodbye?’ His voice came from behind her. And Athene, feeling the last of her resolve begin to crumble, fled.

It was the strangest thing, the cloakroom girl said to the wine waiter afterwards. That snobby girl, the one with dark hair, had walked round the corner, sat down on the pavement and cried as if her heart would break. She had seen her when she went out for a breather. All crumpled up against the wall, howling like a dog, not even caring who saw her.

‘I’d cheer her up,’ said the wine waiter, with a lascivious wink, and the cloakroom girl shook her head with mock despair and turned back to her coats.

When she returned Tony was lying on the bed. It was not surprising, although it was only late afternoon: there was nowhere to sit in the little room. They had asked for a chair, thinking they could squeeze one next to the window, but the landlady had said that as they were already two weeks behind on their rent, and one more in number than they had originally said, she was hardly going to start giving them extras, was she?

Athene opened the door. He startled, as if he had been asleep, and pushed himself into an upright position, blinking as he scanned her face. The room smelt musty: they hadn’t had the money to take the sheets to the launderette for several weeks, and the window didn’t open enough to air it properly. She watched as he rubbed at his hair with his broad, even hands.

‘Well?’ he said.

She couldn’t speak. She walked towards the bed, not bothering to move the newspaper from the crumpled candlewick bedspread, and lay down, her back to him, her shoes slipping from her bloodied heels.

He placed his hand on her shoulder, squeezed it hesitantly. ‘You okay?’

She said nothing. She stared at the wall opposite, at the green flock wallpaper that had started to peel from the skirting, at the bar heater they didn’t have the coins to feed, at the chest of drawers, the bottom one padded with Athene’s old jumpers, lined with her one silk blouse, the softest thing she could think of to lay next to Suzanna’s skin.

‘You did the right thing, you know,’ Tony murmured. ‘I know it’s hard, but you did the right thing.’

She didn’t think she would ever be able to lift her head from the pillow again. She felt so tired, as if she had never previously understood what tiredness was.

She was dimly aware of Tony kissing her ear. Her reticence had made him needy. ‘Sweetheart?’ She could not respond. ‘Sweetheart?’ he said again.

‘Yes,’ she whispered. She could think of nothing else to say.

‘I’ve been looking at jobs,’ he said, as if trying to offer something good, trying to keep his side of the bargain. ‘There’s a firm in Stanmore looking for salesmen. Commission and bonuses. I thought I’d give them a ring later. You never know, eh?’

‘No.’

‘Things will get better, Thene. Really. I’ll make sure of it.’

She would be almost back at Dere Hampton by now, if he had taken the train. Douglas would have struggled with that pram in the same way she had. She could picture him now, demanding that the guard helped him lift it in, wrestling with the hood, the oversized handle. Then, inside the carriage, leaning in to check that the baby was okay. Leaning in, dressed in his smart wool suit, gentle concern on his face. Please don’t let her cry too much without me, she thought, and a large, solitary tear trickled down her cheek towards the pillow.

‘She’ll be better off with him. You know that.’ Tony was stroking her cold, white arm, as if that might comfort her. She heard his voice in her ear, urgent, persuasive, yet distant. ‘We could never cope with two, not in here. We can barely afford to feed ourselves . . . Athene?’ he said, when the silence became too much for him.

She lay on the crumpled classified ads, her face cool against the stale cotton pillow, still staring at the door. ‘No,’ she said.

Athene lay on the bed for four days and nights, not leaving the little bedsit, weeping helplessly, refusing to eat or speak, her eyes unnervingly open, until on the fifth day, fearful for her health, if not her state of mind, Tony took matters into his own hands and called the doctor. The landlady, who enjoyed a bit of drama, stood on the upper landing as the doctor arrived, and proclaimed noisily that she had a respectable house, clean and proper. ‘There’s no disease in this place,’ she said. ‘Nothing unclean.’ She was peering round the door, hoping to get some indication of what was wrong with the girl.

‘I’m sure,’ said the doctor, eyeing the sticky hall carpet with distaste.

‘I’ve never had an unmarried before,’ she said, ‘and this’ll be the last. I can’t be doing with the inconvenience of it.’

‘She’s in here,’ Tony said.

‘I don’t want anything infectious in my establishment,’ the woman called excitedly. ‘I’ll want to be told if there’s anything infectious.’

‘Not unless a big gob is infectious,’ the young man muttered, and shut the door.

The doctor eyed the little room with its damp walls and grimy windows, wrinkling his nose at the stale, tidemarked bucket of soaking laundry in the corner, wondering how many people in this district routinely lived in habitation more suited to animals. He listened to the young man’s hurried explanation, then addressed the woman on the bed.

‘Any pain anywhere?’ he said, peeling back the covers to knead the belly that was just beginning to swell. When she replied, he was a little surprised to hear her cut-glass accent after this bluff northerner’s. But that was the way things were going these days. The so-called classless society.