Peacock Emporium (6 page)

She had dreaded this trip, had considered a thousand times what legitimate excuse she could find for not coming. She had spoken to Douglas only once, when he had arranged to meet her in London, and found his patent happiness and what she could only imagine to be his new air of sexual confidence almost unbearable. Heedless of her discomfort, he had held her hands and made her promise that she would come: ‘You’re my oldest friend, Vee. I really want you there on the day. You’ve got to be there. Come on, be a sport.’

So she had gone home, cried for several days, and then been a sport. She had smiled, when she had wanted to wail and beat her breasts like women in Greek tragedies, and pull the brocade drapes and wedding banners from their hangings and scratch that awful, awful girl’s face and take swings at her head, her hands, her heart to destroy whatever it was about her that Douglas loved most. And then, shocked that she was capable of thinking such dark thoughts about any human being (she had once cried for an entire afternoon after accidentally killing a rabbit), she had smiled again. A bright, benign smile, hoping against hope that if she presented a peaceable front for long enough, if she kept persuading herself to keep living a seemingly normal life, one day at a time, some of her apparent equilibrium might become real.

Athene’s mother had caught her daughter smoking on the stairs. Dressed in her bridal gown, legs splayed, puffing away like a charlady, with a cigarette she had solicited from one of the bar staff. She informed her husband of this discovery in quietly outraged tones, and managed to surprise even him when she told him of Athene’s colourful response. ‘Well, she’s not my responsibility now, Justine.’ Colonel Forster leant back on his gilt chair, and tamped tobacco into his pipe, refusing to look his wife in the face, as if she, too, were complicit in this indiscretion. ‘We’ve done our duty by the girl.’

His wife stared at him for a moment, then turned to Douglas, who had been swilling a brandy in his hand, mulling on The air of maturity the balloon glass seemed to impose. ‘You do understand what you’ve taken on?’ Her tone suggested that her daughter had not been forgiven for her earlier indiscretion.

‘The finest girl in all England, as far as I’m concerned.’ Douglas, full of alcohol, bonhomie and sexual anticipation, felt magnanimous, even to his sour-faced in-laws. He had been remembering the night he had asked her to marry him, a day that separated the two lives of Douglas into a kind of Before and After Athene, the latter less the marking of some rite of passage than a fundamental shift in who he was, how he felt himself joined to his world. To him, now, a married man, that day seemed to signify a crossing-over: a vast leap across a divide that had seen him on one side as someone searching, tentatively trying out new attitudes and opinions, new ways to be, and on the other marked simply as A Man. For Athene had bestowed that upon him. He felt like a rock to her shifting, mercurial self, her separateness bestowing on him a sense of solidity, of surety. She crept up him like ivy, clinging and beautiful, a welcome, parasitic sprite. He had known from the night he first saw her that she was meant for him: she had prompted an ache, an unexpected sense that something was lacking, that some fundamental part of him was, without him having previously known it,
unfulfilled.
She made him think like that, lyrically, fatalistically. He had not known such words were even in his vocabulary. Previously when he had considered marriage it had been with a kind of moribund expectation: it was the thing that one did when one found a suitable girl. It would be expected of him and, as usual, Douglas would fulfil those expectations. But she had stood in the elevator of the London restaurant where they had just eaten and, heedless of the people queuing behind them, she had wedged her childlike feet in the lift doors and, laughing breathlessly – as if, when the words had bubbled unexpectedly out of his trembling mouth, he had suggested something extraordinarily amusing – had said yes. Why not? What fun. They had kissed then, joyfully, greedily, as the lift doors trundled back and forth in a frenzy of thwarted purpose, and the queue of people behind them had grown, muttered crossly and eventually taken the stairs. And he had realised that his life was no longer on some predestined course, but had been diverted by fantastic possibility.

‘You need to knock some sense into her,’ said Colonel Forster.

Douglas’s head jolted backwards.

‘Anthony.’
Justine Forster pursed her lips. She opened her compact and examined her eye makeup. ‘She . . . It’s just that she can be a bit of a handful.’

‘I like her like that.’ Douglas’s tone was one of contented belligerence.

She had dragged him to dance halls run by black people in some of the less savoury parts of London, chiding him if he expressed niggling anxieties, exhorting him instead to dance with her, to join her in drinking, laughing,
living.
And because she seemed perfectly at ease in those places, his worst fears rarely materialised, and he was forced to confront his own conceptions of poor people, or black people or, at any rate, people unlike himself. Along with his fears, he had made himself shed a few inhibitions, smoked and drunk dark rum, and when they were alone allowed himself to approach Athene sexually in a way that he had been brought up to think of as not just daring but probably illegal.

Because she didn’t mind. She didn’t care about shopping, or fashion, or furnishings, or the things that had bored him about so many of the girls he knew. If anything she was careless with her possessions – at the end of a dance she would remove her shoes, complaining that they were a bore, then fail to bring them home. Afterwards, when her lack of footwear was pointed out, she showed none of the tearful sense of loss that another girl might have displayed or, indeed, any anxiety about how she was going to get home, just shrugged her shoulders and laughed. There would always be another pair of shoes, that laugh said. Worrying about things was such a
bore.

‘Yes. Well, dear, don’t say we didn’t warn you.’ Justine Forster was eyeing a piece of wedding cake as if it might spring up and bite her.

‘Very silly girl,’ said Colonel Forster, lighting his pipe.

‘What?’

‘Our daughter. No point beating around the bush. She’s jolly lucky to have married at all.’

‘Anthony.’
Mrs Forster glanced at Douglas fearfully, as if afraid her husband’s damning commentary might prompt her new son-in-law suddenly to announce a change of heart.

‘Oh, come on, Justine. She’s surrounded by feckless young people, and it’s made her feckless. Ungrateful and feckless and silly.’

‘I don’t think she’s feckless.’ Douglas, who would have been appalled to think his own parents might discuss him in this way, felt the need to defend his bride. ‘I think she’s brave, and original, and beautiful.’

Athene’s father regarded him as if he’d just admitted to being a pinko. ‘Yes. Well, you don’t want to go saying all that to her. Don’t know where it might lead. Just see if you can settle her down a bit. Otherwise she’ll end up as no use to anyone.’

‘He doesn’t mean it, Douglas, dear. He just means that we – we’ve probably been a little lax with her at times.’

‘Lax with who?’ Athene appeared at Douglas’s shoulder. He smelt Joy and cigarette smoke, and his innards clenched. Her father grunted and turned away. ‘Are you talking about me?’

‘We were just saying that we’re very glad you’re settling down.’ Justine Forster’s tones were emollient; a wave of her hand suggested she would like the conversation closed.

‘Who says we’re settling down?’

‘Don’t be obtuse, dear. You know what I mean.’

‘No, I don’t. Douglas and I have no intention of settling down, do we, darling?’ Douglas felt her cool hand on the back of his neck. ‘Not if it means ending up like
you.’

‘I’m not going to talk to you, Athene, if you’re going to be deliberately rude.’

‘I’m not being deliberately rude, Mother. Not as rude as you were evidently being about me in my absence.’

‘Very silly girl,’ muttered her father.

Douglas was feeling extremely uncomfortable. ‘I think you’re being rather unfair on Athene,’ he ventured.

‘Douglas, dear, well-meaning as you are, you have no conception of what Athene has put us through.’

Athene leant down and picked up his brandy, as if unconcernedly to examine its contents, then swallowed the amber liquid in one gulp. ‘Oh, Douglas, don’t listen to them,’ she said, replacing the glass and pulling at his arm. ‘They’re such bores. This is our day, after all.’

Within minutes of their being on the dance floor he had almost forgotten the exchange, lost in his own private appreciation of her silk-clad curves, the scent of her hair, the light feel of her hands on his back. When she looked up at him, her eyes were deliquescent, glittering with tears.

‘We don’t have to see them now we’re married.’ It wasn’t a question, but she appeared to demand some kind of reassurance. ‘We don’t have to spend half our time as stuffed shirts, sitting in horrid old family gatherings.’

‘We can do whatever we want, my darling,’ he whispered into her neck. ‘It’s just us now. We can do whatever we want.’ He enjoyed the sound of his own voice, the authority and comfort it promised.

She had held him tighter then, a surprisingly strong grasp, her face buried in his shoulder. Over the sound of the music, he had been unable to make out her reply.

‘Won’t be a minute,’ said the girl in the cloakroom. ‘Some of the tickets have got separated from the coats. We’ll just need a minute to sort them all out.’

‘Fine,’ said Vivi, her foot tapping with impatience to be gone. The sounds of the reception were dulled now, muffled by the expanse of carpet that lined the hallways and stairs. Past her, elderly dowagers were helped to powder rooms, and small shoeless children skidded up and down under the quietly outraged gaze of rigid, uniformed staff. She wouldn’t return home until Christmas. It was likely that Douglas and that woman – she still could not bring herself to say her name, worse still to describe her as ‘his wife’ – would be away for Christmas. His family had always been big on skiing, after all.

It might be easier, now that it was clear her mother understood. And if her longing for her parents became too much, she could always invite them up to London, persuade her father to make a weekend of it. She could show them the antiques market behind Lisson Grove, take them to the zoo, hail a taxi to the Viennese tea rooms in St John’s Wood and feed them frothy coffee and spiced pastries. By then she might not think about Douglas at all. She might feel nothing like a physical pain.

Her coat was taking an age. Beside her, she noticed, two men were smoking, deep in conversation, their own tickets held loosely in their hands.

‘And Alfie made the point that he’ll be away for Wimbledon. Still, you’ve got to admit, he’s done all right for himself. I mean, if you’re going to get marched down the aisle by anyone . . .’

She didn’t even flinch now. Vivi pretended to be absorbed by a carved engraving on the wall, wondering again how much longer it would be before this outward stillness was echoed internally.

Almost twenty minutes later, her mother stood in front of her, in her good wool bouclé suit, her clutch bag held in front of her like a shield. ‘I know it hasn’t been easy,’ she was saying, ‘but I just don’t think you should run away today. Come home with me and Daddy.’

‘I have told you—’

‘Don’t let them keep you away from your home. The car’s gone. And they’ll be away for at least two weeks.’

‘It’s really not that, Mummy.’

‘I’m saying no more, Vivi. I just couldn’t let you leave without talking to you properly. Just don’t keep staying away. I don’t like to think of you alone in London. You’re still so young. And, besides, we miss you, Daddy and I. Have you lost your ticket?’

Vivi was staring, unseeing, at her empty hand in front of her.

‘I thought you’d gone. I’m pretty sure we know which your coat is, anyway.’

Vivi shook her head dully. ‘Sorry. Had to – had to spend a penny.’

‘Daddy really wants to see you. He wants you to help us choose a dog. He’s finally agreed to having one, you see, but he thinks it would be nice for the two of you to do it together.’ Her mother’s expression was hopeful, as if childish pleasures could still cancel out adult pain. ‘A spaniel, perhaps? I know you’ve always liked spaniels.’

‘Is it green?’

‘Sorry?’

The attendant tried to hide her exasperation under a smile. ‘Is your coat the green one? Big buttons?’

She was pointing to a row behind her. Vivi glimpsed the familiar bottle colour. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, Vivi, darling, believe me, I do understand.’

Mrs Newton’s eyes were dark with sympathy. She smelt of the scents of Vivi’s childhood, and Vivi fought an urge to hurl herself into her mother’s arms, and allow herself to be comforted. But now there was no comfort to be had.

‘I know how much you felt for Douglas. But Douglas . . . well, that’s that now, he’s found his – his path in life, and you just have to get on with things. Put it behind you.’

Vivi’s voice was unnaturally stiff. ‘I have put it behind me, Mother.’

‘I hate to see you like this. So sad . . . and . . . well, I just want you to know . . . even if you don’t want to talk to me . . . and I know girls don’t always want to confide in their mothers . . . that I do understand.’ She reached out and stroked Vivi’s hair, smoothing it away from her face, an unthinking maternal gesture.

No, Mummy, you don’t understand, Vivi thought, her hands still trembling, her face still whitened by what she had heard. Because this pain did not stem from the origins her mother assumed. That pain had been almost easy. For some kind of equanimity had been possible while she could at least comfort herself with the thought that he’d be happy. Because that was it, loving someone, wasn’t it? The knowledge that, if nothing else, you wanted them to be happy.

While her mother might have had some comprehension of her pain, her longing, her sense of grief at losing him, she would not have understood the conversation Vivi had just been forced to overhear. Or why Vivi knew already, with a pain that was searing her core, that she would never repeat it to anyone.