Peacock Emporium Page 10

  ‘You haven’t left me any bread.’ She peered into the plastic packet.

  ‘There were only two slices.’

  ‘Oh, just go away, Neil. Go and lie on the sofa.’

  He threw up his arms in exasperation. It was only then that she noticed how tired he looked, that his face was shadowed with grey. ‘Oh, go away yourself,’ he retorted. ‘And don’t be such a bloody martyr. If this shop is going to make you so bloody grumpy I’m already wishing you hadn’t taken it on.’

  He launched himself back into the sofa, which was too big for the room, picked up the remote control and began to flick through the television channels.

  She stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, then came and sat on the chair opposite him, clutching a bowl of cereal. She would not look at him. It was the least arduous way of showing him how fed up she was.

  Abruptly, Neil turned off the television. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, into the silence. ‘I should have thought about the bread. It’s just that by the time I get off the train in the evening, all I can think about is getting home.’

  He had disarmed her. ‘No, I’m the one who should be sorry. It’s just tiredness. It’ll be better when the shop opens.’

  ‘I am pleased you’ve got the shop. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s been nice seeing you so . . . so—’

  ‘Busy?’

  ‘Animated. I like seeing you animated. You seem less bothered by . . . stuff than you have been.’

  The cereal felt like an effort. She felt too tired. She put it on the table in front of her. ‘Less time to think, I suppose.’

  ‘Yup. Too much time to think – always a recipe for disaster. Try not to do it myself.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Want me to see if I can get the day off for your opening?’

  She sighed, acknowledging his smile. ‘No . . . don’t worry. I don’t think I’ll do a grand opening. I don’t even know if it’s going to be Monday, the way things are going. And you’d better not upset the boss. Not this soon into the job.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’ He gave her another tentative smile, then settled back into the sofa, picked up his newspaper and flicked through the pages.

  Suzanna sat opposite, wondering why she had instinctively not wanted him there. It sounded daft, even to her. Ungenerous, even. But she just wanted something that was hers, pure and pleasurable, untainted by her and Neil’s history. Uncomplicated by people.

  Eight

  The old lady stood in the doorway wearing her good tweed coat, a straw hat with cherries, set at a rakish angle, and her patent-leather handbag clutched before her in gnarled fingers. ‘I would like,’ she announced, ‘to go into Dere.’

  Vivi turned, the roasting dish spitting lethally in her gloved hands, and searched frantically for a spare section of the stove on which to rest it. She took in the hat and bag, and her heart sank. ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t say “what”. It’s rude. I am ready to go to town. If you wouldn’t mind fetching the car.’

  ‘We can’t go to town, Rosemary. The children are coming for lunch.’

  A flicker of confusion passed across Rosemary’s features. ‘Which children?’

  ‘All of them. They’re all coming. For Lucy’s birthday lunch, you remember?’

  Rosemary’s cat, which was so bony and decrepit that, when lying outside, it had several times been mistaken for roadkill, scrabbled its way on to the kitchen worksurface and made its way shakily towards the roast beef. Vivi removed an oven glove and gently placed the mutely protesting animal back on the floor, then promptly burnt herself on the roasting tin.

  ‘In that case I’ll just get a quick trip in before they come.’

  Vivi sighed inwardly. She fixed a smile on her face and turned back to her mother-in-law. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Rosemary, but I’ve got to get lunch ready and lay the table yet. And I haven’t dusted the front room. Perhaps you could ask—’

  ‘Oh, he’s far too busy to be running me around. You don’t want to go bothering him.’ The old lady lifted her head imperiously, and glanced at the window. ‘Just run me to the Tall Trees then. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’ She waited, then added, pointedly, ‘With my stick.’

  Vivi checked the beef, and slid the roasting tray back into the lower oven. She walked over to the sink and ran cold water over her throbbing fingers. ‘Is it urgent?’ she said, her voice carefully light. ‘Could it wait until after tea, perhaps?’

  Her mother-in-law stiffened. ‘Oh, don’t mind me. My trips are never urgent, are they, dear? No, I’m far too ancient to have anything important to do.’ She peered dismissively at the other tray on the worktop. ‘Nothing as important as the needs of a few potatoes.’

  ‘Now, come on, Rosemary, you know I—’

  But with an emphatic slam of the door, the volume of which belied her apparent frailty, Rosemary had vanished back into the granny annexe.

  Vivi closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She would pay for that later. But, then, most days she ended up paying for something.

  Normally she would have capitulated, would have dropped whatever she was engaged in to do the old lady’s bidding, just to avoid any unpleasantness, keep things ticking over happily. But today was different: she had not had the three children together in the house for several years and, having got this far, she was not going to jeopardise Lucy’s birthday lunch by running Rosemary around when she should be ladling beef fat over the potatoes. Because with her mother-in-law it was never just a matter of running her into town – Rosemary would suggest a diversion, perhaps to the new shopping centre several miles away, or that Vivi parked somewhere and accompanied her to pick up some dry-cleaning (and Vivi could carry it). Or announce that what she really needed, after all, was to get her hair done, and would Vivi mind waiting? She had become particularly demanding since they had persuaded her she was no longer capable of driving herself. They were still wrestling with the insurance over the ruined fence at Paget’s farm.

  From behind the door to the annexe, Vivi could hear the sound of the television being turned up to a few degrees below full volume – the only way, Rosemary insisted, she could hear a thing the presenters were saying these days. ‘Give me half an hour,’ Vivi muttered to herself, examining her reddened fingers and preparing to venture into the oven again. ‘If she stays in there for half an hour I’ll just about have it all under control before they arrive.’

  ‘Any chance of a cup of tea? Cooking the books always makes me thirsty.’

  Vivi was sitting at the kitchen table. Having found the unalchemistic collection of tired pencils and compacts that passed for her makeup bag, she was trying to brighten herself up a bit, to blot down the high colour and slight sheen she always got from spending too much time cooking. ‘I’ll bring one through,’ she said, after a defeated glance in the little mirror. ‘Does Daddy want one?’

  ‘Dunno. I expect so.’ Her son, all six foot four of him, ducked with practised ease under the lintel as he left the kitchen and walked back down the corridor. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘We forgot to pick up the flowers. Sorry.’

  Vivi stilled, put her compact on the table, then walked briskly after him. ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t say “what”. It’s rude.’ Her son grinned, mimicking his grandmother. ‘Dad and I forgot to pick up those flowers this morning. Got a bit tied up at the feed shop. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh, Ben.’ She stood in the doorway of the study, her hands dropped in exasperation.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘One thing. The one thing I asked you two to do for me, and you leave it till five minutes before they all arrive to tell me you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘What did we forget?’ Her husband lifted his head from the books. He reached forward to pick up a pencil. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said hopefully.

  ‘The table arrangements. You didn’t pick them up like I asked you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ll pick you some, if you want.’ Ben glanced out of the window. He had spent
more than an hour in the study and was fidgety, restless to get outside again.

  ‘There are no flowers, Ben. It’s February, for goodness’ sake. Oh, I am disappointed.’

  ‘What do we need table arrangements for? We don’t usually go in for all this.’

  ‘For the lunch.’ An unaccustomed note of crossness had crept into her voice. ‘I wanted everything to be perfect today. It’s a special day.’

  ‘Lucy’s not going to care if there are no table arrangements.’ Her husband shrugged, and ruled a line underneath some numbers.

  ‘Well, I care. And it’s a terrific waste of money, spending on flowers that we can’t even be bothered to pick up.’ She would get nowhere with them. Vivi gazed up at the clock, wondering vainly whether she could whiz into town and pick them up herself. With luck, and a decent parking space, she could be in and out in twenty minutes.

  Then she remembered Rosemary, who would either want to come too or treat Vivi’s brief visit as further evidence that her needs were not just considered unimportant but could be trampled over in a barbarous manner. ‘Well, you can jolly well pay for them,’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron, and reaching behind her to untie the strings, ‘and explain to Mr Bridgman why we’re ordering flowers that we apparently don’t want.’

  The two men looked at each other, exchanging the blankest of glances.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Ben. ‘I’ll go. If you’ll let me take the Range Rover.’

  ‘You’ll take your mother’s car,’ came her husband’s voice. ‘Pick us up a bottle of sherry for your grandmother while you’re at it . . . You won’t forget that cup of tea, darling, will you?’

  Vivi had been married for precisely nine years when her mother-in-law came to live with them, and fifteen when her husband capitulated and agreed to build her an annexe so that they could watch the odd American cop show without having to pause every five minutes to explain the plot, cook food containing garlic or spices and, just occasionally, read the newspapers in bed on a Sunday morning without an imperious knock at the door and a demand to know why the orange juice wasn’t on its normal shelf in the fridge.

  There had been no question of her going into a home. The house had been hers: she might not have been born there, she was fond of saying, but she could see no reason why she shouldn’t die there. Even though the land was now farmed by tenants, and there was no longer much in the way of livestock, she liked to look out of her window and remember the past. It was a great consolation to her. And someone needed to be around to teach the younger generation about family history, and the ways of the past. Now that most of her friends had died, family was all she had. Besides, Vivi occasionally mused, in a rare mutinous thought, why would she want to move anywhere else when she had a built-in cook-cleaner-chauffeur permanently at her disposal? Not even a five-star hotel would provide that little lot for her.

  The children, having grown up with Granny down the corridor and, like their father, largely left their mother to deal with her, treated the old lady with a mixture of benevolence and irreverent humour, most of which, thankfully, she could not hear. Vivi scolded them for mocking her favourite phrases, or for their veiled references to the fact that she smelt not of Parma violets but of something rather more pungent and organic – she was still not sure how she was going to broach that one – but had loved them, too, for putting the old lady in perspective on the dispiriting days when Rosemary’s demands made her seem ogreish and impossible.

  Because even her son had to admit that Rosemary was not the easiest old lady. Irascible and opinionated, with a firm belief in tradition and an oft-spoken disappointment in her family’s failure to live up to it, she still apparently considered Vivi to be a kind of working guest in the house, even after some thirty years of marriage.

  And, frail and forgetful as she was, she had not gone quietly down that good corridor. Rosemary’s already heightened emotions at the building of the annexe had subsequently wavered between a stubborn resentfulness that she was being ‘pushed out’ to a secret pride in her renewed independence and surroundings. The new rooms had been carefully decorated by Vivi in a mixture of French cherry stripes and toile de Jouy (the one thing Vivi had always been good at, Rosemary had been forced to acknowledge, was fabrics) and were untainted by young people’s incomprehensible music, endless streams of their monosyllabic friends, dogs, racket and muddy boots.

  This didn’t stop her making surreptitious and repeated references to Vivi that she had been ‘cast out’ or ‘shoved off, occasionally in front of her remaining friends. Her own grandmother, she said pointedly, at least once a week, had taken over the good parlour as her living quarters when she became elderly, and children were allowed to go and pay court to her once a day and occasionally read to her.

  ‘I’ve got The Clubber’s Guide to Ibiza here,’ said Ben, cheerfully. ‘That and Basic Tractor Maintenance.’

  ‘We could dig out The Joy of Sex.’ Lucy giggled. ‘Remember Mum and Dad used to hide that in their wardrobe?’

  ‘Who’s hiding in the wardrobe?’ said Rosemary, crossly.

  ‘Lucy!’ exclaimed Vivi, blushing. She had bought it on her thirtieth birthday, in a last-ditch attempt to be something of a siren, back when they had been ‘trying’ for Ben. Her husband had been rather shocked, then put off by the illustrations. ‘No wonder he’s grown all that facial hair,’ he’d said dismissively. ‘I’d want to disguise myself after that little lot.’

  Vivi did her best not to mind. She reminded herself constantly of all the good things she had: a beautiful home, wonderful children, a loving husband, so she endured Rosemary’s barbs and capricious demands, and left him in the dark as to their true extent. He didn’t like family discord: it made him retreat into his shell, like a snail, from where he would lurk, slightly crossly, until everyone else had ‘sorted themselves out’. It was why he didn’t like this business with Suzanna and the others. ‘Well, I think you should sit down and explain it to her,’ Vivi had ventured, on more than one occasion.

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t want all that business stirred up again,’ he would respond abruptly. ‘I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. Especially not to someone who’s just been given a bloody house to live in. She’s just going to have to learn to live with it.’

  It had started to spit. Suzanna stood on the step, sheltering as much as she could under the lintel, as Neil took the bottle of wine and the flowers from the back of the car.

  ‘You got carnations,’ she said, grimacing.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re awful. Such mean-looking flowers.’

  ‘In case it had escaped your notice, Suze, we’re not exactly in a position to be buying rare orchids. Your mum’ll be happy with whatever we give her.’

  Suzanna knew it was true, but it didn’t stop her feeling ill-tempered. She had felt like this ever since they had pulled into the drive and she had seen the mustard-coloured sprawling farmhouse, the huge oak door of her childhood. She could hardly remember a time when this house had meant something uncomplicated and comforting to her. She knew it must have done, some time before the differences between her and her siblings had become pronounced, before she could see them reflected in her father’s complicated gaze, her mother’s overblown efforts to pretend they were invisible. Before they had been written, legally, into her family’s future. Now the house felt tainted, its mere existence colouring her life, drawing her back in and repelling her in one discomfiting swoop. Her stomach lurched, and she glanced at the car. ‘Let’s go home,’ she whispered, as Neil stepped up beside her.

  ‘What?’

  From inside came the distant sound of manic yapping.

  ‘Let’s go – let’s just go now.’

  Neil raised his eyes to heaven, his arms dropping exasper-atedly by his sides. ‘Oh, for God’s s—’

  ‘It’ll be awful, Neil. I just can’t cope with them en masse. I’m not ready.’

  But it was too late. There was the sound of a footf
all, then of someone wrestling with the catch, and the door swung open, allowing out the smell of roast meat and an overexcited Jack Russell. Vivi shooed the yapping dog back inside, then straightened herself and beamed. She brushed her hands on her apron, then held them wide open before her. ‘Hello, my darlings. Oh, it’s good to see you. Welcome home.’

  ‘Don’t give me anything with shellfish. Those shrimps made my lips blow up like a Hottentot’s.’

  ‘You can’t say “Hottentot”, Gran. It’s not PC.’

  ‘I nearly ended up going to the doctor. The skin stretched right across. I couldn’t go out for two days.’

  ‘You were very poorly.’ Vivi was dishing out potatoes. She had scuffed their edges with a fork, and she noted with satisfaction that the beef fat had made them lacy and golden.

  ‘Some women pay good money for that now, Gran,’ said Ben. ‘Can I have a couple more spuds? That one there, Mum. The burnt one.’

  ‘Implants,’ said Lucy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Women. Put them in their lips to make them look fuller. Perhaps they should have just eaten some of Mum’s potted shrimp. No meat for me, Mum. I’m off red meat at the moment. Didn’t you have those once, Suze?’

  ‘You never had implants.’

  ‘Not implants. Injections. In your lips. During your self-improvement phase.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Lucy.’

  ‘You had injections in your lips?’

  ‘They’re only temporary.’ Suzanna looked down at her plate. ‘It’s just collagen. It’s meant to give you more of a pout.’

  Vivi, appalled, turned to her son-in-law, her serving spoon raised in her hand. ‘And you let her do this?’

  ‘You think I had any say in the matter? You remember what she was like then. It was all hair extensions, false nails – I never knew whether I was coming home to Cher or Anna Nicole Smith.’

  ‘Oh, don’t exaggerate, Neil. They were only temporary. I didn’t like them anyway.’ Suzanna, cross, pushed her vegetables around her plate.