Peacock Emporium Page 11

  ‘I saw you with them. I thought it looked like someone had stuck two inner tubes to your face. Very spooky.’

  ‘Inner tubes?’ said Rosemary. ‘On her face? What’s she want to do that for?’

  Suzanna glanced at her father who, head down, was affecting not to have heard the exchange. He had spent most of his time talking to Neil who, as usual, he treated with ridiculous courtesy, as if he were still grateful to the younger man for the huge favour he had done in taking Suzanna off his hands. Neil always told her she was being ridiculous when she said this, but she couldn’t see why her parents always made such a fuss about him being prepared to do things like iron his own shirts, put the rubbish out, or take her to dinner. Like she was somehow genetically predisposed to do all the housework.

  ‘Well, I think Suzanna is quite pretty enough without any . . . enhancements.’ Vivi, seated, handed round the gravy. ‘I don’t think she needs any help at all.’

  ‘Hair’s looking good, Suze,’ said Lucy. ‘I like it when it’s its proper colour.’ Lucy’s own hair, a much lighter shade than Suzanna’s, was cut into a businesslike bob, and woven through with highlights.

  ‘Like Morticia Addams,’ said Ben.

  ‘Who?’ Rosemary leant forward over her plate. ‘Is someone going to help me to potatoes? I don’t seem to have any potatoes.’

  ‘They’re just coming, Gran,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Morticia Addams. Out of The Addams Family.’

  ‘The Stoke-by-Clare Adamses?’

  ‘No, Grandma. Someone on telly. Did you see Radiohead in concert, Luce?’

  ‘He was a Fascist, you know. In the war. Dreadful family.’

  ‘Yup. They were excellent. I’ve got the CD in the car if you want to burn a copy.’

  ‘Used to serve cold cuts every evening for supper. Never a decent meal there. And they kept pigs.’

  Vivi turned to Suzanna. ‘And you must tell us all about your shop, darling. I’m dying to hear. Have you got an opening date yet?’

  Suzanna stared at her plate, took a deep breath, and glanced at Neil, who was still talking to her father. ‘Actually it’s open.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘Open?’ said Vivi, uncomprehending. ‘But I thought you were going to have an opening party.’

  Suzanna looked uncomfortably at Neil, who gazed at his plate with a don’t-bring-me-into-this expression. She swallowed. ‘It was only a small thing.’

  Vivi stared at her daughter and blushed, so delicately that only those watching carefully – like her son, son-in-law and other daughter – would have noticed. ‘Oh,’ she said, methodically spooning gravy on to her plate. ‘Well. You didn’t want us lot clogging the place up, I’m sure. You want proper customers, don’t you? People who are going to buy things . . . Was it . . . Did it go well?’

  Suzanna sighed, cowed by guilt and simultaneously resentful that, within minutes of lunch beginning, she had been made to feel so. It had all seemed perfectly rational when she had justified her decision to herself. It was bad enough that she had been forced to move back into the shadow of her family, surely it wasn’t too much to ask that she carve herself a bit of space aside from them? It wouldn’t be her shop, otherwise, just another extension of her family’s interests. Yet now, listening to Vivi trying to cover the hurt in her voice with a series of mindless observations, aware of the weight of her siblings’ accusatory stares, it seemed somewhat less easy to explain.

  ‘Where is it, Suze?’ She could hear icy politeness in Ben’s voice.

  ‘Just off Water Lane. Two down from the takeaway.’

  ‘Nice for you,’ he said coolly.

  ‘You’ll have to drop in some time,’ she said, smiling gamely.

  ‘We’re a bit busy at the moment.’ He looked at his father. ‘Got some projects going on in the barns, haven’t we, Dad?’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll all find time to pop in soon.’ Her father’s tone was neutral.

  Suzanna’s eyes filled inexplicably with tears.

  Vivi had left the table to fulfil some unspecified task in the kitchen. They could hear her down the corridor, muttering something to the dog.

  ‘Well, that was nice of you, Suze.’ Lucy’s voice cut across the table.

  ‘Lucy . . .’ Her father’s voice held a warning.

  ‘Well, how much would it have hurt her to invite Mum? Even if none of the rest of us came, she could have invited Mum. She was really proud, you know? She told everyone about your bloody shop.’

  ‘Lucy.’

  ‘You’ll have made her look a right idiot in front of her friends.’

  ‘Who’s an idiot?’ Rosemary lifted her head from her meal. She gazed around her, looking for Vivi. ‘Why haven’t I got any mustard? Am I the only one without mustard?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her.’

  ‘No, you never do.’

  ‘It wasn’t even a proper opening. I didn’t serve drinks or anything.’

  ‘All the more reason why it wouldn’t have hurt to invite her. God, after all Mum and Dad have done for you—’

  ‘Lucy—’

  ‘Look, let’s not—’ Neil interrupted, gesturing towards the door, where Vivi was emerging again. ‘Not now . . .’

  ‘I almost forgot to put the pudding on. Wasn’t that silly of me?’ Vivi said, seating herself again, and looking around the table with the vaguely assessing eye of the practised hostess. ‘Has everyone got everything? Is it all right?’

  ‘Delicious,’ said Neil. ‘You’ve excelled yourself, Vivi.’

  ‘I haven’t got any mustard,’ said Rosemary, accusingly.

  ‘Yes, you have, Gran,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s on the side of your plate.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Ben leant across the table, pointing with his knife. ‘There,’ he said, revealing it to her. ‘Mustard.’

  Vivi had been on the verge of crying – Suzanna could see the tell-tale reddening round her eyes. She glanced at Neil across the table and knew that he had seen it too. She found she had lost her appetite.

  ‘We’ve got some news,’ said Neil.

  Vivi smiled at him. ‘Oh, yes?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Suzanna’s decided to think of someone other than herself,’ said Lucy. ‘That would be news.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lucy.’ Her father’s cutlery crashed down on the tabletop.

  ‘We’re going to have a baby. Not yet,’ Neil added hurriedly. ‘Next year. But we’ve decided it would be the right time.’

  ‘Oh, darlings, that’s wonderful.’ Vivi, face brightening, had leapt from her place at the table and reached round to hug Suzanna.

  Suzanna, stiff as a board, sat staring in silent fury at her husband. He refused to meet her eye.

  ‘Oh, I’m so pleased for you. How lovely!’

  Lucy and Ben exchanged glances.

  ‘What’s going on? I wish you would all speak up.’

  ‘Suzanna’s going to have a baby,’ said Vivi, loudly.

  ‘Not yet.’ Suzanna found her voice. ‘I’m not going to have one yet. Not till next year. In fact, it was meant to be a – a surprise.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s lovely,’ said Vivi, taking her seat again.

  ‘She’s pregnant?’ Rosemary leant across the table. ‘About time too.’

  I’m going to kill you, Suzanna mouthed at Neil.

  ‘Isn’t that wonderful, darling?’ Vivi placed her hand on her husband’s arm.

  ‘Not really, no,’ he said.

  The room fell silent – apart from at Rosemary’s end of the table, where some kind of internal gastric explosion had sent Ben and Lucy into barely stifled giggles.

  Their father placed his knife and fork on his plate. ‘They’re still virtually bankrupt. They’re living in rented accommodation. Suzanna has just set up a business, even though she has absolutely no experience of running anything, even a household budget, successfully. I think the last thing they should be doing is bringing children into
the equation.’

  ‘Darling,’ Vivi remonstrated.

  ‘What? Can’t we tell the truth now? In case she decides to absent herself from the family again? I’m sorry, Neil. In other circumstances it would be wonderful news. But until Suzanna has grown up a bit and learnt to accept her responsibilities I think it’s a bloody awful idea.’

  Lucy had stopped giggling. She looked at Suzanna, and then at Neil, who had flushed a deep red. ‘That’s a bit harsh, Dad.’

  ‘Just because something’s not easy to hear, Lucy, doesn’t mean it’s harsh.’ Her father, having apparently exceeded his daily quota of spoken words, had resumed eating.

  Vivi reached for the Yorkshire puddings, her face taut with anxiety. ‘Let’s not talk about this today. It’s so seldom we have everyone together. Let’s just try to have a nice lunch, shall we?’ She held aloft her glass. ‘Shall we make a toast to Lucy, perhaps? Twenty-eight. A wonderful age.’

  Only Ben joined her.

  Suzanna lifted her head. ‘I thought you’d be pleased that I set up a business, Dad,’ she said slowly. ‘I thought you’d be pleased that I was trying to do something for myself.’

  ‘We are pleased, darling,’ said Vivi. ‘We’re very pleased, aren’t we?’ She placed her hand on her husband’s arm.

  ‘Oh, stop trying to pretend, Mum. He never thinks anything I do is good enough.’

  ‘You’re twisting my words, Suzanna.’ He kept eating, in small, regular mouthfuls. His voice hadn’t risen.

  ‘But not your meaning. Why can’t you ever just give me a break?’

  It was like speaking into a vacuum. Suzanna stood up abruptly, waiting for him to look up at her. ‘I knew this would happen,’ she said, burst into tears and fled from the table.

  They listened to her footsteps fading down the corridor, and the sound of a distant door slamming.

  ‘Happy birthday, Luce,’ said Ben, raising a glass ironically.

  Neil pushed back his chair, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Sorry, Vivi,’ he said. ‘It was delicious. Really delicious.’

  His father-in-law did not raise his head. ‘Sit down, Neil. You’ll help no one by galloping after her.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ said Rosemary, turning stiffly towards the door. ‘Morning sickness, is it?’

  ‘Rosemary . . .’ Vivi pushed a strand of hair off her forehead.

  ‘You stay,’ Lucy said, placing her hand on Neil’s shoulder. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Neil eyed his food, unable to hide his relief that he might be allowed to finish his lunch in peace.

  ‘Trust her to hijack Lucy’s birthday celebration.’

  ‘Don’t be unkind, Ben,’ said Vivi. She glanced wistfully at Lucy’s departing back.

  Rosemary reached over to help herself to another potato. ‘I suppose it’s all for the best.’ She jabbed one with a shaking fork. ‘Just as long as she doesn’t turn out like her mother.’

  The barns had all changed. Where, at the rear of the farm, there had been three semi-derelict creosoted-timber shelters for hay, straw and redundant pieces of rusting farm equipment, there were now two double-glazed barn conversions, fronted by gravel parking areas and advertised in discreet signs as ‘all-inclusive offices’. Through the window of what had once been the grain store, Suzanna could make out a man strolling back and forth as he spoke animatedly into a telephone. She had searched for several minutes to find somewhere to sit where he wouldn’t be able to see her cry.

  ‘You all right?’

  Lucy appeared at her left, and seated herself beside her. For some minutes, they watched as the man strode and talked. Suzanna noted that her sister had the even, glowing complexion that spoke of winter sun and expensive skiing holidays, then, with a jolt, that Lucy had joined the ever-increasing list of people she envied. ‘So, when did all this happen?’ She cleared her throat, and gestured towards the barns.

  ‘Started a couple of years ago. Now that Dad’s letting the land, he and Ben are working on ways to make the rest of the estate earn more money.’

  There was something about ‘he and Ben’ that made Suzanna’s eyes fill again with tears.

  ‘They’re holding shoots on the other side of the wood, too. Breeding pheasants.’

  ‘Never thought of Dad as a shooter.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t do it himself. He gets Dave Moon to do it. He’s got dogs and everything. And Mum does the lunches. It’s all barrow-boys from the City who fancy themselves with a Purdey.

  ‘They charge a fortune,’ Lucy added approvingly. ‘Last season paid for Dad’s new car.’ She picked at a piece of lichen near her shoe, then lifted her head and smiled. ‘You’ll never guess – when Dad was younger he became briefly obsessed with the idea of giving it all away. All the land. Gran told me. Can you imagine Dad, the great stickler for tradition, as a kind of Communist Robin Hood?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor me. I thought she had a touch of Alzheimer’s to begin with, but she swears it’s true. She and Grandpa talked him out of it.’ She hugged her knees. ‘Boy, I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation.’

  In the distance, dotted along the narrow field by the river, there were twenty or so black and white sheep, seemingly stationary. Her father had never been particularly successful with his sheep. Too prone to disgusting diseases, he would say. Scab and scald, blowfly strike and liver fluke, medieval names and macabre symptoms that, as children, they had taken a delighted horror in hearing about.

  ‘I hardly recognise it round here.’ Suzanna’s voice was small.

  Lucy’s was brisk in response. ‘You should come home more often. It’s not as if you live miles away.’

  ‘I wish I bloody did.’ Suzanna buried her face in her arms again. She cried for a few more minutes, and then, sniffing, looked sideways at her younger sister. ‘He’s so bloody horrible to me, Luce.’

  ‘He’s just pissed off that you hurt Mum’s feelings.’

  Suzanna wiped her nose. ‘I know I should have invited her. I just – I just get sick of living in their shadow. I know they’ve helped out since we lost the money and everything, but nothing’s the same, now that . . .’

  Lucy turned to her, then shook her head. ‘It’s the will, isn’t it? You’re still going on about the will.’

  ‘I’m not going on about it.’

  ‘You’ll have to let this go, you know. You don’t want to run the estate. You never have. You told me it would drive you mad.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘You’re letting it poison everything. And it’s making Mum and Dad really unhappy.’

  ‘But they’re making me unhappy.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re obsessing over what happens to Dad’s money after his death. I can’t believe you’re prepared to split this family apart over something that isn’t yours in the first place. He’s not going to leave either of us short, you know.’

  ‘It’s not about Dad’s money. It’s about the fact that he believes in some outdated system whereby boys matter more than girls.’

  ‘Primogeniture.’

  ‘Whatever. It’s just wrong, Lucy. I’m older than Ben. It’s wrong, and it’s divisive, and it shouldn’t happen in this day and age.’

  Lucy’s voice rose in exasperation. ‘But you don’t want to run the estate. You never have.’

  ‘It’s not the bloody point.’

  ‘So you’d rather it be broken up and sold off, just so you can have an equal share?’

  ‘No . . . No, Lucy. I just want an acknowledgement that I – that we – are as important as Ben.’

  Lucy made as if to stand. ‘It’s your problem, Suze. I feel just as important as Ben.’

  The man had finished his telephone call. They saw him move, silhouetted, round the desk, and disappear. Then the office door opened and he emerged into the daylight. He nodded at them, then climbed into his car.

  ‘Look, no one else is going to say this to you, but
I think you need to get this into perspective, Suzanna. This all bears no indication of what Dad thinks of you. If anything, you got more attention than either me or Ben when we were young.’ She held up a hand, silencing Suzanna’s protest. ‘And that’s fine. You probably needed it more. But you can’t blame him for everything that’s happened since. He’s given you a house, for God’s sake.’

  ‘He hasn’t given it to us. We’re paying rent.’

  ‘A peppercorn rent. You know as well as I do that you’ve got it for good if you want it.’

  Suzanna fought a childish urge to say she didn’t want it. She hated that little house with its mean rooms and its cottagey beams. ‘It’s because he feels guilty. He’s overcompensating.’

  ‘God, you sound spoilt. I can’t believe you’re thirty-five.’

  ‘Thirty-four.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Perhaps conscious that her tone had been a little hard, she nudged Suzanna with her elbow, a conciliatory gesture. Suzanna, who had started to feel chilled, wrapped her arms round her knees and wondered how her sister, at twenty-eight, had achieved this level of certainty, this self-possession.

  ‘Look. It’s Dad’s right to divide things up as he chooses. His right. And things might change, you know. You just need a bit more going on in your own life and then it won’t matter.’

  Suzanna swallowed the bitter retort. There was something particularly galling about being patronised by one’s baby sister, hearing an echo of family discussions that had taken place without her. Especially if you knew she was right.

  ‘Make a go of this shop and Dad will have to look at you differently.’

  ‘If I make a go of this shop Dad will die of shock.’

  She was shivering now. Lucy was getting to her feet with the balanced ease of someone for whom sporting activity was a daily ritual. Suzanna, standing, thought she heard her own knees creak. ‘Sorry,’ she said. And then, after a pause, ‘Happy birthday.’

  Lucy held out her arm. ‘Come on, let’s go inside. I’ll show you the tin of biscuits Gran gave me for my birthday. It’s the exact one Mrs Popplewell gave her for Christmas two years ago. Besides, if we stay out much longer she’ll convince herself that you’re giving birth already.’

  Vivi sat down heavily on the stool, reached for a pot, and began to wipe the day from her face. She was not a vain woman – there were only two pots on her dressing-table, one for cleansing and a supermarket moisturiser – but tonight she looked at the reflection before her and felt immensely tired, as if someone had placed an intolerable weight on her shoulders. I might as well be invisible, she thought, for all the influence I have in this family. As a younger woman, she had shepherded her three children around the county, had supervised their reading, eating and brushing of teeth, had refereed their squabbles and dictated what they should wear. She had fulfilled her maternal tasks with certainty, rebuffing their protests, setting their boundaries, confident in her own abilities.