Peacock Emporium Read online

  As she was dragging in the pavement sign Arturro walked by, swerved, took it wordlessly from her and placed it carefully inside. ‘Beautiful evening,’ he said, his head tucked inside a soft red scarf.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ she said. ‘A Marsala sunset.’

  He laughed, and lifted a heavy hand as he made to leave.

  ‘Arturro,’ Suzanna called after him, ‘what is it you’re weighing all day? The thing you all yell at each other? Because it’s not the cheeses, is it? I noticed earlier that you weigh them at the counter.’

  The big man looked down. Even over the peach-coloured light she could see that he was embarrassed. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘It’s not weighing exactly . . .’ he said.

  ‘All this “seven point two”, “eight point one”. They must be weighing something.’

  His face, when it met hers, was guiltily amused. ‘I’ve got to go. Really.’

  ‘You don’t want to tell me?’

  ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

  ‘It’s not me, okay? It’s the boys . . . I have told them not to but they don’ listen . . .’

  Suzanna waited.

  ‘They are . . . ahem . . .’

  She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘. . . weighing up the customers.’

  Suzanna’s eyes widened, and she felt a sharp pang, as if she, personally, had somehow been made a fool of. Then she thought back to the queues of women, waiting patiently to be assessed, and let out a rare gulp of laughter. As Arturro walked off, chuckling, down the darkening street, she was still trying to remember exactly what numbers had been traded on the occasions when she had walked in. It was time to go. Neil was coming home early, especially, he said, to cook her a meal, although she knew it was because of the big match, which began before he normally reached the cottage. But that was okay. She fancied a long bath anyway.

  She walked around the shop, straightening things, giving the surfaces a wipe, then placed the cloth in the sink. She checked that the till was turned off and, as she stood at the counter, noticed that the painting was still turned towards the wall. On a whim, she reversed it back, so that Athene, revealed, became instantly burnished, incandescent. The evening sun, burning with the urgent intensity that told of its imminent disappearance, reflected off the canvas, gleamed in points off the old gilded frame.

  Suzanna stared at her. ‘Night, Mother,’ she said.

  Then she glanced round the shop, flicked off the lights and headed for the door.

  Ten

  The pants were in the middle of the dining-room table. Still wrapped in Cellophane, stacked like breakfast pancakes, still advertising their ‘discreet, comfortable security’, they were as untouched as when Mrs Abrahams had left them outside Rosemary’s door that morning, their current positioning under the Venetian chandelier a mute, furious protest.

  Vivi and Rosemary had had some spats over the years, but Vivi could not remember one as bad as that which had resulted from the visit of the Incontinence Lady. She couldn’t remember having been shouted at so long and hard, could not remember seeing that level of puce, stammering fury on Rosemary’s face, the threats, the insults, the slamming of doors. She had been in there for almost two hours now, only the elevated volume of daytime television giving any clue as to her continued presence in the house.

  Vivi removed the pants from the table, walked along the corridor, and stuffed them under the old pew as she passed it. She reached the end and knocked tentatively. ‘Rosemary, will you want lunch today?’ She stood for some minutes, her ear pressed to the wood. ‘Rosemary? Would you like some stew?’

  There was a momentary pause, then the television volume increased, so that Vivi withdrew, eyeing the door nervously.

  It had seemed a sensible idea. She hadn’t felt strong enough to broach it with Rosemary herself, but as the person who did the household laundry she had become aware that her mother-in-law’s control, for want of a better word, was not what it had been. Thanking Mr Hoover for the automatic washing-machine, she had found herself, several times this month, loading Rosemary’s bedlinen sporting rubber gloves and a pained expression. And it wasn’t just the bedlinen: over a period of months, Vivi had become aware that Rosemary’s undergarments had significantly lessened in number. She had waited until she was out, then searched the annexe, wondering if they had been left absentmindedly in the washing basket. Initially, she had discovered the offending items soaking in Rosemary’s bathroom sink. More recently, it was as if the mental effort involved in such handwashing had become too much for the old lady and she had taken to hiding them. In the past weeks Vivi had discovered them beneath Rosemary’s sofa, in the cupboard under the sink, and even stuffed into an empty chopped-tomatoes can, high on a bathroom shelf.

  When she had tried to discuss it with Douglas, he had looked at her with an expression of such unalloyed horror that she had backtracked, promising to sort it out herself. Several times she had sat with Rosemary at lunch, trying to muster the courage to ask whether she was having a bit of trouble with her ‘waterworks’. But there was something about her mother-in-law’s trenchant demeanour, about the aggressive way she now shouted, ‘What?’ whenever Vivi tried to broach some innocent topic of conversation that prevented her. And then her GP, a matter-of-fact young Scottish woman, had rifled through her desk and presented her with a whole range of state-subsidised services that had meant Vivi could perhaps remedy this without having to talk directly about it to her mother-in-law.

  Mrs Abrahams – a plump, capable sort with a comforting manner that suggested not only that she had seen it all but had a plastic-backed non-sweat-inducing discreetly wrapped solution for it – had arrived shortly before eleven. Vivi had explained the delicacy of the situation, and that she had not yet felt brave enough to mention the nature of Mrs Abrahams’s visit to her mother-in-law.

  ‘Much easier if it comes from outside the family,’ Mrs Abrahams said.

  ‘It’s not that I mind the washing, as such . . .’ Vivi had trailed off, already feeling guilty of betrayal.

  ‘But there are health and hygiene considerations as well.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘And you don’t want the old lady to lose her dignity.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You leave it to me, Mrs Fairley-Hulme. I tend to find that once they’ve got over the initial hurdle, most ladies are rather relieved of the help.’

  ‘Oh . . . good.’ Vivi had knocked on Rosemary’s door, and placed her ear to the wood to see if the old lady had heard.

  ‘Sometimes I find that the younger ladies, those just entering middle age, end up taking a few packs off me.’

  Vivi couldn’t hear Rosemary’s familiar tread. ‘Oh, yes . . . ?’

  ‘I mean, after a couple of children, things are often not what they were. No matter how many pelvic-floor exercises. You know what I’m saying?’

  The door had opened, leaving Vivi crouched awkwardly.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Rosemary had stared crossly at her daughter-in-law.

  Vivi righted herself. ‘Mrs Abrahams to see you, Rosemary.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll make some coffee and leave you to it.’ She had scuttled into the kitchen, flushed, aware that her palms were sweating.

  There had been peace for almost three minutes. Then the earth had cracked open, volcanic fire spewed forth and, moments later, against the backdrop of some of the worst language Vivi had ever heard uttered in a cut-glass accent, she had witnessed Mrs Abrahams walking briskly across the gravel to her neat little hatchback, her handbag clutched to her chest, glancing back at the house as various plastic-wrapped items were hurled after her.

  ‘Douglas, darling, I need to talk to you about your mother.’ Ben had gone out for lunch. Rosemary was still locked in her annexe. Vivi didn’t think she could keep this to herself until bedtime.

  ‘Mm?’ He was reading the newspaper, thrusting
forkfuls of food into his mouth, as if he was in a hurry to get out again. It was the drilling season, time to get the arable fields sown – he rarely hung around for long.

  ‘I had a woman here, for Rosemary. To talk about . . . that thing we discussed.’

  He looked up, raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Rosemary took it rather badly. I don’t think she wants any help.’

  Douglas’s head dropped, and his hand waved dismissively above it. ‘Send it all to the laundry, then. We’ll pay. Best thing all round.’

  ‘I don’t know if the laundry will take things that are . . . soiled.’

  ‘Well, what’s the bloody point of it being a laundry, then? You’re hardly going to send things that are clean.’

  Vivi didn’t think she could bear the thought of the staff remarking upon the state of the Fairley-Hulmes’ bedding. ‘I don’t . . . I just don’t think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘Well, I’ve told you what I think, Vivi. If you don’t want to send it away and you don’t want to do it yourself, then I don’t know what you want me to suggest.’

  Vivi wasn’t sure either. If she said she just wanted a bit of sympathy, understanding, the faintest idea that she wasn’t in this on her own, she knew Douglas would look at her blankly. ‘I’ll sort something out,’ she said glumly.

  Suzanna and Neil had not argued in almost five weeks. Not a cross word, a mean-minded snipe, a careless spat. Nothing. When she realised this, Suzanna had wondered whether things were changing, whether her marriage, by some peculiar osmosis, had begun to reflect the satisfaction that she was gleaning from her shop – that on waking she felt, perhaps for the first time in her working life, something approaching anticipation when she thought about her day and the people who now populated it. From the moment she put her key in the door, her spirits lifted at the sight of the cheerful, stuffed interior, the brightly coloured ornaments, the gorgeous scents of honey and freesia. It was almost impossible to retain a bad mood within its walls. And despite her reservations, Jessie’s presence had not just worked for the shop economically: something of her Pollyanna-ish nature seemed to have rubbed off on herself too. Several times, Suzanna had caught herself whistling.

  When she allowed herself time to think about it she realised it wasn’t that she felt any closer to her husband, it was simply that, with both of them working long hours, they had neither the time nor the energy to fight. On three nights this week Neil had not been home before ten. Several times she had left the house before seven, only dimly aware that they had spent any time in the same bed. Perhaps this is how marriages like Dad and Mum’s survive, she mused. They just make sure they’re too busy to think about them. There were more convincing kinds of comfort.

  Neil ruined it, of course, by bringing up the subject of their apparently imminent children. ‘I’ve been finding out about childcare,’ he said. ‘There’s a nursery attached to the hospital that doesn’t just take staff children. If we put our name on the list now, we might have a good chance of getting a place. Then you can keep working, like you wanted.’

  ‘I’m not even pregnant.’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt to plan ahead, Suze. I was thinking, I could even take the baby there on my way to work in the morning so you wouldn’t have to cut into your day too much. It makes sense, now that your shop’s doing okay.’

  He couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice. She knew that now he overlooked lots of things about her that had previously irritated him, her preoccupation with the appearance of her stock, her persistent lack of courtesy towards Vivi, the fact that her exhaustion made her bad-tempered and killed her libido, because of the greater favour she was about to pay him – in around seven months’ time.

  Despite her promise, Suzanna did not feel the same sense of excitement, despite Jessie’s breathless reassurances that it was the best thing that had ever happened to her, that having children made you laugh, feel, love more than you ever dreamed possible. It wasn’t just the sex thing that bothered her – in order to get pregnant they were going to have to embark on a fairly regular bout of sexual activity – it was the feeling that her promise had hemmed her in, that she was now bound by obligation to produce this thing, to harbour it in a body that had always been, quite comfortably, entirely hers. She tried not to think too hard about her mother. Which made her feel something else.

  In one of his more irritating moments, Neil had put his arms round her and said she could ‘always get some counselling’, and she had had to restrain herself physically from hitting him. ‘It would be perfectly understandable. I mean, it’s no wonder you have reservations,’ he went on.

  She had wriggled free of his grasp. ‘The only reservations I have, Neil, are because you keep harping on about it all the time.’

  ‘I don’t mind paying for you to see someone. We’re doing okay at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, just drop it, will you?’

  His expression was sympathetic. It somehow made her even crosser. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re more like your dad than you think. You both just sit on your feelings the whole time.’

  ‘No, Neil. I just want to get on with my life and not obsess about some non-existent baby.’

  ‘Baby Peacock,’ he mused. ‘Neil Peacock Junior.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Suzanna.

  All of the schools in Dere Hampton broke for lunch between twelve thirty and one forty-five, and this stretch of the day was marked, outside the windows of the Peacock Emporium, by passing bunches of leggy schoolgirls in inappropriately customised uniforms, exasperated mothers dragging their younger charges away from the sweet shop, and the arrival of unhappily self-employed regulars, looking for what might just be coffee but was more usually a bit of human contact to break up their day. It had been their first real stock-take, so in honour of this, and that it was the first really hot day of the year, the door of the shop had been propped open and a solitary (probably illegal) table and chairs left outside on the pavement. They had been used legitimately twice, more frequently provided a brief sitting-down opportunity for some of the older ladies, and for climbing through, or knocking over, by a significant number of toddlers and older children.

  It felt, Suzanna told herself, almost Continental. She had not yet tired of staring out, through her meticulous arrangements, of the prismed lit window, still enjoyed standing, her clean white apron starched to old-fashioned stiffness, behind her till. Sometimes she wondered if she hated Dere Hampton less than she had previously thought: having created her own space, imprinted on it her own character, she had felt, at times, almost proprietorial – and not just about the shop.

  Jessie had soon learnt to play to their respective strengths and today, dressed in a flower-printed dress and heavy boots, she was serving at the counter, often nipping out to make conversation with the cement-booted builders and the old ladies, while Suzanna walked around the shop with her jotter, totting up the remaining stock, noting with a vague disappointment how little she had sold in the past few weeks. It was not what you would call a roaring success but, as she frequently reassured herself, at least the shop was on its way to paying for its own stock and staffing costs. If it would only pick up a bit, Neil said, they could start repaying some of the capital outlay. Neil liked saying such phrases. She thought finance was one of the few areas left in which he had unchallengeable authority in their relationship.

  Arturro had come in, drunk two espressos in quick succession, then left. Father Lenny had poked his head round the door, supposedly to ask Jessie if Emma was coming back to Sunday school, but also to introduce himself to Suzanna and remark that if she wanted any more fairy-lights he knew someone near Bury St Edmunds who did them wholesale.

  Mrs Creek had come in, ordered a milky coffee, and sat outside for half an hour, removing her hat so that her wispy hair was exposed to the sun, looking as fragile as frostbitten grass. She told Jessie that this weather reminded her of the first time she had gone abroad, to Geneva, where her husband had be
en in hospital. The aeroplane had been a terrific adventure – actual nurses they’d used as stewardesses then, not the over-painted striplings they employed nowadays – and her arrival in a foreign country so exciting that she had almost forgotten the reason she was there, and managed to miss visiting time on the first day. Suzanna, occasionally venturing outside to pick up coffee-cups, or just to feel the first rays of sun on her face, had heard her reminiscing, with Jessie, chin in hand, soaking up every last detail with the sun. He had been ever so cross, her husband, had refused to talk to her for two days. Afterwards it had occurred to her that she could have fibbed, could have told him her aeroplane had been delayed. But she was never one to lie. You always ended up in a muddle trying to remember what you’d said to whom.

  ‘Jason thinks I lie even when I don’t,’ said Jessie, cheerily. ‘We had a massive fight once because I didn’t Hoover when I was ill. He likes to see those little lines in the carpet, you see, just to prove I’ve done it. But I had this food poisoning, chicken I think it was, so I just lay in bed.

  ‘When he got home I was feeling a bit better and he accused me of sitting around on my arse all day, even though I’d managed to make his tea. And I was so cross I just hit him with the pan. You don’t know how much I’d wanted to puke just peeling his spuds.’ She laughed guiltily.

  ‘That’s men, dear,’ said Mrs Creek, vaguely, as if they were some kind of affliction.

  ‘What did he do?’ said Suzanna, struck by this casual depiction of violence, and unsure whether to take at face value what Jessie had just said.

  ‘He hit me back. So I hit him with the pan again, and knocked out half his tooth.’ She gestured towards the back of her mouth, showing where the damage had been done.

  Mrs Creek had stared across the road, as if she hadn’t heard. After a moment’s stillness, Suzanna had smiled vaguely, as if she had forgotten to pick something up, then turned and walked back into the shop.