The Peacock Emporium Read online

  Three days later they met at the Fenix, a spectacularly lascivious love hotel, where intricate prints of the Kama Sutra decorated the walls and beds vibrated at will. Her mention of their meeting-place had left him in no doubt as to her intention, and they had come together almost wordlessly, in a frenzied coupling that had left Alejandro dazed for almost a week afterwards.

  Their meetings had gradually achieved a pattern. She would swear that they could not meet again, that Eduardo suspected something, had been quizzing her, that she had only got away with it by the skin of her teeth. Then, as he sat beside her, comforted her, told her he understood, she would weep, ask why she, as a young woman, should have to endure a sexless marriage, a life free of passion, when she was not even thirty. (Both were aware that this was not strictly true - the age at least - but Alejandro knew better than to interrupt.) And then, as he comforted her again, agreed that it was unfair, that she was too beautiful, too passionate to grow stale and dry like an old fig, she would hold his face and announce that he was so handsome, so kind, the only man who had ever understood her. And then they would make love (although that always sounded too gentle for what it really was). Afterwards, smoking furiously, she would pull away and tell him that this really was it. The risks were too high. Alejandro would have to understand.

  Several days, or occasionally a week, later she would call again.

  His own feelings about the arrangement had often verged on the ambivalent: Alejandro had always been discreetly selective when it came to sexual partners, uncomfortable with the idea of falling in love. While he felt a sympathy for her predicament, he knew he didn't love Sofia; he wasn't even sure he always liked her. Her own protestations of love, he sensed, were a way of legitimising to a good Catholic girl her illicit actions: while her view of her religion might just accommodate romantic passion, carnal lust was clearly stretching things. What they shared, and what neither had ever been quite brave enough to acknowledge, was a fierce sexual chemistry; it ratified Sofia's enduring belief in her own desirability, and lifted Alejandro out of his habitual reticence, even if his exterior did little to suggest it.

  'Why do you never look at me when you come?'

  Alejandro closed the door quietly behind him, and stood over the prostrate figure of Sofia on the bed. He was used now to these abrupt opening gambits: it was as if the abbreviated nature of their meetings left no room for any kind of nicety. 'I do look at you.' He considered removing his jacket, then changed his mind.

  Sofia rolled over on to her stomach so that she could reach the ashtray. The action caused her skirt to ride up her legs. A pornographic film was playing on the television; he glanced at it, wondered if she had been watching it while she waited for him.

  'No, you don't. Not when you come,' she said. 'I watch you.'

  He knew she was right. He had never opened his eyes to any woman at that moment; no doubt his uncle, the psychoanalyst, would have said it betrayed something ungenerous about him, some determination not to reveal himself. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I hadn't thought about it.'

  Sofia pushed herself upright, lifting one knee so that a long expanse of thigh was clearly visible. Normally this would have been enough to elicit powerful waves of desire in him; today he felt curiously detached, as if he were already thousands of miles from here.

  'Eduardo thinks we should have a baby.'

  Next door someone opened a window. Through the wall, Alejandro could just make out the dull murmur of voices. 'A baby,' he repeated.

  'You're not going to ask me how?'

  'I think I understand the biology of it by now.'

  She wasn't smiling. 'He wants to do it at a clinic. He says it will be the best way to make sure it happens quickly. I think it is just because he doesn't want to make love to me.'

  Alejandro sat on the corner of the bed. The couple on the television were now engaged in an orgiastic frenzy; he wondered whether Sofia would mind if he turned it off. He had told her several times that such films did nothing for him, but she would just smile as if she knew better, as if repeated exposure to them would change his mind. 'I don't think making babies is something you can do by yourself.'

  She had kicked off her shoes in separate corners of the room: Eduardo liked things to be neat, orderly, she had told him before. When she was with Alejandro, she liked to scatter her clothes about, a kind of secret rebellion. 'It doesn't bother you?'

  'If it bothers you.'

  'I don't think he really wants a kid. All those diapers - plastic toys everywhere, baby puke on his shoulders. He just wants to look virile. You know he's losing his hair? I told him it would be cheaper for both of us if he got hair plugs. But he says he wants a baby.'

  'And what do you want?'

  She looked at him sharply, smirked at his psychoanalytic tone. 'What do I want?' She pulled a face, stubbed out her cigarette. 'I don't know. Some other life probably.' She pushed herself off the bed and walked up to him, close enough for him to breathe her perfume, and placed a cool hand against his cheek, letting it slide slowly over his skin. Her hair, which was loose around her shoulders, was slightly matted, as if she had spent some time lying on the bed before he arrived. 'I've been thinking about you,' she said. She leant forward and kissed him, leaving the taste of lipstick and cigarettes on his lips. Then she cocked her head to one side. 'What's up?'

  She surprised him like this every now and then: he had believed her so spoilt and self-absorbed, and yet occasionally she would pick up on some subtle change in atmosphere, like a dog.

  He wondered whether there was any way to soften it. 'I'm going away.'

  Her eyes widened. The woman on the screen had contorted herself into a position that made Alejandro uncomfortable for her. He was longing to turn off the television.

  'For long?'

  'A year . . . I don't know.'

  He had expected an explosion, was still primed for it. But she merely stood very still, then sighed and sat down on the bed, reaching for her cigarettes.

  'It's work. I've got a job in a hospital in England.'

  'England.'

  'I leave next week.'

  'Oh.'

  He moved closer to her, put a hand on her arm. 'I shall miss you.'

  They sat like that for some minutes, vaguely conscious of the sound of muffled lovemaking next door. There had been a time when he would have found it embarrassing.

  'Why?' She turned to him. 'Why are you going?'

  'Buenos Aires . . . is too full of ghosts.'

  'It has always been full of ghosts. Always will be.' She shrugged. 'You just have to choose not to see them.'

  He swallowed. 'I can't.' He reached for Sofia then, perhaps because she had not reacted as he had expected, suddenly desiring her, desperate to lose himself inside her. But she extricated herself from his grasp, twisting nimbly, and stood up. She lifted one hand to her hair, smoothed it, walked to the television and flicked it off.

  When she spoke, her eyes were filled with neither tears nor infantile fury, but a kind of resigned wisdom he hadn't seen before. 'I should be mad with you, leaving me like this,' she said, lighting another cigarette. 'But I'm glad, Ale.' She nodded, as if confirming it to herself. 'It's the first time I've ever seen you do something, make a real decision. You've always been so . . . passive.'

  He felt a brief discomfort, not knowing if she was disparaging his sexual technique. But having lit her cigarette she took his hand, lifted and kissed it, a curious gesture. 'Are you running to something? Or just running away?' Her hand held his firmly.

  It was impossible to answer honestly, so he said nothing.

  'You go, Turco.'

  'Just like that?'

  'Go now. I don't want us to start making stupid promises about meeting again.'

  'I'll write if you want.'

  'Come on . . .'

  He looked at her beautiful, disappointed face, feeling an affection that surprised him. The words he had prepared seemed trite.

  She understood. She squeeze
d his hand, then gestured towards the door. 'Go on. You know I was going to finish things anyway. You're not my type, after all.'

  He heard her tone harden determinedly, and walked towards the door.

  'Just my luck, eh?' she said, laughing humourlessly. 'A husband who is dead to the touch, and a lover too haunted by ghosts to live.'

  Heathrow and its outskirts was the ugliest place he had ever seen. Dere Maternity Hospital was prettier, but even less friendly - especially, he realised, to those with a darker skin. For weeks many of the midwives had refused to speak to him, apparently resentful of this male usurper in their female domain. Two weeks after he arrived, he had slept with a young nurse out of loneliness, and when he had apologised afterwards had been told, bitterly, 'God, you men are all the same.' He was permanently cold. His mother, when she had called, had asked if he had a girlfriend yet: 'A young man, your age,' she said sadly, 'you should be shopping around.'

  He had seen the sign outside the Peacock Emporium and, overcome by a wave of homesickness almost as strong as his exhaustion after a fourteen-hour shift (other midwives told him he was mad not to end a shift during a labour, but he did not consider it fair to leave a woman at her most vulnerable), he had pushed open the door and entered. He was not a superstitious man, but sometimes you had to follow signs. Trying to shut them out didn't seem to have served him well this far.

  He didn't tell the two women this, of course. Or the bit about Sofia. Or Estela, come to that. If it hadn't been for the blonde with the smiling face, the first person who had appeared to want to hear what he had to say, he might not have said anything at all.

  Twelve

  The problem with getting older was not so much that one got stuck in the past, Vivi often thought, but that there was so much more of the past to get lost in. She had been sorting through the old bureau in the sitting room, determined to put all those sepia-tinted photographs into an album, hopefully before the men came in, but suddenly it was getting on for half past five. She had found herself inanimate on the small sofa, absorbed in images of her earlier self, pictures she had not lingered over for years: clinging to Douglas's arm at various social functions, posing self-consciously in frocks, proudly holding newborn babies, and then, as they got older, looking increasingly less confident, her smile perhaps a little more painted on with each year. Perhaps she was being too hard on herself. Or perhaps she was being sentimental, projecting on to herself emotions she felt swamped by now.

  Suzanna had been an easy child. When Vivi considered the upheaval of her daughter's early years, and her own lack of experience as a mother, it amazed her that they had muddled through as well as they had. Suzanna's childhood had never been the problem: it was puberty, when those gawky, elongated limbs achieved a certain sylph-like elegance, when those near-Slavic cheekbones had started highlighting the previously hidden planes of her face, that a distant echo had patently disturbed Douglas's peace of mind. And Suzanna, perhaps reacting to some unseen vibration in the atmosphere, had gone off the rails.

  Rationally, Vivi knew this was not her fault: no one could have offered Suzanna more unconditional love, have understood better her complicated nature. But motherhood was never rational: even now, with Suzanna as settled as she ever had been - and Neil such a wonderful husband - Vivi still found herself suffused with guilt that somehow she had failed to raise this daughter to be happy. 'No reason for her not to be happy,' Douglas would say. 'She's had every advantage.'

  'Yes, well, sometimes it's not quite as simple as that.' Vivi rarely ventured further into family psychology: Douglas did not hold much truck with such discussions and, besides, he was right in his way. Suzanna had had everything. They all had. The fact that her and Douglas's two children were so contented had not alleviated her sense of responsibility - if anything, it had heightened it. Vivi had spent years wondering privately if she had treated the children differently in some way, if subconsciously she had instilled in Suzanna a sense that she was second best.

  She knew how seductive that feeling could be.

  Douglas said it was rubbish. His view of relationships was simple: you treated people fairly, and expected them to treat you fairly in return. You loved your children, they loved you back. You supported them as much as you could, and in return they attempted to do you proud.

  Or, in Suzanna's case, you loved them and they did their best to make themselves unhappy.

  I don't think I can bear this any longer, she thought, her eyes welling with tears as she looked at the eleven-year-old Suzanna, clinging fiercely to Vivi's prematurely thickened waist. Somebody has to do something. And I shall hate myself if I don't at least try.

  What would Athene have done? Vivi had long since stopped asking herself that question: Athene had been such an unknowable quantity it had been impossible to predict her actions even when she had been alive. Now, thirty-odd years later, she seemed so insubstantial, her memory both so fierce and simultaneously ephemeral, that it was hard to imagine her as a mother at all. Would she have understood her daughter's complicated nature, which echoed her own? Or would she have done even more damage, dipping in and out of her daughter's life, her failure to stick at motherhood another painful example of her irredeemably mercurial temperament?

  You're lucky, Vivi told the invisible mother in the photograph, feeling suddenly envious, thinking of how Douglas had waved her away when she had attempted once again to bring up the subject of Rosemary and her laundry. It's easier to be a ghost. You can be romanticised, adored, can grow in the memory instead of diminish in reality. Then, pushing herself out of the chair, and noting the time, she scolded herself for the fanciful indulgence of envying the dead.

  Alejandro arrived at a quarter past nine. He came in most days now but always at different times, according to the apparently random timetable of his shifts. He didn't speak much. He didn't even look at a newspaper. He just sat in the corner and sipped his coffee, occasionally smiling in response to Jessie's cheerful chatter.

  Jessie, never slow in striking up a conversation, had made it her mission to find out all about the man she termed 'the Gaucho Gynae', asking him questions in a manner that occasionally made Suzanna wince. Had he always wanted to be a midwife? Only since he realised he was not going to make the national football team. Did he like delivering babies? Yes. Did the women mind having a male midwife? Mostly no. He backed out gracefully when they did. He had found, he said, that if he wore a white coat no one batted an eyelid. Did he have a girlfriend? No. Suzanna had looked away when he answered that one, furious with herself for her faint but definite blush.

  He didn't seem to mind Jessie's questions, although he often managed not to answer them directly. He sat close enough to the counter, Suzanna had noted, to express some degree of comfort with them. Suzanna herself made sure she was rarely close to him. He already felt, somehow, as if he were Jessie's. As if Suzanna attempting to be equally friendly with him would make everyone uncomfortable.

  'How many babies did you deliver today?'

  'Only one.'

  'Any complications?'

  'Just a fainting father.'

  'Fantastic. What did you do?'

  Alejandro had glanced down at his hands. 'It was not very good timing. We only had time to move him out of the way.'

  'What - drag him?'

  Alejandro had seemed faintly embarrassed. 'We needed our hands. We had to push him with our feet.'

  Jessie loved to hear these stories. Suzanna, more squeamishly, often had to turn up the volume of the music or invent some task in the cellar. It was all a little too close to home. But she frequently found herself staring at him, albeit surreptitiously: while his exotic appearance would have failed to hook her attention in London (in fact, it might have rendered him invisible: she would probably have assumed he was a low-paid immigrant), in the environs of the frighteningly Caucasian Suffolk town, and in the close confines of her little shop, he was a welcome breath of exoticism, a reminder of a wider world outside.

&nbs
p; 'Did he miss the birth?'

  'Not quite. But I think he was a bit confused.' He smiled to himself. 'He tried to punch me when he came round, and then he called me "Mother".'

  He had told them another story, of a man who, while his wife screamed in pain, had sat at the end of the bed, calmly reading his newspaper. Alejandro had buckled under the weight of the woman, had wiped her brow, blotted her tears, while all the while her husband failed to glance up from his reading. By the time the baby was born, Alejandro said calmly, he had wanted to hit the man. But his wife, peculiarly, seemed to bear him no resentment. As the baby was placed in her arms, the husband had stood up, gazed at them both, kissed his wife's forehead, where the sweat still cooled, and left the room. Alejandro, shocked and furious, had asked her, as tactfully as he could, whether she had been happy with her husband's response. 'She looked at me,' he said, 'and smiled a big smile. "Oh, yes," she said. My confusion must have shown on my face, so she explained. Her husband, he had a deep terror of hospitals. But she needed him with her. They struck a deal that if he could make it into the room, just so she knew he was there, she could cope. Because he loved her, he forced himself to do it.'

  'So the moral of the story is . . .' said Jessie.

  'Don't judge a man by his newspaper,' said Father Lenny, looking up from his crossword.

  Jessie had wanted to do a display on him, had wanted a story about some miracle of birth ('It kind of fits, being a newish shop and all'), but Alejandro had been reticent. He didn't think, he said, in his quiet, courteous voice, that he could yet lay claim to being one of the shop's regulars. There was something decisive enough in his tone for Jessie to back off. And despite her compelling charm - Suzanna thought she could probably have flirted with a brick - Alejandro had failed to fulfil any of their expectations about Latin men. He neither swaggered, nor eyed them with a swarthy intent. He didn't even seem to have inbuilt rhythm.

  'Probably gay,' said Jessie as, with a polite goodbye, he left for work.

  'No,' said Suzanna, who wasn't sure whether wishful thinking had made her say it.

  Jessie had injured her hand. Suzanna hadn't noticed it, but Arturro did when he came in for his morning espresso. 'You hurt yourself?' He had lifted her hand from the counter with the tenderness of one used to treating food with reverence, and turned it to the light to reveal a large purplish-brown bruise across three fingers.