Peacock Emporium Page 4

  Vivi was simultaneously repulsed and transfixed, staring for several seconds before she grasped, with a flood of shame, what she had been witnessing. She stood, her back against the half-opened door, that sound echoing grotesquely in her ears, jarring against the thumping of her heart.

  She had meant to move, but the longer she stood there the more paralysed she became, stuck to the door’s roughened surface, even though her arms were mottling in the night air, and her teeth chattering. Instead of escaping, she leant against the cool of the oak door and felt her legs disappear from under her: she had understood that while the tones were those she had never heard before, this man’s voice was not. That the back of the man’s head, his pink-tinged ears, the sharp edge where his hair met his collar were familiar to her: as familiar as they had been twelve years ago, when she had first fallen in love with them.

  Three

  She might not have made Deb of the Year (and now she was ‘respectable’ no one discussed why that might have been) but there were few observers of society who doubted that the nuptials of Athene Forster, variously described as so-called Last Deb, It Girl, or, among some of the less forgiving society matrons, something rather less complimentary, and Douglas Fairley-Hulme, son of the Suffolk farming Fairley-Hulmes, could be hailed as the Wedding of the Year.

  The guest list sported enough old money and double-barrelled names to grant it a prominent position in all the society pages, along with some rather grainy black-and-white pictures. The reception was held at one of the better gentlemen’s clubs in Piccadilly, its customary air of tobacco-scented pomp and bluster temporarily smothered by spring blooms, and swathed drapes of white silk. The bride’s father, as a result of his oft-stated belief since Mr Profumo resigned, that society was falling apart, had decided that his best line of defence against moral anarchy was to gather a rampart of respectable fellows to assert that it wasn’t. This might have made for a rather elderly and sober reception, with its scattering of statesmen, old war comrades, the odd bishop and enough references in his speech to the ‘firm upholding of standards’ to make some of the younger guests giggle. But the young people, it was agreed, had made it look rather gay. And the bride, whom some might have hoped would take this as a direct challenge and behave outrageously, merely smiled vaguely from the top table and gazed adoringly at her new husband.

  There was the groom, universally decreed to be ‘a catch’, whose serious manner, clean-cut good looks, and family fortune had left heartbroken potential mothers-in-law across several counties. Even as he stood, formal and stiff in his morning suit, the occasion weighty upon his broad shoulders, his obvious happiness kept breaking through, evident in the way he kept glancing across to locate his bride, his eyes softening as he saw her. It was also apparent in the way that, despite the presence of his family, his best friends and a hundred others, all of whom wanted to pass on their warmest wishes and congratulations, it was patently obvious that he would rather they had been alone.

  And then there was the bride, whose dewy eyes and bias-cut silk dress, which skimmed a figure that might easily have seemed too thin, had led even her more fervent detractors to note that whatever else she was (and there was no shortage of opinions in that department), she was certainly a great beauty. Her hair, more usually seen cascading down her back in a kind of wilderness, had been glossed and tamed, and sat regally on the crown of her head, pinned down by a tiara of real diamonds. Other girls’ skin might have been greyed by the white of the silk, but hers reflected its marble smoothness. Her eyes, a pale aquamarine, had been professionally outlined and shimmered under a layer of silver. Her mouth formed a small, secretive smile that revealed none of her teeth, except when she turned to her husband and it broke into a wide, uninhibited grin, or occasionally locked surreptitiously on to his in a suggestion of some private, desperate passion, making those around them laugh nervously and look away.

  If her mother’s face, when guests remarked that it really was ‘a lovely day, a wonderful occasion’, expressed a little more than the usual level of relief, then nobody said anything. It would have been unseemly to remember on such a day that several months previously her daughter had been widely considered ‘unmarriageable’. And if anyone wondered why such a huge wedding had been planned in such haste – just four months after the couple’s first meeting – when the bride was evidently not suffering from the kind of condition that usually prompted such things, then most of the men chose to nudge each other and remark that if the only way to get certain pleasures legitimately was to marry, and the bride appeared a more than delightful prospect, then why bother to wait?

  Justine Forster now sat smiling out gamely from the top table. Having tried to ignore that her already habitually choleric husband was still cross that the date of the wedding had interrupted his annual veteran-soldiers’ trip to Ypres (as if this were her fault!) and had mentioned it on no fewer than three occasions already (once during the speech!), she was now trying to ignore her daughter, who, two seats away, appeared to be giving her own husband a verbatim account of the ‘girl-to-girl’ chat she had unwisely embarked upon the previous evening.

  ‘She thinks the Pill is immoral, darling,’ Athene was whispering, snorting with laughter. ‘Says that if we head off to old Dr Harcourt to get a prescription, there’ll be a shrieking hot line to the new Pope before we know it, and we’ll be cast into flaming damnation.’

  Douglas, who was still unused to such frank discussion of bedroom matters, was doing his best to appear composed while fighting off a now familiar wave of longing for the woman beside him.

  ‘I told her I thought the Pope might be a bit busy to worry about little old me swallowing birth-control bonbons but, apparently, no. Like God, Paul VI – or VIII or whatever he is – knows everything, if we’re thinking impure thoughts, if we’re considering copulation purely for pleasure, if we’re not putting enough in the collection plate.’ She leant towards her husband and said, in a whisper just loud enough for her mother to hear: ‘Douglas, darling, he probably even knows where you’ve got your hand right now.’

  There was a sudden spluttering from Douglas’s left, and he tried, but failed, to silence his wife, then asked his new mother-in-law whether he might get her some water, both hands clearly visible.

  As it was not terribly heartfelt, Douglas’s embarrassment did not last long: he had swiftly decided that he loved Athene’s irrepressibility, her lack of concern for the social mores and confines that had so far dictated their lives. Athene shared his embryonic views that society was increasingly unimportant, that they could be pioneers, expressing themselves as they liked, doing what they liked, heedless of convention. He had to fit it all round his job on his father’s estate, but Athene was happy doing her own thing. She wasn’t terribly interested in doing up their new house – ‘The mothers are so good at that kind of thing’ – but she liked riding out on her new horse (his pre-wedding present to her), lying in front of the fire reading and, when he wasn’t working, going up to London for dances, to the cinema and, most of all, spending as much time as they could in bed.

  Douglas had not known it was possible to feel like this: he spent his days in a state of distracted tumescence, for the first time in his life unable to focus on work, the duties of family and career inheritance. Instead his antennae were tuned to a frequency of soft curves, flimsy fabrics and salty smells. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to get inflamed by the things that had inspired him or fed his growing preoccupation with the wrongs of the ruling classes, and the vexed question of whether wealth redistribution meant that he should give up some of his land. Nothing was as relevant, as interesting as it had been. Not when it was compared to the carnal delights of his bride. Douglas, who had once confessed to his friends that he had never become more involved with a woman than he would with a new car (both, he had said, with the shallow confidence of youth, were best replaced within a year by a new model) now found himself sucked into a vortex of feeling in which there was no substitu
te for one particular person. The young man who had always maintained a sceptical distance from the messy doings of the full-blown love affair and prided himself on his skills as an impartial observer now found himself dragged into a vacuum of – well, what was it? Lust? Obsession? The words seemed somehow inadequate for the blind unthinkingness of it, the skin-upon-skin neediness of it, the gloriously greedy voluptuousness of it. The hard, thrusting—

  ‘Going to give the old girl a quickie?’

  ‘What?’ Douglas, flushing, stared at his father, who had appeared unannounced at his shoulder. His small wiry frame stood characteristically straight in his morning suit, his weatherbeaten, normally watchful face softened by alcohol and pride.

  ‘Your mother. You promised her a dance. She fancies a quick whirl if I can get them to strike up a quickstep. Got to meet your obligations, my boy. Your car will be here soon, after all.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Of course.’ Douglas stood, struggling to regroup his thoughts. ‘Athene, darling, will you excuse me?’

  ‘Only if your gorgeous father promises to give this old girl a quickie too.’ Her smile, flickering behind innocently wide eyes, made Douglas wince.

  ‘Delighted, my dear. Just don’t mind me if I wheel you past old Dickie Bentall a few times. I like to show him that there’s life in the old dog yet.’

  ‘I’m heading off, Mummy.’

  Serena Newton turned away from her wiener schnitzel (beautifully done, but she wasn’t sure about the creamed mushrooms) and looked with surprise at her daughter. ‘But you can’t leave until they’ve gone, darling. They’ve not even brought their car round yet.’

  ‘I promised Mrs Thesiger I’d babysit for her tonight. I want to go home first and get changed.’

  ‘But you never said. I thought you were coming home with Daddy and me.’

  ‘Not this weekend, Mummy. I promise I’ll be back in a week or two. It was lovely to see you.’

  Her mother’s cheek was soft and sweet and lightly powdered, the texture of marshmallow. She was wearing her sapphire earrings, the ones her father had bought in India, when they had been posted there in the early years of their marriage. He had ignored the advice of the gemstone cutter, she always said proudly, bypassing the supposedly more valuable stones in favour of two that he declared exactly matched Serena Newton’s eyes. Surrounded by diamonds, the sapphires still held an exotic, expensive depth, while age and now a lingering worry had caused their inspiration to fade.

  Behind her there was a round of applause as the young groom took his bride on to the dance floor. Vivi, glancing away from her mother’s enquiring gaze, didn’t flinch. She had got rather good at hiding her feelings, these last months.

  Her mother reached out a hand. ‘You’ve hardly been home in ages. I can’t believe you’re rushing off like this.’

  ‘Hardly rushing off. I told you, Mummy. I’ve got to babysit tonight.’ She smiled, a broad, reassuring smile.

  Mrs Newton leant forward, placed a hand on Vivi’s knee and dropped her voice: ‘I know this has been terribly hard for you, darling.’

  ‘What?’ Vivi couldn’t hide her sudden colour.

  ‘I was young once, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure you were, Mummy. But I really have to go. I’ll say goodbye to Daddy on my way out.’ With a promise to telephone, and a twinge of guilt at her mother’s hurt expression, Vivi turned and made her way across the room, managing to keep her face towards the doors. She understood her mother’s concern: she looked older, she knew she did, loss etching new shadowy echoes of knowledge on her face, grief sharpening its once puddingy outline into planes. It was ironic, really, she mused, that she should start acquiring those characteristics she had so desired – slimness, a kind of jaded sophistication – through losing the very thing she had wanted them for.

  And, despite being naturally home-loving, Vivi had done her best to return to her family as little as possible over the last few months. She had kept her telephone conversations brief, avoiding all references to anyone outside the family, had preferred to contact her parents through brief, cheerful despatches on jokey postcards, had insisted time after time that she couldn’t possibly come back for Daddy’s birthday, the village fête, the Fairley-Hulmes’ annual tennis party, pleading work commitments, tiredness, or an illusory round of social invitations. Instead, having found work in the offices of a fabric company a little way from Regents Park, she had thrown herself into her new career with a missionary zeal that left her employers astonished daily at her capacity for hard work, her babysitting families grateful for her perpetual availability, and Vivi frequently too exhausted, when she returned to her shared flat, to think. Which suited her just fine.

  After the hunt ball, Vivi had realised that whenever she mentioned Douglas’s name with anything but sisterly interest her parents had gently steered her away from him, perhaps knowing even then that he had longings she could not fulfil. She hadn’t heard them; perhaps, she concluded afterwards, she hadn’t heard him. He had never given her any indication, after all, that his affection for her held anything more than the most innocent brotherly interest.

  Now, having seen him look another way entirely, she had resigned herself to her fate. Not that she was going to have to find someone else, as her mother had repeatedly suggested. No, Vivi Newton now knew herself to be one of an unlucky minority: a girl who had lost the only man she would ever love, and who, having considered the alternatives carefully, had decided she would rather not settle for anyone else.

  It was pointless telling her parents, who would fuss, protest and assure her that she was far too young to make such a decision, but she knew she would never marry. It was not that she was so hurt she could never love again (although hurt she had been – she still found it difficult to sleep without her ‘little helpers’, the prescription benzodiazepine) or, indeed, that she had some idea of herself as a doomed romantic heroine. Vivi had just concluded, in the fairly straightforward manner that she concluded most things, that she would rather live alone with her loss than spend a lifetime trying to make someone else match up.

  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.