The Peacock Emporium Page 7

  He took a long draught of his whisky. 'I thought we might go away.'

  She turned, something unreadable on her face.

  'What?'

  'To Italy.'

  It was as if he had proposed satiating some hidden hunger. She moved towards him, her eyes not leaving his. 'Back to Florence?'

  'If you like.'

  She gave a little gasp, then threw her arms round him with a kind of childish abandon. 'Oh, yes. Yes, let's go back to Italy. Oh, Douglas, what a wonderful idea.'

  He put down his glass and stroked her hair, stunned that it had been so easy to make things right between them. He could feel her limbs, sinuous against his, and felt the battened-down stirrings of desire. She lifted her face to his, and he kissed her.

  'When shall we go? Soon? It will take us hardly any time to pack up.' Her voice was greedy, urgent.

  'I thought we could go for our anniversary.'

  Her eyes were on some distant horizon now, her thoughts already overseas. It was like her face had changed shape, softened and blurred at the edges, as if she were seen through a Vaselined lens.

  'We could even stay at the Via Condolisa.'

  'But where shall we live?'

  'Live?'

  'In Italy.'

  He drew in his chin and frowned. 'We shan't go there to live, Athene. I thought we could have a trip for our anniversary.'

  'But I thought--' Her face closed off as she grasped the ramifications of what he was saying. 'You don't want to move there?'

  'You know I can't move there.'

  There was a sudden desperation in her. 'But let's move away from here, darling. Away from your family. And mine. I hate families. They're always dragging us down with their obligations and expectations. Let's go. Not even to Italy. We've been there. To Morocco. It's meant to be fabulous in Morocco.' Her arms were tight round his waist, her eyes burning intently into his.

  Douglas felt suddenly very tired. 'You know I can't go to Morocco.'

  'I don't see why not.' Her smile was bruised, wavering.

  'Athene, I have responsibilities.'

  She moved away from him then. Stepped back and shot him a hard look. 'God, you sound exactly like your father. Worse. You sound like my father.'

  'Athene, I--'

  'I need a drink.' She turned her back on him, and poured herself a large measure of whisky. He noticed, as she poured, that for a new bottle the level had dropped rapidly. She stayed turned away from him for some minutes. Normally Douglas might have approached her, placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, offered some murmured words of affection. Tonight, however, he was just too tired. Too exhausted to play games with his impossible, flighty wife.

  She turned to him. 'Douglas. Darling. I never ask you for anything. Do I? Really?'

  There was little point in contradicting her. Douglas stared at her pale, unreadable face, at the sadness suddenly visible in it. He hated the thought that it might be his failure as a husband that was responsible for it.

  'Let's go. Let's leave here. Say yes to me, Douglas. Please.'

  He had a brief insane impulse to throw their possessions into a single suitcase and roar up the drive in the MG, Athene delighted and wrapped round him, then disappear into a technicolour future in some exotic foreign land.

  Athene's gaze hadn't wavered.

  'I need a bath,' he said. And, wearily, turned towards the stairs.

  Five

  The Day I Broke Somebody's Heart

  Oh, I know I don't look the type. You're probably thinking I've never inspired passion in anyone. But I did, a long time ago, before middle age and grey hair covered up what few attributes I ever had. His name was Tom, and he was a dear, sweet lad. Not the best-looking chap, but an absolute brick. Solid as a rock, he was. Good family. And he adored me.

  He wasn't the type to talk much. In those days men didn't. Not in my experience, anyway. But I knew he adored me, from the way he used to wait on the corner every evening to walk me home from the office, to the beautiful pieces of ribbon and lace he would save me from the remnants pile at his father's factory. His family was in haberdashery, you see. He was learning the business from his father. That's how we met. Not very manly, you're probably thinking and, yes, we did have the odd ginger, as Mr Holstein used to call them, but when you saw him . . . well, there was nothing effeminate about him. He was a big chap, huge shoulders. Used to carry bolts of fabric for me, piled three or four on his shoulder as easily as if he were tipping his jacket behind him.

  He used to come in with trays of buttons and bits of trimming, lovely Victorian lace that he'd rescued from boxes just starting to go damp. He left them for me wordlessly, laid out, as if he were a dog presenting me with a bone. I used to make my own clothes, then, you see, and when I was dressed up he could always point out one of his buttons, or a piece of his velvet trim. I think it made him rather proud.

  And he never pushed me. Never made any great declarations, or announced his intentions. I had told him, you see, that I'd never marry. I was very certain of that, and I thought it only fair to tell him at the start. But he just nodded, as if that were a fair decision, and decided to adore me anyway. And, gradually, I found I worried less and less about whether I was leading him on, or being unfair, and I just enjoyed his company.

  It was a pretty tricky time to be a single girl, the sixties. Oh, I know you think it was all Mary Quant and free love and nightclubs and the like, but there were very few of us really living that kind of life. For girls like me, from respectable families, who didn't have a 'fast streak', the times could be pretty confusing. There were girls who did, and girls who didn't. And I was never sure which of those I should be. (Although I nearly did, with Tom. Several times. He was very good about it, all things considered, even when I told him I'd decided to be a virgin for life.) And there was this pressure for one to be a la mode, to wear the latest fashions, whether they be Biba or the King's Road, or, like mine, made from Butterick and Vogue patterns. But our parents were all rather scandalised, so one was under this huge pressure to wear a mini-skirt or whatever and yet felt rather embarrassed to be doing so.

  Perhaps I just wasn't liberated enough. There were plenty who were. But Tom seemed to understand and like me, whatever I was, or however I tried to be, and we had a rather lovely time for a couple of years.

  So it was a bit of a shame that he had to suffer so on the first occasion that he was introduced to my parents.

  I had invited them to London to see a show. My mother was excited about it, and Daddy was rather sweet too, although he wouldn't have said as much as I had hardly been home in a year. I had booked us tickets for Hello, Dolly! at the Theatre Royal and afterwards a light supper at one of the new Golden Egg restaurants, and I was going to treat everybody because Mr Holstein had just given me a pay-rise and a promotion from secretary to office manager, which was terrifically exciting. And I mulled things over for ages and ages, and in the end I thought I would probably invite Tom, too, because he was such a sweetheart, and I knew it would mean a lot to him if he were to meet my parents, and I knew they'd like him. They had to. There was nothing to dislike about him. The show was marvellous. Mary Martin was Dolly Levi - I'll never forget how gorgeous she looked, even though we had all secretly wished to see Eve Arden. And Mummy was so pleased to see me that she kept sneaking her hand into mine and squeezing it, and making meaningful little glances at Tom. I know she was rather relieved to see a man on the scene after such a long time, and he had brought her a box of New Berry Fruits. So it was rather a lovely evening until the dinner. Oh, there was nothing wrong with the Golden Egg (Mummy said, gazing around her, that it was 'certainly very . . . colourful'): the food was fine, and I splashed out on a bottle of wine, even though Daddy said he would not let me spend my new salary on entertaining my 'old folks'. And Tom just sat and beamed quietly in that way of his, and talked to Mummy for ages about ribbons and things from before the war and how his father had once met the Prime Minister's wife when she ordered
some fine Belgian lace.

  And then she said it.

  'I meant to tell you, darling. Things are not good in the Fairley-Hulme household.'

  I stared at my fish for a moment, then looked up, my expression a careful blank. 'Oh?'

  Daddy snorted. 'She's bolted.'

  'Who's bolted?'

  'Oh, Henry. That's such an outdated term. Athene Forster. Sorry, Fairley-Hulme. She's run off with some salesman from up north, of all things. Made the most awful mess of everything. The families are desperate to keep it out of the papers.'

  It was as if she thought her words would no longer have an effect on me.

  'I don't read the papers.' My fish had turned to powder in my mouth. I forced myself to swallow, and took a sip of water. Tom, poor thing, was ploughing through his food, oblivious. 'How - how is Douglas?'

  'Hoping she'll come back, poor boy. He's absolutely devastated.'

  'Always looked like trouble, that one.'

  'Well, yes. But she had seemed to settle down.'

  'Girls like that never settle down.'

  Their voices had receded, and I wondered, briefly, if I might faint. Then I looked at Tom and, for the first time, noticed with mild revulsion that he kept his mouth open while he ate.

  'Of course, her parents are absolutely furious. They've actually disinherited her. They're telling everyone she's gone abroad for a bit, just until things calm down. I mean, it's not as if she hadn't pushed her luck before she married Douglas. She didn't have any real friends, did she? Or much of a reputation, come to that.'

  My mother shook her head pensively and swept non-existent crumbs from the tablecloth. 'Douglas's parents have taken it very badly. It reflects awfully on everyone. The chap sold vacuum-cleaners, door to door, would you believe? Vacuum-cleaners. And a few weeks after she'd gone, the girl had the cheek to ring them and ask them for some money. Poor Justine. I saw her at the Trevelyans' bridge evening two weeks ago and it's turned her quite grey.'

  It was then that she must have seen my expression. She gave me a concerned stare, which turned into rather a hard one, and then she glanced at Tom. 'Still, you don't want us wittering on about people you don't know, do you, Tom? Frightfully rude of me.'

  'Don't mind me,' said Tom. His mouth was still open.

  'Yes. Well. Let's think about pudding. Who's for pudding? Anyone?' Her voice had risen almost an octave. She gave me another hard look, the kind that can only travel from mother to daughter.

  I don't think I heard another thing she said.

  I didn't go back home. Not then. But it wasn't fair on Tom to continue seeing him. Not in the circumstances.

  Is that enough, or do you want to know about the baby?

  PART TWO

  Six

  2001

  They always argued on the way to parties. Suzanna was never sure why, although she could always ascribe it to something: their lateness, his habit of waiting until the last minute to check that the back door was locked, her perpetual inability to find anything decent to wear. Perhaps it was in anticipation of the strain of being nice to each other for a whole evening. Perhaps, she sometimes felt, it was just her way of asserting early that there would be no intimacy between them later, when they arrived home. Tonight, though, they had not argued. It was no great victory: they had travelled to the Brookes's house separately, Suzanna navigating her way to the village by carefully annotated directions from her hostess, Neil arriving late from work via train and taxi so that, greeting him at the dinner table, Suzanna had felt her smile calcifying on her face, her j ocular 'We thought you weren't coming,' squeezed through gritted teeth.

  'Ah. Have you met the other half of the Peacocks? Neil, isn't it?' Their hostess had shepherded him gently into his seat. Pearls, expensive, but dated silk blouse, Jaeger-style skirt; her clothes had told Suzanna everything she had needed to know about the night ahead. That she was about to be patronised, rather than admired, for her urban ways. That they had probably only been invited because of her parents.

  'Got held up at a meeting,' Neil had said apologetically. 'Why make an issue of it?' he whispered later, when she scolded him in the corridor. 'No one else seems to think it matters.'

  'It matters to me,' she had said, then forced a smile as her hostess stepped out of the living room and, tactfully avoiding looking too closely at them, asked whether anyone would like a top-up.

  It had been an interminable evening, Neil covering his awkwardness with mildly inappropriate jocularity. Everyone else there had apparently known each other for some time, and slipped frequently into conversation about people she didn't know, village 'characters', making repeated references to events from years past: the rained-off summer fete of two years ago, the tennis tournament in which the finalists knocked heads, the primary-school teacher who ran off to Worcester with poor old Patricia Ainsley's husband. Someone had heard she'd had a baby. Someone else had heard that Patricia Ainsley was now a Mormon. The room was overheated, and Suzanna had sat with her back to the huge log fire so that even before the main course was served her face had become flushed, and occasional beads of sweat ran down her spine, hidden by her overly fashionable shirt.

  They all knew, she was sure of it. She felt that despite her smiles, her assurances that, yes, she was happy to be living in Dere Hampton again, that it was lovely having a bit more time on her hands, that it was good to be closer to one's family, they must be able to tell she was lying. That the studied unhappiness of her husband, gamely making conversation opposite with the opinionated vet and the monosyllabic gamekeeper's wife, must radiate outwards, like a glowing neon sign floating above them. We're Unhappy. And It's My Fault.

  Over the past year, she had become an expert at gauging the state of people's marriages, recognised the women's tense smiles, the barbed comments, the men's blank expressions of withdrawal. Sometimes it made her feel better to see a couple who were obviously so much unhappier than they were, sometimes it made her feel sad, as if it proved that the simmering anger and disappointment were inevitable in everyone.

  The worst, however, were the ones who were clearly still in love. Not those who were newly together - Suzanna knew that the sheen would rub off eventually - but those whose length of tenure together seemed to have deepened something, to have wound them more tightly around each other. She knew all the signs: the conversational 'we', the frequent touches, to small of back, to hand or even cheek, the quiet smiles of attentive satisfaction when the other spoke. Sometimes even the combative argument punctuated by laughter, as if they could still flirt together, the surreptitious squeeze that spoke of something else altogether. Then Suzanna would find herself staring, wondering what glue she and Neil were lacking; whether it was something she could still find to hold them together.

  'I thought that went quite well,' said Neil, bravely, as he started the car. Second to leave, perfectly acceptable. He had offered to drive so that she could drink; a conciliatory gesture, she knew, but somehow she didn't feel generous enough to acknowledge it.

  'They were okay.'

  'But it's good - I mean getting to know our neighbours. And no one sacrificed a pig. Or threw their car keys into the middle of the room. I had been warned about these rural dinner parties.' He was forcing himself to sound light-hearted, she knew.

  Suzanna tried to quell the familiar irritation. 'They're hardly our neighbours. They're almost twenty minutes away.'

  'From our house, everyone's twenty minutes away.' He paused. 'It's just good to see you making friends in the area.'

  'You make it sound like my first day at school.'

  He glanced at her, apparently assessing just how mulish she was determined to be. 'I only meant that it's good you're . . . putting down a few roots.'

  'I've got the roots, Neil. I've always had the bloody roots, as well you know. It's just that I didn't want to be planted here in the first place.'

  Neil sighed. Rubbed his hand through his hair. 'Let's not do this tonight, Suzanna. Please?'

 
; She was being horrible, she knew it, and it made her feel even crosser, as if it were his fault for making her behave in this way. She stared out of the window, watching the black hedgerows speed by. Hedge, hedge, tree, hedge. The never-ending punctuation of the countryside. The debt counsellor had suggested marriage guidance. Neil had looked receptive, as if he would go. 'We don't need that,' she had said bravely. 'We've been together ten years.' As if that made them unbreakable.

  'The kids were sweet, weren't they?'

  Oh, God, he was so predictable.

  'I thought that little girl handing round the crisps was delightful. She was telling me all about her school play and how unfair it was that she got to be a sheep instead of a bluebell. I told her someone was obviously pulling the wool over--'

  'I thought you said you didn't want to start all this tonight?'

  There was a short silence. Neil's hands tightened on the steering-wheel. 'I only said I thought the children were nice.' He glanced sideways at her. 'It was a perfectly innocent remark. I was just trying to make conversation.'

  'No, Neil, there's no such thing as an innocent remark when it comes to you and kids.'

  'That's a bit unfair.'

  'I know you. You're completely transparent.'

  'Oh, so what if I am? Is it really such a sin, Suzanna? It's not like we've been married five minutes.'

  'Why does that have to come into it? Since when was there a time limit on having kids? There's no rule book that says, "You've been married for blah years, better get procreating."'

  'You know as well as I do that things get harder once you hit thirty-five.'

  'Oh, don't start on that again. And I'm not thirty-five.'

  'Thirty-four. You're thirty-four.'

  'I know how bloody old I am.'

  There was a kind of adrenaline rush within the car. It was as if being alone had liberated them from the constraints of having to appear happy.

  'Is it because you're frightened?'

  'No! And don't you dare bring my mother into this.'

  'If you don't want them, why can't you just say so? At least then we'll know where we stand - I'll know where I stand.'

  'I'm not saying I don't want them.'