Peacock Emporium (33 page)

‘She’s up on the Meadville estate. Near her mother. Why?’

Suzanna remembered Jessie’s warning. ‘Nothing important. She’s off with a cold, and I forgot to get some details of an order from her. Thought I’d pop up there and take her some flowers while I was at it. Kill two birds with one stone, you know.’ She smiled reassuringly.

Father Lenny’s eyes searched hers and, having presumably found the answers he required, looked down at his plate where his bacon sandwich lay. ‘Is it a bad cold?’ he asked slowly.

‘Hard to say. I think she’ll be needing a few days off, though.’

He nodded, as if digesting the information. ‘Would you be wanting any company?’ he said carefully. ‘I’ve not a lot on this morning.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Suzanna. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m happy to come. I’ll only stay five minutes if you’ve got . . . things to discuss.’

‘That’s very kind, but you know what it’s like when someone’s got a cold. They don’t want to be disturbed.’

‘No,’ Father Lenny said. ‘They don’t.’ Then he sat upright, pushed away his plate. ‘She’s at forty-six The Crescent. As you go in off the hospital road, take the first right and it’s there on your left.’

‘Thanks.’ Suzanna had already risen from her seat.

‘Tell her I send my love, will you? And I’ll look forward to seeing her back in the shop.’

‘I will’

‘And, Suzanna . . .’

‘What?’ She hadn’t meant to be rude. ‘Sorry. Yes?’

Father Lenny nodded, an acknowledgement of something. ‘I’m glad she’s got a friend.’ He hesitated. ‘Someone to talk to.’

But while it was one thing to have the address, it was quite another, Suzanna realised, as she sat on the step outside her shop, to head up there and push her way, presumably unwanted, into a potential snakepit. What if he was there? She wouldn’t know what to say to him. What was the etiquette in such situations? Did you ignore the woman’s appearance? Make polite conversation? Accept his offer of a cup of tea? What if he was there and wouldn’t let her in? She might make things worse by just turning up.

Suzanna had only ever come up against domestic violence once: at school, her geography teacher, an apologetic, bespectacled woman, would regularly come in trying to shield purplish marks on her face and arms. ‘Her husband beats her up,’ the girls would say knowledgeably to each other afterwards, then give it no further thought. It was as if, Suzanna observed now, they had been parroting parental wisdom. These things happened. That was life. Mrs Nathan had always looked like a victim, anyway.

But this was different.

Suzanna’s head sank on to her knees. She felt weak and inadequate. She could just not go, she thought. Jessie didn’t seem to want her there. It would be the easier path. She would be back in a day or two. And yet there was a degree of complicity in that course that made her ashamed for even considering it.

It felt almost inevitable that he should come. She looked up, still passing her keys from hand to hand, to see him standing in front of her, his long legs for once in pale trousers, a T-shirt in place of the familiar scrubs and jacket. ‘Locked yourself out?’ He looked relaxed, as if wherever he had been in the intervening days had been restorative.

‘Not exactly.’ She thought he might ask for coffee, or make his way in, but he just waited for her to speak. ‘It’s Jessie,’ she said.

He glanced up and past her into the empty shop.

‘I don’t know whether to go to her house.’ She kicked at a stray stone. ‘I don’t know . . . how much it’s right to interfere.’ She didn’t need to explain to him.

He squatted in front of her, his expression set and grim. ‘You are afraid?’

‘I don’t know what she wants. I want to help, but she doesn’t seem to want it.’

He looked down the lane.

‘She talks a lot, Jess,’ she continued, ‘but she’s actually quite private. I don’t know . . . with this thing, whether she’s kind of comfortable with . . . the way things are. Or whether she’s secretly desperate for someone to jump in and help her. And—’ She scratched her nose, ‘I’m not very good at fishing around with people. At confidences and intimacies and all that stuff. To be honest, Ale, I’m out of my depth. And I’m terrified of getting it wrong.’ She didn’t tell him her darker thoughts: that she was afraid of getting too close to the mess of it, to its dark unhappiness; that having salvaged some kind of fragile peace in her own life, she didn’t want it corrupted by someone else’s misery.

He touched her knee with his fingertips, a reassuring, gentle gesture.

They stayed like that for several minutes.

‘You know what?’ he said, lifting himself to his feet. He held out a hand. ‘Lock up your shop. I think we should go.’

The house was prettier than Suzanna had expected – prettier inside than it deserved to be, considering the uniformly depressed air of its neighbours, as if the sun, the blue sky, even the glorious Suffolk countryside surrounding the estate had failed to impress itself on the drab, post-war housing.

Jessie’s house was recognisable outside for its window-boxes and its bright purple front door. Inside, Suzanna had expected a war zone. Instead she found an immaculate sitting room with plumped gingham cushions and carefully dusted shelves. The ungenerous rooms were colourfully painted, decorated with cheap furniture that had been customised, loved into something more attractive. The walls were decorated with family pictures and paintings evidently completed by Emma in the various stages of her school career. Jokey birthday cards still lined the mantelpiece, and a pair of comedy slippers in the shape of stuffed animals that announced they were ‘bear feet’ lay on the floor. The only sign of any disturbance was a parcel of newspaper next to a dustpan and brush, presumably concealing broken glass or china. But what the apparently cheerful interior could not disguise was the air of stunned stillness, an atmosphere quite different from the peaceful silence of a near-unoccupied house, as if it were still digesting actions that had previously taken place there.

‘Tea?’ said Jessie.

Suzanna had heard Alejandro’s gasp as the younger girl opened the front door, the swift attempt, in stepping in, that he made to hide it. Her fine features were swollen, her mouth smeared at a grotesque angle for both lips had been split by some historic blow. There was a large purplish bruise to her upper right cheek and some kind of home-made splint supported her left index finger.

‘It’s not broken,’ she said, wiggling it, as she followed Alejandro’s eyes. ‘I would have gone to hospital if I thought anything was broken.’

She tried and failed to disguise a slight limp when she walked. ‘Go through to the front room,’ she said, a parody of a hostess. ‘Sit down and make yourselves comfortable.’

Against the sound of children riding bicycles on the pavement outside, they had sat silently beside each other on the long sofa, which was covered by a pale throw. Suzanna tried not to think what marks on the sofa had led to it needing to be covered.

Jessie brought through a tray of mugs, refused offers of help, and sat down, facing them. ‘Anyone for sugar?’ she said, her voice thick with the effort of speaking through a fat lip.

Suzanna, with an unexpected hiccup, began to cry, brushing at her face in an attempt to disguise her tears. It all seemed so wrong somehow, seeing Jessie like this. She was so far removed from the kind of women this usually happened to.

Alejandro pulled out a handkerchief. She took it wordlessly, ashamed that, in the face of such pain, it was she who was crying.

‘Please don’t, Suze.’ Jessie’s voice, was determinedly upbeat. ‘It looks worse than it feels, honest.’

‘Where is your daughter?’

‘She was staying at my mum’s, thank God. Now I just have to find a way to keep her there another night without Mum kicking off.’

‘You want me to take a look at your hand?’ Alejandro offered.

‘It’s just bruised.’

‘You might need stitches in that lip.’

‘No. He didn’t break the skin inside. I checked.’

‘You should probably get an X-ray too, just to check your head’s okay.’

Suzanna watched as Alejandro moved over to Jessie and examined her face, turning it gently towards the light. ‘You want me to get some butterfly stitches from work? It would help this heal quicker. Or maybe some painkillers.’

‘I tell you what you could do, Ale. Tell me how I can get the swelling down. I need to have Emma home ASAP and I don’t want to scare the living daylights out of her. I’ve done ice packs and arnica cream, but if there’s anything else . . .’

Alejandro was still looking closely at her head. ‘Nothing that’s going to make any real difference,’ he said.

There was a silence. Suzanna took her tea and stared into it, unsure what to say. Jessie, in her pain and composure, in her apparently well-rehearsed reaction to it, seemed like a stranger.

‘You want me to talk to him?’

Suzanna glanced up. Alejandro’s expression was hard; his voice had been tight with restraint.

Jessie shook her head. ‘I have told him,’ she said eventually. ‘That he’s gone too far, I mean.’

Outside, the children were squabbling. Their voices were raised against each other at the other end of the street.

‘I know what you’re both thinking but I won’t let this carry on. For Emma’s sake, as much as anything. I’ve told him, the next time he lays a finger on me he’s out.’

Alejandro looked down into his mug.

‘I mean it,’ said Jessie. ‘I don’t expect you to believe me, but I do. It’s just that I want to see what happens with this anger-management course before I actually pack up and go.’

‘Jessie, please go now. Please. I’ll help. We’ll all help.’

‘You don’t understand, Suze. This isn’t some stranger, this is the man I’ve loved since I was . . . since I was practically a kid myself. And I know the real him and this is not it. I can’t throw away ten years just because of a rough few months. He’s Emma’s dad, for God’s sake. And, believe it or not, when he’s not . . . like this, we have a good time together. We’ve been happy for years.’

‘You’re making excuses for him.’

‘Yup, I probably am. And I can see how it looks to you. But I just wish you’d known him before this started. I wish you could have seen us together.’

Suzanna glanced at Alejandro. She had thought, given his evident affection for Jessie, that he might get angry, intervene on her behalf despite her instructions, but he was just sitting there, holding his mug, listening. It made her feel almost frustrated.

‘I’m not frightened of him, you know. I mean, yes, it’s a bit frightening when he loses it, but it’s not like I’m walking around the house terrified of setting him off.’ Jess looked from Suzanna to Alejandro. ‘I’m not an idiot. This is his last chance. But what am I saying otherwise? That no one deserves a chance to change?’

‘It’s not that—’

‘Look, you know what started this off, don’t you?’ Jessie lifted a mug with her injured hand, then transferred it to the good one and took a sip. ‘Father Lenny. He had a go at him about losing his temper. He ended up feeling like everyone was judging him. He thought I’d been telling tales and that the town had turned against him. You know what it’s like round here. It’s a horrible feeling having everyone look down on you – I know, because a lot of people wouldn’t talk to me when I was a cleaner. Like it somehow made me different.’

She put her mug down. ‘You’ve got to let me handle this myself. Don’t make things worse. If I decide he really has changed, that he’s turned into someone I don’t feel safe with, I’ll pack my bags and go.’ She tried to smile. ‘I’ll move into the shop, Suzanna. Then you’ll never be rid of me.’

Come now
, Suzanna wanted to say, but there was something determined in Jessie’s expression that halted her.

‘Here’s my number.’ Alejandro was scribbling on a piece of paper. ‘You change your mind about your hand, want me to get you some butterfly stitches, anything,’ Suzanna thought he might have lingered meaningfully on ‘anything’, ‘you call me. Okay?’

‘I’ll be back at work the day after tomorrow.’

‘Whenever you’re ready. It’s not important.’ Suzanna stood up and made to hug Jessie, conscious as she did so that she might be pressing on injuries they hadn’t been told about. She stood back, and tried to impart some kind of urgency to the look that passed between them. ‘You can call me too. Any time.’

‘I’m fine. Really. Now, get lost the pair of you. Go and open that shop or I won’t have a job to go back to.’ She was shepherding them out of the door.

Suzanna would have protested, but she was also aware that Jason might be on his way, that Jess might have her own reasons for wanting an empty house.

‘See you soon.’ Jessie’s voice, cheerful through the net curtains, followed them down the road.

They had walked in silence as far as the Swan hotel on the high street, each alone with their thoughts, their footfalls metronomic on pavement that was already radiating waves of heat, although it was not yet midday.

Suzanna stopped at the corner of the road that led towards the centre of town. ‘I don’t feel like opening the shop today,’ she said. He shoved his hands into his pockets.

‘Where shall we go?’ he said.

Neither felt like eating, the heat and the tenor of their morning having conspired against appetite so, after strolling distractedly past the town’s few lunching options, they went towards the market. Neither seemed to know where they were going: they simply shared a desire not to be alone, not to resume their normal routine. At least, that was what Suzanna told herself.

They walked companionably around the stalls in the square, drinking from bottles of water, until he confessed, apologetically, that he was bored with the market. ‘I have walked here on almost every one of my days off,’ he said. He had seen almost nothing, he added, since he got to England. He hadn’t planned it like that, had thought he would travel to some cities and explore on his days off, but rail travel had proven prohibitively expensive, and in most of his free time he was too tired to make any major effort. He had been to Cambridge once, and there had been an outing for all the midwives to London, organised by the hospital management, when they had visited Madame Tussaud’s, the Tower of London and the London Eye in quick succession, taking in almost nothing. The different nationalities had been barely able to comprehend each other’s accents the women either giggling in exclusively female groupings, or gazing at him shyly, the fact that he was the only man preventing them engaging him in conversation. ‘I was so glad to find your shop,’ he said, his hands deep in his pockets. ‘It is the only place . . . it was just different from everything else.’