Peacock Emporium (34 page)

‘So what do you want to see?’ she had said, blushing faintly at how suggestive that phrase might sound.

‘Show me where you come from,’ he said. ‘Show me this famous estate. The one that causes you so much trouble.’ He had said it teasingly, and she had smiled despite herself.

‘It’s hardly an
estancia,’
she said. ‘It’s about four hundred and fifty acres. Probably not very big by Argentinian standards.’ It was, however, big enough to provide a decent afternoon walk. ‘I’ll take you to the river,’ she said. ‘If you like fishing, you’d like our river.’

It was as if they had made an unspoken decision to step out from the shadow of the morning, not to let Jessie’s situation, the revulsion and helplessness they had both felt, haunt the hours. Or perhaps, Suzanna thought, as they walked along the bridleway up to the woods, she frequently stepping up on to the side of the maize field to avoid the heavily rutted track, it was just that it was impossible to feel bleak for long on a day when the sky was so gloriously blue, when the birds competed in song, their chests bursting with effort, when The afternoon itself was infected with the joyousness of truancy, of hiding when everyone else was working.

Twice he had taken her hand to help her across the path.

The second time, she had had to make a conscious effort to let his go.

They had seated themselves at the top of the forty-acre field and were looking down across the valley. It was one of the few points from which the estate was visible almost in its entirety, its undulating hills and dark patches of forest patchworking their way to the horizon. She pointed to a distant house, set about by outbuildings. ‘That’s Philmore House. It’s let at the moment, but my mother and father lived there when they were first married.’ She stood up, and motioned towards some woods, about five miles west of the house. ‘That mustard-coloured house – you can just see it, right? That’s my parents’ house now. My brother Ben – he’s younger than me – and my grandmother live there too.’

They were a third of the way across the field, where it dropped away sharply below them, rolling down to the valley and the river, unseen behind woodland, when she said, ‘Me and my brother used to come up here when we were little. We’d roll down it. We’d stand here, pretending we didn’t know what was coming, and then the other would push us both down and we’d race each other rolling all the way to the bottom. You’d end up with grass in your mouth, your hair . . .’ She held up her hands, her elbows in, demonstrating the position, lost in a distant memory. ‘Dad turned this field over to the sheep one year. We didn’t think about it. Ben got up at the bottom looking like a currant bun.’ She realised she had brought in her family, and didn’t want to continue. Sometimes, it seemed, there was no escaping them.

He stood next to her, shielding his eyes as he scanned the horizon. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘I don’t really see it any more. I guess when you grow up with something you don’t.’

Below them, a sparrowhawk hovered in the air, its eye trained on some unseen prey. Alejandro followed it as it swooped towards the earth.

‘Even on days like this, I think I still prefer the city.’

He turned towards her. ‘Then why do you let it make you so sad?’

He was looking at her as if her feelings were strange enough to be a curiosity. ‘I’m not sad. And I don’t let it bother me that much. I just don’t agree with the system, is all.’

She sat down, pulled up a piece of long grass and placed its stalk meditatively between her back teeth. ‘It doesn’t rule my life or anything. It’s not like I’m sitting in a dark room somewhere sticking pins in a voodoo doll of my brother.’

She heard him chuckle, as he sat down beside her and folded his legs beneath him. She heard the quiet rustle of grass as he adjusted himself, watched, surreptitiously, as his legs stretched out beside hers.

‘The estate was never yours, right? It belongs to your father?’

‘And his father. And his father before him.’

‘So it was never yours, and it will never be yours. So?’

‘So what?’

‘Exactly. So what?’

She raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘I think you’re being a bit naïve.’

‘For telling you not to let your family’s land eat up your happiness?’

‘It’s not that straightforward.’

‘Why?’

She kicked out at an insect that had landed on her foot. ‘Oh, everyone’s such an expert, aren’t they? Everyone knows how I feel – how I
should
feel. Everyone thinks I should just accept things the way they are and stop railing against them. Well, Alejandro, it’s not as simple as that. It’s not as simple as making yourself not want something. It’s about families and relationships and history and injustice and—’ She broke off, stole a glance at him. ‘It’s never just about land, okay? If it was just about land it would have been sorted out long ago.’

‘Then what is it about?’

‘I don’t know.
Everything.’

She thought suddenly of the greater troubles he had probably seen, of Jessie’s situation, and her voice sounded childish, petulant, even to herself. ‘Look, can we just leave this?’

He pulled his knees up, glanced sideways at her over his shoulder. ‘Don’t get mad, Suzanna Peacock.’

‘I’m not mad,’ she said crossly.

‘Okay . . . I think maybe you have to make a decision. I think . . . it is very easy to let yourself be swallowed by your family, by its history.’

‘Now you sound like my husband.’ She had not meant to mention Neil, felt his presence unwelcome in the air between them.

Alejandro pushed back his hair. ‘Then he and I are in agreement. Neither of us wants to see you unhappy.’

She did look at him then, studied his profile, and then, as he turned towards her, let herself ask silent questions of those brown eyes, the knowing mouth. There was the faintest hint of puzzlement in his face, as if he was trying to work something out.

You are just another crush, she said to herself, then flinched in case she had said it out loud. ‘I’m not unhappy,’ she whispered. It seemed important to persuade him of this.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘I don’t want you to think I am.’

He nodded.

The way he looked at her, as if he understood, as if he knew her history, her guilt, her unhappiness. As if he shared them, as if he bore them too.

He must be a crush, she thought, dropping her head abruptly to her knees to hide her sudden rapid blinking. I’m getting fanciful, imposing feelings on him that I don’t even know he has.

She sat, her forehead resting on her knees – until she felt his touch, electric on her shoulder. ‘Suzanna,’ he said.

She glanced up at him. Against the sun, she could see only a blurred, unnaturally slimmed silhouette. ‘Suzanna.’

She took his proffered hand, made as if to stand, her eyes still adjusting to the fierce afternoon sunlight, accepting somehow, in this strange, dreamy afternoon, that she would follow this man anyway, that she would let herself be sucked into his slipstream. He did not stand, but pulled her slightly towards him, and she watched as he lay back on the grass. As her breath caught in her chest, he fixed his eyes on hers, something mischievous in them, in the invitation they carried. Then, with a childish whoop, he pushed himself off on a trajectory, had begun rolling down the hillside, his legs bumping against each other as he built up speed.

For several seconds, she stared in disbelief at the figure flying away from her, and then, the tension of the past moments liberated in some kind of whooshing release, she threw herself down after him, letting the sky and the earth dissolve into a blur, letting her senses be consumed by the rushing grass, the smell of the earth, the gentle bump of her bones as they met the ground. And she was laughing, lost in the ridiculousness of it, spitting out bits of grass and daisies and God knew what else, laughing, her hands stretched above her head, letting herself fly down a hillside, a child again, knowing she would be caught at the bottom.

He stood over her, as she lay giggling and panting in the grass, her head still spinning from the descent. He swayed above her, one hand reaching forward as if to help her up, standing still until she could gradually make out his beaming face, the livid grass stains all over his trousers. ‘Happy now, Suzanna Peacock?’

She could think of no sensible response. And so, giddily, she lay back, laughing, her eyes closed against the painfully blue sky.

They had reached the centre of town shortly before seven. It was possible they might have made it sooner, but their pace, by mutual consent, had been measured, perhaps to allow them more time for conversation. It came easily now, as if the fact of their infantile physical release had freed something between them. She knew a little more about him: about his housebound mother, the maid, the political situation in Argentina. He knew about her family history: her childhood, her siblings, her anger at having to leave the city. Some time later, she would remember that in several hours of conversation they had not mentioned Neil, and would feel not quite guilty enough about the omission.

They were crossing the square when Suzanna noted the three young men leaving the delicatessen, chatting, their bags slung easily over their shoulders. They glanced at Alejandro’s trousers, gesticulated between themselves and said something possibly rude in Italian, then saluted.

Alejandro and Suzanna lifted their hands in return.

‘He’s taken them back,’ she breathed.

‘Who?’

‘It would take too long to explain but it’s good news. Jessie will be so pleased.’ She found she could not stop smiling, a broad, uninhibited smile. It was as if the pleasure of the day had been intensified by the uniquely miserable way in which it had begun.

‘I’d better go,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘I’m on a late shift.’

‘I guess I should head down to the shop,’ she said, trying not to look as crestfallen as she felt. ‘See whether any deliveries have been left outside.’ She didn’t want to leave, but it was made easier in the knowledge that whatever barrier had been breached today would still be breached tomorrow.

She looked down, then back at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said, hoping he would understand all that that meant. ‘Thanks, Ale.’ He stood there for a minute, then smoothed a stray hair from her forehead. He still smelt of grass, his skin drenched in sun.

‘You look like your mother,’ he said.

She frowned slightly. ‘I don’t think I know what that means,’ she said carefully.

His eyes hadn’t left hers. ‘I think you do.’

He wasn’t at home when she got there. A message on the answerphone said he wouldn’t be in till much later: playing squash with work buddies, he said, he had told her that morning, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t remembered. He added, jokingly, that she should try not to miss him too much.

She didn’t eat any supper. For some reason she still had no appetite. Instead she tried and failed to find something that would interest her on television, then moved restlessly around the little house, staring out of the window at the fields she had walked earlier that day until the skies grew dark.

Finally Suzanna was in her tiny bedroom. She sat in front of her mirror, which only just fitted under the low part of the sloping roof. She stared at her reflection for some time and then, almost unconsciously, she pulled up her hair, and pinned it at the crown of her head. She outlined her eyes with kohl, painted the lids in the closest approximation she could find to that characteristic icy blue.

Her skin, pale as her mother’s, was untouched by the sun. Her hair, free of chemical dyes and disguises, a deep, almost unnatural black. She stared into her own eyes, lifted the corners of her mouth in an approximation of that smile.

Then she sat, motionless, as Athene stared back at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the reflection. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

Eighteen

Isadora Cameron had the sort of springy red hair you didn’t often see any more: once common on impossibly teased schoolchildren, or pinned into submission by surly shop assistants, a new generation of relaxants and leave-in conditioners had generally obliterated the kind of mad carrotty frizz that framed her face. Not that she seemed to mind it; since the first day she had come to Dere House, she had let it bounce loosely around her, a kind of russet explosion, dwarfing a face that would otherwise have been almost circular. ‘Woman looks like a rusting Brillo pad,’ Rosemary had said, with a sniff, on the first day that she came. But, then, Rosemary would have been inclined to dislike her whatever the condition of her hair.

To Rosemary, Mrs Cameron was described as a cleaner, someone to help Vivi now that she was spending more time with Douglas. It was a big house, after all. It was only surprising she’d managed so long without help. To everyone else, Mrs Cameron was Rosemary’s chauffeur, cleaner, underwear launderer and general home help. ‘Someone to take the weight off your shoulders,’ Douglas had said, when he announced her employment. Mrs Cameron didn’t bat an eyelid at unhygienic food cupboards or hazardous refrigerators. She didn’t let moth-eaten cats or dishonest terriers trouble her cheerful demeanour. She considered soiled sheets and undergarments simply as part of the job. And for four hours every morning, for the first time since Rosemary had arrived, since the children had grown up, perhaps in her entire married life, Vivi now found herself able for several hours a day, to do anything she wanted.

At first she had found the freedom almost intimidating. She had sorted cupboards, gardened, baked extra cakes for The Women’s Institute. (‘But you don’t even like baking,’ Ben had said. ‘I know,’ said Vivi. ‘But I feel it’s a waste of your father’s money otherwise.’) Then, gradually, she had begun to enjoy the empty hours. She had started a patchwork quilt, with fabrics she had saved over the years from the children’s favourite clothes. She had driven into town, by herself, to have a cup of tea that she hadn’t made and enjoy the luxury of reading a magazine without interruption. She took her dog for proper walks, rediscovering the estate from ground level, taking pleasure in the land she had never really got to see. And she had spent time alone with Douglas, sharing sandwiches with him in the tractor, blushing pleasurably when she overheard one of the men remark that she and the ‘old man’ were like a pair of honeyspooners, these days.