Peacock Emporium (48 page)

Suzanna seemed to respond to Vivi’s uninhibited affection and became sunnier even than she had been before, placing her soft, cushioned cheek against hers, wrapping fat starfish fingers around her own. Vivi would arrive shortly after seven thirty, and take the child for long walks around the estate, removing her from Douglas’s grief, which hung over the house like a dark cloud, and from the whispered conversations of his parents and the servants, all of whom seemed to consider Suzanna’s presence a problem now of some pressing urgency.

‘We can’t get rid of her now,’ she had heard Rosemary saying to Cyril, as she passed the study. ‘We’ve told everyone the child is Douglas’s.’

‘The child
is
Douglas’s,’ Cyril had said. ‘He’ll have to decide what he wants to do with her. Tell the boy to pull himself together. He’s got decisions to make.’

They were clearing Philmore House. The home that had remained a shrine to Athene – whose wardrobes still bulged with her dresses, whose ashtrays still bore her lipsticked cigarette butts – had fallen into Rosemary’s list of responsibilities. Douglas and Suzanna were now firmly ensconced in Dere House. And Rosemary, who had long itched to remove the physical evidence of ‘that girl’ from the estate, had taken advantage of her son’s newly passive state to deal with it.

Vivi stood on the brow of the hill, holding her hat on her head as she watched the men come out, bearing armfuls of brightly coloured dresses and laying them on the front lawn, while the women, kneeling on rugs and braced against the chill, sorted through bags and boxes of jewellery and cosmetics, exclaiming among themselves at their quality.

For someone who had professed herself so unconcerned with belongings, Athene had had a prodigious amount of things – not just dresses, coats and shoes but records, pictures, lamps, beautiful things bought in haste and discarded, or received as gifts that had been soon forgotten.

‘Anything you want to take, help yourselves. All the rest into a pile to be burnt.’ She heard Rosemary’s voice, clear and commanding, perhaps lifting with the restoration of her own domain, and watched as she marched back inside to bring out yet another box. She wondered if she felt the same small thrill of excitement at Athene’s final, enforced removal. A small, mean thrill that she was hardly able to admit to herself. The same ungenerous feeling that had brought her down here to watch, like an old hag at an execution.

‘You don’t want any of this, do you?’ Rosemary called, catching sight of Vivi as she walked over slowly, pushing Suzanna’s pram.

Vivi glanced at Athene’s going-away suit, the beaded slippers she had worn at that first hunt ball, now lying in a heap by the geranium border, occasionally stirring in the stiff breeze. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No thank you.’

Athene’s own parents had wanted nothing. Vivi had heard her parents discussing it when they thought she wasn’t listening. The Forsters had been so embarrassed by their daughter’s behaviour, so keen to distance themselves from her even in death. They had had her cremated in a closed ceremony, had not even put an announcement in
The Times
, Mrs Newton had said, in a shocked whisper. And they had not wanted to meet their own grandchild. Except they hadn’t referred to Suzanna as a child.

Vivi wheeled Suzanna slowly through the piles of belongings, stooping forward to check on the sleeping baby, making sure she was shielded from any gusts of wind. She hesitated, wincing, as she caught sight of a drawerful of Athene’s undergarments, diaphanous pieces of lace and silk, items that spoke of nights of whispered secrets, of unknown pleasures, now exposed and discarded. As if there was no part of her that deserved to remain sacrosanct.

She had thought this might bring her some secret satisfaction. Now she was here, this hurried, thorough disposal of Athene’s things seemed almost indecent. As if everyone was determined to obliterate her presence. Douglas no longer talked of her. Rosemary and Cyril had forbidden mention of her name. Suzanna was too young to remember her: her age had enabled her to move on seamlessly, to accept the love of the strangers around her as a happy substitute. But, then, one didn’t know how much Suzanna had been loved before.

Vivi picked her way past a heap of expensive wool coats and stood on the edge of the lawn, as a man dumped a box of photographs beside her. Afterwards she wasn’t sure what had made her do it. Perhaps the thought of Suzanna’s rootlessness, perhaps her own discomfort at what seemed an almost fervid desire among those who had known Athene to obliterate her even from history. Perhaps it was those beautiful undergarments, exhibited, discarded, as if they, too, had been tainted by her.

Vivi bent down, pulled a handful of photographs and newspaper cuttings from the box and stuffed them into the bottom of the pram, under her bag. She wasn’t sure what she would do with them. She wasn’t sure she even wanted them. It just seemed important that, no matter how unpalatable, no matter how many awkward questions it might raise, when she was older Suzanna might have some idea where she had come from.

‘Who’s my beautiful girl, then?’ As Vivi made her way back up to the brow of the hill Suzanna had begun to cry. She lifted her from the pram and whirled her around, letting the baby’s cheeks pink in the brisk air. ‘Who’s my beautiful, beautiful girl?’

‘She certainly is.’

She spun round to find Douglas standing behind her, and flushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said haltingly. ‘I didn’t . . . I didn’t know you were there.’

‘Don’t be sorry.’ His tweed collar was lifted against the cold, his eyes weary and red-rimmed. He stepped closer, adjusted Suzanna’s woollen bonnet. ‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine.’ Vivi beamed. ‘Very bonny. Eating everything in sight, aren’t you, precious?’ The baby thrust out a fat hand and pulled at one of the blonde curls that emerged from under Vivi’s hat. ‘She’s – she’s doing very well indeed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Douglas. ‘I’ve neglected her. Both of you.’

Vivi flushed again. ‘You don’t have to . . . nothing to apologise for.’

‘Thank you,’ he said quietly. He glanced down towards the lawn, where they were already tidying up now. ‘For everything. Thank you.’

‘Oh, Douglas . . .’ She was unsure of what else to say.

Douglas had placed his coat on the ground and they had sat in silence for a while, facing the house, he staring at the lawn, at the child whose fingers clenched and unclenched on the blades of grass from the safety of Vivi’s lap.

‘Can I take her?’

She handed over the baby. He looked calmer, she thought. Perhaps as if he were emerging from his self-imposed exile.

‘I keep thinking it’s all my fault,’ he said. ‘That if I’d been a better husband . . . that if she’d stayed here, none of this—’

‘No, Douglas.’ Her voice was unusually sharp. ‘There was nothing you could have done. Nothing.’

He looked down.

‘Douglas, she was gone to you a long time ago. Long before this. You must know that.’

‘I know.’

‘The worst thing you could do is make her tragedy your own.’ She wondered at the strength, the determination of her own words. It came somehow easier to her these days, this certainty. There was pleasure in supporting him. ‘Suzanna needs you,’ she said, pulling the child’s rattle from a pocket. ‘She needs you to be cheerful. And to show her what a wonderful daddy you are.’

He made a mild scoffing noise.

‘You are, Douglas. You’re probably the only father she’s known, and she loves you to bits.’

He looked at her sideways. ‘She loves
you
to bits.’

Vivi reddened with pleasure. ‘I love her. It’s impossible not to.’

They watched as Rosemary’s erect figure marched backwards and forwards between the remaining piles, gesturing and pointing with military efficiency. And then at the bonfire, which had started to burn, just out of sight, its plume of smoke hinting at the irrefutable end of Athene’s tenure of the house. As the grey column gained in strength, lost its translucency, she felt Douglas’s hand creep across the grass to hers, and squeezed it reassuringly in return.

‘What’s going to happen to her?’ she said.

He stared at the child between them, and let out a long breath. ‘I don’t know. I can’t look after her alone.’

‘No.’

At that Vivi felt something shift inside her, the stirrings of a confidence she had never yet felt. The sense of being, for the first time in her life, indispensable. ‘I’ll be here,’ she said, ‘for as long as you need me.’

He had looked up at her then, his eyes – too old and sad for his youthful face – seeing her as if for the first time. He had observed their linked hands, and then he had shaken his head slightly, as if he had missed something and was chastising himself for doing so. At least, that was how she liked to remember it afterwards.

Then, as her breath stalled in her chest, he had lifted his free hand to her cheek, in almost the same way as he had to the child’s. Vivi had lifted her own to meet it, her sweet, generous smile breaking through, willing strength, joy, love into him as if she could do it by willpower alone. So that when his lips met hers, it was no great surprise. Despite it finally closing over that part of her that had always been raw, wounded, it had been no great surprise.

‘Darling,’
she had said, marvelling at the determination, the certainty that requited love could bestow. And her blood sang when he answered her in the same way, his arms enclosing her in an embrace that said as much about his need as it did hers. Not quite a fairytale, but no less momentous, no less real, for that.

I’ll be here.

Twenty-Five

The passengers emerging through the arrivals gate from BA7902 and Buenos Aires were a conspicuously handsome lot. Not that the Argentinians weren’t a good-looking nation generally, Jorge de Marenas observed afterwards (especially when compared to those Spanish Gallegos), but it was perhaps inevitable that a hundred and fifty members of a plastic surgeons’ convention – and their wives – would be a little more aesthetically pleasing than most: tanned Amazonian women with hourglass figures and hair the colour of expensive handbags, men with uniformly thick dark hair and unnaturally firm jawlines. Jorge de Marenas was one of the few whose appearance related to his biological age.

‘Me and Martin Sergio, we played a little game,’ he told Alejandro, as they sat in the back of the taxi, speeding towards London. ‘You look around and work out who’s had what. The women, it’s easy.’ He held an imaginary pair of footballs to his chest, and pouted. ‘They start using too much of everything. They start off with a little nip and tuck here, then they want to look like Barbie. But the men . . . We were trying to start a rumour that the plane had run out of fuel to see who could still form lines on their brow. Most of them were like . . .’ He mimed a frozen expression of benign acquiescence: ‘“Are you sure? But that’s terrible. We’re going to die!”’ He laughed heartily and slapped a hand on his son’s thigh.

The plane journey, and the prospect of seeing his beloved Alejandro, had made him garrulous, and he had talked so much since their embrace in the echoing arrivals hall that it wasn’t until they reached the outskirts of Chiswick, and the taxi slowed on the motorway, that he realised his son had said barely anything. ‘So, how long do you have off work?’ he said. ‘Are we still on for our fishing trip?’

‘All booked, Papa.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘A place about an hour’s drive from the hospital. I’ve booked it for Thursday. You said you’d be finishing your conference Wednesday, right?’

‘Perfect.
Buenisimo.
And what will we be catching?’

‘Salmon trout,’ Alejandro said. ‘I bought some flies in Dere Hampton, the place where I’m living. And I’ve borrowed a couple of rods from one of the doctors. You need nothing apart from your hat and your waders.’

‘All packed,’ said Jorge, motioning towards the boot. ‘Salmon trout, eh? Let’s see if they’ll give us a bit of a fight.’ He sat, heedless of the flat west London sprawl that was building in density through the window, his mind already in clear English rivers, the whir of the line as it flew through the air and landed a length of water in front of him.

‘How’s Mama?’

Jorge regretfully left the bubbling waters behind. He had wondered for much of the plane journey how much to tell him. ‘You know your mama,’ he said carefully.

‘Has she been anywhere lately? Will she leave the house with you?’

‘She . . . she’s still a little worried about the crime situation. I cannot persuade her that things are improving. She watches too much
Cronica
, reads
El Guardian, Noticias
, that kind of thing. It’s not good for her nerves. Milagros has been living with us full-time – did I tell you?’

‘No.’

‘I think your mother likes to have someone else in the house when I’m not around. It makes her . . . more easy in herself.’

‘She didn’t want to come here with you?’ His son was staring out of the taxi window, so it was hard to tell from his voice whether he was regretful or glad.

‘She’s not so keen on aeroplanes these days. Don’t worry, son. Milagros and she, they rub along quite well together.’

The truth was, he was glad to have a little break from her. She had become obsessed with the idea of the supposed affair he was having with Agostina, his secretary, while simultaneously berating him for his lack of interest in her. If he would only agree to tighten her waist, lift her cheeks, he might find her more attractive. He tended to say little in denial – years of experience had shown him that this often made her worse – but he could never articulate the truth: that not only was he getting on, he no longer felt the intense need for physical reassurance he once had. And years of slicing open these young girls, of reshaping them, of padding them out and hauling them in, of carefully sculpting their most intimate parts, meant that he no longer had much more than a detached, artist’s appetite for female flesh.

‘She misses you,’ he said. ‘I’m not telling you this because I want you to feel guilty. God knows, you should have some fun as a young man, see the world a little. But she misses you. She’s packed you some
mate
in my bag, and some new shirts, and a couple of things she thought you might want to read.’ He paused. ‘I think she would like it if you wrote a little more often.’