The Peacock Emporium

'We're going to have a baby. Not yet,' Neil added hurriedly. 'Next year. But we've decided it would be the right time.'

  'Oh, darlings, that's wonderful.' Vivi, face brightening, had leapt from her place at the table and reached round to hug Suzanna.

  Suzanna, stiff as a board, sat staring in silent fury at her husband. He refused to meet her eye.

  'Oh, I'm so pleased for you. How lovely!'

  Lucy and Ben exchanged glances.

  'What's going on? I wish you would all speak up.'

  'Suzanna's going to have a baby,' said Vivi, loudly.

  'Not yet.' Suzanna found her voice. 'I'm not going to have one yet. Not till next year. In fact, it was meant to be a - a surprise.'

  'Well, I think it's lovely,' said Vivi, taking her seat again.

  'She's pregnant?' Rosemary leant across the table. 'About time too.'

  I'm going to kill you, Suzanna mouthed at Neil.

  'Isn't that wonderful, darling?' Vivi placed her hand on her husband's arm.

  'Not really, no,' he said.

  The room fell silent - apart from at Rosemary's end of the table, where some kind of internal gastric explosion had sent Ben and Lucy into barely stifled giggles.

  Their father placed his knife and fork on his plate. 'They're still virtually bankrupt. They're living in rented accommodation. Suzanna has just set up a business, even though she has absolutely no experience of running anything, even a household budget, successfully. I think the last thing they should be doing is bringing children into the equation.'

  'Darling,' Vivi remonstrated.

  'What? Can't we tell the truth now? In case she decides to absent herself from the family again? I'm sorry, Neil. In other circumstances it would be wonderful news. But until Suzanna has grown up a bit and learnt to accept her responsibilities I think it's a bloody awful idea.'

  Lucy had stopped giggling. She looked at Suzanna, and then at Neil, who had flushed a deep red. 'That's a bit harsh, Dad.'

  'Just because something's not easy to hear, Lucy, doesn't mean it's harsh.' Her father, having apparently exceeded his daily quota of spoken words, had resumed eating.

  Vivi reached for the Yorkshire puddings, her face taut with anxiety. 'Let's not talk about this today. It's so seldom we have everyone together. Let's just try to have a nice lunch, shall we?' She held aloft her glass. 'Shall we make a toast to Lucy, perhaps? Twenty-eight. A wonderful age.'

  Only Ben joined her.

  Suzanna lifted her head. 'I thought you'd be pleased that I set up a business, Dad,' she said slowly. 'I thought you'd be pleased that I was trying to do something for myself.'

  'We are pleased, darling,' said Vivi. 'We're very pleased, aren't we?' She placed her hand on her husband's arm.

  'Oh, stop trying to pretend, Mum. He never thinks anything I do is good enough.'

  'You're twisting my words, Suzanna.' He kept eating, in small, regular mouthfuls. His voice hadn't risen.

  'But not your meaning. Why can't you ever just give me a break?'

  It was like speaking into a vacuum. Suzanna stood up abruptly, waiting for him to look up at her. 'I knew this would happen,' she said, burst into tears and fled from the table.

  They listened to her footsteps fading down the corridor, and the sound of a distant door slamming.

  'Happy birthday, Luce,' said Ben, raising a glass ironically.

  Neil pushed back his chair, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. 'Sorry, Vivi,' he said. 'It was delicious. Really delicious.'

  His father-in-law did not raise his head. 'Sit down, Neil. You'll help no one by galloping after her.'

  'What's the matter with her?' said Rosemary, turning stiffly towards the door. 'Morning sickness, is it?'

  'Rosemary . . .' Vivi pushed a strand of hair off her forehead.

  'You stay,' Lucy said, placing her hand on Neil's shoulder. 'I'll go.'

  'Are you sure?' Neil eyed his food, unable to hide his relief that he might be allowed to finish his lunch in peace.

  'Trust her to hijack Lucy's birthday celebration.'

  'Don't be unkind, Ben,' said Vivi. She glanced wistfully at Lucy's departing back.

  Rosemary reached over to help herself to another potato. 'I suppose it's all for the best.' She jabbed one with a shaking fork. 'Just as long as she doesn't turn out like her mother.'

  The barns had all changed. Where, at the rear of the farm, there had been three semi-derelict creosoted-timber shelters for hay, straw and redundant pieces of rusting farm equipment, there were now two double-glazed barn conversions, fronted by gravel parking areas and advertised in discreet signs as 'all-inclusive offices'. Through the window of what had once been the grain store, Suzanna could make out a man strolling back and forth as he spoke animatedly into a telephone. She had searched for several minutes to find somewhere to sit where he wouldn't be able to see her cry.

  'You all right?'

  Lucy appeared at her left, and seated herself beside her. For some minutes, they watched as the man strode and talked. Suzanna noted that her sister had the even, glowing complexion that spoke of winter sun and expensive skiing holidays, then, with a jolt, that Lucy had joined the ever-increasing list of people she envied. 'So, when did all this happen?' She cleared her throat, and gestured towards the barns.

  'Started a couple of years ago. Now that Dad's letting the land, he and Ben are working on ways to make the rest of the estate earn more money.'

  There was something about 'he and Ben' that made Suzanna's eyes fill again with tears.

  'They're holding shoots on the other side of the wood, too. Breeding pheasants.'

  'Never thought of Dad as a shooter.'

  'Oh, he doesn't do it himself. He gets Dave Moon to do it. He's got dogs and everything. And Mum does the lunches. It's all barrow-boys from the City who fancy themselves with a Purdey.

  'They charge a fortune,' Lucy added approvingly. 'Last season paid for Dad's new car.' She picked at a piece of lichen near her shoe, then lifted her head and smiled. 'You'll never guess - when Dad was younger he became briefly obsessed with the idea of giving it all away. All the land. Gran told me. Can you imagine Dad, the great stickler for tradition, as a kind of Communist Robin Hood?'

  'No.'

  'Nor me. I thought she had a touch of Alzheimer's to begin with, but she swears it's true. She and Grandpa talked him out of it.' She hugged her knees. 'Boy, I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation.'

  In the distance, dotted along the narrow field by the river, there were twenty or so black and white sheep, seemingly stationary. Her father had never been particularly successful with his sheep. Too prone to disgusting diseases, he would say. Scab and scald, blowfly strike and liver fluke, medieval names and macabre symptoms that, as children, they had taken a delighted horror in hearing about.

  'I hardly recognise it round here.' Suzanna's voice was small.

  Lucy's was brisk in response. 'You should come home more often. It's not as if you live miles away.'

  'I wish I bloody did.' Suzanna buried her face in her arms again. She cried for a few more minutes, and then, sniffing, looked sideways at her younger sister. 'He's so bloody horrible to me, Luce.'

  'He's just pissed off that you hurt Mum's feelings.'

  Suzanna wiped her nose. 'I know I should have invited her. I just - I just get sick of living in their shadow. I know they've helped out since we lost the money and everything, but nothing's the same, now that . . .'

  Lucy turned to her, then shook her head. 'It's the will, isn't it? You're still going on about the will.'

  'I'm not going on about it.'

  'You'll have to let this go, you know. You don't want to run the estate. You never have. You told me it would drive you mad.'

  'That's not the point.'

  'You're letting it poison everything. And it's making Mum and Dad really unhappy.'

  'But they're making me unhappy.'

  'I can't believe you're obsessing over what happens to Dad's money after h
is death. I can't believe you're prepared to split this family apart over something that isn't yours in the first place. He's not going to leave either of us short, you know.'

  'It's not about Dad's money. It's about the fact that he believes in some outdated system whereby boys matter more than girls.'

  'Primogeniture.'

  'Whatever. It's just wrong, Lucy. I'm older than Ben. It's wrong, and it's divisive, and it shouldn't happen in this day and age.'

  Lucy's voice rose in exasperation. 'But you don't want to run the estate. You never have.'

  'It's not the bloody point.'

  'So you'd rather it be broken up and sold off, just so you can have an equal share?'

  'No . . . No, Lucy. I just want an acknowledgement that I - that we - are as important as Ben.'

  Lucy made as if to stand. 'It's your problem, Suze. I feel just as important as Ben.'

  The man had finished his telephone call. They saw him move, silhouetted, round the desk, and disappear. Then the office door opened and he emerged into the daylight. He nodded at them, then climbed into his car.

  'Look, no one else is going to say this to you, but I think you need to get this into perspective, Suzanna. This all bears no indication of what Dad thinks of you. If anything, you got more attention than either me or Ben when we were young.' She held up a hand, silencing Suzanna's protest. 'And that's fine. You probably needed it more. But you can't blame him for everything that's happened since. He's given you a house, for God's sake.'

  'He hasn't given it to us. We're paying rent.'

  'A peppercorn rent. You know as well as I do that you've got it for good if you want it.'

  Suzanna fought a childish urge to say she didn't want it. She hated that little house with its mean rooms and its cottagey beams. 'It's because he feels guilty. He's overcompensating.'

  'God, you sound spoilt. I can't believe you're thirty-five.'

  'Thirty-four.'

  'Whatever.'

  Perhaps conscious that her tone had been a little hard, she nudged Suzanna with her elbow, a conciliatory gesture. Suzanna, who had started to feel chilled, wrapped her arms round her knees and wondered how her sister, at twenty-eight, had achieved this level of certainty, this self-possession.

  'Look. It's Dad's right to divide things up as he chooses. His right. And things might change, you know. You just need a bit more going on in your own life and then it won't matter.'

  Suzanna swallowed the bitter retort. There was something particularly galling about being patronised by one's baby sister, hearing an echo of family discussions that had taken place without her. Especially if you knew she was right.

  'Make a go of this shop and Dad will have to look at you differently.'

  'If I make a go of this shop Dad will die of shock.'

  She was shivering now. Lucy was getting to her feet with the balanced ease of someone for whom sporting activity was a daily ritual. Suzanna, standing, thought she heard her own knees creak. 'Sorry,' she said. And then, after a pause, 'Happy birthday.'

  Lucy held out her arm. 'Come on, let's go inside. I'll show you the tin of biscuits Gran gave me for my birthday. It's the exact one Mrs Popplewell gave her for Christmas two years ago. Besides, if we stay out much longer she'll convince herself that you're giving birth already.'

  Vivi sat down heavily on the stool, reached for a pot, and began to wipe the day from her face. She was not a vain woman - there were only two pots on her dressing-table, one for cleansing and a supermarket moisturiser - but tonight she looked at the reflection before her and felt immensely tired, as if someone had placed an intolerable weight on her shoulders. I might as well be invisible, she thought, for all the influence I have in this family. As a younger woman, she had shepherded her three children around the county, had supervised their reading, eating and brushing of teeth, had refereed their squabbles and dictated what they should wear. She had fulfilled her maternal tasks with certainty, rebuffing their protests, setting their boundaries, confident in her own abilities.

  Now she was impotent, incapable of intervening in their fights, of helping to lighten their unhappinesses. She tried not to think about the opening of Suzanna's shop: that discovery had made her feel like such an irrelevance she had been almost winded.

  'That dog of yours has been at my slippers.'

  Vivi turned. Her husband was examining the heel of his leather slipper, which had been visibly gnawed.

  'I don't think you should let it upstairs. The place for dogs is downstairs. I don't know why we don't put it in a kennel.'

  'It's too cold outside. The poor thing would freeze.' She turned back to her reflection. 'I'll nip into town tomorrow and get you another pair.'

  They completed their ablutions in silence. Vivi, slipping into her nightdress, wished she hadn't recently finished a book. Tonight she could have done with a little escape.

  'Oh. Mother wants to know if you can dig her out a baking tray. She wants to make scones tomorrow and she doesn't know where hers has gone.'

  'She left it in the walled garden. She used it to feed the birds.'

  'Well, perhaps you could bring it in for her.'

  'Darling, I think you might have been a little hard on Suzanna today.' She kept her tone light, tried to avoid any hint of reproach.

  Her husband made a dismissive sound, a kind of guttural exhalation of air. His lack of a verbal response gave her courage. 'You know, having a child might be the making of her. She and Neil have had such problems. It would give them a new focus.' Her husband was staring at his bare feet. 'Douglas? She's trying so hard. Both of them are.'

  It was as if he hadn't heard.

  'Douglas?'

  'And what if my mother's right? What if she does end up like Athene?'

  It was so rare that he even said her name. Vivi felt it solidify in the atmosphere between them.

  'You need to think about this, Vivi. Really. Think about it. Because who's going to be left picking up the pieces?'

  Nine

  The Dereward estate was one of the largest in that part of Suffolk. Backing on to what later became known as Constable country, it dated back to the 1600s, was unusual in that it had housed an almost unbroken ancestral line, and its land, which was notably hilly for the region, was well placed for a variety of uses, from arable farming to game fishing, and contained an exceptional - some said uneconomic - number of tied cottages. Most estate houses that oversaw some 450 acres were rather grander, perhaps with a portrait gallery or ballroom to indicate the gravitas of the incumbent family. The Dereward estate took some pride in its history - its family portraits were renowned for not just showing every heir in the past four hundred years but for detailing, in rather bald language, the manner of their death - but the mustard-coloured heavily beamed eight-bedroomed house had been extended rather haphazardly, and in occasionally inappropriate architectural styles.

  But, then, the original home of the Fairley-Hulmes had been latched on to a mere sixty acres, and had only increased its size as the result of a wager between Jacob Hulme (1743-90, killed by inadvisably close contact with one of Suffolk's first threshing machines) and the habitually inebriated head of the neighbouring Philmore estate; for a family so keen on trumpeting its history, this snippet was often forgotten. In fact, Jacob Hulme's calling-in of this gambling debt had led to a near-riot among the local villagers, who feared for their homes and their livelihoods, until Jacob, who was unusually canny for a member of the landholding classes, promised that under him, tithes would be reduced and a new school would be built, to be run by one Catherine Lees. (Miss Lees later had a child in unexplained circumstances, although Jacob showed rare benevolence in offering to support the unmarried schoolmistress and provide a roof over her head.)

  The Philmore house had remained largely empty and, it was said, had subsequently been the site of many discreet trysts for the male members of the Hulme family until one Arabella Hulme (1812-1901, choked on a sugared almond), whose brother, the heir, had died in the Crime
a and who had been responsible, through marriage, for the addition of the 'Fairley', put an end to what she saw as the placing of unnecessary temptation in her husband's path. She had employed a particularly dour housekeeper, and spread ghoulish rumours about the emasculating tendencies of the house's supposed 'ghosts'. She needed to: the house had become something of a local legend by then, and it was said that a man need only step through the front door to be overcome by lustful thoughts. Travelling families would set up home nearby so that their girls could be ready to take advantage of such weakness.

  So, Arabella Hulme was the crinoline-clad exception in this row of self-aggrandising male faces - although her jawline was so heavy and her profile so undelicate it often took a second look to be sure. From the turn of the twentieth century, various attempts had been made to portray more female members of the family, just as there had been increasing protests about the possibility of the house falling to the female line of the family. But the wives and daughters tended to look a bit half-hearted, as if they were not convinced of their right to pictorial immortality. They occupied less ornate gilded frames, and less prominent positions, and frequently vanished without trace. The Fairley-Hulmes, as Rosemary was fond of saying, had not survived four hundred years by swaying to fashion and political correctness. For traditions to last, they had to be strong, shored up with rules and certainty. For one so strident on the matter, she spoke little about her own family's history - with good reason: Ben had looked her up on an Internet genealogy database and discovered that Rosemary's family hailed from a slaughterhouse in Blackburn.

  But perhaps mindful of modern social mores, and living in an age where grandiloquence was less relished than it had been, the portraits looked likely to stop with Suzanna's father, of whom a dreadful 'interpretive' mask, in oils, sat in lesser stately splendour on the wall of what had been known to successive generations as the bearpit: a low-ceilinged beamed den with an oversized roughly carved stone fireplace where children scattered toys, teenagers watched television and dogs lay in peace. The last portrait would have been Suzanna's mother's. A young artist had been commissioned on her eighteenth birthday to paint it and, several decades on, had become Important. But it was now Suzanna's, and lived with them in the cottage, although Vivi had repeatedly assured her that she would be more than happy for Athene to take her rightful place on the wall. 'She's very beautiful, darling, and if it would mean something to you to have her up, then that's where she should be. We can get that frame restored, and it will look lovely.' Vivi, always bending over backwards, always so anxious to spare everybody's feelings. As if she had none of her own.