The Peacock Emporium, Page 22

  The boy grunted.

  'And good for her to be earning some money, no doubt. Every little helps, these days.'

  'We did all right before she started there.' The boy placed the heater the right way up on the rug, and kicked at his shoe, as if to dislodge something.

  'I'm sure you did.'

  Outside, two cars had come to an impasse in the road behind the churchyard. Lenny could just see them, each refusing to back up sufficiently to enable the other to pass. 'Must be hard work for her.'

  The boy looked up, uncomprehending.

  'It's obviously a more physical job than it looks.' Lenny kept the boy's eye, trying to look more at ease than he felt. He chose his words carefully, and delivered them slowly, letting their aftershock kick like a mule. 'Must be, anyway, considering the number of injuries I hear she's been getting.'

  The boy started now, glanced away from the priest and back again, his eyes flickering with his discomfort. Then he bent and picked up his screwdriver, placing it in his top pocket. Although his face betrayed little emotion, the tips of his ears had flushed a deep red. 'I'd best be off,' he muttered. 'Got other deliveries.'

  'I'm very grateful to you.'

  He walked down the narrow corridor after him. 'You go easy on her now,' Father Lenny continued, seeing the boy out. 'She's a good girl. I know that with the support of a man like yourself she can find a way to hurt herself a little less often.'

  Jason turned in the porch. His expression, now revealed, was both hurt and furious, his shoulders hunched forward. 'It's not what you--'

  'Of course.'

  'I love Jess--'

  'I know you do. And there are always ways to avoid these things, aren't there?'

  The boy said nothing else. He breathed out, as if he had considered, then decided against, speaking again. His walk, when he headed out to his van, contained the defiant hint of a swagger.

  'Because we wouldn't want the whole town concerned about her, after all?' the priest called, waving as the van door slammed and the overloaded vehicle skidded out of the drive and on to the road.

  There were occasions on which he felt a longing for a larger life, broader horizons, Lenny thought, with some satisfaction, as he turned back towards his neglected, long-undecorated house, his hand shielding his pale, Celtic skin against the sun. But sometimes there were benefits to living in a very small town indeed.

  Liliane MacArthur waited until the young men had disappeared, their bags slung carelessly over T-shirted shoulders, their rolling gait taking them swiftly across the square. Then, peering into the shop to ensure that she would be alone, she pushed open the door tentatively and walked in.

  Arturro was busy at the back. At the sound of the bell he called that he would only be a minute, and she stood awkwardly in the centre of the shop, sandwiched between the preserves and the dried pasta, listening to the hum of the refrigeration units and smoothing her hair.

  When he emerged, drying his hands on his large white apron, his face broke into a broad smile. 'Liliane!' The way he spoke her name made it sound like someone announcing a toast.

  She nearly smiled back, until she remembered why she was there. She reached into her bag and pulled out the box of sugared almonds, checking that the corners hadn't been crushed against the prescription medicines she'd just collected. 'I - I just wanted to say thank you . . . for the chocolates and everything. But it's starting to feel like too much.'

  Arturro looked blank. He gazed at the box in her hand, which she proffered to him, his own hand rising obediently to take it from her.

  She pointed up at the chocolates on the shelf, keeping her voice low as if she were shielding it from other customers. 'You're a very kind man, Arturro. And it's . . . it's been . . . well, I don't get many surprises. And it's been very kind of you. But I - I'd like it to stop now.'

  She held her handbag tight against her side, as if it were shoring her up. 'You see, I'm not sure what you . . . what you're expecting from me. I have to look after my mother, you see. I can't - there are no circumstances in which I'd be able to leave her alone.'

  Arturro moved a step closer to her. He ran a hand through his hair.

  'I thought it only fair to let you know. I've been very touched, though. I wanted you to know that.'

  His voice, when it came, was thick, unwieldy. 'I'm sorry, Liliane . . .'

  She raised a fluttering hand, her expression anguished. 'Oh, no. I don't want you to be sorry - I just . . .'

  '. . . but I don't understand.'

  There was a lengthy silence.

  'The chocolates? All the gifts?'

  He kept looking at her expectantly.

  She studied his face now. 'You left me chocolates? Outside my door?' Her voice was insistent.

  He stared at the box in his hand. 'They are from here . . . yes.'

  Liliane flushed. She glanced down at the box, then back at him. 'It wasn't you? You didn't send any of these?'

  He shook his head slowly.

  Liliane's hand had lifted unconsciously to her mouth. She gazed around the shop, then wheeled towards the door. 'Oh! Forgive me. I'm . . . Just a misunderstanding. Do - please, please forget what I said--' And then, her bag still clutched to her like a life-raft, she ran from the delicatessen, her heels clattering on the wooden floor.

  For some minutes Arturro stood in the middle of the empty shop, staring at the box of sugared almonds, the faintest remnant of her scent hanging in the air. He glanced at the nearly empty market square, across whose surface pigeons strutted through lengthening shadows, and the last of the delivery vans prepared to leave.

  Then he looked up at the three white aprons recently abandoned on the hook by the door, and his face darkened.

  A few hundred yards away, Suzanna was preparing to close the Peacock Emporium. Jessie had left almost half an hour previously, and she had been a little disconcerted to note that Alejandro, who did not appear to have worked that day, had not gone with her. He had written a series of postcards and now sat, reading a newspaper, occasionally gazing out into the lane, his thoughts apparently far from there.

  For some reason, his presence had made Suzanna even more accident-prone. She had dropped a coloured glass vase just as she was about to hand it over to a customer and been forced to replace it, free of charge, with another. She had tripped the last two steps into the cellar and half twisted her ankle, sitting on the floor and silently swearing at herself before she could recover enough to emerge into the shop. She had scalded herself twice on the coffee machine. If he had noticed this, he had said nothing. He sat, sipped at his coffee slowly, and said nothing.

  'Don't you have anywhere to go to?' she said, when there was nobody else left in the shop.

  'You would like me to leave?'

  Suzanna corrected herself, blushing at her transparency: 'No - I'm sorry. I just wondered what was home for you.'

  He frowned at the window. 'No place I want to spend much time in.'

  He had a woman's eyelashes. Dark, silky, calligraphic. She hadn't noticed until now how feminine his eyes were. 'Does the hospital provide accommodation?' Her voice was almost interrogative.

  'Not at first.'

  She waited.

  'Until they discovered that many of the landlords around here do not want "foreigners" as tenants.' He smiled, raised an eyebrow at her concern, as if waiting for her to stumble over a long-held truth. 'You, Suzanna, are one of the few people I have met here who is neither blonde nor blue-eyed.'

  The way he looked at her made her flush. She pushed herself back from the counter and began to align the jars that held coloured buttons, brightly coloured magnets, boxes of pins, into rigid lines. She felt suddenly defensive. 'It's hardly the Aryan Nation. I mean, not everyone here would react like that.'

  'It's fine. I have accommodation at the hospital.'

  Outside, the town had settled into a late-afternoon torpor. Its mothers had shepherded small charges home, and were now tripping over them in kitchens, bracing themselve
s for the evening onslaught of tea, bath and bed. Pensioners were transporting string bags or shopping trolleys with vegetables in paper bags from the market, single portions of brisket or meat pie. Somewhere far from there teeming streets were gearing themselves up for rush hour, tube lines rumbling underfoot, bars and pubs filling, their stuffy confines injected with loose-collared City workers desperate for release and lubrication.

  Suzanna gazed around the interior of her shop, and felt weighed down by its carefully contrived perfection, its stasis. 'How can you stand it here?' she asked.

  'How can I stand what?' He had looked at her then, his head tilted to one side.

  'After Buenos Aires. The small-townism. Like you say, landlords afraid of you because you're different.'

  He frowned, trying to understand.

  'The way everyone has an opinion on everything. The way everyone feels entitled to know your business. Like they need to pigeonhole you, shove you into a neat category in order to feel comfortable. Don't you miss the city? Don't you miss the freedom of it?'

  Alejandro put down his empty coffee-cup. 'I think perhaps you and I have different ideas about freedom.'

  She felt suddenly self-conscious and naive. She knew nothing about Argentina, except the vague snippets she remembered from the television news; some riots, some financial crisis. Madonna as Eva Peron. God, she thought bitterly. And I accuse everyone else of not looking outward.

  In front of her, Alejandro stooped to pick up his kit-bag from under his table. He glanced out of the window, which was still glowing with refracted evening sun, parallelograms of light creeping gradually across the display, bathing its components in pale gold.

  Something welled inside Suzanna. 'She lives with someone, you know.'

  'Who?' He was still stooped over his bag.

  'Jessie.'

  He hardly missed a beat. 'I know.'

  She turned and started scrubbing the sink, furious and ashamed.

  'I am no threat to Jessie.'

  It was a strange thing to say, made more so by the emphatic way in which he said it, as if he was trying to convince himself.

  'I didn't mean . . . I'm sorry.' Her head dipped towards the sink. She fought the urge then to tell him about Jason, to explain, to try to redress the childish jealousy she'd shown. She didn't want him to see her as everyone else seemed to. But to explain Jessie's relationship would put her among the very people she'd been criticising - those who traded each other's domestic secrets as a kind of social currency.

  'I hated living here until I got this shop.' She had spoken suddenly, polishing the taps. 'I was a city girl, you see? I like noise, bustle, anonymity. It's too hard to live in the place where you grew up - a small town like this. Everyone knows everything about you - your parents, where you went to school, where you've worked, who you've been out with. How you fell off the piano stool in your school recital.'

  She could feel him watching her, and the words had tumbled out, unstoppable, while in some distant, sane part of her mind she wondered why she felt this desperate need to fill the silence.

  'And, you see, because they know the things that have happened to you - some of them, at least - it means that people think they know you. They think they know who you are. There's no room for you to be someone else. Around here, I'm the same person I was at twelve, thirteen, sixteen. Set in aspic. That's who they have me down as. And the funny thing is, I know I'm someone else entirely.'

  She stopped, her hands resting on the sides of the sink, and shook her head slightly, like someone trying to clear a buzzing noise from their ears. She breathed out, and tried to collect her thoughts. She had sounded ridiculous, even to herself.

  'Anyway. The shop has changed all that,' she said. 'Because even if I can't be someone else, the shop can. It can be anything I want it to be. Nobody has any expectations of it. I know it's not everyone's idea of a - a commercial venture. I know a lot of people around here think it's daft. But it's got - it's got a--' She wasn't sure what she was trying to say.

  A car reversed slowly up the lane.

  'I have seen her at the hospital,' said Alejandro, standing still, his bag raised over his shoulder. 'Sometimes I go down and pick the mothers up from outside A and E in a wheelchair. The ones who can no longer walk. I have seen her . . . waiting.'

  In the stainless steel of the taps Suzanna could make out her reflection - twisted, inverted. 'You know . . . that she loves Jason, then.' She spoke into her chest. Then, when no reply was forthcoming, she faced him . . .

  He had been watching her. Now he moved his chair neatly under the table. 'I only know what I see.' He shrugged. 'It is not my kind of love.'

  'No,' said Suzanna.

  They stood finally facing each other. His hands rested on the back of the chair. His face was in shadow so she could barely make out his expression.

  A van's rear doors banged outside, breaking the frail threads of the atmosphere. Alejandro looked out of the window, then towards her, his eyes locked onto hers for several seconds before he turned back towards the door. 'Thank you for your hospitality, Suzanna Peacock,' he said.

  Sixteen

  Douglas closed the door behind him, and stared at his wife's dog in frustration. He had been looking for Vivi, had walked the animal round the formal gardens in the hope that it would find her, had continued on round the new offices and down to the dairy yard, and even through the woodland at the back of the grain sheds. The dog had failed to pick up a bloody thing.

  Perhaps I need a sniffer dog, he thought, and let out a sigh at the irony. I need a sniffer dog to locate my wife. She had been so busy lately, had left his meals with polite notes, retired late to bed having discovered a multitude of urgent tasks in underused parts of the house. He was never sure any more where she would be. Or what mood she would be in when he found her. He felt unbalanced by the wrongness of it all.

  The dog got under his feet and yelped as he tripped over it. His mother, from behind the annexe door, called out twice to see if it was him. Feeling mean, he pretended he hadn't heard: he didn't want to be sent on some other errand. He was weary from having to drive Rosemary into town twice this morning - the third time he had had to do so in a week. His mother, still smarting from Vivi's outburst a week earlier, no longer asked where she was, as if her daughter-in-law's verbal insurrection had breached some unspoken rule, had made her in some way invisible. If he wasn't feeling so sorry for himself it might have made him laugh. This, he understood, uncomfortably, was what his wife had been complaining of these last months. That, and the faint, but distinctively unpleasant aroma that now lingered in the passenger seat of the Range Rover.

  Douglas ignored the dog, who was seated in obedience to some non-existent command, silently begging for scraps, and picked up the note on the kitchen table. It had not been there when he left the house this morning, or an hour earlier when he had returned to deliver Rosemary home, and the sight of it made him both annoyed and sad, as if his marriage had been requisitioned by two childish strangers.

  Vivi, the note informed in neat handwriting, would be out for a while. His and Ben's lunch was in the oven, and needed only twenty minutes' reheating. She could not, apparently, guarantee the same punctuality for herself.

  He reread the note, then screwed it up in his broad hand and hurled it across the kitchen, so that the dog went scurrying after it across the flagstones.

  Then, noting that her car keys were on the peg, he glanced out of the window, rammed his cap on his head and left the house via the kitchen door, ignoring the imperious muffled voice calling his name behind him.

  Alejandro pulled the airmail letter from his pigeonhole, registered the familiar stamp, and stuffed it into his pocket as he walked wearily across the hospital grounds to his bed, some twenty-two hours since he had last seen it. He might still be relegated to the 'graveyard shifts', as they were known, but while the hospital was assiduous in noting, at every opportunity, that it was an equal-opportunities organisation, he had, by virtue o
f his sex, struck lucky in his accommodation. It had been agreed that the nurses and midwives would not feel comfortable sharing their quarters with a man, no matter how polite. When it became apparent that finding him local lodgings was going to be a problem (most landlords seemed to expect something different when the word 'midwife' was mentioned), someone had hit upon the solution of giving him what would have been the caretaker's flat, had the hospital still employed one for the upkeep of the nurses' block. He might have to unblock the odd sink, or change the odd fuse, joked the accommodation manager, and Alejandro had shrugged. He hadn't been able to afford his own flat at home. He hadn't known what to expect when he arrived, but two bedrooms and a kitchen big enough to house a table seemed fair exchange for a few odd jobs.

  And yet, several months into his tenancy, Alejandro found the place depressed him, even on a day like today when the sun flooded it with light. He had never understood the ability, so often seen among women, to imprint their own character on a space and, in a living situation that might be temporary, he lacked the will to try. Its bland beige decor and hard-wearing furniture made it feel unloved and sterile. Its emptiness was constantly highlighted by the sound of thumping feet and chatting, giggling women coming and going on the stairs outside. Only two other people had seen its interior: the nurse whom he had unwisely brought home in his first weeks (and who had ignored him whenever they passed each other since) and, more recently, a Spanish girl from the local language school whom he had met on a train, and who had informed him, at a moment when he might normally have forgotten where he was, that she had a boyfriend, and subsequently wept for almost three-quarters of an hour. The money he had paid for her taxi home, he mused, would have fed an Argentinian family of four for a month.

  When I left, he thought, more frequently than he liked, I only thought about what I was escaping.

  He poured himself a glass of iced tea and lay down on the sofa, propping a cushion under his neck, conscious of the smell of stale perspiration on his clothes. His bones ached with tiredness: the second mother of his shift had been grossly overweight, and had thrown herself around the room like a maddened elephant while he clung on - supposedly her support. As always, he had felt nothing but relief at the moment of birth. It was only now, several hours later, that the aches and bruises were revealing themselves. He pulled the letter from his pocket and studied the address. He received few, and the sight of his own name against these unfamiliar English words still had the power to jar.