The Peacock Emporium, Page 41

  'Are you ready?' she mouthed at him, from behind the door, and then as he nodded she stepped to the window, lifted the gauze curtain, and stepped outside, to where the others stood, a few feet back from the shop, watching with a little anxiety as they took in the display in front of them.

  The window was filled with pink gerberas, and draped from above with the stencilled Mexican fiesta decorations that Jessie had planned to take home at an arranged staff discount, and twisted round with the white fairy-lights that had previously decorated the shelves.

  It contained the following items: a pair of net wings that Jessie had once worn all day for a bet, a sequined purse she had loved but regretted she could not afford, and a circular box of pink-wrapped chocolates. To the side there were several magazines, including Vogue and Hello!, and a piece of handwritten work she had brought back from night school, with 'very promising' scrawled in red on the margin. There was a salsa CD, which Jessie had played until Suzanna had begged for mercy, and a drawing of Emma's that she had pinned above the till. In the centre there were two photographs, one of which had been taken by Father Lenny and showed Suzanna and Jessie laughing with Arturro beaming in the background, and the other was of Jessie with Emma, seated outside, both wearing pink sunglasses. It was all arranged round a piece of cream parchment, on which Suzanna had penned, in italic handwriting and fuchsia pink ink:

  Jessie Carter had a smile as bright as August, and the dirtiest laugh this side of Sid James. She loved Mars bar ice creams, bright pink, this shop, and her family, not in that order. She loved her daughter Emma more than anything in the whole world, and for someone so full of love, that meant a lot.

  She wasn't allowed the time to achieve everything she had wanted, but she changed my shop, and then she changed me. I know that nobody in this town who met her could not have been changed by her.

  The display glowed, bright and gaudy, at odds with the bare brick and wood around it. At the very front there were two coffee-cups. One was symbolically empty.

  Nobody spoke. After several minutes, Suzanna began to get anxious and glanced at Father Lenny for reassurance. 'The displays were Jessie's idea,' she said, into the silence, 'so I thought she'd like it.'

  Still no one spoke. Suzanna felt sick suddenly, as if she had reverted to her former self, always prone to saying and doing the wrong thing. She had got it wrong here too. She felt a hiccup of panic rising, fought to keep it down.

  'It's not meant to be everything she was - say everything about her. I just wanted to do a little celebration of her. Something happier than what's been . . .' She tailed off, feeling useless and inadequate.

  Then she felt a hand on her arm, and looked down at the slim, manicured fingers, then up at Liliane's carefully made-up face, softened by something that might have been in the window display or something else entirely. 'It's beautiful, Suzanna,' she said. 'You've done a lovely job.'

  Suzanna blinked hard.

  'It's almost as good as one of hers,' said Mrs Creek, who had leant forward to peer at it. 'You should have put in a packet of those heart sweets. She was always eating those heart sweets.'

  'She'd love it,' said Father Lenny, placing his arm round Cath Carter's shoulders. He squeezed her, and murmured something in her ear.

  'It's very nice,' she said quietly. 'Very nice.'

  'I've taken a few pictures of it for Emma's memory box,' Suzanna said. 'For when . . . it has to come down. When the shop closes. But it'll be in here till then.'

  'You should get someone from the paper,' said Mrs Creek. 'Get them to put a picture in the paper.'

  'No,' said Cath. 'I don't want it in the papers.'

  'I like that picture,' said Father Lenny. 'I always liked those sunglasses. They looked like you should be able to eat them.'

  'I should think they'd taste awful,' said Mrs Creek.

  Behind them, Suzanna realised, Arturro was in tears, his heavy shoulders turned away from them in an attempt to disguise his grief. Liliane stepped towards him, and put an arm round him, whispering words of comfort.

  'Hey . . . big man,' said Father Lenny, leaning forward. 'Come on, now . . .'

  'It's not just Jessie,' Liliane said, turning. She was smiling, her expression indulgent. 'It's . . . everything. He's really going to miss your shop.'

  Suzanna noticed that Liliane's slim arm stretched barely half-way across his back.

  'We'll all miss the shop,' said Father Lenny. 'It had . . . a certain something.'

  'I just liked the feeling. Coming in.' Arturro blew his nose. 'I even liked the word. Emporium.' He enunciated it slowly, savouring each syllable.

  'You could rename your delicatessen Arturro's Emporium,' said Mrs Creek, and bridled as everyone looked blankly at her.

  'We have a lot of reasons to feel fond of your shop,' said Liliane, carefully.

  'Feels almost like it was more Jessie's shop,' said Suzanna.

  'If it doesn't sound too mawkish,' Father Lenny put in, 'I like to think there's another one up there somewhere, with Jessie serving.'

  'You are being mawkish,' said Cath.

  'Serving and talking,' said Suzanna.

  'Oh, yes,' said Father Lenny. 'Definitely talking.'

  Cath Carter, with a faint smile of pride, nudged him. 'She talked at nine months,' she said. 'Opened her mouth one morning and never closed it again.'

  Suzanna was about to speak, then jumped as she heard a familiar voice.

  'Can I add something?' it said.

  Her breath was knocked out of her as if at some great impact - at the simple, physical fact of him. The last time she had seen him he had radiated urgency, anger, so that the air around him had seemed to crackle. Now his movements were easy and fluid, his eyes, which she had last seen accusatory and disbelieving, soft.

  He was looking at her intently, waiting for an answer.

  She tried to speak, then nodded dumbly instead.

  He stepped past them into the shop, reached up to a shelf and placed in the corner of the window his silver mate pot. 'I think we should be happy,' he said quietly, as he emerged. 'She was my first friend in this country. She was good at being happy. And I think she would want everyone to remember her with happiness.'

  She couldn't take her eyes off him, still hardly able to believe that he was here, in front of her.

  'Hear hear,' said Father Lenny, with a hint of determination in his voice.

  There was a long silence, which became slowly awkward. Liliane shifted uncomfortably in her high heels, and Mrs Creek muttered something to herself. Suzanna heard Father Lenny murmur to Alejandro, and watched as he responded with something that made Father Lenny look directly at her. She blushed again.

  'We ought to go.' It was Cath's voice.

  Shaken from her reverie, Suzanna realised that she had heard nothing yet from the one person whose opinion mattered most. She turned and searched for the blonde head. She hesitated for a moment, then: 'Is it all right?' she said, crouching down.

  The child did not move or speak.

  'It'll be there for at least two weeks. But I'll change it if you want, if you think there's something missing. Move it, if you don't like it. I've got time to do that before I go.' She kept her voice low.

  Emma stared at the window, then looked at Suzanna. Her eyes were dry. 'Can I write something to put in it?' Her voice had the glacial composure of childhood. It made something deep within Suzanna ache.

  She nodded.

  'I want to do it now,' said Emma. She glanced up at her grandmother, then back at Suzanna.

  'I'll get you a pen and paper.'

  Suzanna held out her hand. The little girl let go of her grandmother's and took it. Watched by the silent group standing in the lane, they walked inside the shop.

  'It was you, wasn't it?'

  The shop was empty. Suzanna had just finished pinning Emma's words into the display, fighting the urge to edit the last painful sentences from what she had written. It was important to tell the truth. Especially about death. She st
raightened her knees and backed out of the window.

  'Yes,' he said.

  Just that. A simple affirmative.

  'It's bad luck. You should know that.'

  'It was just a feather. It doesn't have to mean anything.' He glanced at the iridescent plume protruding from her handbag. 'And, besides, it's beautiful.' He let the words hang between them as he walked slowly round the shop.

  'And the other things? The butterfly? The plant?' She had to fight the urge to keep sneaking looks at him, to stop her face lighting up at the sheer pleasure of having him nearby.

  'A peacock butterfly. The plant too.'

  'I didn't understand,' she said. 'About the butterfly, I mean. We only looked up its Latin name.'

  'Then it's lucky I didn't catch you a cichlid.'

  They sat for a moment in silence, Suzanna wondering at how, having spent years existing in a kind of low-grade nothingness, her emotions could swing so dramatically from despair to elation and then to something less clear-cut and infinitely more confusing. A group of young girls was peering in at the window, making exaggerated expressions of sentimentality when they read Emma's words.

  'It's beautiful, what you did,' he said, nodding at the display.

  'She would have done it better.'

  Suzanna struggled with the things she had wanted to say, things that now felt awkward, overblown. 'I thought you were in Argentina,' she said, trying to sound noncommittal. Now he was here, she felt suddenly complicated, as if the urgency of the previous day had been an overreaction, had given too much away. 'You didn't come to give evidence. I thought you'd already gone.'

  'I was going to go. But . . . I decided to wait.' He leant against the door, as if he was holding it shut. When she looked up, he was gazing at her intently, and that, combined with the slowly settling meaning of his words, made her blush again.

  She stood up and began to sweep the floor, conscious of the need to do something, to stay focused. 'Right,' she said, unsure why she had. 'Right.' Her hands tightened on the broom. She pushed it along in short strokes, the heat of his gaze still on her. 'Look, you probably know I've left Neil, but I need you to know that I didn't leave him for you. I mean, not that you didn't mean anything to me - don't mean anything to me . . .' She was conscious that she was rambling already. 'I just left him to be on my own.'

  He nodded, still leaning against the door.

  'It's not that I'm not flattered by what you said. Because I am. But so much has happened over the past days - stuff that even you don't know about. To do with my family. And I've only just started to work things out. Things about me, about how I'm going to live.'

  He was looking over at the display - or possibly out of the window. It was impossible to tell.

  'So I just want you to know that you are - will always be - really important to me. In ways you probably don't realise. But I think it's time for me to grow up a little. Stand on my own two feet.'

  She stopped sweeping. 'Do you understand?'

  'You can't run away from this, Suzanna,' he said.

  She was shocked by his certainty, by the absence of his previous reticence. Reticence she had always felt fuelled by her own.

  'Why are you smiling?'

  'Because I'm happy?'

  She made a sound of exasperation. 'Look, I'm trying to explain something here. I'm trying, for once in my life, to be adult.'

  He tilted his head to one side, as if he were party to some private joke. 'Did you cut your hair like that to punish yourself?'

  At first she didn't trust what she had heard. 'What? Who do you think you are?'

  His smile told her.

  Suzanna's heart was thumping uncomfortably, and now, at his bizarre reaction, all the rage of the previous weeks, all the emotion she had been forced to contain, came spilling out. 'I can't believe I'm hearing this. Really! Have you lost your mind?'

  He began to laugh.

  'God, you arrogant - you arrogant . . .'

  'It's not so bad.' He moved forward, lifted his hand as if to touch it. 'I still think you look beautiful.'

  'This is ridiculous!' She ducked away from him. 'You're ridiculous! I don't know what's happened to you, Alejandro, but you don't understand. You don't understand even half of what I've been working through. I've tried to tell you nicely. I've tried to make you understand, but I'm not going to save your feelings if you're going to be too obstinate to listen to them.'

  'I'm not listening to my feelings?' He was laughing properly now, and the unfamiliar sound enraged her more than ever. Almost unaware of what she was doing, she began to shove him, to physically manhandle him out of the shop, knowing only that she had to be away from him, that she needed him far from her to restore her peace of mind.

  'What are you doing, Suzanna Peacock?' he said, as she forced him through the door.

  'Go away,' she said. 'Go back to bloody Argentina. And just leave me alone. I don't need this, okay? I don't need this on top of everything else.'

  'You do--'

  'Just go:

  'You do need me.'

  She closed the door on him, her gasping breaths veering dangerously towards sobs. Now he was actually here, a reality, she wasn't ready for it. She needed him to be like he was before. She needed things to move slowly, so that she could be sure of what she felt, that she wasn't getting it all wrong. Nothing in her life felt secure any more: its elements swooped and fell under her like the decks of a storm-ridden ship, threatening to overwhelm her.

  'I can't just - I can't just be like you. I can't let go of it all.'

  She wasn't sure he had heard her. She leant against the door, feeling his voice vibrate through it. 'I'm not going anywhere.' He was shouting, apparently unafraid of being heard. 'I'm not going anywhere, Suzanna Peacock.'

  The shop seemed to have shrunk. She sat down as it diminished around her, the sound of his muffled voice echoing through her, filling up the remaining space.

  'I will haunt you, Suzanna,' he yelled. 'I will haunt you worse than they ever did. Because they are not your ghosts. They are your mother's and father's and Jason's and poor Emma's. But they are not your ghosts. I am.'

  He paused.

  'You hear me? I am.'

  Eventually she stood, and moved to the window. Through the small frames of curved glass, she could see him, a foot away from the door, addressing it with a kind of evangelical determination, his face relaxed as if he was already sure of the outcome. Behind him, she made out the distant figures of Arturro and Liliane, watching, bewildered, from the door of the Unique Boutique.

  'Can you hear me? I will haunt you, Suzanna.'

  His voice echoed down the cobbled lane, bounced off the flint walls, the water fountain. She leant against the window frame, feeling the fight seep out of her and something give inside her.

  'You are a ridiculous man,' she said. She wiped her eyes, and he caught sight of her. 'A ridiculous man,' she said, louder, so that he could hear. 'You sound like a lunatic'

  He looked right at her and raised his eyebrows.

  'A lunatic,' she yelled.

  'So let me in,' he said, and gave a distinctly Latin shrug.

  The sheer unAlejandroness of that movement sent a shiver through her. She moved to the door and opened it.

  He looked back at her, this foreign man from a million miles away, more strange yet more familiar than anything she could have imagined. And as he stood, a broad, uninhibited smile spread slowly across his face, a smile that told of freedom and uncomplicated pleasure, a smile that held promises it didn't have to explain. A smile that was finally matched by her own. 'You get it now?' he said quietly.

  She began to nod, and then laugh, feeling a great bubble of emotion forcing its way out of her in short, breathless bursts. And for some time, they stood in the door of the shop that used to be the Peacock Emporium, talked about in dismissive and curious whispers for weeks after by those who knew them in the small town and those who didn't. Barely touching each other, watched by the few people who had
once been its customers, the too-dark man, and the woman with the short black hair, a woman who, considering all that had happened, should have been a little less elated, perhaps a little more discreet. Throwing back her head and laughing, the image of her mother.

  Much, much later, Suzanna stood on the painted step of the shop, locked the door for the final time, and looked around. He was seated, fiddling with the paper butterfly, waiting as, for the seventeenth time, she checked that everything she needed was there. 'You know I'm meant to be going to Australia. In about an hour. I've got the ticket and everything.'

  He reached over and put his arm round her legs as she came to him, a gently proprietorial gesture. 'Argentina is closer.'

  'I don't want to rush into anything, Ale.'

  He smiled at the paper butterfly.

  'I mean it. Even if I do come to Argentina, I'm not sure whether we're going to be together, not yet anyway. I've just come out of a marriage. I want to go somewhere for a while where my history doesn't count.'

  'History always counts.'

  'Not to you. Not for us.'

  She sat beside him and told him about her mother, that she had run away. 'I should hate her, I suppose,' she said, feeling the warmth of his hand around hers, savouring the fact that it could now linger there. 'But I don't. I just feel relief that I didn't cause her death.'

  'Well. You have a mother who loves you.'

  'Oh, I know. And Athene Forster,' she looked at the photograph Vivi had given her, which was sitting on top of a cardboard box, 'I look like her, I know, but she feels like nothing to do with me. I can't mourn someone who left me without a backward glance.'

  Alejandro's smile faded as he thought of a baby in a Buenos Aires maternity ward, spirited away by a blonde woman determinedly oblivious to someone else's pain. 'Perhaps she never wanted to leave you,' he murmured. 'You may never know the whole story.'

  'Oh, I know enough.' She was surprised at her lack of animosity. 'I had her down as this glamorous, doomed figure. I think perhaps I was half in love with the idea of being the same. Now I just think Athene Forster was probably rather a stupid, spoilt little girl. Someone who just wasn't meant to be a mother.'

  He stood up and held out his hand to her. 'It's time to be happy, Suzanna Peacock,' he announced. He tried to make his face solemn. 'With me or without me.'