The Peacock Emporium, Page 6

  'Cyril was - we were both wondering how you were.'

  'You're terribly kind. I've just had rather a lot on.' Athene's smile wavered a bit when her mother-in-law did not budge. 'And today I'm feeling rather tired. Which is why I'm not really receiving anyone.'

  'I thought we might have a little chat. About things--'

  'Oh, I don't think so. But it's very kind of you to think of me.'

  'There are a couple of things we'd like you to--' 'Lovely to see you. I'm sure we'll see you again soon.' And, after that brief exchange, the least demonstrative goodbye and not even a hint of an apology, Athene had closed the front door. And her mother-in-law, who normally liked to call a spade a spade, had been almost too stupefied to be offended.

  In fact, despite being a woman of some certainty, she wasn't even quite sure how to describe this turn of events to her husband. What could she say in condemnation? That the girl had received her in her nightdress? Cyril might find that charming - worse, he could start imagining things, and she knew where that might end. That Athene had declined to offer her coffee? Cyril would say simply that she should have given her some warning, telephoned before she left. It was one of the things that irritated her most, her husband's determination always to be fair. She decided to say nothing, but when Douglas arrived she took him to one side and told him straight: if his wife didn't want to dress herself with a little dignity, then she shouldn't answer the door. There was a family name to uphold. When he had looked at her with incomprehension, she had felt a sudden fearful protectiveness, combined with a distant annoyance that the boy was so like his father. You spent their entire youth warning them. Years, perhaps. But it made no difference when it came to girls like that.

  Cyril Fairley-Hulme put down his napkin and glanced at the clock, as he did every day during the short minutes between finishing his meal and the moment at which his wife stood and asked if he'd like a cup of coffee before he headed into his study. Behind him, the radio gave out the weather forecast in measured tones, as it did at the end of every lunch, and all three observed a minute's silence to allow him to listen.

  'Very nice,' Cyril said quietly. Then, as if making some long-pondered observation, 'You can't beat a good game pie.'

  'Delicious. Thank you, Mother.' Douglas pulled the napkin from his lap and crumpled it into a ball on the table.

  'It's one of Bessie's. I'll tell her you liked it. Do you have time for some coffee?' The dining table had been laid, as it always was, with a neat formality and good china despite the mundanity of the occasion. She lifted the plates, and walked, straight-backed, from the room.

  Douglas watched her go, feeling the words leaden in his mouth, at odds with the racing feeling in his chest.

  His father took some minutes meditatively tamping his pipe, then lighting it, his thin, tanned face creased into well-worn lines of concentration. Then he glanced at his son, as if surprised that during this part of the daily routine he hadn't left. 'Dennis is sowing the tubers this afternoon.'

  'Yes,' said Douglas. 'I'm going to head up there when I leave.'

  His father extinguished a shortened match and swore softly under his breath, glancing unconsciously at the door where his wife had exited. 'Want to make sure he gets the distances right. He set them too close together last year.'

  'Yes, Father, you said. I'll talk to him about it.'

  His father looked down at his pipe again. 'Waiting for harvest?' he said, lightly.

  'What? Oh--' It was often difficult to recognise when his father was joking. 'Oh, no. Actually, Father, I wanted to talk to you about something.'

  The pipe was lit. His father leant back, and exhaled a thin plume of smoke, his face briefly relaxing. 'Fire away,' he said genially.

  Douglas looked at him, and then down, trying to remember where he'd put his folder. He stood, fetched it from the dresser, then began to pull out pages, laying them carefully on the table in front of his father.

  'What's this?'

  'What I wanted to talk to you about. Some ideas I've had. For the estate.'

  Douglas rearranged two pages, then stood back, watching as his father leant forward to look a bit more closely.

  'Ideas for the estate?'

  'I've been thinking for ages. I mean, since the stuff with the CAP and you talking about giving up on the dairy side of things. We might look at doing things a bit differently.'

  Cyril watched his son's stammering explanation impassively. Then he lowered his head towards the page. 'Pass me my glasses.'

  Douglas followed his father's pointed finger, located and held out the spectacles. From the kitchen, he could hear his mother placing crockery on the tray, and the sound of cupboards opening and closing. He could hear the blood in his ears. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, then took them out again, fighting the urge to leap forward and point to separate paragraphs on the pages.

  'There's a map under there,' he said, unable to contain himself any longer. 'I've colour-coded the fields according to usage.'

  Time seemed to drag, then stall. Douglas, staring at his father's face, saw not even a flicker of emotion as he methodically scanned the pages. Outside, the dogs barked manically at some offender.

  His father removed his glasses, and sat back slowly in his chair. His pipe had gone out and, after examining it, he laid it on the table beside him. 'This what they taught you at agricultural college, was it?'

  'No,' said Douglas. 'Actually they're pretty well all my own ideas. I mean, I've been reading up and everything, about kibbutzes - and you know all about Rowntree, of course, but--'

  'Because, if so, we wasted every bloody penny sending you there.'

  It came out with force, as if the words had been expelled from a gun, and Douglas jumped, as if they had physically impacted against him.

  His father's face, as ever, revealed almost nothing. But there was a brightness behind his eyes, a faint pallor behind his ruddied complexion that suggested intense hidden anger.

  They sat in silence, eyes locked.

  'I thought you had sense. I thought we'd raised you with some sense of what was right and--'

  'This is right.' Douglas heard his own voice lift in protest. 'It is right to give something back to people. It is right that everyone gets a share in the land.'

  'Give it all away, shall I? Dish it out in parcels to anyone who wants it? Ask them to form a queue?'

  'It would still be our land, Dad. It would just enable other people to work it. We don't even use it all properly.'

  'You think people round here want to work the land? Have you actually asked any of them? The young people don't want to be ploughing and drilling. They don't want to be out in all weathers pulling weeds and spreading muck. They want to be in the cities, listening to popular music and all sorts. Do you know how long it took me to find enough hands just to get the hay in last year?'

  'We'd find people. There are always people who need jobs.'

  His father jabbed at the papers with disgust. 'This is not some social experiment. This is our blood, our sweat in this soil. I can't believe I've raised a son of mine, taught him everything I know about this estate, only to have him want to give it away. Not even sell it, mind. Give it away. You - you're worse than a girl.'

  He spat the words at his son, as if he were bilious. Douglas had rarely heard his father's voice raised against him, and discovered he was shaking. He tried to collect his thoughts against his father's concentrated anger and saw his mother, standing stationary in the doorway, tray in hand.

  Without a word, his father stood up and stomped past her, ramming his hat on to his head as he went.

  Douglas's mother placed the coffee on the table, and stared at her son, whose expression wore the same look of contained shock and misery as it had when he was eight and his father had beaten him for letting one of the dogs get into the calving shed. She fought the urge to comfort him, and instead asked cautiously what had happened.

  For several minutes Douglas didn't answer, and she won
dered whether he was trying to hold back tears. He gestured towards some papers on the table. 'I had some ideas for the estate.' He paused, then spoke in a strangled voice: 'Father didn't like them.'

  'Shall I look?'

  'Feel free.'

  She sat down carefully in her husband's chair and scanned the pages. It took her several minutes to grasp what he was proposing, and she stared at the coloured map, slowly building a picture of her son's vision.

  She thought of her husband, and his uncharacteristic burst of rage, and her initial sympathy for her son was replaced by her own swiftly increasing anger. Young people could be so thoughtless. They never considered what previous generations had had to go through. The world was becoming a more selfish place and, despite the bone-deep love she felt for her only son, she was now filled with fury at his lack of consideration - that of his feckless, shameless wife too, and of their generation in general.

  'I suggest you throw these on the fire,' she said, sweeping them into a pile.

  'What?'

  'Get rid of them. If you're lucky, your father will forget this conversation ever happened.'

  Her son's face was a mask of frustration and incredulity. 'You're not even going to consider them?'

  'I have considered them, Douglas, and they are . . . inappropriate.'

  'I'm twenty-seven years old, Mother. I deserve to have a say in the running of the estate.'

  'You deserve?' Her chest was tight, and her voice came in short bursts: 'That's all your generation cares about - what you supposedly deserve. Your ideas are an insult to your father, and until you can comprehend that I suggest you and I end this conversation here.'

  Douglas had both hands on the table now, was leaning down on straightened arms, as if he had been almost felled by her response. 'I can't believe you're both reacting like this.'

  The last ounce of maternal sympathy she had felt for him evaporated. 'Douglas, sit down,' she commanded, and placed herself opposite him. She took a deep breath, trying to make her words measured. 'I'm going to tell you something about your father, young man. You have no idea what he has been through, keeping this estate together. You have no idea. When he inherited it, it was almost bankrupt. Wheat prices were the lowest in memory, the farm workers were heading off to the city because we couldn't afford to pay them, and we couldn't give the wretched milk away. He had to sell nearly all his family furniture, all the paintings except for the portraits, his own mother's family jewellery, the only reminder he had of her, I might add, just to keep it alive.'

  She stared at her son, determined that he should understand the gravity of what she was telling him. 'And you'd be too young to remember this properly, but in the war the estate was requisitioned - we even had German PoWs here. Did you know that? Your own father's brother killed in the air, and we had to take Germans' - she spat the word - 'just to keep the thing going. Dirty thieves they were, stealing food and all sorts. Even bits off the farm machinery.'

  'They didn't steal anything. It was the Miller boys.'

  She shook her head. 'Douglas, he has worked those fields day in and day out, rain, snow, sleet and hail, for his whole adult life. I have had him come home with hands raw from pulling weeds, and his back burnt blood red from working twelve hours in the sun. I remember nights when he's eaten and fallen asleep at the table. When I've woken him, he's gone off to fix the tenants' roofs, or sort out their drainage. This is the first time we've had enough money for him to relax a bit. The first time he's allowed himself to let other people help him. And now you, his hope, his pride, his heir, you tell him you want to give it away to a bunch of beatniks, or whatever they are.'

  'It's not like that.' Douglas was blushing.

  His mother had said her piece. She stood, and poured the coffee. She added the milk, then pushed a cup to her son. 'I'd like this to be the last time we discuss this,' she said, the heat gone from her voice. 'You're a young man with big ideas. But this estate is bigger than your ideas. And we haven't held it together for so long to let you unravel everything we've done. Because, Douglas, it's not even yours to give away. You are a trustee, a custodian. Your job is simply to act as a conduit for the changes necessary to keep it afloat.'

  'But you said--'

  'We said the estate would be yours. What we did not say, at any time, is that it should be diverted from its natural purpose. Which, first, is farming and, second, to provide a home and a living for successive generations of Fairley-Hulmes.'

  There was a long silence. She took a long, restorative draught of her coffee. Her tone, when she spoke, was conciliatory: 'When you have children, you'll understand a little better.'

  The radio crackled with interference as an aeroplane flew overhead. She turned in her chair, and adjusted the dial. Normal service was resumed.

  Douglas, his head lowered, sat and stared into his cup.

  When he arrived home the house was empty. He hadn't even bothered calling her name when he closed the door behind him; she rarely remembered to leave a light on for him, and the house was possessed of the cold stillness that spoke of many hours of inoccupancy.

  He hung his coat in the echoing hall and made his way to the kitchen, his feet absorbing the chill of the cold linoleum. For the first year of his marriage he had frequently found that his supper consisted of breakfast cereal or bread and cheese. Athene was not a natural homemaker and, after a few early charred efforts, had lost interest in even pretending to be one. More recently, without telling his mother, he had employed Bessie, one of the longest-standing estate wives, to keep their kitchen stocked and put the odd pie or casserole into the refrigerator. He knew she thought Athene scandalous. In a vague attempt to protect his wife's domestic reputation he had explained that flour made her skin break out in hives.

  A cheese pie was sitting on the shelf. Douglas placed it in the range, closed the door and scanned the kitchen table for an explanatory note. Often they told him little: 'Darling Douglas, back soon - A'. Or 'Nipped out for breath of fresh air,' or 'Gone for a spin.' Increasingly she didn't leave a note at all. Tonight he didn't mind. He didn't know if he wanted to talk to anyone at the moment, even his wife.

  He pulled a plate from the dresser, glancing at the framed snapshot of Athene he had taken in Florence. That first year had been wonderful. They had spent three months travelling around Italy, driving Douglas's red MGB Roadster, staying at tiny pensiones and frequently offending the padronas with their uninhibited expressions of love. Athene had made him feel like a king, screaming delightedly at his driving on the winding mountain roads, draping herself over him as they sipped coffee in pavement cafes, wrapping herself round him needily in the dark. On their return, despite the newly decorated house, her horse, his gift of driving lessons and her own car - she was a hopeless driver: he had long since ceased becoming exasperated by the dents in the bumper - she had gradually become a little less adoring, a little less easy to please. She was not interested in his plans for wealth redistribution. He had hoped she'd be inspired. The idea for it had come from her, after all. 'Let's give it all away,' she had said, one summer afternoon as they picnicked alone by the trout river. 'Let's decide who's most deserving in the village, and then give it away in parcels. Like America and the slaves.' She was joking, of course. Like when she announced she had a terrible need to sing jazz and he had booked lessons for her as a surprise.

  In fact, over the past few weeks, not that he liked to dwell on it, Athene had been rather demanding. He never knew where he stood - one minute she was flirtatious, clinging to him, trying to charm him into some outlandish plan, the next she was cold and distant, as if he had fallen foul of some unspoken rule. If he dared ask what he had done, she would explode with exasperation, and ask why he couldn't just let her alone. He had not dared approach her in the dark. He was still smarting from the time two weeks ago when she had physically shoved him off her, accusing him of being like 'some slobbering animal'.

  He glanced up at the picture of the smiling, uncomplicated wife. It
was a fortnight to their second wedding anniversary. Perhaps they might return to Italy for a week or two to give them both a change of scene. He needed to spend some time away from the estate, give himself time to bite down on his disappointment. Perhaps a holiday would make her less irritable, less mercurial.

  She arrived shortly before eight, raising her eyebrows in surprise when she saw the scoured dinner plate in front of him. She was wearing an ice-blue dress and a new white high-collared coat. 'I didn't realise you would be home so early.'

  'Thought you might want company.'

  'Oh, darling, I'm sorry. If you'd said I'd have made sure I was here. I took myself off to Ipswich for the afternoon, to go to the pictures.' She was plainly in a good mood. She swept down to kiss his forehead, leaving an echo of her scent in the air before him.

  'Mother said she stopped by earlier.'

  Athene was removing her coat, her back to him. 'I suppose she still wants me to present a trophy at the village fete. I have told her it isn't my scene.'

  Douglas stood up and walked to the drinks cabinet, where he poured himself two fingers of whisky. 'You could try, Athene. She's not so bad. You could try for me.'

  'Oh, let's not have words. You know I'm no good with families, Douglas.'

  It was a pointless conversation, which had been repeated too many times already.

  'I saw the most fabulous film. French. You must see it too. I was so carried away by it I nearly didn't come home at all.' Her laughter, perhaps deliberate, took any threat from her words.

  Douglas watched her as she moved lightly around the room: the focus of it, yet not belonging to it. Perhaps she would always look like this to him: something otherwordly, floating, refusing to be tied down by the ropes of domesticity. He wished, briefly, that he could tell her about his exchange with his father. That he could express his humiliation, his disappointment at the reaction of the man whose good opinion he valued more than anything in the world. Perhaps lay his head against her and be comforted. But he had learnt through bitter experience that Athene would alight on any potential faultline in his relationship with his parents and do her best to widen it. She didn't want him so closely linked to his family: she wanted to cast them adrift.