Peacock Emporium

by Jojo Moyes

  My dad can’t do nail varnish. I was going to ask him, but I’ve been staying with my grandma and she says she’ll do it for me, when things calm down a bit. She cries a lot. I’ve heard her when she thinks I’m in bed, although she always puts on her happy voice when she thinks I’m listening.

  Sometimes I cry too. I really miss my mum.

  Steven Arnold says my mum’s nails won’t be shiny by now. He says they’ll be black.

  Actually, I don’t want to do this any more.

  Fifteen

  In Suzanna’s teenage years, on days like these, Vivi would have described her as having woken up feeling ‘a bit complicated’. It was nothing one could put one’s finger on, the result of no tangible misfortune, but she had started her day overhung by an invisible cloud, with a sense that her universe was skewed in some way and that she was only a hair’s breadth from bursting into tears. On such days one could usually guarantee that inanimate objects would rise (or lower themselves?) to the occasion: a piece of bread had got wedged in the toaster, and she had shocked herself trying to get it out with a fork; she had discovered a slow leak under a pipe in the bathroom, and bumped her head on the low doorway as she came out; Neil had failed to put the rubbish out, as he’d promised. She had bumped into Liliane in the delicatessen when she’d nipped in to buy a box of sugared almonds, as suggested by Jessie for the next ‘love token’, and been forced to whip them into her bag like a shop-lifter, which she had theoretically become when she left the shop having forgotten to pay for them. And when she finally arrived at the Emporium she had been ambushed by Mrs Creek, who told her with perverse relish that she had been waiting outside for almost twenty minutes, and asked if Suzanna could donate some of her ‘bric-a-brac’ for one of the pensioners’ jumble sales.

  ‘I don’t have any bric-a-brac,’ she had said pointedly.

  ‘You can’t tell me all of this stuff is for sale,’ said Mrs Creek, staring at the display on the back wall.

  Mrs Creek had then segued effortlessly into a story about dinner-dances in Ipswich and how, as a teenage girl, she had supplemented her parents’ income by sewing dresses for her friends. ‘When I started making my own clothes, it was all the New Look,’ she said. ‘Great swirling skirts and three-quarter sleeves. You used to use ever such a lot of fabric on those skirts. You know, when the fashion first came out, people here were scandalised. We’d spent years scrimping on fabric during the war, you see. There was nothing. Not even for coupons. Lots of us went out dancing in dresses we’d made from our own curtains.’

  ‘Really,’ said Suzanna, flicking on switches and wondering why Jessie was late.

  ‘The first one I ever made was in emerald silk. Gorgeous colour it was, ever so rich. It looked like one of Yul Brynner’s outfits in The King and I – you know the one I’m talking about?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Suzanna. ‘Are you having coffee?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, dear. I don’t mind keeping you company.’ She sat on the seat near the magazines and began pulling bits of paper from her bag. ‘I’ve got photographs somewhere, of how we used to look. Me and my sister. We used to share dresses then. Waists that you could stick your hands round.’ She breathed out. ‘Men’s hands, that is. Mine have always been on the small side. Of course, you had to nearly suffocate yourself with corsetry to get the look, but girls will always suffer to be beautiful, won’t they?’

  ‘Mm,’ said Suzanna, remembering to take the sugared almonds from her bag, and place them under the counter. Jessie could take them over later. If she ever decided to turn up.

  ‘She’s got a colostomy now, poor thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My sister. Crohn’s disease. Causes her terrible trouble, it does. You can wear all the baggy clothing you like but you do have to make sure you don’t bump into anyone, you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Suzanna, trying to concentrate on measuring coffee.

  ‘And she lives in Southall. So there you go . . . It’s a recipe for disaster. Still, it could be worse,’ she said. ‘She used to work on the buses.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Jessie. She was dressed in cut-off jeans, with lavender-coloured sunglasses on her head, looking summery and almost unbearably pretty. She was followed closely behind by Alejandro, who stooped as he entered. ‘His fault,’ she explained cheerfully. ‘He needed directing to the good butcher’s. He’s been a bit shocked by the state of the supermarket meat.’

  ‘It is shocking, that supermarket,’ said Mrs Creek. ‘Do you know how much I paid the other day for a bit of pork belly?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alejandro, who had registered Suzanna’s set mouth. ‘It’s hard for me to discover these things when I’m off my shift. The hours never match anyone else’s.’ His eyes held a mute appeal that made Suzanna feel both appeased and irritated.

  ‘I’ll make up the extra minutes,’ said Jessie, shedding her bag under the counter. ‘I’ve been hearing all about Argentinian steak. Tougher, apparently, but tastier.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Suzanna said. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ She wished she hadn’t seen the look that had passed between them.

  ‘Double espresso?’ said Jessie, moving behind the coffee machine. Alejandro nodded, seating himself at the small table beside the counter. ‘Can I get you one?’ she asked Suzanna.

  ‘No,’ said Suzanna. ‘I’m fine.’ She wished she hadn’t worn these trousers. They picked up lint and fluff, and the cut, she saw, made them look cheap. Then again, what did she expect? They were cheap. She had bought no quality clothes since they left London.

  ‘We don’t really eat meat,’ Jessie was saying. ‘Not in the week, anyway. Apart from chicken it’s too expensive – and I don’t like thinking of them in all those battery cages. Plus Emma’s not that bothered. But I do love roast beef. For Sunday lunch.’

  ‘One day I will find you some good Argentinian beef,’ Alejandro said. ‘We let our animals get older. You will know the difference.’

  ‘I thought old steers were meant to get stringy,’ said Suzanna, and immediately regretted it.

  ‘But you tenderise your meat, dear,’ said Mrs Creek. ‘You beat it with a wooden thing.’

  ‘If the meat is good,’ said Alejandro, ‘it should not need beating.’

  ‘You’d think the cow had been through enough.’

  ‘Beef dripping,’ said Mrs Creek. ‘Now there’s something you never see in the shops any more.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same thing as lard?’

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’ Suzanna was starting to feel queasy. ‘Jessie, have you finished that coffee?’

  ‘You never told us,’ Jessie turned to Alejandro, leaning over the counter, ‘about your life before you came here.’

  ‘Not much to tell,’ said Alejandro.

  ‘Like why you wanted to be a midwife. I mean, no offence, but it’s not a normal profession for a bloke, is it?’

  ‘What is normal?’

  ‘But you’d have to be pretty comfortable with your feminine side in a macho country like Argentina to do what you do. So why do you do it?’

  Alejandro took his cup of coffee, and dropped two sugar cubes into the thick black liquid. ‘You are wasted in a shop, Jessie. You should be a psychotherapist. In my home it’s the most prestigious job you can have. Next to a plastic surgeon, of course . . . Or perhaps a butcher.’

  Which was, Suzanna thought, as she began to unpack a new box of bags, a pretty neat way of not answering the question.

  ‘I was just telling Suzanna I used to make dresses.’

  ‘I know,’ said Jessie. ‘You showed me the pictures. Lovely, they were.’

  ‘Have I shown you these ones?’ Mrs Creek held out a fan of battered photographs.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ said Jessie, obligingly. ‘Aren’t you clever?’

  ‘I think we were better with our hands then. Girls today seem to be . . . less resourceful. But then we had to be, with the war and
all.’

  ‘And what did you do, Suzanna, before you opened this shop?’ His voice, with its strong accent, was low, comforting. She could imagine it, consoling, in childbirth. ‘Who were you in your past life?’

  ‘The same person I am now,’ she said, aware as she spoke that she didn’t believe what she was saying. ‘I’ve got to nip out and pick up some more milk.’

  ‘No one is the same person for ever,’ insisted Jessie.

  ‘I was the same person . . . but with less strong views on people minding their own business,’ she said sharply, and slammed the till drawer.

  ‘I come here for the atmosphere, you know,’ Mrs Creek confided to Alejandro.

  ‘Are you all right, Suzanna?’ Jessie leant over to get a better view of her expression.

  ‘Fine. Just busy, okay? There’s a lot to do today.’

  Jessie caught the implicit criticism and winced. ‘That fish,’ she said, to Alejandro, as Suzanna shoved mugs unnecessarily around the shelf above the till, ‘the one you used to catch with your dad, the peacock something.’

  ‘Peacock bass?’

  ‘It’s known for being really grumpy, right?’

  Mrs Creek coughed quietly into her coffee.

  There was a short pause.

  ‘I think maybe it has to be grumpy, as you call it, to survive in its environment,’ said Alejandro, innocently.

  They waited until Suzanna, with a flashing glance their way, closed the shop door hard behind her. They watched her striding up the lane, head down, as if walking into a fierce wind.

  Jessie breathed out, shook her head admiringly at the man opposite. ‘Blimey, Ale, I’m not the only one who’s wasted in my job.’

  Father Lenny walked down Water Lane, turned left and nodded through the window at the occupants of the Peacock Emporium and, on seeing the cheerful face surrounded by blonde plaits, waved vigorously. He thought back to the conversation he had had earlier that morning.

  The boy – for he was still a boy, no matter what maturity he thought paternity had conferred – had come to deliver a storage heater to the presbytery. The central heating was next to useless, these days, and the diocese funds wouldn’t run to a new system. Not with the church roof needing doing. They knew of Lenny’s reputation, knew he could always be relied upon to scrape by on his contacts; after twenty years they turned a blind eye to any commercial activities that might, on close inspection, appear a little inappropriate compared with those normally undertaken by servants of the Church. So the delivery van had turned into the drive, and Lenny had found himself preparing to show in the boy himself.

  It was Cath Carter who had initially sought his advice: Cath who on several occasions now had invited him round supposedly to offer him tea and what she called a ‘catch-up’ but really to solicit his opinion on her daughter’s ever-burgeoning collection of bruises and ‘accidental’ knocks. It wasn’t like she hadn’t a temper herself, she said, and she’d be a liar if she said she and Ed had never come to blows in all their years together, but this was different. He had overstepped a line. And whenever she had tried to broach the subject with Jessie, she had snapped at her to mind her own businesses, or words to that effect. ‘Mothers and daughters, eh?’ he had said, glibly. But there wasn’t much he could offer. Cath believed the girl would be offended if she thought they were discussing her, so he wasn’t allowed to approach her. It wasn’t serious enough, she said, to call the police. In the old days, when he was growing up, a couple of the older men would go round and mark the boy’s card, rough him up a little, just to let him know they were on to him. Most of the time it worked. But there was no Ed Carter around any more, no one outside the social services who was likely to want to take up this little issue. And there was no way Cath or Jessie would want that lot involved. So his hands were tied.

  Until the boy turned up on his doorstep. Because no one had said anything, after all, about the two of them having a discreet word.

  ‘You enjoying your new job, eh?’

  ‘It’s not bad, Father. Regular hours . . . Pay could be better.’

  ‘Ah, now, there’s a universal truth.’

  The boy had looked at him, as if struggling to gauge his meaning, then lifted the heater with formidable ease, and carried it, as directed, into the front room, where he ignored the boxes of discount crockery and alarm clocks stacked high against the walls, partially obscuring two Virgin Marys and a St Sebastian. ‘You want me to put it together for you? It’ll take me five minutes.’

  ‘That would be grand. I have no gift with a screwdriver. Shall I go and find one?’

  ‘Got me own.’ The boy had held it up, and Lenny had been suddenly uncomfortably aware of the strength in those shoulders, the potential force behind the now contained movements.

  The irony was that he was not a bad lad: generally well thought of, polite, brought up on the good part of the estate. While not churchgoers, his parents were decent people. His brother, Lenny remembered, had taken himself abroad to do voluntary service. There might have been a sister, he couldn’t remember. But the boy had never been in any trouble, had not been one of those he would occasionally scoop up from the market square in the early hours of Sunday, semi-conscious from cheap cider and God only knew what else. He had never been found racing stolen cars up and down the moonlit country lanes.

  But that didn’t mean he was good.

  He stood, watching, as the metal legs were forcefully tightened to the body of the thing, the screws and nuts tightened with a spare efficiency. Then, as the boy grasped the heater, preparing to right it, Lenny spoke: ‘So, how’s your woman enjoying her new job?’

  The boy did not raise his face from his work. ‘She says she likes it.’

  ‘It’s a nice shop. Good to see something different in the town.’

  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.’