Peacock Emporium

by Jojo Moyes

  But, then, the last time she had come she hadn’t been thinking about her surroundings. She stood for several minutes, trying frantically to work out which entrance to use, frustrated at her lack of visual memory, her failure to work out which had been Alejandro’s flat. He had lived on the ground floor, she knew, so she walked over the grass and stared in at several windows, trying to see through the net curtains that appeared to be standard issue in the block.

  The third flat she had peered into looked like it might be his. She could just make out the G-plan sofa, the white walls, the beech table. But the emptiness of the flat and the poor visibility caused by the net curtains made it impossible for her to tell if anyone was living there now.

  ‘Why the hell are there so many bloody net curtains?’ she muttered.

  ‘To stop people looking through the windows,’ said a voice behind her.

  Suzanna blushed. Two nurses, one red-headed, one West Indian, were beside her.

  ‘You’d be surprised how excited some people get at the idea of a building full of nurses,’ said the black woman.

  ‘I’m not a peeping—’

  ‘Are you lost?’ she said.

  ‘I’m looking for someone. A man.’

  She caught their amused response, saw that she was a nanosecond away from a bad joke. ‘A specific man. He works here.’

  ‘This is a female block.’

  ‘But you had one man here. A midwife. Alejandro de Marenas. Argentinian?’

  The nurses exchanged glances. ‘Oh . . . him.’

  Suzanna could feel herself being assessed, as if her association with Alejandro had put her in a new light.

  ‘That’s his flat, all right, but I don’t think he’s there. He’s not been around for a while, has he?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘The foreign ones don’t last long,’ said the West Indian woman. ‘They get all the crappy shifts.’

  ‘And they get lonely,’ said the Irish girl. ‘Yeah.’ She looked at Suzanna, her expression unreadable. ‘I’m not sure if he was lonely.’

  Suzanna blinked furiously, daring herself to collapse in front of these women. ‘Is there anyone who would know? Whether he’d gone, I mean.’

  ‘Try Admin,’ said the Irish girl.

  ‘Or Personnel. Fourth floor of the main block.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Suzanna, hating the girls for their knowing looks. ‘Thank you very much.’ She fled.

  The woman in Personnel had been courteous but wary, as if it was not unusual for her to be confronted by people demanding to know where her staff had disappeared to. ‘We’ve had a few cases where foreign nurses have run up considerable debts while they were here,’ she said, in explanation. ‘Sometimes the ones that come from third-world countries get a bit carried away with the lifestyle.’

  ‘He doesn’t owe me any money,’ said Suzanna. ‘He doesn’t owe anyone money. I just – I just really need to know where he is.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re not able to give out personal staff details.’ ‘I have his details. I just need to know if he’s still around.’

  ‘And that would be a hospital employment matter.’

  Suzanna tried to regulate her breathing. ‘Look, he was meant to give evidence at an inquest this morning into The death of a local girl at my shop. I need to know why he wasn’t there.’

  ‘Then you’d have to speak to the police,’ she said.

  ‘He’s a friend.’

  ‘They always are.’

  ‘Look,’ Suzanna said, ‘please. If you want me to humiliate myself, I will—’

  ‘No one’s asking you to humiliate yourself—’

  ‘I love him, okay? I didn’t tell him when I should have told him, and I’m afraid it’s too late, and I need to tell him before he leaves. Because I’ll never find him in Argentina. Ever. I wouldn’t even know where to find it on a map.’

  The woman was staring at her now.

  ‘I don’t even know if it’s near Patagonia, or Puerto Rico or what. I just know it’s got lots of cows, and drinks that taste like twigs and water, and horrible mean fish and that it’s really, really big, and if he leaves here I haven’t got a hope of finding him. I don’t know if I’d be brave enough to try. Please. Please just let me know if he’s still here.’

  The woman gazed at Suzanna for a minute, then moved to the back of her office and pulled a file from a bulging drawer. She stood over it, reading carefully, too far away for Suzanna to see its pages. ‘We’re not allowed by law to reveal the personal details of staff files. What I can tell you is that he’s no longer an employee of the hospital,’ she said.

  ‘So he no longer works for you?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘So you can tell me where he is. If he no longer works for you, he’s no longer staff.’

  ‘Nice try,’ said the woman. ‘Look, you could try his agency. They’re the people who brought him over and placed him with us in the first place.’ She scribbled a number on a piece of paper and handed it to Suzanna.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Suzanna. It was a London number. There was a chance that he had another job there.

  ‘And it’s next to Uruguay.’ ‘What?’

  ‘Argentina. It’s next to Brazil and Uruguay.’

  The woman, smiling to herself, turned away from the counter and headed back towards her filing.

  Arturro hadn’t seen him. He asked the three young assistants, who shook their heads theatrically, then continued their graceful lobbing of large pieces of Stilton, jars of quince paste and pesto – having nominated her, in otherwise gratifying circumstances, as an eight point three. Arturro hadn’t seen him for over a week. Neither had Mrs Creek, nor Liliane, nor Father Lenny, nor the woman who ran the antiques stall, nor the thin man who ran the Coffee Cup, nor the assistants at the café by the garage where he had once been known to get a newspaper.

  ‘About six foot? Quite tanned? Dark-haired?’ she said to a nurse outside the newsagent’s, just on the off-chance.

  ‘Shove him my way if you find him.’ She smirked.

  When it started to get dark, Suzanna went home.

  ‘Are you all packed?’ said Vivi, handing her a cup of tea. ‘Lucy rang to say she’ll be here at midday tomorrow. I was wondering whether you’d mind having a little sit with Rosemary before you left. It would mean a lot to her, you know.’

  Suzanna was on the sofa, wondering whether it was madness to head to Heathrow now. The local airport didn’t do flights to Argentina, and Heathrow wouldn’t give out names on their passenger list. It was a matter of security, apparently. ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, and you know you said you couldn’t get any reply from that number earlier?’ said Vivi. ‘Well, they called back. A nursing agency, they said. Is that who you wanted? I didn’t think it could be right.’

  Suzanna leapt up and snatched the piece of paper from her mother’s hand. ‘It is right,’ she said.

  ‘A nursing agency?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you, thank you.’ She threw herself along the sofa towards the telephone table, heedless of her mother’s bemused look.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever understand that girl,’ said Vivi, in the kitchen, as she peeled potatoes for the shepherd’s pie.

  ‘What’s she done now?’ Rosemary was staring at an old gardening book. She had evidently forgotten the name of the plant she had planned to look up, but had become pleasurably lost in the pictures.

  ‘I thought she was going to Australia. Now, apparently, she’s thinking about being a nurse.’

  ‘What?’ Rosemary spluttered into her wine.

  ‘A nurse.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to be a nurse!’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But she’s on the phone to an agency. Seems to be taking it all terribly seriously.’ Vivi leant over and refilled Rosemary’s glass. ‘I don’t know, things are changing so fast around here. I can hardly keep up.’

  ‘She’ll be a bloody awful one,’ s
aid Rosemary. ‘Awful. First bedpan she has to deal with she’ll be off like a rat up a drainpipe.’

  The man at the agency was very nice. Almost too nice. But Alejandro de Marenas had signed off their books two weeks previously. Having paid their ‘introduction fee’, he was under no obligation to keep in touch. He was probably back in Argentina. The average stay in England was under a year for midwifery. The only ones who tended to stick around were from the poorer countries and, as far as he could remember, Mr de Marenas was relatively well off. ‘I’ll take your number, if you like,’ he said. ‘If he contacts us again I can keep it on file for him. Are you NHS?’

  ‘No,’ she said, staring at the feather in her hand. They were bad luck. She’d just remembered. You weren’t meant to keep them in your house because they were bad luck. ‘Thanks, but no,’ she whispered. And then, finally, her head dropping gently on to the telephone, she wept.

  It was almost nine thirty, and the slight increase in pedestrians that constituted Dere Hampton’s rush hour was easing, as the last of the shops opened and the trailing mothers returned home from the school run.

  Suzanna stood in the Peacock Emporium for the last time. The windows were in place, their frames freshly painted, a sign advertising next week’s one-day closing-down sale. ‘All stock half price or less,’ it said in bold black letters. That was the left-hand side, though. The right-hand window would fulfil a different purpose.

  She checked her watch, noting that Lucy would be here in two and a half hours. She had only invited a few people, Arturro and Liliane, Father Lenny, Mrs Creek, those who could be considered to have had daily contact with Jessie, those to whom the elements might mean something, might add to their memory of her.

  She stood behind the window of her shop, looking out through the gauze curtain she had placed there that morning, an uncomfortable reminder of the net curtains of the days before, watching as they stood in a little huddle. She had wondered whether this was the right time to do it, but Father Lenny, the only one who had known her plan, had said it was exactly the right time for it. He had been at previous inquests. He had known that after a death there were images, words, that should be blocked out, painted over with something sweeter.

  ‘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 sh
e 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.