The Peacock Emporium(107)

“I want you to tell me.”

“Darling, I—”

“Here. Now. Right now. I just want to know,” said Suzanna. There was a kind of desperation in her eyes, and a crack of something sadder and stranger in her voice than Vivi had ever heard before.

Vivi eased herself carefully along the tea chest, motioning to her daughter to occupy the empty half. “All right, Suzanna,” she said. “You’d better sit down.”



* * *



—

The call had come when he had least expected it, on one of the few occasions that he had returned to the house that he had, for two short years, called home. He had walked into the echoing hall in search of his tweed jacket, trying not to think too hard about his surroundings, when the telephone on the hall table had sprung shrilly into life. He had stared at it for several seconds, then moved tentatively forward. No one else would ring him there. Everyone knew he no longer lived there.

“Douglas?” the voice had said, and at that low, heartbreaking enquiry, he found he had lost the ability to stand.

“Where are you?” he had asked, dropping onto the hall chair.

It was as if he hadn’t spoken. “I’ve been trying to get you for weeks,” she said. “You are an impossible gadabout.” As if they had been two people flirting at a party. As if she hadn’t broken him, pierced his heart, and turned his future, his life, to dust.

He swallowed hard. “It’s haymaking. Long days. You know.”

“I thought you must have gone to Italy after all,” she said lightly. “To escape this rotten English weather.” Her voice sounded odd, offset by traffic, as if she was in a telephone box. “Isn’t it awful? Don’t you just hate it?”

He had imagined this moment for so long, had rehearsed so many arguments, apologies, reconciliations in his head, and now she was at the other end of the line. It was as much as he could do to breathe.

“Douglas?”

He noted that his hand was trembling against his leg. “I’ve missed you,” he croaked.

There was the briefest pause.

“Douglas, darling, I can’t talk long, but I need to meet you.”

“Come home,” he said. “Come here.” She had replied sweetly that, if he didn’t mind, she would really rather not. In London, perhaps? Somewhere they could talk privately?

“Huntley’s fish restaurant,” he had suggested, his mind stuttering into life. It had booths, where they could talk virtually unobserved.

“Aren’t you clever, darling?” she had said, apparently unconscious of the way a phrase, so easily discarded, could fan the flames of hope. Huntley’s it was. Thursday.

Now, four interminable days later, he sat in the booth at the back of the restaurant. It was the most discreet in the place, he had been assured by a waiter who had winked at him impertinently, as if he were on some assignation. “It’s for my wife,” Douglas had said coldly, and the waiter had said, “Of course, sir, of course it is.”

He had got there almost half an hour early, had walked past the restaurant several times, willing himself to resist the temptation to go in, knowing that the builders on the scaffolding above probably thought him unhinged. But there was a part of him that feared he might miss her, that fate would intervene and uncross their paths, so he bought a newspaper and sat there by himself, trying to stop his palms sweating, and wishing he could make the slightest sense of the newsprint in front of him.

Outside, girls flashed past in brief skirts, their brightly colored coats incongruous against the grays of London skies and pavement, incurring muffled catcalls. He felt briefly reassured that she had agreed to meet him here, a place where his suit didn’t feel provincial, “straight,” in modern lingo, a place where he didn’t have to feel like an amalgam of all the things she had chafed against.

“Anything to drink, sir, while you’re waiting?”

“No. Actually, yes. Just some water, please.” He glanced toward the door, as it opened to allow in yet another slim dark woman. The bloody restaurant seemed to cater to no other kind of customer.

“Ice and lemon, sir?”

Douglas shook his paper with irritation. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” he snapped, “however it comes . . . will be fine,” he said, collecting himself. He smoothed his hair back from his face, adjusted his tie, and tried to regulate his breathing.

He hadn’t told his parents he was coming—he had known what his mother’s response would be. She had refused to allow Athene’s name to be spoken in the house since the day he had told of her departure. He had moved back home several months previously, leaving the Philmore House like the Mary Celeste, exactly as she had left it, down to the ashtray she had filled with her lipsticked cigarette butts. The staff were on strict instructions not to change a thing.

Not till he knew.

Not till he knew for sure.

“Actually,” he said to the waiter, as he arrived bearing a glass of water on a silver tray, “get me a brandy, would you? A large one.”

The waiter had looked at him for a second longer than suggested completely deferential service. “Whatever you say, sir,” he had said, and was gone.

She had been late, as he had known she would be. He had finished that brandy and another in the half hour that crept by after their allotted meeting time. When he looked up from the newspaper to see her before him, the alcohol had already started to blur the edges of his anxiety.