The Peacock Emporium(11)

“What?” Vivi couldn’t hide her sudden color.

“I was young once, you know.”

“I’m sure you were, Mummy. But I really have to go. I’ll say goodbye to Daddy on my way out.” With a promise to call, and a twinge of guilt at her mother’s hurt expression, Vivi turned and made her way across the room, managing to keep her face toward the doors. She understood her mother’s concern: she looked older now. Loss had etched new shadowy echoes of knowledge on her face, grief sharpening its once puddingy outline into planes. It was ironic, really, she mused, that she should start acquiring the characteristics she had so desired—slimness, a kind of jaded sophistication—through losing the very thing she had wanted them for.

And, despite being naturally home-loving, Vivi had done her best to return to her family as little as possible over the last few months. She had kept her telephone conversations brief, avoiding all references to anyone outside the family, had preferred to stay in touch with her parents through short, cheerful dispatches on jokey postcards, had insisted time after time that she couldn’t possibly come back for Daddy’s birthday, the village fete, the Fairley-Hulmes’ annual tennis party, pleading work commitments, tiredness, or an illusory round of social invitations. Instead, having found work in the offices of a fabric company a little way from Regent’s Park, she had thrown herself into her new career with a missionary zeal that left her employers astonished daily at her capacity for hard work, her babysitting families grateful for her perpetual availability, and Vivi frequently too exhausted, when she returned to her shared flat, to think. And this suited her just fine.

After the hunt ball, Vivi had realized that whenever she mentioned Douglas’s name with anything but sisterly interest her parents had gently steered her away from him, perhaps knowing even then that he had longings she could not fulfill. He had never given her any indication, after all, that his affection for her held anything more than the most innocent brotherly interest.

Now, having seen him look another way entirely, she had resigned herself to her fate. Not that she was going to have to find someone else, as her mother had repeatedly suggested. No, Vivi Newton now knew herself to be one of an unlucky minority: a girl who had lost the only man she would ever love, and who, having considered the alternatives carefully, had decided she would rather not settle for anyone else.

It was pointless telling her parents, who would fuss, protest, and assure her that she was far too young to make such a decision, but she knew she would never marry. It was not that she was so hurt she could never love again (although hurt she had been—she still found it difficult to sleep without her “little helpers,” prescription benzodiazepine) or, indeed, that she had some idea of herself as a doomed romantic heroine. Vivi had just concluded, in the fairly straightforward manner that she concluded most things, that she would rather live alone with her loss than spend a lifetime trying to make someone else match up.

She had dreaded this trip, had considered a thousand times what legitimate excuse she could find for not coming. She had spoken to Douglas only once, when he had arranged to meet her in London, and found his patent happiness and what she could only imagine to be his new air of sexual confidence almost unbearable. Heedless of her discomfort, he had held her hands and made her promise that she would come: “You’re my oldest friend, Vee. I really want you there on the day. You’ve got to be there. Come on, be a sport.”

So she had gone home, cried for several days, and then been a sport. She had smiled when she had wanted to wail and beat her breasts like women in Greek tragedies, and pull the brocade drapes and wedding banners from their hangings, and scratch that awful, awful girl’s face and take swings at her head, her hands, her heart to destroy whatever it was about her that Douglas loved most. And then, shocked that she was capable of thinking such dark thoughts about any human being (she had once cried for an entire afternoon after accidentally killing a rabbit), she had smiled again. She was hoping against hope that if she presented a peaceable front for long enough, if she kept persuading herself to keep living a seemingly normal life, one day at a time, some of her apparent equilibrium might become real.



* * *



—

Athene’s mother had caught her daughter smoking on the stairs. Dressed in her bridal gown, legs splayed, puffing away like a charlady on a cigarette she had solicited from one of the bar staff. She informed her husband of this discovery in quietly outraged tones. “Well, she’s not my responsibility now, Justine.” Colonel Forster leaned back on his gilt chair, and tamped tobacco into his pipe, refusing to look his wife in the face, as if she too was complicit in this indiscretion. “We’ve done our duty by the girl.”

His wife stared at him for a moment, then turned to Douglas, who had been swilling a brandy in his hand. “You do understand what you’ve taken on?” Her tone suggested that her daughter had not been forgiven for her earlier indiscretion.

“The finest girl in all England, as far as I’m concerned.” Douglas, full of alcohol, bonhomie, and sexual anticipation, felt magnanimous, even to his sour-faced in-laws. He had been remembering the night he had asked her to marry him, a day that separated the two lives of Douglas into a kind of Before and After Athene. It was less the marking of some rite of passage than a fundamental shift in who he was. To him, now, a married man, that day seemed to signify a crossing-over: a vast leap across a divide that had seen him on one side as someone searching, tentatively trying out new attitudes and opinions, new ways to be, and on the other marked simply as a Man. Athene had bestowed that upon him. He felt like a rock to her shifting, mercurial self, her separateness bestowing on him a sense of solidity, of surety. She crept up him like ivy, clinging and beautiful, a welcome, parasitic sprite. He had known from the night he first saw her that she was meant for him: she had prompted an ache, an unexpected sense that something was lacking, that some fundamental part of him was, without him having previously known it, unfulfilled. She made him think like that, lyrically, fatalistically. He had not known such words were even in his vocabulary. Previously when he had considered marriage it had been with a kind of moribund expectation: it was the thing that one did when one found a suitable girl. It would be expected of him and, as usual, Douglas would fulfill those expectations. But she had stood in the elevator of the London restaurant where they had just eaten, and, heedless of the people queuing behind them, she had wedged her childlike feet in the lift doors and, laughing breathlessly—as if, when the words had bubbled unexpectedly out of his trembling mouth, he had suggested something extraordinarily amusing—had said yes. Why not? What fun. They had kissed then, joyfully, greedily, as the lift doors trundled back and forth in a frenzy of thwarted purpose, and the queue of people behind them had grown, muttered crossly, and eventually taken the stairs. And he had realized that his life was no longer on some predestined course, but had been diverted by fantastic possibility.