The Peacock Emporium(110)

As soon as Athene had left, Vivi had returned to Dere. Not in the hope of snaring him: she had always known that he wanted Athene back, that he would never countenance anyone else while the possibility remained. But she had adored him since they were children, and felt that at least she could be something of a support.

“I had to listen to a lot of stories of how much he loved your mother,” she said matter-of-factly, “but he needed help. He couldn’t look after a baby. Not with everything he had to do. And, to begin with, his parents weren’t terribly . . .”—she was trying to find an appropriate word—“. . . helpful.” Two months after Athene’s death, he had asked Vivi to marry him.

She pushed her hair off her face.

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you the truth earlier. For a long time we all believed we were protecting your father. He had suffered so much humiliation, and so much pain. And then—I don’t know—perhaps we thought we were protecting you. There wasn’t the same emphasis then on everyone knowing everything as there is now.” She shrugged. “We just did what we thought was best.”

Suzanna was crying, had been for several minutes.

Tentatively Vivi lifted a hand toward her. “I’m so sorry.”

“But you must have hated me,” Suzanna said, sobbing.

“What?”

“All that time I was in the way, always a reminder of her.”

Vivi, finally filled with a kind of courage, put her arms around her and held her tight. “Don’t be silly, darling,” she said. “I loved you. Almost more than my own children.”

Suzanna’s eyes were bleary with tears. “I don’t understand.”

Vivi held her daughter’s too-thin shoulders, and tried to impart something of what she felt. Her voice, when it came, was determined, and uncharacteristically certain: “I loved you because you were the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen,” she said, and hugged her fiercely. “I loved you because none of this was ever your fault. I loved you because from the moment I set eyes on you I couldn’t not love you.” She paused, her own eyes now filled with tears. “And in some small way, Suzanna, I loved you because without you, dearest, dearest child, I would never have had him.”

Later, when she had extricated herself from Suzanna’s arms, Vivi told her how her mother had really died, and Suzanna cried again, for Emma, for Alejandro, and, most of all, for Athene, for whose death she hadn’t been responsible after all.





24


The first night that Suzanna Fairley-Hulme spent with her family was the scene of huge upheaval on the Dere estate, of high emotion and sleeplessness, of anxiety, and barely hidden fear. Moved from the surroundings in which she had spent her first months, from everything and everyone she had known, one might have expected her to have been rather unsettled, but she slept peacefully from dusk until almost seven thirty the following morning. It was the new adults in her life who achieved only a few moments’ sleep.

Rosemary Fairley-Hulme, who had become accustomed to her son’s restored presence in the family house, had panicked when he didn’t arrive home by late evening, and even more so when she realized that neither she nor her husband had any idea where he had spent the day. She had paced the creaking floorboards until midnight, glancing out of the windows in the vain hope of seeing twin headlights coming slowly up the drive. The housekeeper, roused from her bed, told Rosemary that she had seen Mr. Douglas take a taxi to the station at ten o’clock that morning. The stationmaster, when she got Cyril to ring him, said he had been wearing his good suit.

That was the point at which they had rung Vivi, hoping against hope that although their son appeared to pay her no more heed than the furniture when she came to Dere House several times a week, perhaps just this once, he had taken her into town.

“Gone?” said Vivi, and felt a lurch of fear when she understood that her Douglas, the one who had spent the past months weeping privately on her shoulder, confiding his darkest feelings about his wife’s departure, had been keeping something from her.

Vivi had rushed over to the estate, unsure whether she was more afraid that he was lying injured in a ditch or that his disappearance was linked to the reappearance of someone else. He still loved Athene, she knew it. She had been forced to hear him say it often enough over the past months. But that had been bearable when she could believe that his feelings had been dying, like the embers of a fire—one that, now that she had heard all the details, she had not thought would be restoked.

Between the hours of midnight and dawn, split into small groups, armed with flashlights, they had combed the estate, in case he had walked home drunk and fallen into a ditch. A lad had done this several years previously and drowned; the memory of finding that body facedown in several inches of stagnant water haunted Cyril still.

“He’s not drunk much since the first weeks,” he said, as they strode along, bumping gently against each other in the moonlight. “The boy’s past the worst. Much more himself.”

“He’ll be at a friend’s, Mr. Fairley-Hulme. I’ll wager he’s had a few and stayed in London for the night.” The gamekeeper took a sanguine view of the affair and he had remarked four times now that boys would be boys.

“Might have headed over to Larkside,” muttered one of the lads. “Most end up at Larkside one time or another.”