The Peacock Emporium(113)





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Six months to the day after Suzanna had arrived, Rosemary had telephoned shortly before breakfast. She knew Vivi had been planning to go to town, but could she possibly take Suzanna for the day? she said, her voice brusque.

“Of course, Rosemary,” said Vivi, mentally rewriting her plans. “Is there a problem?”

“There’s been . . . it’s . . .”

Afterward Vivi realized that, even then, Rosemary had been reluctant to say her name.

“We’ve had a call. It’s all a bit difficult.” She paused. “Athene has . . . has passed away.” There was a stunned silence. Vivi’s breath stuck in her throat. She was sorry, she said, but wasn’t sure what Rosemary had just told her.

“She’s dead, Vivi. We’ve had a call from the Forsters.” It was as if each time she said it, Rosemary gained a little more confidence, until eventually she could be matter-of-fact about it.

Vivi sat down heavily on the hall chair, heedless of her mother, who, in her dressing-gown, was trying to gauge what was going on. Are you all right, darling? she kept mouthing, stooping in an attempt to meet her daughter’s eyes.

Athene would not be coming back. She would not be returning to take Douglas and Suzanna away from her. Stunned as she was, Vivi saw that her shock was tinged with something uncomfortably close to elation.



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Douglas had mourned for two months, revealing a level of grief that many around him felt excessive, considering his wife had bolted more than a year previously and everyone knew she had taken up with another man.

Vivi didn’t. She didn’t dwell on Athene’s death, finding it impossible to settle on the right balance of sympathy and disapproval, so instead focused on Suzanna, as if she could atone for her mean-spirited thoughts by flooding the child with love. She had taken sole charge of the child for weeks now, finding that without the threat of Athene’s return, an almost shocking amount of it poured from herself into the now motherless child.

Suzanna seemed to respond to Vivi’s uninhibited affection and became even sunnier than she had been before, placing her soft, cushioned cheek against hers, wrapping fat starfish fingers around her own. Vivi would arrive shortly after seven thirty, and take the child for long walks around the estate, removing her from Douglas’s grief, which hung over the house like a dark cloud, and from the whispered conversations of his parents and the servants, all of whom seemed to consider Suzanna’s presence a problem of some pressing urgency.

“We can’t get rid of her now,” she had heard Rosemary saying to Cyril, as she passed the study. “We’ve told everyone the child is Douglas’s.”

“The child is Douglas’s,” Cyril had said. “He’ll have to decide what he wants to do with her. Tell the boy to pull himself together. He’s got decisions to make.”



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They were clearing Philmore House. The home that had remained a shrine to Athene—whose wardrobes still bulged with her dresses—had fallen into Rosemary’s list of responsibilities. Douglas and Suzanna were now firmly ensconced in Dere House. And Rosemary, who had long itched to remove the physical evidence of “that girl” from the estate, had taken advantage of her son’s newly passive state to deal with it.

Vivi stood on the brow of the hill, holding her hat on her head as she watched the men come out, bearing armfuls of brightly colored dresses and laying them on the front lawn, while the women, kneeling on rugs and braced against the chill, sorted through bags and boxes of jewelry and cosmetics, exclaiming among themselves at their quality.

For someone who had professed herself so unconcerned with belongings, Athene had had a prodigious amount of things—not just dresses, coats, and shoes but records, pictures, lamps, beautiful things bought in haste and discarded, or received as gifts that had been soon forgotten.

“Anything you want to take, help yourselves. All the rest into a pile to be burned.” She heard Rosemary’s voice, clear and commanding, perhaps lifting with the restoration of her own domain, and watched as she marched back inside to bring out yet another box. She wondered if she felt the same small thrill of excitement at Athene’s final, enforced removal. A small, mean thrill that she was hardly able to admit to herself.

“You don’t want any of this, do you?” Rosemary called, catching sight of Vivi as she walked over slowly, pushing Suzanna’s pram.

Vivi glanced at Athene’s going-away suit, the beaded slippers she had worn at that first hunt ball, now lying in a heap by the geranium border, occasionally stirring in the stiff breeze. “No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

Athene’s own parents had wanted nothing. Vivi had heard her parents discussing it when they thought she wasn’t listening. The Forsters had been so embarrassed by their daughter’s behavior, so keen to distance themselves from her even in death. They had had her cremated in a closed ceremony, had not even put an announcement in The Times, Mrs. Newton had said, in a shocked whisper. And they had not wanted to meet their own grandchild.

Vivi wheeled Suzanna slowly through the piles of belongings, stooping forward to make sure the sleeping baby was shielded from the wind. She winced as she caught sight of a drawerful of Athene’s undergarments, diaphanous pieces of lace and silk, items that spoke of nights of whispered secrets, of unknown pleasures, now exposed and discarded. As if there was no part of her that deserved to remain sacrosanct.

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