The Peacock Emporium(123)

They were quiet for a moment, conscious of a gap widened by years of silence, hard words, and misunderstanding, of the ghost that would always come between them. “Maybe we’ll visit. When you’re in Australia,” he said. He was now close enough so their arms rested against each other. “Your mother has always fancied a bit of foreign travel. And I wouldn’t want to go too long—without seeing you, I mean.”

“No,” said Suzanna, allowing the warmth of him to seep into her. “Me neither.”



* * *



—

She found Vivi in the picture gallery, staring at the portrait.

“Are you going to your shop?”

My shop, thought Suzanna. It no longer felt like the right phrase to describe it. “I’m going to pick up the last of my clothes from Neil’s first. I think it’s fairer on him to do it while he’s out.”

“Just clothes?”

“A few books. My jewelry. I’m going to leave the rest.” She frowned. “Will you keep an eye on him while I’m gone?”

Vivi nodded.

She had probably already decided as much, Suzanna thought. “I’m not completely heartless. I do care about him, you know,” she said. She would have liked to add, I want him to be happy. But she was glad that she wouldn’t be around to witness that. Her selflessness didn’t stretch that far.

“Will you be happy?”

Suzanna thought of Australia, an unknown continent on the other side of the world. She thought of her own tiny world, of what had once been her shop. Of Alejandro. “Happier than I have been,” she said, unable to explain quite what she felt. “Definitely happier.”

“That’s a start.”

“I suppose it is.”

Suzanna stepped forward, and they stood side by side, gazing up at the gilt-edged painting. “She should be here,” said Vivi. “If it’s all right by you, Suzanna dear, I shall probably be on that wall opposite. Your father, silly old fool, thinks I should be up there too.”

Suzanna wrapped her arm around Vivi’s waist. “You know what? I’m not sure it shouldn’t just be you. It might look a bit odd otherwise. And that frame of hers doesn’t really go with the surroundings.”

“Oh, no, darling. Athene has a right. She has to have her place too.”

Suzanna was transfixed briefly by the glittering eyes of the woman in the portrait. “You’ve always been so good,” she said, “looking after all of us.”

“Goodness has nothing to do with it,” said Vivi. “It’s just the way we were made—I was made.”

Then Suzanna turned from the portrait to the woman who loved her, who had always loved her. “Thanks, Mum,” she said.

“Oh, by the way,” Vivi said, as they made their way toward the stairs, “something came for you while you were out. It was delivered by the most extraordinary old man. He kept smiling at me as if he knew me.”

“An old man?”

Vivi was examining the wood of a table, rubbing at its surface with a fingertip. “Oh, yes. Well into his sixties. Foreign-looking chap with a mustache. No one I’ve seen in town.”

“What was it?”

“He wouldn’t explain who it was from. But it’s a plant. Roscoea purpurea, I think it is.”

Suzanna stared at her mother. “A plant? Are you sure it’s for me?”

“Perhaps it’s from one of your customers. Anyway, it’s in the utility room.” She walked down the stairs, then called over her shoulder, “We used to know it as the peacock eye. Not one of my favorites, I must admit. I’ll give it to Rosemary if you don’t want it.” With a noise that sounded like a gasp, Suzanna almost pushed past her mother and ran down the stairs.





27


She had thought she knew almost all there was to know about Jessie. Now, an hour and a half into the inquest, she learned that the late Jessica Mary Carter had been exactly five feet two and a half inches tall, that she had had her appendix and her tonsils removed more than ten years previously, that she had a birthmark on her lower back, and that the index finger on her left hand had been broken at least three times, the last time relatively recently. Among her other injuries, many of which Suzanna had chosen not to listen to, there were bruises that could not be explained by the events of the night of her death. She didn’t sound like Jessie: she sounded like an amalgam of physical elements, of skin and bone and catalogued damage. That was what was so disturbing: not that there were so many injuries she hadn’t known about, but that nothing of her essence was there at all.

Inside the court, Jessie’s friends and relatives who had braved the inquest, some because they still could not accept that she was gone, others because they were secretly enjoying being part of the biggest thing that had happened to Dere Hampton since the 1996 pet-shop fire, murmured among themselves, or wept silently into handkerchiefs, cowed by the occasion. Suzanna shifted in her seat, trying to look from the edge of the public gallery to the other door. She had to fight the suspicion that he was, at this moment, sitting outside on the bench with Cath Carter’s chain-smoking sisters. It would be disrespectful to keep leaving the courtroom to check.

He hadn’t been there when she arrived, and he had not been there when she had left the court twenty minutes previously to visit the ladies’ room. But as the sole witness to the event, he would have to give evidence.