The Peacock Emporium(20)

I stared at my fish for a moment, then looked up, my expression carefully blank. “Oh?”

Daddy snorted. “She’s bolted.”

“Who’s bolted?”

“Oh, Henry. That’s such an outdated term. Athene Forster. Sorry, Fairley-Hulme. She’s run off with some salesman from up north, of all things. Made the most awful mess of everything. The families are desperate to keep it out of the papers.”

It was as if she thought her words would no longer have an effect on me.

“I don’t read the papers.” My fish had turned to powder in my mouth. I forced myself to swallow, and took a sip of water. Tom, poor thing, was plowing through his food, oblivious. “How—how is Douglas?”

“Hoping she’ll come back, poor boy. He’s absolutely devastated.”

“Always looked like trouble, that one,” my father added.

Their voices had receded, and I wondered, briefly, if I might faint. Then I looked at Tom and, for the first time, noticed with mild revulsion that he kept his mouth open while he ate.

“Of course, her parents are absolutely furious. They’ve actually disinherited her. They’re telling everyone she’s gone abroad for a bit. I mean, it’s not as if she hadn’t pushed her luck before she married Douglas. She didn’t have any real friends, did she? Or much of a reputation, come to that.”

My mother shook her head pensively and swept nonexistent crumbs from the tablecloth. “Douglas’s parents have taken it very badly. It reflects awfully on everyone. The chap sold vacuum cleaners, door to door, would you believe? Vacuum cleaners. Poor Justine. I saw her at the Trevelyans’ bridge evening two weeks ago and it’s turned her quite gray.”

It was then that she must have seen my expression. She gave me a concerned stare, which turned into rather a hard one, and then she glanced at Tom. “Still, you don’t want us wittering on about people you don’t know, do you, Tom? Frightfully rude of me.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Tom. His mouth was still open.

“Yes. Well. Let’s think about pudding. Who’s for pudding? Anyone?” Her voice had risen almost an octave. She gave me another hard look, the kind that can only travel from mother to daughter.

I don’t think I heard another thing she said.

I didn’t go back home. Not then. But it wasn’t fair on Tom to continue seeing him. Not under the circumstances.





Part Two





6




2001


They always argued on the way to parties. Suzanna was never sure why, although she could always ascribe it to something: their lateness, his habit of waiting until the last minute to check that the back door was locked, her perpetual inability to find anything decent to wear. Perhaps it was anticipating the strain of being nice to each other for a whole evening. Or perhaps, she sometimes felt, it was just her way of ensuring that there would be no intimacy between them later, when they arrived home. Tonight, though, they had not argued. It was no great victory given they had traveled to the Brookes’s house separately. Neil arrived late from work via train and taxi, and when Suzanne had greeted him at the dinner table, her smile calcified on her face, and her jocular “We thought you weren’t coming” squeezed through gritted teeth.

“Ah. Have you met the other half of the Peacocks? Neil, isn’t it?” Their hostess, in her pearls, expensive but dated silk blouse, and Jaeger-style skirt, had shepherded him gently into his seat. Her clothes had told Suzanna everything she had needed to know about the night ahead. That she was about to be patronized, rather than admired, for her urban ways. That they had probably only been invited because of her parents.

“Got held up at a meeting,” Neil had said apologetically. “Why make an issue of it?” he whispered later, when she scolded him in the corridor. “No one else seems to think it matters.”

“It matters to me,” she had said, then forced a smile as her hostess stepped out of the living room and, tactfully avoiding looking too closely at them, asked whether anyone would like a top-up.

It had been a long evening, Neil covering his awkwardness with mildly inappropriate jocularity. Everyone else there had apparently known each other for some time, and slipped frequently into conversation about people she didn’t know, making repeated references to events from years past: the rained-off summer fete of two years ago, the primary-school teacher who ran off to Worcester with poor old Patricia Ainsley’s husband. Someone had heard she’d had a baby. Someone else had heard that Patricia Ainsley was now a Mormon. The room was overheated, so even before the main course was served Suzanna’s face had become flushed, and occasional beads of sweat ran down her spine, hidden by her overly fashionable shirt.

They all knew, she was sure of it. She felt that despite her smiles, her assurances that, yes, she was happy to be living in Dere Hampton again, that it was lovely having a bit more time on her hands, that it was good to be closer to one’s family, they must be able to tell she was lying. Her husband’s studied unhappiness—gamely making conversation with the opinionated vet—must radiate like a glowing neon sign floating above them. We’re Unhappy. And It’s My Fault.

Over the past year, she had become an expert at gauging the state of people’s marriages, and she recognized the women’s tense smiles, the barbed comments, the men’s blank expressions of withdrawal. Sometimes it made her feel better to see a couple who were obviously so much unhappier than they were, sometimes it made her feel sad, as if it proved that the simmering anger and disappointment were inevitable in everyone.