The Peacock Emporium(22)
There was a prolonged silence. He didn’t usually give up this easily, and it made Suzanna uneasy.
Neil turned off the main road on to an unlit lane, his lights flicking on to full beam, sending rabbits fleeing into the hedgerows.
“Let me take on the shop.” She said it without looking at him, facing straight ahead, so that she didn’t have to see his reaction.
She heard his deep sigh. “We haven’t got the money. You know we haven’t.”
“I’m sure I can make a go of it.” She added, hopefully, “I’ve been thinking. We can sell my painting to make the deposit.”
“Suze, we’ve just got out of debt. We can’t afford to go dropping ourselves back in it.”
She faced him. “I know you’re not keen, but I need this, Neil. I need something to occupy me. Something of my own. Something that isn’t bloody coffee mornings and village gossip and my bloody family.”
He said nothing.
“It will really help me.” Her voice had become pleading, conciliatory. Its fervency surprised even her. “It will help us.”
Perhaps it was something in her tone. He pulled over and gazed at her. Outside, a mist was descending.
“Give me a year,” she said, and took one of his hands. “Give me a year, and if it’s not working, I’ll have a baby.”
He looked stunned. “But if it is working—”
“I’ll still have a baby. But at least then I’ll have something else. I won’t turn into one of them.” She gestured behind her, referring to the other women at dinner, who had spent a good part of the evening comparing grisly tales of birth and breastfeeding, or talking about the awfulness of other people’s children with veiled contempt.
“Ah. The neo-natal Nazis.”
“Neil—”
“You really mean it?”
“Yes. Please, I just think it will make me a bit happier. You want that, don’t you?”
“You know I do. I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy.”
When he looked at her like that, she could still occasionally garner a fleeting glimpse of how she used to feel about him: allied to someone for whom you felt not irritation or dull resentment, but gratitude and anticipation, and a lingering sexual hunger. He was still handsome. She could look at him and see that he was the type who would age well.
In moments like this, she could just remember what it had felt like for them to be close.
“You don’t have to sell your painting. It’s too personal. And it would be better to hold on to it, keep it as an investment.”
“I don’t think I could cope with you working longer hours than you do already.” It was not living without him that frightened her, but how good she was getting at it.
“I didn’t mean that.” He cocked his head to one side, blue eyes softened and considerate. “You could always ask your father for money. For the deposit. He always said he’d put some by for you.”
He had broken the spell. Suzanna removed her hand from his, and shifted so that, once again, she faced away from him. “I’m not going through all that again. We’ve had to take enough from him already. And I don’t want his money.”
* * *
—
At first they hadn’t thought of it as debt: they were simply living as everyone did, a short distance beyond their means. Double income, no kids. They adopted a lifestyle they believed they deserved. They bought huge matching suede sofas, spent weekends with like-minded friends at noisy West End restaurants, felt entitled to “treat themselves” for the most minor disappointment. Suzanna, cushioned by Neil’s income, and the fact that both of them secretly liked her spending more time at home, took a succession of part-time jobs: working in a women’s clothes shop, driving for a friend who opened a florist, selling specialized wooden toys. None captured her imagination enough to make her want to stay, to deprive herself of morning coffee with girlfriends at pavement cafés, time spent browsing, or the pleasure of cooking elaborate meals. Then, seemingly overnight, everything had changed. Neil had lost his job at the bank, replaced by someone he described afterward as the Ball-Breaking He-Woman from Hell. His sense of humor had vanished, along with their cash flow.
And Suzanna had started shopping.
At first she had done it just to get out of the flat. Alternating between petulant outrage and miserable self-loathing, he became the worst of himself. So she had left him to it, and cheered herself up with expensive soaps, ready meals, the odd bunch of flowers. She told herself she deserved it, her sense of entitlement sharpened by Neil’s filthy temper.
She persuaded herself that there were things they needed, such as new bed linens, matching curtains, antique glass.
It was only a short stop from there to her own personal makeover. She couldn’t possibly get a new job with her existing wardrobe; her hair needed cutting and highlighting; the stress of Neil’s job had left her skin in desperate need of specialist facials.
It had made her feel better at first, gave her purpose, and filled a need. But even as she spent, she knew she had been infected by a kind of madness, that the brightly lit interiors and rows of cashmere sweaters, the fawning shop assistants and beautifully packaged boxes, were increasingly less effective at diverting her attention from the looming reality at home. She gleaned little satisfaction from her acquisitions: the initial rush of the purchase would wear off faster and faster so that she would sit at home, surrounded by crisp shopping bags, blinking in bemusement or, occasionally, weeping after she had felt brave enough to calculate what she had spent. She became an early riser, always up in time for the postman.