The Peacock Emporium(24)
“You don’t waste any time.”
“There’s no point in hanging around. Not if I’ve only got a year.”
He was evidently relishing this unusual intimacy, enjoying holding her close. She would have liked to sit down, but he seemed unwilling to let her go.
“It’s in one of those little lanes, the cobbled ones off the square. And it’s got a Georgian window at the front. Like the Olde Curiosity Shoppe.”
“You don’t want something like that. If you’re going to do it, do it properly, with a great big plate-glass window. Something people can see your stock through.”
“But it’s not going to be that sort of shop. I told you before. Look, come and see it before you say anything. I’ve got the estate agents’ number in my bag.”
“Now, there’s a surprise.”
“I might ring them now. Leave a message. Just to let them know I’m interested.” She could hear the excitement in her voice. It sounded strange to her, as if it came from somewhere else.
“Ring in the morning. It’s not going to go at eleven thirty at night.”
“I just want to get on with it.”
He squeezed her. He smelled of soap powder, and the slightly stale yet inoffensive human scent of the end of the day. “You know, Suze, we should go to this lunch. We’re fine. We’re earning again. You can tell them about your shop.”
“But not the baby stuff.”
“Not the baby stuff.”
“I don’t want to tell any of them about it. They’ll start going on about it, and Mum will get all excited and try to hide it, and then, if nothing happens, they’ll all be walking on eggshells, wondering whether they can say anything. So, no baby stuff.”
He spoke into her hair. “I bet Lucy hasn’t got baby stuff.”
“Neil, no.”
“Look, ring them in the morning. We’ll go, and we’ll be bloody cheerful and have a nice day.”
“We’ll pretend to have a nice day.”
“You might surprise yourself.”
She snorted. “I’d certainly do that.”
* * *
—
Surprisingly, considering it had been nearly eight months, that night they made love. Afterward Neil had become almost tearful and told her how much he really loved her, that he knew this meant everything was going to be all right.
Suzanna, lying in the dark, just able to make out the beamed ceiling she hated, had felt none of his sense of emotional release but rather a mild relief that they had done it. And a sneaking hope, which she was reluctant to admit even to herself, that she had earned herself a couple of months’ grace before she had to do it again.
7
Dere Hampton was usually described in tourist brochures as “Suffolk’s most beautiful market town,” with the Norman church and antique shops providing a lure for ambling tourists throughout the summer months, and the occasional stoic walkers in winter. Its older inhabitants referred to it simply as “Dere,” and its younger folk, who could usually be found on Friday nights drinking cheap cider and catcalling to each other in its market square, as “an effing dump, with nothing to do.” They were not being unreasonable. It was fair to say it was a town more in love with its history than its future, and even more so since it had filled with commuter families pushed out from London. Its tall, elegant, pastel-colored Georgian buildings stood dovetailed by Tudor houses, with tiny windows and beams, that lurched over the pavement like ships in high seas, all arranged in a haphazard network of narrow cobbled lanes and small courtyards that branched out from the square. It held at least two of nearly all the shops one might need—butcher, baker, newsstand, hardware store, and an increasing proliferation of those that one might not.
It had been almost two months before Suzanna realized what bothered her about the town most: that during working hours it was almost exclusively female. There were headscarved matrons in green waistcoats picking up roasts from butchers with whom they were on first-name terms, young mothers pushing prams, carefully coiffed women of a certain age seemingly doing nothing much more than killing time. But apart from those who worked in the shops, or tradesmen, or schoolboys, there were almost no men. They were presumably off on the predawn trains to the City, returning to cooked meals and long-lit houses after dark. It was, she muttered crossly to herself, as if she’d been transported back to the 1950s. She had lost count of the number of times she had been asked what her husband did and, almost a year on, was still waiting for that question to be directed to herself.
Although she would have protested initially that she had nothing in common with those women, she could see herself in the way they shopped, wandering around the town’s only department store with the measured gait of someone who had both money and time.
Suzanna was not sure what category her shop would fall into. As she sat, surrounded by boxes of stock, conscious that not only was her cash register still not working but that the electrician had failed to tell her which lightbulbs she needed for the spotlights, she was not sure that it was going to be a shop at all. Neil had rung twice to check whether she was certain she needed to buy quite so much stock in advance, while the water company had sent several letters demanding money even before she had opened.