The Peacock Emporium(25)

For someone so recently haunted by debt, Suzanna was unworried by any of this. For the weeks that she had held the keys, she had just enjoyed being there, slowly turning the image she had held for the past months into a reality. She had loved traveling around to investigate possible suppliers, at trade exhibitions or tiny backrooms behind London’s Oxford Street, meeting young designers eager to showcase their works, or more established ones who could talk her through years of trade. She loved having a purpose, being able to talk about “my shop,” to make decisions based upon her own taste, choosing only what she thought beautiful and unusual.

And then there was the shop itself. The exterior had been given a fresh lick of white paint and the interior was slowly taking shape, nudged along by visits from local plumbers, carpenters, and her own amateur ability with a paintbrush. She knew they thought her picky and overdeliberate, but the decisions as to where things should go were complicated because it was not going to be a conventional shop. It was, instead, a mixture of things: a coffee room, for which the back wall held an old church pew, several tables and chairs, and a reconditioned Italian coffee machine. It was a secondhand shop, offering a few disparate items simply because she liked the look of them. It had some clothes, some jewelry, some pictures, some ornaments. It had some modern things. And that was about as specific as it got.

She had begun to place a variety of objects in the window. Initially, to make it look inhabited, she had put some of the more beautiful things she had bought during her “shopping” phase and never been able to use: brightly beaded bags, oversized glass rings, an antique picture frame with a modern abstract print. When the stock came, she had felt unwilling to alter her arrangement, so she had simply added to it: beautiful concentric circles of Indian bangles, old dresser drawers full of glowing metallic pens, spice bottles with silver lids in a variety of colors.

“It’s like a sort of doll’s house. Maybe an Aladdin’s cave,” Neil had said, when he had dropped by at the weekend. “It looks very—erm—pretty. But are you sure people are going to understand what it is you’re about?”

“What does it have to be about?”

“Well, what kind of shop is it going to be?”

“My kind of shop,” she said, and enjoyed his look of confusion.

Suzanna was creating something that was entirely her vision, diluted by no husband or partner. Free to do whatever she wanted, she found herself stringing bargain fairy-lights around the shelves, putting up little painted signs in her own intricate handwriting, coloring the floorboards a pale violet because the shade had taken her fancy. She arranged the tables and chairs, bought cheap from a house-clearance shop and painted with tester pots, into the kind of arrangements she would have liked when she got coffee with her girlfriends. She was, she realized, looking at the chairs, making herself a little corner of something magical, perhaps a little cosmopolitan, a place where she could once again feel at home, separate from the provincial eyes and attitudes that now surrounded her.

“So, what kind of shop are you?” one of the antique dealers had said, after eyeing the frame in her window. His voice had held just the faintest note of derision.

“I’m . . . an emporium,” she had said, and ignored his raised eyebrows as he left to return to his own shop. And that’s what she had called it, the Peacock Emporium, the sign painted in chalk blue and white, a stenciled drawing of a peacock feather beside it. Neil had looked at it with a mixture of pride and fearfulness; he confessed later that he had wondered whether, with his name on the door, he might face bankruptcy again if it folded.

“It’s not going to fold,” said Suzanna firmly. “Don’t be so negative.”

“You’re going to have to work bloody hard,” he said.

Even Neil’s anxieties didn’t bother her. She found it harder to argue with him at the moment. She was sleeping well.

Apart from the stock, she had bought nothing for weeks.



* * *



—

“Are you open?”

Suzanna glanced up from her spot on the floor. The religious-icon candles had seemed like a good idea at the London wholesaler’s, but now, as she watched green padded waistcoat after green padded waistcoat pass the window, either oblivious or squinting through the glass in a vaguely disparaging manner, she wondered whether she had been too cosmopolitan in her tastes. They looked beautiful next to the beaded bags but, as Neil kept saying, there was no point in her buying beautiful things if no one around here would be prepared to buy them.

“Not quite. Probably on Monday.”

The woman walked in anyway, closed the door behind her, and gazed around with a rapt expression. She wasn’t wearing a green waistcoat but a maroon anorak, and a hand-knitted multicolored woolen hat from which her gray hair stuck out at right angles. At first glance Suzanna might have written her off as a trainee bag lady, but on looking closer, she noted that her shoes were expensive, as was her purse.

“Doesn’t it look lovely in here? Very different from how it was before.”

Suzanna struggled to her feet.

“This shop was a grocer’s, you know, when I was a girl. There was your fruit over this side . . .” She gestured to where Suzanna’s tables and chairs now stood.“. . . And on this side the vegetables. Oh, and they used to do fresh eggs. They kept their own chickens out the back, you know. I don’t suppose you’ll be doing that.” She laughed, as if she had said something amusing.