The Peacock Emporium(34)
“Well, perhaps you could bring it in for her.”
“Darling, I think you might have been a little hard on Suzanna today.” She kept her tone light, tried to avoid any hint of reproach.
Her husband made a dismissive sound, but his lack of a response gave her courage. “You know, having a child might be the making of her. She and Neil have had such problems. It would give them a new focus.” Her husband was staring at his bare feet. “Douglas? She’s trying so hard.”
It was as if he hadn’t heard.
“Douglas?”
“And what if my mother’s right? What if she does end up like Athene?”
9
The Dereward estate was one of the largest in that part of Suffolk. Backing on to what later became known as Constable country, it dated back to the 1600s, was unusual in that it had housed an almost unbroken ancestral line, and its land, which was notably hilly for the region, was well placed for a variety of uses, from arable farming to game fishing, and contained an exceptional—some said uneconomic—number of tied cottages. Most estate houses that oversaw some 450 acres were rather grander, perhaps with a portrait gallery or ballroom to indicate the gravitas of the incumbent family. The Dereward estate took some pride in its history—its family portraits were renowned for not just showing every heir in the past four hundred years but for detailing, in rather bald language, the manner of their death. From the turn of the twentieth century, various attempts had been made to portray some female members of the family, just as there had been increasing protests about the possibility of the house falling to the female line of the family. But the wives and daughters tended to look a bit halfhearted, as if they were not convinced of their right to pictorial immortality. The Fairley-Hulmes, as Rosemary was fond of saying, had not survived four hundred years by swaying to fashion and political correctness. For traditions to last, they had to be strong, shored up with rules and certainty. For one so strident on the matter, she spoke little about her own family’s history—with good reason: Ben had looked her up on an Internet genealogy database and discovered that Rosemary’s family hailed from a slaughterhouse in Blackburn.
The last portrait would have been Suzanna’s mother’s. A young artist had been commissioned on Athene’s eighteenth birthday to paint it and, several decades on, it had become Important. But it was now Suzanna’s, and lived with them in the cottage, although Vivi had repeatedly assured her that she would be more than happy for Athene to take her rightful place on the wall. “She’s very beautiful, darling, and if it would be meaningful for you to have her up, then that’s where she should be. We can get that frame restored, and it will look lovely.” Vivi was always bending over backward, always so anxious to spare everybody’s feelings. As if she had none of her own.
Suzanna had told her that the reason she liked to have the portrait in her own house was simply that it was beautiful. It was not as if she remembered Athene; Vivi had been the only mother she had known. She couldn’t articulate the real reason. It was to do with guilt, resentment, and that, for as long as her father found it nearly impossible to talk about his first wife, she felt it difficult to confront him with the evidence that he had had one. It was since she had let her hair grow dark again, since she had acquired, as Neil called it, something of her mother’s fierce beauty, that her father had found it so difficult even to look at her at all. “Athene Forster,” it read, the writing just visible against the crumbling gilt of the frame. Perhaps in deference to Suzanna’s feelings, it had never explained the manner of her death.
“You going to put that up? Is it for sale?”
Suzanna eyed the young woman who stood, head cocked, in the doorway.
“She’s like you,” the girl said cheerfully.
“It’s my mother,” Suzanna said reluctantly.
The picture hadn’t looked right in the cottage: it was too grand. Athene, with her glittering eyes and her pale, angular face, had filled the sitting room and left little space for anything else. Now, staring at it in the shop, Suzanna realized it didn’t belong here either. The mere fact that this stranger was inspecting it made her feel uncomfortable, exposed. She turned it to the wall. “I was just taking it home,” she said, and tried to suggest, through her tone, that the conversation was closed.
The girl’s blue-black hair was pulled into two plaits, like a schoolgirl’s, although she was clearly older. “I nearly lost my virginity on your stairs. Drunk as a skunk, I was. Can I have an espresso?”
Suzanna, moving toward the espresso machine, didn’t bother to turn around. “You must be mistaken. This used to be a bookshop.”
“Ten years ago it was a wine bar. The Red Horse. For a couple of years, anyway. When I was sixteen we all used to get hammered on Diamond White in the market square on Saturday nights, then come in here to cop off with each other. It’s where I met my bloke. Snogging away on those stairs. Mind you, if I’d known then . . .” She trailed off, laughing. Suzanna wrestled with levers and coffee measurements, grateful that the din of the machine temporarily drowned the need to talk. She had envisaged that people would come in here, sit down, and talk to each other while she would preside over it all from the safety of the counter. But in the two months that she had been open, she had found that, more often than not, they wanted to talk to her, whether she felt sociable or not.