The Peacock Emporium(37)

Suzanna looked down at it. “I can’t take this,” she said.

“It’s for good luck. For your business.” He smiled shyly, revealing two tiny rows of teeth.

“Uh-oh, Arturro’s on the pull.” There was a catcall behind her. Two of the young men were gazing at him, their arms crossed across their white aprons, mock disapproval on their faces. “You got to watch out, ladies. Next stop Arturro will be offering you a free taste of his salami . . .”

There was stifled laughter in the queue. Suzanna found herself blushing.

“And you know what they say about Italian salami, eh, Arturro?”

The big man turned toward the till, lifted an arm the width of a ham, and let off a volley of what Suzanna assumed was Italian abuse.

“Ciao, signora.”

Suzanna left the deli blushing, trying not to smile too hard in case it made her look like the kind of woman who becomes overexcited when given a bit of attention.

When she got back to the shop she discovered she had forgotten to pick up her sandwich.



* * *



—

Jessie Carter had been born in the Dere maternity hospital, the only daughter of Cath, who worked in the bakery, and Ed Carter, who had been one of the town’s postmen until his death from a heart attack two years ago. It was fair to say her life had not been exotic. She had grown up with her friends on the Meadville estate, attended Dere Primary, then gone on to Hampton High School, which she had left at sixteen with two GCSEs in art and home economics, and a boyfriend, Jason, who became the father of her daughter, Emma, two years later. Emma hadn’t been planned, but was much wanted and Jessie had never regretted her arrival—especially as Cath Carter was the most devoted of grandmothers, which meant Jessie had never been tied down in the way that some girls complained of.

No, it was not Emma who caused any constraints on her life. If she was honest, it was Jason. He was completely possessive, which was stupid, really, as she’d only ever been with him and had no intention of going elsewhere. But he was a great laugh, when he wasn’t being an arse, and a great dad, and there was a lot to be said for a bloke who really loved you. Passion, that was the key. Yes, they fought, but they did loads of making up too. Sometimes she thought they probably fought just to get to the making-up bit. (Well, there had to be some reason for it.) And now that the council had given them a house, not that far from her mum’s, and he had got used to the idea of her doing night school, and was earning a bit himself by driving the delivery van for the local electrical store, things were getting better for them.

Suzanna discovered all of this within the first forty minutes or so of Jessie’s tenure at the shop. Initially, she didn’t mind the chatter. Jessie had cleaned the entire shop almost effortlessly as she spoke, properly lifting and sweeping under all the chairs, had reorganized two shelves and washed up all the coffee cups from the morning. It had made the shop feel warmer, somehow. And she had helped give the Peacock Emporium its most profitable afternoon ever, drawing a seemingly endless trail of locals through the doors with magnetic efficiency. There had been Arturro, who had come alone, had drunk his coffee with the considered attention of the connoisseur, and answered Jessie’s relentless questions with shy pleasure. After he left, Jessie had pointed out that he had spent much of the time gazing through the window at the Unique Boutique, as if hopeful that Liliane might emerge from its smoked-glass door and join him.

There had been the ladies from the department store, where Jessie’s aunt worked, who had oohed and aahed over the wall hangings and ducked under the glittery mobiles and fussed over the glass mosaics and eventually bought one each, exclaiming at their extravagance. There had been Trevor and Martina from the hairdresser’s behind the post office who had known Jessie since school, and had bought one of the raven-black feather dusters, because it would look good in the salon. There had been several young people Jessie knew by their first names, probably from the estate, and there had been Jessie’s mother and daughter, who had come in and sat for a good three-quarters of an hour, admiring almost everything they could see. Emma was a carbon copy of her mother, a self-possessed seven-year-old in myriad shades of pink who pronounced the amaretti biscuits “weird, but nice, especially the sugar,” and said that when she was grown-up she was going to have a shop “exactly the same. Except in my shop I’m going to give people bits of paper and they can do drawings to put on the walls.”

“That’s a good idea, petal. You could put your favorite customers’ drawings in the best spot.” Jessie seemed to treat all her daughter’s pronouncements seriously.

“And put frames on them. People like to see their pictures in frames.”

“There you go,” said Jessie, giving a final polish to the coffee machine. “Retail psychology. How to make your customers feel valued.”

Suzanna, while acknowledging the benefit of extra customers, was feeling a little overwhelmed by Jessie and her extended family. She felt uneasy at the sight of someone else behind the counter, and the reorganization of her shelves (even though they undoubtedly looked better). The shop hadn’t felt hers in the same way since Jessie had been in it.

In fact, after the peaceful previous weeks, so many people had come in that afternoon that Suzanna had had to fight a sneaking sense of inadequacy and a faint jealousy that this girl could have succeeded so apparently effortlessly where she had failed.