The Peacock Emporium(51)

When she spoke, her eyes were filled with neither tears nor infantile fury, but a kind of resigned wisdom he hadn’t seen before. “I should be mad at you for leaving me like this,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “But I’m glad, Ale.” She nodded, as if confirming it to herself. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you do something, make a real decision. You’ve always been so . . . passive.”

He felt a brief discomfort, not knowing if she was disparaging his sexual technique. But having lit her cigarette she took his hand, lifted and kissed it, a curious gesture. “Are you running to something? Or just running away?” Her hand held his firmly.

It was impossible to answer honestly, so he said nothing.

“Go, Turco.”

“Just like that?”

“Go now. I don’t want us to start making stupid promises about meeting again.”

“I’ll write if you want.”

“Come on . . .”

He looked at her beautiful, disappointed face, feeling an affection that surprised him. The words he had prepared seemed trite.

She understood. She squeezed his hand, then gestured toward the door. “Go on. You know I was going to finish things anyway. You’re not my type, after all.”

He heard her tone harden determinedly, and walked toward the door.

“Just my luck, eh?” she said, laughing humorlessly. “A husband who is dead to the touch, and a lover too haunted by ghosts to live.”



* * *



—

Heathrow and its outskirts was the ugliest place Alejandro had ever seen. Dere Maternity Hospital was prettier, but even less friendly—especially, he realized, to those with darker skin. For weeks many of the midwives had refused to speak to him, apparently resentful of this male usurper in their female domain. Two weeks after he arrived, he had slept with a young nurse out of loneliness, and when he had apologized afterward had been told, bitterly, “God, you men are all the same.” He was permanently cold. His mother, when she had called, had asked if he had a girlfriend yet: “A young man, your age,” she said sadly, “you should be shopping around.”

He had seen the sign outside the Peacock Emporium and, overcome by a wave of homesickness almost as strong as his exhaustion after a fourteen-hour shift (other midwives told him he was mad not to end a shift during a labor, but he did not consider it fair to leave a woman at her most vulnerable), he had pushed open the door and entered. He was not a superstitious man, but sometimes you had to follow signs. Trying to shut them out didn’t seem to have served him well this far.

He didn’t tell the two women this, of course. Or the bit about Sofia. Or Estela, come to that. If it hadn’t been for the blonde with the smiling face, the first person who had appeared to want to hear what he had to say, he might not have said anything at all.





12


The problem with getting older was not so much that one got stuck in the past, Vivi often thought, but that there was so much more of the past to get lost in. She had been sorting through the old bureau in the sitting room, determined to put all those sepia-tinted photographs into an album, hopefully before the men came in, but suddenly it was going on half past five. She had found herself inanimate on the small sofa, absorbed in images of her earlier self, pictures she had not lingered over for years: clinging to Douglas’s arm at various social functions, posing self-consciously in frocks, proudly holding newborn babies, and then, as they got older, looking increasingly less confident, her smile perhaps a little more painted on with each year. Perhaps she was being too hard on herself. Or perhaps she was being sentimental, projecting emotions on to herself that she felt overwhelmed by.

Suzanna had been an easy child. When Vivi considered the upheaval of her daughter’s early years, and her own lack of experience as a mother, it amazed her that they had muddled through as well as they had. Suzanna’s childhood had never been the problem: it was puberty, when those gawky, elongated limbs achieved a certain sylph-like elegance, and when those near-Slavic cheekbones had started highlighting the previously hidden planes of her face. The distant echo had patently disturbed Douglas’s peace of mind. And Suzanna, perhaps reacting to some unseen vibration in the air, had gone off the rails.

Rationally, Vivi knew this was not her fault. No one could have offered Suzanna more unconditional love, or have better understood her complicated nature. But motherhood was never rational: even now, with Suzanna as settled as she ever had been—and Neil such a wonderful husband—Vivi still found herself suffused with guilt that somehow she had failed to raise this daughter to be happy. “No reason for her to be unhappy,” Douglas would say. “She’s had every advantage.”

“Yes, well, sometimes it’s not quite as simple as that.” Vivi rarely ventured further into family psychology, as Douglas did not hold much truck with such discussions, and, besides, he was right in his way. Suzanna had had everything. They all had. The fact that Douglas and her two children were so contented had not alleviated her sense of responsibility—if anything, it had heightened it. Vivi had spent years wondering privately if she had treated the children differently in some way, if subconsciously she had instilled in Suzanna a sense that she was second best.

She knew how seductive that feeling could be.

Douglas said it was rubbish. His view of relationships was simple: you treated people fairly, and expected the same in return. You loved your children, they loved you back. You supported them as much as you could, and in return they attempted to do you proud.