The Peacock Emporium(52)
Or, in Suzanna’s case, you loved them and they did their best to make themselves unhappy.
I don’t think I can bear this any longer, she thought, her eyes welling with tears as she looked at a photo of eleven-year-old Suzanna, clinging fiercely to Vivi’s prematurely thickened waist. Somebody has to do something. And I shall hate myself if I don’t at least try.
What would Athene have done? Vivi had long since stopped asking herself that question: Athene had been such an unknowable quantity it had been impossible to predict her actions even when she had been alive. Now, thirty-odd years later, she seemed so insubstantial, her memory both so fierce and simultaneously ephemeral, that it was hard to imagine her as a mother at all. Would she have understood her daughter’s complicated nature, which echoed her own? Or would she have done even more damage, dipping in and out of her daughter’s life, her failure to stick at motherhood another painful example of her irredeemably mercurial temperament?
You’re lucky, Vivi told the invisible mother in the photograph, feeling suddenly envious, thinking of how Douglas had waved her away when she had attempted once again to bring up the subject of Rosemary and her laundry. It’s easier to be a ghost. You can be romanticized, adored, can grow in the memory instead of diminish in reality. Then, pushing herself out of the chair, and noting the time, she scolded herself for the fanciful indulgence of envying the dead.
* * *
—
Alejandro arrived at the Peacock Emporium at a quarter past nine. He came in most days now but always at different times, according to the apparently random timetable of his shifts. He didn’t speak much. He didn’t even look at a newspaper. He just sat in the corner and sipped his coffee, occasionally smiling in response to Jessie’s cheerful chatter.
Jessie, never slow in striking up a conversation, had made it her mission to find out all about the man she termed “the Gaucho Gyno,” asking him questions in a manner that occasionally made Suzanna wince. Had he always wanted to be a midwife? Only since he realized he was not going to make the national football team. Did he like delivering babies? Yes. Did the women mind having a male midwife? Mostly no. He backed out gracefully when they did. He had found, he said, that if he wore a white coat no one batted an eyelid. Did he have a girlfriend? No. Suzanna had looked away when he answered that one, furious with herself for her faint but definite blush.
He didn’t seem to mind Jessie’s questions, although he often managed not to answer them directly. He sat close enough to the counter, Suzanna had noted, to express some degree of comfort with them. Suzanna herself made sure she was rarely close to him. He already felt, somehow, as if he were Jessie’s. As if Suzanna attempting to be equally friendly with him would make everyone uncomfortable.
“How many babies did you deliver today?”
“Only one.”
“Any complications?”
“Just a fainting father.”
“Fantastic. What did you do?”
Alejandro had glanced down at his hands. “It was not very good timing. We only had time to move him out of the way.”
“What—drag him?”
Alejandro had seemed faintly embarrassed. “We needed our hands. We had to push him with our feet.”
Jessie loved to hear these stories. Suzanna, more squeamish, often had to turn up the volume of the music or invent some task in the cellar. It was all a little too close to home. But she frequently found herself staring at him, albeit surreptitiously. While his appearance would have failed to hook her attention in London, in the environs of the frighteningly Caucasian Suffolk town, and in the close confines of her little shop, he was a welcome breath of exoticism, a reminder of a wider world outside.
“Did he miss the birth?”
“Not quite. But I think he was a bit confused.” He smiled to himself. “He tried to punch me when he came round, and then he called me ‘Mother.’”
Jessie had wanted to do a display on him with a story about some miracle of birth (“It kind of fits, being a newish shop and all”), but Alejandro had been reluctant to agree. He didn’t think, he said, in his quiet, courteous voice, that he could yet lay claim to being one of the shop’s regulars. There was something decisive enough in his tone for Jessie to back off. And despite her compelling charm—Suzanna thought she could probably have flirted with a brick—Alejandro had failed to fulfill any of their expectations about Latin men. He neither swaggered, nor eyed them with a swarthy intent. He didn’t even seem to have inbuilt rhythm.
“Probably gay,” said Jessie as, with a polite goodbye, he left for work.
“No,” said Suzanna, who wasn’t sure whether wishful thinking had made her say it.
* * *
—
“You hurt yourself?” Jessie had injured her hand. Suzanna hadn’t noticed it until Arturro asked when he came in for his morning espresso. He had lifted her hand from the counter with the tenderness of one used to treating food with reverence, and turned it to the light to reveal a large purplish-brown bruise across three fingers.
“Car door shut on me,” said Jessie, and pulled it back with a smile. “Daft, aren’t I?”
There was an unexpected embarrassed silence in the shop. The bruise was awful, a livid reminder of some extreme pain. Suzanna had glanced at Arturro’s face, noted that Jessie refused to look directly at either of them, and was ashamed that she had not noticed it. She thought, perhaps, that if the subject were pursued tactfully, Jessie might confide in her, but as she ran through the possible questions she could ask, she became aware that every possible variation sounded not only intrusive but crass, and possibly patronizing too. “Arnica cream,” Suzanna said eventually. “Seems to bring out the bruising quicker.”