The Peacock Emporium(58)
My father looked down and found his sharply pressed trousers polluted by Carmela’s last protest.
My mother, her hand pressed to her lips, began to giggle.
My grandfather, his head raised high, turned on his heel and walked back into the house, his dismissive “Huh!” hanging in the still air behind him. “Even your son can wring the neck of a chicken,” he muttered.
After that my father returned very seldom. I didn’t care. My grandfather taught me about meat, about the differences between pancetta and prosciutto, between dolce latte and panna cotta, how to make paté studded with figs and sealed in goose fat. He never once mentioned my appearance. Ten years later I opened my first shop, and from that day it was my turn to feed him, which I did, with pleasure, until he died.
Carmela was the one chicken we never ate.
14
Liliane stuck the key in the door of the Unique Boutique at twenty minutes to ten. She glanced down and, having wedged open the door with her foot, bent and picked up the small box of gold-wrapped chocolates on the step. She looked closely at them, turned them over twice in her hands, then looked left and right down the lane, her long coat billowing in the brisk breeze. She could just make out the frontage of Arturro’s deli. She waited a moment more, and then, holding the chocolates along with her handbag, close to her chest, she pushed her way into her shop.
Across the road, from their vantage point behind Arturro’s display, Suzanna and Jessie looked at each other. Then they burst into a fit of childish giggles.
* * *
—
The box of gold chocolates was the fourth gift they had left on the steps of the Unique Boutique: once a week was what they had decided. Any more would look obvious, any less and it might appear accidental. Suzanna and Jessie had developed all sorts of ploys to draw Liliane and Arturro into each other’s company. When Liliane’s handbag shelf fell down, they persuaded Arturro to pop over to mend it, telling him that she had so admired the work he had done in his own store. They had dropped hints about oil being good for arthritis, so that Liliane popped into the deli to pick up a bottle for her mother. They manufactured reasons—suddenly scrubbing tables, or whipping away chairs to be “fixed,” why the two should be seated together when they came in for coffee. And occasionally they were rewarded: they would catch them glancing at each other with a kind of shy pleasure, or being startled if they dropped in at the Peacock Emporium and found the other already present. It was working, they told each other in gleeful whispers.
* * *
—
At Dere House, Vivi was preoccupied with culinary matters of her own: she had become haunted by Rosemary’s fridge. Over recent weeks, she had discovered, among the liquefying vegetables and old medicine bottles, several discarded yogurts beside open packs of bacon, and raw chicken on plates, dripping blood into the open milk carton below. The words “listeria” and “salmonella” took on a horrible resonance, and Vivi found herself jumping anxiously when Rosemary talked of making herself “a little sandwich” or having a snack.
She had wanted to talk to Douglas about it, but he had been rather dour and uncommunicative since the thing with Suzanna, and with the hay making he was out often till nine in the evening. She had considered whether any of her friends from the village might help, but she wasn’t close enough to anyone for that level of confidence: she had never been one of those women who surrounded themselves with a “circle,” and with the Fairley-Hulme name being what it was around here, any admission of difficulties at home seemed a kind of disloyalty. Vivi would watch the morning talk shows, with young people who thought nothing of revealing the most intimate details of their sex lives, or their problems with drugs or alcohol, and marvel. How, in the space of a generation, could we have been transported from an age in which everything had to stay within one’s four walls to a point at which that attitude is now considered unhealthy? In the end, she called her daughter Lucy, who listened with the analytical detachment that had made her such a success in her job, then told her that Rosemary was getting to the age when she needed to go into a home.
“I wouldn’t even suggest that to your father,” said Vivi, in hushed tones, as if from the distance of the forty-acre field Douglas could somehow hear her treachery.
“You’re going to have to do something,” said Lucy. “Salmonella’s a killer. A home help?”
Vivi didn’t like to confess the little matter of the Incontinence Lady. “It’s just that she’s so stubborn. She doesn’t even like it when I go into her kitchen. I have to make up all sorts of excuses for why I’ve replaced her food.”
“She should be grateful.”
“Well, yes, darling, but you know that word’s not in Rosemary’s vocabulary.”
“It’s a tough one. Can you not just put cling film over everything?”
“I tried that, but she decided to reuse it. She put the stuff from the chicken round a big lump of cheddar and I had to throw the whole thing out.”
“Just tell her she’s causing a health hazard.”
“I did try, darling. Really. But she gets so cross, and won’t listen. She just waves her hand at me and storms off.”
“She probably knows,” said Lucy, ruminatively. “That she’s losing her marbles, I mean.”