The Peacock Emporium(66)

“Don’t you have anywhere to go to?” she asked, when there was nobody else left in the shop.

“You would like me to leave?”

Suzanna corrected herself, blushing at her transparency: “No—I’m sorry. I just wondered what was home for you.”

He frowned at the window. “No place I want to spend much time in.”

He had a woman’s eyelashes: dark, curly, and silky. She hadn’t noticed until now. “Does the hospital provide accommodation?”

“Not at first.”

She waited.

“Then they discovered that many of the landlords around here do not want ‘foreigners’ as tenants.” He smiled, raised an eyebrow at her concern, as if waiting for her to stumble over a long-held truth. “You, Suzanna, are one of the few people I have met here who is neither blond nor blue-eyed.”

The way he looked at her made her flush. She pushed herself back from the counter and began to align the jars that held colored buttons, magnets, and boxes of pins, into rigid lines.

“It’s fine. I got accommodation at the hospital.”

Outside, the town had settled into a late-afternoon torpor. Its mothers had shepherded small charges home, and were now bracing themselves for the evening onslaught of tea, bath, and bed. Pensioners were transporting string bags or shopping trolleys with vegetables in paper bags from the market, single portions of brisket or meat pie.

Suzanna gazed around the interior of her shop, and felt weighed down by its carefully contrived perfection, its stasis. “How can you stand it here?” she asked.

“How can I stand what?” He had looked at her then, his head tilted to one side.

“After Buenos Aires. The small-townism. Like you say, landlords afraid of you because you’re different.”

He frowned, trying to understand.

“The way everyone has an opinion on everything and feels entitled to know your business. Don’t you miss the city? Don’t you miss the freedom of it?”

Alejandro put down his empty coffee cup. “I think perhaps you and I have different ideas about freedom.”

She felt suddenly self-conscious and na?ve. She knew nothing about Argentina, except the vague snippets she remembered from the television news: some riots, some financial crisis. Madonna as Eva Perón. God, she thought. And I accuse everyone else of being insular.

Alejandro stooped to pick up his backpack from under his table. He glanced out of the window, which was still glowing with refracted evening sun.

Something welled inside Suzanna. “She lives with someone, you know.”

“Who?” He was still stooped over his bag.

“Jessie.”

He hardly missed a beat. “I know.”

She turned and started scrubbing the sink, furious and ashamed.

“I am no threat to Jessie.”

It was a strange thing to say, made more so by the emphatic way in which he said it, as if he was trying to convince himself.

“I didn’t mean . . . I’m sorry.” Her head dipped toward the sink. She fought the urge then to tell him about Jason, to explain, to try to redress the childish jealousy she’d shown. She didn’t want him to see her as everyone else seemed to. But to explain Jessie’s relationship would put her among the very people she’d been criticizing—those who traded each other’s domestic secrets as a kind of social currency.

“I hated living here, until I got this shop,” she said. “I was a city girl. I like noise, bustle, anonymity. It’s too hard to live in the place where you grew up—a small town like this. Everyone knows everything about you—your parents, where you went to school, where you’ve worked, who you’ve been out with. How you fell off the piano stool in your school recital.”

She could feel him watching her, and the words tumbled out, unstoppable, while in some distant, sane part of her mind she wondered why she felt this desperate need to fill the silence.

“And, you see, because they know the things that have happened to you—some of them, at least—it means that people think they know you. There’s no room for you to be someone else. Around here, I’m the same person I was at twelve, thirteen, sixteen. Set in aspic. And the funny thing is, I know I’m someone else entirely.”

She stopped, her hands resting on the sides of the sink, and shook her head slightly. She had sounded ridiculous, even to herself.

“Anyway. The shop has changed all that,” she said. “Because even if I can’t be someone else, the shop can. It can be anything I want it to be. Nobody has any expectations of it. I know it’s not everyone’s idea of a commercial venture. I know a lot of people around here think it’s daft. But it’s got a—” She wasn’t sure what she was trying to say.

A car reversed slowly up the lane.

“I have seen her at the hospital,” said Alejandro, standing still, his bag raised over his shoulder. “Sometimes I go down and pick the mothers up from outside A and E in a wheelchair. The ones who can no longer walk. I have seen her . . . waiting.”

In the stainless steel of the taps Suzanna could make out her reflection—twisted, inverted. “You know . . . that she loves Jason, then.” She spoke into her chest. Then, when there was no reply, she faced him . . .

“I only know what I see.” He shrugged. “It is not my kind of love.”