The Peacock Emporium(67)
“No,” said Suzanna.
They stood finally facing each other. His hands rested on the back of the chair. His face was in shadow so she could barely make out his expression.
A van’s rear doors banged outside, breaking the frail threads of connection in the air. Alejandro looked out of the window, then his eyes locked onto hers for several seconds before he turned back toward the door. “Thank you for your hospitality, Suzanna Peacock,” he said.
16
Douglas closed the door behind him, and stared at his wife’s dog in frustration. He had been looking for Vivi, and walked the animal around the formal gardens in the hope of finding her. He had continued around to the new offices, down to the dairy yard, and even through the woodland at the back of the grain sheds. The dog had failed to pick up a bloody thing.
I need a sniffer dog to locate my wife, he thought, and let out a sigh at the irony. She had been so busy lately, had left his meals with polite notes, retired late to bed having discovered a multitude of urgent tasks in underused parts of the house. He was never sure where she would be anymore. Or what mood she would be in when he found her. He felt unbalanced by the wrongness of it all.
The dog got under his feet and yelped as he tripped over it. Douglas’s mother, from behind the annex door, called out twice to see if it was him. Feeling mean, he pretended he hadn’t heard: he didn’t want to be sent on some other errand. He was weary from having to drive Rosemary into town twice this morning—the third time he had had to do so in a week. His mother, still smarting from Vivi’s outburst a week earlier, no longer asked where she was, as if her daughter-in-law’s verbal insurrection had breached some unspoken rule. If he wasn’t feeling so sorry for himself it might have made him laugh. This, he understood, uncomfortably, was what his wife had been complaining of these last months. That, and the faint, but distinctively unpleasant aroma that now lingered in the passenger seat of the Range Rover.
Douglas picked up the note on the kitchen table. It had not been there when he left the house this morning, or an hour earlier when he had returned to deliver Rosemary home, and the sight of it made him both annoyed and sad, as if his marriage had been requisitioned by two childish strangers.
Vivi, the note informed him in neat handwriting, would be out for a while. His and Ben’s lunches were in the oven, and needed only twenty minutes’ reheating. She could not, apparently, guarantee the same punctuality for herself.
He reread the note, then screwed it up in his broad hand and hurled it across the kitchen, so that the dog went scurrying after it across the flagstones.
Then, noting that her car keys were on the peg, he glanced out of the window, rammed his cap on his head, and left the house via the kitchen door, ignoring the imperious muffled voice calling his name behind him.
* * *
—
Alejandro pulled the airmail letter from his pigeonhole, registered the familiar stamp, and stuffed it into his pocket as he walked wearily across the hospital grounds to his bed, some twenty-two hours since he had last seen it. He might still be relegated to the graveyard shifts, but while the hospital was assiduous in noting, at every opportunity, that it was an equal-opprtunity organization, he had, by virtue of his sex, struck lucky in his accommodation. It had been agreed that the nurses and midwives would not feel comfortable sharing their quarters with a man, no matter how polite. When it became apparent that finding him local lodgings was going to be a problem, someone had hit upon the solution of giving him what would have been the caretaker’s flat, had the hospital still employed one for the nurses’ block. He might have to unblock the odd sink, or change the odd fuse, joked the accommodation manager, but Alejandro had just shrugged. He hadn’t been able to afford his own flat at home. Two bedrooms and a kitchen big enough to house a table seemed fair exchange for a few odd jobs.
And yet, several months into his tenancy, Alejandro found the place depressed him, even on a day like today when it was flooded in sunlight. He had never understood the ability, so often seen among women, to imprint their own character on a space and, in a living situation that might be temporary, he lacked the will to try. Its bland beige decor and hard-wearing furniture made it feel unloved and sterile. Its emptiness was constantly highlighted by the sound of thumping feet and chatting, giggling women coming and going on the stairs outside. Only two other people had seen its interior: the nurse whom he had unwisely brought home in his first weeks (and who had ignored him whenever they passed each other since) and, more recently, a Spanish girl from the local language school whom he had met on a train, and who had informed him, at the critical moment when he might normally have forgotten where he was, that she had a boyfriend and subsequently wept for three-quarters of an hour. The money he had paid for her taxi home, he mused, would have fed an Argentinian family of four for a month.
He poured himself a glass of iced tea and lay down on the sofa, propping a cushion under his neck, conscious of the smell of stale perspiration on his clothes. His bones ached with tiredness. He pulled the letter from his pocket and studied the address. He received few, and the sight of his own name against these unfamiliar English words still had the power to jar.
Son, I was going to write that all is fine here, but I realize, with sincerity, that this is only true for a select few. Your father, God willing, is still among them. There is talk of a new government, but I cannot see how things will be any different. There are now two “neighborhood councils” near us, and many of our neighbors have been on the new protests—waving keys at the government buildings. I fail to see what good this will do, but Vicente Trezza, who used to have the offices next to mine, is out there day in and day out with keys, pots, anything that will make a noise. I fear for his hearing. Your mother has refused to leave the house since our local supermarket was robbed by a mob from the shanty towns. Don’t misunderstand my report, son. I am pleased to be able to say you are doing well in England. I look forward to our salmon fishing trip.