The Peacock Emporium(72)
“Are you saying you’re unhappy?”
“I’m not saying anything. I just wondered what you thought about us. Whether you were happy.”
He turned off the television. “Am I happy? I dunno. I’m happier than I was.”
“Is that good enough?”
He shook his head slightly in exasperation. “I don’t think I know what kind of answer you’re after.”
She grimaced, unsure herself.
“Do you not think, ever, Suze, that you can make yourself happy? Or unhappy?”
“What?”
“All this questioning. All this analyzing yourself. ‘Am I happy?’ ‘Am I sad?’ ‘Is this enough?’ Don’t you think you can worry it all to death? It’s like . . . you’re always looking for things to worry about, always judging yourself by everyone else’s standards.”
“I am not.”
“Is this about Nadine and Alistair?”
“No.”
“They’ve been an accident waiting to happen for years. You can’t say you didn’t notice whenever we went over. At one point they were only communicating through the au pair.”
“It’s not about them.”
“Can’t we just enjoy the moment? The fact that, for the first time in ages, we’re solvent, we’re both employed, we have somewhere nice to live? I mean, no one’s ill, Suzanna. There’s nothing bad on the horizon, just good stuff, your shop, the baby, our future. I think we should be counting our blessings.”
“I do.”
“Then can’t we focus on that and stop looking for problems? Just for once?”
Suzanna gazed steadily at her husband, until, reassured, he turned back toward the television and flicked it into life with the remote.
“Sure,” she said as she stood up, and walked softly into the kitchen.
17
Summer had descended fully on the little town, easing Dere Hampton gently into its sweltering embrace. Its narrow streets baked, and cars drove lazily around the market square, their tires sticky on the molten Tarmac. American tourists in sore-footed clusters stopped and stared at intricate masonry, exclaiming into their guidebooks. On the square, market traders sat under canopies, gulping canned drinks, while elderly dogs lay in the middle of the pavement, their tongues lolling.
The shop was quiet: the better-heeled had taken off for summer holidays in other quiet towns, others spent their time shepherding children half crazed with liberation for six weeks from intensive schooling. Suzanna and Jessie, moving at a leisurely pace, cleaned shelves and windows, rearranged displays, chatted to tourists, and made jugs of iced tea, which became increasingly diluted by the melting ice cubes as the afternoons wore on.
Suzanna had felt dissatisfied with the layout of the shop, and furious with herself that she could not work out what was wrong. One morning they stuck up the “closed” sign, moved all the tables and chairs to the other end, and employed a handyman known to Father Lenny to move the shelving units to the opposite side. It had not looked as Suzanna had envisaged, and she paid the man the same amount—to Neil’s despair, as he went through the books—to move it all back again. She had decided not to do jewelry anymore (too many pieces had “gone missing”) and put the display downstairs in the cellar. As soon as she had done this, no fewer than three women came in separately asking for vintage necklaces. She papered over the wills, and replaced them with colored maps of north Africa. Then she painted the back wall a pale turquoise and immediately regretted the color. Through all this, Athene had sat in her frame on the cellar steps, her smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s, suitable neither for the shop nor home, a constant reminder of Suzanna’s inability to shape her world in a way that could be considered satisfactory.
Eventually, infected by a kind of madness, she took one Saturday off to go to London. She had originally meant to meet Nadine but, on a whim, pleaded a family emergency and went to Bond Street where, diving in and out of shops at a speed unusual in those temperatures, she bought two pairs of summer sandals, only one of which could truly be said to fit, a short-sleeved gray shirt, some earrings, a new pair of designer sunglasses, and a pale blue linen suit that might come in handy should she have to go to a wedding. She also bought a bottle of her favorite scent, some painfully expensive moisturizer, and a new lipstick in a color she had seen in some celebrity magazine. She put all but the shirt on the credit card that Neil thought she had cut up. She would pay for it gradually, she rationalized, and had to stop herself crying on the train home.
Alejandro stayed away for three days, then came every day afterward. Sometimes she would emerge from the cellar and find him seated, his aquiline face expectant as if he had been waiting, and she would blush and cover her confusion under some too-loud remark about the weather or the level of coffee in the machines or the mess of everything in here!
If Jessie was around, Suzanna said little, content to listen to their exchanges, and store the snippets of information Jessie was able to pry out of him: that his father had written, that he had cooked an English meal, that in the maternity ward a “mother” had been admitted the previous evening with nothing more gestational than a pillow under her nightdress. Sometimes Suzanna felt that, through Jessie, he was telling her things about himself, laying himself out in front of her in little pieces. Sometimes she found herself doing the same, being unusually forthcoming, simply because there were parts of her that she wanted him to see: the better parts, someone more attractive, more together, than the person she felt he usually saw.