The Peacock Emporium(78)



“Whenever you’re ready. It’s not important.” Suzanna stood up and made to hug Jessie, conscious as she did so that she might be pressing on injuries they couldn’t see. She stood back, and tried to impart some kind of urgency in the look that passed between them. “You can call me too. Any time.”

“I’m fine. Really. Now, get lost, the pair of you. Go and open that shop or I won’t have a job to go back to.” She shepherded them out of the door.

Suzanna would have protested, but she was also aware that Jason might be on his way, that Jess might have her own reasons for wanting an empty house.

“See you soon.” Jessie’s voice, cheerful through the net curtains, followed them down the road.



* * *





They had walked in silence as far as the Swan hotel on the high street, each alone with their thoughts.

Suzanna stopped at the corner of the road that led toward the center of town. “I don’t feel like opening the shop today,” she said. He shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Where shall we go?” he asked.



* * *





Neither felt like eating, so they went toward the market. Neither seemed to know where they were going: they simply shared a desire not to be alone, not to resume their normal routine. At least, that was what Suzanna told herself.

They walked companionably around the stalls in the square, drinking bottles of water, until he confessed, apologetically, that he was bored with the market. “I have walked here on almost every one of my days off,” he said. He had seen almost nothing, he added, since he got to England. He had thought he would travel to other cities and explore in his spare time, but rail travel had proven prohibitively expensive, and he was usually too tired to make any effort. He had been to Cambridge once, and there had been an outing for all the midwives to London, organized by the hospital management, when they had visited Madame Tussauds, the Tower of London, and the London Eye in quick succession, taking in almost nothing. The fact that he was the only man prevented the exclusively female grouping from engaging him in conversation. “I was so glad to find your shop,” he said, his hands deep in his pockets. “It is the only place . . . it was just different from everything else.”

“So what do you want to see?” she had said.

“Show me where you come from,” he said. “Show me this famous estate. The one that causes you so much trouble.” He had said it teasingly, and she had smiled despite herself.

“It’s hardly an estancia,” she said. “It’s about four hundred and fifty acres. Probably not very big by Argentinian standards.” It was, however, big enough to provide a decent afternoon walk. “I’ll take you to the river,” she said. “If you like fishing, you’d like our river.”

It was as if they had made an unspoken decision to step out from the shadow of the morning. Or perhaps, Suzanna thought, as they walked along the bridleway up to the woods, they had both needed to divest themselves of the darkness of that little living room, the violent secrets that suffused its air, and remind themselves of something clean and good and glorious.

Twice he had taken her hand to help her across the path.

The second time, she had had to make a conscious effort to let his go.



* * *





They had seated themselves at the top of the forty-acre field and were looking down across the valley. It was one of the few points from which the estate was visible almost in its entirety, its undulating hills and dark patches of forest patchworking their way to the horizon. She pointed to a distant house, set about by outbuildings. “That’s Philmore House. It’s let at the moment, but my mother and father lived there when they were first married.” She stood up, and motioned toward some woods, about five miles west of the house. “That mustard-colored house—you can just see it, right? That’s my parents’ house now. My brother, Ben—he’s younger than me—and my grandmother live there too.”

They were standing a third of the way across the field, where it dropped away sharply below them, rolling down to the valley and the river, unseen behind woodland, when she said, “Me and my brother used to come up here when we were little and we’d roll down it. We’d stand here, pretending we didn’t know what was coming, and then the other would push us both down and we’d race each other rolling all the way to the bottom. You’d end up with grass in your mouth, your hair . . .” She held up her hands, her elbows in, demonstrating the position, lost in a distant memory. “Dad turned this field over to the sheep one year. We didn’t think about it. Ben got up at the bottom looking like a currant bun.” She realized she had brought in her family, and didn’t want to continue. Sometimes, it seemed, there was no escaping them.

He stood next to her, shielding his eyes as he scanned the horizon. “It’s beautiful.”

“I don’t really see it anymore. I guess when you grow up with something, you don’t. It’s probably good to see it through somebody else’s eyes.”

Below them, a sparrow hawk hovered in the air, its eyes trained on some unseen prey. Alejandro followed it as it swooped toward the earth.

“Even on days like this, I think I still prefer the City.”

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