The Peacock Emporium(97)

Suzanna sat and thought about Jessie. She thought about Arturro and Liliane, whom she had seen together outside the church, her arm linked in his as he stooped to offer her a handkerchief, and wished that Jessie could have seen it too. She thought about the way her father had closed his eyes as she turned from him, a look of quiet despair, so fleeting that it was likely only she had seen it. She had recognized it all right: it was the same expression she had seen on Neil that morning.

A few feet away, a starling was jabbing at the soil, and across the valley, she heard the distant sound of the market-square bell: it struck five, six, seven o’clock, as it had for all the years she had been absent, creating a life for herself many miles from here. Time to get up. Time to move on.

Suzanna laid her head on her knees, and breathed deeply, wondering at the sheer number of people in her life to whom she needed to say sorry.

Only some of whom would ever hear her.





21


The shop stayed shut for just over a week. Suzanna had arrived to open it on the morning after the funeral and then, having stood on the doorstep for almost seven minutes—long enough for the woman who ran the pet shop on the corner to enquire whether she was all right—she put the key back into her bag and walked home. Two suppliers had rung to ask her whether there was a problem. She had told them politely that there wasn’t, but that she wouldn’t be taking any deliveries in the near future. The builders rang to ask if it would be okay if they put a dumpster right outside the door, and she had surprised them with the readiness with which she had said yes. Arturro had rung her at home to make sure she was okay. She fought the suspicion that he was afraid something would happen to her too.

Suzanna had done little that week. She had completed various domestic tasks, which she had somehow never had time for when the shop was open: she washed windows, hung curtains, painted the unfinished part of the kitchen. She made a few cursory attempts at weeding. She cooked several meals, at least one of which was both attractive and edible, none of which she herself had been able to stomach. She had said nothing to Neil about the shop’s temporary closure. When he discovered it several days later, having been asked by a fellow commuter when she was likely to reopen, he said nothing in return. And if she was rather quiet, he didn’t say much about that either. It was an odd, unbalanced time for everyone. Grief was a strange thing. They were still a little fragile with each other, since the exchange before Jessie’s funeral. And even he knew well enough by now that there were times in a marriage when not talking too much was the right thing to do.



* * *



—

    On the following Monday, exactly nine days after the funeral, Suzanna got up at half past seven. She ran a bath (the cottage didn’t have a shower), washed her hair, put on makeup and a freshly ironed shirt. Then, on a day windy enough to snatch at her hair and turn her pale cheeks pink, she accepted a lift from her husband to the Peacock Emporium. With no visible hesitation, she put her key in the steel anti-squatter door and opened up. Then, having offered the builders a mug of tea, she sorted the pile of post and noted, with mixed feelings, the disappearance of the vast bank of old flowers—and the arrival of several newer bunches, including a posy from Liliane. She pulled out all the things from her bag she had collected over the course of the week, things she had examined and fretted over, things she had remembered and sometimes chosen just because of the way they looked. She laid them out on the pink-painted table, an expression of intense concentration on her face, then began to gather up Jessie’s things.

Mrs. Creek, perhaps predictably, was the first customer to appear. The short gap between her and Suzanna’s arrival made Suzanna wonder afterward whether she hadn’t spent the last days positioned surreptitiously somewhere, one eye on the shop, waiting for the moment when the door would open again. She looked as windswept as Suzanna felt, her silver hair sticking out from under her crocheted beret as if she had been electrocuted. “You didn’t tell anyone you were going to close,” she said accusingly, as she arranged her bag on the table beside her.

“I didn’t know,” said Suzanna, moving all the mugs along the shelf in an attempt to find Jessie’s favorite.

“It’s not very good for business.”

She found it. A blue-and-white one with a line drawing of a bulldog and the words “chien mechant” on the other side. Jessie had said it reminded her of Jason when he woke up in the morning. She had thought this was funny.

“I had to go to the Coffee Pot instead,” Mrs. Creek continued. “I don’t like their sandwiches. But you left me no choice.”

“I don’t do sandwiches.”

“That’s not the point, dear. You can’t have a coffee in there after eleven thirty if you’re not prepared to have something to eat. Their cheapest cheese and tomato is more than two pounds, you know.”

“Do you want those taped boxes at the back?” Neil emerged briefly from the cellar, checking his trousers for marks. “They’ve got ‘Christmas’ written on them, so I’m assuming you don’t want them up yet.”

Suzanna turned. “No,” she said. “The back will be fine. As long as I can get to the other stuff.”

“You’re lucky the builders took all of this in for you,” he said, gesturing to the cellar, where delivery boxes sat in teetering columns, disguising the fact that the area had only recently been cleaned and reorganized. “Some people might have taken them for themselves.”