'No,' said Suzanna, biting back tears. 'I trust you.'
'More fool you, eh?' said Neil, winking at Mrs Creek. Before he left, he gave her a supportive hug. 'You look washed out,' he said kindly. 'Why don't you see if there's someone else who can help you for the next few weeks? It's a big job, running it all by yourself.'
He couldn't understand why this made her start crying again.
PART THREE
Twenty-Two
It is said, among the rare few who have returned from such a state, that the last few moments before drowning are quite pleasant. As the fight ends, and the water floods into the lungs, the victim enters a passive, accepting state, even sees a kind of perverse beauty in their condition.
Suzanna thought of this often over the next few weeks. Sometimes it felt like drowning. Sometimes it felt like sleepwalking, as if she were going blindly through some predetermined motions, not entirely in control of the things she said or did. Some might have said, she thought wryly, that this was an improvement. At home she kept the house tidy and the fridge well stocked, and had failed for some time now to complain about the beams. She and Neil were gentle with each other, solicitous, each recognising that the last weeks had damaged the other in some way and not wanting to be responsible for any further hurt. She told Neil she loved him once a day, a sentiment that, to his credit, he was always quick to return. Funny how in marriage a statement that had in its infancy started out as a question, even a provocation, could ultimately become a kind of benign reassurance.
She thought little of Alejandro. Consciously, anyway. At night she often woke crying and wondered fearfully what she had said in her sleep. Neil had put down these nocturnal episodes to Jessie's death, and periodically she felt guilty, apologising silently to Jessie that she had not yet disabused him.
Alejandro didn't come into the shop. But, then, not many people did. Once the high drama of Jessie's death had faded, once the flowers had been removed and the mawkish and gawpish had melted away, Suzanna had been left with just a few regular customers. There was Mrs Creek - who came, Suzanna suspected, because she had worn out her welcome in most other places. She had once overheard the woman's name mentioned in the market cafe, where there was a consequent rolling of eyes, and she had felt briefly sorry for her. Except that Mrs Creek's relentlessly self-involved stories and inappropriate demands meant that sympathy never lasted for long.
There was Father Lenny, who told her solemnly that if she ever wanted to talk, really talk (here he raised a meaningful eyebrow), he was always there for her. Oh, and if she wanted some beaded lamps at a good price, nice ones, mind, he knew where there were some going. Liliane came in occasionally, glowing with what was possibly new love, and bought among other things a pigskin wallet for Arturro and several handmade greetings cards. She didn't speak to Suzanna more than was strictly necessary, and despite the apparently happy outcome of her and Jessie's actions, Suzanna knew that in some way she was not forgiven for the chocolates in the way Jessie might have been.
Arturro came in, at least once a day, to buy an espresso that she suspected he no longer needed. She had heard on the town grapevine that he was thinking of having his own machine installed, and was holding off only out of loyalty to Suzanna, perhaps in the belief that the shop had suffered enough. He was endlessly kind, checking that there were no jobs needing doing, offering to mind the shop for her so that she could run out to get some lunch. She didn't take him up on it very often. It was rare, these days, that she felt hungry enough to make the effort to buy something, and she was afraid that if he hung around too much Liliane would eye her more malevolently than she already did.
Occasionally she would catch him looking at her with sad, wary eyes, and she would force a bright smile. A smile that said, 'I'm okay, really.' A smile she found herself using so often that she had forgotten what the real one felt like.
Neil told her the shop was failing. He didn't say it in so many words. He probably didn't want to make her sadder than she already was. He just looked at the books every few days, and the way he rested his forehead on his hand as he examined the receipts told her everything she needed to know.
She ought to care more than she did, she realised, but its brightly repainted exterior, the posters someone had put up to hide the ugly hoardings over the windows, failed to draw her or anyone as they once had. The brightly coloured tables suddenly looked sad and makeshift, the drinks leaving coloured rings on their surfaces where she hadn't wiped them enough. The bare patches on the walls where she couldn't face replacing the photographs and pictures they had pasted up there, the white emulsion, which she had one afternoon, with a strange urgency, painted over the maps, the lack of display all somehow conspired to make the shop feel different. Less welcoming. Less about its people. Less like the thing that, almost a year previously, she had first imagined.
Suzanna knew it. Like everyone else knew it. Somehow, corny as it sounded, the heart of the shop had gone.
The weather, so the good ladies of the Women's Institute market had told Vivi that morning when she went in to collect her weekly order of vegetables, was definitely on the turn. The seemingly endless weeks of balmy blue skies and windless heat had been replaced, at first for hours but now for whole days at a time, with stiff breezes, grey skies and patchy smatterings of rain. The flowers had long blown over, their heads brown and shrivelled, waiting for their gradual dissolution back into the earth, while trees were shedding leaves prematurely, showering faded green and gold across the pavements and verges. Perhaps, for a summer like the one they had had, Vivi thought, there always had to be a price. She changed her mind about putting the washing outdoors.
'All set?' Douglas stood behind her, his hands on her hips, and kissed her cheek.
'As set as we can be. I've taken you at your word about not wanting a proper lunch.'
'Sandwiches in the study will be fine,' he said. 'I don't imagine any of them will want to stay long. Well, Lucy might if she's taken the day off.'
'No, she told me she'd get the train back this afternoon and go into the office.'
'Girl's a workaholic,' said Douglas, moving over to check the sandwiches. 'Can't imagine where she gets it from.'
The barns were full of hay and straw. The wheat and barley fields had been topped and ploughed. Vivi watched her husband as he gazed absently out of the kitchen window, monitoring the darkening skies for the prospect of rain, as he had done, several times a day, all his adult life. The first drops were spitting on the window, and she felt melancholy that the summer was over. Winter was so much longer in the country. It was all about dark and cold, endless mud and bare brown earth, about the endless wrapping and unwrapping of oneself against bitter cold. It was no wonder that so many farmers became depressed. And yet this year, the prospect of the shrinking days, the encroaching dark, seemed somehow less of an ordeal than it had previously.
'Have you said anything to your mother?' she asked, peeling the paper off a shop-bought cake. She had not troubled to lower her voice: Rosemary's hearing was so bad now that she rarely caught anything said in normal conversation.
'I have,' said Douglas. 'I told her that, despite what she thought, we were not ignoring her wishes. I've told her that this is something of a happy compromise, and that if she looked at it carefully, she should be able to see it as such.'
'And?'
'And I told her the family's happiness was the most important thing. Including hers.'
'And?'
'She shut the door on me,' he said.
'Poor darling,' said Vivi, moving forward to give her husband a hug, then slapped his hand as he dug a roughened finger into the icing.
Suzanna was the first to arrive and Vivi trod on the cat as she hurried down the hallway to open the door. It uttered a wail so feeble that she realised it probably no longer had enough energy to complain.
'I think I've just squashed Rosemary's cat,' she said, as she opened the door.
Suzanna didn't appear to have he
ard. 'I can't stay long,' she said, kissing her mother's cheek. 'I need to open the shop again this afternoon.'
'I know, darling, and it's very good of you to make the effort. Daddy won't take long, I promise. I've put a few sandwiches out so you can eat them while he talks. Will you look at Rosemary's cat and tell me if you think I've broken anything?'
'It's hard to tell.' Suzanna's smile was forced. 'It's always been a bit bandy-legged. Look, it's walking. I shouldn't worry.'
She looked thin, Vivi noted, as she followed Suzanna into the kitchen, where Mrs Cameron was laying a tray. But it wasn't just the thinness: she looked grey, beaten, as if her essence had somehow been washed from her. Vivi wished that in her unhappiness her daughter could have found more comfort in Neil. But, then, these days, she was never sure how much Neil was part of the problem.
'Did you want us to put something else out for Mrs Fairley-Hulme? If I remember rightly she's not a great lover of sandwiches,' Mrs Cameron enquired.
'Have you met Suzanna, Mrs Cameron? My eldest. Suzanna, Mrs Cameron. Actually, I was going to ask you if you wouldn't mind doing her some scrambled egg.' She lowered her voice. 'She's not coming out of the annexe today, apparently.'
'Is this a protest?' asked Suzanna, leaning against the range, as if she could absorb its warmth.
'Rosemary's whole life's a protest, I think,' said Vivi, and felt disloyal. 'I'll just finish off the shirts, and then I'll make her up a tray.'
A few minutes later she carried it through to the annexe, then made up another with a teapot and four mugs. When she returned to the kitchen, Suzanna was looking out of the window. The sadness on her face made Vivi feel suddenly depressed, and conscious that this was an emotion she had felt too often, for too long. There was no such thing as happiness, she thought, if one of your children was miserable. She wiped her hands on her apron, then untied it and hung it on the back of the door, fighting the urge to put her arms round her daughter as she just had her husband. 'Did you have any more thoughts, darling, about whether you wanted us to keep Athene's picture up in the gallery?'
'No,' said Suzanna. 'I haven't really had time to think about it.'
'No, of course not. Well, if you'd like another look, you know where it is.'
'Thanks, Mum, but not today.'
Vivi, hearing the frozen, subdued little voice, wondered if she was still grieving for her friend. The death was still relatively recent, after all. She remembered the impact of Athene dying - the shock of it reverberating through their families, the limited number of people who knew the truth about Athene's 'extended holiday abroad'. Even though Vivi probably hadn't been as sad as she might have been (who had? she thought guiltily) she still remembered the crushing shock of someone so young and beautiful - a mother - having been wrenched so brutally from life.
She wondered, with the familiar sense of inadequacy, what she could do to alleviate some of her daughter's pain. She wanted to ask her what was wrong, to offer some remedy, to support her. But she knew, from bitter experience, that Suzanna would talk only when she was ready. And that, in Vivi's case, was quite likely to be never.
'Lucy should be here in a minute,' she said, opening the linen drawer and pulling out napkins. 'Ben's just picking her up from the station.'
Vivi hadn't been going to sit in on their little meeting: she knew what was going to be said, after all. But Douglas had said he would like her there, so she placed herself at the back of the room, leaning against the bookshelves, enjoying with a vague maternal satisfaction the sight of her three children's heads in front of her. Ben's hair had gone quite blond over the summer, working outside all day, and he looked like a parody of a corn-fed farmer's son. Lucy, to his right, was tanned and fit, having just returned from one of her exotic holidays. Suzanna, on the right, could not have looked more like the odd one out, with her pale, milky skin, dark hair, and shadowed eyes. She would always be beautiful, Vivi thought, but today she looked like someone trying not to be.
'I was going to ring you, Suze,' said Ben, as he stuffed a sandwich into his mouth. 'Tell Neil I'm getting a list ready for that first shoot. I'll have a place for him if he wants to come.'
'I'm not sure we've got the money,' she said quietly.
'I didn't intend him to pay,' Ben said. His indignation sounded forced, his natural demeanour too sunny to validate it. 'Tell you what, if he's worried, tell him he can pay me back in cleaning out the old pig sheds.'
'Or tidy your room,' said Lucy, nudging him. 'Can't see there's much difference. When are you going to move out, Mummy's boy?'
'When are you going to get a boyfriend?'
'When are you going to get a girlfriend?'
'When are you going to get a life?'
'Hmm,' said Lucy, theatrically. 'Eighty thou' a year plus bonuses, an office overlooking the Thames, my own flat, membership of two private clubs and holidays in the Maldives. Or pocket-money wages from Mum and Dad, the room you've had since you were twelve, a car so useless that you end up borrowing Mum's all the time, and best night out the Dere Young Farmers' disco. Hmm, wonder who really needs to get a life?'
It was the way they reintroduced themselves to each other, Vivi knew, the way they re-established their bonds. But as Lucy and Ben continued their good-natured squabbling Suzanna said nothing, just glanced at her watch and then at their father, who was scrabbling among the papers on his desk for his spectacles.
'So, what is this, Dad?' said Lucy, eventually. 'King Lear? Do I get to be Cordelia?'
Douglas found his spectacles, placed them carefully on his nose and eyed his younger daughter over the thin silver frames. 'Very droll, Lucy. Actually, I thought it was time I consulted you all a little more about the running of the estate. I have altered my will so that while the estate will be run by Ben you will each have an eventual financial interest in it, as well as some say in its future. I think it's better if, before anything happens to me, you have some idea of what is going on.'
Lucy looked interested. 'Can I see the accounts? I've always wondered how much this place earned.'
'I doubt it'll take you to the Maldives,' her father said drily. 'I've made copies. They're over there in the blue folder. I'd just ask that you don't take them anywhere. I feel more comfortable knowing that all the financial information is in one place.'
Lucy made for the table and began to study the spreadsheets that Vivi had always found impenetrable. She knew some farmers' wives acted as their husband's book-keepers, and had warned Douglas at the beginning that she couldn't tell the difference between a debit and a credit.
'The main thing I wanted to tell you is that we have permission to convert the barns by Philmore House into holiday cottages.'
Ben shuffled in his chair, making it obvious that he already knew this. Lucy nodded vaguely. Suzanna's face was blank.
'We think there's a potential market, and that, with reasonable occupancy levels, we could clear the cost of conversion within a few years.'
'Weekenders,' said Lucy. 'Cater for the upper end of the market and you'll be laughing.'
'And people who want a full week. Less laundry and cleaning,' said Ben.
'My boss says there are hardly any really nice weekend cottages for people with money to spend. He says it's all plastic cutlery and nylon sheets.'
'Mum, make a note that we don't want nylon sheets.'
Vivi leant forward. 'I don't believe they even sell them any more. Awful things. Used to make you sweat terribly.'
'Ben is going to oversee the building work, and manage them.' Douglas scanned his three children. 'He'll look after the bookings, the cleaning and the handing over of keys, as well as the money side of things. If he fails, obviously, we'll have him shot.'
'Which will save on raising pheasants.'
'I've got this image of Ben now, running naked through the wood, pursued by tweed-clad bankers,' said Lucy, laughing. 'It's put me right off my lunch.'
'Witch,' said Ben. 'Pass me a cheese and pickle.'
'There
are some other issues, one of which is to do with subsidies. I won't bore you with them today, as I know none of you has much time. But, Suzanna, there was one thing I wanted particularly to mention to you.'
Suzanna sat with her mug of tea in her lap. She hadn't, Vivi noticed, taken a single bite of her sandwich.
'When I was discussing what to do with the barns, I had a long talk with Alan Randall - you know, the estate agent. He's told me that the owner of your shop is thinking of selling. We wondered if you'd like us to take a financial interest.'
Suzanna placed her mug carefully on the table beside her. 'What?'
'In the Peacock Emporium. Neil has told me things aren't great for you at the moment, and I know you've been working very hard at it. I think it's a good little business, or has the potential to be, and I'd like to help it have a future.'
Vivi, watching her daughter, saw almost as soon as Douglas started to speak that yet again they had done the wrong thing.
Suzanna swallowed hard, then lifted her head, her features rearranged into something painfully controlled. 'You don't have to do this, Dad.'
'Do what?'
'Compensate me. For how we've been. For Ben's holiday cottages. Whatever.'
'Suzanna . . .' said Lucy, exasperated.
'It's a legitimate business offer,' said Douglas.
'I'm not being rude. Really. But I'd rather you all stayed out of my business. I'll decide what happens to it.'
'Jesus, Suzanna,' Ben said crossly. 'They were just trying to help.'
Suzanna's voice was icily polite. 'I know. And it's very kind of you to think of me, but I don't want any help. Really. I'd rather you all just left me alone.' She looked around the room. 'I'm really not being difficult,' she said, sounding curiously poised. 'I would rather you just left me and Neil to it.'
Douglas's face had closed. 'Fine, Suzanna,' he said, his head lowering over his paperwork. 'Whatever you want.'
Lucy found Suzanna where she had expected, on the stone steps that overlooked the offices. Suzanna had been smoking, hunched over her knees like someone trying to combat stomach ache. When Lucy closed the house door behind her, her sister nodded acknowledgement.
'I like the hair,' Lucy said.