by Jojo Moyes
It was impossible to answer honestly, so he said nothing.
‘You go, Turco.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Go now. I don’t want us to start making stupid promises about meeting again.’
‘I’ll write if you want.’
‘Come on . . .’
He looked at her beautiful, disappointed face, feeling an affection that surprised him. The words he had prepared seemed trite.
She understood. She squeezed his hand, then gestured towards the door. ‘Go on. You know I was going to finish things anyway. You’re not my type, after all.’
He heard her tone harden determinedly, and walked towards the door.
‘Just my luck, eh?’ she said, laughing humourlessly. ‘A husband who is dead to the touch, and a lover too haunted by ghosts to live.’
Heathrow and its outskirts was the ugliest place he had ever seen. Dere Maternity Hospital was prettier, but even less friendly – especially, he realised, to those with a darker skin. For weeks many of the midwives had refused to speak to him, apparently resentful of this male usurper in their female domain. Two weeks after he arrived, he had slept with a young nurse out of loneliness, and when he had apologised afterwards had been told, bitterly, ‘God, you men are all the same.’ He was permanently cold. His mother, when she had called, had asked if he had a girlfriend yet: ‘A young man, your age,’ she said sadly, ‘you should be shopping around.’
He had seen the sign outside the Peacock Emporium and, overcome by a wave of homesickness almost as strong as his exhaustion after a fourteen-hour shift (other midwives told him he was mad not to end a shift during a labour, but he did not consider it fair to leave a woman at her most vulnerable), he had pushed open the door and entered. He was not a superstitious man, but sometimes you had to follow signs. Trying to shut them out didn’t seem to have served him well this far.
He didn’t tell the two women this, of course. Or the bit about Sofia. Or Estela, come to that. If it hadn’t been for the blonde with the smiling face, the first person who had appeared to want to hear what he had to say, he might not have said anything at all.
Twelve
The problem with getting older was not so much that one got stuck in the past, Vivi often thought, but that there was so much more of the past to get lost in. She had been sorting through the old bureau in the sitting room, determined to put all those sepia-tinted photographs into an album, hopefully before the men came in, but suddenly it was getting on for half past five. She had found herself inanimate on the small sofa, absorbed in images of her earlier self, pictures she had not lingered over for years: clinging to Douglas’s arm at various social functions, posing self-consciously in frocks, proudly holding newborn babies, and then, as they got older, looking increasingly less confident, her smile perhaps a little more painted on with each year. Perhaps she was being too hard on herself. Or perhaps she was being sentimental, projecting on to herself emotions she felt swamped by now.
Suzanna had been an easy child. When Vivi considered the upheaval of her daughter’s early years, and her own lack of experience as a mother, it amazed her that they had muddled through as well as they had. Suzanna’s childhood had never been the problem: it was puberty, when those gawky, elongated limbs achieved a certain sylph-like elegance, when those near-Slavic cheekbones had started highlighting the previously hidden planes of her face, that a distant echo had patently disturbed Douglas’s peace of mind. And Suzanna, perhaps reacting to some unseen vibration in the atmosphere, had gone off the rails.
Rationally, Vivi knew this was not her fault: no one could have offered Suzanna more unconditional love, have understood better her complicated nature. But motherhood was never rational: even now, with Suzanna as settled as she ever had been – and Neil such a wonderful husband – Vivi still found herself suffused with guilt that somehow she had failed to raise this daughter to be happy. ‘No reason for her not to be happy,’ Douglas would say. ‘She’s had every advantage.’
‘Yes, well, sometimes it’s not quite as simple as that.’ Vivi rarely ventured further into family psychology: Douglas did not hold much truck with such discussions and, besides, he was right in his way. Suzanna had had everything. They all had. The fact that her and Douglas’s two children were so contented had not alleviated her sense of responsibility – if anything, it had heightened it. Vivi had spent years wondering privately if she had treated the children differently in some way, if subconsciously she had instilled in Suzanna a sense that she was second best.
She knew how seductive that feeling could be.
Douglas said it was rubbish. His view of relationships was simple: you treated people fairly, and expected them to treat you fairly in return. You loved your children, they loved you back. You supported them as much as you could, and in return they attempted to do you proud.
Or, in Suzanna’s case, you loved them and they did their best to make themselves unhappy.
I don’t think I can bear this any longer, she thought, her eyes welling with tears as she looked at the eleven-year-old Suzanna, clinging fiercely to Vivi’s prematurely thickened waist. Somebody has to do something. And I shall hate myself if I don’t at least try.
What would Athene have done? Vivi had long since stopped asking herself that question: Athene had been such an unknowable quantity it had been impossible to predict her actions even when she had been alive. Now, thirty-odd years later, she seemed so insubstantial, her memory both so fierce and simultaneously ephemeral, that it was hard to imagine her as a mother at all. Would she have understood her daughter’s complicated nature, which echoed her own? Or would she have done even more damage, dipping in and out of her daughter’s life, her failure to stick at motherhood another painful example of her irredeemably mercurial temperament?
You’re lucky, Vivi told the invisible mother in the photograph, feeling suddenly envious, thinking of how Douglas had waved her away when she had attempted once again to bring up the subject of Rosemary and her laundry. It’s easier to be a ghost. You can be romanticised, adored, can grow in the memory instead of diminish in reality. Then, pushing herself out of the chair, and noting the time, she scolded herself for the fanciful indulgence of envying the dead.
Alejandro arrived at a quarter past nine. He came in most days now but always at different times, according to the apparently random timetable of his shifts. He didn’t speak much. He didn’t even look at a newspaper. He just sat in the corner and sipped his coffee, occasionally smiling in response to Jessie’s cheerful chatter.
Jessie, never slow in striking up a conversation, had made it her mission to find out all about the man she termed ‘the Gaucho Gynae’, asking him questions in a manner that occasionally made Suzanna wince. Had he always wanted to be a midwife? Only since he realised he was not going to make the national football team. Did he like delivering babies? Yes. Did the women mind having a male midwife? Mostly no. He backed out gracefully when they did. He had found, he said, that if he wore a white coat no one batted an eyelid. Did he have a girlfriend? No. Suzanna had looked away when he answered that one, furious with herself for her faint but definite blush.
He didn’t seem to mind Jessie’s questions, although he often managed not to answer them directly. He sat close enough to the counter, Suzanna had noted, to express some degree of comfort with them. Suzanna herself made sure she was rarely close to him. He already felt, somehow, as if he were Jessie’s. As if Suzanna attempting to be equally friendly with him would make everyone uncomfortable.
‘How many babies did you deliver today?’
‘Only one.’
‘Any complications?’
‘Just a fainting father.’
‘Fantastic. What did you do?’
Alejandro had glanced down at his hands. ‘It was not very good timing. We only had time to move him out of the way.’
‘What – drag him?’
Alejandro had seemed faintly embarrassed. ‘We needed our hands. We had to push him
with our feet.’
Jessie loved to hear these stories. Suzanna, more squeamishly, often had to turn up the volume of the music or invent some task in the cellar. It was all a little too close to home. But she frequently found herself staring at him, albeit surreptitiously: while his exotic appearance would have failed to hook her attention in London (in fact, it might have rendered him invisible: she would probably have assumed he was a low-paid immigrant), in the environs of the frighteningly Caucasian Suffolk town, and in the close confines of her little shop, he was a welcome breath of exoticism, a reminder of a wider world outside.
‘Did he miss the birth?’
‘Not quite. But I think he was a bit confused.’ He smiled to himself. ‘He tried to punch me when he came round, and then he called me “Mother”.’
He had told them another story, of a man who, while his wife screamed in pain, had sat at the end of the bed, calmly reading his newspaper. Alejandro had buckled under the weight of the woman, had wiped her brow, blotted her tears, while all the while her husband failed to glance up from his reading. By the time the baby was born, Alejandro said calmly, he had wanted to hit the man. But his wife, peculiarly, seemed to bear him no resentment. As the baby was placed in her arms, the husband had stood up, gazed at them both, kissed his wife’s forehead, where the sweat still cooled, and left the room. Alejandro, shocked and furious, had asked her, as tactfully as he could, whether she had been happy with her husband’s response. ‘She looked at me,’ he said, ‘and smiled a big smile. “Oh, yes,” she said. My confusion must have shown on my face, so she explained. Her husband, he had a deep terror of hospitals. But she needed him with her. They struck a deal that if he could make it into the room, just so she knew he was there, she could cope. Because he loved her, he forced himself to do it.’
‘So the moral of the story is . . .’ said Jessie.
‘Don’t judge a man by his newspaper,’ said Father Lenny, looking up from his crossword.
Jessie had wanted to do a display on him, had wanted a story about some miracle of birth (‘It kind of fits, being a newish shop and all’), but Alejandro had been reticent. He didn’t think, he said, in his quiet, courteous voice, that he could yet lay claim to being one of the shop’s regulars. There was something decisive enough in his tone for Jessie to back off. And despite her compelling charm – Suzanna thought she could probably have flirted with a brick – Alejandro had failed to fulfil any of their expectations about Latin men. He neither swaggered, nor eyed them with a swarthy intent. He didn’t even seem to have inbuilt rhythm.
‘Probably gay,’ said Jessie as, with a polite goodbye, he left for work.
‘No,’ said Suzanna, who wasn’t sure whether wishful thinking had made her say it.
Jessie had injured her hand. Suzanna hadn’t noticed it, but Arturro did when he came in for his morning espresso. ‘You hurt yourself?’ He had lifted her hand from the counter with the tenderness of one used to treating food with reverence, and turned it to the light to reveal a large purplish-brown bruise across three fingers.
‘Car door shut on me,’ said Jessie, and pulled it back with a smile. ‘Daft, aren’t I?’
There was an unexpected embarrassed silence in the shop. The bruise was awful, a livid reminder of some extreme hurt. Suzanna had glanced at Arturro’s face, noted that Jessie refused to look directly at either of them, and was ashamed that she had not noticed it. She was going to ask, thought perhaps that, if the subj ect were pursued tactfully, Jessie might confide in her, but as she ran through the possible questions in her head, she became aware that every possible variation sounded not only intrusive but crass, and possibly patronising too. ‘Arnica cream,’ she said eventually. ‘Seems to bring out the bruising quicker.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I’ve done that. We’ve got loads of it at home.’
‘Are you sure your fingers aren’t broken?’ Arturro was still eyeing Jessie’s hand. ‘They look a bit swollen to me.’
‘No, I can move them. Look.’ She gave a gay wave of her fingers, then turned back towards the wall. ‘Who shall we put in the first display, then? I really wanted to do Alejandro, but I think that story about the baby who got given up would make everyone cry.’
‘It was him, wasn’t it?’ said Suzanna, much later, when they were alone.
‘Who?’ Jessie was working on her display after all: she had targeted Father Lenny, who had conceded with some amusement, but only if she would mention that currently he had almost two hundred battery-operated back-massagers for sale. (‘They don’t look much like back-massagers to me,’ Jessie had said, dubiously holding one up. ‘I’m a priest,’ Father Lenny had exclaimed. ‘What else would they be?’)
‘Your boyfriend. Hurt your fingers.’ She had felt it between them all afternoon – was increasingly consumed by the need for them at least to acknowledge that understanding, even if it meant Jessie would take it badly.
‘I shut them in the car door,’ said Jessie.
There was a short delay before Suzanna spoke: ‘You mean he did.’
Jessie had been in the window. She got up off her knees, and backed out of the space, careful not to dislodge any of the items on display. She lifted her hand and examined it, as if for the first time. ‘It’s really difficult to explain,’ she said.
‘Try me.’
‘He liked it when I was just at home with Emma. This all started when I did my night school. He just loses his temper because he gets insecure.’
‘Why don’t you leave?’
‘Leave?’ She looked genuinely surprised, even, perhaps, offended. ‘He’s not some wife-beater, Suzanna.’
Suzanna raised her eyebrows.
‘Look, I know him, and this isn’t really him. He just feels threatened because I’m getting an education and he thinks that means I’m going to bugger off. And now there’s this place, and that’s something new as well. I probably don’t help matters – you know I’m a terrible one for talking to everyone. Sometimes I probably don’t consider how it looks to him . . .’ She gazed meditatively at her half-finished window display. ‘Look, once he sees nothing’s going to change, he’ll go back to how he was. Don’t forget, Suzanna, I know him. We’ve been together ten years. This is not the Jason I know.’
‘I just don’t see that there’s ever an excuse for it.’
‘I’m not making excuses. I’m explaining. There’s a difference. Look, he knows he’s done wrong. Don’t think I’m some cowering little victim. We just fight, and when we fight sometimes we fight nasty. I give as good as I get, you know.’
In the long silence, the atmosphere in the shop seemed to contract. Suzanna said nothing, fearful of how it might sound, conscious that even in her silence she was making some kind of judgement.
Jessie leant back against one of the tables, and looked squarely at her. ‘Okay, what is it that really bothers you about this?’
Suzanna’s voice, when it came out, was small. ‘The effect it might have on Emma? What it’s teaching her?’
‘You think I’d let anyone lay a hand on Emma? You think I’d stay in the house if I thought Jason might lay a hand on her?’
‘I’m not saying that.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘That – that . . . I don’t know . . . I’m just uncomfortable with any kind of violence,’ said Suzanna.
‘Violence? Or passion?’
‘What?’
It was the first time Jessie’s face had darkened. ‘You don’t like passion, Suzanna. You like things neatly packaged. You like to keep things buttoned up. And that’s fine. That’s your choice. But me and Jason, we’re just honest about what we feel – when we love, we really love. But when we fight, we really fight. There aren’t any half-measures. And do you know what? I’m more comfortable with this – even with the odd busted hand,’ here she held up her wrist, ‘than the opposite, which is feeling so not bothered by someone that you lead this sort of cool, polite, parallel life with each other. Have sex once a week
. Hell, once a month. Fight quietly so you don’t wake the kids. What’s that teaching anyone about life?’
‘The two things don’t necessarily . . .’ Suzanna tailed off, mid-sentence. Intellectually, she knew she could have disputed the sense in what Jessie had said, however forcefully it had been put, but even though it had not been meant maliciously, there was something so profoundly discomfiting about it that Suzanna could hardly speak. In Jessie’s description of the relationship she didn’t want, the relationship she found more frightening than violence, than a busted hand, Suzanna had clearly seen herself and Neil.
It had been almost a relief that afternoon when Vivi appeared: Suzanna and Jessie, while outwardly polite, had lost a certain spontaneity in their dealings with each other, as if the conversation had been too premature for their infant friendship to survive its honesty. Arturro had drunk his coffee unusually quickly and, with a nervous thank-you, had left. Two other customers had talked loudly in the corner, oblivious, temporarily masking the long silences. But now that they were gone it had become painfully apparent that Jessie’s normal chattiness had been deadened, replaced by the sense that she was measuring everything she said. Suzanna, making an uncharacteristic effort to talk to her customers as an attempt to bypass the strained atmosphere, found herself greeting Vivi with an unusual warmth, which Vivi, flushed with pleasure at being hugged, had eagerly returned.
‘So, this is it!’ she exclaimed, several times, in the doorway. ‘Aren’t you clever?’
‘Hardly,’ said Suzanna. ‘It’s only a few chairs and tables.’
‘But look at your lovely colours! All these pretty things!’ She bent and examined the shelves. ‘They’re all exquisite. And so nicely arranged. I did want to come by – but I know you don’t like to feel we’re all breathing down your neck. And the couple of times I did come past you looked like you were busy . . . anyway. The Peacock Emporium,’ she said, slowly reading a label. ‘Oh, Suzanna, I’m so proud of you. It really is like nothing else around.’
