by Jojo Moyes
She stopped, and glanced up at Suzanna, who averted her eyes. Neil was now flicking through a newspaper, so he didn't see Jessie's double-take, or that his wife, having smiled awkwardly at Jessie to cover her discomfort, made herself busy with a box of parchment under the counter and stayed down there for several minutes longer than was strictly necessary for the job in hand.
It wasn't about Jason, despite Jessie's clumsy way with words. It wasn't even about Neil. Neither woman had said anything, but both had been aware of it.
Arturro had sacked all the young men in his shop. Just like that, with no warning, no severance pay, nothing. Mrs Creek was the first to discover it, when she walked past on her way to the market. She told them shortly after Neil had left. 'I heard a load of shouting and goodness knows what, and he was blowing off steam like a bull in a field. I was going to go in for some of that nice cheese, the one with bits of apricot in it, but to be honest I thought I'd better give him a chance to cool down.'
Jessie and Suzanna stood very still, as they had since Mrs Creek had begun her story - she had stretched it out over some considerable time, adding inflections and hand gestures, making the most of her unexpectedly rapt audience. When she finished, they exchanged a look.
'I'll go,' said Jessie.
'I'll keep an eye open for Arturro,' said Suzanna.
He hadn't come.
Jessie went to Liliane's, not to pry, of course, just to suss out the atmosphere, as she put it, find out what was going down. Initially, she thought, Mrs Creek must have been exaggerating. Liliane, although reserved as always, was as poised and polite as she normally was. But when Jessie mentioned the delicatessen, she had become distinctly shirty. She was no longer using it, she said. Some people in town thought their way of treating customers pretty shabby. Pretty shabby indeed.
'Anything in particular?' Jessie pressed.
'Let's just say,' said Liliane, her mouth set in a grim line, her hair as rigid as her jaw, 'that there are those who might have been expected to behave like gentlemen but who think nothing of playing practical jokes more suited to the playground.'
'Oh, bugger,' said Jessie, when she got back. 'I've got a bad feeling about this.'
'Do we confess?' said Suzanna, feeling faintly sick.
'If the boys have lost their jobs, I guess we have to. It's our fault.'
Suzanna thought of them, wondering why she could feel so distant towards young men who had once occupied an unhealthy portion of her imagination.
'You go.'
'No, you.'
They were giggling nervously now.
'It was your idea.'
'You bought the sugared almonds. It was going fine until the sugared almonds.'
'I can't believe I'm thirty-five years old and I'm feeling like I've got to go and see the headmistress at school . . . I can't do this. I really can't.' Suzanna leant back against the counter, deep in thought. 'How about if I pay you?' She giggled again.
Jessie put her hands on her hips. 'Ten grand. That's my best price.'
Suzanna gasped theatrically.
'I know - one does Arturro, one Liliane.'
'But you know them better than me.'
'So I've got more to lose.'
'She scares me. I don't think she likes me as it is. Not since I started stocking those T-shirts. She thinks I'm stealing her market.'
'Why? What has she said?'
'It's not what she's said, it's how she looks at them when she comes in.'
'Suzanna Peacock, you're pathetic. You're nearly ten years older than me and--'
'Nine, actually. I'm thirty-five. Only thirty-five.'
'Neil says you've been thirty-five for about ten years.'
Fear had made them hysterical. They clutched at each other, eyes wide, laughter giddy.
'Oh, I'll go - I'll go tomorrow, if you let me off early this afternoon. I need to take Emma to get some shoes. And I can't do it later because I've got night school.'
'That's blackmail.'
'You want me to talk to Arturro? You owe me, big-time. Tomorrow, then.' Jessie began to write out price labels with a fuchsia-coloured pen. 'And only if he hasn't cooled down and let them all back in anyway.'
But the next day Jessie didn't come in. Suzanna was at home drying her hair when the telephone rang. 'Sorry,' said Jessie, sounding unusually subdued. 'You know I wouldn't normally let you down, but I can't make it today.'
'Is it Emma?' Suzanna's mind was racing. She had meant to drive to Ipswich to meet a supplier. She would have to change her plans.
There was a pause.
'No, no. Emma's fine.'
'What is it? A cold? There's a weird summer one going round. Father Lenny said he felt odd yesterday. And that woman with the dogs.' If she rang the supplier now, she thought, she might be able to cancel without too many problems. Otherwise she would have to leave the shop shut all morning.
'You know what? I'm probably going to need a couple of days . . .'
Suddenly Suzanna switched her attention to the voice on the line. 'Jess? Are you okay?'
There was a silence.
'Do you - do you need me to run you to the doctor?'
'I just need a couple of days. I promise I won't let you down again.'
'Don't be ridiculous. What's the matter? Are you ill?'
Another silence, then, 'Don't make a big deal, Suze, please.'
Suzanna sat, staring at her bedside table, her hairdryer still in her hand. She put it down, and switched the receiver to the other ear. 'Has he hurt you?' It came out as a whisper.
'It looks worse than it is. But it doesn't look pretty. Not the right kind of look for the stylish shop assistant.' Jessie mustered a wry laugh.
'What did he do?'
'Oh, Suze, please leave it. Things just got a bit out of hand. He's going to do anger management. He's promised me this time.'
The little bedroom had grown chilly.
'You can't keep doing this, Jess,' she murmured.
Jessie's voice was hard. 'I'm dealing with it, okay? Now, do me a favour, Suzanna, just leave it. And if my mum drops by, don't say anything. Tell her I'm out with a customer or something. I don't want her going off on one.'
'Jess, I--'
The line went dead.
Suzanna sat on the side of her bed, gazing at the wall. Then she scraped her wet hair into a ponytail, ran downstairs for her keys, and headed the short distance into the centre of Dere Hampton.
There were, as far as Suzanna could see, limited advantages to living in such a small town, but an undeniable one was that there were only so many places for people to be. She found Father Lenny in the tearooms, about to bite into a bacon sandwich. When he saw her he cowered jokingly, as if he'd been caught doing something treacherous. 'I'll be in for my normal coffee later,' he said, as she sat down opposite. 'I promise. I just have to test out the opposition every now and then.'
Suzanna forced herself to smile, tried to look more relaxed than she felt. 'Father Lenny, do you happen to know where Jessie lives?'
'She's up on the Meadville estate. Near her mother. Why?'
Suzanna remembered Jessie's warning. 'Nothing important. She's off with a cold, and I forgot to get some details of an order from her. Thought I'd pop up there and take her some flowers while I was at it. Kill two birds with one stone, you know.' She smiled reassuringly.
Father Lenny's eyes searched hers and, having presumably found the answers he required, looked down at his plate where his bacon sandwich lay. 'Is it a bad cold?' he asked slowly.
'Hard to say. I think she'll be needing a few days off, though.'
He nodded, as if digesting the information. 'Would you be wanting any company?' he said carefully. 'I've not a lot on this morning.'
'Oh, no,' said Suzanna. 'I'm fine.'
'I'm happy to come. I'll only stay five minutes if you've got . . . things to discuss.'
'That's very kind, but you know what it's like when someone's got a cold. They don't want to be disturbed.'
'No,' Father Lenny said. 'They don't.' Then he sat upright, pushed away his plate. 'She's at forty-six The Crescent. As you go in off the hospital road, take the first right and it's there on your left.'
'Thanks.' Suzanna had already risen from her seat.
'Tell her I send my love, will you? And I'll look forward to seeing her back in the shop.'
'I will'
'And, Suzanna . . .'
'What?' She hadn't meant to be rude. 'Sorry. Yes?'
Father Lenny nodded, an acknowledgement of something. 'I'm glad she's got a friend.' He hesitated. 'Someone to talk to.'
But while it was one thing to have the address, it was quite another, Suzanna realised, as she sat on the step outside her shop, to head up there and push her way, presumably unwanted, into a potential snakepit. What if he was there? She wouldn't know what to say to him. What was the etiquette in such situations? Did you ignore the woman's appearance? Make polite conversation? Accept his offer of a cup of tea? What if he was there and wouldn't let her in? She might make things worse by just turning up.
Suzanna had only ever come up against domestic violence once: at school, her geography teacher, an apologetic, bespectacled woman, would regularly come in trying to shield purplish marks on her face and arms. 'Her husband beats her up,' the girls would say knowledgeably to each other afterwards, then give it no further thought. It was as if, Suzanna observed now, they had been parroting parental wisdom. These things happened. That was life. Mrs Nathan had always looked like a victim, anyway.
But this was different.
Suzanna's head sank on to her knees. She felt weak and inadequate. She could just not go, she thought. Jessie didn't seem to want her there. It would be the easier path. She would be back in a day or two. And yet there was a degree of complicity in that course that made her ashamed for even considering it.
It felt almost inevitable that he should come. She looked up, still passing her keys from hand to hand, to see him standing in front of her, his long legs for once in pale trousers, a T-shirt in place of the familiar scrubs and jacket. 'Locked yourself out?' He looked relaxed, as if wherever he had been in the intervening days had been restorative.
'Not exactly.' She thought he might ask for coffee, or make his way in, but he just waited for her to speak. 'It's Jessie,' she said.
He glanced up and past her into the empty shop.
'I don't know whether to go to her house.' She kicked at a stray stone. 'I don't know . . . how much it's right to interfere.' She didn't need to explain to him.
He squatted in front of her, his expression set and grim. 'You are afraid?'
'I don't know what she wants. I want to help, but she doesn't seem to want it.'
He looked down the lane.
'She talks a lot, Jess,' she continued, 'but she's actually quite private. I don't know . . . with this thing, whether she's kind of comfortable with . . . the way things are. Or whether she's secretly desperate for someone to jump in and help her. And--' She scratched her nose, 'I'm not very good at fishing around with people. At confidences and intimacies and all that stuff. To be honest, Ale, I'm out of my depth. And I'm terrified of getting it wrong.' She didn't tell him her darker thoughts: that she was afraid of getting too close to the mess of it, to its dark unhappiness; that having salvaged some kind of fragile peace in her own life, she didn't want it corrupted by someone else's misery.
He touched her knee with his fingertips, a reassuring, gentle gesture.
They stayed like that for several minutes.
'You know what?' he said, lifting himself to his feet. He held out a hand. 'Lock up your shop. I think we should go.'
The house was prettier than Suzanna had expected - prettier inside than it deserved to be, considering the uniformly depressed air of its neighbours, as if the sun, the blue sky, even the glorious Suffolk countryside surrounding the estate had failed to impress itself on the drab, post-war housing.
Jessie's house was recognisable outside for its window-boxes and its bright purple front door. Inside, Suzanna had expected a war zone. Instead she found an immaculate sitting room with plumped gingham cushions and carefully dusted shelves. The ungenerous rooms were colourfully painted, decorated with cheap furniture that had been customised, loved into something more attractive. The walls were decorated with family pictures and paintings evidently completed by Emma in the various stages of her school career. Jokey birthday cards still lined the mantelpiece, and a pair of comedy slippers in the shape of stuffed animals that announced they were 'bear feet' lay on the floor. The only sign of any disturbance was a parcel of newspaper next to a dustpan and brush, presumably concealing broken glass or china. But what the apparently cheerful interior could not disguise was the air of stunned stillness, an atmosphere quite different from the peaceful silence of a near-unoccupied house, as if it were still digesting actions that had previously taken place there.
'Tea?' said Jessie.
Suzanna had heard Alejandro's gasp as the younger girl opened the front door, the swift attempt, in stepping in, that he made to hide it. Her fine features were swollen, her mouth smeared at a grotesque angle for both lips had been split by some historic blow. There was a large purplish bruise to her upper right cheek and some kind of home-made splint supported her left index finger.
'It's not broken,' she said, wiggling it, as she followed Alejandro's eyes. 'I would have gone to hospital if I thought anything was broken.'
She tried and failed to disguise a slight limp when she walked. 'Go through to the front room,' she said, a parody of a hostess. 'Sit down and make yourselves comfortable.'
Against the sound of children riding bicycles on the pavement outside, they had sat silently beside each other on the long sofa, which was covered by a pale throw. Suzanna tried not to think what marks on the sofa had led to it needing to be covered.
Jessie brought through a tray of mugs, refused offers of help, and sat down, facing them. 'Anyone for sugar?' she said, her voice thick with the effort of speaking through a fat lip.
Suzanna, with an unexpected hiccup, began to cry, brushing at her face in an attempt to disguise her tears. It all seemed so wrong somehow, seeing Jessie like this. She was so far removed from the kind of women this usually happened to.
Alejandro pulled out a handkerchief. She took it wordlessly, ashamed that, in the face of such pain, it was she who was crying.
'Please don't, Suze.' Jessie's voice, was determinedly upbeat. 'It looks worse than it feels, honest.'
'Where is your daughter?'
'She was staying at my mum's, thank God. Now I just have to find a way to keep her there another night without Mum kicking off.'
'You want me to take a look at your hand?' Alejandro offered.
'It's just bruised.'
'You might need stitches in that lip.'
'No. He didn't break the skin inside. I checked.'
'You should probably get an X-ray too, just to check your head's okay.'
Suzanna watched as Alejandro moved over to Jessie and examined her face, turning it gently towards the light. 'You want me to get some butterfly stitches from work? It would help this heal quicker. Or maybe some painkillers.'
'I tell you what you could do, Ale. Tell me how I can get the swelling down. I need to have Emma home ASAP and I don't want to scare the living daylights out of her. I've done ice packs and arnica cream, but if there's anything else . . .'
Alejandro was still looking closely at her head. 'Nothing that's going to make any real difference,' he said.
There was a silence. Suzanna took her tea and stared into it, unsure what to say. Jessie, in her pain and composure, in her apparently well-rehearsed reaction to it, seemed like a stranger.
'You want me to talk to him?'
Suzanna glanced up. Alejandro's expression was hard; his voice had been tight with restraint.
Jessie shook her head. 'I have told him,' she said eventually. 'That he's gone too far, I mean.'
Outside
, the children were squabbling. Their voices were raised against each other at the other end of the street.
'I know what you're both thinking but I won't let this carry on. For Emma's sake, as much as anything. I've told him, the next time he lays a finger on me he's out.'
Alejandro looked down into his mug.
'I mean it,' said Jessie. 'I don't expect you to believe me, but I do. It's just that I want to see what happens with this anger-management course before I actually pack up and go.'
'Jessie, please go now. Please. I'll help. We'll all help.'
'You don't understand, Suze. This isn't some stranger, this is the man I've loved since I was . . . since I was practically a kid myself. And I know the real him and this is not it. I can't throw away ten years just because of a rough few months. He's Emma's dad, for God's sake. And, believe it or not, when he's not . . . like this, we have a good time together. We've been happy for years.'
'You're making excuses for him.'
'Yup, I probably am. And I can see how it looks to you. But I just wish you'd known him before this started. I wish you could have seen us together.'
Suzanna glanced at Alejandro. She had thought, given his evident affection for Jessie, that he might get angry, intervene on her behalf despite her instructions, but he was just sitting there, holding his mug, listening. It made her feel almost frustrated.
'I'm not frightened of him, you know. I mean, yes, it's a bit frightening when he loses it, but it's not like I'm walking around the house terrified of setting him off.' Jess looked from Suzanna to Alejandro. 'I'm not an idiot. This is his last chance. But what am I saying otherwise? That no one deserves a chance to change?'
'It's not that--'
'Look, you know what started this off, don't you?' Jessie lifted a mug with her injured hand, then transferred it to the good one and took a sip. 'Father Lenny. He had a go at him about losing his temper. He ended up feeling like everyone was judging him. He thought I'd been telling tales and that the town had turned against him. You know what it's like round here. It's a horrible feeling having everyone look down on you - I know, because a lot of people wouldn't talk to me when I was a cleaner. Like it somehow made me different.'
She put her mug down. 'You've got to let me handle this myself. Don't make things worse. If I decide he really has changed, that he's turned into someone I don't feel safe with, I'll pack my bags and go.' She tried to smile. 'I'll move into the shop, Suzanna. Then you'll never be rid of me.'
