Peacock Emporium by Jojo Moyes Read Free Book Online Page A

straightforward manner that she concluded most things, that she would rather live alone with her loss than spend a lifetime trying to make someone else match up.
    She had dreaded this trip, had considered a thousand times what legitimate excuse she could find for not coming. She had spoken to Douglas only once, when he had arranged to meet her in London, and found his patent happiness and what she could only imagine to be his new air of sexual confidence almost unbearable. Heedless of her discomfort, he had held her hands and made her promise that she would come: ‘You’re my oldest friend, Vee. I really want you there on the day. You’ve got to be there. Come on, be a sport.’
    So she had gone home, cried for several days, and then been a sport. She had smiled, when she had wanted to wail and beat her breasts like women in Greek tragedies, and pull the brocade drapes and wedding banners from their hangings and scratch that awful, awful girl’s face and take swings at her head, her hands, her heart to destroy whatever it was about her that Douglas loved most. And then, shocked that she was capable of thinking such dark thoughts about any human being (she had once cried for an entire afternoon after accidentally killing a rabbit), she had smiled again. A bright, benign smile, hoping against hope that if she presented a peaceable front for long enough, if she kept persuading herself to keep living a seemingly normal life, one day at a time, some of her apparent equilibrium might become real.
    Athene’s mother had caught her daughter smoking on the stairs. Dressed in her bridal gown, legs splayed, puffing away like a charlady, with a cigarette she had solicited from one of the bar staff. She informed her husband of this discovery in quietly outraged tones, and managed to surprise even him when she told him of Athene’s colourful response. ‘Well, she’s not my responsibility now, Justine.’ Colonel Forster leant back on his gilt chair, and tamped tobacco into his pipe, refusing to look his wife in the face, as if she, too, were complicit in this indiscretion. ‘We’ve done our duty by the girl.’
    His wife stared at him for a moment, then turned to Douglas, who had been swilling a brandy in his hand, mulling on The air of maturity the balloon glass seemed to impose. ‘You do understand what you’ve taken on?’ Her tone suggested that her daughter had not been forgiven for her earlier indiscretion.
    ‘The finest girl in all England, as far as I’m concerned.’ Douglas, full of alcohol, bonhomie and sexual anticipation, felt magnanimous, even to his sour-faced in-laws. He had been remembering the night he had asked her to marry him, a day that separated the two lives of Douglas into a kind of Before and After Athene, the latter less the marking of some rite of passage than a fundamental shift in who he was, how he felt himself joined to his world. To him, now, a married man, that day seemed to signify a crossing-over: a vast leap across a divide that had seen him on one side as someone searching, tentatively trying out new attitudes and opinions, new ways to be, and on the other marked simply as A Man. For Athene had bestowed that upon him. He felt like a rock to her shifting, mercurial self, her separateness bestowing on him a sense of solidity, of surety. She crept up him like ivy, clinging and beautiful, a welcome, parasitic sprite. He had known from the night he first saw her that she was meant for him: she had prompted an ache, an unexpected sense that something was lacking, that some fundamental part of him was, without him having previously known it, unfulfilled. She made him think like that, lyrically, fatalistically. He had not known such words were even in his vocabulary. Previously when he had considered marriage it had been with a kind of moribund expectation: it was the thing that one did when one found a suitable girl. It would be expected of him and, as usual, Douglas would fulfil those