1. Peacock Emporium by Jojo Moyes

Author:Jojo Moyes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780340752043
Publisher: Hodder Pb
Published: 2005-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Douglas closed the door behind him, and stared at his wife’s dog in frustration. He had been looking for Vivi, had walked the animal round the formal gardens in the hope that it would find her, had continued on round the new offices and down to the dairy yard, and even through the woodland at the back of the grain sheds. The dog had failed to pick up a bloody thing.

Perhaps I need a sniffer dog, he thought, and let out a sigh at the irony. I need a sniffer dog to locate my wife. She had been so busy lately, had left his meals with polite notes, retired late to bed having discovered a multitude of urgent tasks in underused parts of the house. He was never sure any more where she would be. Or what mood she would be in when he found her. He felt unbalanced by the wrongness of it all.

The dog got under his feet and yelped as he tripped over it. His mother, from behind the annexe door, called out twice to see if it was him. Feeling mean, he pretended he hadn’t heard: he didn’t want to be sent on some other errand. He was weary from having to drive Rosemary into town twice this morning – the third time he had had to do so in a week. His mother, still smarting from Vivi’s outburst a week earlier, no longer asked where she was, as if her daughter-in-law’s verbal insurrection had breached some unspoken rule, had made her in some way invisible. If he wasn’t feeling so sorry for himself it might have made him laugh. This, he understood, uncomfortably, was what his wife had been complaining of these last months. That, and the faint, but distinctively unpleasant aroma that now lingered in the passenger seat of the Range Rover.

Douglas ignored the dog, who was seated in obedience to some non-existent command, silently begging for scraps, and picked up the note on the kitchen table. It had not been there when he left the house this morning, or an hour earlier when he had returned to deliver Rosemary home, and the sight of it made him both annoyed and sad, as if his marriage had been requisitioned by two childish strangers.

Vivi, the note informed in neat handwriting, would be out for a while. His and Ben’s lunch was in the oven, and needed only twenty minutes’ reheating. She could not, apparently, guarantee the same punctuality for herself.

He reread the note, then screwed it up in his broad hand and hurled it across the kitchen, so that the dog went scurrying after it across the flagstones.

Then, noting that her car keys were on the peg, he glanced out of the window, rammed his cap on his head and left the house via the kitchen door, ignoring the imperious muffled voice calling his name behind him.

Alejandro pulled the airmail letter from his pigeonhole, registered the familiar stamp, and stuffed it into his pocket as

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