Peacock Emporium Read Online Free PDF Page B

from him now would be the height of impoliteness to someone who had made such an effort to entertain her. And yet the way he was staring at her chest was making her uneasy. ‘Xander, perhaps we can meet for breakfast.’
    He didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘The problem with skinny women,’ he was saying, directly at her chest, ‘and there’re so many bloody skinny women, these days . . .’
    ‘Xander?’
    ‘. . . is that they have no breasts. No breasts to speak of.’ As he spoke, he tentatively lifted a hand towards her. Except it wasn’t her hand he was hoping to touch.
    ‘Oh! You—’ Vivi’s upbringing had left her with no adequate response. She turned, and walked briskly from the room, one hand placed protectively over her bosom, ignoring the rather half-hearted entreaties behind her.
    She had to find Douglas. She wouldn’t be able to sleep until she did. She needed to reassure herself that, no matter how unreachable he had been this evening, once they had left this place he would be her Douglas again: kind, serious Douglas, who had mended punctures on her first bicycle and who, her dad said, was a ‘thoroughly decent young man’ and who had taken her to see Tom Jones twice at the cinema, even if they hadn’t sat anywhere near the back row. She wanted to tell him how awful Alexander had been (and harboured a newly flourishing secret hope that this dastardly behaviour might be the spur for him to realise his true feelings).
    It was easier to search now, the crowds having thinned into small, usually sedentary gatherings, the groups of people becoming less amorphous and now cemented into jaded huddles. The older guests had departed for their rooms, some dragging protesting charges in their wake, and outside at least one tractor could be heard trying to clear a path away from the house. He was not in the gaming room, or in the main ballroom, the adjoining corridor, underneath the grand staircase, or drinking with the pink coats in the Reynard bar. No one noticed her now, the late hour and alcohol consumption having rendered her invisible. But it seemed to have rendered him invisible too; she had wondered several times, in her exhausted state, whether, just as he expressed his dislike for such pompous, class-ridden occasions, he might have crept home after all. Vivi sniffed unhappily, realising that she had never asked him the whereabouts of his room. So wrapped up had she been in her own private fantasy, the prospect of having him escort her to her own room, that she had never considered she might need to know where his was. I’ll find him, she decided. I’ll find Mrs Bloomberg and she’ll tell me. Or I’ll just knock on every door in the other wing until someone can find him for me.
    She went past the main stairs, stepping over the seated couples propped against banisters, listening to the distant sound of squealing girls as the band gamely struck up again. Weary now, she passed rows of ancestral portraits, their colours unmellowed by age, their gilt frames suspiciously bright. Under her feet the plush red carpet now bore the imprint of carelessly stubbed cigarettes and the odd discarded napkin. Outside the kitchens, from which now emanated the smell of baking bread, she passed Isabel, laughing helplessly on the shoulder of an attentive young man. She didn’t seem to recognise Vivi now.
    It was several feet beyond there that the corridor came to an end. Vivi glanced up at the heavy oak door, checked behind her to make sure that no one could see her and let out a huge yawn. She bent down to remove her shoes, several hours after they had first begun to pinch. She would put them back on when she found him.
    It was as she raised her head that she heard it: a scuffling sound, the odd grunt, as if someone had fallen down drunk outside and was trying to raise themselves. She stared at the door from behind which the noise had come, and saw it was just ajar, a sliver of Arctic breeze slipping down the