A Place of Hiding (22 page)

Adrian gave the man a cursory glance. “One of Dad's artists. The place is crawling with them. They're all here to grease the way with Ruth on the chance she's been left most of the bundle.”

“When they should be greasing the way with you? How very strange,” Margaret said.

He gave her a look that she didn't like to interpret. “Believe me. No one's that stupid.”

“About what?”

“About where Dad left his money. They know he wouldn't have—”

“Darling, that makes no difference at all. Where he may have
wanted
his money to go and where it shall end up might very well be two different places. Wise is the man who realises that and acts accordingly.”

“Wise is the woman as well, Mother?”

He sounded hateful. Margaret couldn't understand what she had done to deserve that sort of tone from him. She said, “If we're speaking of your father's latest dalliance with this Mrs. Abbott, I think I can safely say that—”

“You know damn well we're not.”

“—your father's bent for younger women being what it was—”

“Yeah. That's just bloody it, Mother. Would you God damn
listen
to yourself for once?”

Margaret stopped, confused. She tracked back through their last exchange. “What I was saying? About what?”

“About Dad. About Dad's women. About his
younger
women. Just think, all right? I'm sure you can put the pieces together.”

“Darling, what pieces? I honestly don't know—”

“‘Take her to meet your father so she
sees,
my darling,' ” her son recited tersely. “‘No woman will walk away from that.' Because she'd started to have second thoughts about me and you saw that clear enough, didn't you? God knows you probably even expected it. You thought if she knew just how much money was on the horizon if she played her cards right, she'd decide to stay with me. As if I'd bloody want her then. As if I bloody want her now.”

Margaret felt an icy wind chill her neck. “Are you saying . . . ?” but she knew that he was. She glanced round them. Her smile felt like a death mask. She drew her son out of the hall. She led him down the passage and beyond the dining room to the butler's pantry, where she shut the door upon them. She didn't like to think where their conversation was heading. She didn't
want
to think where their conversation was heading. Less did she like or want to think what where it was heading might imply about the recent past. But she couldn't stop the force of things she herself had brought into motion, so she spoke.

“What are you telling me, Adrian?” She kept her back to the door of the butler's pantry so he couldn't escape her. There was a second door—this one to the dining room—but she felt confident that he wouldn't go there. The murmur of voices beyond it told them both that the room was occupied. And he'd started to twitch—his eyes beginning to unfocus—which heralded a state he wouldn't want strangers to observe. When he didn't reply at once, Margaret repeated her question. She spoke more gently now because, despite her impatience with him, she could see his suffering. “What happened, Adrian?”

“You know,” he answered dully. “You knew him so you know the rest.”

Margaret clasped his face between her palms. She said, “No. I can't
believe . . .” She tightened her hold on him. “You were his son. He would have drawn the line at that.
Because
of that. You were his son.”

“As if that mattered.” Adrian jerked away from her. “Just like you were his wife. That didn't matter a whole hell of a lot either.”

“But Guy and
Carmel
? Carmel Fitzgerald? Carmel who never had ten remotely amusing words to say to anyone and probably wouldn't have known a clever comment from—” Margaret brought herself up short. She looked away.

“Right. So she was perfect for me,” Adrian said. “She wasn't used to anyone clever so she was easy pickings.”

“That's not what I meant. That's not what I was thinking. She's a lovely girl. You and she together—”

“What difference does it make what you were thinking? It's the truth. He saw it. She was going to be easy. Dad saw that and he had to make his move. Because if he ever left one patch of ground unploughed when it was right in front of him just begging for it, Mother—” His voice cracked.

Beyond them in the dining room, the clink of plates and cutlery suggested that the caterers were beginning to clear away the food as the reception drew to a close. Margaret glanced at the door behind her son and knew that it was only a matter of moments before they were interrupted. She couldn't bear the thought that he should be seen like this, with his face gone greasy and his chapped lips trembling. He was reduced to childhood in an instant and
she
was reduced to the woman she'd always been as his mother, caught between telling him to get a grip on himself before someone saw him as a puling sniveler and crushing him to her bosom to comfort him while vowing to be avenged on his adversaries.

But it was the thought of vengeance that brought Margaret quickly round to seeing Adrian as the man he was today, not as the child he once had been. And the chill on her neck turned to frost in her blood as she considered the ways that vengeance might have played out here on Guernsey.

The door handle rattled behind her son and the door swung open, hitting him in the back. A grey-haired woman popped her head inside, saw Margaret's rigid face, said, “Oh! Sorry,” and disappeared. But her intrusion was sign enough. Margaret hustled her son out of the room.

She led him upstairs and into her bedroom, thankful that Ruth had placed her in the western half of the house, away from her own room and away from Guy's. She and her son would have privacy here, and privacy was what they needed.

She sat Adrian down on the dressing table's stool and she fetched a bottle of single malt from her suitcase. Ruth was notoriously niggardly with the drink, and Margaret thanked God for this as otherwise she wouldn't have thought to come supplied. She poured a full two fingers and shot them down, then poured again and handed the glass to her son.

“I don't—”

“You do. This will steady your nerves.” She waited until he had obeyed her, draining the glass and then holding it loosely between his palms. Then she said to him, “Are you certain, Adrian? He liked to flirt. You know that. It may have been nothing more. Did you see them together? Did you—” She hated to ask for the grisly details but she needed the facts.

“I didn't need to see them. She was different with me afterwards. I guessed.”

“Did you speak to him? Accuse him?”

“Of course I did. What do you take me for?”

“And what did he say?”

“He denied it. But I forced him to—”

“
Forced
him?” She could scarcely breathe.

“I lied. I told him she'd confessed. So he did as well.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. We went back to England, Carmel and I. You know the rest.”

“My God, then why did you come
back
here again?” she asked him. “He'd had your fiancée right under your nose. Why did you—”

“I was badgered into coming back, as you might recall,” Adrian said. “What did you tell me? He'd be so
pleased
to see me?”

“But if I'd known, I never would have even suggested, let alone insisted . . . Adrian, for the love of God. Why didn't you tell me this happened?”

“Because I decided to use it,” he said. “If reason couldn't get him to make me the loan I needed, then I thought guilt could. Only, I forgot Dad was immune to guilt. He was immune to everything.” Then he smiled. And at the moment, the chill-turned-frost went to ice in Margaret's blood when her son next said, “Well, practically everything, as things turned out.”

Chapter 9

D
EBORAH
S
T.
J
AMES FOLLOWED
the adolescent boy at a distance. She wasn't at her best striking up conversations with strangers, but she wasn't about to leave the scene without at least putting her fingers into the situation. She knew that her reluctance did nothing more than confirm her husband's earlier trepidation about her coming to Guernsey by herself to look into China's difficulties, Cherokee's presence apparently not counting with Simon. So she was doubly determined that her natural reticence wouldn't defeat her in the present circumstance.

The boy didn't know she was behind him. He didn't appear to have any particular destination in mind. He forced his way out of the crowd in the sculpture garden first and then headed across a crisp oval lawn that lay beyond an ornate conservatory at one end of the house. At the side of this lawn, he leaped between two tall rhododendrons and scooped up a thin bough from a chestnut tree growing near a group of three outbuildings. At these, he veered suddenly to the east where, in the distance and through the trees, Deborah could see a stone wall giving on to fields and meadows. But instead of heading in that direction—the surest way to leave behind him the funeral and everything that went with the funeral—he began to trudge along the pebbly road that led back towards the house again. As he walked, he roughly used his bough like a switch against the shrubbery that grew lushly along the drive. This bordered a series of meticulously kept gardens to the east of the house, but he didn't enter any of these either. Instead, he forged off through the trees beyond the shrubbery and picked up his pace when he apparently heard someone approaching one of the cars that were parked in this area.

Deborah lost him momentarily there. It was gloomy near the trees and he was wearing dark brown from head to toe, so he was difficult to see. But she hurried forward in the general direction she'd seen him take, and she caught him up on a path that dipped down to a meadow. In the middle of this, the tiled roof of what looked like a Japanese teahouse rose behind both a stand of delicate maples and an ornamental wooden fence that was oiled to maintain its original rich colour and brightly accented in red and black. It was, she saw, yet another garden on the estate.

The boy crossed a dainty wooden bridge which curved above a depression in the land. He tossed his branch aside, picked his way along some stepping stones, and strode up to a scalloped gate in the fence. He shoved this open and disappeared inside. The gate swung silently shut behind him.

Deborah quickly followed, crossing over the bridge that spanned a little gully in which grey stones had been placed with careful attention to what grew round them. She approached the gate and saw what she hadn't seen before: a bronze plaque set into the wood.
À la mémoire de Miriam et Benjamin Brouard, assassinés par les Nazis à Auschwitz. Nous n'oublierons jamais.
Deborah read the words and recognised enough of them to know that the garden was one of remembrance.

She pushed open the gate upon a world that was different to what she'd seen so far on the ground of
Le Reposoir.
The lush and exuberant growth of plants and trees had been disciplined here. An austere order had been imposed upon it with much of the foliage stripped away from the trees and the shrubbery trimmed into formal shapes. These were pleasing to the eye and they melded one into the other in a pattern that directed one's gaze round the perimeter of the garden to yet another arched bridge, this one extending over a large meandering pond on which lily pads grew. Just beyond this pond stood the teahouse whose roof Deborah had glimpsed from the other side of the fence. It had parchment doors in the manner of private Japanese buildings, and one of these doors had been slid open.

Deborah followed the path round the perimeter of the garden and crossed the bridge. Beneath her she saw large and colourful carp swimming while before her the interior of the teahouse lay revealed. The open door displayed a floor covered by traditional mats and a single room furnished with one low table of ebony round which six cushions lay.

A deep porch ran the width of the teahouse, two steps giving access to it from the swept gravel path that continued round the garden itself. Deborah mounted these steps but made no attempt to do so surreptitiously. Better that she be another funeral guest having a stroll, she thought, than someone on the trail of a boy who probably didn't wish to make conversation.

He was kneeling at a teak cabinet that was built into the wall at the far side of the teahouse. He had this open and was lugging a heavy bag from within it. While Deborah watched, he wrestled it out, opened it, and dug round inside. He brought forth a plastic container. Then he turned and saw Deborah watching him. He didn't start at the sight of an unexpected stranger. He looked at her openly and without the slightest qualm. Then he got to his feet and walked past her, out onto the porch and from there to the pond.

As he passed, she saw that his plastic container held small round pellets. He took these to the edge of the water, where he sat on a smooth grey boulder and scooped up a handful, which he threw to the fish. The water was at once a swarm of rainbow activity.

Deborah said, “D'you mind if I watch?”

The boy shook his head. He was, she saw, about seventeen years old, and his face was marred by serious acne, which grew even redder as she joined him on the rock. She watched the fish for a moment, their greedy mouths pumping at the water, instinct making them snap at anything that moved on its surface. Lucky for them, she thought, to be in this safe, protected environment, where what moved on the surface was actually food and not a lure.

She said, “I don't much like funerals. I think it's because I started at them early. My mum died when I was seven and whenever I'm at a funeral, it all comes back to me.”

The boy said nothing, but his process of throwing the food into the water slowed marginally. Deborah took heart from this and went on.

“Funny, though, because I didn't feel it very much when it actually happened. People would probably say that's because I didn't understand, but I did, you know. I knew exactly what it meant if someone died. They'd be gone and I'd never see them again. They might be with angels and God but in any case, they'd be in a place that I wouldn't be going to for a long, long time. So I knew what it meant. I just didn't understand what it implied. That didn't sink in until much later, when the mother-daughter sorts of things that might have happened between us didn't happen between me and . . . well, between me and anyone.”

Still he said nothing. But he paused in his feeding of the fish and watched the water as they continued to scramble for the pellets. They reminded Deborah of people in a queue when a bus arrives and what once was orderly collapses into a mass of elbows, knees, and umbrellas all shoving at once.

She said, “She's been dead almost twenty years and I still wonder what it might've been like. My dad never remarried and there's no other family and there are times when it seems it would be so lovely to be part of something bigger than just the two of us. Then I wonder, as well, what it could've been like if they'd've had other children, my mum and dad. She was only thirty-two when she died, which seemed ancient to me when I was seven but which I now see meant that she had years ahead of her to have had more children. I wish she had.”

The boy looked at her then. She pushed her hair back from her face. “Sorry. Am I going on? I do that sometimes.”

“You want to try?” He extended the plastic container to her.

She said, “Lovely. I would. Thanks.” She dipped her hand into the pellets. She moved to the edge of the rock and let the food dribble from her fingers into the water. The fish came at once, knocking one another aside in their anxiety to feed. “They make it look like the water's boiling. There must be hundreds of them.”

“One hundred twenty-three.” The boy's voice was low—Deborah found she had to strain to hear him—and he spoke with his gaze back upon the pond. “He keeps the stock up because the birds go after them. Big ones, the birds. Sometimes a gull but they're generally not strong enough or fast enough. And the fish are smart. They hide. That's why the rocks're laid out so far over the edges of the pond: to give them a place when the birds show up.”

“One has to think of everything, I suppose,” Deborah said. “It's brilliant, this place, though, isn't it? I was having a wander, needing to get away from the grave site, and suddenly I saw the roof of the teahouse and the fence and it looked like it might be quiet in here. Tranquil, you know. So I came in.”

“Don't lie.” He set the container of pellets down between them as if he were drawing a line in the sand. “I saw you.”

“Saw . . . ?”

“You were following me. I saw you back by the stables.”

“Ah.” Deborah upbraided herself for being so careless as to give herself away, even more for proving her husband right. But she damn well
wasn't
out of her depth, as Simon would doubtless declare her, and she determined to prove it. “I saw what happened at the grave site,” she admitted. “When you were given the shovel? You seemed . . . Well, as I've lost someone as well—years ago, I admit—I thought you might want to . . . terribly arrogant, I realise. But losing someone is difficult. Sometimes it helps to talk.”

He grabbed up the plastic container and dumped half of it directly into the water, which burst into a frenzy of activity. He said, “I don't need to talk about anything. And especially not about him.”

Deborah's ears pricked up at this. “Was Mr. Brouard . . . ? He would have been rather old to be your dad, but as you were with the family . . . ? Your granddad perhaps?” She waited for more. If she was patient enough, she believed it would come: whatever it was that was eating him up inside. She said helpfully, “I'm Deborah St. James, by the way. I've come over from London.”

“For the funeral?”

“Yes. As I said, I don't much like funerals as a rule. But then, who does?”

He snorted. “My mum. She's good at funerals. She's had the practice.”

Deborah was wise enough to say nothing to this. She waited for the boy to explain himself, which he did, although obliquely.

He told her his name was Stephen Abbott and he said, “I was seven as well. He got lost in a whiteout. You know what that is?”

Deborah shook her head.

“It's when a cloud comes down. Or the fog. Or whatever. But it's really bad and you can't tell which way the hill is going and you can't see the ski runs so you don't know how to get out. All you see is white everywhere: the snow and the air. So you get lost. And sometimes—” He turned his face away. “Sometimes you die.”

“Your dad?” she said. “I'm sorry, Stephen. What a horrible way to lose someone you love.”

“She said he'd find his way down. He's an expert, she said. He knows what to do. Expert skiers always find their way. But it lasted too long and then the snow started, a real blizzard, and he was miles from where he ought to have been. When they finally found him it'd been two days and he'd been trying to hike out and he'd broken his leg. And then they said . . . they said if they'd only got there six hours sooner—” He drove his fist into what remained of the pellets. They sprayed out of the container and onto the rock. “He might've lived. But
she
wouldn't've liked that much.”

“Why not?”

“It would've kept her from collecting her boyfriends.”

“Ah.” Deborah saw how it fitted together. A child loses his beloved father and then watches his mother move from one man to the next, perhaps out of a grief she cannot bear to face, perhaps in a frantic effort to replace what she's lost. But Deborah also saw how it might appear to that child: as if the mother hadn't loved the father in the first place.

She said, “Mr. Brouard was one of those boyfriends, then? Is that why your mother was with the family this morning? That was your mother, wasn't it, then? The woman who wanted you to have the shovel?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That was her, all right.” He brushed at the pellets that he'd spilled round them. They flipped into the water one by one, like the discarded beliefs of a disillusioned child. “Stupid cow,” he muttered. “Bloody stupid cow.”

“To want you to be part of the—”

“She thinks she's so clever,” he cut in. “She thinks she's
such
a bloody good lay . . . Just spread 'em, Mum, and they'll be your puppets. Hasn't worked so far, but if you do it long enough, it bloody well might.” Stephen surged to his feet, grabbing up the container. He strode back to the teahouse and went inside. Again, Deborah followed him.

From the doorway she said, “Sometimes people do things when they miss someone terribly, Stephen. On the surface what they do looks irrational. Unfeeling, you know. Or even sly. But if we can get past what it looks like to us, if we can try to understand the reason behind it—”

“She started right after he
died,
all right?” Stephen shoved the bag of fish food back into the cupboard. He slammed its door. “One of the ski patrol instructors, only I didn't know what was going on right then. I didn't figure it out till we were in Palm Beach and by then we'd lived in Milan already and Paris and there was always a man, do you see, there was
always . . .
That's why we're here now, d'you get it? Because the last was in London and she couldn't get him to marry her and she's getting desperate because if she runs out of money and there's no one, then what the hell is she going to
do
?”

The poor boy cried at that, wrenching, humiliating sobs. Deborah's heart went out to him and she crossed the teahouse to his side. She said, “Sit here. Please sit down, Stephen.”

He said, “I hate her. I really hate her. Sodding bitch. She's so bloody stupid she can't even
see
. . .” He couldn't go on, so hard was he weeping.