A Place of Hiding (56 page)

“He looks cold,” China said. “He's shivering.”

“He thinks I'm going to wallop him. Which I am if he doesn't get his arse in the water. Biscuit!” he shouted. “Come on. Get out there and get that fucking stick.”

The dog turned his back.

“Pile of shit's deaf anyway,” Stephen said. “But he knows what I mean. He knows what I want him to do. And
if
he knows what's good for him, he's going to do it.” He looked round and found a stone, which he weighed in his hand to see its potential for harm.

“Hey!” China said. “Leave him alone.”

Stephen looked at her, lip curled. Then he flung the stone, shouting, “Biscuit! You useless piece of crap! Get out of here!”

The rock hit the dog squarely on the side of the head. He yelped, leaped to his feet, and bounded into the reeds, where they could hear him thrashing round and whimpering.

“My sister's dog anyway,” Stephen said dismissively. He turned away to throw stones in the water, but not before Deborah saw that his eyes were filling.

China took a step towards him, her expression furious, saying, “Look, you little creep,” but Deborah put out a hand to stop her. She said, “Stephen—” gently, but he interrupted her before she could go on.

“‘Take the dog out of here,' she tells me,” he said bitterly. “‘Just take him for a walk, darling.'
I
say tell Jemima to take him. Her stupid dog anyway. But no. She can't do that. Duck's too busy bawling in her room 'cause she doesn't want to leave this shit hole, if you can believe it.”

“Leave?” Deborah said.

“We're out of here. The estate agent's sitting in the living room just trying to keep his greasy hands off Mum's milkers. He's talking about coming to ‘some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement' like he doesn't really mean he wants to stuff her ASAP. The dog's barking at him and Duck's in hysterics 'cause just about the last place she wants to live is with Gran in Liverpool, but I don't care, do I? Anything, let me tell you, to get out of this slag heap. So I bring that stupid dog out here but I'm not Duck, am I, and she's the only person he ever wants.”

“Why're you moving?” Deborah could hear in China's voice the leaps her friend was making. She was making a few of them herself, not the least of which grew from the sequence of events that had brought the Abbott family to this moment.

“That's pretty obvious,” Stephen replied. Then before they could delve further into this subject, he said, “What d'you want, anyway?” and he glanced towards the rushes and reeds where Biscuit had gone quiet, as if he'd found shelter.

Deborah asked him about
Moulin des Niaux.
Had he ever been there with Mr. Brouard?

He'd gone once. “Mum made a big deal of it, but the only reason he asked me to go was that
she
insisted.” He sputtered a laugh. “We were supposed to
bond.
Stupid cow. Like he ever meant . . . It was completely stupid. Me, Guy, Frank, Frank's dad, who's about two million years old, and all this junk. Piles and piles of it. Boxes. Bags. Cabinets. Buckets of it. Everywhere. Bloody waste of time.”

“What did you do there?”

“Do? They were going through hats. Hats, caps, helmets, whatever. Who wore what when, why, and how. It was so stupid—such a stupid waste of time. I went for a walk along the valley instead.”

“So you didn't go through the war stuff yourself?” China asked.

Stephen seemed to hear something in her voice, because he said, “Why d'you want to know? What're you doing here anyway? Aren't you supposed to be locked up?”

Deborah once again intervened. “Was anyone else there with you? The day that you went to see the war collection?”

He said, “No. Just Guy and me.” He gave his attention back to Deborah and to the topic—it seemed—that dominated his thoughts. “Like I said, it was supposed to be our big bonding experience. I was supposed to fall all over myself with joy because he wanted to act like a dad for fifteen minutes. He was supposed to decide I'd do much better as a son than Adrian since
he's
such a pathetic twit and in comparison at least I have a chance of going to university without falling apart because my mummy's not there to hold my hand. It was all so stupid, stupid,
bloody
stupid. As if he was ever going to marry her.”

“Well, it's over now,” Deborah told him. “You're going back to England.”

“Only,” he said, “because she didn't get what she wanted from Brouard.” He cast a scornful look in the direction of
La Garenne.
“As if she ever would have. To think she was ever going to get
anything
off him. I tried to tell her, but she never listens. Anyone with brains could see what he intended.”

“What?” China and Deborah spoke simultaneously.

Stephen looked at them with the same degree of scorn he'd directed at his home and his mother within it. “He was having it elsewhere,” he said succinctly. “I kept trying to tell her that, but she wouldn't listen. She just couldn't think that she'd gone to such trouble to snare him—under the knife and everything, even if he was the one to pay for it—while all the time he was shagging someone else. ‘It's your imagination,' she told me. ‘Darling, you aren't making this up because you've been a little unsuccessful, are you? You'll have your own girlfriend someday. Just see if you won't. Big, handsome,
strapping
lad like you.' God.
God.
What a stupid cow.”

Deborah sifted through all this for a clear understanding: the man, the woman, the boy, the mother, and all the reasons for an accusation. She said, “D'you know the other woman, Stephen?” as China took another anxious step towards him. They were getting somewhere at last, and Deborah gestured to her to keep her from frightening the boy into silence through her desire to get to the bottom of the matter quickly.

“'Course I know her. Cynthia Moullin.”

Deborah glanced at China, who shook her head. Deborah said to Stephen, “Cynthia Moullin? Who is she?”

A schoolmate, it turned out. A teenage girl from the College of Further Education.

“But how do you know this?” Deborah asked, and when he rolled his eyes expressively, she saw the truth. “You lost her to Mr. Brouard? Is that it?”

He said, “Where's that stupid dog?” in answer.

 

When her brother didn't pick up the phone on this third successive morning that she'd rung him, Valerie Duffy couldn't take it any longer. She got in her car and drove to
La Corbière
once Kevin had set about his work on the estate, once Ruth had finished her breakfast, and once she herself had an hour to spare from her duties in the house. She knew she would not be missed.

The first thing Valerie noticed at the Shell House was the ruin of the front garden, and this frightened her instantly, speaking eloquently as it did of her brother's temper. Henry was a good man—a supportive brother, a loyal friend, and a loving father to his girls—but he had a fuse that, when lit, burned to the explosive in a matter of seconds. As an adult, she'd never seen his temper in action, but she'd seen the devastation of its display. He'd yet to direct it at a human being, though, and that was what she'd been counting on on the day she'd dropped in, when she'd found him in the house baking the scones his youngest girl loved and told him that her employer and his dear friend Guy Brouard was having regular intercourse with Henry's oldest daughter.

It had been the only way she knew to put a stop to the affair. Talking to Cynthia hadn't put even a dent in the machine of their mating. “We're in love, Aunt Val,” the girl had told her with all the wide-eyed innocence of a virgin recently and pleasurably deflowered. “Haven't you ever been in love?”

Nothing could convince the girl that men like Guy Brouard didn't fall in love. Even the knowledge that he was having it off with Anaïs Abbott at the same time as he was enjoying Cynthia made not the slightest difference to the girl. “Oh, we talked about that. He's got to do it,” Cynthia said. “Else people might think he was having me.”

“But he
is
having you! He's sixty-eight years old! My God, he could be arrested for this.”

“Oh no, Auntie Val. We waited till I was of age.”

“Waited . . . ?” Valerie had seen in an instant the years that her brother had worked for Guy Brouard at
Le Reposoir,
bringing along one of his girls occasionally because it was important to Henry that he spend time with each of them individually, to make up for the fact that their mother had deserted them for life with a rock star whose celestial glow had long since been extinguished.

Cynthia had been the most frequent of her father's companions. Valerie had thought nothing of this till she'd first seen the looks pass between the girl and Guy Brouard, till she'd noted the casual contact between them—just a hand brushing against an arm—till she'd followed them once and watched and waited and then confronted the girl to learn the worst.

She'd had to tell Henry. There was no other choice when Cynthia couldn't be talked out of the road she was traveling. And now there were the consequences of telling him, hanging over her like the blade of a guillotine that waits for the signal to be released.

She picked her way through the sad debris of the fanciful front garden. Henry's car was parked to one side of the house, not far from the barn where he made his glass, but the barn itself was shut and locked, so she went to the front door. There she steadied herself for a moment before she knocked.

This was her brother, she told herself. She had nothing to worry about and even less to fear from him. They'd weathered a difficult childhood together in the home of a bitter mother who—like Henry himself in a repetition of history—had been deserted by a faithless spouse. They shared more than blood because of this. They shared memories so powerful that nothing could ever be more important than the way they'd learned to lean upon each other, to parent each other in the physical absence of one genitor and the emotional disappearance of the other. They had made it not matter. They had sworn it would not colour their lives. That they had failed at this was nobody's fault, and it certainly wasn't for want of determination and effort.

The front door swung open before she could knock, and her brother stood before her with a basket of laundry balanced on his hip. His expression was as black as she'd ever seen it. He said, “Val. What the hell do you want?” after which he stalked to the kitchen, where he'd built a lean-to that served as a laundry room.

She couldn't help noticing when she followed him that Henry was doing the washing as she herself had taught him. Whites, darks, and bright colours all carefully separated, towels comprising an individual load.

He saw her observing him and a look of self-loathing flitted across his face. “Some lessons die hard,” he told her.

She said, “I've been phoning. Why haven't you answered? You've been home, haven't you?”

“Didn't want to.” He opened the washing machine, where a load was done, and he began shoving this into the dryer. Nearby in a sink, water dripped rhythmically into something that was soaking. Henry inspected this, dumped a splash of bleach in it, and stirred it vigorously with a long wooden spoon.

“Not good for business, that,” Valerie said. “People might be wanting you for work.”

“Answered the mobile,” he told her. “Business calls come there.”

Valerie swore silently at this piece of news. She hadn't thought of his mobile. Why? Because she'd been too frightened and worried and guilt-ridden to think about anything but calming her own ragged nerves. She said, “Oh. The mobile. I hadn't thought of the mobile.”

He said, “Right,” and began tossing his next load of laundry into the washer. These were the girls' clothes: jeans, jumpers, and socks. “You hadn't thought, Val.”

The contempt in his voice stung, but she refused to let him intimidate her into leaving the house. She said, “Where're the girls, Harry?”

He glanced at her when she used the nickname. For an instant she could see past the loathing he wore as his mask and he was again the little boy whose hand she'd held when they'd crossed the Esplanade to bathe at the pools below Havelet Bay. You can't hide from me, Harry, she wanted to tell him. But instead she waited for his answer.

“School. Where else would they be?”

“I suppose I meant Cyn,” she admitted.

He made no reply.

She said, “Harry, you can't keep her locked—”

He pointed his finger at her and said, “No one's locked anywhere. You hear me?
No
one is locked.”

“You've let her out, then. I did see you've taken the grille off the window.”

Instead of answering, he reached for the detergent and poured it onto the clothes. He didn't measure it and he looked at her as he poured and poured, as if challenging her to offer advice. But she'd done that once, only once, God forgive her. And she'd come to assure herself that nothing had resulted from her saying, “Henry, you've got to take action.”

She said, “Has she gone off somewhere, then?”

“Won't come out of her room.”

“You've taken the lock off the door?”

“No need for it now.”

“No need?” She felt a shudder run through her. She clasped her arms round her body although the house was not the least bit cold.

“No need,” Henry repeated, and as if he wanted to illustrate a point, he went to the sink where the water was dripping and he used the wooden spoon to fish something out.

It was a pair of woman's knickers that he held up, and he allowed the water to run off them and pool on the floor. Valerie could see the faint stain that was still upon them despite the soaking and despite the bleach. She felt a wave of nausea as she understood exactly why her brother had kept his daughter in her room.

“So she's not,” Valerie said.

“One breeze in hell.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bedrooms. “So she won't come out. You can talk to her if you have a mind to. But she's got the door locked from the inside now and she's been wailing like a cat when you drown its kittens. Bloody little fool.” He slammed down the lid of the washing machine, pushed a few buttons, and set it to its business.