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.
Deborah urged him down to one of the pillows. He dropped onto it on his knees, his head lowered to his chest and his body heaving.
Deborah didn't touch him although she wanted to. Seventeen years old, abject despair. She knew what it felt like: The sunlight was gone, the night never ended, and the feeling of hopelessness descended like a shroud.
“It feels like hate because it's so strong,” she said. “But it isn't hate. It's something quite different. The flip side of love, I suppose. Hate destroys. But this . . . ? This, what you're feeling . . . ? It wouldn't harm anyone. So it isn't hate. Really.”
“But you saw her,” he cried. “You saw what she's like.”
“Just a woman, Stephen.”
“No! More than that. You saw what she's done.”
At this, Deborah's intellect went on the alert. “What she's done?” she repeated.
“She's too old now. She can't cope with that. And she won't see . . . And I can't tell her. How can I tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“It's too late. For any of it. He doesn't love her. He doesn't even want her. She can do anything she wants to make it different. But nothing's going to work. Not sex. Not going under the knife. Nothing. She'd lost him, and she was too bloody stupid to see it. But she ought to have seen. Why didn't she see? Why'd she just keep on doing things to make herself seem better? To try to make him want her when he didn't any longer?”
Deborah absorbed this carefully. With it, she pondered all the boy had previously said. The implication behind his words was clear: Guy Brouard had moved on from this boy's mother. The logical conclusion was that he'd gone on to someone else. But the truth of the matter could also be that the man had gone on to something else. If he hadn't wanted Mrs. Abbott any longer, they needed to discover what it was he had wanted.
Paul Fielder arrived at Le Reposoir sweating, dirty, and breathless, with his rucksack askew on his back. Although he'd reckoned that it was far too late, he'd pedaled his bicycle from the Bouet to the Town Church first, hurtling along the waterfront as if all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were in hot pursuit. There was a chance, he'd thought, that Mr. Guy's funeral had been delayed for one reason or another. If that had occurred, he would have still been able to be present for at least part of it.
But the fact of no cars sitting along North Esplanade and none in the car parks on the pier told him that Billy's scheme had paid off. His older brother had managed to keep Paul from attending the funeral of his only friend.
Paul knew it was Billy who'd done the damage to his bike. As soon as he got outside and saw it—the back tyre knifed and the chain removed and slung into the mud—he recognised his brother's nasty fingerprints all over the prank. He'd given a strangled cry and charged back into the house, where his brother was eating fried bread at the kitchen table and drinking a mug of tea. He had a fag burning in an ashtray next to him and another forgotten and smoking from the draining board over the sink. He was pretending to watch a chat show on the telly while their toddler sister played with a bag of flour on the floor, but the truth was that he was waiting for Paul to storm into the house and confront him in some way so that the two of them could get into a brawl.
Paul saw this directly he entered. Billy's smirk gave him away.
There'd been a time when he might have appealed to their parents. There was even a time when he might have flung himself mindlessly at his brother without considering the differences in their size and their strength. But those times had passed. The longtime meat market—a fixture of the proud old complex of colonnaded buildings that comprised Market Square in St. Peter Port—had closed forever, destroying his family's means of support. His mother was now behind a Boots till on the High Street, ringing up purchases, while his father had joined a road-works crew where the days were long and the labour was brutal. Neither of them was in the house at the moment to help and even if one of them had been, Paul wasn't about to burden them further. As for taking on Billy himself, he knew he was slow at times, but he wasn't stupid. Taking Billy on was what Billy wanted. He'd wanted it for months and had done much to make it h
appen. He was itching to assault someone, and he didn't care who that someone was.
Paul barely cast him a look. Instead, he leaped to the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink and brought out their father's tool box.
Billy followed him outside, ignoring their sister who remained on the kitchen floor with her hands thrust into the flour bag. Two more of their siblings were squabbling upstairs. Billy was supposed to be getting them off to school. But Billy never did much of anything he was supposed to do. Instead, he spent his days in the weed-filled back garden, pitching pennies into the beer cans that he emptied from dawn to dusk.
“Ohhh,” Billy said with mock concern when his eyes lit on the ruin of Paul's bike. “Wha' the hell happened here, Paulie? Someone do something to your bike, di' they?”
Paul ignored him and flung himself to the ground. He began by removing the tyre first. Taboo, who'd been standing guard at the bike, sniffed round it suspiciously, a whine deep in his throat. Paul stopped and took Taboo over to a nearby lamppost. He tied the dog to it and pointed to the ground where he wanted him to lie. Taboo obeyed but it was clear he didn't like it. He didn't trust Paul's brother one iota and Paul knew the dog would have vastly preferred to stick close to his side.
A Place of Hiding Page 20