A Place of Hiding

In the glove compartment of the Range Rover, she found a map of the island, the sort of map that car hire firms pass out, on which their locations are predominantly displayed and everything else fades into illegibility. But since the car hire firm was at the airport and since La Corbière wasn’t far from either, she was able to pinpoint the hamlet near the south shore of the island, on a lane that looked to be the approximate width of a feline’s whisker.

She gunned the engine as an expression of her feelings and set off. How difficult could it be, she told herself, to trace a route back to the airport and then venture left at La Rue de la Villiaze? She wasn’t an idiot. She could read the street signs. She wouldn’t get lost. Those beliefs, naturally, presupposed that there would actually be street signs. Margaret soon discovered that part of the whimsical nature of the island lay in the manner in which street markings were hidden: generally waist-high and behind a growth of ivy. She also quickly found that one needed to know towards which parish one wished to be headed in order not to end up in the middle of St. Peter Port which, like Rome, appeared to be where all roads led.

Four false starts had her damp with anxious perspiration, and when she finally found the airport, she drove right past La Rue de la Villiaze without noticing it, so tiny was the street when it appeared. Margaret was used to England, where main routes bore some resemblance to main routes. On the map, the street was coloured red, so in her mind it possessed at least two nicely marked lanes, not to mention a large sign indicating she’d found what she was looking for. She was, unfortunately, all the way to a triangular intersection in the middle of the island, one marked by a church halfhidden in a depression in the land, before she thought she may have gone too far. At which point, she pulled onto what went for the verge, studied the map, and saw—with her irritation intensifying—that she’d overshot her mark and would have to try it all again.

This was when she finally cursed her son. Had he not been such a gormless and pathetic excuse of a...But no, no. True, it would have been more convenient to have had him with her, to have had the ability to drive directly to her destination without half a dozen false starts. But Adrian needed to recover from the blow of his father’s will—his bloody bloody bloody father’s will—and if he wanted an hour or so to do that, so be it, Margaret thought. She could cope on her own.

This made her wonder, though, if that was in part what had happened to Carmel Fitzgerald: just one too many moments when she realised there would be times when she would have to cope on her own, times when Adrian took to his room, or worse. God knew Guy could drive anyone with a sensitive nature into the ground, not to mention into self-loathing, and if that had happened to Adrian while he and Carmel had been guests at Le Reposoir, what might have the young woman thought, how vulnerable might she have actually been to the advances of a man so clearly in his element, so virile, and so bloody capable. Vulnerable as hell, Margaret thought. Which Guy had no doubt seen and acted upon with absolutely no conscience.

But, by God, he would pay for what he’d done. He couldn’t pay in life. But he would pay now.

So caught up was she in this resolution that Margaret very nearly missed La Rue de la Villiaze a second time. But at the last moment, she saw a narrow lane veering to the right in the vicinity of the airport. She took it blindly and found herself zipping past a pub and then a hotel and then out into the countryside, coursing between tall banks and hedges beyond which lay farmhouses and fallow fields. Secondary lanes that looked more like tractor tracks began to pop up round her, and just when she was deciding to try any one of them in the hope it might lead her somewhere identifiable, she came to a junction in the road she was traveling and found the miracle of a sign post, pointing to the right and La Corbière. Margaret muttered her thanks to the driving deity that had seen her to this point and turned into a lane that was indistinguishable from any of the others. Had she encountered another car, one of them would have had to reverse back to the lane’s starting point, but her luck held and along the route that passed a whitewashed farmhouse and two flesh-coloured stone cottages, she saw no other vehicle.