A Place of Hiding

In the upstairs corridor, a gilt mirror hung over a mahogany chest, and Margaret paused here to check her appearance. She dropped her gaze to her bosom, where she half-expected the imprint of Brother Fielder’s filthy fingers to be all over her yellow cashmere sweater. She could still feel his hands. She could still smell his breath. Monster. Cretin. Psychopath. Thug. At Adrian’s door she knocked twice, not gently. She said his name, turned the knob, and entered. He was in bed. He wasn’t asleep, however. He was lying with his gaze fixed on the window, where the curtains were drawn back to expose the grey day outside, and the casement was fully open.

Margaret’s stomach lurched and the anger drained out of her. No one normal, she thought, would have been in bed under these conditions. Margaret shivered. She strode to the window and inspected the ledge along it and the ground beneath it. She turned back to the bed. The duvet was drawn up to Adrian’s chin, the lumps beneath it marking the position of his limbs. She followed this topography till her glance reached his feet. She would look, she told herself. She would know the worst. He made no sound of protest as she lifted the duvet round his legs. He didn’t move as she studied the bottoms of his feet for signs that he’d been outside in the night. The curtains and the window both suggested he’d had an episode. He’d never before climbed onto a ledge or a roof in the middle of the night, but his subconscious mind was not always governed by what rational people did and didn’t do.

“Sleepwalkers don’t generally put themselves in danger,” Margaret had been told. “They do at night what they’d do in the day.”

That, Margaret thought grimly, was exactly the point. But if Adrian had wandered out of the room instead of just round it, there was no sign of that on his feet. She crossed a bout of sleepwalking off the list of potential blips on her son’s psychological screen and next checked the bed. She made no effort to be gentle with him as she dug her hands round his hips, feeling for wet spots on the sheets and mattress. She was relieved to find that there were none. The waking coma—which was what she called his periodic descents into daylight trances—could thus be dealt with.

At one time she’d done it gently. He was her poor boy, her dearest darling, so different from her other strapping, successful sons, so sensitive to everything that went on round him. She’d roused him from this twilight state with gentle caresses on his cheeks. She’d massaged his head into wakefulness and murmured him back to earth.

But not now. Brother Fielder had squeezed the milk of maternal kindness and concern right out of her. Had Adrian been with her in the Bouet, none of what had gone on there would have occurred. No matter how utterly ineffectual he was as a male, his presence as another human being—as a witness, mind you—in the Fielder home surely would have done something to halt the progress of Brother Fielder’s assault upon her. Margaret grabbed the duvet and whipped it off her son’s body. She threw it on the floor and snapped the pillow out from beneath Adrian’s head. When he blinked, she said, “Enough is enough. Take charge of your life.”

Adrian looked at his mother, then at the window, then back at his mother, then at the duvet on the floor. He didn’t shiver in the cold. He didn’t move. “Get out of bed!” Margaret shouted.

He came fully awake at that. He said, “Did I...?” i n reference to the window.

Margaret said, “What do you think? Yes and no,” in reference both to the window and to the bed. “We’re hiring a solicitor.”

“They’re called—”

“I don’t bloody care what they’re called. I’m hiring one and I want you with me.” She went to the wardrobe and found his dressing gown. She threw it at him and shut the window as he finally got out of bed. When she turned, he was watching her, and she could tell from his expression that he was completely conscious and finally reacting to her invasion of his room. It was as if an awareness of her examination of his body and his environment seeped slowly into his mind, and she saw it happening: that dawning understanding and what accompanied it. This would make him more difficult to deal with, but Margaret had always known she was more than a match for her son.

“Did you knock?” he asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous. What do you think?”

“Answer me.”

“Don’t you dare talk to your mother like that. Do you know what I’ve been through this morning? Do you know where I’ve been? Do you know why?”

“I want to know if you knocked.”

“Listen to yourself. Have you any idea what you sound like?”

“Don’t change the subject. I’ve a right—”

“Yes. You have a right. And that’s what I’ve been doing since dawn. Seeing to your rights. Trying to get them for you. Trying—for all the thanks I’m getting—to talk some sense into the very people who’ve ripped your rights out of your hands.”

“I want to know—”

“You sound like a sniveling two-year-old. Stop it. Yes, I knocked. I banged. I shouted. And if you think I intended to walk away and wait for you to come out of whatever little fantasy world you’d taken yourself to, then you can have another good think about things. I’m tired of working for you when you have no interest in working for yourself. Get dressed. You’re taking some action. Now. Or I’m finished with all of this.”