A Place of Hiding

At the threshold, he called out, “Dad?” and“Hullo?” but a moment sufficed to tell him no one was there. Only one place, then, was the alternative. Frank beat a hasty path to the first of the cottages where their war memorabilia were stored.

As he passed the small sitting room window what he saw within made his head fill with the sound of rushing water. The River woman’s brother was standing at one side of the filing cabinet with a redheaded woman at his side. The top drawer gaped open and Frank’s father stood before it. Graham Ouseley clutched onto the side of this drawer with one hand to keep himself upright. With the other hand he wrestled with a batch of documents that he was trying to prise out.

Frank moved without pause. Three strides took him to the cottage door, and he threw it open. Its swollen wood shrieked against the old floor. “What the hell,” he said sharply. “What the hell’re you doing? Dad!

Stop it! Those documents are fragile!” Which asked the question in the mind of anyone reasonable, of course, of what they were doing crammed into the filing cabinet higgledy-piggledy. But this was not the moment for worrying about that.

As Frank plunged across the room, Graham looked up. “It’s time, boy,” he said. “I’ve said it and said it. You know what we’ve got to do.”

“Are you mad?” Frank demanded. “Get out of that stuff!” He took his father’s arm and tried to ease him a step backwards. His father jerked away. “No! Those men’re owed. There’re debts to be paid and I mean to pay them. I survived, Frank. Three of them dead and me still alive. All these years later when they could have been. Granddads, Frank. Great-granddads by now. But all of that come to nothing because of a God damn quisling who needs to face the music. You got that, son? Time for people to pay.”

He fought Frank like a teenager being disciplined, but without a teenager’s youthful agility. His frailty made Frank reluctant to get rough with him. At the same time, however, it served the purpose of making the effort to control him so much more difficult.

The redhead said, “I think he believes we’re journalists. We did try to tell him...We’ve actually come to talk to you.”

“Just get out,” Frank said over his shoulder to her, and he tempered the order with “For a minute. Please.”

River and the redhead left the cottage. Frank waited till they were safely outside. Then he pulled his father away from the filing cabinet and slammed the drawer home, saying, “You God damn fool,” between his teeth.

This curse got Graham’s attention. Frank rarely swore, and never at his father. His devotion to the man, the passions they shared, the history that bound them, and the lifetime they’d spent together had always obviated any inclination he might have had towards either anger or impatience when it came to his father’s stubborn will. But this circumstance constituted the absolute limit of what Frank was willing to endure. A dam burst inside him—despite having been so meticulously constructed in the last two months—and he let forth a stream of invective that he hadn’t known was part of his vocabulary.

Graham shrank back from the sound of it. His shoulders fell, his arms dropped to his sides, and behind his thick spectacles, his vague eyes filled with frustrated and frightened tears.

“I meant...” Hi s stubbled chin dimpled. “I meant to do good.”

Frank hardened his heart. “Listen to me, Dad,” he said. “Those two are not journalists. Do you understand me? They are not journalists. That man...He’s...” God. How to explain? And what would be the point of explaining? “And the woman...” He didn’t even know who she was. He thought he’d seen her at Guy’s funeral, but as to what she was doing at the water mill...and with the River woman’s brother...He needed to have the answer to that question at once.

Graham was watching him in utter confusion. “They said...They’ve come to...” And then dismissing this entire line of thinking, he grabbed Frank’s shoulder and cried, “It’s time, Frank. I could die any day, I could. I’m the only one left. You see that, don’t you? Tell me you see. Tell me you know. An’ if we’re not to have our museum...” Hi s gri p was tighter than Frank would have thought possible. “Frankie, I can’t let them die in vain.”

Frank felt pierced by this remark, as if it lanced his spirit as well as his flesh. He said, “Dad, for God’s sake,” but he couldn’t finish. He pulled his father to him and hugged the old man hard. Graham let a sob escape against his son’s shoulder.

Frank wanted to cry with him but he didn’t have the tears. And even if a well of them had been stored within him, he could not have let that well overflow.

“I got to do it, Frankie,” his father whimpered. “It’s important, it is.”

“I know that,” Frank said.