A Place of Hiding

“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.