A Place of Hiding

“Val, I knew his ways. He had the Abbott woman, but she wasn’t for him. He had Cyn, but Cyn’s just a girl. He was wanting a woman with a woman’s ways and a woman’s knowledge, one who’d be as necessary to him as he was to her. And you’re that kind of woman, Val. He knew that. I saw that he knew it.”


“So you thought Mr. Brouard and I...?” Valerie could hardly credit it: not only the belief itself that he held—as irrational as it was—but also her luck in his holding it. He looked so miserable that her heart swelled. She wanted to laugh at the lunacy of the idea that Guy Brouard might have wanted her of all people, with her work-roughened hands and her children-borne body, unaltered by the plastic surgeon’s knife. You fool, he was after youth and beauty to replace his own, she wanted to tell her husband. But instead she said, “Why on earth would you ever have thought that, love?”

“It’s not your nature to be secretive,” he said. “If it wasn’t about Henry—”

“Which it wasn’t,” she said as she smiled at her husband and allowed the lie to own her in whatever way it would.

“Then what else could it have possibly been?”

“But to think that Mr. Brouard and me...How’d you think I’d ever be interested in him?”

“I didn’t think. I only saw. He was who he was and you were keeping secrets from me. He was rich and God knows we’ll never be and that might’ve counted for something with you. While you...That was the easy part.”

“Why?”

He held out his hands. His face told her that what he was about to say was the most reasonable part of the fantasy he’d been living with. “Who wouldn’t have made a move on you if he stood the slightest chance of success?”

She felt her whole body soften towards him: at the question he’d asked, the expression on his face, the movement of his arms. She felt the softness come into her eyes and upon her features. She went to him. She said,

“There’s been only one in my life, Kevin. Few enough women can say that. Fewer still can be proud to say it. I can say it and I’m proud to be able to. There’s always and only been you.”

She felt his arms come round her. He pulled her to him without gentleness. He held on to her without desire. It was reassurance that he was seeking, and she knew it since she sought reassurance herself. Blessedly, he asked nothing further of her.

So she said nothing more at all.

Margaret opened her second suitcase on the bed and began to remove more of her clothing from the chest of drawers. She’d folded it all carefully when she’d arrived, but now she had no concern about how it got itself repacked. She was finished with this place and finished with the Brouards. God only knew when the next flight to England was, but she meant to be on it.

She’d done what she could: for her son, for her former sister-in-law, for bloody everyone. But Ruth’s dismissal of her was the final straw, more final than had been the straw of her last conversation with Adrian.

“Here’s what she thinks,” she’d announced. She’d gone to his bedroom looking for him and not finding him there. She’d finally unearthed him on the top floor of the house, in the gallery where Guy had kept some of the antiques he’d collected over the years along with most of the artworks. The fact that all of this could have been Adrian’s —should have been Adrian’s...No matter that the canvases were all of that modern nonsense stuff—smears of paint and figures looking like something sliced up by a food processor —they were probably valuable, they should have been her son’s, and the thought that Guy had structured his final years to deliberately deny his son what he was owed... Margaret burned. She vowed she would be avenged.

Adrian wasn’t doing anything in the gallery. He was merely in the act of being Adrian, slumped in an armchair. The room was cold and against its chill, Adrian had donned his leather jacket. His legs were stretched out in front of him and his hands were in his pockets. His might have been the posture of someone watching a favourite football team get thoroughly humiliated on the pitch, but Adrian’s eyes were not fixed on a television. Instead, they were fastened onto the mantel. Half a dozen family pictures stood there, among them Adrian with his father. Adrian with his halfsisters. Adrian with his aunt. Margaret said his name and “Did you hear me? She thinks you’ve no right to his money. He thought that as well, according to her. She says he didn’t believe in entitlements. That’s the way she put it. As if we’re supposed to actually believe that story. If your father had had the great good fortune of having someone leave him an inheritance, d’you think he would have turned up his nose at it? Would he have said ‘Oh dear. No thanks. It’s not good for me. Better leave it to someone whose purity wouldn’t be spoiled by unexpected money.’ Not very likely. They’re hypocrites, both of them. What he did, he did to punish me through you, and she’s happy as a slug on a lettuce leaf just to carry on with his plan. Adrian! Are you listening?