A Place of Hiding

The airport comprised a single building sitting to one side of a single runway just off a series of unploughed fields. It had a car park smaller than her own local railway station’s in England, so it was an easy matter to follow Adrian through it. By the time Margaret caught him up, he was shoving her two suitcases into the back of a Range Rover which was, she discovered in very short order, just the wrong sort of car in which to be riding round the threadlike roads of Guernsey.

She’d never been to the island herself. She and Adrian’s father had long been divorced by the time he retired from Chateaux Brouard and set up house here. But Adrian had been to visit his father numerous times since Guy’s removal to Guernsey, so why he was driving round in something nearly the size of a pantechnicon when what was clearly called for was a Mini was beyond her comprehension. As was the case with a number of things that her son did, the most recent being his termination of the only relationship he’d managed to have with a woman in his thirty-seven years. What was that all about? Margaret still wondered. All he’d said to her was “We wanted different things,” which she didn’t believe for a moment, since she knew—from a private and very confidential conversation with the young woman herself—that Carmel Fitzgerald had wanted marriage, and she also knew—from a private and very confidential conversation with her son—that Adrian had considered himself lucky to find someone youthful, moderately attractive, and willing to unquestioningly hook up with a nearly middle-aged man who’d never lived anywhere but in his mother’s house. Save, of course, for that dreadful three months on his own while he tried to go to universi ty...but the less that was thought of the better. So, what had happened?

Margaret knew she couldn’t ask that question. At least, not now with Guy’s funeral coming fast upon them. But she intended to ask it soon. She said, “How’s your poor aunt Ruth coping, darling?”

Adrian braked for a light at an ageing hotel. “Haven’t seen her.”

“Whyever not? Is she keeping to her room?”

He looked ahead to the traffic light, all his attention locked on to the moment the amber would show. “I mean I’ve seen her but I haven’t seen her. I don’t know how she’s coping. She doesn’t say.”

He wouldn’t think to ask her, of course. Any more than he would think to talk to his own mother in something more direct than riddles. Margaret said, “She wasn’t the one who found him, was she?”

“That would be Kevin Duffy. The groundsman.”

“She must be devastated. They’ve been together for...Well, they’ve always been together, haven’t they.”

“I don’t know why you wanted to be here, Mother.”

“Guy was my husband, darling.”

“Number one of four,” Adrian pointed out. It was tiresome of him, really. Margaret knew very well how many times she’d been married. “I thought you went to their funerals only if they died while you were still married to them.”

“That’s an incredibly vulgar remark, Adrian.”

“Is it? Good God, we can’t have vulgarity.”

Margaret turned in her seat to face him. “Why are you behaving like this?”

“Like what?”

“Guy was my husband. I loved him once. I owe him the fact that I have you as a son. So if I want to honour all that by attending his funeral, I intend to do it.”

Adrian smiled in a way that indicated his disbelief and Margaret wanted to slap him. Her son knew her only too well.

“You always thought you were a better liar than you actually are,” he said. “Did Aunt Ruth think I’d do something...hmm...what would it be? unhealthy? illegal? just plain mad without you here? Or does she think I’ve already done that?”

“Adrian! How can you suggest... even as a joke...”

“I’m not joking, Mother.”

Margaret turned to the window, unwilling to listen to any more examples of her son’s skewed thinking. The light changed and Adrian powered through the intersection.

The route they were following was strung with structures. Beneath the sombre sky, postwar stucco cottages sat cheek by jowl with run-down Victorian terraces which themselves occasionally butted up against a tourist hotel that was shut for the season. The populated areas gave way to bare fields on the south side of the road, and here the original stone farmhouses stood, with white wooden boxes at the edge of their properties marking the sites where their owners would deposit homegrown new potatoes or hot-house flowers for sale at other times of the year.

“Your aunt phoned me because she phoned everyone,” Margaret finally said. “Frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t ring me yourself.”

“No one else is coming,” Adrian said in that maddening way he had of altering the course of a conversation. “Not even JoAnna or the girls. Well, I can understand JoAnna...how many mi stresses did Dad go through while he was married to her? But I thought the girls might come. They hated his guts, of course, but I reckoned sheer greed would light a fire beneath their bums in the end. The will, you know. They’d want to know what they’re getting. Big money, no doubt, if he ever got round to feeling guilty about what he did to their mum.”