A Place of Hiding

He said it low so that Valerie nearly couldn’t hear him at all, but his tone alone would have conveyed enough to make her shiver. She said,

“Why do you ask that, Kev?” in the hope that she could force his hand. He said, “What people say they’ll do and what they actually do are different sometimes, aren’t they?” He moved his gaze to her. Valerie’s shiver altered to a permanent chill. She felt it sweep up her legs and shoot into her stomach, where it curled round like a hairless cat and just lay there, asking her to do something about it. She waited for her husband to introduce the obvious topic that everyone who’d been sitting in the drawing room was at that moment probably either thinking of or speaking of to someone else. When he didn’t, she said, “Henry was at the funeral, Kev. Did you speak to him? He came to the burial as well. And to the reception. Did you see him there? I expect that means he and Mr. Brouard were friendly right to the end. Which is good, I think. Because it would be dreadful if Mr. Brouard died at odds with anyone, and especially with Henry. Henry wouldn’t want a crack in their friendship to be troubling his conscience, would he?”

“No,” Kevin said. “A troubled conscience is a nasty thing. Keeps you up at night. Makes it hard to think of anything else but what you did to get it in the first place.” He stopped walking and Valerie did the same. They stood on the lawn. A sudden gust of wind from the Channel brought the salt air with it and with it as well the reminder of what had happened by the bay.

“Do you think, Val,” Kevin said when a good thirty seconds had crawled by between them with Valerie making no reply to his comment,

“that Henry’s going to wonder about that will?”

She glanced away, knowing his gaze was still on her and still attempting to draw her out. He usually could cajole her into speaking, this husband of hers, because no matter the twenty-seven years of their marriage, she loved him the way she’d done from the first, when he’d stripped the clothes from her willing body and loved that body with his own. She knew the true value of having that kind of celebration with a man in your life and the fear of losing it pulled at her to speak and ask Kevin’s pardon for what she’d done despite the promise she’d made never to do it because of the hell it might cause if she did.

But the pull of Kevin’s look upon her wasn’t enough. It drew her to the brink, but it couldn’t shoot her over into certain destruction. She remained silent, which forced him to continue. He said, “I can’t see how he won’t wonder, can you? The whole oddity of it begs for questions to be asked and answered. And if he doesn’t ask them...” Kevi n looked over in the direction of the duck ponds, where the little duck graveyard held the broken bodies of those innocent birds. He said, “Too many things mean power to a man, and when his power’s taken from him he doesn’t deal with that lightly. Because there’s no laughing it off, you see, no saying ‘Ah, it didn’t mean all that much in the first place, did it.’ Not if a man’s identified his power. And not if he’s lost it.”

Valerie started them walking again, determined not to be caught another time by the pin of her husband’s stare, fixed onto a display board like a captured butterfly, with the label female forsworn beneath her. “Do you think that’s what’s happened, Kev? Someone’s lost his power? Is that what you think this is all about?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Do you?”

A coy woman might have said “Why would I...?” but the last attribute Valerie possessed was the one of being coy. She knew exactly why her husband was asking her that question and she knew where it would lead them if she answered him directly: to an examination of promises given and a discussion of rationalisations made.