A Place of Hiding (10 page)

It was these that Frank lifted out of the filing cabinet now. He carried them to a rotting cane-bottomed chair and sat, gingerly holding them on his lap. They were single sheets, typed upon onion-skin paper with as many carbons beneath them as could fit through the platen of an ancient typewriter. They were so fragile that it was nothing short of miraculous that they had survived a month, let alone more than half a century, each of them a micro-millimetre's statement about the bravery of men who would not be cowed by Nazi proclamations and threats.

Had Frank not spent his life being schooled in the importance of history, had he not spent every one of his formative years right on into his solitary adulthood being taught the inestimable value of everything remotely related to Guernsey's time of trial, he might have thought that only one of these sheets of wartime gossamer would suffice as a representation of a people's resistance. But one of anything was never enough for a collector with a passion, and when that collector's passion was for fostering remembrance and exposing truth so that
never again
took on a meaning that would stand the test of time, having too much or too many of any item was simply not an issue.

A rattle outside the cottage prompted Frank to walk to the grimy window. He saw that a cyclist had just squeaked to a stop, and its youthful rider was in the process of dismounting and setting the kickstand into place. He was accompanied by the thatch-furred dog who was his constant companion.

It was young Paul Fielder and Taboo.

Frank frowned at their presence, wondering what they were doing here, all this way from the Bouet, where Paul lived with his disreputable family in one of the dismal terraces that the Douzaine of the parish had voted to have constructed on the east side of the island to accommodate those whose incomes would never match their propensity to reproduce. He had been Guy Brouard's special project—Paul Fielder—and he'd come with him often to
Moulin des Niaux
to squat by the boxes stored in the cottages and to explore their contents with the two older men. But he'd never come to the Talbot Valley on his own before, and Frank felt a clutch in his gut at the sight of the boy.

Paul started to head for the Ouseleys' cottage, readjusting a dirty green rucksack that he wore on his back like a hump. Frank stepped to one side of the window so as not to be seen. If Paul knocked on the door, Graham would never answer. At this time of morning, he'd be mesmerised by the first of his soaps and oblivious of anything beyond the telly. Getting no reply, Paul Fielder would go. That was what Frank depended on.

But the mongrel had other plans. As Paul walked diffidently in the direction of the last cottage, Taboo headed directly for the door behind which Frank skulked like a dim-witted burglar. The dog sniffed round the base of the door. Then he barked, which caused Paul to change routes.

As Taboo whined and scratched at the door, Paul knocked. It was a hesitant tap, irritatingly like the boy himself.

Frank replaced the copies of
G.I.F.T.
in their folder and shoved this back into the filing drawer. He closed the cabinet, wiped his palms along his trousers, and swung the cottage door open.

He said heartily, “Paul!” and looked beyond him to the bike with a pretence of surprise. “Good Lord. Did you
ride
all this way?” As the crow flew, of course, it was no great distance from the Bouet to the Talbot Valley. Nothing was a great distance from anything else as the crow flew on the island of Guernsey. But taking the narrow serpentine roads added considerably to the journey. He'd never made it before, and Frank wouldn't have bet money on the boy's knowing how to get to the valley on his own, anyway. He was not too bright.

Paul blinked up at him. He was short for his sixteen years, and markedly feminine in appearance. He was just the sort of lad who would have taken the stage by storm during the Elizabethan age, when young boys who could pass for women were in high demand. But in their own age, things would be mightily different. The first time Frank had met the boy he'd registered how difficult his life had to be, particularly at school where a peach-skin face, wavy ginger hair, and eyelashes the colour of corn silk were not the sort of qualities that guaranteed someone immunity from bullying.

Paul made no reply to Frank's specious effort at a genial welcome. Instead, his milky grey eyes filled with tears, which he rubbed away by lifting his arm and scoring his face with the overworn flannel of his shirt. He wore no jacket, which was second cousin to insanity in this weather, and his wrists hung out from his shirt like white parentheses finishing off arms the size of sycamore saplings. He tried to say something but he gave a strangled sob instead. Taboo took the opportunity to enter the cottage unbidden.

There was nothing for it but to ask the boy in. Frank did so, sitting him down on the cane-bottomed chair and shoving the door closed against the December cold. But as he turned, he saw Paul was on his feet. He'd shrugged his rucksack off as if it were a burden he hoped someone would take from his shoulders, and he was bent forward against a stack of cardboard boxes in the attitude of someone either embracing their contents or exposing his back for scourging.

Frank thought it was a little of both. For the boxes represented one of the bonds that Paul Fielder had with Guy Brouard at the same time as they would serve to remind him that Guy Brouard was gone forever.

The boy would doubtless be devastated by Guy's death regardless of what he knew or didn't know of the terrible manner in which he'd met it. Living as he probably did in circumstances where he was one of many with parents ill-suited for any undertaking beyond boozing and bonking, he'd certainly have blossomed under the attention Guy Brouard had showered upon him. True, Frank himself had never actually seen evidence of that blossoming in the times Paul had attended Guy at
Moulin des Niaux,
but then again, he hadn't known the taciturn boy
before
Guy's advent in his life. The near-silent watchfulness that appeared to be the hallmark of Paul's character whenever the three of them were sorting through the wartime contents of the cottages might have actually been an astounding evolution from an abnormal and absolute mutism that had gone before.

Paul's thin shoulders trembled and his neck, against which his fine hair curled like the locks of a Renaissance putto, looked too delicate to support his head. This he dropped forward to rest on the top box in the stack. His body heaved. He gulped convulsively.

Frank felt out of his depth. He approached the boy and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, saying, “There, there,” and wondering how he would reply if the boy said, “Where, where?” in reply. But Paul said nothing, merely continued in his pose. Taboo came to sit at his feet and watched him.

Frank wanted to say that he mourned the passing of Guy Brouard with equal depth, but despite his desire to comfort the boy, he knew how unlikely it was that anyone on the island save the man's own sister felt a grief akin to Paul's. Thus, he could offer Paul one of two things: completely inadequate words of comfort or the opportunity to carry on with the work that he, Guy, and the boy himself had been engaged in. The first Frank knew he couldn't carry off. As to the second, he couldn't bear the thought. So the only option was to send the teenager on his way.

Frank said, “See here, Paul, I'm sorry you're upset. But shouldn't you be at school? It's not end of term yet, is it?”

Paul raised a flushed face to Frank. His nose was running and he wiped it on the heel of his hand. He looked simultaneously so pathetic and so hopeful that it came to Frank all in a rush exactly why the boy had come to see him.

Good God, he was looking for a
replacement,
seeking another Guy Brouard to show an interest in him, to give him a reason to . . . what? Dream his dreams? Persevere in their attainment? What, exactly, had Guy Brouard promised this pitiful boy? Certainly nothing that Frank Ouseley—forever childless—could help him acquire. Not with a ninety-two-year-old father to care for. And not with the burdens he himself was trying to carry: of expectations that had run fast and headlong into an incomprehensible reality.

As if in confirmation of Frank's suspicions, Paul snuffled and stilled his spasmodically heaving chest. He wiped his nose a final time along his flannel sleeve, and he looked round him as if only then he'd become aware of where he was. He sucked in on his lip, his hands plucking at the tattered hem of his shirt. Then he went across the room to where a stack of boxes stood, with
to be sorted
written in black felt pen on the top and sides of each.

Frank's spirits sank. It was as he thought: The boy was here to bond with him and carry on with the work as a sign of that bond. This wouldn't do.

Paul pulled the top box from the stack and gingerly set it down on the floor as Taboo joined him. He squatted next to it. With Taboo sinking into his usual posture of blowsy head on paws and devoted eyes fixed on his silent master, Paul carefully opened the box as he'd seen Guy and Frank do a hundred times. The contents constituted a jumble of wartime medals, old belt buckles, boots,
Luftwaffe
and
Wehrmacht
caps, and other items of apparel worn by those enemy troops in the distant past. He did as Guy and Frank had themselves done: He spread a polythene sheet on the stone floor, and he began to set the items out upon it, preparatory to cataloguing each of them in the three-ring notebook that they had been using.

He rose to get the notebook from its storage place, which was at the back of the filing drawer from which Frank had only moments before pulled the copies of
G.I.F.T.
Frank saw his opportunity.

He cried out, “Hey! See here, young man!” and he shot across the room to slam the filing drawer shut as the boy pulled it open. He moved so quickly and spoke at such a volume that Taboo leaped up and began to bark.

Frank seized the moment. “Just what the hell are you doing?” he demanded. “I'm working in here. You can't barge in and take over like this. These are priceless items. They're fragile, and once they're destroyed, they're gone. D'you understand?”

Paul's eyes widened. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Taboo continued to bark.

“And get that mongrel out of here, damn it,” Frank continued. “You don't have the sense of a monkey, boy. Bringing him in here where he might . . . Just
look
at him. Destructive little beast.”

Taboo, for his part, had hackles raised at the source of the commotion, so Frank used this as well. He raised his voice another degree to shout, “Get him out of here, boy. Before I throw him out myself.” When Paul shrank back further but made no other move to depart, Frank looked round frantically for something to spur him into action. His eyes lit on the boy's rucksack and he picked it up, swinging it menacingly at Taboo, who backed off, yelping.

The threat to the dog was what did it. Paul gave a strangled, inarticulate cry and raced for the door with Taboo at his heels. He paused only long enough to grab the rucksack from Frank. He threw it over his shoulder as he ran.

Through the window, his heart hammering, Frank watched them go. The boy's bike was a relic that at best would probably only have squeaked along at little above a walking pace. But he managed to pedal it furiously, so that in record time he and dog had vanished round the side of the water mill, teetering beneath the overhead weed-clogged sluice in the direction of the road.

When they were safely gone, Frank found that he could breathe again. His heart had been pounding in his ears and this had prevented him from hearing a second pounding, from the wall that joined this cottage to the one in which Frank and Graham lived.

He dashed back to see why his father was calling for him. He found Graham tottering back to the armchair from which he'd struggled, a wooden mallet in his hand. He said, “Dad? You all right? What is it?”

“Man can't get any peace in his own home?” Graham demanded. “Wha's the matter with you this
A.M
., lad? Can't even hear the bloomin' telly over all your racket.”

“Sorry,” Frank said to his father. “That boy came round alone. Without Guy. You know the one I mean. Paul Fielder? Well, we can't have that, Dad. I don't want him prowling round here by himself. Not that I don't trust him, but some of what we've got is valuable and as he's from . . . well, rather deprived circumstances . . .” He knew he was talking too fast, but he couldn't help himself. “I don't like to take the chance he might nick something and sell it. He opened one of the boxes, you see. He just dived right in without a how-do-you-do and I—”

Graham took up the remote for the television and raised the volume to a level that assaulted Frank's eardrums. “You go about your damn business,” he ordered his son. “I trust you c'n bloody well see for yourself I got my own here.”

 

Paul pedaled like a madman, Taboo running along at his side. He made no stop to breathe, to rest, or even to think. Instead, he shot along the road out of the Talbot Valley, skirting too close for safety to the ivy-grown wall that held back the hillside into which the road was carved. Had he been able to think clearly, he might have stopped where a lay-by gave access to a path up the hill. He could have parked his bike there and followed that path upwards and along the fields where the tawny dairy cows grazed. No one would walk there at this time of year, so he would have been safe, and the solitude would have given him a chance to ponder what to do next. But all he had in his mind was escape. Bellowing was the precursor to violence, in his experience. Flight had long been his only option.

So he coursed up the valley and ages later, when he finally came round to wondering where he was, he saw that his legs had taken him to the single place he'd ever found safety and bliss. He was at the iron gates of
Le Reposoir.
They stood open as if in expectation of his arrival, as they had done so many times in the past.