A Place of Hiding (60 page)

 

Deborah and China had a bit of trouble finding Cynthia Moullin's home in
La Corbière.
They'd been told that it was commonly called the Shell House and that they wouldn't be able to miss it despite its being on a lane the approximate width of a bicycle tyre, which was itself the offshoot of another lane that wound between banks and hedges. It was on their third try when they finally saw a post box done up in oyster shells that they decided they might well have found the spot they were looking for. So Deborah pulled their car into the drive, which allowed them to note a vast wreckage of more shells in the garden.

“The house formerly known as Shell,” Deborah murmured. “No wonder we didn't see it at first.”

The place looked deserted: no other car in the drive, a closed-up barn, curtains drawn tight against diamond-paned windows. But as they climbed out of the car onto the shell-strewn driveway, they noted a young woman crouched at the far side of what was left of a fanciful garden. She embraced the top of a small shell-crusted concrete wishing well, with her blonde head resting upon its rim. She looked rather like a statue of Viola after the shipwreck, and she didn't move as Deborah and China approached her.

She did speak, however, saying, “Go away. I don't want to see you. I've phoned Gran and she says I can come to Alderney. She
wants
me there, and I mean to go.”

“Are you Cynthia Moullin?” Deborah asked the girl.

She raised her head, startled. She looked from China to Deborah as if attempting to make out who they were. Then she looked beyond them, perhaps to see if they were accompanied by anyone else. There being no one with them, her body slumped. Her face settled back to its expression of despair.

“I thought you were Dad,” she said dully, and lowered her head to the rim of the wishing well again. “I want to be dead.” She went back to clutching the sides of the well as if she could force her will upon her body.

“I know the feeling,” China said.

“No one knows the feeling,” Cynthia rejoined. “No one knows because it's mine.
He's
glad. He says, ‘You can go about your business now. The milk's been spilt and what's over is over.' But that's not how it is. He just thinks it's over. But it never will be. Not for me. I will
never
forget.”

“D'you mean you and Mr. Brouard being over?” Deborah asked her. “Because he's dead?”

The girl looked up again at the mention of Brouard. “Who are you?”

Deborah explained. On their drive from
Le Grand Havre
China had told her that she'd not heard a whisper about Guy Brouard and anyone called Cynthia Moullin while she herself had been at
Le Reposoir.
As far as she'd known, Anaïs Abbott was Guy Brouard's only lover. “They both sure acted like it,” China had said. So it was clear that this girl had been out of the picture prior to the Rivers' arrival on Guernsey. It remained to be seen why she was out of the picture and at whose instigation.

Cynthia's lips began trembling, curving downwards as Deborah introduced China and herself and laid out the reasons for their visit to the Shell House. By the time everything had been explained to her, the first tears were snaking down her cheeks. She did nothing to stop them. They dripped onto the grey sweatshirt she was wearing, marking it with miniature ovals of her grief.

“I wanted it,” she wept. “He wanted it, too. He never said and I never said but we both
knew.
He just looked at me this one time before we did it and I knew everything had changed between us. I could
see
it all in his face—what it would mean to him and everything—and I said to him, ‘Don't use anything.' And he smiled that smile which meant he knew what I was thinking and it was okay. It would've made everything easier in the end. It would've made it logical for us to get married.”

Deborah looked at China. China mouthed her reaction:
wow.
Deborah said to Cynthia, “You were engaged to Guy Brouard?”

“Would've been,” she said. “And now . . . Guy. Oh Guy.” She wept without embarrassment, like a little girl. “There's nothing left. If there'd been a baby, I'd've had something. But now he's truly, really dead and I can't bear it and I hate him. I hate him. I
hate
him. He says, ‘Go on, now. Get on with your life. You're free to go about like before,' and he acts like he didn't
pray
for this to happen, like he didn't think I'd run off if I could and hide till I'd had the baby and it was too late for him to do
anything
to stop it. He talks about how it would've ruined my life, when my life's ruined
now.
And he's glad about that. He's glad. He's
glad.
” She threw her arms round the wishing well, weeping against its granular rim.

They definitely had their question answered, Deborah thought. There could hardly be a cloud in the sky of certainty about Cynthia Moullin's relationship with Guy Brouard. And the
he
that she hated had to be her father. Deborah couldn't imagine who else would have had the concerns she was attributing to the
he
she so despised.

She said, “Cynthia, may we help you into the house? It's cold out here and as you've only that sweatshirt . . .”

“No! I will
never
go back in there! I'll stay out here till I die. I
want
to.”

“I don't expect your dad's going to let that happen.”

“He wants it as much as I do,” she said. “‘Hand over the wheel,' he says to me. ‘You're not deserving of its protection, girl.' Like I was supposed to be hurt by that. Like I was supposed to get his
meaning.
He's saying ‘You're no daughter of mine,' and I'm supposed to hear that without his saying it. But I don't care a bloody whit, see. I do not care.”

Deborah looked at China in some confusion. China shrugged her own mystification. These were waters far too deep just to wade in. Obviously, some sort of life belt was needed.

“I'd already given it to Guy anyway,” Cynthia said. “Months ago. I told him to carry it with him always. It was stupid, I know. It wasn't anything but a stupid stone. But I told him it would keep him safe, and I expect he believed . . . because I told him . . . I told
him . . .” Her sobbing renewed. “But it didn't, did it? It was only a bloody stupid
stone.
”

The girl was a fascinating mix of innocence, sensuality, naivete, and vulnerability. Deborah could see her appeal to a man who might want to educate her in the ways of the world, to protect her from it simultaneously, and to initiate her into some of its delights. Cynthia Moullin offered something of a full-service relationship, a definite temptation for a man with a need to maintain an aura of superiority at all times. In fact, Deborah could see herself in the younger girl before her: the person she might have been had she not struck out on her own in America for three years.

It was this realisation that prompted her to kneel by the girl and put her hand gently on the back of her neck. She said, “Cynthia, I'm terribly sorry for what you're going through. But please. Let us take you into the house. You want to die now, but you won't want that always. Believe me. I know it.”

“So do I,” China said. “Really, Cynthia. She's telling you the truth.”

The idea of sisterhood implied in their statements seemed to reach the girl. She allowed herself to be helped to her feet and once upon them, she wiped her eyes on the sleeves of her sweatshirt and said pathetically, “Got to blow my nose.”

Deborah said, “There'll be something you can use in the house.”

Thus, they got her from the wishing well to the front door. She stiffened there, and for a moment Deborah thought she might not enter, but when Deborah called out a hello and asked if anyone was at home and no answer came, Cynthia became willing to go inside. There, she used a tea towel as a handkerchief. Afterwards, she wandered into the sitting room and curled into an old overstuffed chair, putting her head on its arm and pulling down a knitted blanket from its back to cover her.

“He said I'd have to have an abortion.” She spoke numbly now. “He said he'd keep me locked up till he knew if I'd need one. No way was he going to have me running off somewhere to have that bastard's bastard, he said. I said it wasn't going to be anyone's bastard because we'd marry long before it was born, and he went quite mad at that. ‘You'll stay till I see the blood,' he said. ‘As for Brouard, we'll see about him.' ” Cynthia's gaze was fixed on the wall opposite her chair, where a collection of family pictures hung. Central to them was a large shot of a seated man—presumably her dad—surrounded by three girls. He looked earnest and well-meaning. They looked serious and in need of fun. Cynthia said, “He couldn't see what
I
wanted. It didn't matter to him. And now there's nothing. If I at least had the baby from it all . . .”

“Believe me, I understand,” Deborah said.

“We were in love but he didn't get it. He said he seduced me but that's not how it was.”

“No,” Deborah said. “It doesn't happen like that, does it?”

“It doesn't. It
didn't.
” Cynthia crumpled the blanket in her fists and brought it up to her chin. “I could see that he liked me from the first and I liked him back. That's what it was. Just us liking each other. He talked to me. I talked to him. And he really
saw
me. I wasn't just there in the room for him, like a chair or something. I was real. He told me that himself. And it happened over time, the rest of it. But not one single thing that I wasn't ready for. Not one thing that I didn't want to happen. Then Dad found out. I don't know how. He ruined it for both of us. Made it ugly and foul. Made it sound like something Guy did for a laugh. Like he had a bet with someone that he could be my first and he needed the bedsheets to prove it.”

“Dads are protective that way,” Deborah said. “He probably didn't mean—”

“Oh, he meant it. And that's what Guy was like anyway.”

“Getting you to bed on a
bet?
” China exchanged an unreadable look with Deborah.

Cynthia hastened to correct her. “Wanting to show me what it could be like. He knew I'd never . . . I told him. He talked about how important it was for a woman's first time to be . . . he said . . . exultant.
Exultant.
And it was. Like that. Every time. It was.”

“So you felt bound to him,” Deborah said.

“I wanted him to live forever, with me. I didn't care he was older. What difference did it make? We weren't just two bodies on a bed shagging. We were two souls that found each other and meant to stay together, no matter what. And that's how it would've been if he hadn't . . . he hadn't . . .” Cynthia put her head back on the arm of the chair and began to weep again. “I want to die, too.”

Deborah went to her. She stroked her head and said, “I'm so sorry. To lose him and then not to have his baby either . . . You must feel crushed.”

“I feel destroyed,” she sobbed.

China remained where she was, a few feet away. She crossed her arms as if to protect herself from the onslaught of Cynthia's emotion. She said, “It probably doesn't help to know it right now, but you
will
get through this. You'll actually even feel better someday. In the future. You'll feel completely different.”

“I don't
want
to.”

“Nope. We never do. We love like crazy and it seems like if we lose that love, we'll shrivel up and die, which would be a blessing. But no man's worth us ending up dead, no matter who he is. And anyway, things don't happen that way in the real world. We just muddle on. We finally get through it. Then we're whole again.”

“I don't
want
to be whole!”

“Not right now,” Deborah said. “Right now you want to grieve. The strength of your grieving marks the strength of your love. And letting grief go when the time comes to do it honours that love.”

“Really?” The girl's voice was a child's, and she looked so childlike that Deborah found herself wanting to fly to her protection. All at once, she understood completely how this girl's father must have felt when he learned Guy Brouard had taken her.

“That's what I believe,” Deborah said.

They left Cynthia Moullin with that final thought, curled beneath her blanket, her head pillowed on one arm. Her weeping had left her exhausted but calm. She would sleep now, she told them. Perhaps she'd be able to dream of Guy.

Outside on the shell-strewn path to the car, China and Deborah said nothing at first. They paused and surveyed the garden, which looked like something a careless giant had trampled upon, and China stated flatly, “What a godawful mess.”

Deborah glanced at her. She knew that her friend wasn't talking about the decimation of whatever crusty ornaments had once decorated the lawn and the flowerbeds. “We do plant landmines in our lives,” she commented.

“More like nuclear bombs, you ask me. He was something like seventy years old. And she's . . . what? Seventeen? That ought to be God damned child abuse. But oh no, he was careful about that one, wasn't he?” She drove her hand through her short hair in a gesture that was rough, abrupt, and so like her brother's. She said, “Men are pigs. If there's a decent one out there, I'd sure as hell like to meet him sometime. Just to shake his hand. Just to say howdy-fucking-do. Just to know they aren't all out for the great big screw. All this you're-the-one and I-love-you bullshit. Why the hell do women keep going for it?” She glanced at Deborah, and before Deborah could reply, she went on with “Oh. Forget it. Never mind. I always forget. Getting trampled by men doesn't apply to you.”

“China, that's—”

China waved her off. “Sorry.
Sorry.
I shouldn't have . . . It's just that seeing her . . . listening to that . . . Never mind.” She hurried towards the car.

Deborah followed. “We all get handed pain that we have to deal with. That's just what happens, like a by-product of being alive.”