The Hiding Place: Paul Westmoreland

The Hiding place is Paul Westmoreland’s third published novel.

It is a much longer work than his previous two novels but, like them, it has engaging characters, major and minor, but always significant, who weave in and out of a sure-footed plot.

The novel centres on Mark Atkinson described, as he considers his reflection in the hallway mirror in Woodstock, his father’s grand and beautiful house in Yorkshire, as somewhat overweight with thick, dark-rimmed spectacles and a bald head.

Mark’s mother, Judith, dies whilst he is still a young boy and his father, Andrew, takes up with Mary Arnold, wife of Patrick, one of Andrew’s wealthy business friends who, like Andrew, is a philanderer and who leaves Mary to pursue other women.

Mark’s father has sent his son to St Stephen’s, a boarding school like the one which he himself had attended and where Mark is bullied mercilessly by two older boys, Peter Bloude and Geoffrey Taylor.

Mary discovers this on questioning Mark about how he is getting on at the school and she vows to get him removed from his place of torment and transferred to King Edward’s, the school where her daughter, Selena, is a pupil.

Mark finds Mary Arnold one of the very few people in his life to whom he can talk easily and they develop a close relationship. Tragically, Mary discovers she has cancer and soon is absorbed in making arrangements for her inevitable demise. To this end, she informs Mark, initially by letter, that he will receive a legacy and her ‘treasure’. The latter consists of jewellery Patrick has given her over the years. Mary tells Mark that she has hidden ‘her treasure’ on Neidpath island, Andrew Atkinson’s holiday retreat in the Western Isles, and she has drawn a rough map showing its hidden location which Mark can use should he decide to access it.

The author makes good use of the technique of using ‘flash backs’ to explain some of the events in the lives of his main characters which will later have considerable significance in the story line.

Early on in the book we are introduced to some of the other main characters. Dick Ford, a one-time big game hunter and trader whose help Mary Arnold enlists to get Mark moved to another school; Fay, Mark’s cousin, daughter of Andrew’s brother John, and who is Head of History at a private school in London; Richard, Selena’s brother, a devout missionary with whom Fay is in love. We also meet various other former friends and acquaintances of Selena – Mel Marchant, Maddy (Amanda) Dale, Chas Corman and Debbie Shaw who all ‘pop up’ from time to time in the narrative. And who are the mysteriously nicknamed ‘Badge’ and “Ace”?

Then there is – Lori.

Lori is the daughter of Ross (who has perished in a plane crash) and Alice his drug addicted partner.

After university, Mark joins the Civil Service but his real passion is writing and he has already written and re-written chapters of a fantasy novel – ‘The Enchanted Circle’. Much of the work is written whilst Mark is on holiday on Neidpath.

Neidpath, or the Dark Island as Mark calls it, is where Mark can be himself and he becomes ever more devoted to it and regards it as his real home. So much so that Mark ‘peoples’ the island with staged tableaux of the characters in ‘The Enchanted Circle’ – even dressing up himself as Bjorn the Hunter, one of the leaders of the quest to rescue a royal princess and recover a great cross stolen from the Citadel ‘an ancient city in the heart of the Ocean Hills’ The island is to be the setting for much of the action in the novel and for the climactic events which involve some of the principal characters Mark, Fay, Dick and Lori.

Early on in the story, Mark is introduced to Lori who, because her mother, Alice is unable to care for her, is being looked after, temporarily, at Selena’s house in Kensington and the girl becomes fascinated by the enchanted world Mark has created in his writing. Very soon, Lori is Mark’s devoted disciple and confidante. However, this is not the first time that Mark has met Lori…

What happened at this first encounter, which takes place on the Dark Island, proves to be of fateful significance and is the key to understanding many of the novel’s later events.

“There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man’s mind” says Nostromo in the novel of that name by Joseph Conrad. “There is no getting away from a treasure that once fastens upon your mind.”

The Hiding Place is fundamentally a ‘tale of treasure’ and the efforts to locate and possess it.

The outline of the plot and the extracts from ‘The Enchanted Circle’, Mark Atkinson’s magnum opus, provide a parallel and perhaps allegorical counterpoint to the events in real time that Mark and Lori and the other principal characters in this absorbing novel become caught up in.

The book is also, of course, about relationships and unrequited love.

“You don’t know how you haunt me and bewilder me” says Mr Wrayburn to Lizzie in Our Mutual Friend. This could also be said by Mark to Selena or by Fay to Richard or Dick Ford to Mary.

Many of the relationships Paul Westmoreland describes in the book are casual, indeed promiscuous, among Selena’s student friends and her parent’s generation. More than once we are told of Patrick and Mary’s failed marriage, Andrew Atkinson’s pursuit of other women and Selena’s failed marriage to Tony Delahaye. By contrast, the two most stable and ‘faithful’ characters we encounter are Fay and Dick and, indeed, much of the narrative focuses on Fay’s thoughts and actions.

As with Paul Westmoreland’s two previously published novels, he has created characters the reader is interested in and wants to know how they develop. In addition, the author is to be congratulated on his ability to convey tension and excitement in the various action sequences in this book which are hugely enjoyable.

Finally, in chapter 88 of this long and absorbing work, Mark shares with Fay the difficulty of reaching an ending of a story. “Finishing something that has taken years of effort leaves you with another quite considerable challenge: what will you do now?”

We can all look forward with curiosity and eager anticipation as to how Paul Westmoreland will answer his own question!

Nick Lloyd April 2022