A Place of Hiding (16 page)

“Sooner is better than later, though, dearest,” Margaret said gently. “You ought to speak to him. It's rather important.”

Ruth set the frame down but continued to look at it. “It won't change things, speaking to anyone,” she said.

“But it will clarify them.”

“If clarity's needed.”

“You do need to know how he wanted . . . well, what his wishes were. You do need to know that. With an estate as large as his is going to be, forewarned is forearmed, Ruth. I've no doubt his advocate would agree with me. Has he contacted you, by the way? The advocate? After all, he must know . . .”

“Oh yes. He knows.”

Well,
then? Margaret thought. But she said soothingly, “I see. Yes. Well, all in good time, my dear. When you feel you're ready.”

Which would be soon, Margaret hoped. She didn't want to have to stay on this infernal island any longer than was absolutely necessary.

 

Ruth Brouard knew this about her sister-in-law. Margaret's presence at
Le Reposoir
had nothing to do with her failed marriage to Guy, with any sorrow or regret she might feel about the manner in which she and Guy had parted, or even with respect she might have thought appropriate to show at his terrible passing. Indeed, the fact that she'd so far not shown the least bit of curiosity about who had murdered Ruth's brother indicated where her true passion lay. In her mind, Guy had pots of money and she meant to have her ladle-full. If not for herself, then for Adrian.

Vengeful bitch
was what Guy had called her. She's got a collection of doctors willing to testify that he's too unstable to be anywhere but with his bloody mother, Ruth. But she's the one ruining the pathetic boy. The last time I saw him, he was covered with hives.
Hives.
At his age. God, she's quite mad.

So it had gone year after year, with holiday visits cut short or canceled till the only opportunity Guy had to meet his son was in his ex-wife's watchful presence. She bloody stands
guard,
Guy had seethed. Probably because she knows if she didn't, I'd tell him to cut the apron strings . . . with a hatchet if necessary. There's nothing wrong with that boy that a few years in a decent school wouldn't sort out. And I'm not talking one of those cold-baths-in-the-morning and straps-on-the-backsides places, either. I'm talking about a
modern
school where he'd learn self-sufficiency which he isn't about to learn as long as she keeps him attached to her side like a barnacle.

But Guy had never won the day over that. The result was poor Adrian as he was now, thirty-seven years old with no single talent or quality upon which he could draw to define himself. Unless an uninterrupted line of failures at everything from team sports to male-female relationships could be deemed a talent. Those failures could be laid directly at the feet of Adrian's relationship with his mother. One didn't need a degree in psychology to arrive at that conclusion. But Margaret would never see it that way, lest she have to take some form of responsibility for her son's enduring problems. And that, by God, she would never do.

That was Margaret to the core. She was a don't-blame
-me,
pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps sort of woman. If you couldn't pull yourself up by the bootstraps you were given, then you damn well ought to cut the bootstraps off.

Poor, dear Adrian, to have had such a mother. That she meant well came to nothing at the end of the day, considering the ill she managed to do along the way.

Ruth watched her now, as Margaret pretended to inspect the single memento she had of her mother, that little half-locket forever broken. She was a big woman, blonde with fiercely upswept hair and sunglasses—in grey December? How extraordinary, really!—perched on the top of her head. Ruth couldn't imagine that her brother had once been married to this woman, but she'd never been able to imagine that. She'd never quite managed to reconcile herself to the image of Margaret and Guy together as husband and wife, not the sex business which of course was part of human nature and could, as a result of that fact, accommodate itself to any sort of strange pairing, but to the emotional part, the sustaining part, the part that she imagined—having never been privileged to experience it herself—to be the fertile earth into which one planted family and future.

As things turned out between her brother and Margaret, Ruth had been quite correct in her assumption that they were wildly unsuited. Had they not produced poor Adrian in a rare moment of sanguinity, they probably would have gone their separate ways at the end of their marriage, one of them grateful for the money she'd managed to excavate from the ruins of their relationship and the other delighted to part with that money as long as it meant he'd be free of one of his worst mistakes. But with Adrian as part of the equation, Margaret had not faded into obscurity. For Guy had loved his son—even if he'd been frustrated by him—and the fact of Adrian made the fact of Margaret an immutable given. Till one of them died: Guy or Margaret herself.

But that was what Ruth didn't want to think of and couldn't bear to speak of, even though she knew she couldn't avoid the topic indefinitely.

As if reading her thoughts, Margaret replaced the locket on the desk and said, “Ruth, dearest, I can't get ten words from Adrian about what happened. I don't want to be ghoulish about it, but I
would
like to understand. The Guy I knew never had an enemy in his life. Well, there were his women, of course, and women don't much like being discarded. But even if he'd done his usual—”

Ruth said, “Margaret. Please.”

“Wait.” Margaret hurried on. “We simply can't pretend, dear. This is not the time. We both know how he was. But what I'm saying is that even if a woman's been discarded, a woman rarely . . . as revenge . . . You know what I mean. So who . . . ? Unless it was a married woman this time, and the husband found out . . . ? Although Guy did
normally
avoid those types.” Margaret played with one of the three heavy gold chains she wore round her neck, the one with the pendant. This was a pearl, misshapen and enormous, a milky excrescence that lay between her breasts like a glob of petrified mashed potato.

“He hadn't . . .” Ruth wondered why it hurt so to say it. She'd
known
her brother. She'd known what he was: the sum of so many parts that were good and only one that was dark, that was hurtful, that was dangerous. “There was no affair. No one had been discarded.”

“But hasn't a woman been arrested, dear?”

“Yes.”

“And weren't she and Guy . . . ?”

“Of course not. She'd been here only a few days. It had nothing to do with
. . . nothing.
”

Margaret cocked her head, and Ruth could see what she was thinking. A few hours had long been more than enough for Guy Brouard to work his way when it came to sex. Margaret was about to begin probing on this subject. The shrewd expression on her face was enough to communicate that she was seeking a way into it that would look less like morbid curiosity and a belief that her once-philandering husband had finally got what he deserved and more like compassion for Ruth's loss of a brother more beloved to her than her own life. But Ruth was saved from having to enter into that conversation. A hesitant tap sounded against the open morning room door, and a tremulous voice said, “Ruthie? I'm . . . I'm not disturbing . . . ?”

Ruth and Margaret turned to see a third woman standing in the doorway and behind her a gawky teenage girl, tall and not yet used to her height. “Anaïs,” Ruth said. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“We used our key.” Anaïs held it up, a single brass statement of her place in Guy's life lying desolately in the palm of her hand. “I hope that was . . . Oh Ruth, I can't believe . . . still . . . I can't . . .” She began to weep.

The girl behind her looked away uneasily, wiping her hands down the sides of her trousers. Ruth crossed the room and took Anaïs Abbott into her arms. “You're welcome to use the key as long as you like. That's what Guy would have wanted.”

As Anaïs wept against her shoulder, Ruth extended her hand to the woman's fifteen-year-old daughter. Jemima smiled fleetingly—she and Ruth had always got on well—but she didn't approach. She looked instead beyond Ruth to Margaret and then to her mother and said, “
Mum
my,” in a low but agonised voice. Jemima had never liked displays such as this. In the time Ruth had known her, she'd cringed more than once at Anaïs's propensity for public exhibition.

Margaret cleared her throat meaningfully. Anaïs pulled away from Ruth's arms and fished a packet of tissues from the jacket pocket of her trouser suit. She was dressed in black from head to toe, a cloche covering her carefully maintained strawberry-blonde hair.

Ruth made the introductions. It was an awkward business: former wife, current lover, current lover's daughter. Anaïs and Margaret murmured polite acknowledgements of each other and immediately took stock.

They couldn't have been less alike. Guy liked them blonde—he always had—but beyond that, the two women shared no similarities except perhaps for their background, because if truth were told, Guy had always liked them common as well. And no matter how either of them was educated, how she dressed or carried herself or had learned to pronounce her words, the Mersey still oozed out of Anaïs occasionally and Margaret's charwoman mother emerged from the daughter when she least wanted that part of her history known.

Other than that, though, they were night and day. Margaret tall, imposing, overdressed, and overbearing; Anaïs a little bird of a thing, thin to the point of self-abuse in the odious fashion of the day—aside from her patently artificial and overly voluptuous breasts—but always dressed like a woman who never donned a single garment without obtaining her mirror's approval.

Margaret, naturally, hadn't come all the way to Guernsey to meet, let alone to comfort or entertain, one of her former husband's many lovers. So after murmuring a dignified albeit utterly spurious “So nice to meet you,” she said to Ruth, “We'll speak later, dearest,” and she hugged her sister-in-law and kissed her on both cheeks and said, “Darling Ruth,” as if she wished Anaïs Abbott to know from this uncharacteristic and mildly disturbing gesture that one of them had a position in this family and the other certainly had not. Then she departed, trailing behind her the scent of Chanel No. 5. Too early in the day for such an odour, Ruth thought. But Margaret wouldn't be aware of that.

“I should have been with him,” Anaïs said in a hushed voice once the door closed behind Margaret. “I wanted to be, Ruthie. Ever since it happened, I've thought if I'd only spent the night here, I would have gone to the bay in the morning. Just to watch him. Because he was such a joy to watch. And . . . Oh God, oh
God
why did this have to happen?”

To me
was what she didn't add. But Ruth was no fool. She hadn't spent a lifetime observing the manner in which her brother had moved in and around and out of his entanglements with women not to know at what point he was in the perpetual game of seduction, disillusionment, and abandonment that he played. Guy had been just about finished with Anaïs Abbott when he died. If Anaïs hadn't known that directly, she'd probably sensed it at one level or another.

Ruth said, “Come. Let's sit. Shall I ask Valerie for coffee? Jemima, would you like something, dear?”

Jemima said hesitantly, “'V' you got anything I c'n give Biscuit? He's just out front. He was off his feed this morning and—”

“Duck, darling,” her mother cut in, the reproof more than clear in her use of Jemima's childhood nickname. Those two words said everything that Anaïs did not: Little girls concern themselves with their doggies. Young
women
concern themselves with young men. “The dog will survive. The dog, in fact, would have survived very well had we left him at home where he belongs.
As
I told you. We can't expect Ruth—”

“Sorry.” Jemima seemed to speak more forcefully than she thought she ought in front of Ruth because she lowered her head at once, and one hand fretted at the seam of her trim wool trousers. She wasn't dressed like an ordinary teenager, poor thing. A summerlong course in a London modeling school in combination with her mother's vigilance—not to mention her intrusion into the girl's clothes cupboard—had taken care of that. She was instead garbed like a model from
Vogue.
But despite her time learning how to apply her makeup, style her hair, and move on the catwalk, she was in truth still gawky Jemima, Duck to her family and ducklike to the world with the same kind of awkwardness a duck would feel thrust into an environment where he was denied water.

Ruth's heart went out to her. She said, “That sweet little dog? He's probably miserable out there without you, Jemima. Would you like to bring him in?”

“Nonsense,” Anaïs said. “He's fine. He may be deaf but there's nothing wrong with his eyes and sense of smell. He knows quite well where he is. Leave him there.”

“Yes. Of course. But perhaps he'd like a bit of minced beef? And there's leftover shepherd's pie from lunch yesterday. Jemima, do scoot down to the kitchen and ask Valerie for some of that pie. You can heat it in the microwave if you like.”

Jemima's head bobbed up and her expression did Ruth's heart more good than she expected. The girl said, “If it's okay . . . ?” with a glance at her mother.

Anaïs was clever enough to know when to sway with a wind that was stronger than one she herself could blow. She said, “Ruthie. That is so good of you. We don't mean to be the slightest bit of trouble.”

“And you aren't,” Ruth said. “Go along, Jemima. Let us older girls have a chat.”

Ruth didn't intend the term
older girls
to be offensive, but she saw that it had been as Jemima left them. At the age she was willing to declare—forty-six—Anaïs could actually have been Ruth's daughter. She certainly looked it. Indeed, she made every effort to look it. For she knew better than most women that older men were attracted to feminine youth and beauty just as feminine youth and beauty were so frequently and conveniently attracted to the source of the means to maintain themselves. Age didn't matter in either case. Appearance and resources were everything. To speak of age, however, had been something of a faux pas. But Ruth did nothing to smooth over that solecism. She was grieving for her brother, for the love of God. She could be excused.