A Place of Hiding

From the room next to hers, she heard a sound. But this time it wasn’t a noise out of place, born of dream or imagination. Rather, it was the movement of wood upon wood as a wardrobe door was opened and closed and a drawer in the chest was handled likewise. Something thudded quietly on the floor, and Ruth pictured the trainers accidentally falling from his hands in his haste to get them on.

He would already have gyrated his way into his bathing suit—that insignificant triangle of azure Lycra that she thought so unsuitable for a man of his age—and his track suit would be covering it for now. All that remained of his bedroom preparations were the shoes he would wear on his walk to the bay, and those he was putting on at the moment. A creak of the rocking chair told Ruth that.

She smiled as she listened to her brother’s movements. Guy was as predictable as the seasons. He’d said last night that he intended to swim in the morning, so swim he would, as he did every day: tramping across the grounds to gain access to the outer lane and then fast-walking down to the beach to warm up, alone on the narrow switchback road that carved a tunneled zigzag beneath the trees. It was her brother’s ability to adhere to his plans and to make them successful that Ruth admired more than anything else about him.

She heard his bedroom door closing. She knew exactly what would come next: Through the darkness, he’d feel his way to the airing cupboard and pull out a towel to take with him. That procedure would take ten seconds, after which he’d use up five minutes to locate his swimming goggles, which he’d have placed yesterday morning in the knife box or draped over the canterbury in his study or shoved without thought into that corner dresser that listed against the wall in the breakfast room. With the goggles in his possession, he’d be off to the kitchen to brew his tea, and when he had it in hand—because he always took it with him for afterwards, his steaming ginkgo-and-green reward for another successful dip into water too cold for ordinary mortals—he’d be out of the house and striding across the lawn towards the chestnuts, beyond them the drive and beyond that the wall that defined the edge of the property.

Ruth smiled at her brother’s predictability. It was not only what she loved best about him; it was also what had long given her life a sense of security that by rights it shouldn’t have had.

She watched the numbers on her digital clock change as the minutes passed and her brother made his preparations. Now he would be at the airing cupboard, now descending the stairs, now rustling round for those goggles and cursing the lapses of memory that were becoming more frequent as he approached seventy. Now he would be in the kitchen, she thought, perhaps even sneaking a pre-swim snack.



At the point at which Guy’s morning ritual would be taking him out of the house, Ruth rose from bed and wrapped her dressing gown round her shoulders. She padded to the window on bare feet and pulled aside the heavy curtains. She counted down from twenty, and when she hit five, there he was below her, coming out of the house, dependable as the hours of the day, as the December wind and the salt it blew off the English Channel.

He was wearing what he always wore: a red knitted cap pulled low on his forehead to cover his ears and his thick greying hair; the navy running suit stained at the elbows, the cuffs, and the thighs with the white paint he’d used on the conservatory last summer; trainers without socks—although she couldn’t see that, merely knew her brother and how he dressed. He carried his tea. He had a towel slung round his neck. The goggles, she guessed, would be in a pocket.

“Have a good swim,” she said into the icy window pane. And she added what he’d always said to her, what their mother had cried out long ago as the fishing boat pulled away from the dock, taking them from home in the pitch-black night, “Au revoir et adieu, mes chéris.”

Below her, he did what he always did. He crossed the lawn and headed for the trees and the drive beyond them.