A Place of Hiding

But this morning, Ruth saw something else as well. Once Guy reached the elms, a shadowy figure melted out from beneath them and began to follow her brother. Ahead of him, Guy Brouard saw that the lights were already on in the Duffys’ cottage, a snug stone structure that was, in part, built into the boundary wall of the estate. Once the collection point for rent from tenants of the privateer who’d first built Le Reposoir in the early eighteenth century, the steep-roofed cottage now served to house the couple who helped Guy and his sister maintain the property: Kevin Duffy on the grounds and his wife, Valerie, inside the manor house. The cottage lights indicated that Valerie was up seeing to Kevin’s breakfast. That would be exactly like her: Valerie Duffy was a wife beyond compare.

Guy had long thought that the mould had been broken after Valerie Duffy’s creation. She was the last of a breed, a wife from the past who saw it as her job and her privilege to take care of her man. If Guy himself had had that sort of wife from the first, he knew he wouldn’t have had to spend a lifetime sampling the possibilities out there in the hope of finally finding her. His own two wives had been true to tedious type. One child with the first, two children with the second, good homes, nice cars, fine holidays in the sun, nannies, and boarding schools...It hadn’t mattered: You work too much. You’re never at home. You love your miserable job more than me. It was an endless variation on a deadly theme. No wonder he’d not been able to keep himself from straying.

Out from beneath the bare-branched elms, Guy followed the drive in the direction of the lane. It was quiet still, but as he reached the iron gates and swung one of them open, the first warblers stirred from within the bramble, the blackthorn, and the ivy that grew along the narrow road and clung to the lichened stone wall that edged it.

It was cold. December. What could one expect? But as it was early, there was still no wind, although a rare southeast promised for later that day would make swimming impossible after noon. Not that anyone other than he would likely be swimming in December. That was one of the advantages of having a high tolerance for cold: One had the water all to oneself. That was how Guy Brouard preferred it. For swimming time was thinking time, and he generally had much to think about. Today was no different. The wall of the estate to his right, the tall hedgerows of the surrounding farmland to his left, he strode along the lane in the dim morning light, heading for the turn that would take him down the steep hillside to the bay.

He considered what he had wrought in his life in the past few months, some of it deliberately and with plenty of forethought, some of it as a consequence of events no one could have anticipated. He’d engendered disappointment, confusion, and betrayal among his closest associates. And because he’d long been a man who kept his own counsel in matters closest to his heart, none of them had been able to comprehend—let alone to digest—the fact that their expectations of him had been so wildly off the mark. For nearly a decade he’d encouraged them to think of Guy Brouard as a permanent benefactor, paternal in his concern for their futures, profligate in the manner in which he assured those futures were secure. He hadn’t meant to mislead any of them with this. To the contrary, he’d all along fully intended to make everyone’s secret dream come true.

But all that had been before Ruth: that grimace of pain when she thought he wasn’t looking and what he knew that grimace meant. He wouldn’t have realised, of course, had she not started slipping away for appointments she called “opportunities for exercise, frère” along the cliffs. At Icart Point, she said, she was taking inspiration for a future needlepoint from the crystals of feldspar in the flaky gneiss. At Jerbourg, she reported, the patterns of schist in the stone formed unequal grey bands that one could follow, tracing the route that time and nature used to lay silt and sediment into ancient stone. She sketched the gorse, she said, and she described with her pencils the thrift and sea-campion in pink and white. She picked ox-eye daisies, arranged them on the ragged surface of a granite outcrop, and made a drawing of them. She clipped bluebells and broom, heather and gorse, wild daffodils and lilies as she went along, depending on the season and her inclination. But the flowers never quite made it home.

“Too long on the car seat, I had to throw them out,” she’d claim. “Wild flowers never last when you pick them.”

Month after month, this had gone on. But Ruth wasn’t a walker of cliffs. Nor was she a picker of flowers or a student of geology. So all of this made Guy naturally suspicious.

He’d foolishly thought at first that his sister finally had a man in her life and was embarrassed to tell him so. The sight of her car at Princess Elizabeth Hospital had brought him round, however. That in conjunction with her grimaces of pain and her lengthy retreats to her bedroom had forced him to realise what he didn’t want to face.

She had been the only constant in his life from the night they’d set off from the coast of France, making good an escape left far too late, on a fishing boat, hidden among the nets. She’d been the reason he himself had survived, her need for him a spur to maturity, to laying plans, and to ultimate success.