A Place of Hiding

“Guy wanted—”

“I don’t bloody care what you think Guy wanted because I know what he wanted: what he always wanted.” Margaret advanced on Ruth where she’d been sitting, at her dressing table, trying to put some artificial colour on her face. “Young enough to be his daughter, Ruth. Younger than his own daughters, even, if it comes down to it. Someone who by no stretch of the imagination was meant to be available to him. That’s what he was up to this last time. And you know it, don’t you?”

Ruth’s hand trembled so she couldn’t twirl her lipstick up from the tube. Margaret saw this and she leaped upon it, interpreting it as the reply Ruth had no intention of speaking outright.

“My God, you did know.” Margaret’s voice was hoarse. “You knew he meant to seduce her, and you did nothing to stop it. As far as you were concerned—as far as you’ve always been concerned—bloody little Guy could do no wrong, no matter who got hurt in the process.”

Ruth, I want it. She wants it as well.

“What did it matter, after all, that she was merely the latest in a very long line of women he just had to have? What did it matter that in taking her he was acting out a betrayal that no one would recover from? With him, there was always the pretence that he was doing them some kind of gentlemanly favour. Enlarging their world, taking them under his wing, saving them from a bad situation, and we both know what that situation was. When all along what he was really doing was bucking himself up in the easiest way he could find. You knew it. You saw it. And you let it happen. As if you had no responsibility to anyone other than yourself.”

Ruth lowered her hand, which was by now shaking far too much to be useful. Guy had done wrong. She would admit that. But he hadn’t set out to do so. He hadn’t planned in advance...or even thought about...No. He wasn’t that sort of monster. It was just a case of her being there one day and the blinkers falling from Guy’s eyes in the way they fell when he suddenly saw and just as suddenly wanted and thought that he had to have, because She’s the one, Ruth. And she was always “the one” to Guy, which was how he justified whatever he did. So Margaret was right. Ruth had known the peril.

“Did you watch?” Margaret asked her. She’d been gazing at Ruth from behind, at her reflection in the mirror, but now she came round and stood so that Ruth had to look at her and even if she hoped to do otherwise, Margaret removed the lipstick from her hand. “Is that what it was?

Were you part of it? No longer in the background, Guy’s little Boswell of the needlepoint, but an active participant in the drama this time. Or maybe a Peeping Thomasina? A female Polonius behind the arras?”

“No!” Ruth cried.

“Oh. Then just someone who didn’t get involved. No matter what he did.”

“That isn’t true.” There was too much to bear: her own physical pain, the grief of her brother’s murder, bearing witness to the destruction of dreams before her eyes, loving too many people in conflict with each other, seeing the wheel of Guy’s misplaced passion keep turning in revolutions that never once changed. Not even at the end. Not even after She’struly the one, Ruth, one last time. Because she hadn’t been, but he had to tell himself that she was, because if he hadn’t done that, he’d have had to face what he himself really was, an old man who’d tried and failed to recover from a lifelong grief he’d never allowed himself to feel. There’d been no luxury for that with Prends soin de ta petite soeur, the injunction that became the motto on a family escutcheon that existed only in her brother’s mind. So how could she have called him to account? What demands could she have made? What threats?

None. She could only try to reason with him. When that failed, because it was doomed to failure the moment he said She’s the one yet again as if he’d never made that declaration three dozen times before, she knew that she would have to take another route to stop him. This would be a new route, representing frightening and uncharted territory for her. But she had to take it.

So Margaret was wrong, at least in this. She hadn’t played the part of Polonius, lurking and listening, having her suspicions confirmed and at the same time getting a vicarious satisfaction from something she herself never had. She’d known. She’d tried to reason with her brother. When that had failed, she’d acted.