A Place of Hiding

Ruth said, “This is—” but could go no further with words. She could only imagine and what she imagined was too terrible to face, so she turned her head away.

Guy said, “Ruth, you’ve nothing to fear from this. Your home is with me as it always has been. Cyn knows that and she wants it as well. She loves you like...” But he didn’t complete the thought. This allowed her to complete it. “A grandmother,” she said. “And what does that make you?”

“Age isn’t important in love.”

“My God. You’re fifty years—”

“I know how much older I am,” he snapped. He came back to the bed and stood looking down at her. His face was perplexed. “I thought you’d actually celebrate this. The two of us. Loving each other. Wanting a life together.”

“How long?” she asked.

“No one knows how long anyone’s going to live.”

“I meant how long. Today...This couldn’t have been...She was too familiar.”

Guy didn’t answer at first and Ruth’s palms dampened as she realised exactly what his reluctance implied. She said, “Tell me. If you don’t, she will.”

He said, “Her sixteenth birthday, Ruth.”

It was worse than she’d thought because she knew what it meant: that her brother had taken the girl on the very day it had become completely legal to do so. This would mean he’d had his eye on her for God only knew how long. He’d laid his plans, and he’d carefully orchestrated her seduction. My God, she thought, when Henry found out...when he worked it all out as she herself had just done...She said numbly, “But what about Ana?s?”

“What about Ana?s?”

“You said the same about her. Don’t you remember? You said, ‘She’s the one.’ And you believed it then. So what makes you think—”

“This is different.”

“Guy, it’s always different. In your mind, it’s different. But that’s only because it’s new.”

“You don’t understand. How could you? Our lives have taken such different paths.”

“I’ve seen you walk every step of yours,” Ruth said, “and this is—”

“Bigger,” he cut in. “Profound. Transforming. If I’m mad enough to walk away from her and from what we have, then I deserve to be alone forever.”

“But what about Henry?”

Guy looked away.

Ruth saw, then, that Guy knew very well that in order to get to Cynthia, he’d engaged in a calculated use of his friend Henry Moullin. She saw that Guy’s “Let’s get Henry to take a look at the problem” about this or that round the estate had been his way of gaining access to Henry’s daughter. And just as he would doubtless rationalise this machination with regard to Henry if she challenged him about it, so would he continue to rationalise what she knew was in effect yet another delusion about a woman who’d ostensibly won his heart. Oh, he believed that Cynthia Moullin was the one. But so had he believed about Margaret and then JoAnna and all the Margarets and JoAnnas since them, up to and including Ana?s Abbott. He was talking about marrying this latest Margaret-andJoAnna only because she was eighteen years old and she wanted him and he liked what this did for his old man’s ego. In time, though, his eye would stray. Or hers would. But in either case, people were going to be hurt. They were going to be devastated. Ruth had to do something to prevent all that.

So she’d spoken to Henry. Ruth told herself this action was to save Cynthia from getting her heart broken, and she needed to believe that even now. A thousand different things had made the affair between her brother and the teenager more than just morally and ethically wrong. If Guy lacked the wisdom and the courage to end it gently and to set the girl free to have a full and real life—a life with a future—then she must take steps to make it impossible for him to do anything else. Her decision had been to tell Henry Moullin only a partial truth: that Cynthia was, perhaps, getting too fond of Guy. Hanging about Le Reposoir a bit too much instead of spending time with her friends or upon her studies, making excuses to drop in at the estate and visit her aunt, using far too many of her free hours following Guy about. Ruth called it calf love and said that Henry might want to speak to the girl...He’d done so. Cynthia responded with a frankness Ruth had not expected. It wasn’t a school-girl crush and it wasn’t calf love, she told her father placidly. There was really nothing to worry about, Daddy. They meant to marry, for she and her father’s friend were lovers and had been for nearly two years.