A Place of Hiding

So Henry stormed to Le Reposoir and found Guy feeding the ducks at the edge of the tropical garden. Stephen Abbott had been with him, but that hadn’t mattered a whit to Henry. He shouted, “You filthy piece of rot!” and advanced upon Guy. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard. I’ll cut off your prick and shove it down your throat. God damn you to hell. You touched my daughter!”


Stephen had come on the run to fetch Ruth, babbling. She caught the name Henry Moullin and the words “yelling about Cyn” and she dropped what she was doing and followed the boy outside. Hurrying across the croquet lawn, she could hear the raging for herself. She looked round frantically for someone who could intervene, but Kevin and Valerie’s car was gone and only she and Stephen were there to stop the violence. For it would be violence, Ruth had realised. How stupid she’d been to think a father would face the man who’d seduced his daughter and not want to throttle him, not want to kill him.

Even as she approached the tropical garden, she could hear the blows. Henry was grunting and raging, the ducks were squawking, but Guy was utterly silent. As the grave. She gave a cry and rushed through the shrubbery. The bodies were everywhere. Blood, feathers, and death. Henry stood amid the ducks he’d beaten with the board he still carried. His chest heaved, and his face was twisted with his tears.

He’d lifted a shaking arm and pointed to Guy, who stood transfixed near a palm, a bag of feed spilling out at his feet. “You stay away, ” Henry hissed at him. “I’ll kill you next if you touch her again.”

Now in Guy’s bedroom, Ruth relived it all. She felt the tremendous weight of her own responsibility for what had happened. Meaning well had not been enough. It had not spared Cynthia. It had not saved Guy. She folded her brother’s coat slowly. She turned as slowly and went back to the wardrobe to pull out the next garment.

As she was removing trousers from a hanger, the bedroom door swung open and Margaret Chamberlain said, “I want to talk to you, Ruth. You managed to avoid me at dinner last night—the long day, the arthritis, the necessary rest...how convenient for you. But you aren’t going to avoid me now.”

Ruth stopped what she was doing. “I haven’t been avoiding you.”

Margaret sputtered derisively and came into the room. She looked, Ruth saw, much the worse for wear. Her French twist was askew, with locks of hair slipping from its generally careful roll. Her jewellery didn’t complement her day’s clothing as it always did, and she’d forgotten the sunglasses that, rain or shine, habitually perched on the top of her head.

“We’ve been to see a solicitor,” she announced. “Adrian and I. You knew we would, of course.”

Ruth laid the trousers gently on Guy’s bed. “Yes,” she said.

“So did he, obviously. Which was why he made sure we’d be cut off at the pass before we got to it.”

Ruth said nothing.

Margaret’s lips became thin. She said, “Isn’t that the case, Ruth?” with a malignant smile. “Didn’t Guy know exactly how I’d react when he disinherited his only son?”

“Margaret, he didn’t disinherit—”

“Don’t let’s pretend otherwise. He investigated the laws on this contemptible little pimple of an island and he discovered what would happen to his property if he didn’t hand every bit of it over to you upon purchase. He couldn’t even sell it without telling Adrian first, so he made sure he never owned it in the first place. What a plan it was, Ruthie. I hope you enjoyed destroying the dreams of your only nephew. Because that’s what’s happened as a result of this.”

“It had nothing to do with destroying anyone,” Ruth told her quietly.

“Guy didn’t arrange things this way because he didn’t love his children, and he didn’t do it because he wanted to hurt them.”

“Well, that’s not how things turned out, is it?”

“Please listen, Margaret. Guy didn’t...” Ruth hesitated, trying to decide how to explain her brother to his former wife, how to tell her that nothing was ever as simple as it looked, how to make her understand that part of who Guy was was who Guy wanted his children to be. “He didn’t believe in entitlement. That’s all it was. He created himself from nothing, and he wanted his children to have that same experience. The richness of it. The sort of confidence that only—”

“What utter nonsense,” Margaret scoffed. “That absolutely flies in the face of everything that...You know i t does, Ruth. You damn well know it.” She stopped as if to steady herself and to marshal her thoughts, as if she believed there was something she could actually base a case upon, one that would force change upon a circumstance that was fixed in concrete.