A Place of Hiding

The girl behind her looked away uneasily, wiping her hands down the sides of her trousers. Ruth crossed the room and took Ana?s Abbott into her arms. “You’re welcome to use the key as long as you like. That’s what Guy would have wanted.”


As Ana?s wept against her shoulder, Ruth extended her hand to the woman’s fifteen-year-old daughter. Jemima smiled fleetingly—she and Ruth had always got on well—but she didn’t approach. She looked instead beyond Ruth to Margaret and then to her mother and said, “Mum my,” in a low but agonised voice. Jemima had never liked displays such as this. In the time Ruth had known her, she’d cringed more than once at Ana?s’s propensity for public exhibition.

Margaret cleared her throat meaningfully. Ana?s pulled away from Ruth’s arms and fished a packet of tissues from the jacket pocket of her trouser suit. She was dressed in black from head to toe, a cloche covering her carefully maintained strawberry-blonde hair.

Ruth made the introductions. It was an awkward business: former wife, current lover, current lover’s daughter. Ana?s and Margaret murmured polite acknowledgements of each other and immediately took stock. They couldn’t have been less alike. Guy liked them blonde—he always had—but beyond that, the two women shared no similarities except perhaps for their background, because if truth were told, Guy had always liked them common as well. And no matter how either of them was educated, how she dressed or carried herself or had learned to pronounce her words, the Mersey still oozed out of Ana?s occasionally and Margaret’s charwoman mother emerged from the daughter when she least wanted that part of her history known.

Other than that, though, they were night and day. Margaret tall, imposing, overdressed, and overbearing; Ana?s a little bird of a thing, thin to the point of self-abuse in the odious fashion of the day—aside from her patently artificial and overly voluptuous breasts—but always dressed like a woman who never donned a single garment without obtaining her mirror’s approval. Margaret, naturally, hadn’t come all the way to Guernsey to meet, let alone to comfort or entertain, one of her former husband’s many lovers. So after murmuring a dignified albeit utterly spurious “So nice to meet you,” she said to Ruth, “We’ll speak later, dearest,” and she hugged her sisterin-law and kissed her on both cheeks and said, “Darling Ruth,” as if she wished Ana?s Abbott to know from this uncharacteristic and mildly disturbing gesture that one of them had a position in this family and the other certainly had not. Then she departed, trailing behind her the scent of Chanel No. 5. Too early in the day for such an odour, Ruth thought. But Margaret wouldn’t be aware of that.

“I should have been with him,” Ana?s said in a hushed voice once the door closed behind Margaret. “I wanted to be, Ruthie. Ever since it happened, I’ve thought if I’d only spent the night here, I would have gone to the bay in the morning. Just to watch him. Because he was such a joy to watch. And...Oh God, oh God why did this have to happen?”

To me was what she didn’t add. But Ruth was no fool. She hadn’t spent a lifetime observing the manner in which her brother had moved in and around and out of his entanglements with women not to know at what point he was in the perpetual game of seduction, disillusionment, and abandonment that he played. Guy had been just about finished with Ana?s Abbott when he died. If Ana?s hadn’t known that directly, she’d probably sensed it at one level or another.

Ruth said, “Come. Let’s sit. Shall I ask Valerie for coffee? Jemima, would you like something, dear?”

Jemima said hesitantly, “ ’V’ you got anything I c’n give Biscuit? He’s just out front. He was off his feed this morning and—”

“Duck, darling,” her mother cut in, the reproof more than clear in her use of Jemima’s childhood nickname. Those two words said everything that Ana?s did not: Little girls concern themselves with their doggies. Young women concern themselves with young men. “The dog will survive. The dog, in fact, would have survived very well had we left him at home where he belongs. As I told you. We can’t expect Ruth—”