A Place of Hiding

“Sorry.” Jemima seemed to speak more forcefully than she thought she ought in front of Ruth because she lowered her head at once, and one hand fretted at the seam of her trim wool trousers. She wasn’t dressed like an ordinary teenager, poor thing. A summerlong course in a London modeling school in combination with her mother’s vigilance—not to mention her intrusion into the girl’s clothes cupboard—had taken care of that. She was instead garbed like a model from Vogue. But despite her time learning how to apply her makeup, style her hair, and move on the catwalk, she was in truth still gawky Jemima, Duck to her family and ducklike to the world with the same kind of awkwardness a duck would feel thrust into an environment where he was denied water. Ruth’s heart went out to her. She said, “That sweet little dog? He’s probably miserable out there without you, Jemima. Would you like to bring him in?”


“Nonsense,” Ana?s said. “He’s fine. He may be deaf but there’s nothing wrong with his eyes and sense of smell. He knows quite well where he is. Leave him there.”

“Yes. Of course. But perhaps he’d like a bit of minced beef ? And there’s leftover shepherd’s pie from lunch yesterday. Jemima, do scoot down to the kitchen and ask Valerie for some of that pie. You can heat it in the microwave if you like.”

Jemima’s head bobbed up and her expression did Ruth’s heart more good than she expected. The girl said, “If it’s okay...?” wi th a glance at her mother.

Ana?s was clever enough to know when to sway with a wind that was stronger than one she herself could blow. She said, “Ruthie. That is so good of you. We don’t mean to be the slightest bit of trouble.”

“And you aren’t,” Ruth said. “Go along, Jemima. Let us older girls have a chat.”

Ruth didn’t intend the term older girls to be offensive, but she saw that it had been as Jemima left them. At the age she was willing to declare—

forty-six—Ana?s could actually have been Ruth’s daughter. She certainly looked it. Indeed, she made every effort to look it. For she knew better than most women that older men were attracted to feminine youth and beauty just as feminine youth and beauty were so frequently and conveniently attracted to the source of the means to maintain themselves. Age didn’t matter in either case. Appearance and resources were everything. To speak of age, however, had been something of a faux pas. But Ruth did nothing to smooth over that solecism. She was grieving for her brother, for the love of God. She could be excused.

Ana?s walked over to the needlepoint frame. She examined the design of the latest panel. She said, “What number is this one?”

“Fifteen, I think.”

“With how many more to go?”

“As many as it takes to tell the whole story.”

“All of it? Even Guy...at the end?” Ana?s was red-eyed but she didn’t weep again. Instead, she seemed to use her own question to guide them to the point of her call at Le Reposoir. “Everything’s changed now, Ruth. I’m worried for you. Are you taken care of?”

For a moment, Ruth thought she meant the cancer and how she would face her own imminent dying. She said, “I think I’ll be able to cope,” whereupon Ana?s’s reply disabused her of the notion that the other woman had come to offer shelter, care, or just support in the coming months.

Ana?s said, “Have you read the will, Ruthie?” And as if she actually knew at heart how vulgar the question was, she added, “Have you been able to reassure yourself that you’re taken care of?”

Ruth told her brother’s lover what she’d told her brother’s former wife. She managed to relay the information with dignity in spite of what she wanted to say about who ought to have a vested interest in the distribution of Guy’s fortune and who ought not.