A Place of Hiding

“It could indeed,” he said.

Margaret Chamberlain congratulated herself for insisting upon the reading of the will directly after the funeral reception. She’d earlier said, “Call the solicitor, Ruth. Get him over here after the burial,” and when Ruth had told her Guy’s advocate would be present anyway—yet another of the man’s tedious island associates who had to be accommodated at the funeral—she thought this was far more than just as well. It was decidedly meant. Just in case her sister-in-law intended to thwart her, Margaret had cornered the man himself as he stuffed a crab sandwich into his face. Miss Brouard, she informed him, wanted to go over the will immediately after the last of the guests left the reception. He did have the appropriate paperwork with him, didn’t he? Yes? Good. And would it present any difficulty to go over the details as soon as they had the privacy to do so? No?

Fine.

So now they were gathered. But Margaret wasn’t happy about who constituted the group.

Ruth had evidently done more than merely contact the solicitor upon Margaret’s insistence. She’d also made sure that an ominous collection of individuals were present to take in the man’s remarks. This could mean only one thing: that Ruth was privy to the details of the will and that the details of the will favoured individuals other than family members. Why else would she have taken it upon herself to invite an assembly of virtual strangers to join the family for this serious occasion? And no matter how fondly Ruth greeted and seated them in the drawing room, they were strangers, defined—according to Margaret’s thinking—as anyone not directly related by blood or marriage to the deceased. Ana?s Abbott and her daughter were among them, the former as heavily made up as she’d been on the previous day and the latter as gawky and slump-shouldered as she’d been as well. The only thing different about them was their clothing. Ana?s had managed to pour herself into a black suit whose skirt curved round her little bum like cling film on melons, while Jemima had donned a bolero jacket that she wore with all the grace of a dustman in morning dress. The surly son had apparently disappeared, because as the company assembled in the upstairs drawing room beneath yet another of Ruth’s tedious needlepoint depictions of Life As A Displaced Person—this one apparently having to do with growing up in care...as i f she’d been the only child who’d had to endure it in the years following the war—Ana?s kept wringing her hands and telling anyone who’d listen that “Stephen’s gone off somewhere...He’s been inconsolable...” and then her eyes would fill yet again in an irksome display of eternal devotion to the deceased.