A Place of Hiding

But beyond those things that Valerie didn’t want to have present in any conversation with her husband, there was the fact of her own feelings that she had to consider now as well. For it was no easy matter to live with the knowledge that you were probably responsible for a good man’s death. Going through the motions of day-after-day with that on your mind was trying enough. Having to cope with someone other than yourself knowing about your responsibility would make the burden of it intolerable. So there was nothing to be done save to sidestep and obfuscate. Any move she might make appeared to Valerie to be a losing one, a short journey on the long path of covenants broken and responsibilities not faced. She wanted more than anything to reverse the wheel of time. But she could not do it. So she kept walking steadily towards the cottage, where at least there was employment for both of them, something to take their minds off the chasm that fast was developing between them.

“Did you see that man talking to Miss Brouard?” Valerie asked her husband. “The man with the bad leg? She took him off upstairs. Just near the end of the reception this was. He’s no one I’ve seen round here before, so I was wondering...Could he have been her doctor? She isn’t well. You know that, Kev, don’t you? She’s tried to hide it, but now it’s getting worse. I wish she’d say something about it, though. So I could help her more. I can understand why she wouldn’t say a word while he was alive— she wouldn’t want to worry him, would she?—but now that he’s gone...We could do a lot for her, you and I, Kev. If she’d let us.”

They left the lawn and crossed a section of the drive that swung by the front of their cottage. They approached the front door, Valerie in the lead. She would have strode straight through it and hung up her coat and got on with her day, but Kevin’s next words stopped her.

“When’re you going to stop lying to me, Val?”

The words comprised just the sort of question that she would have had to answer at some other time. They implied so much about the changing nature of their relationship that in any other circumstances the only way to refute that implication would have been to give her husband what he was asking for. But in the current situation, Valerie didn’t have to do that because as Kevin spoke, the very man she’d been talking about the moment before came through the bushes that marked the path to the bay. He was accompanied by a red-haired woman. The two of them saw the Duffys and, after exchanging a quick word, they walked immediately over. The man said he was called Simon St. James and he introduced the woman, who was his wife, Deborah. They had come from London for the funeral, he explained, and he asked the Duffys if he could have a word with them both.

The most recent of the analgesics—that which her oncologist had called the “one last thing” they were going to try—no longer possessed the strength to kill the brutal pain in Ruth’s bones. The time had obviously come to bring on morphine in a very big way, but that was the physical time. The mental time, defined by the moment when she admitted defeat over her attempt to govern the way her life would end, still had not arrived. Until it had, Ruth was determined to carry on as if the disease were not running amok in her body like invading Vikings who’d lost their leader.

She’d awakened that morning in an exquisite agony that hadn’t diminished as the day continued. In the early hours, she’d maintained such a fine focus on carrying out her duties to her brother, his family, his friends, and the community that she’d been able to ignore the stranglehold which the fire had on most of her body. But as people said their final goodbyes, it became more and more difficult to ignore what was so earnestly trying to claim her. The reading of the will had provided Ruth a momentary diversion from the disease. What followed the reading of the will was continuing to do so.



Her exchange with Margaret had been blessedly and surprisingly brief.

“I’ll deal with the rest of this mess later on,” her sister-in-law had asserted, wearing the expression of a woman in the presence of rancid meat, her body stiff with outrage. “As for now, I want to know who the hell they are.”

Ruth knew Margaret was referring to the two beneficiaries of Guy’s will other than his children. She gave Margaret the information she wanted and watched her sweep from the room to engage in what Ruth knew very well was going to be a most dubious battle. This left Ruth with the others. Frank Ouseley had been surprisingly easy. When she approached him to stumble through an embarrassed explanation, saying surely something could be done about the situation because Guy had made his feelings quite clear with respect to the wartime museum, Frank had said in reply, “Don’t trouble yourself about this, Ruth,” and had bade her goodbye without the slightest degree of rancour. He would be disappointed enough, though, considering the time and effort that he and Guy had put into the island project, so before he could leave she told him that he wasn’t to think the situation was hopeless, that she herself felt sure that something could be done to bring his dreams to reality. Guy had known how much the project meant to Frank and he’d surely intended...But she couldn’t say more. She couldn’t betray her brother and his wishes because she didn’t yet understand what he’d done or why he had done it.