A Place of Hiding

“So they insinuated themselves into his life, didn’t they? Always with the hope...They got introduced and they came here and had a good look round and knew if they played their cards just so, there was a chance he’d leave them something. That’s it. That’s what happened. That’s it.” She threw the cushion to one side.

Ruth listened and watched. She marveled at Ana?s’s capacity for selfdelusion. She felt inclined to say And that’s not what you yourself were up to, my dear? Were you instead attaching yourself to a man nearly twentyfive years your senior out of blind devotion? I don’t think so, Ana?s. Instead, she said, “I think he was confident that Jemima and Stephen would do well in life under your wing. But the other two...They didn’t have the same advantages your children have been blessed with. He wanted to help them out.”

“And me? What did he intend for me?”

Ah, Ruth thought. Now we’ve arrived at the real point. But she had no answer that she was willing to give to Ana?s’s question. All she said was

“I’m so sorry, my dear.”

To which Ana?s replied, “Oh, I expect you are.” She glanced round her as if she’d come fully awake, taking in her environment as if seeing it for the very first time. She gathered her belongings and rose. She headed towards the door. But there she paused and turned back to Ruth. “He made promises,” she said. “He told me things, Ruth. Did he lie to me?”

Ruth replied with the only fact that felt safe to give the other woman.

“I never knew my brother to lie.”

And he never had done, not once, not to her. Sois forte, he had told her. Ne crains rien. Je reviendrai te chercher, petite soeur. And he’d been as good as that simple promise: returning to find her in care, where she’d been deposited by a harried country to whom two refugee children from France meant only two more mouths to feed, two more homes to find, two more futures dependent upon the appearance of two grateful parents who would come to fetch them. When those parents hadn’t shown up and the great enormity of what had occurred in the camps became widespread knowledge, Guy himself had come. He had sworn fiercely beyond his own terror that cela n’a d’importance, d’ailleurs rien n’a d’importance to mitigate her fears. He’d spent his life proving that they could survive parentless—even friendless if necessary—in a land they had not claimed for themselves but one that had been thrust upon them. So Ruth did not see and had never seen her brother as a liar, despite knowing that he had to have been one, had to have created a virtual web of deceit in order to betray two wives and a score of lovers as he’d moved from woman to woman.

When Ana?s left her, Ruth considered these points. She pondered them in light of Guy’s activities in the last several months. She realised that if he’d lied to her even by omission—as was the case with a new will she’d known nothing about—he could have lied about other things as well.

She rose and went to Guy’s study.





Chapter 11


“And are you quite certain of what you saw that morning?” St. James asked. “What time was it when she passed the cottage?”

“Shortly before seven,” Valerie Duffy replied.

“Not fully light, then.”

“No. But I’d gone to the window.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Cup of tea in the morning. Kevin not down yet. Radio on. I was just standing there, organising the day in my head, the way people do.”

They were in the sitting room of the Duffys’ cottage, where Valerie had ushered them as Kevin disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes to put on the kettle for a cup of tea. There they sat beneath the low ceiling until his return, amid shelves of photo albums, oversize art books, and every video made by Sister Wendy. It would have put a strain on the room to contain four people in the best of circumstances. With additional books piled on the floor and several stacks of cardboard boxes along the walls— not to mention the scores of family pictures everywhere—the human presence was overwhelming. As was the proof—if any were required— of Kevin Duffy’s surprising education. One wouldn’t expect a groundskeeper-handyman to have an advanced degree in art history, and perhaps that was why in addition to family photos, the walls also held Kevin’s framed university degrees and several portraits of the graduate much younger and sans wife.

“Kev had parents who believed the purpose of education is education,” Valerie had said as if in answer to an obvious and unasked question.