A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  Perhaps the book on the woman's lap was an account she was keeping of the museum's construction. And the fact that Mr. Guy had left this message for Paul to find—when he clearly could have given it to anyone else—comprised Mr. Guy's instructions for the future. And the inheritance Paul had been left by Mr. Guy fit in with the message he had been sent: Ruth Brouard would keep the project going forward, but Paul's was the money that would build it.

  That had to be it. Paul knew it. But more, he could feel it. And Mr. Guy had talked to him more than once about feelings.

  Trust what's inside, my boy. There lies the truth.

  Paul saw, with a jolt of pleasure, that inside had meant more than just inside one's heart and soul. It also had meant inside the dolmen. He was to trust what he found inside that dark chamber. Well, he would do so.

  He hugged Taboo and felt as if a mantle of lead had been lifted from his shoulders. He'd been wandering in the dark since he'd learned of Mr. Guy's death. Now he had a light. But more than that, really. He had far more. Now he had a good sense of direction.

  Ruth didn't need to hear the oncologist's verdict. She saw it on his face, especially on his forehead, which looked even more lined than usual. She understood from this that he was fending off the feelings that invariably went with imminent failure. She wondered what it must be like to choose as one's life work bearing witness to the passing of countless patients. Doctors, after all, were meant to heal and then to celebrate victory in the battle against illness, accident, or disease. But cancer doctors went to war with weapons that were often insufficient against an enemy that knew no restrictions and was governed by no rules. Cancer, Ruth thought, was like a terrorist. No subtle signs, just instant devastation. The word alone was enough to destroy.

  “We've gone as far as we can with what we've been using,” the doctor said. “But there comes a time when a stronger opioid analgesic is called for. I think you know we've reached that time, Ruth. Hydromorphone isn't enough now. We can't increase the dosage. We have to make the change.”

  “I'd like another alternative.” Ruth knew her voice was faint, and she hated what that revealed about her affliction. She was meant to be able to hide from the fire, and if she couldn't do that, she was meant to be able to hide the fire from the world. She forced a smile. “It wouldn't be so bad if it simply throbbed. There'd be that respite between the pulsing, if you know what I mean. I'd have the memory of what it was like . . . in those brief pauses . . . what it was like before.”

  “Another round of chemo, then.”

  Ruth stood firm. “No more of that.”

  “Then we must move to morphine. It's the only answer.” He observed her from the other side of his desk, the veil in his eyes that had been shielding him from her seemed to drop for an instant. The man himself appeared as if naked before her, a creature who felt too many other creatures' pain. “What are you afraid of, exactly?” His voice was kind. “Is it the chemo itself? The side effects from it?”

  She shook her head.

  “The morphine, then? The idea of addiction? Heroin users, opium dens, addicts nodding off in back alleyways?”

  Again, she shook her head.

  “Then the fact that morphine comes at the end? And what that means?”

  “No. Not at all. I know I'm dying. I'm not afraid of that.” To see Maman and Papa after such a long time, to see Guy and be able to say I'm so sorry . . . What, Ruth thought, was there to fear in this? But she wanted to be in control of the means and she knew about morphine: how at the end it robbed you of the very thing you yourself were gallantly attempting to release on a sigh.

  “But it's not necessary to die in such agony, Ruth. The morphine—”

  “I want to go knowing I'm going,” Ruth said. “I don't want to be a breathing corpse in a bed.”

  “Ah.” The doctor placed his hands on his desk, folded them neatly so that his signet ring caught the light. “You've an image of it, haven't you? The patient comatose and the family gathered round the bedside watching her at her most defenceless. She lies immobile and not even conscious, unable to communicate no matter what's in her mind.”

  Ruth felt the call of tears but she didn't reply to it. Fearful that she might, she simply nodded.

  “That's an image from a long time ago,” the doctor told her. “Of course, we can make it a present-day image if that's what the patient wants: a carefully orchestrated slide into a coma, with death waiting at the end of the descent. Or we can control the dosage so that the pain gets dulled and the patient remains alert.”

  “But if the pain's too great, the dosage has to be equal to it. And I know what morphine does. You can't pretend it doesn't debilitate.”

  “If you have trouble with it, if it makes you too sleepy, we'll balance it with something else. Methylphenidate, a stimulant.”

  “More drugs.” The bitterness Ruth heard in her voice was a match for the pain in her bones.

  “What's the alternative, Ruth, beyond what you already have?”

  That was the question, with no easy answer that she could accept and embrace. There was death at her own hand, there was welcoming torture like a Christian martyr, or there was the drug. She would have to decide.

  She thought about this over a cup of coffee, which she sipped at the Admiral de Saumarez Inn. A fire was blazing there, just a few steps off Berthelot Street, and Ruth found a tiny nearby table that was empty. She eased herself down into a chair and ordered her coffee. She drank it slowly, savouring its bitter flavour as she watched the flames lick greedily at the logs.

  She wasn't supposed to be in the position she was in, Ruth thought wearily. As a young girl, she'd thought she would one day marry and have a family as other girls did. As a woman who moved into first her thirties and then her forties without that happening, she'd thought she could be of service to the brother who'd been everything to her throughout her life. She was not meant for other pursuits, she told herself. So be it. She would live for Guy.

  But living for Guy brought her face-to-face over time with how Guy lived, and that had been difficult for her to accept. She had managed it eventually, telling herself that what he did was just a reaction to the early loss he had endured and to the endless responsibilities that had been foisted upon him because of that loss. She had been one of those responsibilities. He'd met it wholeheartedly. She owed him much. This had allowed her to turn a blind eye until the time she'd felt she could no longer do so.

  She wondered why people reacted as they did to the difficulties they'd encountered in childhood. One person's challenge became another person's excuse, but in either case their childhood was still the reason behind what they did. This simple precept had long been evident to her whenever she'd evaluated her brother's life: his drive to succeed and to prove his worth determined by early persecution and loss, his restless endless pursuit of women merely a reflection of a boyhood starved of a mother's love, his failed attempts in the role of father only an indication of a paternal relationship terminated before it had a chance to bloom. She knew all this. She'd pondered it. But in all her pondering, she'd never considered how the precepts governing the role of childhood worked in lives other than Guy's.

  In her own, for example: an entire existence dominated by fear. People said they would return and they never did—that was the backdrop against which she'd acted her part in the unfolding drama that became her life. One could not function in such an anxious climate, however, so one sought ways to pretend the fear didn't exist. A man might leave, so cling to the man who could not do so. A child might grow, change, and flee the nest, so obviate that possibility in the simplest way: have no children. The future might bring challenges that could thrust one into the unknown, so exist in the past. Indeed, make one's life a tribute to the past, become a documentarist of the past, a celebrant of it, a diarist of it. In this way, live outside of fear which, as it turned out, was just another way of living outside of life.

  But was that so wrong? Ruth couldn't think so, espec
ially when she considered what her attempts to live inside life had led to.

  “I want to know what you intend to do,” Margaret had demanded this morning. “Adrian's been robbed of what's rightfully his—on more than one front and you know it—and I want to know what you intend to do. I don't care how he managed it, frankly, what sort of legal fancy-dancing he did. I'm beyond all that. I just want to know how you mean to put it right. Not if, Ruth. How. Because you know where this is going to lead if you don't do something.”

  “Guy wanted—”

  “I don't bloody care what you think Guy wanted because I know what he wanted: what he always wanted.” Margaret advanced on Ruth where she'd been sitting, at her dressing table, trying to put some artificial colour on her face. “Young enough to be his daughter, Ruth. Younger than his own daughters, even, if it comes down to it. Someone who by no stretch of the imagination was meant to be available to him. That's what he was up to this last time. And you know it, don't you?”

  Ruth's hand trembled so she couldn't twirl her lipstick up from the tube. Margaret saw this and she leaped upon it, interpreting it as the reply Ruth had no intention of speaking outright.

  “My God, you did know.” Margaret's voice was hoarse. “You knew he meant to seduce her, and you did nothing to stop it. As far as you were concerned—as far as you've always been concerned—bloody little Guy could do no wrong, no matter who got hurt in the process.”

  Ruth, I want it. She wants it as well.

  “What did it matter, after all, that she was merely the latest in a very long line of women he just had to have? What did it matter that in taking her he was acting out a betrayal that no one would recover from? With him, there was always the pretence that he was doing them some kind of gentlemanly favour. Enlarging their world, taking them under his wing, saving them from a bad situation, and we both know what that situation was. When all along what he was really doing was bucking himself up in the easiest way he could find. You knew it. You saw it. And you let it happen. As if you had no responsibility to anyone other than yourself.”

  Ruth lowered her hand, which was by now shaking far too much to be useful. Guy had done wrong. She would admit that. But he hadn't set out to do so. He hadn't planned in advance . . . or even thought about . . . No. He wasn't that sort of monster. It was just a case of her being there one day and the blinkers falling from Guy's eyes in the way they fell when he suddenly saw and just as suddenly wanted and thought that he had to have, because She's the one, Ruth. And she was always “the one” to Guy, which was how he justified whatever he did. So Margaret was right. Ruth had known the peril.

  “Did you watch?” Margaret asked her. She'd been gazing at Ruth from behind, at her reflection in the mirror, but now she came round and stood so that Ruth had to look at her and even if she hoped to do otherwise, Margaret removed the lipstick from her hand. “Is that what it was? Were you part of it? No longer in the background, Guy's little Boswell of the needlepoint, but an active participant in the drama this time. Or maybe a Peeping Thomasina? A female Polonius behind the arras?”

  “No!” Ruth cried.

  “Oh. Then just someone who didn't get involved. No matter what he did.”

  “That isn't true.” There was too much to bear: her own physical pain, the grief of her brother's murder, bearing witness to the destruction of dreams before her eyes, loving too many people in conflict with each other, seeing the wheel of Guy's misplaced passion keep turning in revolutions that never once changed. Not even at the end. Not even after She's truly the one, Ruth, one last time. Because she hadn't been, but he had to tell himself that she was, because if he hadn't done that, he'd have had to face what he himself really was, an old man who'd tried and failed to recover from a lifelong grief he'd never allowed himself to feel. There'd been no luxury for that with Prends soin de ta petite soeur, the injunction that became the motto on a family escutcheon that existed only in her brother's mind. So how could she have called him to account? What demands could she have made? What threats?

  None. She could only try to reason with him. When that failed, because it was doomed to failure the moment he said She's the one yet again as if he'd never made that declaration three dozen times before, she knew that she would have to take another route to stop him. This would be a new route, representing frightening and uncharted territory for her. But she had to take it.

  So Margaret was wrong, at least in this. She hadn't played the part of Polonius, lurking and listening, having her suspicions confirmed and at the same time getting a vicarious satisfaction from something she herself never had. She'd known. She'd tried to reason with her brother. When that had failed, she'd acted.

  And now . . . ? She was left with the aftermath of what she'd done.

  Ruth knew she had to make reparation for this somehow. Margaret would have her think that wresting Adrian's rightful inheritance from the legal quagmire Guy had created to keep the young man from it would be an appropriate form of restitution. But that was because Margaret wanted a quick solution to a problem that had been years in the making. As if, Ruth thought, an infusion of money into Adrian's veins would ever be the answer to what had long ailed him.

  In the Admiral de Saumarez Inn, Ruth finished the last of her coffee and dropped the necessary money onto the table. She worked her way back into her coat with some difficulty and fumbled with the buttons and her scarf. Outside, the rain was falling softly, but a streak of light sky in the direction of France made a promise that the weather might improve as the day wore on. Ruth hoped that would be the case. She'd come to town without her umbrella.

  She had to ascend the incline of Berthelot Street, and she found this difficult. She wondered how long she'd be able to manage and how many months or even weeks she had before she would be forced to her bed for the final countdown. Not long, she hoped.

  Near the top of her climb, New Street veered off to the right in the general direction of the Royal Court House. In this vicinity, Dominic Forrest had his office.

  Ruth entered to find that the advocate had just returned from making a few morning calls. He could see her if she didn't mind waiting for fifteen minutes or so. He had to return two phone calls that were most important. Would she like a coffee?

  Ruth demurred. She didn't sit because she wasn't sure if she would be able to rise again without assistance. Instead, she found a copy of Country Life, and she looked at the photos without actually seeing them.

  Mr. Forrest came to fetch her within the promised fifteen minutes. He looked grave when he called her name, and she wondered if he'd been standing at the doorway to his office, watching her and making an assessment of how much longer she'd be able to go on. It seemed to Ruth that a greater part of her world observed her that way now. The more she did to appear normal and unaffected by disease, the more people seemed to watch her as if waiting for the lie to be flushed out.

  Ruth took a seat in Forrest's office, knowing how odd it would look if she remained standing throughout their meeting. The advocate asked if she would mind if he had a coffee . . . ? He'd been up for hours, getting an early start on the day, and he found he needed a jolt of caffeine right now. Would she take a slice of gâche at least?

  Ruth said no, she was really quite fine, as she'd just come from her own cup of coffee at Admiral de Saumarez. She waited till Mr. Forrest had his cup and his slice of the island bread, though, before she launched into the reason for her visit.

  She told the advocate of her confusion regarding Guy's will. She'd been witness to his previous wills, as Mr. Forrest knew, and it had been something of a shock to her to hear the changes he'd made in the legacies: nothing for Anaïs Abbott and her children, the wartime museum forgotten, the Duffys ignored. And to see less money left to Guy's own children than to his two . . . She struggled for words and settled on local protégés . . . It was a most bewildering situation.

  Dominic Forrest nodded solemnly. He had wondered what was going on, he admitted, when he'd been asked to go over the
will in front of individuals who were not beneficiaries of it. That was irregular—Well, the whole reading of the will in such a meeting in this day and age was a bit irregular, wasn't it?—but he'd thought perhaps Ruth was surrounding herself with friends and loved ones during a troubling time. Now he saw that Ruth herself had been left in the dark as to her brother's final testament. That explained much about the oddity of the formal reading. “I did wonder when you didn't come with him the day he signed the documents. You'd always done before. I thought perhaps you weren't feeling well, but I didn't ask at the time. Because . . .” He shrugged, looking both sympathetic and embarrassed. He, too, knew, Ruth realised. So Guy had probably known as well. But like most people, he didn't know what to say. I'm sorry you're dying seemed too vulgar.

  “But you see, he always told me before,” Ruth said. “Every will. Every time. I'm trying to understand why he kept this final version a secret.”

  “Perhaps he believed it would upset you,” Forrest said. “Perhaps he knew you'd disagree with the changes in the bequests. Moving part of the money out of the family.”

  “No. It can't be that,” Ruth said. “The other wills did the same.”

  “But not a fifty-fifty split. And in earlier versions his children each inherited more than the other beneficiaries. Perhaps Guy thought you might pounce on this. He knew you'd understand what the terms of his will meant the moment you heard them.”

  “I would have protested,” Ruth admitted. “But that wouldn't have changed things. My protests never counted with Guy.”

  “Yes, but that was before . . .” Forrest made a little gesture with his hands. Ruth took it to mean the cancer.

  Yes. It made sense if Guy knew she was dying. He'd listen to the wishes of a sister not long for this world. Even Guy would do that. And to listen to her would have meant to leave his three children a legacy that at least equaled—if it did not exceed—that which he'd left to the two island adolescents, which was exactly what Guy had not wanted to do. His daughters had long made themselves nothing to him; his son had been a lifelong disappointment. He wanted to remember the people who had returned his love in the manner he'd decided love ought to be returned. So he'd cooperated with the laws of inheritance and left his children the fifty percent they were owed, freeing him to do whatever he wanted with the rest.