A Place of Hiding (26 page)

The rest of Valerie's worries remained, however. These pertained to Kevin's natural taciturnity, which she generally found untroubling but which she now found unnerving.

She and her husband walked across the grounds of
Le Reposoir,
leaving the manor house behind them, heading for their cottage. Valerie had seen the variety of reactions on the faces of those who'd been gathered in the drawing room, and she'd read in each of them the hopes they'd had dashed. Anaïs Abbott had been relying upon financial exhumation from the grave she'd dug herself attempting to hold on to her man. Frank Ouseley had been anticipating a bequest enormous enough to build a monument to his father. Margaret Chamberlain had expected more than enough money to move her adult son permanently out from under her roof. And Kevin . . . ? Well, it was clear enough that Kevin had a lot on his mind, most of it having nothing to do with wills and bequests, so Kevin had walked into the drawing room without the handicap of a crowded canvas on which he'd painted his aspirations.

She looked at him now, just a quick glance as he walked beside her. She knew he would think it unnatural if she made no comment, but she wanted to be careful with how much she said. Some things didn't bear talking about.

“D'you think we ought to ring Henry, then?” she finally asked her husband.

Kevin loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt, unused to the type of clothes most other men wore with ease. He said, “I expect he'll know soon enough. Doubtless, half the island will know by supper.”

Valerie waited for him to say more, but he didn't. She wanted to be relieved at this, but the fact that he didn't look at her told her his thoughts were on the run.

“Makes me wonder how he'll react, though,” Valerie said.

“Does it, love?” Kevin asked her.

He said it low so that Valerie nearly couldn't hear him at all, but his tone alone would have conveyed enough to make her shiver. She said, “Why do you ask that, Kev?” in the hope that she could force his hand.

He said, “What people say they'll do and what they actually do are different sometimes, aren't they?” He moved his gaze to her.

Valerie's shiver altered to a permanent chill. She felt it sweep up her legs and shoot into her stomach, where it curled round like a hairless cat and just lay there, asking her to do something about it. She waited for her husband to introduce the obvious topic that everyone who'd been sitting in the drawing room was at that moment probably either thinking of or speaking of to someone else. When he didn't, she said, “Henry was at the funeral, Kev. Did you speak to him? He came to the burial as well. And to the reception. Did you see him there? I expect that means he and Mr. Brouard were friendly right to the end. Which is good, I think. Because it would be dreadful if Mr. Brouard died at odds with anyone, and especially with Henry. Henry wouldn't want a crack in their friendship to be troubling his conscience, would he?”

“No,” Kevin said. “A troubled conscience is a nasty thing. Keeps you up at night. Makes it hard to think of anything else but what you did to get it in the first place.” He stopped walking and Valerie did the same. They stood on the lawn. A sudden gust of wind from the Channel brought the salt air with it and with it as well the reminder of what had happened by the bay.

“Do you think, Val,” Kevin said when a good thirty seconds had crawled by between them with Valerie making no reply to his comment, “that Henry's going to wonder about that will?”

She glanced away, knowing his gaze was still on her and still attempting to draw her out. He usually could cajole her into speaking, this husband of hers, because no matter the twenty-seven years of their marriage, she loved him the way she'd done from the first, when he'd stripped the clothes from her willing body and loved that body with his own. She knew the true value of having that kind of celebration with a man in your life and the fear of losing it pulled at her to speak and ask Kevin's pardon for what she'd done despite the promise she'd made never to do it because of the hell it might cause if she did.

But the pull of Kevin's look upon her wasn't enough. It drew her to the brink, but it couldn't shoot her over into certain destruction. She remained silent, which forced him to continue.

He said, “I can't see how he won't wonder, can you? The whole oddity of it begs for questions to be asked and answered. And if he doesn't ask them . . .” Kevin looked over in the direction of the duck ponds, where the little duck graveyard held the broken bodies of those innocent birds. He said, “Too many things mean power to a man, and when his power's taken from him he doesn't deal with that lightly. Because there's no laughing it off, you see, no saying ‘Ah, it didn't mean all that much in the first place, did it.' Not if a man's identified his power. And not if he's lost it.”

Valerie started them walking again, determined not to be caught another time by the pin of her husband's stare, fixed onto a display board like a captured butterfly, with the label
female forsworn
beneath her. “Do you think that's what's happened, Kev? Someone's lost his power? Is that what you think this is all about?”

“I don't know,” he replied. “Do you?”

A coy woman might have said “Why would I . . . ?” but the last attribute Valerie possessed was the one of being coy. She knew exactly why her husband was asking her that question and she knew where it would lead them if she answered him directly: to an examination of promises given and a discussion of rationalisations made.

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.

Frank had taken her hand into both of his, saying, “There'll be time to think about all this later. Don't worry about it now.”

Then he'd gone, leaving her to deal with Anaïs next.

Shell shocked
popped into Ruth's mind when she was at last alone with her brother's lover. Anaïs sat numbly on the same love seat she'd taken during Dominic Forrest's explanation of the will, her posture unchanging and the only difference being that she sat there now alone. Poor Jemima had been so eager to be dismissed that when Ruth murmured, “Perhaps you might find Stephen somewhere in the grounds, dear . . . ?” she'd caught one of her great large feet on the edge of an ottoman and nearly knocked over a small table in her haste to be gone. This haste was understandable. Jemima knew her mother quite well and was probably foreseeing what was going to be asked of her in the way of filial devotion in the next few weeks. Anaïs would require both a confidante and a scapegoat. Time would tell which role she would decide her gangling daughter was going to play.

So now Ruth and Anaïs were alone and Anaïs sat plucking the edge of a small cushion from the love seat. Ruth didn't know what to say to her. Her brother had been a good and generous man despite his foibles, and he'd earlier remembered Anaïs Abbott and her children in his will in a fashion that would have relieved her anxiety enormously. Indeed, that had long been Guy's way with his women. Each time he took a new lover for any period longer than three months, he altered his will to reflect the extent to which he and she were devoted to each other. Ruth knew this because Guy had always of necessity shared the contents of his wills with her. With the exception of this most current and final document, Ruth had read each one of them in the presence of Guy and his advocate because Guy had always wanted to be certain that Ruth understood how he meant his money to be distributed.

The last will Ruth had read had been drawn up some six months into her brother's relationship with Anaïs Abbott, shortly after the two of them had returned from Sardinia, where they'd apparently done very little more than explore all the permutations of what a man and woman could do to each other with their respective body parts. Guy had returned glaze-eyed from that trip, saying, “She's the one, Ruth,” and his will had reflected this optimistic belief. Ruth had asked Anaïs to be present for that reason and she could see by the expression on her face that Anaïs believed Ruth had done so out of malice.

Ruth didn't know which would be worse at the moment: allowing Anaïs to believe that she harboured such a desire to wound her that she would allow all her hopes to be dashed in a public forum or telling her that there had been an earlier will in which the four hundred thousand pounds left to her would have been the answer to her current dilemma. It had to be the first alternative, Ruth decided. For although she didn't actually want to be the recipient of anyone's antipathy, telling Anaïs about the earlier will would likely result in having to talk about why it had been altered.

Ruth lowered herself to the seat. She murmured, “Anaïs, I'm terribly sorry. I don't know what else to say.”

Anaïs turned her head like a woman slowly regaining consciousness. She said, “If he wanted to leave his money to teenagers, why not mine? Jemima. Stephen. Did he only
pretend . . . ?” She clutched the cushion to her stomach. “Why did he do this to me, Ruth?”