A Place of Hiding

  As Anaïs wept against her shoulder, Ruth extended her hand to the woman's fifteen-year-old daughter. Jemima smiled fleetingly—she and Ruth had always got on well—but she didn't approach. She looked instead beyond Ruth to Margaret and then to her mother and said, “Mummy,” in a low but agonised voice. Jemima had never liked displays such as this. In the time Ruth had known her, she'd cringed more than once at Anaïs's propensity for public exhibition.

  Margaret cleared her throat meaningfully. Anaïs pulled away from Ruth's arms and fished a packet of tissues from the jacket pocket of her trouser suit. She was dressed in black from head to toe, a cloche covering her carefully maintained strawberry-blonde hair.

  Ruth made the introductions. It was an awkward business: former wife, current lover, current lover's daughter. Anaïs and Margaret murmured polite acknowledgements of each other and immediately took stock.

  They couldn't have been less alike. Guy liked them blonde—he always had—but beyond that, the two women shared no similarities except perhaps for their background, because if truth were told, Guy had always liked them common as well. And no matter how either of them was educated, how she dressed or carried herself or had learned to pronounce her words, the Mersey still oozed out of Anaïs occasionally and Margaret's charwoman mother emerged from the daughter when she least wanted that part of her history known.

  Other than that, though, they were night and day. Margaret tall, imposing, overdressed, and overbearing; Anaïs a little bird of a thing, thin to the point of self-abuse in the odious fashion of the day—aside from her patently artificial and overly voluptuous breasts—but always dressed like a woman who never donned a single garment without obtaining her mirror's approval.

  Margaret, naturally, hadn't come all the way to Guernsey to meet, let alone to comfort or entertain, one of her former husband's many lovers. So after murmuring a dignified albeit utterly spurious “So nice to meet you,” she said to Ruth, “We'll speak later, dearest,” and she hugged her sister-in-law and kissed her on both cheeks and said, “Darling Ruth,” as if she wished Anaïs Abbott to know from this uncharacteristic and mildly disturbing gesture that one of them had a position in this family and the other certainly had not. Then she departed, trailing behind her the scent of Chanel No. 5. Too early in the day for such an odour, Ruth thought. But Margaret wouldn't be aware of that.

  “I should have been with him,” Anaïs said in a hushed voice once the door closed behind Margaret. “I wanted to be, Ruthie. Ever since it happened, I've thought if I'd only spent the night here, I would have gone to the bay in the morning. Just to watch him. Because he was such a joy to watch. And . . . Oh God, oh God why did this have to happen?”

  To me was what she didn't add. But Ruth was no fool. She hadn't spent a lifetime observing the manner in which her brother had moved in and around and out of his entanglements with women not to know at what point he was in the perpetual game of seduction, disillusionment, and abandonment that he played. Guy had been just about finished with Anaïs Abbott when he died. If Anaïs hadn't known that directly, she'd probably sensed it at one level or another.

  Ruth said, “Come. Let's sit. Shall I ask Valerie for coffee? Jemima, would you like something, dear?”

  Jemima said hesitantly, “'V' you got anything I c'n give Biscuit? He's just out front. He was off his feed this morning and—”

  “Duck, darling,” her mother cut in, the reproof more than clear in her use of Jemima's childhood nickname. Those two words said everything that Anaïs did not: Little girls concern themselves with their doggies. Young women concern themselves with young men. “The dog will survive. The dog, in fact, would have survived very well had we left him at home where he belongs. As I told you. We can't expect Ruth—”

  “Sorry.” Jemima seemed to speak more forcefully than she thought she ought in front of Ruth because she lowered her head at once, and one hand fretted at the seam of her trim wool trousers. She wasn't dressed like an ordinary teenager, poor thing. A summerlong course in a London modeling school in combination with her mother's vigilance—not to mention her intrusion into the girl's clothes cupboard—had taken care of that. She was instead garbed like a model from Vogue. But despite her time learning how to apply her makeup, style her hair, and move on the catwalk, she was in truth still gawky Jemima, Duck to her family and ducklike to the world with the same kind of awkwardness a duck would feel thrust into an environment where he was denied water.

  Ruth's heart went out to her. She said, “That sweet little dog? He's probably miserable out there without you, Jemima. Would you like to bring him in?”

  “Nonsense,” Anaïs said. “He's fine. He may be deaf but there's nothing wrong with his eyes and sense of smell. He knows quite well where he is. Leave him there.”

  “Yes. Of course. But perhaps he'd like a bit of minced beef? And there's leftover shepherd's pie from lunch yesterday. Jemima, do scoot down to the kitchen and ask Valerie for some of that pie. You can heat it in the microwave if you like.”

  Jemima's head bobbed up and her expression did Ruth's heart more good than she expected. The girl said, “If it's okay . . . ?” with a glance at her mother.

  Anaïs was clever enough to know when to sway with a wind that was stronger than one she herself could blow. She said, “Ruthie. That is so good of you. We don't mean to be the slightest bit of trouble.”

  “And you aren't,” Ruth said. “Go along, Jemima. Let us older girls have a chat.”

  Ruth didn't intend the term older girls to be offensive, but she saw that it had been as Jemima left them. At the age she was willing to declare—forty-six—Anaïs could actually have been Ruth's daughter. She certainly looked it. Indeed, she made every effort to look it. For she knew better than most women that older men were attracted to feminine youth and beauty just as feminine youth and beauty were so frequently and conveniently attracted to the source of the means to maintain themselves. Age didn't matter in either case. Appearance and resources were everything. To speak of age, however, had been something of a faux pas. But Ruth did nothing to smooth over that solecism. She was grieving for her brother, for the love of God. She could be excused.

  Anaïs walked over to the needlepoint frame. She examined the design of the latest panel. She said, “What number is this one?”

  “Fifteen, I think.”

  “With how many more to go?”

  “As many as it takes to tell the whole story.”

  “All of it? Even Guy . . . at the end?” Anaïs was red-eyed but she didn't weep again. Instead, she seemed to use her own question to guide them to the point of her call at Le Reposoir. “Everything's changed now, Ruth. I'm worried for you. Are you taken care of?”

  For a moment, Ruth thought she meant the cancer and how she would face her own imminent dying. She said, “I think I'll be able to cope,” whereupon Anaïs's reply disabused her of the notion that the other woman had come to offer shelter, care, or just support in the coming months.

  Anaïs said, “Have you read the will, Ruthie?” And as if she actually knew at heart how vulgar the question was, she added, “Have you been able to reassure yourself that you're taken care of?”

  Ruth told her brother's lover what she'd told her brother's former wife. She managed to relay the information with dignity in spite of what she wanted to say about who ought to have a vested interest in the distribution of Guy's fortune and who ought not.

  “Oh.” Anaïs's voice reflected her disappointment. No reading of a will suggested no sure knowledge of whether, when, or how she was going to be able to pay for the myriad paths she'd followed to keep herself young since meeting Guy. It also meant the wolves were probably ten steps closer to the front door of that overly impressive house that she and her children occupied at the north end of the island near Le Grand Havre Bay. Ruth had always suspected Anaïs Abbott was living well above her means. Financier's widow or not—and who knew what that meant anyway: my husband was a financier, in these days of stocks worth nothing one wee
k after they were purchased and world markets sitting on top of quicksand? Naturally, he could have been a financial wizard who made other people's money multiply like loaves before the hungry, or an investment broker capable of turning five pounds into five million given enough time, faith, and resources. But on the other hand, he could have just been a clerk at Barclays whose life insurance policy had enabled his grieving widow to move in loftier circles than those into which she had been born and had wed. In either case, gaining entrance to those circles and moving in them took cold, hard cash: for the house, the clothing, the car, the holidays . . . not to mention for little incidentals like food. So it stood to reason that Anaïs Abbott was likely in dire straits at this point. She'd made a considerable investment in her relationship with Guy. For that investment to produce in dividends, the assumption had been that Guy would remain alive and heading towards marriage.

  Even if Ruth felt a degree of aversion for Anaïs Abbott because of the Master Plan from which she believed the other woman had always been operating, she knew she had to excuse at least part of her machinations. For Guy had indeed led her to believe in the possibility of a union between them. A legal union. Hand in hand before a minister or a few minutes of smiling and blushing in Le Greffe. It had been reasonable for Anaïs to make certain assumptions because Guy had been generous. Ruth knew he'd been the one to send Jemima off to London, and she little doubted that he was also the reason—financial or otherwise—that Anaïs's breasts protruded like two firm perfect symmetrical cantaloupes from a chest too small to accommodate them naturally. But had it all been paid for? Or were there bills outstanding? That was the question. In a moment, Ruth was given the answer.

  Anaïs said, “I miss him, Ruth. He was . . . You know I loved him, don't you? You know how I loved him, don't you?”

  Ruth nodded. The cancer feeding upon her spine was beginning to demand her attention. Nodding was the only thing she could do when the pain was there and she was trying to be its master.

  “He was everything to me, Ruth. My rock. My centre.” Anaïs bowed her head. A few soft curls escaped her cloche, lying like the evidence of a man's caress against the back of her neck. “He had a way of dealing with things . . . Suggestions he made . . . things he did . . . Did you know it was his idea that Jemima go to London for the modeling course? For confidence, he said. That was so like Guy. Full of such generosity and love.”

  Ruth nodded again, caught in the grip of her cancer's caress. She pressed her lips together and suppressed a moan.

  “Not a single thing he wouldn't do for us,” Anaïs said. “The car . . . its maintenance . . . the garden pool . . . There he was. Helping. Giving. What a wonderful man. I'll never meet anyone even close to being . . . He was so good to me. And without him now . . . ? I feel I've lost it all. Did he tell you he paid for school uniforms this year? I know he didn't. He wouldn't because that was part of his goodness, protecting the pride of the people he helped. He even . . . Ruth, this good, dear man was even giving me a monthly allowance. ‘You're more to me than I thought a woman could ever be and I want you to have more than you can give yourself.' I thanked him, Ruth, time and time again. But I never stopped to thank him enough. Still, I wanted you to know some of the good he did. The good he did for me. To help me, Ruth.”

  She could have made her request more blatant only by scrawling it on the Wilton carpet. Ruth wondered how much more tasteless her brother's putative mourners were going to become.

  “Thank you for such an elegy, Anaïs,” she settled upon saying to the woman. “To know you knew he was goodness itself . . .” And he was, he was, Ruth's heart cried out. “It's an act of kindness for you to come here and tell me. I'm terribly grateful. You're very good.”

  Anaïs opened her mouth to speak. She even drew breath before she appeared to realise there was nothing more to say. She couldn't directly ask for money at this point without appearing grasping and crass. Even if she had no regard for that, she probably wasn't going to be willing any time soon to set aside the pretence that she was an independent widow for whom a meaningful textured relationship was more important than what funded it. She'd been living that pretence too long.

  So Anaïs Abbott said nothing more and neither did Ruth as they sat together in the morning room. Really, at the end of the day, what more could they possibly say?

  Chapter 7

  THE BAD WEATHER CONTINUED to abate during the day in London, and it was this that allowed the St. Jameses and Cherokee River to make the journey to Guernsey. They arrived by late afternoon, circling round the airport to see spread out below them in the fading light grey cotton thread roads unspooling haphazardly, twisting through stony hamlets and between bare fields. The glass of countless inland greenhouses caught the last of the sun, and the leafless trees on valley and hillside marked the areas where winds and storms reached less fiercely. It was a varied landscape from the air: rising to towering cliffs on the east and the south ends of the island, sloping to tranquil bays on the west and in the north.

  The island was desolate at this time of year. Holiday makers would fill its tangle of roads in late spring and summer, heading for the beaches, the cliff paths, or the harbours, exploring Guernsey's churches, its castles, its forts. They would walk and swim and boat and bike. They would throng the streets and swell the hotels. But in December, there were three kinds of people who occupied the Channel island: the islanders themselves who were bound to the place by habit, tradition, and love; tax exiles who were determined to shelter as much of their money as was possible from their respective governments; and bankers who worked in St. Peter Port and flew home to England at weekends.

  It was to St. Peter Port that the St. Jameses and Cherokee River took themselves. This was the largest town and the seat of government on the island. It was also where the police were headquartered and where China River's advocate had his office.

  Cherokee had been loquacious for most of their journey that day. He veered from subject to subject like a man who was terrified of what a silence among them might imply, and St. James had found himself wondering if the constant barrage of conversation was designed to keep them from considering the futility of the mission in which they were engaged. If China River had been arrested and charged, there would be evidence to try her for the crime. If that evidence went beyond the circumstantial, St. James knew there was going to be little or nothing he could do to interpret it differently to the way the police experts had already done.

  But as Cherokee had continued his dialogue, it had begun to seem less like distracting them from drawing conclusions about their objective and more like attaching himself to them. St. James played the watcher in all this, a third wheel on a bicycle lurching towards the unknown. He found it a distinctly uneasy ride.

  Cherokee chatted most about his sister. Chine—as he called her—had finally learned to surf. Did Debs know that? Her boyfriend, Matt—did Debs ever meet Matt? She must've, right?—well, he finally got her out in the water . . . I mean far enough out because she was always freaked out about sharks. He taught her the basics and made her practise and the day she finally stood up . . . She finally got what it was all about, mentally got it. The Zen of surfing. Cherokee was always wanting her to come down to surf in Huntington with him . . . in February or March, when the waves could get gnarly, but she would never come because coming to Orange County meant going over to Mom's in her mind and Chine and Mom . . . They had issues with each other. They were just too different. Mom was always doing something wrong. Like the last time Chine came down for a weekend—probably more'n two years ago—it became a major big deal that Mom didn't have any clean glasses in the house. It's not like Chine couldn't wash a glass herself, but Mom should have had them washed in advance because washing the glasses in advance meant something. Like I love you or Welcome or I want you to be here. Anyway, Cherokee always tried to stay out of it when they went at it. They were both, you know, really good people, Mom and Chine. They were just so different. However, whenev
er Chine came to the canyon—Debs knew Cherokee lived in the canyon, didn't she? Modjeska? Inland? That cabin with the logs across the front?—anyway, when Chine came over, believe it, Cherokee put clean glasses everywhere. Not that he had too many of them. But what he did have . . . everywhere. Chine wanted clean glasses, and Cherokee gave her clean glasses. But it was weird, wasn't it, the kinds of things that set people off . . .

  All the way to Guernsey, Deborah had listened sympathetically to Cherokee's rambling. He'd wandered among reminiscence, revelation, and explanation, and within an hour it seemed to St. James that over and above the natural anxiety the man felt because of his sister's position, he also felt guilt. Had he not insisted that she accompany him, she wouldn't be where she was at the moment. He was at least in part responsible for that. Shit happens to people was the way he put it, but it was clear that this particular shit wouldn't have happened to this particular person had Cherokee not wanted her to come along. And he'd wanted her to come along because he needed her to come along, he explained, because that was the only way he himself was going to be able to go in the first place and he'd wanted to go because he wanted the money because finally he had a job in mind for himself that he could bear to think about doing for twenty-five years or more and he just needed a down payment to finance it. A fishing boat. That was it in a nutshell. China River was locked behind bars because her asshole brother wanted to buy a fishing boat.

  “But you couldn't have known what would happen,” Deborah protested.

  “I know that. But it doesn't make me feel any better. I've got to get her out of there, Debs.” And with an earnest smile at her and then at St. James, “Thank you for helping me out. There's no way I can ever repay you.”

  St. James wanted to tell the other man that his sister wasn't out of gaol yet and there was a very good chance that even if bail was offered and paid, her freedom at that point would constitute only a temporary reprieve. Instead, he merely said, “We'll do what we can.”