A Place of Hiding (39 page)

The woman before him held a quill.
Wasn't
it a quill? It
looked
like a quill. She had a book open upon her lap. Behind her rose a building tall and vast and beneath it labourers worked on its construction. It looked like a cathedral to Paul. And she looked like . . . He couldn't say. Downcast, perhaps. Infinitely sad. She was writing in the book as if
documenting . . . What? Her thoughts? The work? What was being done behind her? What
was
being done? A building being raised. A woman with a book and a quill and a building being raised, all of it comprising a final message to Paul from Mr. Guy.

You know many things you think you don't know, son. You can do anything you want.

But with this? What
was
there to be done? The only buildings associated with Mr. Guy that Paul knew about were his hotels, his home at
Le Reposoir,
and the museum he and Mr. Ouseley talked of constructing. The only women associated with Mr. Guy that Paul knew about were Anaïs Abbott and Mr. Guy's sister. It seemed unlikely that the message Mr. Guy wanted Paul to have had anything to do with Anaïs Abbott. And it seemed even more unlikely that Mr. Guy would send him a hidden message about one of his hotels or even his house. Which left Mr. Guy's sister and Mr. Ouseley's museum as the core of the message. Which had to be what the message itself meant.

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, especially 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.