A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(113)

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?