A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(47)
Ruth made the introductions. It was an awkward business: former wife, current lover, current lover’s daughter. Ana?s 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 Ana?s 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; Ana?s 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 sisterin-law and kissed her on both cheeks and said, “Darling Ruth,” as if she wished Ana?s 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,” Ana?s 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 Ana?s Abbott when he died. If Ana?s 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 Ana?s 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,” Ana?s 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...?” wi th a glance at her mother.
Ana?s 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—Ana?s 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.