Robin Williams rode shotgun up a hill in Scotland

There's an awkward little pause after someone says, "No thanks, I can manage." You offered to help and he turned you down. Now you can insist and make him feel old, or step back and leave him on the stairs alone. Judi Dench's new memoir, out in the US on November 3, has a third option in it, and it came from Robin Williams.

Dench is 91, and the book is a set of conversations with her friend Brendan O'Hea. In one of them she remembers a party in the woods at Billy Connolly's house in Scotland, with a ceilidh and a bonfire. Her husband, the actor Michael Williams, was very ill with lung cancer. She could see him flagging, so they said good night and started up "this very steep hill." Robin appeared beside them and offered to help. Michael said he could manage, and Robin answered, "Well, I think I'll ride shotgun anyway."

Michael died in January 2001, and Dench says that even now, 25 years on, she imagines "he's going to walk in through the front door." What she remembers of that night is a man "just offering to be there, gently supportive, without imposing himself."

The Bible has an older walk like this one, and a much longer one. Naomi had buried her husband and both her sons in Moab. When she set out for home in Bethlehem, she told her two daughters-in-law to go back to their mothers. One of them did. Ruth wouldn't, and her answer on the road is the line people now read at weddings. What happens next gets read less often.

Ruth 1:18When she saw that she was steadfastly minded to go with her, she left off speaking to her.

Naomi's silence is a small concession. She gives up the argument about the road and keeps everything else, her grief included. When they reach Bethlehem, she tells the town to call her by a new name that means bitter, and the chapter gives Ruth no word of protest. Ruth gave up her country, her family and her gods, which is a great deal more than a walk up a hill, but the two are built the same way.

She refused to be sent away, and she never took Naomi's grief out of her hands.

Most help asks you to admit you need it before it shows up. The kind Ruth gave, and the kind Michael was offered on that hill, skips the admission. It comes along anyway, and you get to keep your pride on the way up.