The Night Guest (11 page)

Richard knocked at the door rather than ringing the bell. Because Ruth didn’t hear him knock, it was a moment before she realized that Frida’s bustle to the front hallway was in response to his arrival. By the time Ruth reached the front of the house, Frida had taken his bag and coat, and the sound of a car in the lane was George’s taxi driving away. Ruth stepped from the door into the front garden, where Richard waited for her. He was older, yes, and he wore glasses, but he was still discernibly Richard, and her heart quickened just as it had when she’d watched him run in from a Fijian rainstorm, except that she was not nervous, or frightened, and she intended to be bold. He held his hands out to hers, and she took them. They kissed on the cheek as if they had always greeted each other this way, and as Frida passed through the door with his luggage, Richard took Ruth’s arm to lead her into the house. They spoke together softly and with great happiness: it’s so wonderful to see you, it’s so good to be here, my goodness, you look marvellous, so do you, just like yesterday, I can’t believe it.

“This is exactly how I imagined you to live,” said Richard. He stood without effort in the lounge room of Ruth’s house, and Ruth surveyed with him the paintings of pale cattled hillsides, the antique
masi
framed above the fireplace, and the photographs of her children and grandchildren smiling out from among green glassware. She saw evidence of comfort, happiness, and a well-lived life. Richard seemed so inevitable in that room, so welcome, that she hugged him again, and he laughed at her; they laughed together and sat holding hands on the lounge. Frida was making noises in the kitchen.

“Let me look at you properly,” said Richard, and instead of hiding her face in her arm, as she might once have done, Ruth looked back; she held her breath and lengthened her neck while she did it.

His hair had thinned and whitened, but he still had a great deal of it, and perhaps for this reason he’d let it grow longish, so that it stood out from his head in an ectoplasmic cloud. His forehead was high, just as she remembered, and she felt relieved for him that his hairline had barely receded. They’d been young together, and now they were old; because there was nothing in between, this strange telescoping of time gripped Ruth’s heart like vertigo. She was touched again by the flattening of his nostrils where they met his cheek, the particular tuck of his smallish chin, and the familiar way he smoothed his trousers out with the palms of his hands. It all reminded her of the night he’d criticized her father for washing feet.

“Do you smoke still?” she asked.

“Not for years.”

“Good,” she said, mindful of his lungs, but she was also disappointed. She wanted to see him smoke again; she had a pretty idea that young Richard would rise up out of those specific gestures—the lift of his wrist and the tap of the ash—and declare himself. Then she remembered his wife had died of lung cancer, and was mortified; she recalled giving Harry this news, and Harry’s responding by talking about the low incidence of lung cancer among Japanese smokers, so that Kyoko Porter’s death seemed doubly unlucky, a terrible consequence of having left Japan. Ruth sat, immobilized, while Richard told her about his journey: the traffic in Sydney, the train delayed. Perhaps he and Jeffrey would get on after all. She began to worry that he should never have come.

“Dinner is served,” announced Frida, and Richard stood; Ruth saw his hand go without thinking to button a jacket he hadn’t worn for decades.

“Oh, Richard, this is Frida, my dear Frida,” said Ruth. She was gushing, but she pulled herself together. “Frida Young, Richard Porter.”

Richard extended his hand to Frida, who took it with a solemnity Ruth had become accustomed to; she saw Richard’s surprise at it. The two of them, shaking hands, seemed to be agreeing to a matter of national importance on which Frida had forced Richard to compromise. Ruth noticed how trim he still was as he held out his hand and was relieved by the size of her own waist, if not by the plump stomach that swelled underneath it. Richard offered her his arm, and she took it, and they walked that way to the dining table.

During dinner, Frida moved between the kitchen and dining room with an efficient, soundless skill. Ruth asked her to join them, but she shook her head and hands in a gracious pantomime. No, her smile said, softer at the corners than Ruth had ever seen, I wouldn’t dream of it. Perhaps she was one of these women who behaved differently around men. Had Ruth really never seen Frida with a man? She thought of Bob Fretweed, who seemed too perfunctory to really count as a man; she thought of Frida bending into the taxi window to laugh with George. But George was her brother. Frida dished up beans and poured gravy and retreated to the kitchen, where she hummed as she went about cleaning counters that were already clean. Ruth disapproved of this pointless industry. A triple-cleaned house, in her opinion, looked too much as if it had been licked all over by a cat’s antiseptic tongue.

Ruth found it strange to eat a meal with Richard, in a dining room, without her parents present. Because she was determined not to start out with reminiscences—she was afraid of seeming sloppy and sentimental—she was worried there would be nothing to say. Fortunately there were children to discuss. They both seemed to have raised reassuringly ordinary children; there were no drastic prodigies among them. His eldest daughter was a doctor.

“Sometimes she reminds me of you,” said Richard. “She’s so stubborn, in the best way. I always thought you’d make a good doctor.”

Frida was clearing the plates now, and Richard leaned over the empty table to touch Ruth’s hand. His skin hadn’t spotted with age, as hers had; it was a clear, folded brown. From behind him, Frida raised inquisitive eyebrows. She shook her head as she went to the kitchen, as if tut-tutting the flagrant ways of the very young.

“What made you think I’d be a good doctor?” asked Ruth.

“I watched you help in the clinic. But it’s not just that. You have the right sort of mind: so clear and kind.”

“Not clear anymore.” Ruth shook her head as if to settle a cloudy liquid.

Richard laughed. He said, “I feel sometimes as if every part of me is different to what it was then. I feel unrecognizable.”

“Oh, no,” said Ruth. “You’re just the same.”

“Really? That’s good to know.” He still held her hand, which Ruth found both delightful and embarrassing. She wanted to point out that actually, as a young man, he had never touched her so readily as this. He needed something else from her now, or was more willing to demonstrate that need, or was softer and more sentimental. But he was still Richard. Ruth suggested they move to the lounge room; Richard sat beside her on the couch. Her leg touched his, so she shifted it. It was silly to be shy; she was annoyed at herself, but couldn’t seem to help it. She asked questions about Sydney, and he asked questions about her house, and he didn’t touch her again.

Frida came in to say good-night. She stood by the lounge-room door, demure in her grey coat, and Ruth went to her and put a hand against her cheek.

“Thank you for everything, my dear,” Ruth said, and Frida nodded. She seemed bashful. Then she moved out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

“You’re very lucky to have found her,” said Richard.

“It was more the other way around,” said Ruth. “She found me.”

“Tell me,” said Richard.

Ruth found she didn’t want to. She disliked remembering the day of Frida’s arrival, without being sure why. “Oh, you know, the government sent her. Isn’t it marvellous? She just showed up. She’s basically heaven-sent.”

“A deus ex machina.”

“Yes, yes.” Ruth was annoyed by the flourish with which Richard produced this phrase; a phrase he had once taught her. “But really, she just came from Fiji.”

“From Fiji? What an amazing coincidence. What was she doing there?”

“She’s
from
Fiji,” said Ruth. “She’s Fijian.”

Richard looked towards the door as if Frida might reappear, conveniently, to display her features for him. “She doesn’t look it,” he said.

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know. I suppose if you asked me where she was from, I wouldn’t know where to say.”

“I never wanted to be the kind of person who would say, ‘I couldn’t do without her,’ but I think now that I am.”

“These things creep up on you, don’t they,” said Richard.

Ruth wondered who had crept up on him. Her chest tightened—she felt for a minute as she had on the boat in Sydney Harbour, being told about a girl named Coco—and she changed the subject. “You know, you couldn’t have come in a better month,” she said. “You’re here just in time for the whales.”

At this time of the year, Southern humpbacks travelled down the coast. They lingered sportively off the headlands and frequently came farther into the bay. When Ruth, younger and subtler of spine, walked down the dune and onto the beach, it had always felt to her that she was going out ceremoniously to meet them. She thought they knew she was paying them court. Phillip came one year and paddled a sea kayak out to get a better look; Harry called to him from the shore in a forlorn monotone, “Too close! Too close!” The whales’ unearthly sounds, urgent and high-pitched, conjured the night cries of wrecked sailors.

It had always been one of Ruth’s greatest pleasures to show her guests the whales. She liked to line visitors up on the window seat in the dining room, each of them looking with narrowed eyes out to sea; she passed around pairs of inherited binoculars, all of which had been held to missionary faces in the Pacific; invariably her guests became so agitated that finally, whatever the weather, they rushed outside in an effort to get closer to the water. Everyone shouted when a spout went up, and Ruth felt happily responsible for the communal, mammalian mood on the beach. She looked forward to seeing Richard see the whales, and leaned with relief into his shoulder when they said good-night in the hallway. He said, “I’m so glad to be here.” The visit hadn’t been a mistake; it would be all right. It would be more than all right. Ruth closed the door to the lounge room. She slept thankfully in her bed.

But in the morning there was rain, and it obscured the view. The sea from the windows was crooked and fogged, with no sign of whales. There were still surfers down at the town beach, and Ruth observed them from the dining room with uncharacteristic bitterness.

“Rain or shine, there they are,” she said, peering out at the blurry sea. She wondered if the boy who had sold her the pineapple was among them. “Don’t they have jobs?”

In better weather—in better moods—she approved of their tireless leisure.

Frida cleared the breakfast plates.

“Thanks, Frida,” said Richard. “It’s a long time since I ate such a good big breakfast.”

Frida smiled with pleasure but said nothing.

They stayed at the dining table; Ruth sat in her chair and Richard on the long window seat. The house was peaceful in the rain. The air was comfortable and warm. Frida lit lamps against the dullness of the day, brought tea and shortbread, and worked in the kitchen preparing lunch. She was so far from the Frida of the diet and the floors; her hair was an ordinary brown and she wore it demurely, half up and half down. This placid Frida was efficient as ever, quiet, but never invisible. Her presence filled the house with calm, so that Ruth forgot the whales and relaxed into the day with Richard. He was attentive to her and to their shared past, and Ruth took great pleasure in speaking with someone who had known her as part of her family; who had known her parents, and who had seen them all together in Fiji. She could think of no other living person who was capable of remembering her in this way. They talked about her father, about his busy hopes for his clinic and the world, and the quiet, good, regretful way he left both of these places. Ruth reminded Richard about his refusal to participate in the foot washing, and he laughed and said, “I was such a snob.”

“You were wonderful. At least, I thought so.”

“You were quite wonderful yourself,” he said. “But very young.”

So, as if she were still young enough to be hurt by being accused of youth, she said, “You’re much older now than my father was then.” Richard gave a good-natured grimace. “I used to curse you in Hindi, you know,” she said. “I thought you wouldn’t understand me.”

“I understood you,” said Richard. “And so did your mother. She knew her Hindi from the servants.”

“Oh, dear.”

“We’re so transparent when we’re young.”

Ruth was horrified for her young self. He must have known she loved him all along, just by looking—even once—at her devoted face.

“But you stopped when my Hindi improved,” Richard said. “I remember the day you realized I knew more than you did. You heard me speaking to one of my patients.”

Frida brought them tea, and the rain still fell over the dim, indistinguishable sea.

“Have you ever been to India?” he asked. Ruth hadn’t. “I have, twice, and when I first arrived, I tried to speak what I remembered of my Fiji Hindi. They only understood every fifth word.”

“I’ve never even been back to Fiji,” said Ruth. She knew Richard had because he’d sent her a postcard, Fiji-stamped, about five years after her parents retired to Sydney. It was a photograph of the Grand Pacific Hotel, and it said, “I miss my Fijians—your mother, your dad, and you.” She was a married woman, a mother, and still capable of wondering if the hotel postcard was some reference to the kiss at the ball. Overanxious, she hid the card from Harry.

“Why not?”

“At first I couldn’t afford it,” Ruth said. “And then, when I could—when we could—there were so many other places to go.”

“There’s some sense in not going back. That way, you preserve it.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come here.” Ruth laughed. “You can’t preserve me now.”

“Oh, I can,” said Richard. “I have an excellent memory of you as a teenager, and nothing will change it.”

“What do you remember?”

“Let’s see. I remember you reading
Ulysses
faster than anyone in the world has ever read it.”

And then Ruth remembered reading
Ulysses
, which Richard treasured and had brought with him from Sydney. She was determined to read it; she’d never before worked so hard at anything. She remembered, too, that she and Richard had been young people discussing the existence of heaven (she said yes, he said no, but both admitted they had doubts—and that was the first time she realized she doubted). Oh, oh, and she remembered that in her anxiety to appreciate Bach she had found herself in love with Mozart and was ashamed of this for years, simply because Richard didn’t love Mozart, until she read somewhere that Abraham Lincoln did. Then she felt herself bloom into the recognition of her own opinion. She’d read about Lincoln and Mozart in a biography of Lincoln that Harry had bought but never read. No, Jeffrey had bought it for Harry (who loved political biographies) as a Christmas present. There was also that particular passage of Auden’s she had loved—Caliban’s song in a long poem, she’d forgotten the name of it—and made Richard read aloud for her, and there was one line—“helplessly in love with you”—that he paused over. She was overtaken by promise.
Surely, surely,
she thought when he paused. And then he continued reading and afterwards in conversation—just a few days later—Ruth realized he’d forgotten all about it, and she was furious at the way she fell in love with small things that turned out to be meaningless. Where had all this been waiting while she worked so effortlessly to forget it? She sat trembling with gratitude for her brain, that sticky organ.