The Night Guest (22 page)

“Where in God’s name have you been?” Frida cried, but Ruth, remembering her manners, drew back and turned to Ellen.

“This is Ellen,” she said. “Frida, this is
Ellen
.”

“Hello,” said Ellen. “You’re Ruth’s nurse?”

“I’m her carer.” Frida released Ruth from her arms.

“Frida, can I ask what’s happened here?” Ellen sounded terse and assured. She sounded almost detective-like, until Frida took a terrible step towards her; then the difference in their sizes was frightening.

“What’s happened here,” snapped Frida, and then she seemed to reconsider her position and soften her voice, “is that I’ve been worried sick about Ruthie vanishing like that. I’ve been waiting for my brother to help me find her.”

The tone was soft, but also efficient and proud. Ruth waited by the front door, cradling her bundles of meat and her purse, concerned that Ellen and Frida’s meeting was going badly. She noticed a bitterness in the air, a smell of old bushfire.

“You didn’t know she’d left the house?”

“Not till she was halfway to the bus. Listen, you,” said Frida, addressing Ruth now, “that was quite a stunt you pulled.” She stepped backwards and drew Ruth into a huddle under her arm. Ellen rattled her keys and looked towards the car.

“You better say thank you to your friend for bringing you home safe,” Frida said, and Ruth, who knew this was unnecessary, smiled at Ellen. Ellen smiled back. There was an understanding between them.

“How often does this happen?” Ellen asked, looking at Ruth.

“Never before,” said Frida. “But that’s just the way it is with these old dears. They get it in their heads to do something, and off they go.”

Ellen continued to address Ruth. “If you’d ever like to go into town again, please give me a call. I’d love to take you out to lunch one day. You have my number, don’t you?” She looked at Frida. “She has my number. Ellen Gibson. I’m the one who—helped when—”

Frida nodded in a businesslike way. Of course she knew all the details of Harry’s death, but this nod seemed to indicate that she considered her own work—the daily drudgery of care for the widow—much meatier than Ellen’s glamourous part in proceedings.

“All right then,” said Ellen, and her body turned towards the car, but she seemed to be waiting for something—some reassurance, possibly, that it was all right to go. Frida didn’t move towards Ellen or the house. She gave the impression that she had grown on this spot, from tender root to woody trunk, and would never be persuaded to leave it; nor would she, for that matter, release Ruth.

“Drive safely, won’t you,” said Frida, in a tone indicative of her merry indifference to Ellen’s well-being.

“Goodbye, Ruth,” Ellen said, and although she hesitated again, with one leg in the car and the other foot on the ground, she still sat down and drove away and was swallowed up by the grasses.

With Ellen gone, Frida’s bravado vanished. She wept. Could this be true—Frida weeping? Ruth held her—was really held
by
her, but in a clinging way—and she watched Frida the way Harry used to watch a fire he was building: with a feeling that he had no real control over proceedings but should probably be on hand for emergencies.

“I thought I’d lost you,” Frida sniffed. “I thought you were gone for good. How long have you been planning this?”

Now she mastered herself and held Ruth at arm’s length. Her eyes were a damp, foggy red, and her face had puffed into a new and compassionate shape, but she shook Ruth a little at the shoulders and pulled her close into another airless clinch. “Come on,” she said. “What were you up to?”

Ruth, smothered, only shook her head.

“Who did you see in town, hey?” Now Frida was walking them into the house. “Did you plan to meet Ellen? Who else were you chatting to?”

When they reached the front hall, Frida released Ruth against the coatrack before locking the door and leaning against it with small exhalations that still managed to lift her chest to her chins.

“No one,” said Ruth. She stood nestled among the winter coats, which hung all year in the hall and gave off a stale, resentful smell. There was the vaguest odour, too, of Harry—just a fugitive whiff. Ruth thought she might have stood among the coats after he died, searching out that smell. “Only Ellen. I bumped into her outside the chemist. Wasn’t that a lovely piece of luck?”

“Just lovely,” said Frida. “Just absolutely darling.”

Frida seized Ruth’s purse and reviewed it in a businesslike way.

“Oh! And the Sausage King,” said Ruth, proffering the white parcels. She anticipated a scolding for omitting the Sausage King, but Frida only straightened her shoulders as if she needed to reassert her own majesty.

“Now listen,” she said, “I’m going to get this over with. There’s been a small accident while you were out, but don’t worry. Hardly any damage done. This way—it’s the kitchen.”

Ruth followed her down the hall.

There had been a fire in the kitchen: a small, blackish, crawling kind of fire, apparently, because the kitchen hadn’t burned. Instead it seemed to have expired, having first given up on something—some former dignity, some presumed usefulness—before slumping into despair. Dark streaks spread up the wall from the oven as if painted by a brush of smoke, and the smell was intense—the comforting fug of a house fire, mingled with something bitter and almost salty. Sooty water puddled the floor.

“Oh,” said Ruth.

“I’m sorry,” said Frida. She didn’t seem to be apologizing so much as imparting information. “I went crazy when I couldn’t find you—I forgot I had oil on the stove.”

Ruth considered the stubbed kitchen. “What do I do?”

“What d’you mean?”

“How do I fix it?” Ruth supposed she would have to fix it.

“You
don’t
fix it. I fix it. Like I fix everything.”

“That’s what you’re here for,” said Ruth.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Frida. “Now take a seat. I can’t believe you, running off like that. What am I going to do with you?”

She began to bustle in the kitchen. Ruth sat in her chair and felt weighed down by gratitude for Frida, who fixed everything. It was as if something heavy and warm had been placed on her lap. Then a thought came to her, and she said, “But what were you cooking?”

“What now?” called Frida, as if her head were buried at the bottom of some inconvenient cupboard, among linens, when in fact she was only putting the butcher’s parcels in the fridge.

“What were you cooking when the oil caught fire?”

Frida sighed and stalled behind the fridge door. “Fish fingers,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Why, Sherlock, do you want to see the box? Do you want to check the garbage?”

Ruth laughed. “I only wondered.”

Frida ran into the dining room, sat at the table, and surprised Ruth—seemed to surprise herself—by beginning to cry again. What a fragile Frida she was today. Ruth felt so sad for her.

“This is too much for me,” Frida said in a voice entirely unaffected by the weeping; but Ruth could see the tears on her face and the despairing lift to her shoulders.

“Oh, no, no,” Ruth said. “Don’t cry, dear. Everything’s lovely. Everything’s fine.”

Then Frida lowered her head onto the table. Her hairstyle seemed perfectly designed for this maneuver because it remained fixed in a rigid bun. Ruth could undertake a detailed inspection of the back of Frida’s neck. It was smooth, except for one thick fold that traversed it like a defensive moat. Her skin was paler than Ruth remembered it, which worried her momentarily; she scrutinized Frida’s arms, which were pale, too, and sallow; then she remembered that winter was barely over. Everyone paled in the winter. Ruth saw that Frida’s hair was currently a nutty brown, a rich yuletide colour, which matched her lighter shade perfectly. How clever she was, and how farseeing. But fish fingers? In oil? And in the morning?

Frida looked out at Ruth from the cradle of her pastel arms. “You’re too good to me. Last night—”

“Now listen, my dear,” said Ruth, who had an idea that a kind severity was called for in response to such statements. “There’s no need to cry. There are plenty more fish in the deep blue sea.”

Ruth found it easy to say these things from the safety of her chair. It was a little like recovering a language she’d forgotten she knew and still wasn’t entirely sure of the sense of.

Frida lifted her head from the humid table; her face was blotted and wet, but she had stopped crying. “You’re a funny old thing.”

Ruth didn’t feel funny, but she smiled and smiled.

14

Later that day the telephone rang. The noise startled Ruth, who was dozing in her chair, half aware of Frida’s cleaning the kitchen. Ruth was pulled from a dream about a trapeze and a public swimming pool; she was hoisted in the air, on the trapeze, and the water glinted below, dangerous in some indefinable, chlorinated way.

Frida answered the phone. “Yes, Jeff,” she said. “A little adventure, yes. She’s fine, the silly duck. She probably won’t remember any of it tomorrow.”

And then: “Now, Jeff, it’s not exactly—”

And finally: “Sure, sure, here she is.”

Frida presented the phone to Ruth, then returned to scrubbing the brown kitchen. Ruth held the receiver to her ear.

“Ma? I just had a phone call from Ellen Gibson.” Jeffrey’s voice came at Ruth from around a suspicious corner.

“Lovely Ellen!” said Ruth.

“I hear you went into town today. What was that for?”

“I felt like it,” said Ruth. She suspected she was in trouble, but couldn’t decide how to feel about it. “I’m allowed, aren’t I?”

Jeffrey was quiet for a moment. “I was thinking I might come out for a visit soon, see how you’re getting on. What do you think of that idea?”

“That sounds nice,” said Ruth. She had not yet considered it an idea, nice or otherwise.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“There’s a problem.” She was filled with sudden anxiety; but what was the problem?

“There is!” Jeffrey pounced as if he had lured her into a confidential trap.

“I know!” she cried. “I can’t get to the railway station.”

“You don’t need to pick me up from the station, Ma. I’ll take a cab.”

“Oh, that’s marvellous! That’s just as well. I’ve lost your father’s car.”

“What do you mean, you’ve lost Dad’s car?”

“It’s not lost, of course not. It’s sold.”

“You didn’t tell me you were selling Dad’s car.”

“I’m not selling it,” said Ruth. “It’s sold.”

“When was this?”

“Frida arranged it.”

“She did, did she?” Jeffrey used Harry’s lawyerly voice—ruminating, withholding, sure of some hidden possibility that ticked over in his mathematical mind. “Listen, how about this coming weekend? I’ll have to check flights, but if I come on Friday night, how’s that?”

“Yes, all right, yes,” said Ruth. Then the proximity of Friday startled her. “This Friday? So soon?”

Frida stopped scrubbing and looked over her shoulder.

“The sooner the better,” said Jeffrey, and this seemed to decide it. Yes, the sooner the better. “Friday, then. You don’t have any more mysterious visitors coming, do you? No more boyfriends? We’ll have a great time. We’ll play Scrabble and look for whales.”

So Jeffrey didn’t care about the trip to town; not the way Frida cared. He was her good and generous son, her forgiving son. How kind and clement he was. He was just, as his father had been—he was unyielding, but also compassionate. He was the law. Ruth called Frida over to hang up the phone. There was nothing to be afraid of.

But Frida’s face was a cliff under a cloud. “What’s happening on Friday?” she asked, leaning against the wall as if she had been washed up, just like that, on the beach. There was a general look of wreckage about everything surrounding her, but the dark streaks on the kitchen wall did look cosier after their scrubbing; almost old-fashioned.

“Jeffrey’s coming,” said Ruth.

“Why? What did you say to him?”

“Nothing,” said Ruth. She felt as if she’d been caught up in a procession of events over which she had no control; but she was calm.

“First Ellen, now Jeff. Those two stickybeaks are in it together.” Frida said
Ellen
with a specific spite. She walked from the table to the window and back again, and when she reached the window for a second time, she tapped it with one calculating hand. “There are a couple of things we might not mention to good old Jeff,” she said.

“What things?”

Frida was coaxing and deferential. “Obviously the tiger.”

“I thought you were proud of the tiger.”

Frida failed to look proud. She seemed to have failed, generally, in some important way. She gave an impression of pending collapse that she warded off only by tapping the window.

“If Jeff knew everything I do for you, he’d only worry. He’d put you in a home, and you know what that means: no more house. No more sea views. No more picking and choosing what you want for dinner. No more Frida.”

Ruth sat with this possibility. It seemed quite soothing to her, at that moment.

“And he’ll never let you go to Richard—you know that, don’t you? No one’s going to let you do that. They’ll say you’re too old and he’s too old, and you can’t look after each other. They’ll say it’s not in your best interests.”

“Who’ll say that?” asked Ruth, startled, not just by the thought of being stopped, but by hearing Richard’s name, which had been important to her last night, or even this morning. She had, hadn’t she, wanted to go to him?

“Jeff will,” said Frida.

“Jeffrey can’t stop me.”

“But the law can stop you, if Jeff wants it to. The government can stop you.”

“You’re the government,” said Ruth.

“Well, I quit.”

“When?”

“Right now,” said Frida. “But I can help you, Ruthie, if you help me.”

Ruth nodded. She needed time to think; also, she was hungry. Why did her shoulders still hurt?

“So that’s decided. Now I’m going to use the phone,” said Frida. “I’m going to call George.”

“Maybe George can sort out the garden.” Ruth was worried about the state of the garden; Jeffrey wouldn’t like it.

“I’m going to call him from my room. In private.”