The Night Guest (3 page)

Harry’s noticeable height, his excessively straight posture distorted only by the swell of his down vest, the neat white brush of his hair and the startling black of his eyebrows, the soft, dishy ears that sat at a slightly odd angle from his head, and the unusual tremble of his hands in his dignified lap: all of these things attracted the attention of a passing motorist, who drew up alongside the curb. This motorist, a young woman, leaned across the passenger seat of her car, lowered the window, and asked Harry in a loud voice if he was all right. Harry was not all right. His chest moved violently with every heartbeat, and as he turned his body away from the sea and towards the road, he began to throw up onto the sandy concrete. The motorist recalled afterwards that Harry had leaned forwards to avoid soiling his clothes, that his left hand was pressed against his ribs as if in womanly surprise, and that he made an effort to kick sand over the vomit, his head bobbing up and down in a helpless motion of agreement.

The motorist, whose name was Ellen Gibson, described these things to Phillip and Jeffrey the day after their father’s death. They quizzed her, and she was forthcoming. There was a phrase Harry liked to say: “to die like a dog in the gutter.” He said it of men he didn’t approve of but was willing to tolerate (certain prime ministers, for example): “I don’t like what he has to say for himself, but I wouldn’t leave him to die like a dog in the gutter.” This sentiment formed part of the expansive democracy of his generally approving heart. Jeffrey, with some objections from his younger brother, told Ruth what Ellen had told him, and Ruth loved this Ellen who had made sure Harry didn’t die like a dog in the gutter. Ellen held Harry when he began to slip from the bench and onto the ground; she assured him, again and again, that everything would be all right. He was dead when the ambulance arrived.

At Harry’s funeral, a group of kindly mourners introduced Ruth to a small, tearless, hesitant woman. They called her “the young Samaritan.” Until that moment Ellen Gibson had been a principle of humanity and coincidence; now Ruth must acknowledge her as the person who had seen Harry die. Ellen looked young as a teenager, although she was known to have two small sons. She would not allow Ruth to thank her; Ruth would not allow Ellen to express regret. The women held hands for a long time while the funeral eddied about them, as if hoping to communicate to each other a love that couldn’t be justified by the scarcity of their contact.

Now, without Harry for five years, Ruth was prepared to accommodate the possibility that good strangers could materialize and love her for no reason beyond their goodness. Ellen was proof of that; why shouldn’t Frida Young be? Another sort of woman could have convinced herself that Harry—still present in some way—had sent Frida to look after his wife; not Ruth, who was vaguely optimistic about the afterlife, but never fanciful. She felt similarly about the government and was ready to accept that it might provide her with Frida after a long, sensible, law-abiding life. Ruth and Harry had never begrudged paying taxes. Roads! Libraries! Schools! Government carers! Of course Harry hadn’t sent Frida, but Ruth had a feeling he would approve. Her sons would approve, and their wives; so would Ellen Gibson, who dropped in every now and then with a cake or a new book. And Ruth liked approval. It had shored up her life. It had made her blessedly ordinary, and now it made her want to swear; but she still liked it.

With Frida and the taxi gone, Ruth had the day to herself. Oh, the gentle, bewildering expanse of the day, the filling of all those more-or-less hours. She inspected Frida’s suitcase, which was taking up audacious space in the dining room: an old-fashioned cream-coloured case, similar to the one Ruth had carried when she first sailed to Sydney in 1954. It was heavy, and locked. Ruth worried for a moment that it might contain a bomb, so she nudged it with a gentle foot and thought she heard the washing of bottled liquid. This reassured her. Obeying her earlier contract with the number of waves seen from the window, she swept the garden path of sand. She rested her back and watched the sea. She ate sardines on toast. She took a long shower, sitting on the plastic stool Jeffrey had bought during his last visit.

As she went about these activities, she thought about the tiger. She thought, too, about other periods of her life when she had felt something approaching this sense of personal consequence. There was her missionary childhood, during which she was told repeatedly that she was part of a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God. She saw it, now, as a strangely urgent life, in which her father must heal the sick and save their souls, and the flowers bloomed in useless profusion, and there was too much of everything: sun, and green, and love. Her parents were fine singers, and every night her mother played hymns on a damp piano. Ruth used to read letters from her cousins back in Sydney and feel sorry for them, with their ordinary lives. Her parents had been called to serve, and she had been called with them. She had been named for a stranger in a strange land. “How bitter is the path of joy,” she would say to herself; she had read that somewhere. There was never, at that time, a moment to lose. Even as she grew older and the strong, wet light of Fiji dazzled her less, and the hymns, too, seemed less luminous, Ruth was caught up in consequence. She fell in love—of course she fell in love—with a man named Richard Porter. She was unskilled, and prudish, and baffled by love; she managed it badly. That was dreamlike, too. Every night she endured violent dreams of impossible pleasure. She received her own body, and ate a meek breakfast in the morning.

Then Ruth grew up and left Fiji. She went to Sydney, where her cousins wore the right clothes and knew the right songs; they exchanged friendly jokes about her weird, fervent childhood. And so she made, from then on, a conscious effort to live an ordinary life, like those of the people she saw around her: people who grew up where they were born, among their own kind, and made their merry, sad way through a world they understood entirely. For only one period, after coming to Sydney, did Ruth recover her sense of the extraordinary: during a childhood illness of Phillip’s, a severe case of pleurisy. For four weeks, Phillip lay in bed with his chest bound. There was fever, pain, and a dry cough like sheaves of papyrus rubbing together. Ruth remembered this period of her life in more detail than any other; the sense of urgency she felt lent significance to the most trivial things. She could still recall, for example, the exact order of the books on the shelf beside Phillip’s crib. His laboured breathing reminded her of a toy train ascending a mountain; she thought of it now as she washed herself in the shower, balancing on the plastic stool. She thought of that row of children’s books. She could see, in the shower tiles, the faces of animals, and also the man in the moon. By then it was dark, and she had succeeded in passing the day; she had survived it. Before going to bed, Ruth closed the lounge-room door as a precaution against tigers.

She woke, just after three, to the possibility of sounds from the lounge room. The cats stirred when she did, but subsided into sleep. She listened for some time, blinking herself awake in the grainy dark, but could hear only an unusual noise of birds and insects, as if it were summer outside, or maybe a jungle. There was a whine or two that might have been a tiger, but might also have been the cats snoring; they produced so much noise for such little sleeping things. Ruth listened for him, her tiger, her consequential visitor, until her eyes drowsed shut. He was a one-off, then, she thought, on the edge of sleep and disappointed.

The following morning, a taxi pulled up in front of the house. Ruth tiptoed into the lounge room to investigate. She was sure it was the same taxi she had seen yesterday: a yellow Holden, an older make with a chariot shine and, painted on its doors, the words
YOUNG LIVERY
and a telephone number. Its windows were tinted a shade Harry would call illegally dark. Frida emerged from the passenger’s side of the car and gave the door a firm but casual slam, as if it required such treatment to close at all. She was wearing the grey coat and, beneath it, white trousers and the same grey-white sandshoes, and her hair fell in loose curls around her face, which made her look younger. Frida walked the few steps to where Harry’s car, a silver Mercedes, was parked by the side of the house. She gave the rear wheel an exploratory press with her foot and returned to the taxi; she leaned listening into the driver’s opening window, laughed, and rapped the taxi’s dazzling roof. It crept backwards down the drive as if fearful of causing a disturbance.

Ruth went to open the front door. The doorbell rang as she did so: an older doorbell, with a two-note chime that Ruth always thought of as actually saying “ding-dong.”

“I didn’t see the bell yesterday,” said Frida. She was smiling, and not quite as tall as the day before, and had a string bag full of oranges hooked to her elbow; she leaned down to take Ruth’s hands, a little as she had when they’d first met, and managed in this gesture to move past Ruth and into the hallway. “There I was, knocking my little heart out—no wonder you didn’t hear me, when you’re used to that lovely doorbell. Good morning! Good morning! I’ve got oranges.”

She swung the bag down the hall and into the kitchen like a priest with a censer.

“You didn’t need to bring anything,” protested Ruth.

“I know, I know,” said Frida, pouring the oranges into a bowl she took from an upper cupboard. “But I’ve got these beauties coming out of my ears. My brother George knows a bloke who gets ’em free. Don’t know how, and I don’t ask. That was my brother you saw dropping me off. It’s his own taxi—he’s an independent. You ever need a taxi, let me know, and I’ll call George.”

The oranges made a gorgeous, swollen pile.

“Thank you,” said Ruth. “I have a car.”

“Well,” said Frida, evidently taken aback by this refusal; her eyes widened in something like disapproval.

“But sometimes you need a taxi, don’t you,” said Ruth. “To be honest, I hate driving.”

Frida, placated, patted Ruth’s arm. “Let’s have the grand tour, then.” She hung her grey coat on the hook behind the back door. She wore a different shirt today. It was a brighter white and matched the white trousers. She looked like a beautician.

Frida seemed to lead the tour. She marched into rooms and cupboards and corridors, announcing “The bathroom!” and “The linen press!” as if Ruth were a prospective buyer inspecting the property. No new discovery seemed to surprise her. She was tactful in Ruth’s bedroom but pitiless in the guest rooms, going so far as to look under the beds, pulling up wreaths of cat hair from hidden corners and shaking her curly head. Ruth responded with an apologetic smile, at which Frida only tutted; she put her arm around Ruth’s shoulders as if to say, “Don’t you worry, things will be different from now on.”

“These were my sons’ bedrooms,” explained Ruth, “when we came here on holidays. This was our holiday house.”

“I see,” said Frida. She ran her left forefinger along a bookshelf and examined it for dust. This was in Phillip’s room, and all the books were for bright young boys. “What happened to your other house?”

“Our Sydney house? We sold it. We moved out here for retirement,” said Ruth.

“We?”

“My husband and I. Harry.”

Frida squeezed Ruth’s shoulder again. “It really doesn’t bother you to live out here all alone?”

“Not at all,” said Ruth. “Why should it?”

Her mother had once warned her: loneliness is off-putting, boredom is unattractive. Ruth was convinced both sensations shone from her face. She was certain she had the odd, unexpected movements of a person used to solitude; when she watched television, for example, she mirrored the facial expressions of the actors. Sometimes she made a game of it. She did once think, while reading a newspaper article about the subject, that she might be depressed, but because Harry hadn’t believed in it—“Happiness is a matter of choice,” he would say—she never mentioned it to her doctor, and certainly not to her sons. She knew quite soon after Harry’s death that her grief wouldn’t disrupt the public order of her days. She expected, instead, a long and private season.

“Come and have a cuppa and we’ll talk things over,” said Frida.

Ruth worried that, if pressed, she would talk too much about Harry; she longed for the chance to and was mortified in advance.

But Frida was all business. “There’s some documents you need to look at,” she said, finding her suitcase in the dining room and hoisting it onto the table with a marvellous grunt. The suitcase looked smaller than Ruth remembered. It only took up the space of a bulky briefcase. Frida searched among its contents, pulled out a plastic sleeve full of papers, and, offering this to Ruth with a look of patient distaste, said, “Official paperwork.”

But before Ruth could take the sleeve, Frida stepped away towards the window. “Would you look at that,” she said.

The view from the back of the house often prompted reactions of this kind. There was the dune, sloping away from the garden and down to the beach; there was the wide water and the curve of the bay to the right with the distant silver of the town and, out on the headland, a white lighthouse. Harry used to stand in the garden with his hands on his hips and say, with satisfaction, “Nothing between here and South America.” Since his death, it had felt to Ruth that the house was participating in a cosy continental drift, making its leisurely way on an island of its own to the open sea. Ruth liked islands. She had lived all her life on them, and they suited her.

“It’s disgusting, is what it is,” said Frida.

“Oh, dear,” said Ruth. She had always been embarrassed by the splendour of the view, as if owning so much beauty was an admission of vanity on her part, and she wondered if Frida was the guest she’d been waiting for, the one who would rebuke her for it.

“Would you just look at this?”

Ruth looked, and saw a group of people on the beach below. There were nine or ten of them, and they were all naked, or almost naked. Some lay on the sand and others played in the water. Ruth felt a cheerful innocence rising from them; it was like standing on a mountain pass and seeing a town down in the snug valley. But Frida was unmistakably affronted, just as Harry would have been, and she loomed out into the garden. Ruth followed. So little happened at this end of the beach during winter—lone runners, a few dogs. Once, the old jetty splintered and slumped after a storm tide and over the course of a winter was washed out to sea. Skinny-dippers were a definite event, and Ruth liked the idea of them.