The Night Guest (6 page)

“Avocados? In winter?”

“A present,” said Ruth.

“Not much of a present when I have to carry them myself,” said Frida, but Ruth saw that she was pleased. The quantity was what impressed her; Frida was a natural friend to bulk. She ferried and puffed until the fruit was inside, and then Ruth went to lock the car. There was the pineapple in the front seat. She lifted it out with special care: for her back, but also for the pineapple.

When Ruth reentered the house, Frida was in the dining room. She stood at the window making strange sounds in her throat: a low throaty coo that might have been a bird noise. Ruth looked, and there were magpies in the garden. Frida watched them and made her gentle throbbing calls; she stopped when Ruth said, “I’ve decided to sell the car.”

Then Frida turned and smiled. “Yes,” she said. She was lovely when she smiled, with her plump, pretty face. She held out her arms and accepted the pineapple as if she had expected it all along; had placed an order for it. Ruth put the car keys on the table. Her hands, now empty, smelled of coins.

“It’s really for my own peace of mind,” she said.

“George can get you a good price,” said Frida, and the next day she introduced a man named Bob, who looked over the car—he insisted on calling it “the vehicle”—and was prepared to buy it for thirteen thousand dollars. The idea of freedom from the car delighted Ruth; so did the idea of selling it without consulting her sons. This satisfaction increased when Bob presented her with a cheque. Ruth noted in passing that along with his other misfortunes—Frida mentioned a traitorous wife and kidney stones—Bob bore the unusual surname of Fretweed. He returned that afternoon with a skinny assistant who maneuvered the vehicle down the drive. Ruth was reminded of the specific sound a familiar car makes, which seemed to her, almost more than any other noise—even more than the sound of Harry’s voice—to have been stored inescapably in her memory. But the car was disappearing, taking its sound with it; Harry, too, went down the drive for the last time. Frida seemed sensitive to this in the quiet of the house. There was a sense of relief and exhaustion at the end of their little battle, and it manifested in small tender things: tea made, quiet maintained, and no competition over the affection of the cats. The grass beneath the car had yellowed to the colour of cereal. Frida pinned the cheque to the fridge with a magnet and told Ruth she would bank it first thing on Monday.

5

Frida took charge of Ruth’s banking. She presented Ruth with statements and letters from the bank, and Ruth waved a regal arm above each one, as if in dismissal. Frida treated Ruth’s bankbook like a sacred object, always requesting permission to use it and returning it with a public flourish to its proper place at the back of Harry’s filing cabinet. Jeffrey had explained the function of keycards, but Ruth liked the efficient cosiness of the book; she liked how contained it felt, how manual.

Frida had no time for keycards. “Money isn’t plastic,” she said, although, in fact, it was.

Ruth intended to inspect all this paperwork in private, at night. She remembered her mother’s lessons about managing staff: never give them any reason to believe you don’t trust them. But the house at night was not the place for these daytime plans; it encouraged a different kind of resolution. After dark, the heat thickened so that every noise seemed tropical: palms rattled their spears, insects rubbed their wings in the dripping trees; the whole house shuffled and buzzed. The heat made Ruth’s head itch. She listened for any hint of the tiger, but it all seemed safely herbivorous. One night she woke to the sound of a dog crying out, and it made her wonder about wild dogs—she thought she remembered a hyena in
The Jungle Book
. Her mother had read her
The Jungle Book
when she was very young, the age when her bed was moved away from the window because of nightmares; the view from her pillow was of a chest of drawers, painted green, with a glass night-light that threw pinkish shadows on a framed picture of Sydney Harbour (apparently, she was born in a place called Sydney). So she must have been six or seven.

Now she lay awake listening to the hyena, which was undoubtedly a dog on the beach. The cats fidgeted at her side, but slept again. Her sense of the extraordinary was particularly strong. She might have been seven, waiting to hear her father come home from a late night at the clinic. She might have been nineteen, waiting for Richard’s voice in the hall; he came home even later than her father and stepped so carefully past her throbbing door she could easily have missed him. The consequence rose up out of the sounds she heard and those she only remembered; it met somewhere between them, and finding space there, it grew. Ruth lay and listened for it; then she grew tired of waiting. I’m too old, she thought, to be a girl waiting for important noise. Why not go out to meet it, why not prepare? She rose from her bed to run a bath and, as the greenish water filled the noisy tub, looked in Harry’s study for her old address book. If I find it before the bath runs over, she thought, Richard’s address will be in there. She found the book before the bath was half full; she opened it, and there under
P
for Porter was Richard’s address. Just reading it felt like a summons.

Ruth lowered herself into the water with the help of Frida’s railing. The water amplified the white of her legs, but it smoothed and dazzled all the folds of her skin, so that half of her body was old and actual and the other half was marine and young.

Ruth was happy and clumsy after her bath. She dressed in a new nightgown. It was sleeveless and pale and, although short, felt bridal. Frida had chosen it and dismayed Ruth with its matronly florals; now, in the night, it shone. The heat of the house made a canopy over the hallway, where the moon came in through the fanned glass in the front door. The moonlight lay on the wooden floor like a deck of cards, and Ruth could see that the hall was straight and long and empty of tigers and birds and palm trees. She crossed it with her arms held out because she was afraid of falling (Harry’s mother had fallen in her old age, after a lifetime of robust health, and had never been the same again), and when she opened the door to the lounge room, the light from the windows seemed to jump at her all at once. This room felt comparatively cool and quiet, but it contained an echo of heated noise all the same. It was this noise she was looking for.

Ruth found nothing in the lounge room but the stillness of her furniture, which was either in shadow or patterned by the lace curtains that fell between it and the moon. The moon seemed to be big and full whenever Ruth looked at it, and tonight it was emphatic, as if it had blown itself to a ball in order to assure her that there was nothing unusual in her lounge room. The moon was full on the space in front of the house, but beyond that it was eaten up by the grassy drive. Anything might be lurking in that drive: a tiger or a taxi. Ruth walked through the dining room and looked at the garden. Everything on the sea side of the house was blasted white by the moon. All this emptiness had a carved quality that made Ruth want to swear. She loved the crowded bluster of swearing, the sense of an audience; it was so humanizing. She stood at the half-open back door and said “Fuck,” and wished for the comforting hot ticking singing jungle she had disturbed by getting out of bed. It didn’t really sound like Fiji—at night in Fiji she heard cars on the road, her parents moving about, the telephone ringing in the hallway and her father leaving to see a patient, crepe myrtles rubbing at her windows, and the sound of hot water in the pipes when her mother ran a bath—but it sounded different enough to remind her of Fiji; it was enough to make her think of the room with the night-light and the picture of Sydney Harbour. The sound of the jungle was full, and everything here was empty.

Ruth went back to the lounge room and listened for some time. Every noise she heard was ordinary, and the cool room was stiff and airless. She lay on the sofa, turned her back from the lace of the windows, and waited. It seemed important that something might touch her, and crucial that she not open her eyes to look for whatever that thing might be. A tiger would be perfect, but anything would do; a bird, maybe, but it needn’t be a bird. Just a fly. Just a frond of something, stirring in a yellow wind. Lying on the couch with her eyes closed, Ruth might feel her jungle come back; there might be yellow light, there might be a tiger to bump its broad nose against her back. The water, at least, might hammer in the pipes. Frida woke her the next morning by turning her on the sofa, peering into her face, and saying, “I nearly wet my pants, you idiot. I thought you were dead.”

6

Frida gave the floors a thorough mopping that morning and, a-swim in the alluvial muck, with her bare feet depositing grey tracks no matter how long she left the floors to dry, worked herself into a black mood. She persisted with her mop, and eventually the floors were smooth and softly lit. Then she became generous and hearty. She sat at the dining-room table, gazed magnanimously out to sea, and ate dried apricots. Her hair was coiled in a complicated triple braid, and the floors were, briefly, perfect.

Ruth joined her at the table and said, “Jeffrey thinks I should invite a friend to visit.”

Frida chewed her apricots.

“What he wants,” said Ruth, “is Helen Simmonds, who’s a sensible woman he’s known forever who’ll ring him up and tell him everything.”

Frida clicked at the roof of her mouth with her cheerful tongue.

“So I thought I’d invite a man instead.”

Frida hooted. Her whole face shone with suggestive delight. “Well, well,” she said. “Just when I thought I had you figured out.”

Ruth, pleased by this innuendo, nevertheless dismissed it with an airy hand.

“Who is he, then?” said Frida. “Your boyfriend?”

“I haven’t seen him in fifty years.”

“Ex-boyfriend?”

“No. Sort of.”

“Ha!” cried Frida, triumphant. “It’s always the quiet ones who’re up to no good.”

“Oh, Frida, it was the fifties! Nobody was up to no good. Nobody I knew. It was the fifties, and in Fiji it may as well have been 1912.”

Frida snorted as if there had never been a 1912.

“I mean Fiji in the fifties, is all I mean,” Ruth corrected. “I don’t mean Fiji is a
backward
country.”

“I could care less if Fiji is a
backward
country,” said Frida. Each apricot disappeared inside her benevolent mouth. Ruth began to worry for Frida’s digestive system, but counseled herself not to; Frida was the kind of woman her mother would have referred to, with approval, as having the constitution of an ox. As a child, Ruth was frightened of oxen, which rolled their eyes and ate the tops of sugarcane and were glossy flanked in the sun, but she knew now that her mother had never had those real oxen in mind when she complimented anyone’s constitution.

“His name was Richard Porter,” said Ruth.

“Oh, yes,” said Frida, lifting one groomed eyebrow as if she’d been anticipating Richard all along. But this was Frida’s way: it was impossible to surprise her. She would rather starve than be caught off guard; she had said so on more than one occasion. It was also unnecessary to ask if Frida wanted to hear about Richard, because she would only shrug or sigh or, at best, say, “Suit yourself.” Much better just to begin.

“He was a doctor who came to help my father at the clinic,” said Ruth. “I was nineteen. He was older.”

Frida seemed to smirk at this, as if she were hearing a smutty story. But it was hard to tell what she was thinking. She sat, almost tranquillized, with her feet lifted from the floor, and looked out across the bay, where an insistent wind cleared the haze and lifted the flags over the surf club.

Richard, Ruth explained, was in Fiji as a medical humanitarian rather than a missionary, although he agreed to profess certain beliefs in order to fill the post at the clinic—it was so difficult to find trained men after the war that Ruth’s father was willing to accept this compromise. Ruth’s parents referred to Richard, before his arrival, as “that gifted but misguided young man” and busied themselves preparing the house, since he would be staying with them until he found accommodation of his own. He was Australian, too; Ruth’s parents prayed in thankfulness to God for this provision, and Ruth prayed along with them. She was most interested in how handsome he was. He arrived during a rainstorm; Ruth stood on the verandah at the side of the house to watch him run from a taxi through the downpour. She felt a strong sense of destiny because she was nineteen and because he seemed so providential: young, Australian, a doctor, and now coming from rain into her own house. So she rounded the corner, mindful of her own effect—because she had been pretty at nineteen, a lovely pale blonde—and ready, so consciously ready, for her life to make some plausible beginning. But he was sodden and there was some concern about his bags, which the driver was carrying in through the rain. Richard seemed to want to help and was being forcibly restrained from doing so by Ruth’s father, who had prepared a welcome speech and was delivering it while holding Richard in a paternal embrace. Ruth was forgotten in the confusion and then only hurriedly introduced; she went to her bedroom and moped over an impression of dark hair and a thin frame.

Later that evening, dry, Richard’s hair was light and his body seemed less scarce.
Handsome
was not the right word for him; he was good-looking, but in a neat, shining, narrow way, with his combed hair and his straight nose and a paleness about the lips. It was as if his beauty had been tucked away—politely, resolutely—so that he might get on with the rest of his life, but it made itself known, just the same, in the shine of his hair and the fineness of his face. The faint lines on his forehead indicated seriousness. Ruth liked all this; she approved. Sometimes she tied up her hair too tightly to be flattering because, let loose, it was a long white-gold line, a distraction, and had nothing to do with the work of God.

They all sat together at the dinner table—Ruth, her parents, and Richard—and Ruth saw the dining room as he must have: how long and narrow it was, how dingily white, with the chipped sideboard holding family silver (a tureen, a pepperpot, a punch bowl with six glass cups, each carried lovingly from Sydney, out of the past, and rarely used; isn’t it funny, thought Ruth, how some objects are destined to survive certain things, like sea voyages and war). A fan revolved in the upper air. Ruth’s mother didn’t believe in lamps, only in bright, antiseptic light, so the dining table was laid out, the equator in that longitudinal room, as if emergency surgery might be performed there at any moment. There were no shadows; everything blazed as if under the midday sun. Watercolour landscapes flanked a photograph of the King. When Richard bent his head for her father to say grace, Ruth saw the pale canal of white scalp where he parted his hair. The tops of his ears were red and his forehead was brown and damp. He kept his eyes open and his long, fine face still, but he mouthed
Amen
. Perhaps he could be converted. She looked at him too long, and he saw her.