The Night Guest (12 page)

“You look very happy right now,” said Richard.

She ducked her head but lifted it again to look at him. “I am happy,” she said. “I’m sorry I was in such a mood this morning. I was disappointed about the weather.”

“The weather is perfect.”

When had she ever heard Richard describe something as perfect? He was looking back at her in a confidential way. If she’d been told, at nineteen, that it would take over fifty years to have him look at her like this, she would have been disgusted and heartbroken; now she was only a little sad, and it was both bearable and lovely. She brushed Richard’s arm with her hand.

Frida was quiet in the kitchen, so perhaps she was listening. Richard was talking about the smell of molasses over the sugar mills, and Ruth told him about the time her mother took her along to a game of contract bridge with the CSR wives in a sugar town outside Suva. They sat at little tables while their children ate sausage rolls and scones, and because Ruth’s father wasn’t a company officer—wasn’t in the company at all, and not even a government doctor—certain children didn’t bother talking to her. That was the only time her mother played bridge.

“My mother would have loved all that,” said Richard. “I think she would have managed very well in one of those hierarchical little sugar towns. She would have treated it like some kind of siege.”

“You had to be ruthless.”

“She was. Once my brother was invited to the birthday party of a school friend, but he was too sick to go. I would have been about eight, I think, and he was ten. She made me pretend to be my brother because she wanted to be on good terms with the parents of the birthday boy. She’d been waiting for an invitation to the house, was the thing, and this party was going to be the only way. So we arrived, and the other children knew I wasn’t my brother, obviously, but my mother called me James and eventually they did, too.”

“But why?”

“They were well-to-do, well connected, these people. It was an enormous house. I remember being impressed into submission. Invitations of that kind were very important to my mother. She could invite
them
to parties after that.”

This story bothered Ruth; she wanted to swat it away. She didn’t like to hear Richard compare his childhood to her own. His childhood was Sydney: liver-coloured brick, ferries on the water, leashed dogs, women pegging out washing on square lines in square gardens.

Richard leaned forward on the window seat. “It’s a relief, isn’t it, not to worry about those things anymore. My wife used to complain about the casualness of everything, but I prefer it. Don’t you? Kyoko ended up getting on very well with my mother.”

Ruth didn’t like to hear him criticize his wife, however gently. She felt that she should respond with a complaint about Harry, and couldn’t. How ridiculous, she thought, to be sitting here and worrying about being unfaithful to Harry. But she laid her arm out on the table so that her small white wrist was turned up towards Richard. If he looks at it, she thought—and before she could decide what his looking might mean, he looked.

“I used to throw parties in Sydney,” said Ruth, “but I was never very good at it. I used to wake up on the morning of the party and think, ‘Damn it, why did I do this again?’ But Harry loved parties. Then we moved out here and there was no one to throw parties for.”

“How long did you live here together?”

“Just over a year,” said Ruth. Really, it was such a little time. “I always planned to be one of those old women who kept very busy. You know—involved in things, taking classes, cooking elaborate dinners, visiting friends. And I was, in Sydney. I was working—well,
work
isn’t the right word—I was helping at a centre for refugees. I taught elocution, did you know? I still had private students, and I taught pronunciation classes at the centre. Then we came out here, because Harry was set on it. He retired so late, which I always knew he would, and what he wanted was to rest by the sea. He’d say, ‘I’m ready to put my feet up, Ruthie.’ But of course when we got here, Harry spent all day gardening and walking for hours every morning and fixing things up in the house, and we would drive to this lighthouse or that historic gaol, and the boys came at Christmas and we visited the city. He could just generate busyness for himself. But I’m not like that. Especially not without him. I came out here and just sort of—stopped.”

“That seems a shame,” said Richard. Ruth felt, for a minute, as if he had called her a bad book or a bad play, but he was no longer that man; he was tired, she thought, and it had loosened him. He had been tired by the difficulty of having to be something.

“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Everyone expected me to go back to Sydney after he died. I mourned so beautifully in every other way, they expected me to be rational about that. Or they thought I should move to be near one of my boys, or that the boys should move back home. But Phil is completely tied up in Hong Kong, and Jeffrey’s father-in-law is very ill in New Zealand, and I wouldn’t let them. And I turned out to be the one who wanted to rest by the sea.”

The rain stopped in the afternoon. Ruth and Richard stood out on the dune with binoculars, looking for whales. Ruth was in suspense. If we see a whale, she decided, then nothing will happen between us. If we see two, then everything will happen. She was unsure what she meant by
everything
. There were no whales.

Frida had roasted a pork loin and sweet potatoes for dinner. She set it all out on the table and refused to eat, no matter how Ruth and Richard pleaded.

“No! No!” Frida insisted, and laughed as if she were being tickled; she sounded pained and unwilling.

“Then at least leave the dishes,” said Ruth. “We can sort those out ourselves.”

Frida objected and then acquiesced. Ruth noticed that Frida had trouble looking at Richard. Whenever he spoke to her, she looked to the left of his face and patted her neat hair. She took her coat from the hook in the kitchen, mumbled,
“Bon appétit,”
and went down the hall. The front door opened and closed.

Now Ruth was ready for something to happen. She kept her hopes vague. Richard was in the best of health. He ate with good appetite and laughed a great deal while telling her about the one and only time his daughter took him to a yoga class. He promised to cook her a Japanese meal. It grew dark on the dune, and Ruth drew the lounge-room curtains while Richard closed the seaward shutters. Neither of them made any attempt to clear the table of dishes. They moved into the lounge room, where Ruth regretted her decision to sit in an armchair and not next to him on the couch. Her nineteen-year-old self would have made the same mistake.

“I was thinking the other day about that ball we went to for the Queen,” she said.

“So was I,” said Richard. He sat on the end of the couch closest to her, and his hands were clenched and unnaturally still on his knees. That’s how he quit smoking, thought Ruth, by forcing himself to keep his hands still. That’s how he would do it.

“I still have my menu somewhere. I saved it,” she said, although, now that she mentioned it, she was certain Frida had made her dispose of everything of that kind in the spring cleaning of her early employment.

“What were you thinking, about the ball?” asked Richard.

“I was thinking about you kissing me, of course. How much I liked it.”

“Why were we even there? Why was I even invited?”

“All kinds of people were invited. I remember someone getting upset about it—about your being invited, and my parents left out. Do you think they minded? I thought they probably didn’t care.”

“And I whisked off their daughter and kissed her.” Richard laughed at himself. “I thought I was so old and wise, and you were so young. I was very ashamed of myself.”

“So you should have been. With your secret fiancée and everything.”

“You’re teasing me,” said Richard. “And I think I was drinking. Was I drinking?”

“Everyone was drinking,” said Ruth. “I never saw a group of people so willing to toast the Queen.” Ruth felt herself lit with the pleasure of laughing with him. It was so good to flirt; it made her think that flirting should never be entrusted to the very young. “And listen—I told you a moment ago how much I liked you kissing me, and you didn’t even say thank you.”

“What I should have said was how much I liked kissing you.” Richard bowed his head at her, courtly. It was ridiculous! And wonderful. Richard in his twenties would never have talked like this. When had he become so much less serious? Even their kiss at the ball had been serious. What we should have done, thought Ruth, was sleep together on the boat back to Sydney and then been done with it, since it would have been a mistake to marry his bad books and good plays. But this, now, was delightful.

“What made you do it?” Ruth asked.

“You were so lovely, of course. Like a milkmaid, remember? And I was thinking—well, I was drinking, but also I was thinking how sweet and straightforward it would have been to love you. You even looked like a bride, in your white dress.”

“It was pale blue,” said Ruth. “And why straightforward?”

“Less complicated,” said Richard. He moved his hands; this movement was the first evidence of any nervousness. “It’s all so long ago, it’s hard to imagine. Kyoko’s family disowned her, and the first house we lived in together, well—the neighbours got together and put Australian flags in their windows and refused to speak to us. We expected it, but nothing prepares you. If I’d married someone like you, they would have come to us with cakes and babies.”

“So it wasn’t me in particular,” said Ruth. He’d kissed her to see how it felt to be simple and safe; why hadn’t she thought of that?

“It was nobody else but you,” he said. The room was quiet. “I really was ashamed of myself.”

“I was heartbroken,” said Ruth. When she saw his genuine surprise, she smiled and cried, “Let’s have a drink! To toast our reunion. There’s still some of Harry’s Scotch.”

“All right,” said Richard.

“It’s good Scotch.”

“Lawyers always have excellent Scotch.”

“Now where”—Ruth stood up with a small frown and moved towards the liquor cabinet—“has Frida put the tumblers? She’s always moving things around.”

“You seem to manage very well out here,” said Richard.

Ruth was proud to hear this. She poured the drinks and sat down next to him on the couch. Proceedings had a promising air. The Scotch tasted shuttered and old, but golden.

“You seem very sufficient to me,” said Richard.

“Self-sufficient?”

“I think you and Frida together are a sufficiency. You’re like a little world, a little round globe.”

“That sounds claustrophobic, actually.” Ruth added the cats to the population of this little world. They sat at Richard’s feet without touching him. How still they were, how like artificial cats.

“I think it sounds wonderful. I like to think of her looking out for you at any given hour.”

“Not really at any given hour,” said Ruth. “She goes home at night.”

“Really? I just assumed she lived in.”

“‘Lived in’?” It’s like we’re discussing servants!”

“Isn’t it,” said Richard, mildly.

“Believe me, Frida’s no servant. She’s usually only here on weekdays, just for the morning. She leaves after lunch and then her brother, the mythical George, brings her back in the morning in his golden taxi. Young Livery, he calls it. I think it makes him sound like a youthful alcoholic.”

“The driver who brought me here?”

“Yes, of course, you met George! What was he like?”

“He’s Frida’s brother? Well,
he
certainly looks Fijian. He seemed—I don’t know, self-possessed. He didn’t talk much. So Frida’s just staying over while I’m here, is that it? She seems very settled.”

“She’s not staying at all,” said Ruth. “What gave you that idea?”

“Well, her bedroom.” Ruth lifted her head like a wary cat; Richard paused with his glass at his mouth, as if she could hear an alarm that he, deaf but alert, still listened for. He said, with apology, “I just assumed it was her bedroom.”

“Which room?”

“At the end of the hall.”

“Phil’s room?” asked Ruth, but Richard didn’t know the rooms by the names of her sons. He had never met her sons.

He said again, “At the end of the hall.”

At the end of the hall Ruth found Frida, who earlier in the night had opened the front door in her grey coat and then closed it again behind her. In Phillip’s room, Frida lived among her things. The room wasn’t cluttered or in any way untidy, but it was distinctly inhabited: the furniture had been rearranged, unfamiliar postcards were stuck to the otherwise denuded walls, and her suitcase was tucked neatly on top of the wardrobe. Frida sat in a chair Ruth didn’t recognize, soaking her feet in a basin of water and reading a detective novel. The knowledge that Frida’s feet ached and that she enjoyed detective novels was almost as shocking to Ruth as the fact of Frida’s living—all the evidence suggested it—in her house. Frida laid down her book.

“What’s going on?” said Ruth.

The upper half of Frida’s body remained still, but she lifted her feet, one at a time, out of the basin of water and set them down on a towel that lay on the floor. She had a steadfast quality, as if she had always been in this room and would always remain; it also seemed that she would never speak. In Frida’s silence, Ruth heard the sound of Richard in the kitchen, turning on the taps and shuffling dishes.

“What are you doing in here?” asked Ruth, holding tightly to the doorknob.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” said Frida. “Relaxing at the end of a long day.”

“But why are you
here
?”

“Why wouldn’t I be here?”

“I saw you leave,” said Ruth.

“How could you see me leave when I didn’t?”

“I
heard
you leave, then. I heard the front door. You came in with your coat and said good-night.”

“I was taking the bins out,” said Frida. “It’s rubbish night.”

“With your coat?”

“Yep.” Then: “It’s cold out there.”

“I thought you were leaving.”

“You assumed I was leaving, obviously. Who knows why.”