The Night Guest (19 page)

“Those are beautiful lilies,” said Ruth. “Where are they from?”

“Mum’s house. What’s all this junk?”

“It’s my father’s. It isn’t junk.”

“Are they antiques?” Frida butted the table with one curious hip; a blue bottle began to roll. Ruth caught it with the tips of her fingers. Her head felt a little clearer now, but everything she saw was strangely luminous.

“I suppose they’re old. They’ve survived war and shipwreck, these things. Well, not shipwreck. But they did survive. Even just the sea they survived—the shells.”

“Are they worth anything?”

“Oh, now, Frida—goodness!” Ruth gave a miniature laugh. The lilies burned on the countertop; it was easier not to look at them. “I doubt any of it’s worth anything. Just personal value.”

“But you could take it to someone, couldn’t you, and find out? George’ll know. He knows about this stuff.”

“I wouldn’t sell my father’s things.”

Frida prodded a glittering rock. “This looks valuable. It looks like silver.”

“It’s only mica,” said Ruth. “Look at the label. Your mother grew lilies?”

“And then there’s the insurance. Think of that! What if the house burned down—this stuff might be worth millions.”

Frida touched the curve of a shell with her finger and watched it vibrate against the table.

“That’s pretty,” said Ruth. “Shell music.”

Frida touched another. It was a spotted shell, but she wasn’t really looking at it; something else had occurred to her. “Ruthie,” she said, “where did you find all this?”

“There used to be other shells, too—big ones. What do you call those big ones? Starts with a
c
? Not conches. Cowries.”

“Cowries aren’t that big.”

“We had some big ones with island scenes etched in. They must be around somewhere.”

Frida bent to the floor; the action seemed so effortless, so well-oiled. When she stood again, she had the box in her hand; she rubbed its sides with her big thumbs and looked into its empty corners. The expression on her face was one of recognition, as if she, too, remembered the box from childhood.

“That’s my father’s,” said Ruth. “It’s mine.”

Frida didn’t speak. She held the box to her chin to inspect it further; then she turned into the hallway, towards her room, and Ruth began to recall what she would find there.

“You locked me in!” Ruth called. She rose from her chair and hurried to the lilies—it was easy, when she had taken multiple pills, to rise and hurry. The lilies were still damp. Ruth tore the wrapping paper away in order to be closer to them. Each petal was flooded with pink, but the centres paled out to blond, and the stamens, which shook as Ruth held them to her face, were loaded with dusty yellow. Frida bellowed from her room; Ruth fenced herself in with lilies. They smelled both clean and definite. They smelled of a saltless garden.

Frida was quiet coming back down the hallway. Still holding the box, she stepped into the kitchen as if walking out onto a rickety jetty. Her shoulders were drawn back and her chest was full of air, as if she were about to recite the days of the week; but she didn’t. She didn’t even shout. She looked at Ruth among her flowers and said, “Those aren’t yours.”

Ruth held tighter to the lilies. “They’re from Richard,” she said.

“Poor dear crazy. Give them here.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Confused, then. As usual, poor Ruthie’s just a bit confused.”

“No,” said Ruth, but she recognized the word
confused
as approaching what she was, after her sticky, bright dream.

“All right,” said Frida. “Let’s see. How old are you?”

“Seventy-five.”

“What colour are my eyes?”

“Brown.”

“And what’s the capital of Fiji?”

“Suva.”

“No it isn’t.”

“It is,” said Ruth. “I lived there. I should know.”

“You
don’t
know,” said Frida. “You only
think
you do. That’s what I’m talking about—confused! Now that’s cleared up, maybe you can tell me what you were doing in my room.”

“It’s my room. My lilies.”

“Give them to me. I’ll put them in some water.”

“No.”

Frida came no closer to Ruth. She held her arm out with the box at the end of it, as if it might be the perfect receptacle for flowers; then she turned and threw it into the wastepaper basket that sat beside Ruth’s chair.

Ruth winced. “I know you were at Richard’s house. Why? Why was my box under your bed?”

“What were you doing looking under my bed?”

“You locked me in.”

“I didn’t lock anybody in!” Frida cried. She was in the kitchen now, tearing at the wrapping paper, which was wet from the lilies and stuck to her angry fingers. She shook it off into the wastepaper bin. “I closed the door so you wouldn’t go wandering out there with all the traps in the grass. The bloody doors weren’t locked.”

But Ruth had tried the doors. She had tried them. “What do you want?” she asked, because it occurred to her that Frida wanted something from her—was always wanting, wanting, without ever quite admitting it.

“I want you to apologize for trashing my room,” said Frida. “For wrecking my stuff and for disrespecting my privacy. I want you to give me those lilies, and I want you to admit Suva isn’t the capital of Fiji.”

Ruth shook her head.

“All right then,” Frida said, and, her face expressionless, used her forearm to sweep the objects across the dining table. They clattered over the surface, catching and dragging, and the bottles tipped and rolled to the left and right, but they were all carried by Frida’s arm to the table’s edge, and then they fell into the wastepaper bin. None of the glass shattered; everything fell neatly and quietly, almost as if the objects were taking up their original places, snug in the bin as they had been in the box. It was like a magic trick. Then Frida lifted the bin and held it on her hip like an awkward baby; she opened the door with one quick hand and, still matronly, marched into the garden.

Ruth couldn’t understand how the door had opened; but she was safe behind her lilies. She followed and watched as Frida shook the contents of the bin out over the edge of the dune. Some of the shells and coral bounced a little before rolling, and all the grit and dust swarmed up in a grubby cloud before puffing away, abruptly, as if with a specific destination in mind. The box flew from the bin and caught a little in the coastal wind; it only subsided among the grasses after a short, desperate flight. Then Frida threw her arms out, so that the wastepaper basket swung high into the low sun and spun onto the beach.

Ruth stood beside Frida at the crest of the dune. The lilies were growing heavier in her arms. Down the slope, the coral and shells were beginning their primordial crawl back to the sea.

“Those things belong to my family,” Ruth said.

“A little life lesson for you, Ruthie,” said Frida. “Don’t get attached to
things
.”

Ruth began to test out the slope of the dune with one foot. Frida was grinning into the salt of the wind. There was a tremendous well-being about her, and she lifted her face to the sky as if feeling the sun for the first time in months. Frida often gave off an impression of posthibernation. She was a great brown bear, a slumbering hazard, both dozy and vigilant. And Ruth was used to her slow surety of movement; but now she had woken up.

“You’re an awful woman,” said Ruth, and Frida gave a gnomic titter. The chalky sand rubbed at Ruth’s bare feet. “A savage woman.” Frida laughed harder, with that same round gong Ruth had heard on the telephone. Ruth pointed down the dune with her lilies. “I want everything back.”

Frida dusted her hands and emitted the sigh she often did immediately before standing up. “Two things,” she said. “First of all, apologize. Second, tell me Suva isn’t the capital of Fiji. Then I’ll pick it all up for you. Otherwise, you can do it yourself.”

Ruth began to descend. She still clung to the lilies. This was the very worst request to make of her back: to walk down a steep slope with her arms full. She bent into the dune and it fell away beneath her; she kicked up whirlwinds of sand.

Frida watched from above. “Mind your step,” she said.

Ruth moved forward and the grass collapsed; she felt her feet slide, and then she was lying on the ground with the lilies scattered over and around her. She wriggled them off. She didn’t think she was hurt; it didn’t even feel like a fall. It was as if the dune had scooped her up, and she was caught in a shallow, sandy bowl.

“Oh, Ruthie,” said Frida from above.

“What is it?” asked Ruth from among the grasses, but she knew she had fallen into the tiger trap. It had filled considerably in the hours since its construction; now it cradled Ruth. It was fragrant with lilies. She closed her eyes and opened them again, and the world bumped up against her and tilted away. She was lying on her side. Ants moved among the sand, over and under each grain, and all of this was too close to Ruth’s nose. Above her she saw the very edge of the lawn, or what remained of it. It was a frayed rug of green. It was the only kind of civilized grass that consented to grow here—a tough, shiny species with strenuous roots. Harry never liked it; it wasn’t soft enough, he said, and it contrasted too much with the sand. Ruth was able to roll onto her back, and then the sky appeared, a dark, blank blue. She felt a dizzy sting behind her eyes.

“Any bones broken?” called Frida.

Ruth looked to every bone for information, and each reassured her. But her back was burning. She felt around in the sand for some kind of handhold and found a small mineral lump with string still attached. A flurry of sand from above suggested Frida might be coming down the dune.

“Don’t!” Ruth cried.

“Please yourself.” Frida sighed again, and the sound was both resigned and happy. The sand settled. “You know, this is exactly what I said to Jeff. I said to him, it just isn’t safe to have an old girl like your mother living in this kind of environment. She walks in the garden, and what do you know, she slips and falls. I’ve seen a fall do someone in—never the same again. And that’s why I’m here twenty-four hours a day.” The sea sounded close, and something tickled in Ruth’s ear. “But does Jeff ever thank me? Does he ever ring me up and say, ‘Frida, you’re the ant’s pants’?”

Some sand scattered across Ruth’s forehead. She wasn’t sure if the wind was at fault, or Frida. She tried to sit up and found that she couldn’t. “I can’t get up,” she said, but not to Frida; to herself.

“Not with that attitude, you can’t.”

“I really can’t,” said Ruth, still to herself. She would have liked to see one cloud in the sky. That would have been fluffy and merry and in some way comforting. If I see a cloud, she thought, it means I’ll get up again. It means I haven’t fallen.

“Take me, for instance,” said Frida. “If I went around all day saying, ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ I’d get nowhere. What you need is some positive thinking. Say to yourself, ‘I
will
get up.’ Then do it.”

Ruth moved one foot experimentally.

“Too many people in this country are old before their time,” Frida sighed.

“Frida.” Ruth heard the bleat in her voice. Her body wouldn’t move. “I think I’m paralysed.”

Ruth felt something tickle at her forehead, like a handful of thrown grass; she knocked it away with her right hand.

“Not paralysed,” said Frida. “See? So negative. You know, this might be good for you. Give you a bit of a challenge, break you out of your can’t can’t can’t and show you your actions have consequences. I’ll be inside, Ruthie, tidying your mess. And one day you’ll thank me for this.” Frida inhaled loudly, as if she were filling her lungs with the sea, and then she was gone. Sand rose in her wake and settled over other sand. The back door opened and closed again.

Now the cats emerged from wherever they had been hiding. They sniffed at Ruth’s cheeks and shoulders. One of them curled against her side. The dune had shifted to accommodate her, and it was pleasant to think—or at least less frightening to think—that eventually this hollow would shape itself around her and be perfectly moulded to her back and bones. Then she would sleep the way she had as a child, when everything was supple and new and it was possible to abandon her body entirely, night after night, without ever knowing how lucky that was. Something whirred in the grasses near her head, some insect, and it occurred to Ruth that Frida’s tiger might be nearby. He might come as night fell and find her. Frida might make him come; she might make him a real tiger, with real teeth. This alarmed Ruth into action. She would have to make her way back to the house, even if it took her all night, and then she would run. She would go to Richard: find his address on the envelope she had saved, take the bus into town, catch the train to Sydney. Ruth felt around with her hands and caught at the grasses; the grass cut into her palms, little quick slits, as she pulled herself into a half-sitting position. The cat at her side leapt away, indignant. Her hips were a faulty hinge, and she fell to the sand again.

Ruth’s back objected to all of this. She often imagined her back as an instrument; that way she could decide if the pain was playing in the upper or lower registers. Sometimes it was just a long, low note, and sometimes it was insistent and shrill. To Ruth, lying in the sand, it was both. It was a whole brassy, windy ensemble. She cried out, but there was no one to hear her. The lifesavers would be sitting in their flagged turrets down at the surf club, scanning the sun and the sea, ready to pack up for the day; they didn’t know she was drowning. The wind was a little cold. Perhaps, if she lay still enough, it would make her a coverlet of sand.

The cats watched her from the grasses. They seemed to be encouraging her with their dumbstruck eyes. This is what you get, she thought, for living on a beach, not a road; and that was Harry’s fault, since Harry had insisted on this isolation and then killed them both with it. Because now she felt she was in danger of dying out on the dune, and that Frida had been trying, all along, to bring her to this point—had sent a tiger, and built traps, and now was trying to kill her. And Ruth was sure, too, that if Harry had stayed in Sydney and walked every day beside the Harbour the way he used to, he would still be alive; he would have been whisked to a state-of-the-art hospital, where the business of saving the lives of stupid old men happened every day. Not that she blamed the girl who picked him up from the gutter. What was her name? Ellen something. Jeffrey had told her this Ellen Something had held Harry’s head as he died. What a stupid old isolated head. Now Ruth lay dying in a tiger trap, and no one was there—not even Frida—to cradle any part of her.