The Night Guest (21 page)

“Mrs. Field!” he called.

She felt quite famous. This might have been why he won that prize, year after year; not for his sausages, but for his memory. Ruth used to know the name of the Sausage King. He used to hold a barbecue for his “favourite customers” in the New Year, when Ruth and her family were always at the coast for the summer; she had been to his house. He barbecued with fierce pride and made people taste everything. He winked at her now, which was his way of saying, “I don’t want to serve this woman, I want to serve you; I can’t wait to serve you,” and flattered, Ruth waited her turn. She and Harry used to laugh about the jolly flirtations of the Sausage King. They never offended any husband. She had known this man for nearly forty years.

“Mrs. Field,” he said now, turning towards her. He was tall and merry and trim. She remembered there had been some heartbreak over a son who didn’t want to be a butcher; or maybe the trouble was that he did. The Sausage King wore a striped apron and seemed to have absolutely no hair on his arms. His hands were big and pink, and youthful from the handling of all that meat.

“We haven’t seen you in town for months,” he said, twinkling. “Tell me where you’ve been hiding.”

That was another thing she remembered: he always used the royal plural, as if speaking for both himself and his sausages. But what was his name?

“Nowhere, nowhere,” she said, bashful. He always made her blush, and she supposed this was how she knew his attentions were harmless. “I have someone to shop for me now.”

Frida bought all their meat in styrofoam and plastic from the supermarket, but he didn’t know that. Still, Ruth felt the guilt as a new heat on her face.

“It’s just a treat to see you,” he said, and turned to the other people in the shop—people younger than Ruth and the Sausage King. “Mrs. Field is one of my oldest and most loyal customers. We’ve known each other since before you were all born.”

Ruth blushed further. No one in the shop was that young, but she might have been that old.

“And what can I get for you today?” he asked. “The lamb is a miracle, the spring lamb.”

“Oh, yes, lamb. From New Zealand.”

“Australian lamb, Mrs. Field! Always! Now—a roast? Chops?”

“Oh, dear,” said Ruth. The other customers began to stir with polite exasperation. Many of them had been in the shop before the arrival of the steadfast Mrs. Field. “Chops,” she said, because Frida would scold about a roast. Frida, returning home from the supermarket, talked at great length about the expense of groceries in this day and age.

“Chops it is. How many? How many?” sang the Sausage King. His busy pink hands worked over the lamb chops, selecting good specimens and shifting the plastic parsley. “Five ninety-nine a kilo, five-fifty for you.” The customers shook their heads at the lovable favouritism of the Sausage King.

“Five-fifty,” said Ruth.

“One kilo it is. Anything else I can do for you today?” He wrapped the lamb in waxy white paper. Ruth loved the cool weight of butchers’ bundles; they reminded her of babies.

“That’s all,” she said, wishing she could be sure it really was.

“No sausages? I tell you what, I’ll throw a couple in, on the house.” Now the shop threatened mutiny. The door opened and the bell rang; someone was leaving. The Sausage King swaddled the sausages in white paper. Ruth saw him wink at another woman; he would serve her next. “And that’s five-fifty for Mrs. Field.”

Ruth nodded. She opened her purse and there was no money in it, except for the few coins she had left after the bus fare. The only other thing in there was a library card. “Goodness,” she said. “I’ve forgotten my purse.”

The Sausage King looked at the purse in her hands.

“I mean, it’s empty. What a duffer!”

He was poised with the smooth white packages. “Not to worry, not to worry,” he reassured, but he grinned now at the other customers. His grin said, “Silly old bird.” It said, “Stupid, stupid, and old, old, old.” Once, when he was still young, he had presented her sons with hats folded out of butcher’s paper; they had loved them for a whole afternoon.

“I can’t think—” began Ruth, but the woman who had been winked at stepped up, businesslike, although determinedly kind, and passed six dollars to the Sausage King.

“There now!” he cried, as if a spring-lamb miracle truly had come to pass. How he trusted and loved the world; it was everywhere on his face. He patted the woman’s hand. She would be invited to the New Year’s barbecue.

“Oh, thank you, thank you so much,” said Ruth, taking possession of her packages and their smooth infant weight. She had some idea of sending Frida to her saviour’s house with six dollars, but the woman was ordering now—a complicated order, designed for a family, which called on all the skills of the delighted butcher. Her expression was resolutely against interruption or further gratitude.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Field!” the Sausage King called, and Ruth waved from among her parcels and empty purse, and a woman opened the door for her. The bell shook. When she passed into the street, the customers laughed at some joke he made. Ruth hated him and his lusty courtesies. Harry was truly kind; truly chivalrous. None of it was for show. She would tell him that, when she got home, and she would also conceal the embarrassing free meat from Frida, who frequently expressed her contempt for handouts, freeloaders, and anyone who didn’t perform honest hard labour for her money. Frida would never hear about the empty purse or the helpful, mortifying woman or the temptation of the lamb roast, and she wouldn’t be angry. To believe this filled Ruth with busy purpose. Where to next? The street was lined with conveniences. Next door was the chemist, across the road was the bakery, and farther down was the bank. She wondered why she didn’t come to town more often. Where had she parked the car? She was always forgetting that. No—she had caught the bus. And at the end of the street was the railway station, where the trains pulled out for Sydney every three hours. Why should that be such a comforting thought? Her arms still ached.

Two boys waited outside the chemist with that particular alert boredom of boys who have been promised a reward for their patience. They watched every passing car with interest; whenever the street was empty, their shoulders fell; their feet stepped over each other, shifting their bantam weights, like newly foaled giraffes. They had boyish faces, choral and virtuous, as if cast in a Nativity play, and long light hair which they threw out of their eyes with a beautiful backwards motion of the head. They were maybe nine and eleven. The older boy was sure of his gestures—the movement of his head, the stepping of his feet—and the younger one copied him, so their resemblance seemed less genetic and more an act of desperate study. Ruth’s heart was burdened with love for these boys, who waited outside the chemist and cancelled out the Sausage King. They wore blue-and-grey school uniforms. In the shadow of the striped awning they waited and slouched, and because they had been so patient, she would buy them a milk shake each, or an ice cream if they wanted it. Surely she had enough coins for that.

Ruth hurried to them with her hands outspread; her purse dropped right at their feet, and the oldest boy picked it up for her. He was nearly as tall as she was and handed her the purse with a bashful elegance, almost feminine, which drew his features into a courtly mask.

“Thank you, my darling!” cried Ruth, and embraced him.

“S’all right,” he said, in that gulping growl of boys on the very verge of change, and she released his rigid shoulders.

“You’re such good boys for waiting so quietly. How about a milk shake?” Ruth held her hand out to the youngest boy, who hung back behind his brother and looked at her as if she had committed some fascinating faux pas, right there on the street. But Ruth knew the way boys could behave when they reached a certain age; she knew to ignore the discouraging twinge it produced in her throat. She shook her hand at him again, cheerfully. “What do you say? A milk shake, or do you want ice cream? You’ve certainly earned it.”

“Mum,” he said, and he seemed startled and perhaps a little afraid, and he looked past her at a woman who was leaving the chemist.

“Hello again!” said the woman; she was Ellen Gibson. “Have you met my boys? This is Brett, and this is Jamie. Boys, this is Mrs. Field.”

The boys nodded their blond heads, and their bodies seemed to dip in brief curtsies. They had the same shy smile. Their names were Brett and Jamie. They seemed to have agreed to conceal some residual awkwardness from their mother.

“You’ve got your meat, Ruth? Can I take you home now?”

Ruth looked towards the railway station. How would she pay for a train, with only a library card? And also—the meat would spoil.

The boys were already walking; Ellen was walking. So was Ruth. She was being led. The sea retreated, as if it had been winched down to its proper level, and that was a kind of surrender.

“This way. Mine’s the red car.” Ellen smiled and nodded, that same curtsey of the head her sons made. “I’ll drop the boys at school first, if that’s all right? They’re late today, they’ve been to the dentist.”

The boys, already belted into the back of the car, groaned on cue, as if appalled to have had their dentistry made public. Ruth sensed an injustice; she suspected her seat had been promised to one of them for the ride, and now she’d usurped it.

“Oh, dear,” she said, because she couldn’t manage her own seat belt. Ellen snapped it into place while Ruth held her hands, as if at gunpoint, on either side of her downcast face.

The school wasn’t far away; the boys ran towards the entrance and seemed to fall into it. Ruth was amazed they could do anything at all on those long feet. “They’re going to be very tall, aren’t they,” she said.

Ellen smiled and nodded. “Just like their father.” She was proud of them; she watched until they were out of sight.

“Isn’t it funny to watch children grow.”

Ellen said, “It’s a privilege.”

Ruth scrutinized this possibility. No, she thought; it’s melancholy and strange. Children were so temporary. When Jeffrey was born, Harry stroked his son’s nose and said, “What’s amazing is that this is
forever
.” But it wasn’t forever; it wasn’t even a month. In a few weeks Jeffrey was different, and the blind, bumping, waterlogged Jeffrey was gone; he was rosy and plump; he butted at her face the way the cats did. It came to her that she missed her children, not as they were now, with their own children, but as they had been when they were young. She would never see them again. Jeffrey on the beach when the house was still for holidays; Phillip’s failing breath; their small hands. She wanted—very badly—to say “Fuck.”

“Now let’s get you home,” said Ellen.

“Do you know the way?” asked Ruth, because she herself was unsure.

“Yes. But you might have to remind me where to turn in.”

Ruth tried to picture where to turn in and saw only grass—long, pale grass with a tiger in it. She smiled vaguely. She was so comfortable in the car, which Ellen handled with such confidence. The town passed, and the sea. The suggestion of rain had vanished now, and the pale sky tended cloudlessly towards white. Ellen wanted to know what Ruth had been up to; if she’d had visitors; if she’d been getting out and enjoying the weather. “How are your sons?” she asked, and Ruth said, “They’re going to be very tall.”

“How often do you come into town?”

“Not nearly enough. You know how it is. Busy busy busy.”

“Oh, yes,” said Ellen.

“You know how it is. You’re a mother.”

“And you have someone looking after you?”

“I’m very well cared for,” said Ruth. The car advanced so easily. “Not only that, I’m
defended
.”

“Defended? Against what?”

Ruth noted the wonder in Ellen’s voice—these small currents of response were important to her now, they were signposts for behaviour, and they alerted her to the possibility that she must rethink her previous comments—so she answered, “Against the slings and arrows of fortune.”

“Of outrageous fortune,” said Ellen, laughing.

And Ruth was grateful to her, and also to Frida, who had worn herself out with constant care on behalf of the house and the cats and herself, and who had driven out the tiger. But she was aware of a sense of misgiving, as if she had done something to make Frida angry; why was she frightened of Frida? The fear came and went. She remembered, then, something about making a mess in the house yesterday: throwing pills on the floor and flowers on the dune. Of course Frida was angry.

The sea was different when travelled along at speed. The sun shone from every part of the sky and water: bright light arrived from everywhere. Ruth closed her eyes and saw strong pink. She could feel the car climbing the hill and said, “It’s just on the right here.” Then, opening her eyes, it was like arriving at her house for the first time. She saw the grasses and tangled scrub that needed beating back from the drive, and the riot of the ruined garden, and among all this frenzy was the neat house with its scrubbed windows. It radiated a tidy quiet, but there was something unusual about it nonetheless; a faint fog seemed to rise from behind it, dimly grey and almost invisible against the water. Ellen brought the car to a stop.

Frida was sitting on the low step across the front door of the house. She looked wearily up at the car, her face resigned to disaster, and her arms fell across her knees so that her wrists turned out, as if expecting handcuffs. But when she saw the unfamiliar car, she raised herself from the step with a slow concentration that recalled her mythically fatter past. Ellen leaned over Ruth to open the passenger door, and Ruth found herself wanting it closed again; she wanted it shut against Frida. But it was too late now: Ellen was out of the car, Frida was moving. Ruth swung in the seat and her legs came sticking out into the air like a child’s. This seemed to prompt Frida to hastier action. She held out her arms for Ruth to run into, and so Ruth did; she was closer to Frida’s body at this moment than she had ever been. It gave out an agitated heat. She recognized this embrace; it was the way she’d hugged Jeffrey the day she came home from the hospital with his baby brother. Perhaps Frida wasn’t angry after all. Ellen had averted her eyes and was studying the foggy house.