The Night Guest (28 page)

“Harry?” she said into the wind. Where was he? Here in the garden, maybe. She listened for sounds of him. “Harry? Darling?”

The garden was empty. There were no cats and no plants; it was bare and scrubbed. The trees were leafless, as if someone had plucked every branch clean. There was also no sun. Only the dune, greyish, and the sky, greyish, and at some distance the white-and-black sea.

“Here I am!” cried Frida. She had come out into the garden carrying Ruth’s chair; she found level ground for it near the frangipani tree. Then she came to Ruth and held her shoulders, something like the way she had when Ruth had arrived home with Ellen from town.

“Here
I
am,” said Ruth. She looked about, still, for Harry. He was probably kneeling in some garden bed, possibly among the hydrangeas. Hydrangea flowers don’t fall off. They go brown, don’t they, and they stay; but really they should fall. In the past, Harry must have cut them. Maybe she could help him. There must be some worm that wanted to come and eat the flower-heads. Ruth stamped her feet to call the worms up out of the ground. The sound of her feet travelled through the dune, and other sounds joined it: the shooting of new roots, maybe, and busy crabs and insects burrowing in the sand. Frida held her tighter, to keep her still.

“Now, what’s this?” said Frida, and she began to sing a low lullaby; Ruth recognized the tune, but not the words, which didn’t seem quite English. Then she recognized them, without understanding. It was a Fijian song. She and Frida rocked on the dune, the words fell over and around them, and the lullaby inhabited some interior place of Ruth’s, where it greeted other things—the shape of her mother’s mouth and a dog she saw killed on the street in Suva. There was a reunion there, in that place. Ruth attended to it, and to the subtle movement of Frida’s big body, and to the feel of the air on her arms as they moved. The nurses sang sometimes as they worked in the clinic. New mothers sang to their babies. Her mother and father sang hymns. Her father read to them in the evening while the houseboy sang in the kitchen: “Consider the lilies of the field,” read her father, and Ruth considered them. “How they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” I neither toil nor spin, thought Ruth. She leaned into Frida’s belly and felt herself arrayed in glory.

What could this song be for? To send babies to sleep. Phillip slept fitfully in his crib. Isn’t
pleurisy
a lovely word? Beside his crib:
The Cat in the Hat. I Am a Bunny. Go, Dog. Go!
Ruth rested and sang. It was humid in the hollow of Frida’s arm, and Ruth’s hair clung to her cheek. She remembered then that Harry was dead. I remember that I remember that, she thought. Thank God that fact was sticky enough; she wanted to honour it. Every future minute announced itself, broad and without Harry. And then her life, her whole past, crowded up against this minute—entirely filled this minute, it was over so quickly. It all insisted so busily on something Ruth could not identify, something that had to do with happiness. How disappointing it was not to have been happy, thought Ruth, at every moment you expected to be. Now, here, she might be happy, but it was unlikely.

Frida bent her knees to the ground and took Ruth with her. She still sang, but there were no longer any words; Frida was only a tune, and warm breath, taking Ruth towards the ground. The grass was smooth and rough, and Frida laid her out on it. Frida kissed Ruth’s forehead; she lifted her free hand to keep the sun from Ruth’s eyes. She still sang, but she paused to say, “This won’t do,” and she moved Ruth a little farther into the shade, or what shade there was under the thick grey lace of the frangipani, with no flowers on it yet, and few leaves, so early in November. A gull sat at the top of the tree, not watching, not sleeping, not anything but a gull.

“How’s that?” asked Frida, and she lifted Ruth’s head and laid it on something soft.

“My back doesn’t hurt,” said Ruth, as if delivering a weather report. “It’s very fine.”

“That’s the way,” said Frida. She stood over Ruth and was no longer wearing her coat. She held a glass of water, which she gave to Ruth, and a blue pill, and another, and then—hesitating a moment—another. Frida helped Ruth swallow each one. “Now you’ll be comfy. You just rest there for a little while, and when you’re ready, I want you to call Jeff and tell him right away about George. All right? You promise me?”

“I promise,” said Ruth. The ground was more elastic than she remembered.

“What will you tell him about George?”

“Young Livery.”

“That’s right, that’s his taxi,” said Frida, patient. “But what has he done? What bad thing has George done?”

“George has run off with everyone’s money.”

“Good. Tell Jeff I’ve left papers on the table for him to give to the police. All right?”

“Frida,” said Ruth, smiling, “I can’t call Jeff from out here.”

“I know. You’ll need to get yourself inside—just like that day when you were out here on your own and you got back in all by yourself. But this time your back won’t hurt you, because of the pills, and also I put your chair out here to help you get up. You just hold on to your chair, and it’ll be easy. I’m going in a minute, and then, when you’re ready, you start heading for the phone. Call Jeff as soon as you can. All you need to do is give me some time. Got it?”

“What do you need time for?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Ruth still smiled. Frida was kneeling beside her now, wearing a pink T-shirt. Pink! Her whole face was lit with the colour.

“The back door is open,” said Frida, stroking Ruth’s face, “and the cats are in your bedroom with food and water. You just go in there when you want to find them. Nothing to worry about, all right?”

“All right,” Ruth said. Frida stayed still, looking at her. “All right,” Ruth said again, and she squeezed Frida’s hand, which she noticed was holding hers. The squeezing produced little effect—Ruth couldn’t feel her hand tightening, and she didn’t know if Frida squeezed back. Harry always squeezed back. One, two, three squeezes meant “I love you.” In her other hand, Ruth held Richard’s letter.

“I’m going now,” said Frida, but she still didn’t move. She had a terrible look on her face, calm but terrible; it was resolved, and patient. The sand and grass would ruin her pretty trousers.

“You should wear pink more often,” said Ruth, and Frida let go of Ruth’s hand and stood. Now her face was gone completely. She stood there for a moment—Ruth could see her legs, and her trousers were a little crushed from the kneeling, but not stained; she had a rim of hair at her ankle, and a small mole. Frida turned and walked into the house. The gull still sat in the frangipani.

19

The empty garden was quiet. There was a lull in everything: the wind, the sound of the sea, and even the light, as if a thin cloud was passing over the sun. Ruth settled her head into the pillow Frida had given her and rested for some time, in order to gather the strength she would require to reach the telephone. She thought of Harry as she lay there in the garden because she knew he was dead, and she knew she had forgotten he was dead. That seemed the same as forgetting he had lived. Mainly she thought of how his face looked beside hers in bed. Ruth thought of Harry and squeezed her own hand. She rubbed her feet together the way happy babies do, but she couldn’t feel them. It was as if a soft coat had risen over her legs—something soft and heavy, also warm, but not a fabric. It took her some time to decide what this blanket might be, and eventually it occurred to her—since she couldn’t seem to lift her head from where it lay on the pillow—that Frida might have covered her feet with the skin of the tiger. Then she saw herself under the tree under the tiger skin, and what would Harry say? He would say, George, George, George. Young George stole everyone’s livery money. Ruth couldn’t tell if she had stopped rubbing her feet. She thought Frida should have brought the telephone out here if she wanted her to call George so badly. She thought Frida should have done many things differently. Something was cutting into her hand as she squeezed it, and after she had squeezed some more, she realized it was her mother’s engagement ring.

Soon she would have to get to the house to find the telephone. It would be wound in white cord. Ruth couldn’t feel her feet, but she thought she could feel her elbows. She tried to lift herself on them the way she had the day she was caught in the tiger trap. They wouldn’t lift; nothing would. When she lay in the tiger trap, there was only the wide sky, but here there was the green slant of the sun in the frangipani. Ruth knew the size of that sun, and all of its properties: it was moving now down the length of her spine, burning some things away and dulling others. Its heat rolled, but subtly. She imagined her spine as a rough shaft, crusted and frayed, like underwater wood. She needed to find this shaft of wood where it splintered underwater; she seized hold of it with her hands; she tugged and the wood came free. Then Ruth came out of the sea. She tasted the salt on her lips to check that it was the sea; she had no memory of getting there. Also she was holding this piece of clammy wood, which was easy enough to throw out over the sand, so that it flew above the dunes and up and into the long-distance wind. The wind made a high piping sound before leaving pinkish traces behind. The sky reddened a little—the tiniest drop of blood stirred in water—which was the strangest weather. A storm might be coming, or leaving; this might be the centre of it. It rattled the windowpanes like a herald, as if to say, “Prepare! Prepare!” Someone must take the chair into the house before it was ruined. No one could move the gull away from the frangipani, but he might fly off with the first piece of rain. The whales would sound deeper, where there was no storm, and the boy might speed out across the water in his boat to look for them. Then Harry, that necessary man, would call out from the shoreline, “Prepare! Prepare!” He was too busy to take the chair in from the garden, so it would have to be bound with white cord and pulled, the way the wood was pulled from under the sea. Harry ran along the shore, calling out, and the boat was a narrow yellow spill on the bay. The waves rose up and sent spray out over the dunes. The spray fell across the frangipani tree, but the gull stayed; it only turned one curious eye. The cord was too heavy to lift from the floor, so the chair shook, but couldn’t be moved. The sun was gone now; it was no longer the sun. There was no name for it because it wouldn’t come again. A papery blue shape fell from somewhere and gusted up into the tree. It wasn’t terribly important. The chair would have to stay outside, and so would the man calling below the dunes. The windows could rattle and rattle, and no one and nothing would be inside.

Then the rub of the storm over the trees. There was no rain; only sound. First the birds, objecting, as if morning had come in the middle of the night, and then every insect. A bell rang to call a doctor out of sleep. “Not in this weather,” said a woman, a mother, but the father went out into the sound nevertheless. He went down to the beach, where people stood with binoculars. He waded there among the people and it was as if a god had come among them; an old, pastoral god, driving sheep. The mother’s ring spanned her finger. She had lost her husband, too, and was inconsolable; she said, “There’s no marriage in heaven.” Now the volume of the jungle increased, but it wasn’t quite right: there were monkeys and macaws, all the wrong objects, great opening lilies that sent out a smell of rain. Nothing is so loud as the sound of insects. And on the faint sea: a yellow shape that wasn’t a boat. It was long and walking out of the water. It paused to inspect items on the beach; it turned every now and then when it heard someone crying out, but at a distance. It stayed in the rough edge of the waves, and it came closer and was recognizable. The tiger was there in the water. His throat wasn’t cut, and he wore his own seared skin. Tigers can be patient; they know how to wait.

He was also fast; he was coming. He seemed to know there was nothing to stop him. Now he was out of the water and on the sand; now at the bottom of the dune where the end of the trap lay. His breath came in evenly over the sound of the birds, his ears lay back against his head, and his claws in the sand made a sound of rolling rock. He was the colour of the gone sun. And he sang! He sang a low hymn as he ran, which came out with his breath over his irregular tongue. Now he came singing up the dune, and all the birds flew screaming behind him, except the one gull in the frangipani tree. That tree swam in and out of the green light. It was bound around with a long white cord that couldn’t be lifted from the ground, and a sound intermittently rang out from it. Could it really be so loud under this tree, after all that quiet? Here he was at the beginning of the grass. His heavy head was so familiar, and he still sang in a low, familiar voice. What a large gold space he filled at the edge of the garden. His face flared out from itself, and every black line was only a moving away, so he seemed to be retreating even when he stood his ground. And he was totally unharmed; someone had lied about this tiger. A woman as large as he was, and real as he was, had lied. When he came forward over the lawn, the hydrangeas shook and the dune grass blew back from the greener grass. He stopped at the chair and reached forward—all that length of him, reaching forward—and sharpened his claws on its wooden leg. Then he leant back on his hind legs, and paused, and leapt onto the chair. It tipped to the left. He didn’t sing, after all, but his breath was melodic, and he sat up tall with his paws together, like a circus tiger. He began to groom his symmetrical sides.

“Now,” said Ruth. Ruth was her name. It had been promised to her and had remained faithful. “Now!” she called out, but the tiger didn’t move. She noticed she was in the process of standing only because she was no longer on the ground. Weren’t those oil tankers high in the water? Her wooden spine was burned away, and she could stand. There wasn’t even any need to hold on to the white cord, which was just as well, because where would it lead her? Standing, as she was now, she was as tall as the tiger. He didn’t watch her, only licked and smoothed. Ruth held her hands out to him. She crossed the fine, dusty lawn, and every step seemed to sweep it away. All the grass flew down the dune, and only the barest, brownest white showed through.