The Night Guest (8 page)

Ruth had expected her character to become more sharply defined with age, until eventually she found that it no longer mattered to her; she left off worrying about it, like a blessedly abandoned hobby. But now Richard might come with his bad books and his excellent symphonies and fill her with doubt all over again. She lay in bed with her hands on her meaty stomach and worried until the cats, from their bedposts, began to perk and stare. They were listening to something, and so she listened, but heard nothing unusual. Her heart was stiff but strong. Not now, she thought, addressing the tiger. Not with Richard coming—which meant she did want him to come. One of the cats gave a low, funny growl or produced, at least, a growl-shaped noise. When Ruth went to comfort him, he snapped at her fingers, which always made her sad and shy. She moved in the bed, unhappy, and the cats jumped and ran.

“Fine!” she called after them. She would write to Richard. Things could still happen to her. She lifted her back from the bed, went to her dressing table, and found paper and a pen.

“My dear,” she wrote, “this will be a bolt from the blue, but if you can spare the time and make the journey, this old lady would like to see you again. I live by the sea, I have a very good view (there are whales), and I also have a wonderful woman called Frida whose brother George has a taxi and will collect you from the station and bring you here. We can talk Fiji and fond memories, or just snooze in the sun. Come as soon as you’d like to. The whales are migrating. Come as soon as you can.”

Ruth wrote the letter, didn’t reread it, sealed it in an envelope, and sent it out with Frida the following morning. There might have been spelling mistakes, and she worried afterwards about having signed off “all my love,” but the important thing was that the letter existed and had been sent. Five days later there was a reply from Richard. His handwriting was lean as winter twigs. He was delighted to hear from her. He had been thinking about her lately, would you believe; and if she was old, then he was older. His next month was busy, but he would come on a Friday in four weeks’ time.

7

Ruth telephoned Jeffrey a few days before Richard’s arrival.

“What’s wrong?” he asked when she announced herself. His midweek voice was poised for action.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m going to be busy this weekend, that’s all, so I thought I’d ring you now.”

“Busy doing what?”

“I’ve invited a friend to stay,” said Ruth.

“Good on you, Ma! Anyone I know? Helen Simmonds? Gail? Barb?”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“An old friend.”

“If you’re going to be deliberately mysterious, I won’t keep asking you about it,” said Jeffrey. So like Harry it was unearthly, but Ruth supposed this happened all the time with widows and their sons, and it would be maddening to mention. She’d worked hard to maintain her belief in the distinct differences between herself and her own parents.

“I’m not being mysterious,” she protested. “This is an old friend from Fiji, a man called Richard Porter.”

There was that same feeling as when she’d told her school friends, “I’m taking the boat to Sydney with Richard Porter.” Then, in 1954, the girls nodded and smiled at one another. Ruth blossomed in the midst of all that gentle insinuation. Her fond heart filled. Now Jeffrey said, “That’s nice.”

“Do you remember—we used to get Christmas cards from him? And his wife.”

“Not really.”

“He knew me when I was a girl. He knew your grandparents. He was quite an extraordinary man. I suppose a sort of activist, you’d call it now.”

“Find out if he’s got any old photos,” said Jeffrey.

“I’m sure he will. I remember he had a camera when the Queen visited.”

Ruth knew that Jeffrey mistook her use of the word
girl
to mean child; he imagined this Richard as a considerably older man, avuncular, and talked about him that way. He claimed to be pleased she would have company, although she should really ask Helen Simmonds up one of these days; he also worried about the extra work a visitor (who wasn’t Helen Simmonds) would generate. Ruth explained that Frida was helping, for a low fee—he asked how much and approved of the answer—and she expected they would do nothing but watch whales and drink tea, which would create so little “extra work” she was almost ashamed of herself. Frida was washing the dining-room windows as Ruth spoke on the phone; she made a small noise of disgust at this talk of her fee.

Jeffrey, who was always interested in the transport arrangements of other people and spent a great deal of time planning his own, asked, “How’s this Richard getting to your place?”

Ruth’s answer was insufficiently detailed. The conversation persisted, and Ruth thought, What can I say that means he won’t go? But when can I go? She always listened for hints that Jeffrey might be ready to finish a call, and when she identified them, she finished it for him, abruptly, as if there weren’t a moment to lose. He didn’t seem at all scandalized that his mother was planning to entertain a male guest, which was a relief and also, thought Ruth, something of a shame. Not that she set out to scandalize her sons. She’d never liked that obvious kind of woman.

“I hope you’ll have a lovely time,” said Jeffrey.

Ruth made a face into the phone. A lovely time! I carried you under my ribs for nine months, she thought. I fed you with my body. I’m God. The phrase that occurred to her was
son of a bitch
. But then she would be the bitch.

The phone produced a small chime as Ruth replaced it, as if coughing slightly to clear Jeffrey from its throat. She considered the preprogrammed button that was supposed to conjure Phillip.

“What time is it in Hong Kong?”

Frida, with knitted brow, consulted her watch and began to count out the hours on her fingers. “It’s too early to call,” she sighed, as if she regretted the result of her calculations but would bear it bravely. It was always too late or too early to call Hong Kong; Ruth had begun to doubt if daytime existed in that distant place. In the last four weeks, waiting for Richard to come, she had begun to doubt the existence of any place other than this one; it seemed so unlikely that Richard might be somewhere right at this moment, living, and waiting to see her.

Returning to her windows, Frida said, “Jeff’s happy with my salary, is he.” It wasn’t a question. The flesh of her arms shook as she rubbed at the windowpanes; the windowpanes shook, too. She had grown so attached to the house that this mutual trembling seemed a kind of conversation. Ruth found it comforting.

Now that she had told Jeffrey, Richard was definitely coming. Ruth inspected her heart: there was a leaping out, and also a drawing back. Difficulties presented themselves. The house was so hot, and there were possibly birds in the night, and almost certainly unseasonal insects. The cats threw up on the floor and the beds, and their fur seemed to sprout from the corners. For the first time in months, Ruth noticed the state of the garden: it seemed to be shrinking around the house. Harry had spent so many hours tending this garden against the sand and salt, climbing ladders and kneeling in the grass wearing soft green kneepads which gave him the look of an aged roller skater. He would be horrified to see it now. His shrubs and hedges had worn away in patches; they reminded Ruth of an abandoned colouring book. The hydrangeas looked as if enormous caterpillars had chewed them to rags; snapped frangipani branches lay across the grass; and the worn turf gave the impression of faded velvet. The soil had failed under the brittle grass—had simply blown away. Now there was sand; there was more sand than lawn; the few trees stood embattled against the sea, and the only flourishing plants were the tall native grasses that surrounded the house on three sides.

“He’ll take it as he finds it,” said Frida, who saw the dismay with which Ruth surveyed the garden through the dining room’s soapy windows.

“Yes,” said Ruth.

“It’s wild. You said yourself you like it better this way.”

“Yes,” said Ruth.

“And inside will be pure gold.”

Frida seemed very sensible of the honour of the house; it reflected her own honour, after all, and so she set about cleaning every corner in preparation for Richard’s arrival. Ruth had never observed this level of zeal in her before. She wouldn’t accept any help, but confined Ruth to the dining room, where she would be “less likely to cause trouble.”

As Frida cleaned, Ruth told her more about Richard; talking about him made her less nervous. She may have told each story more than once. There was the green sari he’d given her for her birthday, and how embarrassed he’d been when she tried it on. There was the first time he ate a kumquat and chased her through the house trying to make her eat one, too. There was the Christmas he made her a puppet theatre out of a tea chest because she was a teaching assistant at the Girls’ Grammer School. There was the royal ball.

“I had a dress made up in pale blue Chinese silk,” she said airily, as if she had been in the habit of ordering silken dresses. Ruth didn’t mention that Richard had kissed her at the ball and that ever since, Ruth had felt an unshakeable gratitude towards the Queen, whose dark royal head had been visible, now and then, among the people in the ballroom. She was newly crowned and not much older than Ruth. The Queen! And Richard! All in the same night. The blue silk lit Ruth’s yellow hair. Richard danced with her and asked if she was tired and guided her through the crowd with his hand in the small of her back without telling her why; he led her to a corridor and kissed her there among the potted palms until Andrew Carson came and flushed them out. Andrew Carson, the maybe-Communist, the kiss-killer! It was no chaste kiss, either. Ruth had saved the dress for the daughters she might have and had no idea where it was now.

Frida encouraged these reminiscences by not objecting to them; otherwise she gave no sign that they interested her. She stayed late that Thursday, cleaning and cooking, and for the first time they ate their dinner together. Frida made a slim stir-fry, piled Ruth’s plate with rice, and picked at her own vegetables.

“Still dieting?” Ruth asked.

Frida nodded, serene. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” she said, “but I’ve lost an inch off my waist.”

It was strange to have Frida at the dining table, fiddling with her food. She ate a little and a little more, and stood to clear the table.

“No hurry,” she said, gathering plates, so Ruth pushed her rice away.

“I’m too nervous to eat, anyway.”

“What on earth are you nervous for?” asked Frida, who was already wetting dishes in the sink. The water surged among the saucepans and plates and Frida’s hands.

“There’s something I’m worried about,” said Ruth.

“What thing?”

“I wouldn’t be so worried except that we have guests coming.”

“We have one guest coming.”

“Is it normal for my head to be so itchy?” Ruth held her hand to her hair but wouldn’t scratch in front of Frida. “It’s driving me mad.”

Frida shook the suds from her fingers and said, “How long since you last washed your hair?”

Ruth began to cry. This was unprecedented; it was terrible. But while Ruth knew this to be terrible, she let herself cry, in part because she was so horrified at forgetting to wash her hair and allowing the itch to continue without remembering. She’d worried in the night that she had lice or some parasite, or that she was imagining the itch and going insane. She woke greasily from sleep with these fears and pulled at her hair in an effort not to scratch, and now Frida was reminding her that this was simply the way hair felt when it hadn’t been washed. Frida observed Ruth’s tears with evident disapproval. But this mode of Frida’s disapproval was usually the prelude to an act of helpful sacrifice on Frida’s part, and Ruth was comforted by the thought of this assistance.

“You want me to wash your hair for you?” asked Frida, and Ruth said, gulping, “I wash every night.”

“I know you do.”

“I’m very particular about it.”

“I’d know if you didn’t, love. You’d smell,” said Frida, so kindly that Ruth pressed a bashful hand to her face. Her scalp raged. It may have been weeks since she last washed it. Frida pulled the plug from the sink. She wiped her hands with a tea towel, rolled up the sleeves of her shirt, and smoothed her own hair back.

“Don’t you worry,” said Frida. “We’ll get it washed. It’ll be nice. Like going to a hairdresser.”

“Oh, dear,” said Ruth, feeling herself settle into a helplessness that was pleasant now, for being a little artificial. She looked forward to surrendering to the complete attention of beneficent hands. “It’s a lot to ask, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

At first Frida planned to wash Ruth’s hair in the bathroom basin. Ruth liked this idea. She explained that this was how her hair had been washed as a girl. She described the bathroom of the house in Fiji, with its narrow, shallow bath (her father could only squat in it, pouring a small bucket of water over his back). Her mother had hung green gauze at the windows, for privacy and also because she, like the other women she knew, considered green a cooling colour.

“Blue is the coolest colour,” said Frida. And blue, when Frida said it, was the coolest colour; it simply was.

But when Ruth tried to rise from her chair to go into the bathroom, her back objected. Frida—sceptical, impatient Frida, whose reliable spine usually prevented any sympathy for Ruth’s lumbar condition—decided the basin would be too much. Instead, she directed Ruth to the wingback recliner in the lounge room: a “subtle recliner,” Ruth had once called it, because she didn’t entirely approve of recliners, which she supposed was a very Protestant way to think about a chair. Frida filled a large bowl with water and spread towels over the chair, the floor, and Ruth. She cranked the recliner beyond any previous limits, so that Ruth could see, beyond her small stomach, the tops of her toes.

Frida was good at washing hair, which was the result, Ruth assumed, of so much practice on her own healthy head. She took great care over each of the steps: the wetting, the shampooing and conditioning and rinsing, even a head massage in the able, indifferent way of trained hairdressers. Her skill wasn’t unexpected; what surprised Ruth was the way Frida, washing hair, began to talk. She started by complaining of sleepless nights, nervous headaches, and bowel trouble.