The Night Guest: A Novel Part 2

"Goodness," said Ruth.

"And look at me now!" said Frida, presenting her sizable self with a flourish of her palms.

"But you do eat?"

"Of course. You don't leave a marriage with nothing, do you? I took some things with me-healthy stuff. Everything else I was divorced from, so I just had to forget about it. There's that thing when you break up with someone and you hate him like poison but sometimes you just want to touch his shoulder, you know? Or hold his hand."

Ruth tried to imagine Frida holding someone's hand; she could just about manage it.

"But even if you want to, you can't. That's divorce," said Frida. It's death, too, thought Ruth. "And then you forget. There are things I couldn't even tell you how they taste. Ask me how something tastes."

"I don't know. Lettuce," said Ruth.

"I'm allowed lettuce. I took lettuce. Ask me something else. Ask me about ice cream."

"All right. How does ice cream taste?"

"I don't remember!" said Frida. "That's divorce."

Ruth was enchanted by Frida's divorce; she wanted to telephone everyone she knew and tell them all about it. But who was there to call? Phillip was never home, or she hadn't calculated the time difference properly; she could tell Jeffrey, but he had never quite approved of what he referred to as her "wicked sense of humour," by which he clearly meant "streak of cruelty"; he hated to hear people made fun of. So if she said to him, "This woman, Frida, divorced food," he would probably make Ruth explain the whole thing and then say, "Good for her." He was already inclined to approve of Frida. Ruth had sent him the paperwork, as promised; he also, according to Frida, sent regular e-mails with instructions on how to care for his mother, a field Frida was trained in, thank you very much, but, as you soon learn, the hardest part of this job is usually the families. Oh, the families.

Frida ate the last of her egg. "You're naturally thin, aren't you," she said, with a trace of pity in her voice.

"I've got a bit of a belly these days," said Ruth, but Frida wasn't listening. She tapped the top of her empty egg until it fell inwards.

"It's good, though, to be a big girl in this job. That's what I've noticed. I've met nurses though, tiny girls, with the strength of ten men. Never underestimate a nurse."

"I know something about nurses," said Ruth, and Frida looked at her in what seemed liked surprise. "My mother was a nurse."

"She took you to work with her, did she?" Frida asked, a little p.r.i.c.kly, as if she had a tender bundle of children she had been instructed to leave at home.

Ruth laughed. "She had to, really. My parents were missionaries. She was a nurse, and he was a doctor. They ran a clinic together, attached to a hospital. In Fiji."

This was the first time Ruth had mentioned Fiji in the weeks since Frida's arrival. Frida didn't respond. She seemed to be engulfed in an obscure displeasure.

"I saw how hard my mother worked, and how exhausted she always was," said Ruth, nervous now, in a bright, chatty tone. "And I suppose she was never really what you would call appreciated, though she was very loved. My father's work was appreciated, and my mother's sacrifice. That's how people put it."

"What people?" asked Frida, as if she were questioning the existence of any people, ever.

"Oh, you know," said Ruth, waving a vague hand. "Church people, hospital people, family. I've always thought of nursing as a very undervalued profession."

Frida snorted. "I wouldn't call this nursing," she said. Then she stood; she seemed to call on the security of her height. She raised her eggcup from the table like a chalice, pa.s.sed into the kitchen, and pushed open the screen door with one hip, still with the eggcup lifted high.

"For the snails," she said, and threw the crushed eggsh.e.l.l into the garden.

The taxi called for her soon afterwards, and she left the house in an excellent mood.

4.

Ruth often woke with a sense that something important had happened in the night. She might have dreamt a tiger again. She might have dreamt, as she used to, of Richard Porter in her bed-although surely, a dream like that should be of Harry. She did think of Richard more now that Frida was in the house, as if to have daily company reminded her of the existence of other people. Between Richard, and Frida, and this sense of curious importance, the weeks were crowded; they were also thick, Ruth noticed, with a strange hothouse heat. She shed blankets from her bed and wore light clothing-summer dresses, or cotton shorts with the small, soft T-s.h.i.+rts her sons had worn as boys. The cats lost their winter fur in springtime clumps, and Ruth continued to hear bird and insect sounds at night. But little happened: Frida installed bath rails and taught Ruth how to lie down and sit up with the least strain on her back; she mopped and swept; she introduced pills recommended by a naturopath friend of George's, which were supposed to help with memory and brain function and, being made of an ordinary orange kitchen spice, turned Ruth's urine bright yellow; Jeffrey and Phillip telephoned; these things filled the time, but were not extraordinary.

There was, however, the matter of the car. Ruth disliked driving and was frightened of Harry's car; she peered at it through the kitchen windows; she worried over it at night. She began to live off Frida's gifts of fruit and bulk canned goods, all sourced from some inexplicable friends of George's, so that it was no longer necessary to drive or even take the bus into town. She lost weight. She ate the last of the pumpkin seeds, and they went straight through her. Once a week, under Jeffrey's orders, she went out to sit in the car and run the engine; doing so, she experienced a busy, practical sense of renewal followed by the disquieting feeling she was about to drive herself to her own funeral.

One day, while Ruth sat in the driver's seat, Frida's head loomed at the window like a sudden policeman's. Ruth's heart jumped but she kept her hands on the wheel; she was proud of this, as if it indicated that, counter to her own belief, she was a good driver.

"You never drive this thing," said Frida. "You should sell it."

Ruth was afraid of the car, but she didn't want to sell it. That seemed so irrevocable. "I couldn't," she said.

A week later, Frida raised the matter again. "I can think of three or four people who'd buy that car off you tomorrow," she said.

"Driving means independence," said Ruth, quoting Harry, who used to make her drive at least once a week. He called this "keeping your hand in."

Frida shook her head. "Not if you don't actually drive." She promised that her brother's taxi would always be at Ruth's disposal, free of charge. "After all, you're family now," she said, with unusual gaiety.

She also offered to take over Ruth's shopping, to buy stamps and mail letters, to pay bills, and to arrange house calls from the doctor if necessary.

"You can't eat tinned sardines every night," said Frida. "If the government's paying me to do your shopping, you may as well let me do your shopping. That's what I'm here for."

Frida liked this phrase, if using it regularly indicated a preference. It seemed so adequately to sum up the melancholy importance of her willingness to serve. Still Ruth resisted the idea of selling the car. What if, alone at night, she heard an intruder and needed to get away? Or had some kind of medical emergency and the phones weren't working?

"How would you drive in a medical emergency?" asked Frida.

"It might just be a burst eardrum. Or maybe there's a problem with the cats and I need to drive them somewhere. You can't call an ambulance for a cat, can you. Can you?"

What actually worried her, she was surprised to realize, was the tiger. Which was ridiculous, of course. But what if he came back some night on which she'd forgotten to close the lounge-room door? She would hear him coming down the hallway to her bedroom, intent on his agile paws, and her only escape would be the window. Ruth pictured climbing into the garden and crouching in the bushes waiting for the tiger's superior nose to smell her out. As if, with her back, she could still climb and crouch! Or there might be a short moonlit dash over the beach with the tiger's hot breath on her heels, the car meanwhile slumbering in the comfortable driveway of a more fortunate stranger.

"I won't sell it," she said, and turned the key to kill the engine, which was the wrong gesture if her intention was to prove her resolve. The car shuddered and wheezed before falling silent, the way a much older car might.

"Suit yourself," said Frida, shrugging her round shoulders. "I'm only trying to help."

After this discussion, Frida's hair entered a dormant period of brittle French rolls. She spent more time with the floors and her eucalypt mop, and she made noises as she moved: sighs, soft grunts and groans; everything required some effort, some complaint, or, alternatively, an aggressively cheerful energy. She muttered in pa.s.sing about aged drivers and overdue registration checks; she referred, more than once, to the difficulty of helping people who won't help themselves. Frida stirred the house with these perceptible struggles and satisfactions, and Ruth found it easier to stay out of her way. She withdrew to her chair. She counted s.h.i.+ps and pretended to read the newspaper. Jeffrey called with the idea of inviting a friend from Sydney to stay for the weekend; he suggested an unmarried woman who, Ruth knew, was a discreet and grateful guest and a diligent spy for the worried children of her elderly friends. Ruth nodded and smiled into the phone. Frida mopped, and the car waited.

The following week, Ruth sat in the driver's seat facing the sea, which was level and green except in the path of the morning sun; there, it was ribbed with silver. She felt the familiar dread as she turned the ignition key, but today there was an additional terror: the car seemed to press in on her, as if it were being compacted with her inside it; the car felt so small and so heavy that it might at any moment sink into the dune, leaving her buried in a sandy hole.

"You hate this car," Ruth said aloud, and lifted her hands to those places on the steering wheel that Harry had smoothed by touching so often. He believed in buying expensive European cars that would last a long time; this car vindicated him. It was sheathed in indestructibility.

"You hate this car," said Ruth again, because she did hate it and was afraid, not just of driving it but of the expensive machinery of its European heart. Frida was right, as usual. She was probably right about everything.

But it annoyed Ruth that Frida was right, so she put the car in reverse and backed it down the long driveway with the surety that comes only from bravado. Frida came to the lounge-room window; Ruth could see hands s.h.i.+fting the lace of the curtains. But it was too late-Ruth was heading down the drive. Out on the road, she turned right, away from town. To her left were the hills; to her right was the sea. A low wing of cloud rolled away as she drove. It was July-the middle of the mild winter. The road was bright and grey, and the car so fast under her heated hands; the word she thought of was quicksilver, and that was an important word, a word for a pirate or a tomcat; her own cats had silly athletes' names, human names she disapproved of and declined to use; how focused her mind felt, she thought, even with all of this in it, pirates and tomcats; she was moving towards a definite point and would be delighted to discover what it was. She would find it, and go home again. But her return would have to be perfect: a gesture of both surrender and magnificence. It would have to indicate that Ruth, although willing to sell the car, was not entirely ruled by Frida's will.

Ruth followed the broad leftward curve of a hillside until she was a little dizzy, and there as the road straightened stood a roadside fruit stand with s.p.a.ce for a few cars to park beside it. She had often wondered who stopped at fruit stands like this. Harry always refused. Now she turned off the road, b.u.mped up the gra.s.sy verge, and sat for a moment in the stilled car. When she stepped out, the air felt newly polished. It both buoyed and stung.

A teenage boy, dark-skinned and light-haired from too much sun, manned the stall. His blinking face was scrubbed clean by boredom, and the surfboard propped beside him explained his look of marine longing. His stock was almost entirely made up of avocados, but a glorious pineapple caught Ruth's eye. It shouldn't have been there: a pineapple, this far south, in July! She approached and laid one hand on its corrugated hide.

"Busy today?" Ruth asked. She had emptied the car's ashtray of coins, and now they weighed down her pockets.

"Nope," said the boy, and he shrugged and sighed and looked towards the swelling sea. "I could of been out there for hours."

"Could have," said Ruth. She produced her coins. "I don't know how much this amounts to, but I want to spend all of it."

He was a fast counter. "Nineteen dollars and forty-five cents," he said. Harry would have tutted at her for not clearing out the coins before now.

"What will that buy?"

The boy looked at the sea and then at Ruth. "Everything."

It took ten minutes to load the car with everything. The boy's chest seemed to expand with every carton; he began to chat about the weather and a s.h.i.+fting sandbar in the bay and finally allowed himself a luxurious scratch of his barely stubbled chin. The backseat was full of avocados, but the pineapple sat by itself in the front; Ruth was tempted to strap it in. The liberated boy waved as she drove away. The pineapple rolled a little into the coastal curves, and something about it-its swollen movement, its heavy golden smell, and the absurdity of its spiked green haircut-made Ruth feel like taking a holiday. It made her feel like driving forever and never coming back. But, she wondered, how do you take a holiday from a holiday? And by the time she wondered this, she was home.

Ruth hoped Frida might be waiting in front of the house, or at least hovering behind the front door. She wasn't, so Ruth parked the car in its usual spot. The crus.h.i.+ng sensation was gone; the car and the ground both felt solid. She thought of a time when she was young, with young sons, and only ever looked severe while driving: she set her lips thin, her elbows strained at ballet angles from the wheel, and her face took on an expression that used to frighten her children. It couldn't be a mistake to put all that behind her.

Ruth called for Frida from the garden and the front hall; she went back and opened the car's rear doors, looked at the avocado trays, and thought about lifting them. Only then did Frida come out of the house, drying her hands on the hem of her white s.h.i.+rt.

"Avocados? In winter?"

"A present," said Ruth.

"Not much of a present when I have to carry them myself," said Frida, but Ruth saw that she was pleased. The quant.i.ty was what impressed her; Frida was a natural friend to bulk. She ferried and puffed until the fruit was inside, and then Ruth went to lock the car. There was the pineapple in the front seat. She lifted it out with special care: for her back, but also for the pineapple.

When Ruth reentered the house, Frida was in the dining room. She stood at the window making strange sounds in her throat: a low throaty coo that might have been a bird noise. Ruth looked, and there were magpies in the garden. Frida watched them and made her gentle throbbing calls; she stopped when Ruth said, "I've decided to sell the car."

Then Frida turned and smiled. "Yes," she said. She was lovely when she smiled, with her plump, pretty face. She held out her arms and accepted the pineapple as if she had expected it all along; had placed an order for it. Ruth put the car keys on the table. Her hands, now empty, smelled of coins.

"It's really for my own peace of mind," she said.

"George can get you a good price," said Frida, and the next day she introduced a man named Bob, who looked over the car-he insisted on calling it "the vehicle"-and was prepared to buy it for thirteen thousand dollars. The idea of freedom from the car delighted Ruth; so did the idea of selling it without consulting her sons. This satisfaction increased when Bob presented her with a cheque. Ruth noted in pa.s.sing that along with his other misfortunes-Frida mentioned a traitorous wife and kidney stones-Bob bore the unusual surname of Fretweed. He returned that afternoon with a skinny a.s.sistant who maneuvered the vehicle down the drive. Ruth was reminded of the specific sound a familiar car makes, which seemed to her, almost more than any other noise-even more than the sound of Harry's voice-to have been stored inescapably in her memory. But the car was disappearing, taking its sound with it; Harry, too, went down the drive for the last time. Frida seemed sensitive to this in the quiet of the house. There was a sense of relief and exhaustion at the end of their little battle, and it manifested in small tender things: tea made, quiet maintained, and no compet.i.tion over the affection of the cats. The gra.s.s beneath the car had yellowed to the colour of cereal. Frida pinned the cheque to the fridge with a magnet and told Ruth she would bank it first thing on Monday.

5.

Frida took charge of Ruth's banking. She presented Ruth with statements and letters from the bank, and Ruth waved a regal arm above each one, as if in dismissal. Frida treated Ruth's bankbook like a sacred object, always requesting permission to use it and returning it with a public flourish to its proper place at the back of Harry's filing cabinet. Jeffrey had explained the function of keycards, but Ruth liked the efficient cosiness of the book; she liked how contained it felt, how manual.

Frida had no time for keycards. "Money isn't plastic," she said, although, in fact, it was.

Ruth intended to inspect all this paperwork in private, at night. She remembered her mother's lessons about managing staff: never give them any reason to believe you don't trust them. But the house at night was not the place for these daytime plans; it encouraged a different kind of resolution. After dark, the heat thickened so that every noise seemed tropical: palms rattled their spears, insects rubbed their wings in the dripping trees; the whole house shuffled and buzzed. The heat made Ruth's head itch. She listened for any hint of the tiger, but it all seemed safely herbivorous. One night she woke to the sound of a dog crying out, and it made her wonder about wild dogs-she thought she remembered a hyena in The Jungle Book. Her mother had read her The Jungle Book when she was very young, the age when her bed was moved away from the window because of nightmares; the view from her pillow was of a chest of drawers, painted green, with a gla.s.s night-light that threw pinkish shadows on a framed picture of Sydney Harbour (apparently, she was born in a place called Sydney). So she must have been six or seven.

Now she lay awake listening to the hyena, which was undoubtedly a dog on the beach. The cats fidgeted at her side, but slept again. Her sense of the extraordinary was particularly strong. She might have been seven, waiting to hear her father come home from a late night at the clinic. She might have been nineteen, waiting for Richard's voice in the hall; he came home even later than her father and stepped so carefully past her throbbing door she could easily have missed him. The consequence rose up out of the sounds she heard and those she only remembered; it met somewhere between them, and finding s.p.a.ce there, it grew. Ruth lay and listened for it; then she grew tired of waiting. I'm too old, she thought, to be a girl waiting for important noise. Why not go out to meet it, why not prepare? She rose from her bed to run a bath and, as the greenish water filled the noisy tub, looked in Harry's study for her old address book. If I find it before the bath runs over, she thought, Richard's address will be in there. She found the book before the bath was half full; she opened it, and there under P for Porter was Richard's address. Just reading it felt like a summons.

Ruth lowered herself into the water with the help of Frida's railing. The water amplified the white of her legs, but it smoothed and dazzled all the folds of her skin, so that half of her body was old and actual and the other half was marine and young.

Ruth was happy and clumsy after her bath. She dressed in a new nightgown. It was sleeveless and pale and, although short, felt bridal. Frida had chosen it and dismayed Ruth with its matronly florals; now, in the night, it shone. The heat of the house made a canopy over the hallway, where the moon came in through the fanned gla.s.s in the front door. The moonlight lay on the wooden floor like a deck of cards, and Ruth could see that the hall was straight and long and empty of tigers and birds and palm trees. She crossed it with her arms held out because she was afraid of falling (Harry's mother had fallen in her old age, after a lifetime of robust health, and had never been the same again), and when she opened the door to the lounge room, the light from the windows seemed to jump at her all at once. This room felt comparatively cool and quiet, but it contained an echo of heated noise all the same. It was this noise she was looking for.

Ruth found nothing in the lounge room but the stillness of her furniture, which was either in shadow or patterned by the lace curtains that fell between it and the moon. The moon seemed to be big and full whenever Ruth looked at it, and tonight it was emphatic, as if it had blown itself to a ball in order to a.s.sure her that there was nothing unusual in her lounge room. The moon was full on the s.p.a.ce in front of the house, but beyond that it was eaten up by the gra.s.sy drive. Anything might be lurking in that drive: a tiger or a taxi. Ruth walked through the dining room and looked at the garden. Everything on the sea side of the house was blasted white by the moon. All this emptiness had a carved quality that made Ruth want to swear. She loved the crowded bl.u.s.ter of swearing, the sense of an audience; it was so humanizing. She stood at the half-open back door and said "f.u.c.k," and wished for the comforting hot ticking singing jungle she had disturbed by getting out of bed. It didn't really sound like Fiji-at night in Fiji she heard cars on the road, her parents moving about, the telephone ringing in the hallway and her father leaving to see a patient, crepe myrtles rubbing at her windows, and the sound of hot water in the pipes when her mother ran a bath-but it sounded different enough to remind her of Fiji; it was enough to make her think of the room with the night-light and the picture of Sydney Harbour. The sound of the jungle was full, and everything here was empty.

Ruth went back to the lounge room and listened for some time. Every noise she heard was ordinary, and the cool room was stiff and airless. She lay on the sofa, turned her back from the lace of the windows, and waited. It seemed important that something might touch her, and crucial that she not open her eyes to look for whatever that thing might be. A tiger would be perfect, but anything would do; a bird, maybe, but it needn't be a bird. Just a fly. Just a frond of something, stirring in a yellow wind. Lying on the couch with her eyes closed, Ruth might feel her jungle come back; there might be yellow light, there might be a tiger to b.u.mp its broad nose against her back. The water, at least, might hammer in the pipes. Frida woke her the next morning by turning her on the sofa, peering into her face, and saying, "I nearly wet my pants, you idiot. I thought you were dead."

6.

Frida gave the floors a thorough mopping that morning and, a-swim in the alluvial muck, with her bare feet depositing grey tracks no matter how long she left the floors to dry, worked herself into a black mood. She persisted with her mop, and eventually the floors were smooth and softly lit. Then she became generous and hearty. She sat at the dining-room table, gazed magnanimously out to sea, and ate dried apricots. Her hair was coiled in a complicated triple braid, and the floors were, briefly, perfect.

Ruth joined her at the table and said, "Jeffrey thinks I should invite a friend to visit."

Frida chewed her apricots.

"What he wants," said Ruth, "is Helen Simmonds, who's a sensible woman he's known forever who'll ring him up and tell him everything."

Frida clicked at the roof of her mouth with her cheerful tongue.

"So I thought I'd invite a man instead."

Frida hooted. Her whole face shone with suggestive delight. "Well, well," she said. "Just when I thought I had you figured out."

Ruth, pleased by this innuendo, nevertheless dismissed it with an airy hand.

"Who is he, then?" said Frida. "Your boyfriend?"

"I haven't seen him in fifty years."

"Ex-boyfriend?"

"No. Sort of."

"Ha!" cried Frida, triumphant. "It's always the quiet ones who're up to no good."

"Oh, Frida, it was the fifties! n.o.body was up to no good. n.o.body I knew. It was the fifties, and in Fiji it may as well have been 1912."

Frida snorted as if there had never been a 1912.

"I mean Fiji in the fifties, is all I mean," Ruth corrected. "I don't mean Fiji is a backward country."

"I could care less if Fiji is a backward country," said Frida. Each apricot disappeared inside her benevolent mouth. Ruth began to worry for Frida's digestive system, but counseled herself not to; Frida was the kind of woman her mother would have referred to, with approval, as having the const.i.tution of an ox. As a child, Ruth was frightened of oxen, which rolled their eyes and ate the tops of sugarcane and were glossy flanked in the sun, but she knew now that her mother had never had those real oxen in mind when she complimented anyone's const.i.tution.