“Just a minute,” said Ruth, to both Frida and Jeffrey, and, with bashful urgency, as if she had a pressing need to urinate, she hurried into the lounge room and stood at the window. The yellow of the taxi was still visible at the end of the drive.
“I’m alone now,” she said, her voice lowered and her lips pressed to the phone. “Now, I’m not sure about this. I’m not doing badly.”
Ruth didn’t like talking about this with her son. It offended her and made her shy. She supposed she should feel grateful for his love and care, but it seemed too soon; she wasn’t old—not too old, only seventy-five. Her own mother had been past eighty before things really began to unravel. And to have this happen today, when she felt vulnerable about calling Jeffrey in the middle of the night with all that nonsense about a tiger. She wondered if he’d mentioned any of that to Frida.
“You’re doing wonderfully,” said Jeffrey, and Ruth winced at this, and her back vibrated a little, so she put out her left hand to hold the windowsill. He had said exactly the same thing when, on his last visit, he mentioned retirement villages and in-home carers. “Frida’s only here to assess your situation. She’ll probably just take over some of the housework, and you’ll relax and enjoy yourself.”
“She’s Fijian,” said Ruth, mainly for her own reassurance.
“There you are, some familiarity. And if you hate it, if you don’t like her, then we’ll make other arrangements.”
“Yes,” said Ruth, more doubtfully than she felt; she was heartened by this, even if she knew Jeffrey was patronizing her; but she knew the extent of her independence, its precise horizons, and she knew she was neither helpless nor especially brave; she was somewhere in between; but she was still self-governing.
“I’ll let Phil know. I’ll tell him to call you. And we’ll talk more on Sunday,” said Jeffrey. Sunday was the day they usually spoke, at four in the afternoon: half an hour with Jeffrey, fifteen minutes with his wife, two minutes each with the children. They didn’t time it deliberately; it just worked out that way. The children would hold the phone too close to their mouths; “Hello, Nanna,” they would breathe into her ear, and it was clear they had almost forgotten her. She saw them at Christmas and they loved her; the year slid away and she was an anonymous voice, handwriting on a letter, until they arrived at her festive door again; for three or four years this pattern had continued, after the first frenzy of her husband’s death. Ruth’s younger son, Phillip, was different: he would spend two or three hours on the phone and was capable of making her laugh so hard she snorted. But he called only once every few weeks. He saved all the details of his merry, busy life (he taught English in Hong Kong, had boys of his own, was divorced and remarried, liked windsurfing); he poured them out over her, then vanished for another month.
Jeffrey ended this call with such warmth that for the first time Ruth worried properly for herself. The tenderness was irresistible. Ruth was a little afraid of her sons. She was afraid of being unmasked by their youthful authority. Good-looking families in which every member was vital, attractive, and socially skilled had made her nervous as a young woman, and now she was the mother of sons just like that. Their voices had a certain weight.
Ruth followed the phone cord back to the kitchen and found Frida sitting at the dining table drinking a glass of water and reading yesterday’s newspaper. She had removed her grey coat and it hung lifelessly, like something shredded, over the back of a chair. Underneath it she wore white trousers and a white blouse; not exactly a nurse’s uniform, but not unlike. A handbag, previously concealed by the coat, was slung across her body, and her discarded sandshoes lay by the door. Frida’s legs were stretched out beneath the table. She had hooked her bare toes onto the low rung of the opposite chair, and her arms were pressed down over the newspaper. She read the paper with a mobile frown on her broad face. Her eyebrows were plucked so thin they should have given her a look of permanent surprise; instead, they exaggerated each of her expressions with a perfect stroke. And her face was all expression: held still, it might have vanished into its own smooth surface.
“Listen to this,” she said. “A man in Canada, right? In a wheelchair. They cut off his electricity one night, it’s an accident, they get the wrong house, and he’s frozen stiff by morning. Dead from the cold.”
“Oh, dear,” said Ruth, smiling vaguely. She noted that Frida’s vowels were broad, but her t’s were crisp. “That’s terrible. You found the water all right?”
Frida looked up in surprise. “Just from the tap,” she said. “Who’d live in a place you could freeze overnight? I don’t mind heat, but I feel the cold. Though I reckon I’ve never been really, truly cold. You know”—she leaned back in her chair—“I’ve never even seen snow. Have you?”
“Yes. Twice, in England,” said Ruth. Her back trembled but she bent, nevertheless, to reach for a cat. She wasn’t sure what else to do. The cat evaded her and jumped into Frida’s lap. Frida didn’t look at the cat or remark on it, but she stroked it expertly with the knuckles of her right hand. She wasn’t wearing any rings.
“He’s nice, your son,” said Frida. “Got any more kids?”
“Just the two boys.”
“Flown the nest.” Frida folded the newspaper to frame the blurry face of the frozen Canadian and shook the cat off her lap.
“Long ago,” said Ruth. “They have kids of their own.”
“A grandmother!” cried Frida, with bloodless enthusiasm.
“So you see, I’m used to being alone.”
Frida lowered her head over the table and looked up at Ruth so that each brown eye seemed cradled in its respective brow. There was a new gravity to her; she seemed to have absorbed it from the room’s more important objects, from the newspaper and the table and the rungs of Ruth’s chair. “Don’t think of me as company, Mrs. Field,” Frida said. “I’m not a guest. I come for an hour every morning, same time every day, I do my job, and I’m out of your hair. No surprises. No strangers showing up any time of the day or night. I’m not a stranger, and I’m not a friend—I’m your right arm. I’m the help you’re giving yourself. This is you looking after you, this is you mattering. Does that make sense? I get it, Mrs. Field, I really do.”
“Oh,” said Ruth, who believed, at that moment, that Frida Young “got it”: that she understood—how could she understand?—the tiger’s visit, the smell in the hallway, Fiji of course, that strange, safe place, and the dream of consequence in the silly night.
But Frida broke the spell by standing up. Her bulk arranged itself quite beautifully around her; she suited her size. And her voice was cheerful now; it had lost its thrilling, tented quality. “Let’s leave it at that for today,” she said. “It’s a lot to take in. And I’ve left my bag outside.”
Ruth followed her into the garden. “Lovely day,” Frida said, although it was a flat, pale day, and the sea lay dull against the dull sand. Frida paid no attention to the view. She stepped down the dune towards the suitcase with her elbows folded in and her hands up near her shoulders, as if afraid of falling. She was more graceful in descent; her back had so much strength that it made Ruth’s ache. Having retrieved the case, Frida paused to check the state of her hair, which was dark and drawn into a no-nonsense knot at the back of her head. The suitcase was heavy and she chatted as she heaved it.
“There’s nothing to worry about, Mrs. Field,” she said. A rim of sweat shone on her forehead. “We’ll talk duties tomorrow. I cook, clean, make sure you’re taking your meds, help with exercise. Bathing? You’ve got that covered for the time being, is my guess. Whatever’s hard on you now, I’m here for. You’ve got a bad back, am I right? I can see how careful you are with it. Gotta look out for your back. Here we go.” Frida hoisted the suitcase over the lip of the dune, swung it across the garden and into the house, and brought it to rest next to Ruth’s chair under the dining-room window.
“What’s in there?” asked Ruth.
“Only about three thousand kilos. I’ve got to get me
one of these with wheels.” Frida kicked the suitcase at the same moment a car horn sounded from the front of the house, so that the suitcase appeared to have honked. “That’s my ride,” she said. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock suit you?” She seized her coat and hunted for her sandshoes until Ruth pointed out where they lay beside the door. The car horn came again; the cats jumped and flew in giddy circles around Frida’s feet. Frida didn’t bend to pet them; instead, she looked around the kitchen and dining room as if surveying the goodness of her creation, and walked with confidence down the hallway to the front door.
“You have a nice house,” she said. She opened the door. Ruth, following, saw the rectangle of light from outside, the shape of Frida in the light, and, dimly, the golden flank of a taxi.
“The suitcase?” Ruth asked.
“I’ll leave it, if that’s all right with you,” said Frida. “Bye now!” She was closing the door. By the time Ruth reached the lounge-room window, there was no Frida and no taxi. The grass stood high in the winter garden, and there was no sound besides the sea.
2
Ruth’s husband, Harry, used to walk, every day, to the nearby town to buy the newspaper. He undertook this exercise on the advice of his father, who retained a spry step well into his eighties and had the blood pressure of a much younger man. It was on this walk that Harry died, in the second year of his retirement. He proceeded from the front door of his house down a narrow lane (Ruth and Harry called this lane their drive), heading away from the sea. The sea disappeared; the air altered suddenly, became more dense, and smelled of insects rather than seaweed; the laneway was just wide enough for a car, and so Harry, a tall man, could stretch out his arms and touch the high grass and casuarinas on either side of the drive. Behind him was the house, the slope of the dune, the broad beach, and the beginning of the sun. This was six-thirty in the morning no matter the weather. He was in his stride by the time he reached the coastal road, which fell away down the sandy hill on which his own house stood. At the foot of this slope, a small bus stop waited in humble circumstances—a torn billboard, a splintered bench—and here Harry leaned against the black-and-yellow sign that read STOP! BUS and felt the strange movement of his active heart. Or so Ruth imagined. Harry sat on the bench with his back to the road. He wore a light blue down vest that was swollen in the back, just a little, as if designed to accommodate a minor hunch. From here he could observe the passage of seagulls over the estuary that separated the road from the beach. He had loved this beach since childhood.
Harry’s noticeable height, his excessively straight posture distorted only by the swell of his down vest, the neat white brush of his hair and the startling black of his eyebrows, the soft, dishy ears that sat at a slightly odd angle from his head, and the unusual tremble of his hands in his dignified lap: all of these things attracted the attention of a passing motorist, who drew up alongside the curb. This motorist, a young woman, leaned across the passenger seat of her car, lowered the window, and asked Harry in a loud voice if he was all right. Harry was not all right. His chest moved violently with every heartbeat, and as he turned his body away from the sea and towards the road, he began to throw up onto the sandy concrete. The motorist recalled afterwards that Harry had leaned forwards to avoid soiling his clothes, that his left hand was pressed against his ribs as if in womanly surprise, and that he made an effort to kick sand over the vomit, his head bobbing up and down in a helpless motion of agreement.
The motorist, whose name was Ellen Gibson, described these things to Phillip and Jeffrey the day after their father’s death. They quizzed her, and she was forthcoming. There was a phrase Harry liked to say: “to die like a dog in the gutter.” He said it of men he didn’t approve of but was willing to tolerate (certain prime ministers, for example): “I don’t like what he has to say for himself, but I wouldn’t leave him to die like a dog in the gutter.” This sentiment formed part of the expansive democracy of his generally approving heart. Jeffrey, with some objections from his younger brother, told Ruth what Ellen had told him, and Ruth loved this Ellen who had made sure Harry didn’t die like a dog in the gutter. Ellen held Harry when he began to slip from the bench and onto the ground; she assured him, again and again, that everything would be all right. He was dead when the ambulance arrived.
At Harry’s funeral, a group of kindly mourners introduced Ruth to a small, tearless, hesitant woman. They called her “the young Samaritan.” Until that moment Ellen Gibson had been a principle of humanity and coincidence; now Ruth must acknowledge her as the person who had seen Harry die. Ellen looked young as a teenager, although she was known to have two small sons. She would not allow Ruth to thank her; Ruth would not allow Ellen to express regret. The women held hands for a long time while the funeral eddied about them, as if hoping to communicate to each other a love that couldn’t be justified by the scarcity of their contact.
Now, without Harry for five years, Ruth was prepared to accommodate the possibility that good strangers could materialize and love her for no reason beyond their goodness. Ellen was proof of that; why shouldn’t Frida Young be? Another sort of woman could have convinced herself that Harry—still present in some way—had sent Frida to look after his wife; not Ruth, who was vaguely optimistic about the afterlife, but never fanciful. She felt similarly about the government and was ready to accept that it might provide her with Frida after a long, sensible, law-abiding life. Ruth and Harry had never begrudged paying taxes. Roads! Libraries! Schools! Government carers! Of course Harry hadn’t sent Frida, but Ruth had a feeling he would approve. Her sons would approve, and their wives; so would Ellen Gibson, who dropped in every now and then with a cake or a new book. And Ruth liked approval. It had shored up her life. It had made her blessedly ordinary, and now it made her want to swear; but she still liked it.
With Frida and the taxi gone, Ruth had the day to herself. Oh, the gentle, bewildering expanse of the day, the filling of all those more-or-less hours. She inspected Frida’s suitcase, which was taking up audacious space in the dining room: an old-fashioned cream-coloured case, similar to the one Ruth had carried when she first sailed to Sydney in 1954. It was heavy, and locked. Ruth worried for a moment that it might contain a bomb, so she nudged it with a gentle foot and thought she heard the washing of bottled liquid. This reassured her. Obeying her earlier contract with the number of waves seen from the window, she swept the garden path of sand. She rested her back and watched the sea. She ate sardines on toast. She took a long shower, sitting on the plastic stool Jeffrey had bought during his last visit.
As she went about these activities, she thought about the tiger. She thought, too, about other periods of her life when she had felt something approaching this sense of personal consequence. There was her missionary childhood, during which she was told repeatedly that she was part of a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God. She saw it, now, as a strangely urgent life, in which her father must heal the sick and save their souls, and the flowers bloomed in useless profusion, and there was too much of everything: sun, and green, and love. Her parents were fine singers, and every night her mother played hymns on a damp piano. Ruth used to read letters from her cousins back in Sydney and feel sorry for them, with their ordinary lives. Her parents had been called to serve, and she had been called with them. She had been named for a stranger in a strange land. “How bitter is the path of joy,” she would say to herself; she had read that somewhere. There was never, at that time, a moment to lose. Even as she grew older and the strong, wet light of Fiji dazzled her less, and the hymns, too, seemed less luminous, Ruth was caught up in consequence. She fell in love—of course she fell in love—with a man named Richard Porter. She was unskilled, and prudish, and baffled by love; she managed it badly. That was dreamlike, too. Every night she endured violent dreams of impossible pleasure. She received her own body, and ate a meek breakfast in the morning.
Then Ruth grew up and left Fiji. She went to Sydney, where her cousins wor
e the right clothes and knew the right songs; they exchanged friendly jokes about her weird, fervent childhood. And so she made, from then on, a conscious effort to live an ordinary life, like those of the people she saw around her: people who grew up where they were born, among their own kind, and made their merry, sad way through a world they understood entirely. For only one period, after coming to Sydney, did Ruth recover her sense of the extraordinary: during a childhood illness of Phillip’s, a severe case of pleurisy. For four weeks, Phillip lay in bed with his chest bound. There was fever, pain, and a dry cough like sheaves of papyrus rubbing together. Ruth remembered this period of her life in more detail than any other; the sense of urgency she felt lent significance to the most trivial things. She could still recall, for example, the exact order of the books on the shelf beside Phillip’s crib. His laboured breathing reminded her of a toy train ascending a mountain; she thought of it now as she washed herself in the shower, balancing on the plastic stool. She thought of that row of children’s books. She could see, in the shower tiles, the faces of animals, and also the man in the moon. By then it was dark, and she had succeeded in passing the day; she had survived it. Before going to bed, Ruth closed the lounge-room door as a precaution against tigers.
She woke, just after three, to the possibility of sounds from the lounge room. The cats stirred when she did, but subsided into sleep. She listened for some time, blinking herself awake in the grainy dark, but could hear only an unusual noise of birds and insects, as if it were summer outside, or maybe a jungle. There was a whine or two that might have been a tiger, but might also have been the cats snoring; they produced so much noise for such little sleeping things. Ruth listened for him, her tiger, her consequential visitor, until her eyes drowsed shut. He was a one-off, then, she thought, on the edge of sleep and disappointed.
The Night Guest Page 2