The Night Guest

by Fiona McFarlane

  Ruth, smothered, only shook her head.

  “Who did you see in town, hey?” Now Frida was walking them into the house. “Did you plan to meet Ellen? Who else were you chatting to?”

  When they reached the front hall, Frida released Ruth against the coatrack before locking the door and leaning against it with small exhalations that still managed to lift her chest to her chins.

  “No one,” said Ruth. She stood nestled among the winter coats, which hung all year in the hall and gave off a stale, resentful smell. There was the vaguest odour, too, of Harry—just a fugitive whiff. Ruth thought she might have stood among the coats after he died, searching out that smell. “Only Ellen. I bumped into her outside the chemist. Wasn’t that a lovely piece of luck?”

  “Just lovely,” said Frida. “Just absolutely darling.”

  Frida seized Ruth’s purse and reviewed it in a businesslike way.

  “Oh! And the Sausage King,” said Ruth, proffering the white parcels. She anticipated a scolding for omitting the Sausage King, but Frida only straightened her shoulders as if she needed to reassert her own majesty.

  “Now listen,” she said, “I’m going to get this over with. There’s been a small accident while you were out, but don’t worry. Hardly any damage done. This way—it’s the kitchen.”

  Ruth followed her down the hall.

  There had been a fire in the kitchen: a small, blackish, crawling kind of fire, apparently, because the kitchen hadn’t burned. Instead it seemed to have expired, having first given up on something—some former dignity, some presumed usefulness—before slumping into despair. Dark streaks spread up the wall from the oven as if painted by a brush of smoke, and the smell was intense—the comforting fug of a house fire, mingled with something bitter and almost salty. Sooty water puddled the floor.

  “Oh,” said Ruth.

  “I’m sorry,” said Frida. She didn’t seem to be apologizing so much as imparting information. “I went crazy when I couldn’t find you—I forgot I had oil on the stove.”

  Ruth considered the stubbed kitchen. “What do I do?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “How do I fix it?” Ruth supposed she would have to fix it.

  “You don’t fix it. I fix it. Like I fix everything.”

  “That’s what you’re here for,” said Ruth.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Frida. “Now take a seat. I can’t believe you, running off like that. What am I going to do with you?”

  She began to bustle in the kitchen. Ruth sat in her chair and felt weighed down by gratitude for Frida, who fixed everything. It was as if something heavy and warm had been placed on her lap. Then a thought came to her, and she said, “But what were you cooking?”

  “What now?” called Frida, as if her head were buried at the bottom of some inconvenient cupboard, among linens, when in fact she was only putting the butcher’s parcels in the fridge.

  “What were you cooking when the oil caught fire?”

  Frida sighed and stalled behind the fridge door. “Fish fingers,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Why, Sherlock, do you want to see the box? Do you want to check the garbage?”

  Ruth laughed. “I only wondered.”

  Frida ran into the dining room, sat at the table, and surprised Ruth—seemed to surprise herself—by beginning to cry again. What a fragile Frida she was today. Ruth felt so sad for her.

  “This is too much for me,” Frida said in a voice entirely unaffected by the weeping; but Ruth could see the tears on her face and the despairing lift to her shoulders.

  “Oh, no, no,” Ruth said. “Don’t cry, dear. Everything’s lovely. Everything’s fine.”

  Then Frida lowered her head onto the table. Her hairstyle seemed perfectly designed for this maneuver because it remained fixed in a rigid bun. Ruth could undertake a detailed inspection of the back of Frida’s neck. It was smooth, except for one thick fold that traversed it like a defensive moat. Her skin was paler than Ruth remembered it, which worried her momentarily; she scrutinized Frida’s arms, which were pale, too, and sallow; then she remembered that winter was barely over. Everyone paled in the winter. Ruth saw that Frida’s hair was currently a nutty brown, a rich yuletide colour, which matched her lighter shade perfectly. How clever she was, and how farseeing. But fish fingers? In oil? And in the morning?

  Frida looked out at Ruth from the cradle of her pastel arms. “You’re too good to me. Last night—”

  “Now listen, my dear,” said Ruth, who had an idea that a kind severity was called for in response to such statements. “There’s no need to cry. There are plenty more fish in the deep blue sea.”

  Ruth found it easy to say these things from the safety of her chair. It was a little like recovering a language she’d forgotten she knew and still wasn’t entirely sure of the sense of.

  Frida lifted her head from the humid table; her face was blotted and wet, but she had stopped crying. “You’re a funny old thing.”

  Ruth didn’t feel funny, but she smiled and smiled.

  14

  Later that day the telephone rang. The noise startled Ruth, who was dozing in her chair, half aware of Frida’s cleaning the kitchen. Ruth was pulled from a dream about a trapeze and a public swimming pool; she was hoisted in the air, on the trapeze, and the water glinted below, dangerous in some indefinable, chlorinated way.

  Frida answered the phone. “Yes, Jeff,” she said. “A little adventure, yes. She’s fine, the silly duck. She probably won’t remember any of it tomorrow.”

  And then: “Now, Jeff, it’s not exactly—”

  And finally: “Sure, sure, here she is.”

  Frida presented the phone to Ruth, then returned to scrubbing the brown kitchen. Ruth held the receiver to her ear.

  “Ma? I just had a phone call from Ellen Gibson.” Jeffrey’s voice came at Ruth from around a suspicious corner.

  “Lovely Ellen!” said Ruth.

  “I hear you went into town today. What was that for?”

  “I felt like it,” said Ruth. She suspected she was in trouble, but couldn’t decide how to feel about it. “I’m allowed, aren’t I?”

  Jeffrey was quiet for a moment. “I was thinking I might come out for a visit soon, see how you’re getting on. What do you think of that idea?”

  “That sounds nice,” said Ruth. She had not yet considered it an idea, nice or otherwise.

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “There’s a problem.” She was filled with sudden anxiety; but what was the problem?

  “There is!” Jeffrey pounced as if he had lured her into a confidential trap.

  “I know!” she cried. “I can’t get to the railway station.”

  “You don’t need to pick me up from the station, Ma. I’ll take a cab.”

  “Oh, that’s marvellous! That’s just as well. I’ve lost your father’s car.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve lost Dad’s car?”

  “It’s not lost, of course not. It’s sold.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were selling Dad’s car.”

  “I’m not selling it,” said Ruth. “It’s sold.”

  “When was this?”

  “Frida arranged it.”

  “She did, did she?” Jeffrey used Harry’s lawyerly voice—ruminating, withholding, sure of some hidden possibility that ticked over in his mathematical mind. “Listen, how about this coming weekend? I’ll have to check flights, but if I come on Friday night, how’s that?”

  “Yes, all right, yes,” said Ruth. Then the proximity of Friday startled her. “This Friday? So soon?”

  Frida stopped scrubbing and looked over her shoulder.

  “The sooner the better,” said Jeffrey, and this seemed to decide it. Yes, the sooner the better. “Friday, then. You don’t have any more mysterious visitors coming, do you? No more boyfriends? We’ll have a great time. We’ll play Scrabble and look for whales.”

  So Jeffrey didn’t care about the trip to town; not
the way Frida cared. He was her good and generous son, her forgiving son. How kind and clement he was. He was just, as his father had been—he was unyielding, but also compassionate. He was the law. Ruth called Frida over to hang up the phone. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  But Frida’s face was a cliff under a cloud. “What’s happening on Friday?” she asked, leaning against the wall as if she had been washed up, just like that, on the beach. There was a general look of wreckage about everything surrounding her, but the dark streaks on the kitchen wall did look cosier after their scrubbing; almost old-fashioned.

  “Jeffrey’s coming,” said Ruth.

  “Why? What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing,” said Ruth. She felt as if she’d been caught up in a procession of events over which she had no control; but she was calm.

  “First Ellen, now Jeff. Those two stickybeaks are in it together.” Frida said Ellen with a specific spite. She walked from the table to the window and back again, and when she reached the window for a second time, she tapped it with one calculating hand. “There are a couple of things we might not mention to good old Jeff,” she said.

  “What things?”

  Frida was coaxing and deferential. “Obviously the tiger.”

  “I thought you were proud of the tiger.”

  Frida failed to look proud. She seemed to have failed, generally, in some important way. She gave an impression of pending collapse that she warded off only by tapping the window.

  “If Jeff knew everything I do for you, he’d only worry. He’d put you in a home, and you know what that means: no more house. No more sea views. No more picking and choosing what you want for dinner. No more Frida.”

  Ruth sat with this possibility. It seemed quite soothing to her, at that moment.

  “And he’ll never let you go to Richard—you know that, don’t you? No one’s going to let you do that. They’ll say you’re too old and he’s too old, and you can’t look after each other. They’ll say it’s not in your best interests.”

  “Who’ll say that?” asked Ruth, startled, not just by the thought of being stopped, but by hearing Richard’s name, which had been important to her last night, or even this morning. She had, hadn’t she, wanted to go to him?

  “Jeff will,” said Frida.

  “Jeffrey can’t stop me.”

  “But the law can stop you, if Jeff wants it to. The government can stop you.”

  “You’re the government,” said Ruth.

  “Well, I quit.”

  “When?”

  “Right now,” said Frida. “But I can help you, Ruthie, if you help me.”

  Ruth nodded. She needed time to think; also, she was hungry. Why did her shoulders still hurt?

  “So that’s decided. Now I’m going to use the phone,” said Frida. “I’m going to call George.”

  “Maybe George can sort out the garden.” Ruth was worried about the state of the garden; Jeffrey wouldn’t like it.

  “I’m going to call him from my room. In private.”

  Ruth nodded again. It felt good to nod, so she continued to do so; yes, she said with her pendulous head, and yes and yes again; she was a clock, she thought; she was generous and wise. Frida left, and Ruth went into the lounge room. She went looking for Richard—not because she thought he would be there, but because she might find evidence of him. There might be something to tell her he really had put his hand on her knee and said, “Please think about it.” But the only unusual thing in the lounge room was a dent in the lampshade, which Ruth attempted to smooth and only deepened. Lifting her arms towards the light, she noticed funny yellow patches on her skin.

  The cats had followed Frida to Phil’s room and were probing at the closed door with their adventurous noses; they gave out little cries, and Ruth called for them to come. At the same time, Frida raised her voice. She must be shouting at George. Ruth supposed he didn’t want to come and sort out the garden. A new idea came to her: that George, and not the cats, was responsible for its wreckage. Possibly George was responsible for everything. He assumed a new shape for her then: sinister and godlike. Then Frida must have let fly with her foot or her arm; something crashed. The cats baulked and blinked and turned to Ruth for comfort. She coaxed them onto the lounge, where they stretched and sat in funny bundles.

  “I don’t think I want an angry man in the house,” she told them, but she wasn’t sure exactly which man she meant. Maybe Jeffrey? But why was he angry? Maybe George. She couldn’t mean Richard, who wanted her to go to his house. Frida’s voice rose, indecipherable, from her bedroom.

  Ruth sat among the cats. They bumped their heads against her and their claws needled her lap. Every window was open, and the front and back doors, because of the smell of the fire. Still the house was hot, and the smell had only intensified. It was a sharp, unmistakably burnt smell, but it reminded Ruth of the night jungle; it had the same colour. The lounge-room clock sounded five times, and with each chime the cats twitched and sank.

  Frida appeared in the lounge-room doorway. She looked undone. Her hair had strayed from its style, her mascara was smudged, and her white beautician’s pants were soiled with ash. “I have some bad news,” she said. “It’s George.”

  “What’s George?”

  “It’s really bad.”

  “Oh, Frida,” sighed Ruth. She thought she knew. She saw George dead in the road, entombed in his taxi. She saw him prone in the grass, maybe a heart attack. Possibly in the sea—buoyant, with burst lungs. There were so many possibilities. Maybe smoking one day, alone in the dunes, and then—the tiger. Yes, she could see that: the water sprawling below his feet, the smoke near his face, a view of her house from where he sat, and also the town—the rigid flag over the surf club—and the tiger, downwind, stalking unfortunate George. She would say to Frida, “I’m sure it was all over quickly. I’m sure he felt no pain.” She would say, “I wish I’d known him better.” But she had no wish to know him better. She preferred him as a dark shape in the front of a taxi.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, but Frida said, “What for?” so quickly that Ruth knew to be quiet.

  “Right then,” continued Frida. “George has stolen all my money and lost the house and ruined me.” She calmly announced this deadpan disaster.

  “No!” cried Ruth. Panic and horror were a handkerchief at her throat. “But you just spoke to him!” Frida just spoke to George, so he couldn’t be dead in the taxi or from the tiger; he couldn’t have stolen all her money.

  “That’s how I know,” said Frida.

  “But how?”

  “Because he told me, is how,” said Frida, defensive, as if she suspected Ruth of not believing her.

  “But how did he steal all your money?” This genuinely puzzled Ruth, who had never considered stealing anyone’s money and wondered how to go about it.

  “It’s to do with Mum’s house.”

  “The house she died in,” said Ruth.

  “Yes, yes,” said Frida, impatient. “I’ve been giving him my salary and he hasn’t kept up with the mortgage and they’re going to take the house.”

  “Who are?”

  “The bank,” said Frida. “Unless I can pay them right away. And the worst thing is, I can’t just catch up on the mortgage. It’s still legally half George’s house. So I need to get the mortgage up-to-date and buy half the house from George. Otherwise I’ll lose it.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” said Ruth. “You just keep giving George money? That can’t be right.”

  “It doesn’t matter, because I don’t have any money to give.”

  “I know what we’ll do,” said Ruth, and Frida raised her head with a quick, sharp look. “We’ll talk to Harry. He’ll know how to sort all this out.”

  “Jesus,” said Frida.

  “He’s a very good lawyer.”

  Frida sank into the catless end of the couch. “Ruthie,” she said, with unexpected softness, “Harry’s dead.”

  “I know that,” snapped R
uth, and she did know it; she had even known it a moment ago when she suggested they consult him. And she was disgusted with him, because nobody could be really, truly dead; nobody could stand it. It was one thing, maybe, to die—and Ruth held his head as Harry died, she remembered that now, she saw the sand on the pavement at the bus stop and Harry’s shaking dying head—but it was quite another to go on being dead. That was obstinate; it was unkind.

  Frida buried one hand in the yielding fur of the nearest cat. “I do have an idea,” she said. “We might be able to help each other.”

  The cat twitched under her fingers, stood and yawned, and trotted onto Ruth’s lap.

  “Richard,” Frida said. “I can help you with Richard, and you can help me with George.”

  “Do I need your help with Richard?”

  “You need me on your side if you’re going to convince Jeffrey. You need me to say, ‘In my professional opinion, your mother should go live with Richard.’”

  “Should I?”

  “I went to see his house yesterday. I wanted to see the setup there, whether or not it’d be good for you.”

  “And?” A tiredness came over Ruth; it felt like a blanket, suddenly pulled. She thought she might have done the pulling.

  “It’s a really nice place. All on one level, a huge kitchen, even a spa bath. It’s too deep for you right now, he doesn’t even use it, but I could put railings in and—bingo!”

  “What about the garden?”

  “Very pretty. His daughter looks after it. Jacaranda tree, big herb garden, brick patio.”

  “Lilies?”

  “He picked the last of them for you. And he has this one fat palm tree that looks exactly like a pineapple.”

  “Good for the cats.”

  “Well, that’s one downside. His daughter’s allergic to cats. I thought about not mentioning that, by the way, just for the record. But you just lock them up when she visits. Easy fixed. The other thing is that he sleeps with this mask at night, it’s for his breathing, and it’s loud.”

  Ruth closed her eyes at the thought of these loud nights. “I can’t believe you went there without me,” she said from her lidded darkness. She saw the garden: green, with a fence, and other fenced greens at its edges. She saw that ear of Richard’s again, horizontal against his head, and his head lying still: his sickbed. And no more sea.