The Night Guest (14 page)

There was no sense of Harry in the room or in the bed; there was no sense of anything besides Ruth and Richard. There were noises, but Ruth didn’t speak. Richard was tender and obliging and prudent. He would probably have been the same fifty years ago, but now there was an additional care, a familiarity, and a relief in not loving him except retrospectively. She had observed something similar about sex with Harry as they grew older: that nothing depended on it, not in the way it used to. Richard was so calm, and he was so graceful, although his frame was thin and his breath scraped over her face. He was good-humoured, too, and patient; they both were. They attempted little, so as not to be disappointed, and also because less was required, but Ruth bit the inside of her mouth because she felt more pleasure than she expected to. This made Richard kiss her on the shoulder. Richard! The cats might have been here or anywhere, and Frida might have come down the drive and walked in on them; but she didn’t.

Afterwards, Richard helped her dress. They sat on the edge of her bed. He was still shirtless, and she saw moles on his lower back she’d never known were there.

“I wish I could stay,” he said.

“Why don’t you?”

Richard pulled on his shirt and laughed, and she shook her head in order to say, Of course not.

“It’s my granddaughter’s birthday tomorrow,” he said. He held her hand and kissed it. “I’m not going to ask you to marry me. I think it would be unfair to our children to muddy the whole question of inheritances. I mean, at our age. Do you mind my being practical?”

Ruth said, “Not at all.” And she didn’t.

Then he lay his head in her lap. She brushed back his hair so she could see the upturned dish of his ear.

“How would you feel about coming to live with me?” he asked.

Ruth saw herself sitting by Richard’s bed. She watched him dying. Frida had once said of Harry, “At least he spared you a sickbed,” and Ruth had been appalled. Now the weight of Richard’s head in her lap was both heavy and dear. She pressed the hair above his flat ear and might have bent to kiss his forehead, but he sat up and said, apologetic, “Sorry. I’m rushing things.” Then he was buttoning his shirt, and she saw how thick his fingernails had become, and how his hands shook. “But you’ll think about it?”

“Yes,” said Ruth. She stood up, aware of her calm, her lack of surprise, and her feeling not of great luck or pleasure but of amusement, as if someone had told her a slightly sad joke. None of this seemed urgent. They had waited half a century, so why were they talking like teenagers, as if they couldn’t bear to be apart? But she would think about it.

They were both dressed now, and they brushed each other down, laughing, the way their mothers might once have done. Together they walked through the house discussing possibilities. Ruth could come to Sydney in a few weeks. Richard could visit again. They could talk on the phone and write to each other. There might have been a conquering armada of whales in the bay, and they would never have noticed. In fact they avoided the sea and sat in the lounge room, where the white light of midafternoon flooded through the curtains, and Richard placed his right hand on Ruth’s left knee and said, “Please think about it.” They heard George’s taxi in the drive, which surprised them both; he wasn’t due for half an hour.

Frida had been gone long enough to do more than shopping, and Ruth was afraid for a moment that George was only here to pick Richard up; that this was his last act of service before he and his sister disappeared from Ruth’s life altogether. But there was a bustle in the garden, and then at the front door, of plastic bags and exaggerated breath, and then Frida announcing that George had a fare and would be back for Richard at the appointed time.

“So what’s news with you two?” She wore her grey coat and looked unusually jubilant.

Ruth and Richard smiled and shrugged.

Frida, distracted, was giddily confidential among her shopping bags. “Well,
I
have news. Big news. Shark attack at the beach.”

Richard and Ruth, still dazed, struggled up out of their privacy.

Richard managed, “A shark!”

“Oh, dear,” said Ruth. And she made Frida tell every detail—it was years since the last attack, and the news would be in all the papers: not a local boy (not the pineapple boy, thought Ruth), but a surfer who came regularly from the city; he wasn’t dead, not yet, but things were bad, loss of blood, and a leg that would most likely have to come off.

“He’ll either wake up dead or one-legged,” said Frida, with a small grimacing laugh.

So the visit came to an end in the commotion of this disaster. They all went out into the garden and saw a helicopter flying low over the bay.

“They’re tracking him,” said Frida.

“The boy?” asked Ruth.

“The shark.”

The knots of whale watchers scanned the sea in frantic sweeps. Frida walked down the dune towards them, and Ruth and Richard followed. Richard, gallant, held Ruth’s elbow on the slope.

It seemed natural for the whale watchers to turn to Frida and call out, as she advanced over the sand, “Is it a shark? A shark?” They gathered about her, and she answered all their questions with a festive confidence. A young girl in a wet bikini began to cry, and others took out their mobile phones to take photographs of the empty sea. There were no visible whales. There was instead a continuous scurfy roll of poststorm waves onto the shore. The helicopter produced an insectile buzz that came and went over the water. Richard held Ruth’s hand as they watched it, finally, lift away from the bay; then the group on the sand disbanded.

Richard went to help Ruth climb the dune, but Frida took her arm from the other side and almost lifted her away from him. Richard walked behind them; he was like a small boy whose every attention is focused on how inessential he is. So he must make unnecessary noise, and Frida must wilfully ignore him, and Ruth must not notice, must climb the dune in Frida’s arms with only the dune on her mind. But all the while she replayed the way he had put his hand on her knee and said, “Please think about it.”

The taxi was waiting for Richard. Ruth even saw, for the first time, the bulky and unmediated form of mysterious George. His window was rolled down and there he sat, in shade, at the wheel, with one meaty forearm crooked into the pink of the sun. Frida made no move to speak with or introduce him. Richard’s small suitcase was waiting by the front door. That was the weekend over; it had passed without Ruth’s noticing. She kept waiting for something more to happen, and she supposed it had; but she was still in a state of anticipation. It was George who spoiled things; George who took people away. His taxi was waiting, so Richard must wheel his suitcase out, and Ruth must stand with Frida on the doorstep and smile.

“It’s all right about last night,” said Frida.

“Of course it is,” said Ruth.

“What I mean is that I forgive you.”

Ruth and Frida held up their hands, and Richard waved from the back of the taxi, which reversed down the drive and vanished among the yellow grasses.

10

Ruth became sick almost as soon as Richard left. She decided these things were related, because of the timing—she couldn’t keep down the cup of tea Frida made her immediately after Richard’s departure—and because there was nothing specific about her illness. She was heartsick, possibly. It was too much to stir up her old heart, she thought; in her less sentimental moments, she berated herself for behaving like a schoolgirl, but remained quietly pleased at this evidence of her continuing romantic sensitivity. Still, she spent a few days in bed, always tired and rarely hungry, but never with a fever or headaches or any particular pain besides her back; she took her prescriptions and assured Frida that a doctor wasn’t necessary and her sons needn’t be alerted. Frida thought she had simply overexerted herself with Richard; Ruth blushed, but Frida paid no attention.

Frida was a good nurse. She made soup and cleaned and checked on her patient in a sensible way, clinical rather than confiding. She exhibited no sympathy, but was never dismissive of Ruth’s vague troubles. She kept Ruth’s fluids up and, having quizzed Richard on the benefits of fish oil for elderly brains, introduced a large capsule fuzzily full of golden liquid. Ruth’s only complaint was that Frida kept the cats from the bedroom. A new atmosphere of calm settled over the house; it was cool and clean, and noiseless in the night. Frida didn’t mention George, her money troubles, or the argument about living in Phillip’s room. During periods of restless confusion—when she had slept too much, or too little—Ruth would try to talk about Richard, but Frida, so serene and straightforward, only shook her head a little. She wore the plump smile of a Madonna who always looks over the head of her child, as if deciding what to cook for Joseph’s dinner. Ruth, considering the possibility of going to Richard, sometimes said aloud, “Why shouldn’t I? Who could stop me?” and other times argued, “Anyway, I’m not the kind of woman who would up and leave her whole life for a man.” At other times, she felt she had an important decision to make, but was pleasantly unsure of what it was. Frida read detective novels and said nothing. The sun came through the window in long lines over the bed, and these lines moved throughout the day, and then it was dark again.

These were comfortable days, although swampy and forgetful. Ruth found it easy to surrender to Frida’s care, and so, even when she began to feel better, she composed her face into wan expressions and pretended to sip soup. She was caught out of bed one morning preparing to smuggle one of the cats through the window, and there were recriminations.

“This is what I get, is it, for looking after you like a saint?” Frida cried. “All right, up and out. No more of this lying around with me waiting on you hand and foot.”

Frida behaved as if Ruth were not only better, but in the best of health: youthful, but lazy. She shooed her charge into the garden, where Ruth was expected to sit in the sun and tail beans or polish silver.

“And don’t tell me any old family stories about that silver,” Frida warned.

In the garden, in the afternoons, Ruth was supposed to “take the air”—instead of an indoor nap.

“We’ll have you walking on the beach in no time,” said Frida, as if Ruth had been accustomed to daily canters on the sand, and whenever Ruth complained about her back, Frida tapped her temple and said, “Have you ever stopped to think it might all be in your head? What’s the word for that? Jeffrey would know.”

“Psychosomatic,” said Ruth.

“Jeffrey would know.”

One morning, Frida returned from the letterbox with a pale blue envelope. She presented it to Ruth with some ceremony and hovered to see it opened. Ruth didn’t hurry. She looked at the return address: Richard Porter, and then the number and street of the house in Sydney she could live in if she wanted to. Frida shuffled and sighed beside her.

“Can you get me the letter opener?” asked Ruth. “It’s on Harry’s desk.”

“Just open it.”

“I want to slit it open. I want to keep the address.”

Frida shook her head and bugged her eyes, an uncharacteristically comic face, and went inside. This gave Ruth the opportunity to smell the envelope. She pressed her fingers along the closed flap, feeling the places where Richard’s hands—and maybe his tongue—must have touched. Ruth had expected to hear from him sooner, but she wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed since his visit.

Frida returned with a small, sharp knife from the kitchen.

The envelope contained a card, and the card held a sheet of that same thin paper on which Richard had written to accept her invitation to visit. The card had a photograph of a beach on it—not this beach, not Ruth’s bay—and the sky in the picture was a ludicrous blue. Ruth found it hard to imagine Richard selecting the card. It said, “To dear Ruth and Frida, with thanks for a very special weekend.”

Ruth passed the card to Frida, who took it with some care, as if it might be the bearer of exquisite news. Then Ruth read the note, which was addressed only to her: “Dearest Ruth, I hope you’re feeling better. I would love to hear your voice and know what you’re thinking. My garden is full of daylilies, all of them pink, which I want you to see—my daughter tells me I’ll enjoy them for another three weeks or so. She has the family’s green thumb—and all our fingers. Please telephone as soon as you’re well enough, or write, or else! Or else I’ll come back up there and fetch you.”

Ruth wondered if she would enjoy being fetched.

Frida was watching. “Can I see?” she asked.

“It’s private.”

“Oh,
private
.” Frida appeared to find this funny and raised her arms as if she were in a movie and a man in wacky stripes had just told her to stick ’em up.

“How does he know I’ve been sick?” asked Ruth. “Has he been calling?”

“He called,” said Frida.

“When?”

“When you were sick.” Frida stuck the card in the waistband of her trousers.

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you want me to start writing everything down? I’m not your secretary.” Frida shifted her weight from foot to foot. “He just wanted to tell us thank you. Like he says in his card. I don’t think you missed a big chin-wag.”

“If you must know,” said haughty Ruth, “he wants me to go and live with him.”

Frida’s face registered surprise for only a moment; then she corrected it. Ruth had never seen Frida off guard, and there was something alarming about the visible motion of her thought.

“And?” Frida said.

“I haven’t decided,” said Ruth. She already regretted telling Frida; she remembered a phrase of Mrs. Mason’s: “Trap your tongue if it tattles out of turn.”

But Frida said nothing more. She evidently had further questions, but wouldn’t lower herself to asking them. She flicked at the card in her waistband and rolled away into the house.

Jeffrey telephoned that evening. “I’ve just had a very interesting call from Frida,” he said. “She’s worried about you.”

Ruth wondered when Frida had found the time; she seemed to have spent the last few hours in the bathroom, dyeing her hair.