The Night Guest (20 page)

She might have cried, but one of the cats had climbed onto her chest and was clawing lovingly at it. She felt the fraying of her thin skin. In shifting to shake the cat off, Ruth managed to lift herself onto her elbows. This presented new possibilities. She saw her feet now, and that thin sickle was the edge of the sea. If she pushed her feet towards the water and kept her elbows propped underneath her, she could manage a slow backwards shuffle up the dune. She reversed an experimental inch and her back didn’t make any special objection. At first this filled her with wild energy. She thought of the grim joy of mountaineers trapped on glaciers, who realize they can cut off their own crushed arms. An inch later, she lay back in the sand, exhausted, and slid a little way towards the beach. She wasn’t overly disheartened, because she had accepted that this would take hours. Part of her welcomed the effort of it; it was so allegorical. The fight for life! Ruth was quick to feel sorry for herself, and quick to congratulate. This was deliberate on her part; a lifelong mechanism which in her opinion had served her well. She lifted her elbows and began her backwards crawl.

Everything was millimetres away, particularly the sea and the ending sun, but the house was impossibly far. Whenever she paused, she slipped down the dune, and those were precious millimetres lost; but if she didn’t rest, her eyes filled with the pain of her back, and her arms seemed to melt away. Then she had to lie back in the sand and stretch her arms out on either side of her, like wings; or she stretched them down over her body, to touch her thighs. She felt lumps in her skirt, fished in her pockets, and found pills. One more can’t hurt, she thought, and she swallowed a pill dry, gagging on her own sandy spit. Then she raised herself up and started again. This may have happened more than once. She learned to turn her feet outward to brace herself against the sand, and to hold on to the roots of the grass, which helped slow her slide. Her rests grew longer and the cats lost interest. Ruth felt the way she did on plane rides: empty, suspended, and consumed by the inconvenience of urination. She knew she had kicked free of the tiger trap when there were no longer any lilies around her feet.

The sun dropped before Ruth reached the edge of the garden. She was moving faster now; the grass was thicker, and she rarely slid. She rested half on the dune and half on the lawn and wondered if, summoning her strength, she might make one magnificent final burst for the house. This summoning of her strength took some time. A bright star came out—or was it Venus? Harry knew the constellations. He had taught her some way to look at Venus and figure out the direction of the pole. Or was that in the northern hemisphere? The sky was still bluer than the sea, but the lights were coming on in the town across the water, the Milky Way was scattering, and soon Frida’s tiger might run along the beach under the stars of that galaxy.

There was no sign of life from the house until the sky grew darker; then one window was lit, and another, so that half of Ruth’s body lay in shadow and the other half in a yellow square. Whose hand lit those lamps? Ruth couldn’t be sure. Frida’s, of course; but it might also have been Harry’s, and maybe her own. Until now she had never experienced vertigo while lying down. She thought she heard a male voice inside the house, but it might be the television. The cats were nearby begging for their dinner, but Ruth refused to join their chorus. She would never cry out. She lifted herself again and now was almost walking on her elbows, dragging her feet along; she made it to the house. She used the wall to reach a full sitting position, and she rested with her head against it, by the back door.

It was peaceful in the garden. It was so separate. The evening seemed to be stalling, to only reluctantly be growing dark. Ruth lay against the wall and thought of Frida inside the house, waiting for her arrival, but at the same time she was inside with Frida, sitting in her chair and being tended to. She was both in and out of the house; she was away from Frida, but bound to her; she was hungry. The cats cried out again—what a noise they could make, those tiny things—and finally somebody opened the door and stood above Ruth without speaking; all she could see was the light. Arms attempted to lift her, but she resisted them. She let her body go limp and drag, and eventually the arms gave up. Then the door closed. Someone was moving in the kitchen, feeding the cats and singing and cooking sausages. The fat smell of the sausages cleared Ruth’s mind. It came to her that the box hadn’t belonged to her father. It was Harry’s—it had come from his family, from the Solomon Islands, and it had nothing to do with her. How was it possible to forget a thing like that?

If the box wasn’t her father’s and the doors hadn’t been locked, then maybe Suva wasn’t the capital of Fiji. And what did that matter? There was so little of Fiji left to remember. There was only this feeling, which everyone must have about their childhood, that it was extraordinary in some way. But she had been to a royal ball. Ruth saw the small figure that was the Queen at the ball. It was funny to watch a queen grow old; it made Ruth feel as if she hadn’t grown at all. But of course they both had. They had expanded, as they must, into their responsibilities. She wondered if that was the point of a queen, if you had to have one: that she should help you mark the passage of time, because you saw every year how her profile on the backs of coins became softer with age, but at the same time she stopped you from noticing time at all, in the sense that she seemed fixed and immovable on her distant throne. How unlikely she appeared from here, on the ground, in the night, on the other side of the world. But there was something to knowing that one day, in 1953, they had been in the same place at the same time. So Ruth felt proprietary when Phillip talked about how unnecessary the Queen was, how anachronistic, and when she protested, citing the Queen’s dignity and suffering, Jeffrey was always careful to say, “We have nothing against her personally, Ma.”

“Yeah,” Phillip would say, “I’m sure she’s the salt of the earth.”

But didn’t salt stop the earth from producing greenery? Didn’t crops never again grow in fields sown with salt? So who would want to be the salt of the earth? And didn’t salt come from the sea? The salt of the earth, then, was sand. And Frida hated sand. Ruth thought she would wake up one morning and find that Frida had swept all of it into the sea. She imagined Frida with a great broom sweeping at the sea, and the obedient waves swallowed everything she threw at them. The beach would lie empty and open: rock and fossil, the immodest bones of dinosaurs, great petrified sea monsters, the ashy ends of ancient fires. After Frida, everything would be clean, white, and extinct. She would soap it all up with eucalyptus, and only then would she be happy. Ruth couldn’t tell if she wanted Frida to be happy. This seemed to be something Ruth had once—perhaps quite recently—held a position on. Frida, Frida, Queen of Sheba. And there, with the Queen in attendance, was Richard kissing Ruth—but all the time loving someone else. The thought of this—Richard’s loving someone else, loving her, or perhaps both, or perhaps it was the same thing—became, then, more exhausting than climbing the dune. It became juniper trees and pirate granddaughters and funerals, when she, Ruth, wasn’t even sure how she would stand up again.

There was a noise from behind her, a creaking, and then arms lifted Ruth out of the garden. She was too tired to oppose them. No one said a word, but doors opened and closed, and then she was lying on her bed. She drank water and swallowed some pills; after that, no one fussed. Ruth lay and lay and became hungry and restless, but because no one came to her, she fell asleep. Her back didn’t hurt her in the morning, and the sun was inviting in the grass. Ruth felt she was the only one awake in the house: no husbands, no boys, no one else stirring. She rolled up from the bed and found her handbag in Harry’s study; her coin purse was inside it. Ruth knew, without quite understanding why, that she must act quickly and make no sound. The front door did squeal a little as she closed it behind her.

The grasses in the shaded drive were so tall! It must be a good harvest. This was the way Harry walked in the mornings, out into the drive and onto the road, and so Ruth walked to the road and looked down the hill. She was surprised to see people at the bus stop. They crowded around it as if something dramatic were taking place. She made her careful way down the hill. What a spread the sea made from here, finer somehow with the road running alongside it. A particular glassy quality to its surface meant it lacked colour and was only shine; but by the shore it turned green. Ruth remembered explaining to her children that the glitter on the water was the reflection of a thousand thousand suns off each new angle made by the waves; every point of light was the sun, repeated. She must walk this way more often.

The people at the bus stop, it seemed, were not gathered for a disaster, but for the bus. They had come sandily from the beach—the sky in that direction suggested rain. The thought of rain worried Ruth, but she felt strangely placid, at a remove from the particulars of her life, and simultaneously at one with the pleasurable fates of the people around her, as if they were all waiting together at the gates of heaven. The bus arrived. She fumbled with her coins and had to be helped; the driver selected the correct change out of her palm, a bird after worms. A courteous young boy vacated his seat for her. She sat, feeling sentimental towards herself, feeling beloved and assisted, and watched as the displaced boy swayed farther up the bus. The rear windows depicted, like a painting, a heavyset woman descending the hill. Grey clouds fell into the sea. The windows were moving away from the woman. Oh, but she would be left behind! Ruth cried out, although she felt no distress. The man across the aisle cast a sceptical look in her direction, and Ruth smiled. Together they had all crested the next hill by the time Frida reached the bus stop.

13

The bus deposited Ruth on a hillside street where she expected shops and the railway station—and found only houses. Their tiled roofs were deep orange; they flared up against the colour of the sea like a warning against tidal wave or flood. The horizon felt higher than it ought to, so that the sea tilted dizzily down over the houses and Ruth found it necessary to walk with her hand touching their low brick fences. She remembered this street after all. She’d walked here once with Jeffrey, when he was a boy. He dropped a coin and it rolled beneath a parked car; she risked her back to recover it for him. He didn’t cry, but stood with his fists tight and an expression of unbearable suspense on his face. When she returned the coin, he thanked her so formally, and with such solemn grace, that he seemed like a foreign child accepting some attention from a tourist. Then he spent it, minutes later, on a tea bun, and was his sticky, happy self again.

A large red dog walked down the middle of the street. It moved its head from side to side, attentive, as if it were hunting. Ruth stayed pressed against the fences. She admired the houses, which were neat and unassuming, with white-framed windows sheltered by awnings and brick fences the same red as the dog. One of these houses might belong to Frida’s mother. Ruth’s shoulders had begun to ache, as if she’d been lifting heavy objects all night long.

She turned a corner and found herself on the main street of town. The shops nestled together in tidy rows; it felt like Christmas because lights were strung up across the road. Perhaps there were always lights now, to make shopping feel festive. She remembered the merriness of the butcher, who displayed annual signs declaring him the South Coast Sausage King. This was an official title, apparently, won year after year and jealously guarded. A taxi drove down the street and Ruth hid from it in the shade of the butcher’s doorway. That meant she blocked the opening door, and she and the door and the person behind it were forced to do a sprightly little dance, and the person, a woman, turned out to know her.

“Mrs. Field! Ruth!” cried this woman. She was so very small—“petite,” Ruth’s mother would have called her—that she made Ruth think of a little toy prised from behind the door of an expensive Advent calendar. Ruth tried to arrange her face into an expression of recognition; she must have failed because the woman said, with a hopeful smile, “It’s Ellen?”

“Oh, Ellen!” said Ruth, and in saying the name aloud did remember her as Ellen Gibson. “But how funny! Do you live here, too?”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” said Ellen. “I’ve been meaning to call you. It’s so nice to see you again.”

Ruth beamed. Yes, it was
nice
—what a true word that was, how fine and underrated. It meant more than kindness; it meant a fastidious effort to be thoughtful and good. To be nice in this world, thought Ruth, was to be considered—what? Milky and feeble, she thought; fragile. But Ruth valued niceness, and so did Ellen Gibson. This was their bond; this was why Ellen would stop her car to ask after an elderly man of distinguished bearing, breathing strangely on the side of the road.

“And how are you doing these days?” asked Ellen.

“I’m doing very well, my dear. And of course I have Frida to help me.” Ruth recognized Frida, then, as a shield of some kind; she seemed to be wielding her. “Frida cooks everything and cleans. She’s my right arm.”

“I’m so pleased,” said Ellen. “What brings you into town this morning? Some shopping?”

At this moment, Ruth was unsure what had brought her into town. She had an idea that her business would eventually lead in the direction of the railway station.

“Can I drive you somewhere?” Ellen was asking. “I’d be happy to take you home. I love driving out that way.”

Ruth wanted to accept because it would please Ellen so much. Wasn’t it wonderful to please people? But that was impossible. “I don’t want to go home,” she said.

“All right,” said Ellen. She wore sunglasses pushed up into her hair; that was why light flashed from the top of her head. “Can I take you somewhere else?”

“I have some shopping.” Ruth looked in her purse for her to-do list. She always brought a to-do list to town with her, and today it was missing—wasn’t that just typical? But she was there at the butcher’s. “Sausages,” she said, and the butcher’s door sang as she opened it; inside, the shop had a cold, bloody smell. Ellen remained for a moment in the street with a look of surprise on her face, but Ruth refused to let that worry her. The South Coast Sausage King stood behind the counter, chatting and joking, while his courtiers ordered lamb chops and steak. He knew her name, too; did everybody?