Authors: Fiona McFarlane

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

The Night Guest (29 page)

BOOK: The Night Guest

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“Now,” she said to the tiger, but he only swung his lazy head to his other flank and licked it down. He defined his stripes. He fastened them with his tongue.

So Ruth stepped closer. “Kit, kit, kit!” she said. She reached out with her arms and gripped the rough, warm fur on his shoulders. Now the bird in the tree began to sing out for the first time. It sang “Prepare! Prepare!” But there was no reason to be afraid of this calm tiger. He smelled like dirty water. She leaned her head into his soft chest, where his great heart ticked.

The cats found a home with Ellen Gibson. She learned of their plight because her sister was a receptionist at the veterinary surgery Jeffrey called to ask for details about the nearest cat shelter. He was apologetic on the phone, Ellen’s sister reported, but there were dogs and international flights and allergies to consider, and his tone was both guilty and defensive. Ellen knew that when Jeffrey called the surgery he had just come from the bank—various people had seen him there and witnessed his rage with the bank manager and with Gail Talitsikas, and they all talked about him in those fresh, suspenseful days, so that everywhere Ellen went she heard new details: that Frida’s surname was not Young, for example, and that the government had never sent her.

Ellen drove in her small red car to the top of the hill, parked it on the coastal road, and made her way to the house on foot. Her intention had been to arrive without fuss and with no air of judgment, but she was forced to battle with the scrub that had overtaken the drive. Low, stunted trees caught at her legs and in her hair, and the dune grasses shook off a seedy substance that made her sneeze. Jeffrey was waiting for her when she emerged by the house.

“It’s like a fairy-tale castle, isn’t it,” he said. He wore old clothes that might have been his father’s, and gardening kneepads.

“A little.” Ellen sneezed again and gave a small laugh; she felt both intrusive and self-righteous. She felt silly.

“It’s much better in a car,” said Jeffrey. “You just nose your way through and push everything out of the way.”

Ellen thought Jeffrey should be ashamed of having, among other things, allowed his mother’s property to reach this state; but she also remembered the condition of the drive only a week ago, which hadn’t struck her as nearly this impassable. It was as if the garden had deliberately grown up to hide the house. She gave Jeffrey a small, awkward hug, and he patted her shoulder lightly, as if to say, “There, there.”

“You seem to be the guardian angel of our family,” he said.

The angel of death, thought Ellen. She had thought about this. She was a bad omen; a bird circling overhead asking, “Are you all right?”—when no one was ever all right.

“I’m so sorry about—everything,” said Ellen; but that sounded like an apology and there was nothing, really, to apologize for. The part of Ellen that considered it Jeffrey’s place to cancel her apology and make one of his own was hushed by another, more sympathetic part. He was leaner than he’d been at his father’s funeral, as if that death had surprised him into cardiovascular diligence. But he also stood with one fist balled into the small of his back, stretching it out, as if he’d inherited Ruth’s back and was only just feeling it now. Maybe a family’s troubles, thought Ellen, are always with them, and they just pass among the members with every death. Of course—silly—that’s genetics, isn’t it.

“We’re very grateful to you.”

“Oh, there’s no need. I wish I could have done more.” She wished, actually, that she could have done less.

“We all wish we could have done more,” said Jeffrey, which was intolerable; for a minute Ellen let her full disgust at Jeffrey rise up from some bottomless place. If Ruth had been
my
mother, she thought, as she had thought so many times before; but she gave her head a compassionate tilt. It was difficult to think what to say. Jeffrey had a strange convalescent look, like a man recovering from a dreamlike illness, and all his movements had a submarine quality: he stepped over to a wheelbarrow that lay by the side of the house and half lifted it, then let it drop again. So he was suffering, which Ellen realized she required from him, and then she was afraid she would cry.

Phillip erupted from the house.

“Ellen!” he called. He looked like his mother, with that same light-haired, dairy-fed roundness of cheek, and he had her expansive smile. He was the baby of his family and had never quite abandoned the undignified safety of that position. His duty to be sweetly jovial was, under the circumstances, a great burden; he enfolded Ellen and held her for some time. He smelled of fresh laundry. When he released her, he was smiling—but sadly, lovably. He held her hand. Phillip was much easier to forgive than his brother.

“I feel like you’re part of the family,” he said as Jeffrey walked away from them around the side of the house. “Like you’re a sister.” Ellen preferred this to being an angel. She squeezed his hand in hers.

“I can’t imagine—” she began, but she could imagine, so she stopped.

They went inside to find the cats.

The house was tidy, but important objects were missing—the lounge, for example, and then, in the kitchen, the oven. The wall behind it was stained a deep, frazzled brown, as if there had been a fire. There were no longer any paintings or photographs on the walls, and the lounge room was full of funeral flowers. Ellen had sent hers ahead to the funeral parlour and now regretted it. Ruth’s favourite chair stood where the lounge should have been; it looked battered and bleached, as if it had sat outside for many days in strong temperatures. The dining table was covered in papers; Phillip swept his arm over them and said, “Everything the police didn’t want. You’ll have a cup of tea, won’t you?”

Through the windows, Ellen could see Jeffrey in the garden. He seemed to be pulling weeds out of the dune grass with some difficulty; or perhaps he was pulling up the grass itself. The sea behind him was a drenched green.

“Are you selling the house?”

“Absolutely.” Then, as if to temper the finality of this, Phillip said, “Yes.” He called for the cats by name but without conviction, and they didn’t come.

He was obviously adrift in the kitchen. He opened cupboards and closed them again, looking for cups and tea and sugar in a slow slapstick. Ellen sat in one of the dining chairs and made an effort not to look at the papers on the table. When the water began to rattle in the kettle, she said, “I hear they found Frida’s brother. That’s good news.”

“He was her boyfriend,” said Phillip, fussing with milk.

“Oh. For some reason I thought brother. I suppose that makes more sense.”

“More sense of what?”

“Of why she would just—give up. She didn’t strike me as the type.”

Then Ellen felt nervous at having raised the topic of Frida; at having said her name like a bad spell in this emptying house.

But Phillip didn’t seem to mind. “You met her, didn’t you?”

“Once,” said Ellen. She remembered the way Ruth and Frida had run together like lovers, and how embarrassed she was by that intimacy, and, later, how unsettled. A great deal of time seemed to have passed since the day she saw Ruth in town.

Phillip brought mugs to the table and cleared space among the papers with his elbow. He looked out at his brother in the garden. “I just got here yesterday,” he said. Then he went to the door and called out, “Jeff! Tea?” Jeffrey stood up from the grass with his arm pressed against his forehead and shook his whole torso to say no. He seemed to be holding a bundle of barbed wire.

Phillip turned to Ellen, who dutifully sipped her tea, and said, “I took the first flight out of Hong Kong. Jeff’s been here since Friday.”

“I wish I’d known. I could have brought food out.”

Now Phillip sat. “You know what we found among all this?” he said, indicating the papers. “Letters from a man she knew in Fiji. Love letters, all recent, most of them unopened. Did you know she lived in Fiji? We wondered if that’s why she dyed her hair. So Jeff called and told him, and he’ll be at the funeral. You’re coming, yes? Richard, his name is. He came out here to see her, and of course he met Frida. Everyone met her but us.” He blew on his tea. “What was she like?”

“It was so brief,” said Ellen. “She was very tall.”

“Her mother contacted us through the police. She’s English, apparently. The father was from New Zealand—half Maori. He’s been dead for years, and there was a sister, too, also dead, cancer. But this mother—she’s really something. She wants to come to the funeral.”

“Goodness,” said Ellen. “Is she local?”

“She lives in Perth, but she flew out. So that’s something else we have to decide.”

“I only talked to Frida for a few minutes,” said Ellen. “But I got the impression she really loved your mum.”

Phillip remained quiet for a moment. Then he said, “She was a cleaner, you know, at that nursing home. Seawind? Seacrest?”

“Seacrest Court.”

“We assume that’s how she got Mum’s details. Jeff rang them earlier this year when Mum seemed a bit wobbly, calling in the middle of the night with bad dreams, that kind of thing. The police think Frida and George were waiting for some opportunity or other, and there she was.” Phillip seemed so serene as he said all this, but Ellen suspected he wasn’t the kind of man to have complicated regrets. He was filled, instead, with a dulling, puzzling grief, which occupied everything. He rubbed one finger over the edge of his mug of tea, and outside his brother pulled weeds. Jeffrey had found Ruth lying under a tree in the garden, everyone knew, but Ellen didn’t think this accounted for his industry; he was probably just getting the house ready to sell. Some people in town disapproved of this haste, and others supported it.

Because the town, of course, was electric with all this news, with these events and fears and speculations. Some were sure they had seen George Young’s taxi parked at the end of the Field drive late at night or early in the morning; others had seen Frida arguing over cheques in the supermarket. Everyone called their aging parents or dropped in on them at nursing homes. For the couple of days after Ruth was found, when no one knew where Frida and George might be, Ellen, like everyone else, double-checked the locks on her doors and windows, as if anything might come creeping through in the night. And then on Sunday afternoon a fisherman discovered Frida’s body where it had been swept among the lighthouse rocks, and there was some disappointment in town; they wanted her brought to justice. She was too heavy for one man to lift out of the water, and by the time the requisite emergency services arrived, a crowd had gathered to watch. For two days, everyone had wanted this woman, and now she was hoisted from the sea. Then the danger seemed to have passed, but the flag stayed at half-mast on the surf club.

Now the cats came in from the garden, but they lingered at the door, unwilling, so Ellen leaned down and made kissing noises; then they approached with caution.

“You really are a lifesaver,” Phillip said, and that was awkward because—in the case of the cats, at least—it may have been true.

The cats wore imbecile expressions; they jumped superstitiously at their own tails, trimmed their tidy claws, and sniffed at Ellen’s offered fingers with mild curiosity. Phillip told her they weren’t eating a thing.

“In the spirit of full disclosure,” he said, “the tabby, the boy, throws up at least once a day.”

The tweedy boy cat looked vacantly at Ellen. He allowed himself to be handled into a carrier she had bought specially, and the tortoiseshell girl was similarly docile. They were fragile bundles beneath their important fur. They made no noise as they were carried from the house or were settled into the backseat, but they howled as the car descended the hill, with plaintive, inconsolable cries. As she drove past the bus stop, Ellen saw a cloud of seagulls rise in a body from the sea. They lunged for the sky, then fell back.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my family, Lyn, Ian, Katrina, Evan, and Bonita McFarlane; I think also of my grandmothers, Hilda May Davis and Winifred Elsie Mary McFarlane. I’d also like to thank my teachers, especially Elizabeth McCracken, Steve Harrigan, Alan Gurganus, and Margot Livesey. I’m grateful to Stephanie Cabot, Chris Parris-Lamb, Anna Worrall, Rebecca Gardner, Will Roberts, and everyone at the Gernert Company; also to my editors, Mitzi Angel, Ben Ball, Meredith Rose, and Carole Welch. This book was written with the generous assistance of the Australia Council for the Arts; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; St. John’s College, Cambridge; Phillips Exeter Academy; and the Michener Center for Writers—in association with these wonderful places, I’d like to thank Salvatore Scibona, Roger Skillings, Charles Pratt, Marla Akin, Debbie Dewees, Michael Adams, and Jim Magnuson. Finally, I must thank my friends, especially Mimi Chubb, Kate Finlinson, Virginia Reeves, and, most of all, Emma Jones.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney, Australia. She has degrees in English from Sydney University and Cambridge University, and was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Sydney.

Faber and Faber, Inc.

An affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First edition, 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McFarlane, Fiona, 1978–

The night guest / Fiona McFarlane. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-86547-773-5 (hardback)

1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Caregivers—Fiction. 3. Australia—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9619.4.M38355 N54 2013

823'.92—dc23