The Night Guest (5 page)

Ruth tried to imagine Frida holding someone’s hand; she could just about manage it.

“But even if you want to, you can’t. That’s divorce,” said Frida. It’s death, too, thought Ruth. “And then you forget. There are things I couldn’t even tell you how they taste. Ask me how something tastes.”

“I don’t know. Lettuce,” said Ruth.

“I’m allowed lettuce. I took lettuce. Ask me something else. Ask me about ice cream.”

“All right. How does ice cream taste?”

“I don’t remember!” said Frida. “That’s divorce.”

Ruth was enchanted by Frida’s divorce; she wanted to telephone everyone she knew and tell them all about it. But who was there to call? Phillip was never home, or she hadn’t calculated the time difference properly; she could tell Jeffrey, but he had never quite approved of what he referred to as her “wicked sense of humour,” by which he clearly meant “streak of cruelty”; he hated to hear people made fun of. So if she said to him, “This woman, Frida, divorced food,” he would probably make Ruth explain the whole thing and then say, “Good for her.” He was already inclined to approve of Frida. Ruth had sent him the paperwork, as promised; he also, according to Frida, sent regular e-mails with instructions on how to care for his mother, a field Frida was trained in, thank you very much, but, as you soon learn, the hardest part of this job is usually the families. Oh, the families.

Frida ate the last of her egg. “You’re naturally thin, aren’t you,” she said, with a trace of pity in her voice.

“I’ve got a bit of a belly these days,” said Ruth, but Frida wasn’t listening. She tapped the top of her empty egg until it fell inwards.

“It’s good, though, to be a big girl in this job. That’s what I’ve noticed. I’ve met nurses though, tiny girls, with the strength of ten men. Never underestimate a nurse.”

“I know something about nurses,” said Ruth, and Frida looked at her in what seemed liked surprise. “My mother was a nurse.”

“She took you to work with her, did she?” Frida asked, a little prickly, as if she had a tender bundle of children she had been instructed to leave at home.

Ruth laughed. “She had to, really. My parents were missionaries. She was a nurse, and he was a doctor. They ran a clinic together, attached to a hospital. In Fiji.”

This was the first time Ruth had mentioned Fiji in the weeks since Frida’s arrival. Frida didn’t respond. She seemed to be engulfed in an obscure displeasure.

“I saw how hard my mother worked, and how exhausted she always was,” said Ruth, nervous now, in a bright, chatty tone. “And I suppose she was never really what you would call appreciated, though she was very loved. My father’s work was appreciated, and my mother’s sacrifice. That’s how people put it.”

“What people?” asked Frida, as if she were questioning the existence of any people, ever.

“Oh, you know,” said Ruth, waving a vague hand. “Church people, hospital people, family. I’ve always thought of nursing as a very undervalued profession.”

Frida snorted. “I wouldn’t call
this
nursing,” she said. Then she stood; she seemed to call on the security of her height. She raised her eggcup from the table like a chalice, passed into the kitchen, and pushed open the screen door with one hip, still with the eggcup lifted high.

“For the snails,” she said, and threw the crushed eggshell into the garden.

The taxi called for her soon afterwards, and she left the house in an excellent mood.

4

Ruth often woke with a sense that something important had happened in the night. She might have dreamt a tiger again. She might have dreamt, as she used to, of Richard Porter in her bed—although surely, a dream like that should be of Harry. She did think of Richard more now that Frida was in the house, as if to have daily company reminded her of the existence of other people. Between Richard, and Frida, and this sense of curious importance, the weeks were crowded; they were also thick, Ruth noticed, with a strange hothouse heat. She shed blankets from her bed and wore light clothing—summer dresses, or cotton shorts with the small, soft T-shirts her sons had worn as boys. The cats lost their winter fur in springtime clumps, and Ruth continued to hear bird and insect sounds at night. But little happened: Frida installed bath rails and taught Ruth how to lie down and sit up with the least strain on her back; she mopped and swept; she introduced pills recommended by a naturopath friend of George’s, which were supposed to help with memory and brain function and, being made of an ordinary orange kitchen spice, turned Ruth’s urine bright yellow; Jeffrey and Phillip telephoned; these things filled the time, but were not extraordinary.

There was, however, the matter of the car. Ruth disliked driving and was frightened of Harry’s car; she peered at it through the kitchen windows; she worried over it at night. She began to live off Frida’s gifts of fruit and bulk canned goods, all sourced from some inexplicable friends of George’s, so that it was no longer necessary to drive or even take the bus into town. She lost weight. She ate the last of the pumpkin seeds, and they went straight through her. Once a week, under Jeffrey’s orders, she went out to sit in the car and run the engine; doing so, she experienced a busy, practical sense of renewal followed by the disquieting feeling she was about to drive herself to her own funeral.

One day, while Ruth sat in the driver’s seat, Frida’s head loomed at the window like a sudden policeman’s. Ruth’s heart jumped but she kept her hands on the wheel; she was proud of this, as if it indicated that, counter to her own belief, she was a good driver.

“You never drive this thing,” said Frida. “You should sell it.”

Ruth was afraid of the car, but she didn’t want to sell it. That seemed so irrevocable. “I couldn’t,” she said.

A week later, Frida raised the matter again. “I can think of three or four people who’d buy that car off you tomorrow,” she said.

“Driving means independence,” said Ruth, quoting Harry, who used to make her drive at least once a week. He called this “keeping your hand in.”

Frida shook her head. “Not if you don’t actually drive.” She promised that her brother’s taxi would always be at Ruth’s disposal, free of charge. “After all, you’re family now,” she said, with unusual gaiety.

She also offered to take over Ruth’s shopping, to buy stamps and mail letters, to pay bills, and to arrange house calls from the doctor if necessary.

“You can’t eat tinned sardines every night,” said Frida. “If the government’s paying me to do your shopping, you may as well let me do your shopping. That’s what I’m here for.”

Frida liked this phrase, if using it regularly indicated a preference. It seemed so adequately to sum up the melancholy importance of her willingness to serve. Still Ruth resisted the idea of selling the car. What if, alone at night, she heard an intruder and needed to get away? Or had some kind of medical emergency and the phones weren’t working?

“How would you drive in a medical emergency?” asked Frida.

“It might just be a burst eardrum. Or maybe there’s a problem with the cats and I need to drive them somewhere. You can’t call an ambulance for a cat, can you. Can you?”

What actually worried her, she was surprised to realize, was the tiger. Which was ridiculous, of course. But what if he came back some night on which she’d forgotten to close the lounge-room door? She would hear him coming down the hallway to her bedroom, intent on his agile paws, and her only escape would be the window. Ruth pictured climbing into the garden and crouching in the bushes waiting for the tiger’s superior nose to smell her out. As if, with her back, she could still climb and crouch! Or there might be a short moonlit dash over the beach with the tiger’s hot breath on her heels, the car meanwhile slumbering in the comfortable driveway of a more fortunate stranger.

“I won’t sell it,” she said, and turned the key to kill the engine, which was the wrong gesture if her intention was to prove her resolve. The car shuddered and wheezed before falling silent, the way a much older car might.

“Suit yourself,” said Frida, shrugging her round shoulders. “I’m only trying to help.”

After this discussion, Frida’s hair entered a dormant period of brittle French rolls. She spent more time with the floors and her eucalypt mop, and she made noises as she moved: sighs, soft grunts and groans; everything required some effort, some complaint, or, alternatively, an aggressively cheerful energy. She muttered in passing about aged drivers and overdue registration checks; she referred, more than once, to the difficulty of helping people who won’t help themselves. Frida stirred the house with these perceptible struggles and satisfactions, and Ruth found it easier to stay out of her way. She withdrew to her chair. She counted ships and pretended to read the newspaper. Jeffrey called with the idea of inviting a friend from Sydney to stay for the weekend; he suggested an unmarried woman who, Ruth knew, was a discreet and grateful guest and a diligent spy for the worried children of her elderly friends. Ruth nodded and smiled into the phone. Frida mopped, and the car waited.

The following week, Ruth sat in the driver’s seat facing the sea, which was level and green except in the path of the morning sun; there, it was ribbed with silver. She felt the familiar dread as she turned the ignition key, but today there was an additional terror: the car seemed to press in on her, as if it were being compacted with her inside it; the car felt so small and so heavy that it might at any moment sink into the dune, leaving her buried in a sandy hole.

“You hate this car,” Ruth said aloud, and lifted her hands to those places on the steering wheel that Harry had smoothed by touching so often. He believed in buying expensive European cars that would last a long time; this car vindicated him. It was sheathed in indestructibility.

“You hate this car,” said Ruth again, because she did hate it and was afraid, not just of driving it but of the expensive machinery of its European heart. Frida was right, as usual. She was probably right about everything.

But it annoyed Ruth that Frida was right, so she put the car in reverse and backed it down the long driveway with the surety that comes only from bravado. Frida came to the lounge-room window; Ruth could see hands shifting the lace of the curtains. But it was too late—Ruth was heading down the drive. Out on the road, she turned right, away from town. To her left were the hills; to her right was the sea. A low wing of cloud rolled away as she drove. It was July—the middle of the mild winter. The road was bright and grey, and the car so fast under her heated hands; the word she thought of was
quicksilver
, and that was an important word, a word for a pirate or a tomcat; her own cats had silly athletes’ names, human names she disapproved of and declined to use; how focused her mind felt, she thought, even with all of this in it, pirates and tomcats; she was moving towards a definite point and would be delighted to discover what it was. She would find it, and go home again. But her return would have to be perfect: a gesture of both surrender and magnificence. It would have to indicate that Ruth, although willing to sell the car, was not entirely ruled by Frida’s will.

Ruth followed the broad leftward curve of a hillside until she was a little dizzy, and there as the road straightened stood a roadside fruit stand with space for a few cars to park beside it. She had often wondered who stopped at fruit stands like this. Harry always refused. Now she turned off the road, bumped up the grassy verge, and sat for a moment in the stilled car. When she stepped out, the air felt newly polished. It both buoyed and stung.

A teenage boy, dark-skinned and light-haired from too much sun, manned the stall. His blinking face was scrubbed clean by boredom, and the surfboard propped beside him explained his look of marine longing. His stock was almost entirely made up of avocados, but a glorious pineapple caught Ruth’s eye. It shouldn’t have been there: a pineapple, this far south, in July! She approached and laid one hand on its corrugated hide.

“Busy today?” Ruth asked. She had emptied the car’s ashtray of coins, and now they weighed down her pockets.

“Nope,” said the boy, and he shrugged and sighed and looked towards the swelling sea. “I could of been out there for hours.”

“Could
have
,” said Ruth. She produced her coins. “I don’t know how much this amounts to, but I want to spend all of it.”

He was a fast counter. “Nineteen dollars and forty-five cents,” he said. Harry would have tutted at her for not clearing out the coins before now.

“What will that buy?”

The boy looked at the sea and then at Ruth. “Everything.”

It took ten minutes to load the car with everything. The boy’s chest seemed to expand with every carton; he began to chat about the weather and a shifting sandbar in the bay and finally allowed himself a luxurious scratch of his barely stubbled chin. The backseat was full of avocados, but the pineapple sat by itself in the front; Ruth was tempted to strap it in. The liberated boy waved as she drove away. The pineapple rolled a little into the coastal curves, and something about it—its swollen movement, its heavy golden smell, and the absurdity of its spiked green haircut—made Ruth feel like taking a holiday. It made her feel like driving forever and never coming back. But, she wondered, how do you take a holiday from a holiday? And by the time she wondered this, she was home.

Ruth hoped Frida might be waiting in front of the house, or at least hovering behind the front door. She wasn’t, so Ruth parked the car in its usual spot. The crushing sensation was gone; the car and the ground both felt solid. She thought of a time when she was young, with young sons, and only ever looked severe while driving: she set her lips thin, her elbows strained at ballet angles from the wheel, and her face took on an expression that used to frighten her children. It couldn’t be a mistake to put all that behind her.

Ruth called for Frida from the garden and the front hall; she went back and opened the car’s rear doors, looked at the avocado trays, and thought about lifting them. Only then did Frida come out of the house, drying her hands on the hem of her white shirt.