The Night Guest: A Novel Part 11

"Poor dear crazy. Give them here."

"I'm not crazy."

"Confused, then. As usual, poor Ruthie's just a bit confused."

"No," said Ruth, but she recognized the word confused as approaching what she was, after her sticky, bright dream.

"All right," said Frida. "Let's see. How old are you?"

"Seventy-five."

"What colour are my eyes?"

"Brown."

"And what's the capital of Fiji?"

"Suva."

"No it isn't."

"It is," said Ruth. "I lived there. I should know."

"You don't know," said Frida. "You only think you do. That's what I'm talking about-confused! Now that's cleared up, maybe you can tell me what you were doing in my room."

"It's my room. My lilies."

"Give them to me. I'll put them in some water."

"No."

Frida came no closer to Ruth. She held her arm out with the box at the end of it, as if it might be the perfect receptacle for flowers; then she turned and threw it into the wastepaper basket that sat beside Ruth's chair.

Ruth winced. "I know you were at Richard's house. Why? Why was my box under your bed?"

"What were you doing looking under my bed?"

"You locked me in."

"I didn't lock anybody in!" Frida cried. She was in the kitchen now, tearing at the wrapping paper, which was wet from the lilies and stuck to her angry fingers. She shook it off into the wastepaper bin. "I closed the door so you wouldn't go wandering out there with all the traps in the gra.s.s. The b.l.o.o.d.y doors weren't locked."

But Ruth had tried the doors. She had tried them. "What do you want?" she asked, because it occurred to her that Frida wanted something from her-was always wanting, wanting, without ever quite admitting it.

"I want you to apologize for trashing my room," said Frida. "For wrecking my stuff and for disrespecting my privacy. I want you to give me those lilies, and I want you to admit Suva isn't the capital of Fiji."

Ruth shook her head.

"All right then," Frida said, and, her face expressionless, used her forearm to sweep the objects across the dining table. They clattered over the surface, catching and dragging, and the bottles tipped and rolled to the left and right, but they were all carried by Frida's arm to the table's edge, and then they fell into the wastepaper bin. None of the gla.s.s shattered; everything fell neatly and quietly, almost as if the objects were taking up their original places, snug in the bin as they had been in the box. It was like a magic trick. Then Frida lifted the bin and held it on her hip like an awkward baby; she opened the door with one quick hand and, still matronly, marched into the garden.

Ruth couldn't understand how the door had opened; but she was safe behind her lilies. She followed and watched as Frida shook the contents of the bin out over the edge of the dune. Some of the sh.e.l.ls and coral bounced a little before rolling, and all the grit and dust swarmed up in a grubby cloud before puffing away, abruptly, as if with a specific destination in mind. The box flew from the bin and caught a little in the coastal wind; it only subsided among the gra.s.ses after a short, desperate flight. Then Frida threw her arms out, so that the wastepaper basket swung high into the low sun and spun onto the beach.

Ruth stood beside Frida at the crest of the dune. The lilies were growing heavier in her arms. Down the slope, the coral and sh.e.l.ls were beginning their primordial crawl back to the sea.

"Those things belong to my family," Ruth said.

"A little life lesson for you, Ruthie," said Frida. "Don't get attached to things."

Ruth began to test out the slope of the dune with one foot. Frida was grinning into the salt of the wind. There was a tremendous well-being about her, and she lifted her face to the sky as if feeling the sun for the first time in months. Frida often gave off an impression of posthibernation. She was a great brown bear, a slumbering hazard, both dozy and vigilant. And Ruth was used to her slow surety of movement; but now she had woken up.

"You're an awful woman," said Ruth, and Frida gave a gnomic t.i.tter. The chalky sand rubbed at Ruth's bare feet. "A savage woman." Frida laughed harder, with that same round gong Ruth had heard on the telephone. Ruth pointed down the dune with her lilies. "I want everything back."

Frida dusted her hands and emitted the sigh she often did immediately before standing up. "Two things," she said. "First of all, apologize. Second, tell me Suva isn't the capital of Fiji. Then I'll pick it all up for you. Otherwise, you can do it yourself."

Ruth began to descend. She still clung to the lilies. This was the very worst request to make of her back: to walk down a steep slope with her arms full. She bent into the dune and it fell away beneath her; she kicked up whirlwinds of sand.

Frida watched from above. "Mind your step," she said.

Ruth moved forward and the gra.s.s collapsed; she felt her feet slide, and then she was lying on the ground with the lilies scattered over and around her. She wriggled them off. She didn't think she was hurt; it didn't even feel like a fall. It was as if the dune had scooped her up, and she was caught in a shallow, sandy bowl.

"Oh, Ruthie," said Frida from above.

"What is it?" asked Ruth from among the gra.s.ses, but she knew she had fallen into the tiger trap. It had filled considerably in the hours since its construction; now it cradled Ruth. It was fragrant with lilies. She closed her eyes and opened them again, and the world b.u.mped up against her and tilted away. She was lying on her side. Ants moved among the sand, over and under each grain, and all of this was too close to Ruth's nose. Above her she saw the very edge of the lawn, or what remained of it. It was a frayed rug of green. It was the only kind of civilized gra.s.s that consented to grow here-a tough, shiny species with strenuous roots. Harry never liked it; it wasn't soft enough, he said, and it contrasted too much with the sand. Ruth was able to roll onto her back, and then the sky appeared, a dark, blank blue. She felt a dizzy sting behind her eyes.

"Any bones broken?" called Frida.

Ruth looked to every bone for information, and each rea.s.sured her. But her back was burning. She felt around in the sand for some kind of handhold and found a small mineral lump with string still attached. A flurry of sand from above suggested Frida might be coming down the dune.

"Don't!" Ruth cried.

"Please yourself." Frida sighed again, and the sound was both resigned and happy. The sand settled. "You know, this is exactly what I said to Jeff. I said to him, it just isn't safe to have an old girl like your mother living in this kind of environment. She walks in the garden, and what do you know, she slips and falls. I've seen a fall do someone in-never the same again. And that's why I'm here twenty-four hours a day." The sea sounded close, and something tickled in Ruth's ear. "But does Jeff ever thank me? Does he ever ring me up and say, 'Frida, you're the ant's pants'?"

Some sand scattered across Ruth's forehead. She wasn't sure if the wind was at fault, or Frida. She tried to sit up and found that she couldn't. "I can't get up," she said, but not to Frida; to herself.

"Not with that att.i.tude, you can't."

"I really can't," said Ruth, still to herself. She would have liked to see one cloud in the sky. That would have been fluffy and merry and in some way comforting. If I see a cloud, she thought, it means I'll get up again. It means I haven't fallen.

"Take me, for instance," said Frida. "If I went around all day saying, 'I can't, I can't,' I'd get nowhere. What you need is some positive thinking. Say to yourself, 'I will get up.' Then do it."

Ruth moved one foot experimentally.

"Too many people in this country are old before their time," Frida sighed.

"Frida." Ruth heard the bleat in her voice. Her body wouldn't move. "I think I'm paralysed."

Ruth felt something tickle at her forehead, like a handful of thrown gra.s.s; she knocked it away with her right hand.

"Not paralysed," said Frida. "See? So negative. You know, this might be good for you. Give you a bit of a challenge, break you out of your can't can't can't and show you your actions have consequences. I'll be inside, Ruthie, tidying your mess. And one day you'll thank me for this." Frida inhaled loudly, as if she were filling her lungs with the sea, and then she was gone. Sand rose in her wake and settled over other sand. The back door opened and closed again.

Now the cats emerged from wherever they had been hiding. They sniffed at Ruth's cheeks and shoulders. One of them curled against her side. The dune had shifted to accommodate her, and it was pleasant to think-or at least less frightening to think-that eventually this hollow would shape itself around her and be perfectly moulded to her back and bones. Then she would sleep the way she had as a child, when everything was supple and new and it was possible to abandon her body entirely, night after night, without ever knowing how lucky that was. Something whirred in the gra.s.ses near her head, some insect, and it occurred to Ruth that Frida's tiger might be nearby. He might come as night fell and find her. Frida might make him come; she might make him a real tiger, with real teeth. This alarmed Ruth into action. She would have to make her way back to the house, even if it took her all night, and then she would run. She would go to Richard: find his address on the envelope she had saved, take the bus into town, catch the train to Sydney. Ruth felt around with her hands and caught at the gra.s.ses; the gra.s.s cut into her palms, little quick slits, as she pulled herself into a half-sitting position. The cat at her side leapt away, indignant. Her hips were a faulty hinge, and she fell to the sand again.

Ruth's back objected to all of this. She often imagined her back as an instrument; that way she could decide if the pain was playing in the upper or lower registers. Sometimes it was just a long, low note, and sometimes it was insistent and shrill. To Ruth, lying in the sand, it was both. It was a whole bra.s.sy, windy ensemble. She cried out, but there was no one to hear her. The lifesavers would be sitting in their flagged turrets down at the surf club, scanning the sun and the sea, ready to pack up for the day; they didn't know she was drowning. The wind was a little cold. Perhaps, if she lay still enough, it would make her a coverlet of sand.

The cats watched her from the gra.s.ses. They seemed to be encouraging her with their dumbstruck eyes. This is what you get, she thought, for living on a beach, not a road; and that was Harry's fault, since Harry had insisted on this isolation and then killed them both with it. Because now she felt she was in danger of dying out on the dune, and that Frida had been trying, all along, to bring her to this point-had sent a tiger, and built traps, and now was trying to kill her. And Ruth was sure, too, that if Harry had stayed in Sydney and walked every day beside the Harbour the way he used to, he would still be alive; he would have been whisked to a state-of-the-art hospital, where the business of saving the lives of stupid old men happened every day. Not that she blamed the girl who picked him up from the gutter. What was her name? Ellen something. Jeffrey had told her this Ellen Something had held Harry's head as he died. What a stupid old isolated head. Now Ruth lay dying in a tiger trap, and no one was there-not even Frida-to cradle any part of her.

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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.ses 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 gla.s.sy quality to its surface meant it lacked colour and was only shine; but by the sh.o.r.e 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 a.s.sisted, 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 una.s.suming, 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 t.i.tle, 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-"pet.i.te," 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 sungla.s.ses 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, b.l.o.o.d.y 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?

"Mrs. Field!" he called.

She felt quite famous. This might have been why he won that prize, year after year; not for his sausages, but for his memory. Ruth used to know the name of the Sausage King. He used to hold a barbecue for his "favourite customers" in the New Year, when Ruth and her family were always at the coast for the summer; she had been to his house. He barbecued with fierce pride and made people taste everything. He winked at her now, which was his way of saying, "I don't want to serve this woman, I want to serve you; I can't wait to serve you," and flattered, Ruth waited her turn. She and Harry used to laugh about the jolly flirtations of the Sausage King. They never offended any husband. She had known this man for nearly forty years.

"Mrs. Field," he said now, turning towards her. He was tall and merry and trim. She remembered there had been some heartbreak over a son who didn't want to be a butcher; or maybe the trouble was that he did. The Sausage King wore a striped ap.r.o.n and seemed to have absolutely no hair on his arms. His hands were big and pink, and youthful from the handling of all that meat.

"We haven't seen you in town for months," he said, twinkling. "Tell me where you've been hiding."

That was another thing she remembered: he always used the royal plural, as if speaking for both himself and his sausages. But what was his name?

"Nowhere, nowhere," she said, bashful. He always made her blush, and she supposed this was how she knew his attentions were harmless. "I have someone to shop for me now."

Frida bought all their meat in styrofoam and plastic from the supermarket, but he didn't know that. Still, Ruth felt the guilt as a new heat on her face.

"It's just a treat to see you," he said, and turned to the other people in the shop-people younger than Ruth and the Sausage King. "Mrs. Field is one of my oldest and most loyal customers. We've known each other since before you were all born."

Ruth blushed further. No one in the shop was that young, but she might have been that old.

"And what can I get for you today?" he asked. "The lamb is a miracle, the spring lamb."

"Oh, yes, lamb. From New Zealand."

"Australian lamb, Mrs. Field! Always! Now-a roast? Chops?"

"Oh, dear," said Ruth. The other customers began to stir with polite exasperation. Many of them had been in the shop before the arrival of the steadfast Mrs. Field. "Chops," she said, because Frida would scold about a roast. Frida, returning home from the supermarket, talked at great length about the expense of groceries in this day and age.

"Chops it is. How many? How many?" sang the Sausage King. His busy pink hands worked over the lamb chops, selecting good specimens and shifting the plastic parsley. "Five ninety-nine a kilo, five-fifty for you." The customers shook their heads at the lovable favouritism of the Sausage King.

"Five-fifty," said Ruth.

"One kilo it is. Anything else I can do for you today?" He wrapped the lamb in waxy white paper. Ruth loved the cool weight of butchers' bundles; they reminded her of babies.

"That's all," she said, wishing she could be sure it really was.