The Night Guest

by Fiona McFarlane

  The following morning, a taxi pulled up in front of the house. Ruth tiptoed into the lounge room to investigate. She was sure it was the same taxi she had seen yesterday: a yellow Holden, an older make with a chariot shine and, painted on its doors, the words YOUNG LIVERY and a telephone number. Its windows were tinted a shade Harry would call illegally dark. Frida emerged from the passenger’s side of the car and gave the door a firm but casual slam, as if it required such treatment to close at all. She was wearing the grey coat and, beneath it, white trousers and the same grey-white sandshoes, and her hair fell in loose curls around her face, which made her look younger. Frida walked the few steps to where Harry’s car, a silver Mercedes, was parked by the side of the house. She gave the rear wheel an exploratory press with her foot and returned to the taxi; she leaned listening into the driver’s opening window, laughed, and rapped the taxi’s dazzling roof. It crept backwards down the drive as if fearful of causing a disturbance.

  Ruth went to open the front door. The doorbell rang as she did so: an older doorbell, with a two-note chime that Ruth always thought of as actually saying “ding-dong.”

  “I didn’t see the bell yesterday,” said Frida. She was smiling, and not quite as tall as the day before, and had a string bag full of oranges hooked to her elbow; she leaned down to take Ruth’s hands, a little as she had when they’d first met, and managed in this gesture to move past Ruth and into the hallway. “There I was, knocking my little heart out—no wonder you didn’t hear me, when you’re used to that lovely doorbell. Good morning! Good morning! I’ve got oranges.”

  She swung the bag down the hall and into the kitchen like a priest with a censer.

  “You didn’t need to bring anything,” protested Ruth.

  “I know, I know,” said Frida, pouring the oranges into a bowl she took from an upper cupboard. “But I’ve got these beauties coming out of my ears. My brother George knows a bloke who gets ’em free. Don’t know how, and I don’t ask. That was my brother you saw dropping me off. It’s his own taxi—he’s an independent. You ever need a taxi, let me know, and I’ll call George.”

  The oranges made a gorgeous, swollen pile.

  “Thank you,” said Ruth. “I have a car.”

  “Well,” said Frida, evidently taken aback by this refusal; her eyes widened in something like disapproval.

  “But sometimes you need a taxi, don’t you,” said Ruth. “To be honest, I hate driving.”

  Frida, placated, patted Ruth’s arm. “Let’s have the grand tour, then.” She hung her grey coat on the hook behind the back door. She wore a different shirt today. It was a brighter white and matched the white trousers. She looked like a beautician.

  Frida seemed to lead the tour. She marched into rooms and cupboards and corridors, announcing “The bathroom!” and “The linen press!” as if Ruth were a prospective buyer inspecting the property. No new discovery seemed to surprise her. She was tactful in Ruth’s bedroom but pitiless in the guest rooms, going so far as to look under the beds, pulling up wreaths of cat hair from hidden corners and shaking her curly head. Ruth responded with an apologetic smile, at which Frida only tutted; she put her arm around Ruth’s shoulders as if to say, “Don’t you worry, things will be different from now on.”

  “These were my sons’ bedrooms,” explained Ruth, “when we came here on holidays. This was our holiday house.”

  “I see,” said Frida. She ran her left forefinger along a bookshelf and examined it for dust. This was in Phillip’s room, and all the books were for bright young boys. “What happened to your other house?”

  “Our Sydney house? We sold it. We moved out here for retirement,” said Ruth.

  “We?”

  “My husband and I. Harry.”

  Frida squeezed Ruth’s shoulder again. “It really doesn’t bother you to live out here all alone?”

  “Not at all,” said Ruth. “Why should it?”

  Her mother had once warned her: loneliness is off-putting, boredom is unattractive. Ruth was convinced both sensations shone from her face. She was certain she had the odd, unexpected movements of a person used to solitude; when she watched television, for example, she mirrored the facial expressions of the actors. Sometimes she made a game of it. She did once think, while reading a newspaper article about the subject, that she might be depressed, but because Harry hadn’t believed in it—“Happiness is a matter of choice,” he would say—she never mentioned it to her doctor, and certainly not to her sons. She knew quite soon after Harry’s death that her grief wouldn’t disrupt the public order of her days. She expected, instead, a long and private season.

  “Come and have a cuppa and we’ll talk things over,” said Frida.

  Ruth worried that, if pressed, she would talk too much about Harry; she longed for the chance to and was mortified in advance.

  But Frida was all business. “There’s some documents you need to look at,” she said, finding her suitcase in the dining room and hoisting it onto the table with a marvellous grunt. The suitcase looked smaller than Ruth remembered. It only took up the space of a bulky briefcase. Frida searched among its contents, pulled out a plastic sleeve full of papers, and, offering this to Ruth with a look of patient distaste, said, “Official paperwork.”

  But before Ruth could take the sleeve, Frida stepped away towards the window. “Would you look at that,” she said.

  The view from the back of the house often prompted reactions of this kind. There was the dune, sloping away from the garden and down to the beach; there was the wide water and the curve of the bay to the right with the distant silver of the town and, out on the headland, a white lighthouse. Harry used to stand in the garden with his hands on his hips and say, with satisfaction, “Nothing between here and South America.” Since his death, it had felt to Ruth that the house was participating in a cosy continental drift, making its leisurely way on an island of its own to the open sea. Ruth liked islands. She had lived all her life on them, and they suited her.

  “It’s disgusting, is what it is,” said Frida.

  “Oh, dear,” said Ruth. She had always been embarrassed by the splendour of the view, as if owning so much beauty was an admission of vanity on her part, and she wondered if Frida was the guest she’d been waiting for, the one who would rebuke her for it.

  “Would you just look at this?”

  Ruth looked, and saw a group of people on the beach below. There were nine or ten of them, and they were all naked, or almost naked. Some lay on the sand and others played in the water. Ruth felt a cheerful innocence rising from them; it was like standing on a mountain pass and seeing a town down in the snug valley. But Frida was unmistakably affronted, just as Harry would have been, and she loomed out into the garden. Ruth followed. So little happened at this end of the beach during winter—lone runners, a few dogs. Once, the old jetty splintered and slumped after a storm tide and over the course of a winter was washed out to sea. Skinny-dippers were a definite event, and Ruth liked the idea of them.

  “Think there’s no one out here, huh?” said Frida. “Think you’re alone and you can do whatever you want?”

  She made her way to a corner of the garden where two abandoned aluminium bins, long ago used for compost, sprang to new life in the martial gravity of Frida’s intentions. She took the lids from the bins, gave them a preparatory shake, and turned to Ruth with a look of mirthful cunning. Ruth was startled by this look. Who was this stranger crossing her land and heading for the ocean with the lids of the compost bins in her firm grip? What could justify her warlike march? It was all both splendid and alarming.

  Frida stood on the sandy ridge at the edge of the garden and bellowed down at the beach. She brandished the lids and commenced her descent of the dune, giving her war cry; she clashed the lids together above her head. The people on the beach—and Ruth saw now that they were very young, only teenagers—had been laughing but, noticing Frida, they lifted themselves from the sand or scrambled from the sea, their heads dark with water. They
looked clumsy and beautiful from this distance. A warp in the clouds flooded sun onto their arms and backs. They jeered at Frida but swept up their possessions in anticipation of her arrival, wrapping themselves in towels and stumbling away over the wet sand.

  Frida paused at the dirty line that marked high tide. Holding one lid up over her head, as if shading her eyes to see, she became a ship’s captain scanning the horizon; these heroic poses came easily to her and her gallant bulk. She moved slowly towards the sea until she reached the place the children had made camp. Then she threw down the lids and began to kick at the sand so that it rose in wild flurries around her; when she finished, it fell smoothly until there was no sign anyone had ever settled on that spot. She retrieved the lids and made her way back to the house.

  Ruth watched Frida’s serene face float up the dune. She was hard to recognize as the woman who had laboured up this same slope the day before. It was as if she’d required only that one difficult ascent to become sure-footed; or perhaps the garbage lids were acting as ballast: she did hold them a little way out from her body, like wings.

  “That’s that, then,” said Frida. By now she was standing beside Ruth and exhaling through her nose with an equine vigour. The incident appeared to have given her a kind of health.

  Ruth, unsure of what to say, ventured, “They shouldn’t swim all the way out here without lifeguards. It’s not safe.”

  “They won’t be back.”

  “It’s just high jinks, I suppose.”

  Frida replaced the lids on the compost bins. “They can have their fun in front of someone else’s house, then. Spoil someone else’s view.” And with a firm and nursery air she withdrew to the house.

  Ruth remained outside long enough to watch the swimmers take the path up to the small parking lot behind the bus stop, where a Norfolk pine had once dropped during a windstorm and crushed a surfer’s truck. She had expected the children to move down the beach and set up camp again, but Frida appeared to have scared them off for good. Ruth was sorry to see them go. But a ripe, wet wind was developing, a familiar sea wind which would have driven them away soon enough. Sand and salt flew up and about, into Ruth’s hair and over her garden. This end of the beach was empty now. Any car taking the road to town might be full of those banished children. If I see one car in the next ten seconds, she thought, I’ll tell her to go away. A white car burst from behind the hill; a dark one followed immediately behind it. Ruth hadn’t had time to prepare for two cars.

  “Teatime!” called Frida.

  Ruth found her bustling in the kitchen among tea bags and mugs.

  “How do you take it?” Frida asked. “Milk and sugar?”

  “Lots of milk, one sugar.”

  “Milky and sweet,” Frida said. The combination seemed to please her. Her own tea was strong and dark, and she wouldn’t sit to drink. She leaned against the kitchen counter.

  “So, tell me things,” she said, peering into her steamy tea.

  “What things?” Ruth’s tongue stammered; she felt something like stage fright.

  “I like to get a sense of my clients before we get started. Husband? Job? Family? Childhood? All that stuff.”

  “That’s a lot of stuff.”

  “You can keep it simple,” offered Frida. She was noncommittal; she wouldn’t sit, Ruth guessed, because she didn’t want this to take all day.

  “All right,” said Ruth. “Harry was a solicitor. He died of a pulmonary embolism five years ago. I told you about my sons. What else? I used to teach elocution lessons. I grew up in Fiji.”

  Ruth waited for Frida to react to the mention of Fiji, but she failed to do so. Instead, she narrowed her eyes as if trying to see farther. “You taught what? Electrocution?”

  “Elocution!” said Ruth, delighted. “Speech.”

  “Like speech therapy?”

  “No,” said Ruth. “The art of speaking. Of clear, precise speech. Pronunciation, vocal production—”

  “You mean you taught people how to talk posh?” It was difficult to tell if Frida was disgusted or incredulous or both.

  “To speak correctly,” said Ruth. “Which isn’t the same thing.”

  “And people paid you?”

  “I taught young people, usually, and their parents paid me.”

  Frida was shaking her head as if she’d been told a ludicrous but diverting story. “Is that why you sound kind of English when you talk?”

  “I don’t sound English,” protested Ruth, but she’d been accused of this before. Once, it would have been a compliment. There had been a schoolteacher: Mrs. Mason. She was of elegant, indeterminate age, had an intriguingly absent husband, and she was English; every rounded vowel that fell from her mouth was delivered like a sweet polished fruit to her students, who were the children of sugar-company executives, engineers, missionaries, and government officials: the children of the Empire. They must be trained to speak correctly, so far from home. Mrs. Mason taught them rhymes, tongue twisters, and tricky operetta lyrics and made her students recite the days of the week, over and over, four, five, seven times on the strength of one deep breath. She discouraged the use of pidgin, slang, or Hindi; she was vigilant against the lazily dropped t’s of her Australian students; she pounced on the use of would of and should of and was unfailingly specific about which contractions she would and wouldn’t allow. Ruth was her prize pupil.

  “You sound pretty English,” said Frida, scooping up Ruth’s empty mug. “You sound a bit like the Queen.”

  Ruth had a soft spot for the Queen. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Listen: ‘How now brown cow.’ That’s how I say it. And this is how the Queen would say it: ‘How now brown cow.’ Listen to her diphthongs! Completely different!”

  “Dip-thongs?” Frida snorted over the sink. And suddenly it was a funny, stupid, dirty word, and Ruth was laughing, and she loved it, although it hurt her back. Frida laughed, too, and rising from her capacious chest, her laugh seemed a rare and lovely object; it seemed to spread, like wings. Her whole face was transformed: she was warm and pretty, she knocked the mugs together in the sink, and she raised a tea towel to her face to cover her widening smile. Ruth felt buoyant in her spindly chair. She smiled and sighed and thought, Yes, Ruth, silly thing, this could be good, this could be all right.

  3

  The house took to Frida; it opened up. Ruth sat in her chair and watched it happen. She saw the bookcases breathe easier as Frida dusted and rearranged them; she saw the study expel its years’ worth of Harry-hoarded paperwork. She had never seen such perfect oranges as the ones Frida brought in her little string bag. The house and the oranges and Ruth waited every weekday morning for Frida to come in her golden taxi, and when she left, they fell into silences of relief and regret. Ruth found herself looking forward to the disruption of her days; she was a little disgusted at herself for succumbing so quickly.

  But Frida was fascinating. For one thing, her hair was always different: braided, curled, lacquered, soft. Each morning, just before nine, Ruth opened the lounge-room door she had been so careful to close the night before and went to the window to watch Frida’s emergence from the taxi. Frida’s hair might be piled on her head or straightened to her shoulder blades. It might be a new colour. One day she arrived with hair so blond, so cloudy and insubstantial, that her head seemed an unlikely match for the capable body beneath it. She was a little bleary that morning; she made a cup of tea first thing and sat on the back step drinking it with an air of bleached glamour; the cats took pains to avoid the chemical smell she gave off. The bright blond lasted only a few days before it became brassier, more yellow; then came a softer, whitish colour, more sophisticated and at the same time more childish. After this blond period came red, and burgundy, and a glossy true black, and back to brown, ready for the cycle to start all over again. Frida accepted compliments about her hair with a dignified smile and raised one careful hand to hover near it.

  “It’s my hobby,” she said. Ruth had never before met anyone who
considered her own head a hobby.

  Frida’s magnificent hair never interfered with her duties. She worked in her first few weeks with a bright disposition, but was never what could be described as cheery. She had a determined efficiency about her, and at the same time a languorous quality, a slow, deliberate giving of herself. Her suitcase turned out to contain enormous bottles of eucalyptus-scented disinfectant; she cleaned the floors with this slick substance every morning, shepherding the mop with graceful movements of her tidy feet. The house at first smelled sweet and forested, and then so astringent the cats took to sleeping in elevated places, away from the scrubbed wood and tile. When Ruth drew attention to this, Frida only stood over the immaculate floors and inhaled deeply, with a nasal echo, to demonstrate the bracing bronchial qualities of her cleaning regime.

  “Smell that!” she cried, and made Ruth breathe in until her throat burned. “Isn’t it great? Isn’t it better than seaweed and flies?”

  Frida made it clear early on that she disliked the smell of the sea.

  While she cleaned, Frida carried out her assessment of Ruth’s “situation.” She noted the absence of rails in the bath and a fence around the garden. She quizzed Ruth about her medical conditions, flexibility, hair loss, sleeping patterns, eating habits (“You’re wasting away,” she accused, as if she had long familiarity with the shape of Ruth’s body), and frequency of social contact. She made Ruth fill out a number of questionnaires—“How often do you bathe? (a) Daily; (b) Every two to three days; (c) Sporadically; (d) On special occasions” and “Circle the box appropriate to your income in the last financial year.”

  At the end of her assessment, the first thing Frida announced was that Ruth wasn’t eligible for public housing. “People like you usually aren’t,” she said with apparent pleasure. When Ruth protested that she had no interest in public housing, Frida sucked in an experienced breath and said, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Beggars should be no choosers,” said Ruth.

  “Beggars can’t be is the phrase,” said crisp, corrective Frida.