“He thinks he’s found some funds for me. I want to get out to the villages. I want to buy a truck.”
“A truck,” said Ruth, with a solemnity in keeping with Richard’s plans.
“And in the meantime, yes, I’m here to help in your clinic.”
“I’m glad,” she said, “about both things—that you’re here to help my father, and Indian women.” This was the most deliberate statement she had ever made to a man she wasn’t related to, and she felt as if her ears were burning red.
Richard rewarded her with another smile. The smoke stood beside him without seeming to rise or fall. “Your father likes to talk, doesn’t he?”
Ruth was sensitive to criticism of her father, in that tenuous and personal way in which children are anxious for the dignity of their parents. She worried a great deal for him out in the world.
“Not usually,” she said. “He’s happy to have you to talk to.”
“I like him very much,” said Richard. “I’ve read everything he’s written on whooping cough.” She waited for him to say, “But I’m sure you’re not interested in all that.” He didn’t. His cigarette burnt right down to his fingers, and he shook them as he flicked it away. “I always smoke them down to the very end. It’s a bad habit. Army days.”
“Where were you?”
“Mainly New Guinea, and then for a while in Tokyo.” He was obviously contemplating another cigarette; she saw him decide against it. “Is it the holidays for you? Do you go back to Sydney for school?”
Ruth stood. “You must be exhausted.”
“You know, I really am,” he said, standing too. “You’ve made me feel very welcome. Thank you.”
He didn’t offer his hand. He stood, holding his cigarettes, and his tea was only half finished; he had no idea of the cost of good tea in Suva. The square of the kitchen window went catastrophically dark.
“I hope you’ll be happy here,” said Ruth. She was moving inside, too quickly. “I’ve finished school. I’m nineteen. Good night.”
She ran up the stairs, thinking, Idiot, idiot.
Now she said to Frida, “I fell in love with him the very first night. What a goose. I didn’t even know him.”
“Usually better not to,” said Frida.
“In some cases, maybe. But Richard was quite a special man.”
“And you didn’t marry him.”
“No,” said Ruth.
“Silly bugger.”
“It wasn’t up to me.”
“I meant him,” said Frida.
“Oh, he did all right. He got married before I did. We sailed back to Sydney together in 1954, and I hoped something might happen. Something definite, I mean. But it turned out he was engaged all that time. Never mentioned it, not even to my father. I went to his wedding and never saw him again.”
“Really? Never again?”
“Never.” Ruth liked the dramatic finality of never, but was compelled to admit there had been Christmas cards.
“If you ask my opinion,” said Frida, who rarely waited for the solicitation of her opinion, “you’re better off. What kind of bloke doesn’t tell anyone he’s engaged?”
“The girl he was marrying was Japanese. He met her in Japan.” Ruth, defensive, saw Frida dismiss this as a reason for secrecy. “It wasn’t all that long after the war. It was a sensitive subject.”
Frida sent out one blind hand for an apricot. She was thoughtful; she understood sensitive subjects. She chewed her apricot before asking, “And what happened in the end?”
As if a life is a period during which things happen. I suppose it is, thought Ruth, and they do, and then at my age, at Richard’s age, they’ve finished happening, and you can ask.
“His wife died about a year or two before Harry. She was older than him—older than Richard.”
Now Frida held a hand to her dark hair and produced a sigh so bitter, so exhausted, and at the same time so sweet that Ruth was tempted to reach out and comfort her. Frida stood up from the table.
“You really want to see him again?” Her mood was shifting; she was already giving a farsighted frown.
“I think I do. Yes,” said Ruth. “I do.”
“It’d be a lot of work,” Frida said, and she sighed and stretched as if that work were already upon her. “I hate to say it, Ruth, but I’m not sure you’re up to it. And how old is this Richard now? Eighty? Ninety?” She said “Eighty? Ninety?” as if there were a negligible difference between those two ages.
“He must be over eighty,” said Ruth. Richard, over eighty! That seemed so unlikely.
“You might call it irresponsible, asking a man like that to travel. Expecting to be able to look after him, at his age.” Frida looked at Ruth in a way that added, “At your age,” and swept the package of apricots up from the table.
“In last year’s Christmas card he said he was in the best of health.”
“The best of health for eighty,” said Frida with a snort.
Frida believed she had a secret, Ruth saw, and it was this: that Ruth and Richard were innocents, that they were old, older than old, and that while they might still be capable of a sweet, funny romance, any physical possibility was extinguished for them both. Well, probably it was. Ruth wondered. She permitted herself to hope, and at the same time not define the thing she hoped for.
“Jeffrey will agree with you,” said Ruth with a carefully blameless face, and she saw Frida consider this distasteful possibility before proceeding to the kitchen. Ruth sat still with the idea of Richard. She was surprised by how much she wanted to see him, and also by the pleasure of wanting. He would be an arrival—one that she had asked for, that she had planned.
“You know what?” called Frida from the kitchen. She often delivered good news—gave of the bounty of herself—from another room, at high volume, so she needn’t be troubled by gratitude. “I could help out. You know, come over on the weekend. Not for free, mind.” Now she appeared, briefly, in the archway between the rooms. “But for a reasonable price, you know, I could cook and keep an eye on things.”
“Would you really?”
Frida made a clatter in the kitchen which meant “Yes, but don’t you dare start thanking me.”
Frida seemed to think it was decided: Ruth would ask Richard to come, and Frida would keep an eye on things. She prepared an uncharacteristically festive meal: a curryish dish, with pieces of pineapple and indecipherable meat. It tasted like the distant cousin of something Fijian.
“What do you call this?” Ruth asked as Frida fastened her grey coat and made for the front door.
“Dinner,” said Frida.
Later, lying in bed with the doubtful meat in her stomach, Ruth fretted about Richard. She wanted to think only of how fine he was, of how every girl had loved him, and of how he liked her best; how she would be walking with friends and his shabby truck would roll by, his mobile dispensary, lifting dust and rattling at the seams, and he would honk his horn or stop to talk and sometimes drive her home, or take them all in the truck to the beach, and when they swam, he stayed close to her, lay beside her in the sun, gossiped about Andrew Carson, poured sand on her feet, asked her advice about some faux pas he had made with the Methodist minister’s wife, told her she reminded him of a milkmaid on a biscuit tin, and finally, when the Queen visited Fiji and a ball was held in her honour at the Grand Pacific Hotel, invited Ruth to come with him—although he disapproved of queens—because he knew she wanted to go. And everyone waited for Ruth and Richard—their names were said together so often—to become an item; even when Richard began to disgrace himself by caring too much about the health of Indian women, by befriending the wrong Fijians (“agitators,” Ruth’s father called them), by staying at Ruth’s parents’ house too long (“saving money for the dispensary,” he said; “staying for me,” prayed Ruth), and by refusing church without even being a Communist, the women of Suva hoped to see happiness for Ruth with this “gifted but misguided” young man. She had given up the hope of converting him
. She was no longer much sure of God herself. He came home late at night, and she listened for his soft walk past her door, and he never stopped. Not true: he stopped once. Her door was open. He came in to apologize; he had kissed her the night before at the Queen’s ball and would never do it again. People began to wonder if he was quite normal. They wondered about Indian women and Andrew Carson; they never suspected a Japanese fiancée.
And how Ruth defended him to everyone! Because she was his favourite, his milkmaid on the biscuit tin. But that was exhausting, too. For example, he would lend her difficult books without her having asked for them and want to know her opinion; when the ocean liners docked in Suva carrying orchestras or theatre companies, he took her to see them perform. And if he didn’t like what he saw or read or heard, he would call it “a bad play,” “a bad book.” Bad in his mouth was the strongest of adjectives. He always had a definite view of the play or the symphony, and he would presage it with this declamatory staccato, as if helpfully summarizing his opinion before expanding upon it: “It was bad,” he would say, or “uniformly bad” if he considered it irretrievable. Or, if approved of, things were either “important” or “excellent” or “very fine.” Most of the events he took her to bored her even when she enjoyed them, and she felt Richard notice this whole world of his from which she was excluded, by her own choice it seemed. She saw him observe, mournfully, her overenthusiastic applause when the thing was finally over.
He was courteous; he always withheld his opinion until it was asked for. He would wait for her to say, “What did you think?” And then he would say, “Very bad” or “Excellent,” and there would be some minutes of talk about why, during which Ruth wondered how he thought of all these things to say. It astonished her that he could have such inexhaustible opinions, and that he was capable of articulating them. He’s smarter than I am, she concluded, and he cares more than I do. But part of her was also suspicious of his ability to translate feeling so readily into words. She came away from music with a sense of its shape, and from plays with a suggestion of pulled threads; she had no idea how to describe shapes and threads. Richard would talk, and then he would say, “What did you think?” And she might say, “I agree” or “I liked it.” She didn’t have opinions, if what he had were opinions; only preferences, and these were often vague. She knew that her opinions existed—that she responded with true pleasure to the things she enjoyed—but she never found it necessary to scrutinize them. Whenever she was pressed to reveal her tastes in books or art or music, she sounded to herself as if she were discussing her favourite colours. But she shared her pleasures easily with Harry, whose delights were similarly blurry: they both loved Handel’s Messiah, for example, but felt no need to investigate the particular sensations it aroused in them. Books were different; they were private. No one could read them along with her, reacting and looking for her reaction. Richard had tried to draw her out, and she was afraid to disappoint him with the little he found there. In comparison, the ease of Harry was a relief.
Ruth had expected her character to become more sharply defined with age, until eventually she found that it no longer mattered to her; she left off worrying about it, like a blessedly abandoned hobby. But now Richard might come with his bad books and his excellent symphonies and fill her with doubt all over again. She lay in bed with her hands on her meaty stomach and worried until the cats, from their bedposts, began to perk and stare. They were listening to something, and so she listened, but heard nothing unusual. Her heart was stiff but strong. Not now, she thought, addressing the tiger. Not with Richard coming—which meant she did want him to come. One of the cats gave a low, funny growl or produced, at least, a growl-shaped noise. When Ruth went to comfort him, he snapped at her fingers, which always made her sad and shy. She moved in the bed, unhappy, and the cats jumped and ran.
“Fine!” she called after them. She would write to Richard. Things could still happen to her. She lifted her back from the bed, went to her dressing table, and found paper and a pen.
“My dear,” she wrote, “this will be a bolt from the blue, but if you can spare the time and make the journey, this old lady would like to see you again. I live by the sea, I have a very good view (there are whales), and I also have a wonderful woman called Frida whose brother George has a taxi and will collect you from the station and bring you here. We can talk Fiji and fond memories, or just snooze in the sun. Come as soon as you’d like to. The whales are migrating. Come as soon as you can.”
Ruth wrote the letter, didn’t reread it, sealed it in an envelope, and sent it out with Frida the following morning. There might have been spelling mistakes, and she worried afterwards about having signed off “all my love,” but the important thing was that the letter existed and had been sent. Five days later there was a reply from Richard. His handwriting was lean as winter twigs. He was delighted to hear from her. He had been thinking about her lately, would you believe; and if she was old, then he was older. His next month was busy, but he would come on a Friday in four weeks’ time.
7
Ruth telephoned Jeffrey a few days before Richard’s arrival.
“What’s wrong?” he asked when she announced herself. His midweek voice was poised for action.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m going to be busy this weekend, that’s all, so I thought I’d ring you now.”
“Busy doing what?”
“I’ve invited a friend to stay,” said Ruth.
“Good on you, Ma! Anyone I know? Helen Simmonds? Gail? Barb?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“An old friend.”
“If you’re going to be deliberately mysterious, I won’t keep asking you about it,” said Jeffrey. So like Harry it was unearthly, but Ruth supposed this happened all the time with widows and their sons, and it would be maddening to mention. She’d worked hard to maintain her belief in the distinct differences between herself and her own parents.
“I’m not being mysterious,” she protested. “This is an old friend from Fiji, a man called Richard Porter.”
There was that same feeling as when she’d told her school friends, “I’m taking the boat to Sydney with Richard Porter.” Then, in 1954, the girls nodded and smiled at one another. Ruth blossomed in the midst of all that gentle insinuation. Her fond heart filled. Now Jeffrey said, “That’s nice.”
“Do you remember—we used to get Christmas cards from him? And his wife.”
“Not really.”
“He knew me when I was a girl. He knew your grandparents. He was quite an extraordinary man. I suppose a sort of activist, you’d call it now.”
“Find out if he’s got any old photos,” said Jeffrey.
“I’m sure he will. I remember he had a camera when the Queen visited.”
Ruth knew that Jeffrey mistook her use of the word girl to mean child; he imagined this Richard as a considerably older man, avuncular, and talked about him that way. He claimed to be pleased she would have company, although she should really ask Helen Simmonds up one of these days; he also worried about the extra work a visitor (who wasn’t Helen Simmonds) would generate. Ruth explained that Frida was helping, for a low fee—he asked how much and approved of the answer—and she expected they would do nothing but watch whales and drink tea, which would create so little “extra work” she was almost ashamed of herself. Frida was washing the dining-room windows as Ruth spoke on the phone; she made a small noise of disgust at this talk of her fee.
Jeffrey, who was always interested in the transport arrangements of other people and spent a great deal of time planning his own, asked, “How’s this Richard getting to your place?”
Ruth’s answer was insufficiently detailed. The conversation persisted, and Ruth thought, What can I say that means he won’t go? But when can I go? She always listened for hints that Jeffrey might be ready to finish a call, and when she identified them, she finished it for him, abruptly, as if there weren’t a moment to lose. He didn’t seem at all scand
alized that his mother was planning to entertain a male guest, which was a relief and also, thought Ruth, something of a shame. Not that she set out to scandalize her sons. She’d never liked that obvious kind of woman.
“I hope you’ll have a lovely time,” said Jeffrey.
Ruth made a face into the phone. A lovely time! I carried you under my ribs for nine months, she thought. I fed you with my body. I’m God. The phrase that occurred to her was son of a bitch. But then she would be the bitch.
The phone produced a small chime as Ruth replaced it, as if coughing slightly to clear Jeffrey from its throat. She considered the preprogrammed button that was supposed to conjure Phillip.
“What time is it in Hong Kong?”
Frida, with knitted brow, consulted her watch and began to count out the hours on her fingers. “It’s too early to call,” she sighed, as if she regretted the result of her calculations but would bear it bravely. It was always too late or too early to call Hong Kong; Ruth had begun to doubt if daytime existed in that distant place. In the last four weeks, waiting for Richard to come, she had begun to doubt the existence of any place other than this one; it seemed so unlikely that Richard might be somewhere right at this moment, living, and waiting to see her.
Returning to her windows, Frida said, “Jeff’s happy with my salary, is he.” It wasn’t a question. The flesh of her arms shook as she rubbed at the windowpanes; the windowpanes shook, too. She had grown so attached to the house that this mutual trembling seemed a kind of conversation. Ruth found it comforting.
Now that she had told Jeffrey, Richard was definitely coming. Ruth inspected her heart: there was a leaping out, and also a drawing back. Difficulties presented themselves. The house was so hot, and there were possibly birds in the night, and almost certainly unseasonal insects. The cats threw up on the floor and the beds, and their fur seemed to sprout from the corners. For the first time in months, Ruth noticed the state of the garden: it seemed to be shrinking around the house. Harry had spent so many hours tending this garden against the sand and salt, climbing ladders and kneeling in the grass wearing soft green kneepads which gave him the look of an aged roller skater. He would be horrified to see it now. His shrubs and hedges had worn away in patches; they reminded Ruth of an abandoned colouring book. The hydrangeas looked as if enormous caterpillars had chewed them to rags; snapped frangipani branches lay across the grass; and the worn turf gave the impression of faded velvet. The soil had failed under the brittle grass—had simply blown away. Now there was sand; there was more sand than lawn; the few trees stood embattled against the sea, and the only flourishing plants were the tall native grasses that surrounded the house on three sides.
The Night Guest Page 6
