The Night Guest

by Fiona McFarlane

  “He’ll take it as he finds it,” said Frida, who saw the dismay with which Ruth surveyed the garden through the dining room’s soapy windows.

  “Yes,” said Ruth.

  “It’s wild. You said yourself you like it better this way.”

  “Yes,” said Ruth.

  “And inside will be pure gold.”

  Frida seemed very sensible of the honour of the house; it reflected her own honour, after all, and so she set about cleaning every corner in preparation for Richard’s arrival. Ruth had never observed this level of zeal in her before. She wouldn’t accept any help, but confined Ruth to the dining room, where she would be “less likely to cause trouble.”

  As Frida cleaned, Ruth told her more about Richard; talking about him made her less nervous. She may have told each story more than once. There was the green sari he’d given her for her birthday, and how embarrassed he’d been when she tried it on. There was the first time he ate a kumquat and chased her through the house trying to make her eat one, too. There was the Christmas he made her a puppet theatre out of a tea chest because she was a teaching assistant at the Girls’ Grammer School. There was the royal ball.

  “I had a dress made up in pale blue Chinese silk,” she said airily, as if she had been in the habit of ordering silken dresses. Ruth didn’t mention that Richard had kissed her at the ball and that ever since, Ruth had felt an unshakeable gratitude towards the Queen, whose dark royal head had been visible, now and then, among the people in the ballroom. She was newly crowned and not much older than Ruth. The Queen! And Richard! All in the same night. The blue silk lit Ruth’s yellow hair. Richard danced with her and asked if she was tired and guided her through the crowd with his hand in the small of her back without telling her why; he led her to a corridor and kissed her there among the potted palms until Andrew Carson came and flushed them out. Andrew Carson, the maybe-Communist, the kiss-killer! It was no chaste kiss, either. Ruth had saved the dress for the daughters she might have and had no idea where it was now.

  Frida encouraged these reminiscences by not objecting to them; otherwise she gave no sign that they interested her. She stayed late that Thursday, cleaning and cooking, and for the first time they ate their dinner together. Frida made a slim stir-fry, piled Ruth’s plate with rice, and picked at her own vegetables.

  “Still dieting?” Ruth asked.

  Frida nodded, serene. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” she said, “but I’ve lost an inch off my waist.”

  It was strange to have Frida at the dining table, fiddling with her food. She ate a little and a little more, and stood to clear the table.

  “No hurry,” she said, gathering plates, so Ruth pushed her rice away.

  “I’m too nervous to eat, anyway.”

  “What on earth are you nervous for?” asked Frida, who was already wetting dishes in the sink. The water surged among the saucepans and plates and Frida’s hands.

  “There’s something I’m worried about,” said Ruth.

  “What thing?”

  “I wouldn’t be so worried except that we have guests coming.”

  “We have one guest coming.”

  “Is it normal for my head to be so itchy?” Ruth held her hand to her hair but wouldn’t scratch in front of Frida. “It’s driving me mad.”

  Frida shook the suds from her fingers and said, “How long since you last washed your hair?”

  Ruth began to cry. This was unprecedented; it was terrible. But while Ruth knew this to be terrible, she let herself cry, in part because she was so horrified at forgetting to wash her hair and allowing the itch to continue without remembering. She’d worried in the night that she had lice or some parasite, or that she was imagining the itch and going insane. She woke greasily from sleep with these fears and pulled at her hair in an effort not to scratch, and now Frida was reminding her that this was simply the way hair felt when it hadn’t been washed. Frida observed Ruth’s tears with evident disapproval. But this mode of Frida’s disapproval was usually the prelude to an act of helpful sacrifice on Frida’s part, and Ruth was comforted by the thought of this assistance.

  “You want me to wash your hair for you?” asked Frida, and Ruth said, gulping, “I wash every night.”

  “I know you do.”

  “I’m very particular about it.”

  “I’d know if you didn’t, love. You’d smell,” said Frida, so kindly that Ruth pressed a bashful hand to her face. Her scalp raged. It may have been weeks since she last washed it. Frida pulled the plug from the sink. She wiped her hands with a tea towel, rolled up the sleeves of her shirt, and smoothed her own hair back.

  “Don’t you worry,” said Frida. “We’ll get it washed. It’ll be nice. Like going to a hairdresser.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Ruth, feeling herself settle into a helplessness that was pleasant now, for being a little artificial. She looked forward to surrendering to the complete attention of beneficent hands. “It’s a lot to ask, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  At first Frida planned to wash Ruth’s hair in the bathroom basin. Ruth liked this idea. She explained that this was how her hair had been washed as a girl. She described the bathroom of the house in Fiji, with its narrow, shallow bath (her father could only squat in it, pouring a small bucket of water over his back). Her mother had hung green gauze at the windows, for privacy and also because she, like the other women she knew, considered green a cooling colour.

  “Blue is the coolest colour,” said Frida. And blue, when Frida said it, was the coolest colour; it simply was.

  But when Ruth tried to rise from her chair to go into the bathroom, her back objected. Frida—sceptical, impatient Frida, whose reliable spine usually prevented any sympathy for Ruth’s lumbar condition—decided the basin would be too much. Instead, she directed Ruth to the wingback recliner in the lounge room: a “subtle recliner,” Ruth had once called it, because she didn’t entirely approve of recliners, which she supposed was a very Protestant way to think about a chair. Frida filled a large bowl with water and spread towels over the chair, the floor, and Ruth. She cranked the recliner beyond any previous limits, so that Ruth could see, beyond her small stomach, the tops of her toes.

  Frida was good at washing hair, which was the result, Ruth assumed, of so much practice on her own healthy head. She took great care over each of the steps: the wetting, the shampooing and conditioning and rinsing, even a head massage in the able, indifferent way of trained hairdressers. Her skill wasn’t unexpected; what surprised Ruth was the way Frida, washing hair, began to talk. She started by complaining of sleepless nights, nervous headaches, and bowel trouble.

  “If you could just feel my neck and shoulders,” said Frida. “Like concrete.”

  The problem, it seemed, was her brother. More specifically, the house he and Frida owned between them. The house had belonged to Frida’s mother, who died four years ago and left her property to her three children: George, Frida, and their sister, Shelley. Shelley died not long afterwards, leaving George and Frida in joint possession of the house.

  “A crappy little place, really,” said Frida. “Ex–housing commission. But it’s home, and the view’s good. The land’s worth a pretty penny these days.”

  The house was in the nearby town. Frida’s mother and Harry had, it turned out, purchased their houses in the same year. At that time, the town was functional and quiet, with an atmosphere of helpless evacuation: the canning industry that once gave it purpose had disappeared a decade before. In those quieter days, Harry and Ruth, holidaying, would drive in with the boys to buy groceries and linger only to eat slightly greasy ice cream on the waterfront. Ruth recalled streets full of neat fibro homes. They could easily have been housing commission: the cannery workers would, after all, have needed somewhere to live.

  Frida’s mother and Harry had bought their houses in and close to this unassuming town, and within a few years cafés and boutiques began to open among the greengrocers and newsagen
ts of the main street, and in the old cannery buildings; a small hotel was built, and then a larger; the caravan park shrank to a third of its size to accommodate a marina. Frida’s mother and Harry had inadvertently made excellent investments. They were both, as Frida put it, “sitting on a gold mine.” Ruth imagined them congratulating each other. Frida’s mother, in this image, was a rosy, stout Fijian woman who embraced tall, patrician Harry; Harry, never more pleased than when discovering himself to have been astute, shook a bottle of champagne over her head.

  But now this house of Frida’s mother’s was causing trouble. George, it seemed, was a gambler.

  “Not big-league,” said Frida. “Just the pokies and keno when he’s at the club. But I tell you what, that’s more than enough.”

  Ruth loved poker machines; she enjoyed the small lights and the tinny music, the complicated buttons and the promise of luck. She didn’t come across them often, but she insisted on playing whenever she did and referred to this as “having a flutter,” a phrase she always said in a fake Cockney accent. It had never occurred to her that a person could fall into debt from a love of poker machines, but this is what George had done. She pitied him and knew Harry wouldn’t have, because Harry was so sensible, and every now and then a snob. Ruth suspected she was a snob in ways she wasn’t even aware of, but felt that her sympathetic, impressionable heart made up for it.

  Ruth felt sorry for George, but mostly for Frida. George had taken out two mortgages, the first to bankroll a business importing and packaging car-phone parts, and the second to establish his taxi company when the first failed. By this time he had moved into the house, and Frida joined him there soon afterwards.

  “To protect my inheritance,” she said. “Or he’d let it go to the piss.”

  Ruth didn’t comment on Frida’s sudden bad language. She liked it. She liked the way Frida’s swift hands moved over and through her hair to prevent any water from running onto her face. It was a long time since anyone had touched her.

  At first George’s taxi was a success. He’d purchased two licenses from the friend of a friend, and by the time the town took off, he was in a position to franchise. There was a time when nearly every taxi in town bore the words YOUNG LIVERY. But, according to Frida, poor business sense, lack of organization, a surly manner, and a reputation for unreliability—“an arrogant prick to all and sundry, customers and employees and drivers alike, not to mention his own sister”—ruined things for unlucky George. His gambling intensified as drivers quit, cabs broke down, and insurance payments lagged. Now he was back to just the one cab, which he drove himself. Only last weekend, a lengthy love affair with one of his former telephone operators had ended in a fight with her husband, and George spent the night in hospital as a result.

  In short, George was a mess. Frida had tried everything, but he didn’t want to be helped. Ruth sympathized with people who “didn’t want to be helped”; she felt that generally she was one of them, despite her current submission. Frida’s concern now was her mother’s house, which she referred to as “the house she died in.” Ruth made supportive noises. She had never been to the house her mother died in, which was a rectory in country Victoria. Her mother had been visiting friends and died of a stroke in the night. Ruth’s father died in hospital. And there was Harry, who didn’t die in a house at all.

  Frida took the bowl to the bathroom to exchange dirty water for fresh. Ruth thought Frida moved much faster than usual, but perhaps less efficiently. Soapy water splashed onto her handsome floors.

  “I have no idea why I’m telling you all this,” she said on her return, suddenly prim, but she relaxed again as she combed the conditioner through Ruth’s hair. She held the hair at the roots so that it wouldn’t tug, just as Ruth’s mother had done in the green-lit bathroom. Here was the trouble: two mortgages on the house, and payments lagging. Not minding losing the house so much, except that it was “the house she died in.” Government carers being paid so little these days.

  “I don’t need to tell you that,” said Frida. “You know how underappreciated we are.”

  And George too proud to ask for help. Both of them too proud, really. Certain family members might lend a hand, for their mother’s sake, and for Frida’s, but pride prevented her asking.

  “Once you’ve left home, you’ve left,” said Frida. “You go back with your head held high, or you don’t go back.”

  This indicated to Ruth that Frida had severed her ties with Fiji; that her leave-taking had been dramatic and that she expected the rest of her life to live up to it. So Ruth nodded to indicate that she understood, and Frida stilled her head with strong fingers.

  “I thought about taking a second job,” said Frida. She paused as they both considered the noble step of taking a second job. “Then I thought, ‘Excuse me? I barely have time for this one.’ But it’s not like I’m making millions. You know how helpful it is to have this extra work from you, cooking this weekend? It’s paying my electricity bill. George leaves every light on. If it wasn’t for me, he’d have the whole place lit up like a Christmas tree, all night every night. And the time he spends in the shower!”

  “So wasteful,” said Ruth.

  “Well, who doesn’t like a good, long shower?” said snippy Frida. Now she was drying Ruth’s hair with a towel. “How does that feel?”

  “So much better.” Ruth pressed experimentally at her scalp, which responded by flaring into itch.

  “What else needs doing? We want you all done up for your visitor, don’t we.” Ruth listened carefully for any insinuation in this, but found none. “Let’s take a look at your feet.”

  Ruth hadn’t thought about her feet in some time. She was mildly surprised to find them intact at the end of her legs; she held them out in the air with pointed toes, and Frida, Prince Charmingly, removed her slippers. Her small feet were freckled, and her brittle nails nestled in her long toes. Frida was shocked by the dryness of her heels.

  “We can’t have this,” Frida said, and bustled to the bathroom. She returned with another bowlful of hot water, and a small grey lump of pumice stone. “You know,” she said, “I once heard the best remedy for cracked heels—you won’t believe this—nappy-rash cream!” Frida smirked and lowered Ruth’s feet into the steaming bowl. She scrubbed with the stone, and the water went a milky white, none of which seemed to revolt her.

  Ruth flexed one experimental foot. It felt heavy and boneless in the heat of the water. “You’re too good to me,” she said.

  Frida remained quiet. The wet bowl slopped.

  “My father used to do this,” said Ruth. “He used to hold a foot-washing ceremony once a year. He washed all the patients’ feet, then the clinic staff, the household staff, and mine, and last of all my mother’s.”

  “What for?”

  “To remind us and himself that he was there to serve us, and not the other way around.”

  Frida paused in her scrubbing and closed one dubious eye.

  “And because it was nice,” said Ruth. “It was a nice thing to do.”

  Ruth remembered those ceremonies as gold-lit days, brighter than usual, but there was something uncomfortable about them, a feeling of potential disaster. Her mother prepared everyone: had the patients’ feet uncovered and their toenails cut and cleaned, and lined up the staff. The Fijian nurses giggled as they removed the soft white shoes Ruth’s father made them wear. The hospital groundskeeper, a thin, cheerful man, rinsed his feet beneath the outdoor tap until he was beaten back from it by the nurses’ cries.

  “What if he sees you! What if he sees you!” they scolded.

  The clinic was for the Suva poor. They came voluntarily with pains and injuries and difficulty breathing and blood in their stools and numb limbs and pregnancies and migraines and fevers, and Ruth’s father repaired them or referred them or sent them home. They weren’t supposed to stay overnight, but frequently they did, when the Fijian wards in the hospital were full. So on the morning of the foot washing there would be the patien
ts who had stayed and their visiting families, and there would be the new patients, who had arrived that morning, and before seeing to any of them, Ruth’s father washed their feet.

  The washing took place on Good Friday: that solemn, reposeful day, set apart from the rest of the year (although the patients still needed tending, the floors still had to be swept, and Ruth’s mother had to arrange lunch with the help of the houseboy). First there was church, which at that time of year, right before Easter, was full of tense expectation. The chosen hymns were grateful and the Bible passages subdued; the entire service was a form of sheepish mourning. Then Ruth’s family walked down the road from the church to the clinic. Ruth’s father walked in front, his shoulders set in his church suit. He was a man of tireless industry, of easy good cheer, and he was broad over the back the way a bricklayer is broad, or a sportsman; but his head was small, his Adam’s apple prominent, and his hair persisted in a boyish cowlick at the back of his crown. It was fine hair, and his eyelashes were long. He was thick and strong in the trunk, but contradictory in his extremities: his fine ankles and long kangaroo’s feet, his surgeon’s hands, his neat head and filigree hair. This gave him a slightly flimsy look. New mothers winced to see their bulky babies in his slim hands. When, on the day of the Easter washing, those bony hands passed soapily over the feet of his staff and patients and family, they felt like a woodworker’s precise tools. Ruth recalled the pressing of a knuckle against an instep, and the two long hands held together over her foot as if in prayer.