The Night Guest

by Fiona McFarlane

  In the garden, in the afternoons, Ruth was supposed to “take the air”—instead of an indoor nap.

  “We’ll have you walking on the beach in no time,” said Frida, as if Ruth had been accustomed to daily canters on the sand, and whenever Ruth complained about her back, Frida tapped her temple and said, “Have you ever stopped to think it might all be in your head? What’s the word for that? Jeffrey would know.”

  “Psychosomatic,” said Ruth.

  “Jeffrey would know.”

  One morning, Frida returned from the letterbox with a pale blue envelope. She presented it to Ruth with some ceremony and hovered to see it opened. Ruth didn’t hurry. She looked at the return address: Richard Porter, and then the number and street of the house in Sydney she could live in if she wanted to. Frida shuffled and sighed beside her.

  “Can you get me the letter opener?” asked Ruth. “It’s on Harry’s desk.”

  “Just open it.”

  “I want to slit it open. I want to keep the address.”

  Frida shook her head and bugged her eyes, an uncharacteristically comic face, and went inside. This gave Ruth the opportunity to smell the envelope. She pressed her fingers along the closed flap, feeling the places where Richard’s hands—and maybe his tongue—must have touched. Ruth had expected to hear from him sooner, but she wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed since his visit.

  Frida returned with a small, sharp knife from the kitchen.

  The envelope contained a card, and the card held a sheet of that same thin paper on which Richard had written to accept her invitation to visit. The card had a photograph of a beach on it—not this beach, not Ruth’s bay—and the sky in the picture was a ludicrous blue. Ruth found it hard to imagine Richard selecting the card. It said, “To dear Ruth and Frida, with thanks for a very special weekend.”

  Ruth passed the card to Frida, who took it with some care, as if it might be the bearer of exquisite news. Then Ruth read the note, which was addressed only to her: “Dearest Ruth, I hope you’re feeling better. I would love to hear your voice and know what you’re thinking. My garden is full of daylilies, all of them pink, which I want you to see—my daughter tells me I’ll enjoy them for another three weeks or so. She has the family’s green thumb—and all our fingers. Please telephone as soon as you’re well enough, or write, or else! Or else I’ll come back up there and fetch you.”

  Ruth wondered if she would enjoy being fetched.

  Frida was watching. “Can I see?” she asked.

  “It’s private.”

  “Oh, private.” Frida appeared to find this funny and raised her arms as if she were in a movie and a man in wacky stripes had just told her to stick ’em up.

  “How does he know I’ve been sick?” asked Ruth. “Has he been calling?”

  “He called,” said Frida.

  “When?”

  “When you were sick.” Frida stuck the card in the waistband of her trousers.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you want me to start writing everything down? I’m not your secretary.” Frida shifted her weight from foot to foot. “He just wanted to tell us thank you. Like he says in his card. I don’t think you missed a big chin-wag.”

  “If you must know,” said haughty Ruth, “he wants me to go and live with him.”

  Frida’s face registered surprise for only a moment; then she corrected it. Ruth had never seen Frida off guard, and there was something alarming about the visible motion of her thought.

  “And?” Frida said.

  “I haven’t decided,” said Ruth. She already regretted telling Frida; she remembered a phrase of Mrs. Mason’s: “Trap your tongue if it tattles out of turn.”

  But Frida said nothing more. She evidently had further questions, but wouldn’t lower herself to asking them. She flicked at the card in her waistband and rolled away into the house.

  Jeffrey telephoned that evening. “I’ve just had a very interesting call from Frida,” he said. “She’s worried about you.”

  Ruth wondered when Frida had found the time; she seemed to have spent the last few hours in the bathroom, dyeing her hair.

  “She actually asked me not to mention our chat,” said Jeffrey. “I don’t like that kind of subterfuge, though I’m sure she has her reasons.”

  “She usually does.”

  “Now, about this Richard. How old is he, exactly?”

  “He’s about eighty.”

  “Oh. He’s eighty,” said Jeffrey, so Ruth knew his wife was listening. “That’s different. Frida made him sound like some kind of gold-digger.”

  “Harry isn’t a gold-digger!”

  “You mean Richard.”

  “Yes, Richard. I’ve known him for fifty years. He isn’t after me for my money.”

  “But he is after you?” asked Jeffrey.

  “I think, yes, he is after me. Is that all right with you, darling?”

  “What are we talking here? Companion? Boyfriend? Husband?” There was a boyish tremor in his voice, but it seemed to stem from embarrassment rather than anxiety. He mastered it by clearing his throat.

  “I think it would be unfair on you boys to drag mud over the question of inheritance, at my age,” said Ruth.

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to marry him.”

  “I know you need companionship. I worry about you out there on your own, I really do.”

  “I have Frida.”

  “And thank God for Frida,” said Jeffrey.

  “Does Richard have your permission, then, to be after me?”

  “You don’t need my permission, Ma. This is about what you want. But I’d like to meet him before you make any decisions.”

  “The lilies only have three weeks or so,” said Ruth.

  “What was that?”

  “He wants me to see the lilies. They’re pink.”

  Jeffrey cleared his throat; Ruth thought she might have said something wrong.

  “Pink lilies, right, okay. Where does he live?”

  “In Sydney, like your father.”

  “Are you going to invite him for Christmas?” asked Jeffrey. “So we can all meet him? Oh—but where would he sleep?” Small, practical details of this nature always bothered him, even as a young boy; and then he seemed to realize he’d asked a more personal question than he’d intended, and he said, “I mean, with all of us staying.”

  “And Frida already in Phil’s room,” said Ruth. “Or maybe she wouldn’t want to stay for Christmas.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’ll probably want to spend Christmas with George.”

  Frida appeared, without sound, at the door between the kitchen and the hall. Her hair was now a light reddish brown, rounded and shiny, like a polished apple, and her face was terribly blank.

  “But why is Frida in Phil’s room?” asked Jeffrey.

  “Well, she lives there now,” said Ruth, irritated; how many times did she have to say it?

  “Is she there? Put her on.”

  Already Frida’s hand was stretched out. Ruth offered up the receiver like a heifer to Juno. Frida’s voice sounded bright when she said, “Jeff,” into the phone, but her flat eyes remained on Ruth’s face.

  “Yes, Jeff,” said Frida, with a noble weariness. “Yes, that’s right. I assumed she’d told you.”

  Jeff’s voice was so small on the other end of the line—just a pitch, really, rather than words—and this made it seem as if an argument was already over and he had lost. Frida stood, waiting, as Jeff’s voice buzzed, and her eyes flicked from Ruth’s face to her own fingernails, which she held away from the shadow of her body.

  “Look, Jeff, this is between you and your mother. Who hasn’t been well these last couple of weeks, just FYI. She didn’t want to worry you—overdoing things, is all, with Richard and everything. She’s no spring chicken. I wanted to be on hand. We talked it through, didn’t we, Ruthie?”

  Frida didn’t look at Ruth, who retreated into the di
ning room, annoyed at her son for making a fuss. This is my house, she thought. It isn’t Phil’s room; it’s mine. If I want to install one thousand Fridas in Phil’s room, one thousand Richards in Jeff’s room—in my room—then I will. And Jeffrey didn’t seem to care one bit about the lilies, which would be long gone by Christmas.

  “Just some tiredness, loss of appetite, nothing serious,” said Frida into the phone. “And we’re much better now, aren’t we, Ruthie?”

  “Yes!” piped Ruth from the dining room.

  “You go right ahead and do that, Jeff,” said Frida. “Look, I didn’t see the need. I’m a trained nurse, and the only person whose time I’m willing to waste is my own. All right, first thing in the morning. You’re welcome. Not at all. There’s no need, Jeff—I’m happy to do it. And she likes the company, the dear. Don’t you, Ruthie? All right, now.” Frida turned and carried the handset, on the end of its long white cord, to Ruth, who held it with reluctance to her ear.

  “Ma, if you’re sick, you’ve got to tell me. I want you to tell me. All right?” Jeffrey’s voice was exasperated, like a boy’s, as if tired of these adult games from which he was unjustly excluded.

  “Actually,” she said, “I don’t have to tell you anything. What do you think of that?”

  And she hung up, or tried to; but she was so far from the wall, with all that cord between them, that she succeeded only in dropping the receiver. It rolled stupidly on the floor until Frida picked it up, looked at it as if she’d never seen its like, and then replaced it in its cradle.

  “Thank you,” said Ruth.

  The phone began to ring again, but Frida only looked at Ruth with that big, blank face and shook her head as she walked away towards Phil’s room. The phone rang and rang, and Ruth didn’t answer it until she heard a door slam; then she did. It was Jeffrey, of course, upset.

  “Did you hang up on me?” he demanded, and Ruth, until that moment proud of her defiance, repented and said, “I dropped the phone.”

  Then he was warm and fatherly. “I just feel that one of us should come out there and meet this woman who’s living in your house,” he said.

  “You’ll meet her at Christmas.”

  “She calls you Ruthie.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” said Ruth.

  “What are you paying her?”

  “I told you, I’m not paying her a cent.”

  This wasn’t true; they had worked out a small salary in return for Frida’s extra services. It wasn’t generous, but Frida insisted on the smallness of the amount.

  “Christmas is weeks away,” said Jeffrey. “Would you object to a quick visit before then?”

  “Lovely,” said Ruth. Was it lovely? It occurred to her that Jeffrey might be planning a visit in order to stop her from going to Richard. Would Richard come, then, and fetch her, as he threatened?

  They spent some time—more than usual—saying good-night to each other, as if they were sweethearts who couldn’t bear to part, until the cats came to Ruth’s feet to say, “Bed! Bed!” She hung up and took them in to bed. They rolled and begged and bathed, and finally they slept. Ruth went noisily to the bathroom, washed herself with maximum fuss, and closed the lounge-room door with some force, but there was no sound at all from Frida’s part of the house.

  11

  The tiger came back that night. At least the noise of him did; or whatever it was that produced his noise. Ruth was lying in bed thinking about Richard and what it might be like to live in the city again. Richard lived in a sunny, hilly part of Sydney, northwest of the Harbour, where the trees tended to lose their leaves in the autumn and the wide evening roads were strung with homewards traffic. The gardens up there were all rhododendrons and azaleas, as if the climate were cooler and wetter than in other parts of the city, and Ruth, who didn’t know the area well, associated it with the large, heavy house of one of her elocution students whose parents had invited her to dinner and then argued with each other over the cost of her lessons. Ruth also thought about Jeffrey, how boyish he had sounded on the phone, and the way he’d said, “This is about what you want.” Could that be true? Since Harry died, she’d rarely thought about wanting anything. Frida was the one who wanted. She wanted clean floors, a smaller waist, and differently coloured hair. Frida filled the world with her desires. And Ruth admired it. Why not be like that?

  The cats heard the noises first. Ruth was almost asleep, but they sat up, sphinxlike, their paws folded inward and their eyes slit. They were like little emperors on fabric shipped from China to England in the eighteenth century. Their ears moved and their tails were alert. Ruth, sensing their attention, turned her head on her pillow to listen, and there it was: something moving through the lounge room, shifting the furniture; but its tread was so light, so subtle; there was a louder exhalation, the amplification of a house cat sniffing under an unaccountably closed door, and at this the cats lost their composure and fled.

  Now Ruth noticed an unusual smell, which seemed to enter the room as the cats left it. This very particular smell, concentrated and rank, was quite unlike the actual jungle, although it was this childhood scent that Ruth recalled now. The smell reminded her of the warning cries of seagulls in the garden when the cats were in the grass: not a specific panic, just a general alarm. Could a smell be a seagull? Perhaps it was more like a parrot. The tiger shook his head—new breathing accompanied the shake—and padded through the lounge room. It annoyed Ruth to hear him; she was impatient with herself because there was no point to him now that she had Frida and Richard; he had prepared the way for them and was no longer needed. She listened for any modulation in the tiger’s sounds, and when she heard it, she drew wild conclusions: the tiger is in the hallway, there are two tigers, the insects are eating the furniture, there may also be a wild pig. Lost in these conjectures, she fell asleep. Ruth was fortunate in this way—she always slept, no matter what her anxiety, but she suffered through the night with fretful dreams. Waking in the morning, with the cats anchoring the quilt around her feet, she concluded that her ability to sleep despite the danger indicated a lack of belief in the tiger.

  “After all,” she said, aloud, “there is no tiger.”

  The cats gave her their quizzical attention and then began to bathe. Ruth dressed. She brushed her hair. There was no tiger, not last night, not ever. Today she would telephone Richard, not to say she would come to him—not yet; just to hear his voice.

  But the lounge room, when Ruth entered it, did look dishevelled. An armchair stood in closer than usual proximity to a lamp. One corner of the rug lay folded back. And were the feline hairs she found rubbed into the rug more bristly than usual, more orange? The light fell innocently through the lace curtains. Everything was calm, but each piece of furniture seemed unmoored in the flat, insipid light, as if it had been stranded in its insistence on the ordinary. Ruth had the feeling that her whole house was lying to her. How could it smell of a jungle in the night and now so strongly, so freshly, of eucalyptus? But that was Frida, mopping the floors. Ruth thought, She’s hiding the evidence, whether she knows it or not. Does she know it?

  “Frida!” she called.

  Frida came. She came with all the Valkyric majesty of Frida in the morning, when her mood had not yet solidified for the day, and any whim might take her: to be kind, to be sullen. Capricious Frida of the milky mornings, who might eat yoghurt or deny herself dairy, who might wash Ruth’s hair or kick at the cats (never striking them), and who carried with her a new kind of privacy, which also emanated from what had formerly been Phillip’s room so that Ruth knew it was off-limits. The floors gleamed with water, and they threw up light so that Frida, moving over them, seemed larger than ever. How was it possible, Ruth wondered, that as Frida shrank (her diet was working), she also seemed to take up more space? It must be a trick of all that light bouncing up from the immaculate floors.

  “You’re up,” said Frida, good-natured. “I’ll call the doctor.”

  “What for?”

  “Yo
ur son told me to—on the phone last night.”

  “I’m not sick anymore.”

  “Fine,” said Frida. “No doctor.” And she turned to leave.

  “Frida!” cried Ruth. Frida hated to be stopped when she was busy, and she hated to hear her name called out. Ruth would do it only under special circumstances; twice in one morning was quite remarkable.

  “What?” Frida asked, revolving. She seemed placid enough. Her toffee-coloured hair made her sweeter.

  “Did you notice a funny smell in here this morning?”

  “What d’you mean, funny?”

  “I suppose a sort of animal smell.”

  “The cats, you mean? They’re stinkers. Not much we can do about that.”

  “No, no, more than the cats. Stronger than that. Do they really smell so bad? Cats are clean little things, aren’t they?”

  “If they’re clean, then I’m the Queen of Sheba.”

  Frida probably was the Queen of Sheba. She stood robed in magisterial light; she had just proceeded with wisdom and splendour from the court of Solomon, where she solved all manner of problems: unnecessary automobiles, impossible tigers, the melancholy of the king. Now she was here to assist Ruth. She was a golden opportunity.

  “This is a golden opportunity,” said Ruth.

  Frida shook her head and began to move back towards the kitchen.

  “Frida, wait!” Now there was urgency: when Frida shook her head, it was necessary to tell her things quickly or not at all. “What would you say if I told you a tiger walked around the house last night?”

  “Walked around inside the house, or walked around the house?”

  “Inside,” Ruth said.

  “What kind of tiger?”

  “What kind of tigers are there?”

  “A big tiger? A boy tiger?”

  “Yes.”

  “Big or boy?” asked Frida, still reasonable.

  “Big boy.”

  “A Tasmanian tiger? Or the ordinary kind?”

  “Ordinary,” said Ruth.

  “And what makes you think we’ve got a tiger?”

  “I thought I heard him.”