The Night Guest (10 page)

“How did you annoy them?”

“Oh, politics.” Richard waved his hand with the cigarette in it. “All this repatriation business—get rid of the Indians, get rid of the Chinese. Send them home or give them the Marquesas, just get them out of here. Let them all kill each other somewhere else, and leave Fiji to the Fijians.” He was silent for a moment. “And the English.”

“You don’t agree.” Ruth knew he didn’t agree; they had talked this through before; Ruth never cared so much as when she cared with him.

“I’m tired of controversy today,” he said. “I think I’d better just go to bed.”

“Not yet,” said Ruth. “Not until you tell me why my father’s so wrong.”

Richard looked at her in a patient way, but it was enough to shake her heart. He seemed to be taking her measure. He had not yet kissed her at the ball.

“All right,” he said. “All right, tell me something: When does he give them a chance to wash
his
feet? Is it that he’s the greatest, the noblest servant of them all? This privilege of service! He calls himself a servant and I know he’s referring to certain ideas—abasement, humility, sacrifice, the servant Christ, that whole Christian model of service—I know all that, but hasn’t he ever stopped to think that he’s in a country where people work and live every day as servants, for him? You have a houseboy! He doesn’t wash your father’s feet in a great public show—he scrubs dishes every night when no one’s there to see him. I’m sorry, it infuriates me. No, but I’m not sorry—God!”

And no one spoke this way; no one grew angry. Ruth was astonished, and in her admiration became clumsy and receptive. None of what he said surprised her; she’d begun to think most of these things herself. But she had never heard a respectable man blaspheme, and this made the strongest impression. She would at that moment have ceded the Church, her family, and Fiji and fled with him in pilgrim haste to any land of his choosing—if only he would ask her. But he didn’t, so she remained loyal and, as a result, defensive; it was the same impulse that made her ashamed of her father’s audible knees.

“You haven’t been here long enough to understand about servants,” she said, but that sounded feeble (she had heard so many people say it to newcomers before), so she continued, “And what else should he do? No foot-washing at all? Just hope they all know he doesn’t think he’s above them?”

Ruth shifted and touched Richard’s arm with her elbow, which produced no sensation. But she wanted him to put his hand on hers and agree with her, very badly.

“This morning,” he said, “I drove that bloody truck over those bloody roads because somebody told somebody else who told me that a pregnant woman collapsed at Nasavu—and they wouldn’t let me near her, they said the problem was caused by walking on uneven land and she’d go to the temple and be fine, and meanwhile I’d blown a tire, I rode back to Suva with a bloody monarchist, Fijians are all monarchists, and the truck’s still out there, I’ll have to get myself back tomorrow, and I told you I should go to bed. I really should go to bed.”

And he stood and kissed her on the top of her head, which was nothing at all; she was at her most chaste when she was angry with him, or embarrassed, or particularly in love, and at this moment she was all three. Also, she felt very young.

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” he said. And then, because he was kind: “You’re absolutely right, about everything, probably, but I couldn’t be fair to you tonight. I’m far too sad.”

This astonished her, too. What was there for Richard to feel sad about?

There was another moment like this, Ruth remembered, without mentioning it to Frida: on the boat to Sydney. Richard was returning to Sydney to take up a position with the World Health Organization; Ruth was “going home,” as her parents called it, to find work. She spent the trip in terror that nothing would happen with Richard; that nothing would happen with her whole life. She knew, foolishly, that she had counted on being her parents’ daughter forever, even while she contemplated such things as university or teaching or nursing (could she be a nurse, like her mother? Would she really go back to Fiji as a teacher? She vacillated on this point daily). And the trip passed, and on a September morning she stood next to Richard on the boat’s deck where schoolgirls played paddle tennis. She looked out at the heads of Sydney Harbour and said, “Apparently I’m going to have to
be
something.”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it,” said Richard, “this having to be something.”

And Ruth was astonished that a man so obviously
something
—a doctor, a soldier, the saviour of Indian women—could sound so sad about it. But he had held her hand twice on the boat, once to steady her in a rough sea and once for three minutes because she’d been stupid enough to cry a little about leaving Fiji. He had sought her out with drinks and, as the weather grew colder the farther they sailed from the equator, brought rugs for her knees. They were sitting on the sundeck, and because she wore gloves, which might hide a ring, a man had smiled at them and assumed—Ruth was sure—they were married. And Richard had kissed her at the ball for the Queen, although she wondered sometimes if she had imagined that. None of it was enough, but it was the beginning—it was the passage over, and then Sydney waited, this city Ruth belonged in without knowing anything about it. Richard would show her Sydney, and she would love him, and he would love her back.

The boat entered the Harbour. The wide, bright city crowded up against the water, but drew back from its very edge; Ruth saw green parklands full of trees, with white flocks of parrots bursting out of them. The parrots surprised Ruth, who had expected Sydney to be much more like England than Fiji. And then Richard leaned forward against the railing of the deck and spoke so that she couldn’t see his face, but the wind still carried every word he said, and what he said was that he was engaged to be married.

“To whom?” asked Ruth, and Richard had to turn and ask her to repeat herself.

“Her name is Kyoko,” he said, which sounded to Ruth like
Coco
, and she pictured a bright blond girl with the kind of brilliant, beautiful face that produces its own light (Ruth’s own face only reflected light, like the moon), and she was more surprised—at first—that Richard could love a girl called Coco than she was by the fact that Richard loved anyone at all. There was a strong gagging pulse in her throat.

“Congratulations,” she said, with a stiff smile; she didn’t trust herself to ask questions. They were surrounded now by the schoolgirls, waving landwards with their paddles; Ruth felt much older than all of them.

The wind was making Richard’s nose run. “I met Kyoko in Japan,” he said. “She’s a widow. She’s Japanese.”

“That’s nice,” said Ruth, tight-lipped but dignified, she thought, which mattered most. She thought.

“She’s Japanese,” he said. “Which is why I didn’t talk about it. I wasn’t sure—well—what you’d think. All of you.”

Ruth pretended not to have heard him. She shook against the railing but had no intention of crying. The main thing was to extricate herself without revealing the extent of her agony.

Now Richard turned to look at her—to properly look. He cleared his throat and squinted. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Oh, whatever for?” cried Ruth, smiling too much and taking a step away from him because she thought he was going to touch her arm. “Maybe I should go and—” She couldn’t think what she should go and do; she had told him a number of times how much she was looking forward to the passage through the Harbour.

“She’s going to meet the boat,” said Richard. “I’d like to introduce you.”

So he and Kyoko had exchanged letters with plans and arrangements: I’ll be on this boat, I can’t wait to see you, there’ll be a child with me, a silly girl who hates opera, I’m afraid you’ll have to meet her. Ruth saw the soft, admiring faces of all those girls to whom she had boasted about sailing to Sydney with Richard Porter. At that moment, those faces seemed worse than Richard’s. The green and grey city tilted at the end of the boat.

“That would be lovely,” lied Ruth.

She felt like stepping off the boat and walking back to Suva across the bottom of the sea. But she planned to be kind and unshakeable, an emissary from her parents, a testament to the marvellous work Richard had done among the Indian women of Fiji; she wouldn’t have him think she disapproved of his marrying a Japanese widow, or that she cared about his kissing her at the ball when all the time he was engaged. Perhaps it might be possible, however, in the crowded rush to leave the boat, to meet her flustered uncle and collect her luggage, surely it might be possible to lose Richard, to look only halfheartedly for him—where
could
he have got to?—and not to meet Kyoko after all. And that turned out to be true. Richard was almost too easy to lose, as if he dreaded the meeting himself. Ruth stumbled among her luggage and in the arms of her sentimental aunt, and she was almost sure she didn’t see Kyoko. There
was
a dark-haired woman waiting in a yellow dress, but she didn’t look definitely Japanese. Ruth went home with her relatives to a street lined with heavy mauve jacarandas, to a borrowed bedroom warming in the mild sun, and cried into a pillow that smelled of someone else’s hair.

That was a painful hour, and in the midst of it she was self-possessed enough to hope it had taught her humility. Really, her heart had been broken in the most inconspicuous way. She had never risked it (she knew this later and had moments of regret). That no one knew she was suffering was both her triumph and, in part, the cause of her torment. After a terrible week or two, it was a very governed torment. In some ways, she passed with relief from the shadow of Richard’s opinions, his disapproval and his industry. She was never quite sure how he had made her a less interesting person. Was it nerves? Or did he bore her? She attended his wedding four months later with a tight heart. His imminent wife had dark hair arranged around an oblong forehead. How would it feel to walk down the aisle towards his opening face? She refused all his attempts to see her, citing busyness; and she was busy, working as a secretary for her parents’ missionary society, moving into a flat with some other girls, making resolutions to be like them, to wear the shoes they did and read their magazines, to be just like every other girl in wide, clean, temperate Sydney. She suspected, at times, that Richard would disapprove, and so she made an effort to think about him less, until eventually it was no effort at all. Ruth used to overhear her mother counseling the brokenhearted nurses. “There are plenty of fish in the sea,” she would say, and from her biblical mouth it sounded like wisdom literature. Now Ruth said fondly to herself, “There are bigger fish in the sea than me.”

For six months she wore the right shoes and read the right magazines and went out with the right men. Then she met Harry during a work event at which she was guardian of the sandwiches. He had come with his parents, who were missionaries in the Solomons. He seemed to have a great appetite for sandwiches; he ate at least four before asking if he could see her again. And he was kind, and handsome, and effortless. It was as if they had both been raised in the same country—Missionary Childhood—and were now finding their way together in the real world. Harry liked to say, “Isn’t it amazing how
normal
we are?”—which prompted a happy spasm in Ruth’s grateful heart. She liked to be reassured. They kissed and courted, and Richard receded; they married, and Richard wasn’t invited. Although their parents were missionaries, religion was, for both of them, a private matter; in comparison to their parents’ difficult, foreign faith and the vigour with which they had pursued it, their own attempts seemed feeble and best concealed. They fell, together, out of the habit of belief. They liked the same furniture and paintings, the same music, and the same food, and this made for the easeful establishment of their household. When Ruth recalled this early period of her marriage—and she often did—the impression was of an existing happiness that had only been waiting for them to enter into it.

Frida rocked back onto her heels. “There,” she said, with the same beatific look on her face as when she finished cleaning the floors. She lifted Ruth’s feet from the basin and dried them with a thorough towel, and then she rubbed in moisturizer. Her hands were slick and strong. Ruth rested her head against the recliner. She closed her eyes. Frida hummed as she rubbed, and there was only safety in the world, and Richard coming tomorrow, in the best of health for eighty.

8

Ruth, stepping into the garden on the morning of Richard’s arrival, was reminded of spring, as if spring were a season that took place distinctly in her part of the world. The air was sweet and dry and green. The house was clean, the cupboards were full of food, and a vase of wattle blossoms stood on the dining-room table. Frida had cut them from a tree at her mother’s house; they emitted their own subtle light. Richard was due that evening.

The only flaw in all this beauty was the discovery of a sticky presence on one of the lounge cushions: cat-deposited, which inspired Frida to a brief rant about the cats’ gastrointestinal hold over the house (she was convinced their messes were deliberate attacks on her own person). But after all, that was easily solved: Frida sponged the cushion, turned it over, and seemed to forget it had ever happened. She was in an exceptional mood. She was busy and in control without being domineering; she asked Ruth’s opinion on everything, fluffed cushions and her currently curly hair, and fussed over Jeffrey’s room, where Richard would sleep. She and Ruth made the bed together, using the best, slightly yellowed linen sheets—Frida had ironed them, and spread out and tucked in, they reminded Ruth of well-buttered bread. The entire house waited expectantly, as if the food and ironed sheets and clean windows were secrets it would be compelled to reveal by delightful means. Frida spent the afternoon cooking, so Ruth swept the garden path clean of sand. She was proud of the smooth sun over her hair and shoulders, the familiar arc of the sea, and the beauty of her house on the hilltop. Her back hurt; she thought about taking an extra pill, but chose not to; she worried the pills made her foggy at times, and she wanted clarity this weekend. She changed into a blue skirt she could belt at her becoming waist and settled to wait in her chair. Waiting was difficult under these circumstances. The sense that something important was going to happen rose in Ruth’s chest as if a wind were blowing there.