The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane

voice—to have been stored inescapably in her memory. But the car was disappearing, taking its sound with it; Harry, too, went down the drive for the last time. Frida seemed sensitive to this in the quiet of the house. There was a sense of relief and exhaustion at the end of their little battle, and it manifested in small tender things: tea made, quiet maintained, and no competition over the affection of the cats. The grass beneath the car had yellowed to the colour of cereal. Frida pinned the cheque to the fridge with a magnet and told Ruth she would bank it first thing on Monday.

 
    5
    Frida took charge of Ruth’s banking. She presented Ruth with statements and letters from the bank, and Ruth waved a regal arm above each one, as if in dismissal. Frida treated Ruth’s bankbook like a sacred object, always requesting permission to use it and returning it with a public flourish to its proper place at the back of Harry’s filing cabinet. Jeffrey had explained the function of keycards, but Ruth liked the efficient cosiness of the book; she liked how contained it felt, how manual.
    Frida had no time for keycards. “Money isn’t plastic,” she said, although, in fact, it was.
    Ruth intended to inspect all this paperwork in private, at night. She remembered her mother’s lessons about managing staff: never give them any reason to believe you don’t trust them. But the house at night was not the place for these daytime plans; it encouraged a different kind of resolution. After dark, the heat thickened so that every noise seemed tropical: palms rattled their spears, insects rubbed their wings in the dripping trees; the whole house shuffled and buzzed. The heat made Ruth’s head itch. She listened for any hint of the tiger, but it all seemed safely herbivorous. One night she woke to the sound of a dog crying out, and it made her wonder about wild dogs—she thought she remembered a hyena in The Jungle Book . Her mother had read her The Jungle Book when she was very young, the age when her bed was moved away from the window because of nightmares; the view from her pillow was of a chest of drawers, painted green, with a glass night-light that threw pinkish shadows on a framed picture of Sydney Harbour (apparently, she was born in a place called Sydney). So she must have been six or seven.
    Now she lay awake listening to the hyena, which was undoubtedly a dog on the beach. The cats fidgeted at her side, but slept again. Her sense of the extraordinary was particularly strong. She might have been seven, waiting to hear her father come home from a late night at the clinic. She might have been nineteen, waiting for Richard’s voice in the hall; he came home even later than her father and stepped so carefully past her throbbing door she could easily have missed him. The consequence rose up out of the sounds she heard and those she only remembered; it met somewhere between them, and finding space there, it grew. Ruth lay and listened for it; then she grew tired of waiting. I’m too old, she thought, to be a girl waiting for important noise. Why not go out to meet it, why not prepare? She rose from her bed to run a bath and, as the greenish water filled the noisy tub, looked in Harry’s study for her old address book. If I find it before the bath runs over, she thought, Richard’s address will be in there. She found the book before the bath was half full; she opened it, and there under P for Porter was Richard’s address. Just reading it felt like a summons.
    Ruth lowered herself into the water with the help of Frida’s railing. The water amplified the white of her legs, but it smoothed and dazzled all the folds of her skin, so that half of her body was old and actual and the other half was marine and young.
    Ruth was happy and clumsy after her bath. She dressed in a new nightgown. It was sleeveless and pale and, although short, felt bridal. Frida had chosen it and dismayed Ruth with its matronly florals; now, in the night, it