The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane Page B

invite a man instead.”
    Frida hooted. Her whole face shone with suggestive delight. “Well, well,” she said. “Just when I thought I had you figured out.”
    Ruth, pleased by this innuendo, nevertheless dismissed it with an airy hand.
    “Who is he, then?” said Frida. “Your boyfriend?”
    “I haven’t seen him in fifty years.”
    “Ex-boyfriend?”
    “No. Sort of.”
    “Ha!” cried Frida, triumphant. “It’s always the quiet ones who’re up to no good.”
    “Oh, Frida, it was the fifties! Nobody was up to no good. Nobody I knew. It was the fifties, and in Fiji it may as well have been 1912.”
    Frida snorted as if there had never been a 1912.
    “I mean Fiji in the fifties, is all I mean,” Ruth corrected. “I don’t mean Fiji is a backward country.”
    “I could care less if Fiji is a backward country,” said Frida. Each apricot disappeared inside her benevolent mouth. Ruth began to worry for Frida’s digestive system, but counseled herself not to; Frida was the kind of woman her mother would have referred to, with approval, as having the constitution of an ox. As a child, Ruth was frightened of oxen, which rolled their eyes and ate the tops of sugarcane and were glossy flanked in the sun, but she knew now that her mother had never had those real oxen in mind when she complimented anyone’s constitution.
    “His name was Richard Porter,” said Ruth.
    “Oh, yes,” said Frida, lifting one groomed eyebrow as if she’d been anticipating Richard all along. But this was Frida’s way: it was impossible to surprise her. She would rather starve than be caught off guard; she had said so on more than one occasion. It was also unnecessary to ask if Frida wanted to hear about Richard, because she would only shrug or sigh or, at best, say, “Suit yourself.” Much better just to begin.
    “He was a doctor who came to help my father at the clinic,” said Ruth. “I was nineteen. He was older.”
    Frida seemed to smirk at this, as if she were hearing a smutty story. But it was hard to tell what she was thinking. She sat, almost tranquillized, with her feet lifted from the floor, and looked out across the bay, where an insistent wind cleared the haze and lifted the flags over the surf club.
    Richard, Ruth explained, was in Fiji as a medical humanitarian rather than a missionary, although he agreed to profess certain beliefs in order to fill the post at the clinic—it was so difficult to find trained men after the war that Ruth’s father was willing to accept this compromise. Ruth’s parents referred to Richard, before his arrival, as “that gifted but misguided young man” and busied themselves preparing the house, since he would be staying with them until he found accommodation of his own. He was Australian, too; Ruth’s parents prayed in thankfulness to God for this provision, and Ruth prayed along with them. She was most interested in how handsome he was. He arrived during a rainstorm; Ruth stood on the verandah at the side of the house to watch him run from a taxi through the downpour. She felt a strong sense of destiny because she was nineteen and because he seemed so providential: young, Australian, a doctor, and now coming from rain into her own house. So she rounded the corner, mindful of her own effect—because she had been pretty at nineteen, a lovely pale blonde—and ready, so consciously ready, for her life to make some plausible beginning. But he was sodden and there was some concern about his bags, which the driver was carrying in through the rain. Richard seemed to want to help and was being forcibly restrained from doing so by Ruth’s father, who had prepared a welcome speech and was delivering it while holding Richard in a paternal embrace. Ruth was forgotten in the confusion and then only hurriedly introduced; she went to her bedroom and moped over an impression of dark hair and a thin frame.
    Later that evening, dry, Richard’s hair was light and his body seemed less scarce.