The Night Guest Read Online Free PDF Page A

into rooms and cupboards and corridors, announcing “The bathroom!” and “The linen press!” as if Ruth were a prospective buyer inspecting the property. No new discovery seemed to surprise her. She was tactful in Ruth’s bedroom but pitiless in the guest rooms, going so far as to look under the beds, pulling up wreaths of cat hair from hidden corners and shaking her curly head. Ruth responded with an apologetic smile, at which Frida only tutted; she put her arm around Ruth’s shoulders as if to say, “Don’t you worry, things will be different from now on.”
    “These were my sons’ bedrooms,” explained Ruth, “when we came here on holidays. This was our holiday house.”
    “I see,” said Frida. She ran her left forefinger along a bookshelf and examined it for dust. This was in Phillip’s room, and all the books were for bright young boys. “What happened to your other house?”
    “Our Sydney house? We sold it. We moved out here for retirement,” said Ruth.
    “We?”
    “My husband and I. Harry.”
    Frida squeezed Ruth’s shoulder again. “It really doesn’t bother you to live out here all alone?”
    “Not at all,” said Ruth. “Why should it?”
    Her mother had once warned her: loneliness is off-putting, boredom is unattractive. Ruth was convinced both sensations shone from her face. She was certain she had the odd, unexpected movements of a person used to solitude; when she watched television, for example, she mirrored the facial expressions of the actors. Sometimes she made a game of it. She did once think, while reading a newspaper article about the subject, that she might be depressed, but because Harry hadn’t believed in it—“Happiness is a matter of choice,” he would say—she never mentioned it to her doctor, and certainly not to her sons. She knew quite soon after Harry’s death that her grief wouldn’t disrupt the public order of her days. She expected, instead, a long and private season.
    “Come and have a cuppa and we’ll talk things over,” said Frida.
    Ruth worried that, if pressed, she would talk too much about Harry; she longed for the chance to and was mortified in advance.
    But Frida was all business. “There’s some documents you need to look at,” she said, finding her suitcase in the dining room and hoisting it onto the table with a marvellous grunt. The suitcase looked smaller than Ruth remembered. It only took up the space of a bulky briefcase. Frida searched among its contents, pulled out a plastic sleeve full of papers, and, offering this to Ruth with a look of patient distaste, said, “Official paperwork.”
    But before Ruth could take the sleeve, Frida stepped away towards the window. “Would you look at that,” she said.
    The view from the back of the house often prompted reactions of this kind. There was the dune, sloping away from the garden and down to the beach; there was the wide water and the curve of the bay to the right with the distant silver of the town and, out on the headland, a white lighthouse. Harry used to stand in the garden with his hands on his hips and say, with satisfaction, “Nothing between here and South America.” Since his death, it had felt to Ruth that the house was participating in a cosy continental drift, making its leisurely way on an island of its own to the open sea. Ruth liked islands. She had lived all her life on them, and they suited her.
    “It’s disgusting, is what it is,” said Frida.
    “Oh, dear,” said Ruth. She had always been embarrassed by the splendour of the view, as if owning so much beauty was an admission of vanity on her part, and she wondered if Frida was the guest she’d been waiting for, the one who would rebuke her for it.
    “Would you just look at this?”
    Ruth looked, and saw a group of people on the beach below. There were nine or ten of them, and they were all naked, or almost naked. Some lay on the sand and others played in the water. Ruth felt a cheerful innocence rising from them;