The Night Guest Read Online Free PDF

it was like standing on a mountain pass and seeing a town down in the snug valley. But Frida was unmistakably affronted, just as Harry would have been, and she loomed out into the garden. Ruth followed. So little happened at this end of the beach during winter—lone runners, a few dogs. Once, the old jetty splintered and slumped after a storm tide and over the course of a winter was washed out to sea. Skinny-dippers were a definite event, and Ruth liked the idea of them.
    “Think there’s no one out here, huh?” said Frida. “Think you’re alone and you can do whatever you want?”
    She made her way to a corner of the garden where two abandoned aluminium bins, long ago used for compost, sprang to new life in the martial gravity of Frida’s intentions. She took the lids from the bins, gave them a preparatory shake, and turned to Ruth with a look of mirthful cunning. Ruth was startled by this look. Who was this stranger crossing her land and heading for the ocean with the lids of the compost bins in her firm grip? What could justify her warlike march? It was all both splendid and alarming.
    Frida stood on the sandy ridge at the edge of the garden and bellowed down at the beach. She brandished the lids and commenced her descent of the dune, giving her war cry; she clashed the lids together above her head. The people on the beach—and Ruth saw now that they were very young, only teenagers—had been laughing but, noticing Frida, they lifted themselves from the sand or scrambled from the sea, their heads dark with water. They looked clumsy and beautiful from this distance. A warp in the clouds flooded sun onto their arms and backs. They jeered at Frida but swept up their possessions in anticipation of her arrival, wrapping themselves in towels and stumbling away over the wet sand.
    Frida paused at the dirty line that marked high tide. Holding one lid up over her head, as if shading her eyes to see, she became a ship’s captain scanning the horizon; these heroic poses came easily to her and her gallant bulk. She moved slowly towards the sea until she reached the place the children had made camp. Then she threw down the lids and began to kick at the sand so that it rose in wild flurries around her; when she finished, it fell smoothly until there was no sign anyone had ever settled on that spot. She retrieved the lids and made her way back to the house.
    Ruth watched Frida’s serene face float up the dune. She was hard to recognize as the woman who had laboured up this same slope the day before. It was as if she’d required only that one difficult ascent to become sure-footed; or perhaps the garbage lids were acting as ballast: she did hold them a little way out from her body, like wings.
    “That’s that, then,” said Frida. By now she was standing beside Ruth and exhaling through her nose with an equine vigour. The incident appeared to have given her a kind of health.
    Ruth, unsure of what to say, ventured, “They shouldn’t swim all the way out here without lifeguards. It’s not safe.”
    “They won’t be back.”
    “It’s just high jinks, I suppose.”
    Frida replaced the lids on the compost bins. “They can have their fun in front of someone else’s house, then. Spoil someone else’s view.” And with a firm and nursery air she withdrew to the house.
    Ruth remained outside long enough to watch the swimmers take the path up to the small parking lot behind the bus stop, where a Norfolk pine had once dropped during a windstorm and crushed a surfer’s truck. She had expected the children to move down the beach and set up camp again, but Frida appeared to have scared them off for good. Ruth was sorry to see them go. But a ripe, wet wind was developing, a familiar sea wind which would have driven them away soon enough. Sand and salt flew up and about, into Ruth’s hair and over her garden. This end of the beach was empty now. Any car taking the road to town might be full of those banished children. If I see one