Read Online The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane - Free Book Online

Handsome was not the right word for him; he was good-looking, but in a neat, shining, narrow way, with his combed hair and his straight nose and a paleness about the lips. It was as if his beauty had been tucked away—politely, resolutely—so that he might get on with the rest of his life, but it made itself known, just the same, in the shine of his hair and the fineness of his face. The faint lines on his forehead indicated seriousness. Ruth liked all this; she approved. Sometimes she tied up her hair too tightly to be flattering because, let loose, it was a long white-gold line, a distraction, and had nothing to do with the work of God.
    They all sat together at the dinner table—Ruth, her parents, and Richard—and Ruth saw the dining room as he must have: how long and narrow it was, how dingily white, with the chipped sideboard holding family silver (a tureen, a pepperpot, a punch bowl with six glass cups, each carried lovingly from Sydney, out of the past, and rarely used; isn’t it funny, thought Ruth, how some objects are destined to survive certain things, like sea voyages and war). A fan revolved in the upper air. Ruth’s mother didn’t believe in lamps, only in bright, antiseptic light, so the dining table was laid out, the equator in that longitudinal room, as if emergency surgery might be performed there at any moment. There were no shadows; everything blazed as if under the midday sun. Watercolour landscapes flanked a photograph of the King. When Richard bent his head for her father to say grace, Ruth saw the pale canal of white scalp where he parted his hair. The tops of his ears were red and his forehead was brown and damp. He kept his eyes open and his long, fine face still, but he mouthed Amen . Perhaps he could be converted. She looked at him too long, and he saw her.
    They all ate with that furious attention which comes of social unease and willed good feeling. Or Ruth did, and her mother, and Richard; but her father was relaxed and happy, expanding into male medical company with obvious pleasure, as if he’d been many months at conversational sea. Ruth supposed he had. Her father dominated Richard, and she barely spoke. She hoped instead to burn with an inner intensity that would communicate itself to him secretly. Richard answered her father’s questions with a politeness that suggested he was keeping his true feelings to himself. Ruth recognized and appreciated that kind of reserve. She decided, He’s a moral man, but considerate. He’s kind. Probably—as she admitted to herself later—he could have been utterly without principles or sensitivity and she would still have found something to admire. She was that determined to love him.
    After dinner, they all sat on the verandah (which Ruth referred to, privately, as the terrace) and drank tea. The tea was never hot enough. It was like drinking the air, which pressed close around them, as if the earlier rain had finally just refused to fall any farther and remained suspended. Bats swam overhead. Richard lit a cigarette and Ruth imagined the smoke passing in and out of his lungs. Everything was a vapour—the tea, the damp air, the smoke—but Richard sat distinctly inside all of it. She rarely looked at him or spoke, but she tried to be especially graceful as she fanned her head to keep mosquitoes away; they didn’t bite her, but they fussed at her face. Finally her mother grew tired and said, “I’m sure the young people have a lot to talk about,” and Ruth saw her father look astonished, as if the thought that Richard and Ruth might have anything in common—even the proximity of their ages—had never occurred to him. Then the withdrawal: her mother indulgent, and her father flustered. He’d been caught midmonologue. They achieved their exit with the utmost awkwardness, and Ruth, mortified, nearly fled.
    Richard sat and smoked. There was an atmosphere around him: exhaustion, relief, forced courtesy. All this just in the way he sat and