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

smoked. Ruth liked that he held his wrist rigid. Some men, in her opinion, smoked like women; she liked that he didn’t. He wore a wedding band, but not on the correct finger, and she learned much later that it belonged to his father, who was dead. Ruth, afraid of a moment’s silence, asked questions. He’d come to Fiji, he said, with the hope of opening a dispensary for the treatment of Indian women.
    “For the treatment of—what?” Ruth asked, surprised, because she thought he meant that Indian women suffered from some special malady, unknown to Australians and Fijians and the English, and although she suspected it might be embarrassing, she wanted to know what it was.
    “Of Indian women,” he repeated. Did he think she didn’t know Indian women existed? It was a bad beginning.
    “Oh,” said Ruth. “I thought you were here to help us. In our clinic.”
    “Your clinic?” he asked.
    Ruth considered this rude of him, and enjoyed her resulting indignation. But she was also ashamed: everything she looked at seemed so shabby, so obvious; there was the sound of the houseboy washing dishes in the kitchen, and no real order in the riotous garden, and they were at once too privileged (they were not Indian women, with their mysterious afflictions) and not privileged enough (surely, entertaining a young man on the terrace, she shouldn’t have been able to hear dishes being washed in the kitchen). So she corrected herself by saying, “ The clinic.”
    He smiled at her then, and she felt herself smiling back, unable to help it. “What I really want to do,” he said—and she leaned forward to where his smoke began; she could have dipped her head in it—“is run my own clinic, once a month to start with, more often if there’s interest and resources. There’s a man named Carson—do you know him?”
    “Yes,” said Ruth with regret. Andrew Carson was a youngish man who worked for the South Pacific Commission. He was suspected, in a genial way, of being a Communist, mainly because he didn’t attend church. He approved of Ruth’s father because he could have been making money in Sydney as a doctor—“serious money,” he called it, as if there were any other kind—but was here instead, curing Fijians. Ruth’s father disliked this secular sort of approval. The thought of Richard and Andrew Carson becoming friends—allies—made Ruth disconsolate.
    “He thinks he’s found some funds for me. I want to get out to the villages. I want to buy a truck.”
    “A truck,” said Ruth, with a solemnity in keeping with Richard’s plans.
    “And in the meantime, yes, I’m here to help in your clinic.”
    “I’m glad,” she said, “about both things—that you’re here to help my father, and Indian women.” This was the most deliberate statement she had ever made to a man she wasn’t related to, and she felt as if her ears were burning red.
    Richard rewarded her with another smile. The smoke stood beside him without seeming to rise or fall. “Your father likes to talk, doesn’t he?”
    Ruth was sensitive to criticism of her father, in that tenuous and personal way in which children are anxious for the dignity of their parents. She worried a great deal for him out in the world.
    “Not usually,” she said. “He’s happy to have you to talk to.”
    “I like him very much,” said Richard. “I’ve read everything he’s written on whooping cough.” She waited for him to say, “But I’m sure you’re not interested in all that.” He didn’t. His cigarette burnt right down to his fingers, and he shook them as he flicked it away. “I always smoke them down to the very end. It’s a bad habit. Army days.”
    “Where were you?”
    “Mainly New Guinea, and then for a while in Tokyo.” He was obviously contemplating another cigarette; she saw him decide against it. “Is it the holidays for you? Do you go back to Sydney for school?”
    Ruth stood. “You must be exhausted.”
    “You know, I really am,” he