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 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 said, standing too. “You’ve made me feel very welcome. Thank you.”
He didn’t offer his hand. He stood, holding his cigarettes, and his tea was only half finished; he had no idea of the cost of good tea in Suva. The square of the kitchen window went catastrophically dark.
“I hope you’ll be happy here,” said Ruth. She was moving inside, too quickly. “I’ve finished school. I’m nineteen. Good night.”
She ran up the stairs, thinking, Idiot, idiot.
Now she said to Frida, “I fell in love with him the very first night. What a goose. I didn’t even know him.”
“Usually better not to,” said Frida.
“In some cases, maybe. But Richard was quite a special man.”
“And you didn’t marry him.”
“No,” said Ruth.
“Silly bugger.”
“It wasn’t up to me.”
“I meant him,” said Frida.
“Oh, he did all right. He got married before I did. We sailed back to Sydney together in 1954, and I hoped something might happen. Something definite, I mean. But it turned out he was engaged all that time. Never mentioned it, not even to my father. I went to his wedding and never saw him again.”
“Really? Never again?”
“Never.” Ruth liked the dramatic finality of
never
, but was compelled to admit there had been Christmas cards.
“If you ask my opinion,” said Frida, who rarely waited for the solicitation of her opinion, “you’re better off. What kind of bloke doesn’t tell anyone he’s engaged?”
“The girl he was marrying was Japanese. He met her in Japan.” Ruth, defensive, saw Frida dismiss this as a reason for secrecy. “It wasn’t all that long after the war. It was a sensitive subject.”
Frida sent out one blind hand for an apricot. She was thoughtful; she understood sensitive subjects. She chewed her apricot before asking, “And what happened in the end?”
As if a life is a period during which things happen. I suppose it is, thought Ruth, and they do, and then at my age, at Richard’s age, they’ve finished happening, and you can ask.
“His wife died about a year or two before Harry. She was older than him—older than Richard.”
Now Frida held a hand to her dark hair and produced a sigh so bitter, so exhausted, and at the same time so sweet that Ruth was tempted to reach out and comfort her. Frida stood up from the table.
“You really want to see him again?” Her mood was shifting; she was already giving a farsighted frown.
“I think I do. Yes,” said Ruth. “I do.”
“It’d be a lot of work,” Frida said, and she sighed and stretched as if that work were already upon her. “I hate to say it, Ruth, but I’m not sure you’re up to it. And how old is this Richard now? Eighty? Ninety?” She said “Eighty? Ninety?” as if there were a negligible difference between those two ages.
“He must be over eighty,” said Ruth. Richard, over eighty! That seemed so unlikely.
“You might call it irresponsible, asking a man like that to travel. Expecting to be able to look after him, at his age.” Frida looked at Ruth in a way that added, “At
your
age,” and swept the package of apricots up from the table.
“In last year’s Christmas card he said he was in the best of health.”
“The best of health for
eighty
,” said Frida with a snort.
Frida believed she had a secret, Ruth saw, and it was this: that Ruth and Richard were innocents, that they were old, older than old, and that while they might still be capable of a sweet, funny romance, any physical possibility was extinguished for them both. Well, probably it was. Ruth wondered. She permitted herself to hope, and at the same time not define the thing she hoped for.
“Jeffrey will agree with you,” said Ruth with a carefully blameless face, and she saw Frida consider this distasteful possibility before proceeding to the kitchen. Ruth sat still with the idea of Richard. She was surprised by how much she wanted to see him, and also by the pleasure of wanting. He would be an arrival—one that she had asked for, that she had planned.
“You know what?” called Frida from the kitchen. She often delivered good news—gave of the bounty of herself—from another room, at high volume, so she needn’t be troubled by gratitude. “I could help out. You know, come over on the weekend. Not for free, mind.” Now she appeared, briefly, in the archway between the rooms. “But for a reasonable price, you know, I could cook and keep an eye on things.”
“Would you really?”
Frida made a clatter in the kitchen which meant “Yes, but don’t you dare start thanking me.”
Frida seemed to think it was decided: Ruth would ask Richard to come, and Frida would keep an eye on things. She prepared an uncharacteristically festive meal: a curryish dish, with pieces of pineapple and indecipherable meat. It tasted like the distant cousin of something Fijian.
“What do you call this?” Ruth asked as Frida fastened her grey coat and made for the front door.
“Dinner,” said Frida.
Later, lying in bed with the doubtful meat in her stomach, Ruth fretted about Richard. She wanted to think only of how fine he was, of how every girl had loved him, and of how he liked her best; how she would be walking with friends and his shabby truck would roll by, his mobile dispensary, lifting dust and rattling at the seams, and he would honk his horn or stop to talk and sometimes drive her home, or take them all in the truck to the beach, and when they swam, he stayed close to her, lay beside her in the sun, gossiped about Andrew Carson, poured sand on her feet, asked her advice about some faux pas he had made with the Methodist minister’s wife, told her she reminded him of a milkmaid on a biscuit tin, and finally, when the Queen visited Fiji and a ball was held in her honour at the Grand Pacific Hotel, invited Ruth to come with him—although he disapproved of queens—because he knew she wanted to go. And everyone waited for Ruth and Richard—their names were said together so often—to become an item; even when Richard began to disgrace himself by caring too much about the health of Indian women, by befriending the wrong Fijians (“agitators,” Ruth’s father called them), by staying at Ruth’s parents’ house too long (“saving money for the dispensary,” he said; “staying for me,” prayed Ruth), and by refusing church without even being a Communist, the women of Suva hoped to see happiness for Ruth with this “gifted but misguided” young man. She had given up the hope of converting him. She was no longer much sure of God herself. He came home late at night, and she listened for his soft walk past her door, and he never stopped. Not true: he stopped once. Her door was open. He came in to apologize; he had kissed her the night before at the Queen’s ball and would never do it again. People began to wonder if he was quite normal. They wondered about Indian women and Andrew Carson; they never suspected a Japanese fiancée.
And how Ruth defended him to everyone! Because she was his favourite, his milkmaid on the biscuit tin. But that was exhausting, too. For example, he would lend her difficult books without her having asked for them and want to know her opinion; when the ocean liners docked in Suva carrying orchestras or theatre companies, he took her to see them perform. And if he didn’t like what he saw or read or heard, he would call it “a bad play,” “a bad book.”
Bad
in his mouth was the strongest of adjectives. He always had a definite view of the play or the symphony, and he would presage it with this declamatory staccato, as if helpfully summarizing his opinion before expanding upon it: “It was bad,” he would say, or “uniformly bad” if he considered it irretrievable. Or, if approved of, things were either “important” or “excellent” or “very fine.” Most of the events he took her to bored her even when she enjoyed them, and she felt Richard notice this whole world of his from which she was excluded, by her own choice it seemed. She saw him observe, mournfully, her overenthusiastic applause when the thing was finally over.
He was courteous; he always withheld his opinion until it was asked for. He would wait for her to say, “What did you think?” And then he would say, “Very bad” or “Excellent,” and there would be some minutes of talk about why, during which Ruth wondered how he thought of all these things to say. It astonished her that he could have such inexhaustible opinions, and that he was capable of articulating them. He’s smarter than I am, she concluded, and he cares more than I do. But part of her was also suspicious of his ability to translate feeling so readily into words. She came away from music with a sense of its shape, and from plays with a suggestion of pulled threads; she had no idea how to describe shapes and threads. Richard would talk, and then he would say, “What did you think?” And she might say, “I agree” or “I liked it.” She didn’t have opinions, if what he had were opinions; only preferences, and these were often vague. She knew that her opinions existed—that she responded with true pleasure to the things she enjoyed—but she never found it necessary to scrutinize them. Whenever she was pressed to reveal her tastes in books or art or music, she sounded to herself as if she were discussing her favourite colours. But she shared her pleasures easily with Harry, whose delights were similarly blurry: they both loved Handel’s
Messiah
, for example, but felt no need to investigate the particular sensations it aroused in them. Books were different; they were private. No one could read them along with her, reacting and looking for her reaction. Richard had tried to draw her out, and she was afraid to disappoint him with the little he found there. In comparison, the ease of Harry was a relief.