Part 3 (1/2)

”His name was Richard Porter,” said Ruth.

”Oh, yes,” said Frida, lifting one groomed eyebrow as if she'd been antic.i.p.ating Richard all along. But this was Frida's way: it was impossible to surprise her. She would rather starve than be caught off guard; she had said so on more than one occasion. It was also unnecessary to ask if Frida wanted to hear about Richard, because she would only shrug or sigh or, at best, say, ”Suit yourself.” Much better just to begin.

”He was a doctor who came to help my father at the clinic,” said Ruth. ”I was nineteen. He was older.”

Frida seemed to smirk at this, as if she were hearing a s.m.u.tty story. But it was hard to tell what she was thinking. She sat, almost tranquillized, with her feet lifted from the floor, and looked out across the bay, where an insistent wind cleared the haze and lifted the flags over the surf club.

Richard, Ruth explained, was in Fiji as a medical humanitarian rather than a missionary, although he agreed to profess certain beliefs in order to fill the post at the clinic-it was so difficult to find trained men after the war that Ruth's father was willing to accept this compromise. Ruth's parents referred to Richard, before his arrival, as ”that gifted but misguided young man” and busied themselves preparing the house, since he would be staying with them until he found accommodation of his own. He was Australian, too; Ruth's parents prayed in thankfulness to G.o.d for this provision, and Ruth prayed along with them. She was most interested in how handsome he was. He arrived during a rainstorm; Ruth stood on the verandah at the side of the house to watch him run from a taxi through the downpour. She felt a strong sense of destiny because she was nineteen and because he seemed so providential: young, Australian, a doctor, and now coming from rain into her own house. So she rounded the corner, mindful of her own effect-because she had been pretty at nineteen, a lovely pale blonde-and ready, so consciously ready, for her life to make some plausible beginning. But he was sodden and there was some concern about his bags, which the driver was carrying in through the rain. Richard seemed to want to help and was being forcibly restrained from doing so by Ruth's father, who had prepared a welcome speech and was delivering it while holding Richard in a paternal embrace. Ruth was forgotten in the confusion and then only hurriedly introduced; she went to her bedroom and moped over an impression of dark hair and a thin frame.

Later that evening, dry, Richard's hair was light and his body seemed less scarce. Handsome was not the right word for him; he was good-looking, but in a neat, s.h.i.+ning, 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 G.o.d.

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 gla.s.s 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 ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sing 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 fl.u.s.tered. 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 embarra.s.sing, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.g.g.e.r.”

”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 j.a.panese. He met her in j.a.pan.” 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.