Free The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane Page A

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.
    Ruth had expected her character to become more sharply defined with age, until eventually she found that it no longer mattered to her; she left off worrying about it, like a blessedly abandoned hobby. But now Richard might come with his bad books and his excellent symphonies and fill her with doubt all over again. She lay in bed with her hands on her meaty stomach and worried until the cats, from their bedposts, began to perk and stare. They were listening to something, and so she listened, but heard nothing unusual. Her heart was stiff but strong. Not now, she thought, addressing the tiger. Not with Richard coming—which meant she did want him to come. One of the cats gave a low, funny growl or produced, at least, a growl-shaped noise. When Ruth went to comfort him, he snapped at her fingers, which always made her sad and shy. She moved in the bed, unhappy, and the cats jumped and ran.
    “Fine!” she called after them. She would write to Richard. Things could still happen to her. She lifted her back from the bed, went to her dressing table, and found paper and a pen.
    “My dear,” she wrote, “this will be a bolt from the blue, but if you can spare the time and make the journey, this old lady would like to see you again. I live by the sea, I have a very good view (there are whales), and I also have a wonderful woman called Frida whose brother George has a taxi and will collect you from the station and bring you here. We can talk Fiji and fond memories, or just snooze in the sun. Come as soon as you’d like to. The whales are migrating. Come as soon as you can.”
    Ruth wrote the letter, didn’t reread it, sealed it in an envelope, and sent it out with Frida the following morning. There might have been spelling mistakes, and she worried afterwards about having signed off “all my love,” but the important thing was that the letter existed and had been sent. Five days later there was a reply from Richard. His handwriting was lean as winter twigs. He was delighted to hear from her. He had been thinking about her lately, would you believe; and if she was old,