The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane

here. Let them all kill each other somewhere else, and leave Fiji to the Fijians.” He was silent for a moment. “And the English.”
    “You don’t agree.” Ruth knew he didn’t agree; they had talked this through before; Ruth never cared so much as when she cared with him.
    “I’m tired of controversy today,” he said. “I think I’d better just go to bed.”
    “Not yet,” said Ruth. “Not until you tell me why my father’s so wrong.”
    Richard looked at her in a patient way, but it was enough to shake her heart. He seemed to be taking her measure. He had not yet kissed her at the ball.
    “All right,” he said. “All right, tell me something: When does he give them a chance to wash his feet? Is it that he’s the greatest, the noblest servant of them all? This privilege of service! He calls himself a servant and I know he’s referring to certain ideas—abasement, humility, sacrifice, the servant Christ, that whole Christian model of service—I know all that, but hasn’t he ever stopped to think that he’s in a country where people work and live every day as servants, for him? You have a houseboy! He doesn’t wash your father’s feet in a great public show—he scrubs dishes every night when no one’s there to see him. I’m sorry, it infuriates me. No, but I’m not sorry—God!”
    And no one spoke this way; no one grew angry. Ruth was astonished, and in her admiration became clumsy and receptive. None of what he said surprised her; she’d begun to think most of these things herself. But she had never heard a respectable man blaspheme, and this made the strongest impression. She would at that moment have ceded the Church, her family, and Fiji and fled with him in pilgrim haste to any land of his choosing—if only he would ask her. But he didn’t, so she remained loyal and, as a result, defensive; it was the same impulse that made her ashamed of her father’s audible knees.
    “You haven’t been here long enough to understand about servants,” she said, but that sounded feeble (she had heard so many people say it to newcomers before), so she continued, “And what else should he do? No foot-washing at all? Just hope they all know he doesn’t think he’s above them?”
    Ruth shifted and touched Richard’s arm with her elbow, which produced no sensation. But she wanted him to put his hand on hers and agree with her, very badly.
    “This morning,” he said, “I drove that bloody truck over those bloody roads because somebody told somebody else who told me that a pregnant woman collapsed at Nasavu—and they wouldn’t let me near her, they said the problem was caused by walking on uneven land and she’d go to the temple and be fine, and meanwhile I’d blown a tire, I rode back to Suva with a bloody monarchist, Fijians are all monarchists, and the truck’s still out there, I’ll have to get myself back tomorrow, and I told you I should go to bed. I really should go to bed.”
    And he stood and kissed her on the top of her head, which was nothing at all; she was at her most chaste when she was angry with him, or embarrassed, or particularly in love, and at this moment she was all three. Also, she felt very young.
    “Can we talk about this tomorrow?” he said. And then, because he was kind: “You’re absolutely right, about everything, probably, but I couldn’t be fair to you tonight. I’m far too sad.”
    This astonished her, too. What was there for Richard to feel sad about?
    There was another moment like this, Ruth remembered, without mentioning it to Frida: on the boat to Sydney. Richard was returning to Sydney to take up a position with the World Health Organization; Ruth was “going home,” as her parents called it, to find work. She spent the trip in terror that nothing would happen with Richard; that nothing would happen with her whole life. She knew, foolishly, that she had counted on being her parents’ daughter forever, even while she contemplated such things as