Chapter 1
Encounter
The first thing Ruth noticed about the Kasozi house was that somebody was trying to murder it.
She noticed this from the car, before she had even switched off the engine, because the sound carried across the lawn and through the open window: a dry, patient scrape of metal on wood, followed by a crack, followed by a pause in which she could almost hear someone thinking. Then the scrape again. It was a quarter to eight on a Tuesday morning in early March, the light still low and gold over Lake Victoria, and a man was up a ladder against the front veranda taking a flat bar to the fascia board of a house that had stood on that shore since 1958.
She sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel.
Ruth had prepared for this meeting for eleven days. She had a folder on the passenger seat containing a preliminary condition survey, three heritage-restoration case studies, a budget in two scenarios, and a laminated photograph of the house as it had looked in 1962, wide-eaved and white, with old Yosefu Kasozi standing on its steps in a pale suit like a man who owned the weather. She had practised her opening paragraph in the bathroom mirror. It began Mrs. Kasozi, what you have here is not a wedding venue, it is a work of art that happens to have a roof, and she had thought it rather good. She had not rehearsed what to say to a stranger who was dismantling the client's property before breakfast.
She got out of the car. The gravel crunched under her flat shoes, loudly enough that she winced.
"Excuse me," she said.
The scraping stopped. The man did not turn around immediately. He finished, with great care, whatever small piece of destruction he had been halfway through, laid the flat bar along the top of the ladder, and only then looked down.
He was perhaps thirty-eight, lean, with the kind of height that made a ladder look like an unnecessary courtesy. His shirt was a faded grey cotton with the sleeves pushed past the elbow, and there was sawdust, or something like it, in the dark hair at his temples. His face was not handsome in the way she usually noticed handsome. It was too still for that. It had a shut quality, like a good door, and the eyes in it, brown, almost amber where the sun caught them, were looking at her with polite and exhausted attention.
"Good morning," he said.
"You shouldn't be doing that."
"No?"
"That's the original fascia." She heard her own voice go brisk, the voice she used on contractors who wanted to replace period joinery with something from a catalogue. "It's part of the survey. Nothing should be removed or disturbed until the assessment is complete and the family has approved the scope."
"Ah," he said. "The survey."
"Yes."
"Have you done it?"
"I'm about to."
"Then you'll want to write this down." He turned back and tapped the board he had been working on, and a long grey strip of wood came away from the eave as though it had been waiting to be asked. Behind it the timber was the colour and texture of wet bread. "Rot from the third bracket to the corner. Termites came in through the downpipe about ten years ago, when somebody redid the guttering in a hurry. The beam behind it, the mvule, that's sound. It's mvule, it'll outlive us all. But the 1980s tin on top was nailed through the ridge, not the flat, and every rain since has been walking straight down the nail holes into the wall plate." He looked at her. "If your survey says the fascia is original and in fair condition, your survey is wrong."
Ruth opened her mouth, then closed it.
It was an unusual experience, being corrected by a stranger on a ladder, and the fact that he was right, that she could see already, from the ground, that he was right, did nothing to improve it. What irritated her most was how little he seemed to enjoy it. He had not said it to score a point. He had said it the way a doctor reads out a number.
"My survey hasn't been written yet," she said, with dignity. "Who are you?"
"Nobody who was asked."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the accurate one." A small movement at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, gone before she could be sure of it. "Is it the old man you're looking for? Kibuuka? He doesn't start until nine. He sleeps in the shed some nights, but he's at his daughter's this week."
So he was the caretaker's relation, then, or some hired hand who had been told to do a little tidying and had developed opinions. Ruth felt her shoulders come down a fraction. She had met his type often enough on sites: men who had worked on a building so long they believed they were its husband.
"I'm Ruth Nakitende," she said, more gently. "I'm the architect. Mrs. Kasozi is expecting me at eight."
"I know."
"You know?"
"She's been up since five arranging cups." He came down the ladder in four unhurried steps and stood on the gravel, wiping his palms on his trousers. Up close he was taller than she had thought, and he smelled of cut wood and rain-damp cotton and something faintly metallic, like old keys. His hands were scarred across the knuckles with the small white lines of years of minor accidents, and on the inside of the left forearm was a long, pale burn that had healed in a ridged shine. She looked at it a second too long. He let her.
"She told me," he said, "that the architect is a woman who talks about buildings as if they were people, and that I should be polite."
"And are you?"
"I'm trying. It's been a while."
The answer was so dry, so lightly dropped, that she nearly laughed. She caught it at the last second and turned it into a cough, and he noticed, and the corner of his mouth moved again.
"I'm going to walk the outside before she comes out," Ruth said, because she was a professional and had folders. "Perhaps you could show me where else the water's getting in, since you appear to have made a study of it."
"I'd rather you found it yourself."
"Why?"
"Because then you'll believe it."
It was, she would think later, the most irritating and the most intelligent thing anyone had said to her all month. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he held her gaze, and there was a moment, nothing, a breath, a single held beat in which neither of them seemed to think of a reason to speak. The lake moved behind the wall. A kite wheeled up from the shore and a sunbird started up in the hibiscus with its small angry music. Ruth became aware that she was standing very straight and that she had no idea why.
He looked away first. It surprised her.
"Mind the third step," he said. "It's lying to you."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The third step on the veranda. It looks sound. It isn't."
She looked at the veranda, a wide shaded sweep of red-polished cement raised four steps from the lawn, with a row of square columns painted a chipped cream and a swing seat hung from the beam at one end on rusting chains. It was beautiful. It was one of the most beautiful verandas she had seen in her working life, and she had a sudden unprofessional ache to put both hands flat against its columns and say I'm here, I'm going to look after you. She put her folder under her arm, walked to the steps, and stepped, with her full weight, on the third.
It gave.
Not dramatically. There was just a soft, sickening sag, a give like a mattress, and her ankle began to turn, and her whole body understood in advance that it was going to fall. And then a hand closed round her elbow, firm and warm and utterly steady, and she did not fall.
For a second she stood with her weight on someone else's strength, her back almost touching his chest, the folder slipping from under her arm and fanning its pages across the step. She heard him breathe in. She smelled the wood on him, and felt, through the cotton of her sleeve, a small ridge of callus pressing against the soft skin of her inner arm.
Then he let go. Too quickly, she thought. As if the touch had been a thing he had not meant to allow.
"Told you," he said, a little rough.
"You could have said it was rotten."
"I said it was lying."
"That's the same thing."
"No," he said. "Rot is honest. It just sits there."
She bent to gather her papers because she did not trust her face, and he bent too, and for one awkward second they both reached for the laminated photograph at the same time. His fingers closed over the corner of it. Hers closed over his. Neither of them moved.
He was looking at the picture, not at her. It showed the house as it had been, the veranda swept and gleaming, the swing seat new, the old man posed on the steps with one hand in his pocket and an expression of stern satisfaction. A small boy of perhaps five or six sat at his feet with his knees drawn up. An infant was in a woman's arms near the doorway. In the corner of the lawn stood a tall girl holding a bicycle.
He was looking at the little boy at the old man's feet.
"Where did you get this?" he asked, not quite steadily.
"Your—" she began. "Mrs. Kasozi's late husband's papers. They're at the Entebbe archive. I only had the print made last month." She hesitated. Something about his stillness had changed. "It was taken in sixty-two. That's Yosefu Kasozi in the suit, and I think the little boy is Dr. Kasozi himself."
"Yes," he said. "I know who it is."
The way he said it made her look up.
And then the front door opened with the long wooden groan of its original hinges, and a voice said, in the high delighted clipped tones of a woman who had taught school for forty years and still believed in being heard from the back of the hall, "Danny! I told you to wait for me!"
Ruth turned.
Grace Kasozi came out onto the veranda in a lilac gown, with her reading glasses pushed up in her grey hair and a tray of cups held out before her like a peace offering. She was a small woman, narrower than the voice suggested, with a straight back and the slightly startled bright eyes of someone who had not slept and would never admit it. She was looking at the man beside Ruth with an expression so naked, so full of fear and joy braided together, that Ruth felt as if she had walked into a room where she was not supposed to be.
"I was only looking at the roof, Mama," the man said gently.
"You were tearing at it. I could hear you from the kitchen." She set the tray down on the swing seat with a rattle. Her hands, Ruth saw, were not quite steady. "Ruth. My dear. You're early, how good. Forgive the state of everything. You've met, I see, I see you've met. I had meant to introduce you properly. I had meant to have the kettle on first."
"I think we'd got as far as the third step," said the man.
"Ruth," said Grace, with a small formal catch, "this is my elder son. Daniel."
The word did not land at first.
Elder son. Timothy had an elder brother, of course. Ruth knew that in the way she knew a great many things about the man she was going to marry in December: the way one knows the facts of a country one has never visited. Timothy's elder brother lived abroad. Timothy's elder brother was not close to the family, and that was said, on the three occasions it had come up, in the same level voice he used for the weather and for his father's death. He worked on ships, or near ships. He had not come home in years. In eight months of being engaged, Ruth had never once seen a photograph of him, and she had never asked, because she was a considerate woman and because she had understood, in the way one understands a locked cupboard in a friend's house, that there was a rule about it.
And now here he was, with sawdust in his hair and his mother's tray at his elbow and his hand, a moment ago, round her arm.
Daniel Kasozi watched the understanding cross her face. He did not look embarrassed, exactly. He looked like a man who had been expecting a bill and was now relieved to have it in his hand.
"I should have said," he said. "I wasn't sure you'd want to shake hands with the brother."
"Why wouldn't I?"
"Depends what Tim told you."
"He told me you worked abroad," Ruth said carefully, "and that you weren't able to be here much."
Something passed behind his eyes, brief and unreadable, there and gone like a bird's shadow over water.
"That's about right," he said.
He held out his hand. She took it. It was the same hand that had caught her, hard, warm, rough, and the same small electric pause went through her that had gone through her on the step, a quick, unlooked-for lift, like the first stair in the dark that you thought was the last. It lasted no longer than a handshake should. He let go at exactly the correct moment, and she thought: That was nothing. That was a handshake.
She believed it completely. She believed it for at least a day.
"I'll fetch the tea," said Grace, in the brisk voice of a woman choosing to continue a morning rather than examine it. "Danny, wash. You are a disgrace. Ruth, please come in, come in, the house is yours. Mind the third step."
"I've met the third step," said Ruth.
"Yes," said Daniel, very quietly, so that only she could hear, and looked at her once more, one level second too long. "I noticed."