Chapter 10
Midnight
On the second Saturday of August, the Nambi went back into the lake.
It took six men and a borrowed tractor. Mzee Kibuuka supervised from a folding chair with a flask of tea, shouting instructions that nobody followed, and Grace stood on the lawn in her best hat and wept with open pleasure, and when the old boat slid down the slipway on its greased runners and touched the water, a small cheer went up from the gardeners, the cook, a pair of cousins from Kisubi and a boy who had wandered in from the road for no reason at all. She floated. It was a mercy and a small miracle. She lay on the lake like a leaf on a pond, honey-brown and sweet-lined, with her new knee braced against her thwart and a single patched sail lifting slowly in the wind.
Daniel stood in the stern. Ruth watched him from the jetty.
He had not been out in a sailing boat in thirty years, and he looked it for the first five minutes, hesitant and stiff, his hand on the tiller as if it might bite. Then the wind took the sail, and the hull heeled a little and came alive, and something in his back gave way. She saw it from fifty yards off: the long muscles letting go. He tacked once, twice. The water ran white along the strakes. He lifted his head and laughed aloud, a sound she had not known he possessed, a free, startled, boyish whoop that carried across the water to the shore, and Grace pressed both hands to her mouth.
"Look at him," she said, to nobody. "Look at him. He's nine."
Ruth could not answer. She stood on the bleached boards with the sun in her eyes and her fingers locked on the rail, and understood with the dull finality of a nail going into a plank that there was nothing in the world she would rather look at. Not the lake. Not the sky. Not the house she had spent half a year learning to read. She wanted to stand on this jetty for the rest of her life and watch this man learn to be happy.
It was the plainest sentence her heart had ever spoken, and she did not even have the strength to pretend she had not heard it.
Timothy was in Nairobi.
He had gone on Thursday, for a regional development forum, three days of panels and receptions that he had called, with a groan, "a long weekend of men in lanyards." He rang her that morning at seven, and again at noon, and she had said the right things both times: I miss you. Is the hotel all right? Have you eaten? Grace had asked her to stay the night, since the evening was to be a celebration, and the road from Entebbe in the dark was a poor road, and the guest room had been aired. It was a perfectly ordinary invitation. She had said yes without hesitation. She had thought of it as a kind of test.
She told herself that for nearly nine hours.
The party was held on the veranda. Grace had decreed it. There were paraffin lamps along the rail and long tables of food, and the cook had killed a goat, and the gardeners and the cousins and the old man himself had been given places of honour. Someone had brought a radio. The old songs came out of it low and crackling, Lingala and Kadongo Kamu, and Mzee Kibuuka sang along with them in a cracked, delighted tenor with a chicken leg in his hand.
Ruth sat between Brian and a cousin, and ate, and spoke. She was a model of cheerfulness. She laughed at Brian's account of a goat that had once eaten a site manager's blueprints. She admired the cook's greens. Every few minutes she raised her eyes, quite casually, to the end of the table where Daniel sat, bare-armed, sun-browned, with the salt of the lake still dried white on his forearms. He talked to his mother. He teased the cook. He did not once look at Ruth.
It was, she understood after the third time she had checked, a very precise and deliberate not-looking. It had the care of a man walking across a floor he knew to be mined.
At ten, Brian's bus was due. He rose with great ceremony to take his leave, bowed to Grace, shook hands with all the gardeners, and kissed Ruth, to her surprise, on both cheeks, with a rapt, unreadable smile. "You will be at the office on Monday, Madam Ruth?"
"I'll be there."
"Good. I thought maybe you would live here."
"Brian."
"I only say." He was already walking down the steps. "It is a very nice house."
She laughed. She looked around, and found, in the abrupt lull that followed, that Daniel had come to stand at the rail, a few feet away, with his back to the lamplight and a glass of water in his hand.
"It's late," he said.
He said it quietly, but not so quietly that the table could not hear. Grace looked up. The cousins turned. Mzee Kibuuka paused with his chicken leg in the air.
"It's a dark road to Kampala," said Daniel, and now he was looking at her. His face was composed and polite and perfectly empty, and she knew with a cold clairvoyant certainty that every muscle behind it was clenched. "You've had a long day, Ruth. I'd hate you to be on the road alone. You ought to go home."
It was not what he said. It was the way he said home, as if it were a country they had both agreed never to name. The word fell into the lamp-lit air and every person on the veranda heard something different in it. The cousins heard concern. Grace heard something else, and set down her cup. Ruth heard a door, held shut by one man's shoulder, creaking audibly on its hinge.
"Your mother's asked me to stay," she said, as lightly as she could. "The guest room's aired."
"Of course." A small, stiff smile. "Then I'm being tiresome. Forgive me."
"Not at all."
He nodded, and went into the house, and the evening went on.
She found him in the kitchen an hour later.
It was a quarter to midnight. The guests had gone, the cousins had been bedded on mattresses in the sitting room, and Grace had retired upstairs with a hot-water bottle and a long, speculative look. The kitchen was warm and low-lit, with a single bulb over the sink and the smell of charcoal and cold goat. Daniel was standing at the window with a tap running over a glass he was not filling.
"You should be asleep," said Ruth.
"I'm washing a glass."
"It's clean."
"It was very dirty." He did not turn. "Why didn't you leave?"
"Your mother asked me to stay."
"I asked you to go."
"You didn't ask. You told me in front of the whole veranda, in the voice of a man giving an order to a cabin boy."
"Ruth." His hand tightened on the tap. "I'm trying to keep a promise. I made it to myself, and I made it to my brother, without his knowing, and I have kept it for five months. You've no idea how hard it's been. I watched you at that table tonight and I thought, one more hour, and I'll do something that can't be undone. I have never in my life been so near to being a bad man. I don't want to be. I'd like to be the man you thought I was in the study." His voice thickened. "Go home. Please."
"I've been home," said Ruth.
He turned.
"I've been to the flat in Nakasero," she said. Her voice was perfectly level, and she heard it with distant interest, as one hears one's own voice on a recording. "I've sat at the table with a plate of rice. I've been to the office. I've stood in the hall of Timothy's flat, at the dress fitting with my mother on the phone, at the mirror in the bathroom where I put my face on. I've been to all the places I'm meant to live. And every one of them was a very clean, well-ordered room. And I wasn't in it." She drew breath. "I looked at the lake this afternoon, and I could not remember where home was meant to be. So please don't tell me to go back to it. I don't think I know the way."
The tap ran. Water splashed unheeded into the sink.
Daniel stood there, with the glass in his hand, and his face had stopped being a door. It had become a window, and behind it a very tired man was struggling not to cry.
"Don't say that," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because I'll believe it."
"It's true."
"It can't be." He set the glass down on the draining board with a precise little click. "I'm going to go and sleep in the boathouse. I'm going to lock the door and put the key in the lake. And in the morning, when you've had a night to think, you'll thank me."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I'll deserve it." He crossed the kitchen to the door, and stopped, with his hand on the frame. Not looking at her. "Go to bed, Ruth. Lock yours. I'm asking you."
The door shut softly behind him.
She did not go to bed.
She went upstairs, to the guest room, a pale green square with an iron bedstead and a window that looked on the lake, and she sat on the edge of the mattress with her hands between her knees for the better part of two hours. She listened to the house. It ticked and settled around her, a vast old creature falling slowly asleep. She heard Grace's bed creak. She heard a cousin snore. She heard the lake, patient and enormous, turning over in its sleep. Once, a little after one, she heard the slow tread of someone in the passage, stopping outside her door, and she held her breath with a hand pressed flat to her ribs until the footsteps went on.
She thought about Timothy.
She made herself do it, as one forces a finger into a wound to know how deep it is. She thought about his hands, and his anxious, hopeful face. She thought about the spreadsheet with eleven tabs, and the little jetty at Ggaba, and Marry me, please, and she felt love, honest and unmistakable, rise in her like a tide. It did not diminish. It was perfectly real. It simply lay on one side of her, quietly, with the cold luminous patience of a thing that does not need to prove itself, and on the other side lay the other thing, which was louder, and darker, and had a name she had not yet dared to say.
It's wanting, she told herself. It's only wanting. You've been working in a house full of loneliness for six months and you've mistaken a draught for a door.
But a draught did not know that a man took no sugar in his tea after four in the afternoon. A draught did not hold her gaze for one second too long on the veranda in front of forty people because it could not bear to look away. A draught had not once, in all those months, been anything but gentle with her, even when it was cruellest.
She stood up. She found, by the faint light from the window, her good linen shirt, the blue one, which she had brought in her bag on the off-chance of a dinner, and she put it on over her camisole, and did up the buttons with fingers that would not be steady. She slipped her shoes off. She did not look in the mirror. She picked them up in her left hand, the one with the ring, and she opened the door, and went down the stairs in the dark, avoiding the fourth tread from the top, and out by the kitchen door into the cold wet grass.
The boathouse door was not locked.
It stood ajar, a hand's breadth, and a thin yellow line of lamplight lay along the wet boards at its foot like a drawn thread. Beyond it, in the stillness, she heard the small sounds of a man trying not to make any: the knock of a wooden mallet laid carefully down, the slow shift of weight on the floor.
She pushed the door.
He was standing in the middle of the room with the dinghy behind him, and he had been waiting. She saw that at once. He had taken the tarpaulin off the bench and spread a clean sail on the cradle, as if for a guest, and lit three lamps instead of one, and had not sat down. He had not even taken off his boots. His face was ashen in the yellow light, and his eyes, enormous and dark, went at once to her bare feet on the sill, to the wet hem of her trousers, to the ring on her hand, and stayed there.
"I told you to lock it," said Daniel, hoarsely.
"You told me to lock my door."
"You are a very literal woman."
"I'm an architect." She stepped over the sill. The wood was cold under her feet. "You didn't lock yours."
"I couldn't find the key." His mouth twisted. "That's a lie. I had it in my hand. I couldn't put it in the lock. I stood here for an hour thinking, if she doesn't come, I've been a fool, and if she does, I've been a bigger one. And then I thought, I shall leave it as it is, and let God decide, and it was the most cowardly thing I have ever done."
"Daniel."
"Is this what you want?"
"I don't know what I want."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I have." She put down her shoes. "I have a man in Nairobi who loves me, and I love him, and I'm wearing his ring. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist. I'm not going to say that I don't care. I care about it so much that I can hardly breathe. And I'm here. I walked down the garden in the dark in my bare feet, and I'm here, and I've no idea what to do now that I've arrived. All I know is that I couldn't not."
He drew a long unsteady breath.
"If we do this," he said, "it can't be taken back."
"I know."
"It will cost you. It'll cost me more than I can say. It will cost Tim. It will cost my mother, and God knows what else. It could ruin everything you've built." He stepped toward her. "And I will not tell you that it's worth it. I don't know. I only know that if you walk back up that garden, I will spend the rest of my life knowing that I let you."
"Then don't let me."
She did not know which of them moved first. It was one of those things that cannot be assigned. A slight sway, an unrecorded half-pace, a hand lifting, and then his palm was against her face, and her hand was in his shirt, and the whole room had closed around them like a fist.
His mouth was warmer than she had imagined, and gentler. The first kiss was almost an apology, light, searching, hardly more than a breath exchanged. She felt him shaking. She felt her own knees give, and his arm come hard around her waist to take the weight, and then the apology ended, and what followed was nothing of the kind. It was months of silence breaking all at once. It was a kiss with a whole year's weather in it. She heard a small broken sound and realised it was hers. His hands were in her hair. Her back met the cool curve of the boat's hull, the wood warm and faintly oiled against her spine, and he said her name against her throat, once, in a voice she would remember for the rest of her life, as one remembers the pitch of a bell struck in an empty church.
"Tell me to stop," he said.
"No."
"Ruth."
"I'm not going to tell you." Her fingers found the buttons of his shirt and he caught his breath. "I'd like to be the one who's brave, just once. I've spent so long being sensible."
He rested his forehead against hers. His eyes were closed. A tear had caught in the corner of one, and she kissed it away without thinking, and he made a sound like a man struck.
"Are you sure?" he whispered.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes, Daniel."
After that there was very little talk. He undid her buttons the way he did everything, slowly, with his whole attention, as though each one were a joint he meant to seat properly, and she stood with her back against the warm curve of the hull and let him. The blue linen slid from her shoulders and fell to the boards. His breath caught. He looked at her in the lamplight for a long moment, with a kind of stunned reverence, and she saw his hands hover, rough and uncertain, an inch from her skin.
"You can," she whispered.
"I've been afraid to," said Daniel. "For months. I thought if I did, I'd never be able to stop."
"Then don't."
He touched her then. The flat of his palm, hot and callused, came to rest at the hollow of her waist, and she shivered from her scalp to her heels. His thumb traced the line of her ribs. His mouth followed his hands, her collarbone, the slope of her shoulder, the soft place beneath her ear where her pulse beat so hard it hurt, and she heard herself make a sound she did not know she owned. Her fingers were in his hair. Then they were at his shirt, tugging, clumsy with impatience, and he laughed against her throat, a low unsteady laugh, and let her drag it over his head.
She had watched that body for months. She had watched it lift props and carry planks and bend over a bench, and had told herself she was only an architect assessing a structure. She put her palms flat on his chest now and felt the heart going under them, as fast as her own, and the heat coming off him like a stone in the sun. He was lean and hard and marked here and there with the small white scars of a life lived with tools. She kissed the long pale burn on his forearm. He closed his eyes.
"Ruth," he said, as though it were the only word he had left.
The sail was on the cradle bench, clean and folded, spread for a guest he had not dared to expect. He lifted her onto it as if she weighed nothing, and followed her down, and the old canvas gave under them with a soft creak and smelled of salt and sun and tar. The lamplight moved on the ceiling. She pulled him against her, skin to skin at last, and the shock of it went through her like a bell, the whole length of him warm and heavy and shaking over her, his mouth at her breast, his hand sliding slowly down the curve of her hip. She arched into it. She was not gentle. Months of silence rose in her all at once and she took him by the shoulders and drew him closer, and he groaned her name into her neck, and she felt that sound in every part of her body.
"Look at me," he said, low, against her ear.
She did. His eyes were dark and wide and utterly open. There was no martyr in them, no careful brother, no man standing at the edge of a dock deciding not to jump. There was only a man who wanted her and was afraid of how much, and she held his face in both hands as he moved, and they went on looking at each other, breathing together, while the heat built between them slow and deep as the slow swell of the lake.
She cried out once. He caught the sound in his mouth. After that there were only the lamps, and the hard warm boards beneath the canvas, and his hands, which had learned the grain of every wood in Africa and now learned her; and the rising rush of it, the tightening, the held breath and the great slow break, so that she clung to him as to a hull in a rough sea and felt him follow, shuddering, his face buried in her hair, her name broken on his lips like a prayer.
Afterwards they lay tangled and slick with sweat, his heart thundering against her cheek. Outside, a night wind came up from the lake and stirred the reeds. The lamps burned low. The old dinghy creaked on her cradle, once, as though in blessing or in warning. And neither of them said anything at all, because everything that could be said had already been done, and the world was dark and warm and very still.
It was nearly dawn when she woke.
A grey light lay in the high windows. The lamps had burned out. Somewhere on the shore a cock crowed, a thin gold sound, and down on the water, a fisherman's paddle knocked once against his gunwale. She lay on her side under the edge of the sail, with her cheek on a man's bare shoulder and her bare foot against his leg, and for the length of a breath she did not remember who she was.
Then she did.
It came back to her in order, stage by stage, like a building taking its shape out of mist. The ring. The Nairobi hotel. The linen shirt on the boards. The long, warm, tangled hours in between. She lay with her eyes open and looked at her left hand on his chest, and in the first colourless daylight the diamond caught a thread of grey and flashed once, small and cold and very clear.
His chest rose and fell. He was awake. She knew by the slight, careful stillness of his breath.
"Don't," he said quietly.
"Don't what?"
"Say you're sorry."
"I wasn't going to." She turned her face against his skin. She was not sorry. That was the awful thing. She searched herself for it, as a woman checks her pockets for a lost key, and found only a vast aching peace, and underneath it, like the cold seam of water at the bottom of a well, a fear so large that it had no outline. "I was going to say that it's morning."
"Yes."
"And I have to go back up before Mama Grace wakes."
"Yes."
"And Tim comes back on Sunday night."
His hand tightened on her hair. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he said, very low, "I'll tell him."
"No."
"Ruth—"
"Not yet. Not like this." She lifted her head. His face was inches from hers, tender and exhausted and full of a naked fear that she had never seen in anyone. "I need to think. I need to work out what I'm going to say, because I can't just put it down on the table like a bill. He'll be destroyed. And I don't know what this is. I don't know if it's—" She faltered. "I don't know what it is. I won't lie to him, Daniel. But I won't tell him half a thing, either."
"All right."
"Give me a little time."
"I'll give you whatever you want." He lifted his hand and touched her cheek, with a thumb gone gentle as breath. "I'd like it on record, though, that I tried to send you home."
"It's on record."
"Twice."
"Twice," said Ruth, and laughed, a small ragged sound, and wept a little, and he held her until the sun was clear of the water.
At half past five she dressed. The linen shirt was creased beyond help. She put on her shoes at the door and looked back once. He sat up on the folded sail in the new light, naked to the waist, with his hair on end, watching her with an expression she would not have had a name for even if she had been given a week.
She went up the slope in the cool wet dawn. The lawn was silver. The frangipani dripped. At the top of the garden, by the kitchen door, she stopped, with her hand on the latch, and looked up.
The window above her, Grace's, was dark. The curtain, she thought, had just stopped moving.
She stood perfectly still for a long time. Nothing stirred. A hornbill croaked in the mango tree, and the sky behind the house went slowly from grey to rose. Then Ruth Nakitende, who always read the contract, went inside and shut the door, and the house closed over her like water.