Chapter 11
Guilt
Guilt, Ruth discovered, was not a feeling. It was a set of small physical facts.
It was the cold spot between her shoulder blades at the breakfast table. It was the way her tea tasted of metal. It was a sudden drumming in her ears whenever a phone rang, and a sudden, shameful flush of heat whenever it did not. It was her inability, that Sunday, to look at a clock without calculating how many hours remained. It was the bruise, no larger than a thumbprint, high on the inside of her left arm, which she found in the shower and covered with a long sleeve for two days.
She did not cry. She had expected to. She had expected the first gust of remorse to knock her flat, and instead she moved through the day with a strange exact calm, like a woman carrying a very full glass across a crowded room. She drove home from Entebbe at seven in the morning. She showered. She put on a clean shirt and went to the office and answered nine emails, one of them from a municipal clerk, in a tone of such perfect courtesy that the clerk wrote back to say she was a pleasure to deal with.
At four she took the car to Entebbe Airport and waited in Arrivals with a bunch of flowers.
They were not yellow roses. She had stopped, on the Kampala road, at a stall under a flame tree and bought the first bunch that came to hand, and only afterwards, standing in the cool bright hall with the cellophane crackling, did she see that they were white lilies. Funeral flowers. She stood with them in her arms, thinking of her grandmother's grave, and a woman beside her said, "Beautiful. Who are they for?" and Ruth heard herself say, "My fiancé."
Timothy came through the sliding doors at ten past five with a small suitcase and a laptop bag, looking tired and boyish, his collar open. He saw her and his whole face changed. It was an astonishing thing to watch, even now, how fully he could be glad. He dropped the bag, crossed the concourse at a run, and picked her off her feet.
"You came."
"Of course I came."
"I didn't ask you to." He put her down, but kept hold of her, his face in her neck. "I'd have taken a taxi. I'm so tired of taxis. I'm tired of men in lanyards." He drew back, laughing, and took the lilies, and smelled them. "These are the saddest flowers I've ever seen. You're mad. I love them."
"I'm sorry. They were the only—"
"They're perfect." He kissed her, hard, in the middle of the hall, with a taxi driver whistling. "I missed you so much it was ridiculous. I kept reaching for my phone to tell you things. A man from Rwanda gave a ten-minute presentation on mobile banking while eating a banana. I wanted to tell you about the banana."
She laughed. It came out of her without effort, light and real, and with it a stab of pain so sharp that she nearly flinched. This is who he is, she thought. This is who I did that to.
In the car he held her hand the whole way to Kololo. He talked about Nairobi, and Rob, and a new idea for the Kasozi house, an annual heritage festival on the lawn. The sun was going down behind the Kampala hills in a long smear of orange and rust. He looked at her sideways, at the traffic lights, and said: "You're very quiet."
"I'm tired."
"Did Mama work you hard?"
"She's well. She's wonderful. She had a goat killed."
"Of course she did." He squeezed her fingers. "And Danny?"
It was a small question, asked lightly, and it was the one she had been waiting for since the moment he stepped through the doors. She kept her eyes on the road.
"He took the Nambi out. On the lake. It was lovely, Tim. You should have seen him."
"I'd have given anything." His voice was soft. "I don't think I've seen him sail since we were boys. He's so good on the water. He's like a different person." He smiled out of the window at the passing lights. "I think he's happier here than he lets on. Don't you? I think Mama's good for him. And you."
Me.
"I think so," said Ruth.
His flat was on the fourth floor of a quiet block off Acacia Avenue, with a balcony full of herbs that she had planted and he watered with military devotion. She walked in through the door she had walked through a hundred times. There was her blue mug on the rack. There was her cardigan on the back of the chair, where she had left it in June. There was a framed photograph on the hall table, of the two of them on the jetty at Ggaba, with her mouth open in mid-laugh and his arm round her shoulders and the sun behind them like a halo.
She stood looking at it for a long time.
"I've got something for you," said Timothy, from the bedroom.
"You didn't have to."
"I know. I wanted to." He came out with a small flat box, wrapped in tissue, and put it in her hand. His eyes were bright with a child's nervous pleasure. "Don't laugh. It's silly. I saw it in a shop at the airport, and I thought, that's Ruth."
She unwrapped it.
It was a pendant on a fine chain: a tiny shutter, no bigger than her thumbnail, in sterling silver. The louvres were slimmer than a hair. Two minute hinges. It lay in her palm and caught the lamplight, delicate and absurd and perfect.
"It's a shutter," said Timothy. "I couldn't find a window. It was the nearest thing."
She could not speak.
"You said that when you were small, you used to open the shutters to see if your father's car was in the road." His voice had dropped, and was quite unsteady. "I've never forgotten it. I thought, I'll never be a man who leaves, but if she ever needs to look out and check, she'll know there's a shutter that opens. And that someone's on the other side." He gave a small embarrassed cough. "Which is a very long way of saying, sorry, it's too much, I should have bought chocolates."
"Tim."
"Yes?"
"It's beautiful."
She put it round her neck. He fastened the clasp, with his warm clumsy fingers, at the nape, and kissed her skin just there, lightly, with a little breath, and she shut her eyes. The silver was cold. It rested against the hollow of her throat like a small, accusing coin.
Tell him. Now. Say it.
"Timothy," she said.
"Mm."
"I need to tell you something."
He stilled. She felt it through his hands on her shoulders, a slight check, a cold current, and she turned in his arms and saw that he had gone pale.
"I need to tell you something too," he said.
She stared at him.
"I've been meaning to," said Timothy, slowly, in a voice she did not know. It was thin and stripped and careful. "For a long time. For—" He swallowed. "It's about Danny. About why he left. About me. It's not a small thing, Ruth. It's the worst thing I have ever done, and you ought to know it before you marry me, and I have been trying for six months to find the words. I almost told you in Naivasha. I wrote it on a napkin."
The room seemed to tilt very slightly.
"What is it?"
"I can't tonight. I can't." He pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes, then took them away, and she saw that he was not about to cry. It was worse. He looked like a man who had decided, with enormous effort, to stop running, and was looking at the ground to see where he would fall. "I want to do it properly. I want to do it somewhere we can talk without a phone going off and my mother in the next room. After the blessing. The fourth of October. You remember, Mama's planned the whole thing, the pastor, the stone-laying." His smile was thin. "I thought, I'll get through the blessing. I'll stand on that lawn and be the good son one more time. And then that night I'll sit you down and tell you everything, and you can decide."
"Decide what?"
"Whether you'll still have me."
"Tim." She took his face in her hands. It was wet. She had not seen him cry, in a year and a half, not even on the anniversary of his father's death. "Whatever it is."
"Don't say it. Not till you know." He caught her wrists, gently. "What was yours?"
For a long time she looked at him.
It would have been so simple. It was there, behind her teeth: I slept with your brother. I walked down the garden in my bare feet. I am a bad person, and I am so sorry. She could feel the weight of the sentence, as a swimmer feels the weight of the dive. And she saw, quite distinctly, in the lamplit eyes in front of her, what would happen if she said it. Not rage. Not the cry of an injured man. He would simply nod. He would nod and say I see, and thank her for being honest, and sit down in a chair, and something that had held him upright for thirty-five years would go out of his face.
After the blessing, he had said. Whatever it is. He had only asked for seven weeks.
"It was nothing," said Ruth. "It was the same thing. I'm tired, Tim. I wanted to say that I love you, and that I'll be here whatever it is."
It was the third lie. It was also, God help her, the truth.
He kissed her. He folded her into his chest, rocking a little, and she stood there with her face in his shirt and the silver shutter pressed into her collarbone, and wept without sound.
"You have the face," said Mzee Kibuuka, "of a man who has stolen bread."
It was Monday afternoon, and the shed was warm with the smell of cut mvule. Daniel, at the bench, did not look up. He was shaping a louvre slat, one of the sixty-four that would be needed for the north windows, and he had been shaping the same one for twenty minutes.
"I haven't stolen anything."
"Then why do you hold it like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like it will be taken."
Daniel put down the plane.
The old man had settled on a three-legged stool at the end of the bench, with his stick between his knees and his chin on his hands. He was looking at Daniel with the long, absolutely unsentimental appraisal of a man who had spent fifty years assessing planks. In the slanting light his face looked carved out of the shed itself, brown and cracked and patient.
"I am not asking," said Mzee. "I am too old to be told. If you tell me, I will have to know it, and I have a bad heart and a worse mouth. I will only say what I have said before. Your father was a hard man with a soft place, and he put the soft place in a box and sat on it. I saw what it did. He sat on that box for thirty years, and when it finally broke, it broke all over everyone."
"I know."
"Do you? Because you are doing it, too." The old stick tapped once on the floor. "You think you are protecting someone. You think that if you carry the thing quietly, and say nothing, and go away, the house will stand. Eh. It will not. Houses fall down for exactly this reason. Somebody has stopped telling the truth about where the weight is."
"Mzee."
"I am an old fool. I know. Sharpen your chisel." He heaved himself to his feet. At the door he paused, and without turning, said in a quite different voice, "She is a good girl. The little one. I was afraid for her, when I came. I thought, she's going to be broken by this family. But she has a spine. She looks at the grain." He cleared his throat. "Whatever you do, do it in the open. A secret is only wood that's been painted over. It rots from the back."
He limped out. The door swung to behind him.
Daniel stood in the dust, with the plane in his hand, and thought of a woman's face turned up to the sunrise at the boathouse door. Give me a little time, she had said. He would. He would give her everything. It was the only thing he had left to give.
But he could not stop hearing it. Somebody has stopped telling the truth about where the weight is.
It was not Ruth who was carrying the weight. It was himself. It was Timothy. It was a ledger, eight years long, which both brothers had agreed to keep shut. And in the middle of it, like a flaw in the grain, lay a name that neither of them ever spoke aloud, and a small house in Katabi that Daniel could not think of without his chest closing.
Not yet, he thought. Not until she decides. Then I'll say it all.
He picked up the plane. His hands were shaking.
Her mother arrived in Kampala on Wednesday, for the dress fitting.
Joyce Nakitende was sixty-two, small and spare and upright, in a navy skirt and white blouse and the sensible black shoes she had worn through thirty-one years of teaching primary school. She had come by the early bus from Masaka with a basket of passion fruit on her knees. She kissed Ruth on both cheeks and looked at her for exactly three seconds, in the doorway of the flat, with her head on one side.
"You've lost weight."
"I've been working."
"Mm," said her mother. And went to put the kettle on.
The dressmaker was an Indian lady in Kamwokya, Mrs. Patel, who worked from a back room full of tape measures and tissue and tiny sewing machines. She wore her glasses on a chain and pins in her mouth. She said, around them, "Please stand on the box."
Ruth stood on the box.
The dress was ivory silk, plain and long, with narrow sleeves and a boat neck. She had chosen it in a spirit of calm practical delight in March. She had said to Esther, I want something that looks like it could last. It fell to the floor in clean, heavy folds, and when Mrs. Patel turned her to the triple mirror, she saw three women in white, one in front and two at the sides, each of them extremely pale.
"Beautiful," said Mrs. Patel. "Your fiancé will cry."
"Yes," said Ruth.
"A little tighter in the waist. Hold still. You've been dieting, I think." She pinned. "Everyone does. It is always a mistake. A bride should be glowing, not hungry."
Her mother sat on a cane chair in the corner with her hands folded over her handbag. She said nothing at all. She watched Ruth's face in the three mirrors, one after another, with the dry patient attention that Ruth remembered from childhood, from the long evenings of homework at the kitchen table. It was the look of a teacher who has already seen the wrong answer.
When Mrs. Patel went to fetch more pins, her mother said, quite conversationally, "Who is he?"
Ruth went still.
"I don't mean Timothy. I know Timothy. He is a lovely boy. I mean the other one." She did not raise her voice. "You look the way I looked, the year your father left."
"Mama—"
"I was not going to ask. I told myself, Joyce, you have no right. You are her mother, not her priest. But you were never good at lying, Ruth. It was the one thing about you I always thanked God for." She turned her handbag over on her lap. "I stood at that window for a year because I loved your father more than I respected myself. I want to tell you what I learned. I learned that it is very easy to be loyal to a man. It's much harder to be loyal to the truth."
"I haven't—" Ruth's voice cracked. "I'm not—"
"I did not ask if you were. I asked who he is."
In the mirrors, three women in ivory silk looked back at her, white-lipped, with the silver shutter at their throats. Outside, in the sunlit street, a boda-boda hooted and a child shouted something in Luganda.
"His brother," said Ruth.
Her mother closed her eyes.
For a long moment she said nothing. Then she rose, and crossed the small room, and stood in front of Ruth where she stood on the dressmaker's box, so that for once her mother was looking up. She put out a dry, warm hand, and laid it flat against the cold silk over Ruth's heart.
"My poor girl," said Joyce Nakitende. "You are going to have to be so very brave."
"I don't feel brave."
"No one does." The small hand pressed. "That's how you can tell."
Mrs. Patel came back, with a mouthful of pins, and stopped in the doorway, and looked from one to the other.
"Is something wrong?" she said. "Is the dress too tight?"
"No," said Ruth, and looked in the mirror at the woman in white, who was going to be kind to everyone in the world except herself. "It fits perfectly."