Chapter 13
Mistaken
For nine days Ruth was a woman who did not ask.
She went to the office. She drew staircases. She told Brian, pleasantly, that she would be handling the Entebbe site by phone for the time being, and Brian, who was not a fool, said "Yes, Madam," and looked at her with such round, careful sympathy that she wanted to throw a ruler at him. She ate dinner with her mother on the telephone and told her, truthfully, that she had not decided anything. She answered Timothy's messages within five minutes, every time, in the same bright voice. Miss you. Dinner Friday? Yes, of course. She did not tell Esther that she slept three hours a night. She did not tell herself.
She did, on the Friday, ask Timothy.
It was a clumsy question, and she hated herself for it. They were walking home from the restaurant, along a quiet road in Kololo, under the heavy dripping branches of a row of mvule trees, with his arm hooked through hers. She said, as casually as she could, "Do you ever have people you owe money to?"
He glanced at her. "Why?"
"I was only thinking. About debts. How you carry them."
"Everyone carries debts, my love."
"Do you?"
He had gone very still. She felt it through his sleeve. He kept walking, at the same pace, with the same easy swing of the shoulders, but she saw the muscle tighten in his cheek in the light of a passing car.
"One," he said. "A very old one. I'll tell you about it on the fourth."
"Is it to someone called Okello?"
The footsteps stopped.
It was so quiet that she heard, in the ditch beside the road, a frog begin to creak. Timothy stood quite motionless, his hand still in the crook of her arm, and she looked up into his face and saw it as she had never seen it before: not frightened, not angry, but old. Terribly old. As if she had pulled a tarpaulin off something that had stood under it for years, and it had crumbled into powder in the open air.
"Where did you hear that name?" he said, very softly.
The same sentence, she thought. Word for word.
"I saw a slip. In your bathroom. I wasn't prying, Tim. I was looking for my cardigan."
"Of course." He closed his eyes. "Of course you were." He drew a breath through his nose, long and slow, and when he opened them, he was smiling, and the smile was the most wretched thing she had ever seen. "I did leave it there. I suppose I wanted someone to find it. It's four weeks, Ruth. Four weeks and one day. Can you give me that?"
"I've been giving you things for months."
"I know you have."
"I'm not sure how much more I have."
"Then give me the four weeks," said Timothy, "and then, if you have nothing left, I won't ask you for anything again." He lifted her hand and kissed it, very gently, and she felt his lips shake. "I love you. Whatever I am. I want you to know that before you hear it."
They walked on. He did not say another word about it. At the door of her car he kissed her once, on the forehead, like a man saying goodbye at a station, and she drove home through the dark, and cried so hard on the Entebbe road that she had to pull over under a street lamp and put her head on the wheel.
They are both doing it, she thought. Both of them. They have a language I can't read.
On the following Tuesday she took Grace to the hospital.
It was a routine check, a blood-pressure review with the young cardiologist, and Grace had said, tartly, that she didn't need an escort, that she'd been going to that hospital since before Ruth was born. Then, with a dry sideways look, she had added that she would not object to the company. They drove to Entebbe in the late morning, in Ruth's little Toyota, with the windows down and a basket of mangoes in the back for the nurses.
"You're very quiet," said Grace, as they turned in at the hospital gate.
"I'm parking."
"You've been parking for a week."
"Mama Grace—"
"I'm sixty-eight. Not blind." She gathered her handbag, and the faint, level eyes went to the windscreen. "Stay in the car if you like. It's a very long wait and the chairs are dreadful. I shall be an hour."
"I'll be here."
"Of course you will." The old woman patted her hand. "You are a very good girl, Ruth. I do hope you know that. Whatever else happens."
She went in, small and upright, with her stick, and the swing doors closed behind her.
Ruth sat in the car with the engine off. The hospital forecourt was a bare strip of tarmac in front of a low yellow building with a red cross on the wall, and the day was already heavy and bright, the air throbbing with heat. Taxis. Boda-bodas. A woman selling roasted groundnuts from a basin on her head. She watched without seeing. She was too tired to think. She leaned her temple against the window and shut her eyes.
When she opened them, Daniel was across the road.
He was standing under a flame tree outside the pharmacy, in his work shirt, with his hands in his pockets. She had not known he was coming. For a second she did nothing at all. Her heart simply gave a great confused leap, as it did every time, whatever she told it. Then she saw that he was not alone.
There was a girl with him.
She was young, twenty-three or twenty-four, slight and quick, in a blue student-nurse uniform and a white cardigan, with a plastic identity badge swinging from a lanyard. She had a small, serious, delicate face, and her hair was pulled back in a tight knot. She stood very close to him. She was looking up into his face and talking fast, with one hand pressed against her mouth, and as Ruth watched, the girl's shoulders began to shake.
Daniel took his hand from his pocket. It held an envelope.
It was a long white envelope, plump with something. He put it into the girl's hand and closed her fingers round it, firmly, like a man pressing a coin into a child's palm. The girl shook her head. He said something. She shook her head again, more violently, and began to cry in earnest, and Daniel set both his hands against her face, one on either side, as he had once set them against Ruth's in a dark corridor, with the same unbearable gentleness. He leaned down. He kissed her forehead.
The girl put her arms round his neck and held on.
Oh, thought Ruth.
It was a small, flat thought, like the click of a latch. Nothing else came. She sat quite still, with her hands in her lap, and looked at the man she had walked down a garden for, standing in the street in the sun with another woman in his arms. He had his eyes shut. His face, in profile, was the face she knew. It was the face from the boathouse at dawn, grave and tender and unguarded.
The girl drew back. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and said something that made him smile, and the lanyard swung against her chest, and for a moment the sun caught the card.
Ruth could read it from across the road. She had always had good eyes.
BRENDA OKELLO. STUDENT NURSE.
The world did something very slow and very strange.
She felt it happen. It was like a house settling in the night: a distant groan, a shifting of weight in some deep place, and all at once every beam that had carried her for six months simply lay down. Okello. The slips on the tiles of Timothy's bathroom. The name in the mirror. The man she had asked, with her whole heart in her mouth, under a mango tree, and who had gone white and said I gave my word.
I gave my word.
I'm not telling you for any reason. I'm telling you because I won't lie to you.
A girl with a student's badge. An envelope of money. A kiss, on the brow, in the open street, so easy, so practised, so fond, the way he had never once kissed Ruth except in the dark. A man who left, eight years ago, because staying would have cost someone else something I couldn't let them pay. A man who had never lied to her and had never told her anything either. A man who paid. Who knew exactly what was owed. Who had a secret so large he had carried it across the world and would not set it down even for her.
And Timothy, ninety-six slips, a woman and a name.
She had been such a fool.
It would not form into a story. It lay in her head in loose bright pieces, like a broken plate, and she kept picking up one and another and trying them against each other, and all of them cut. Both of them. She did not know what she thought. She only knew what she felt, which was the old cold plain feeling from the kitchen window, a hand drying a dish for forty minutes, and a man loading a suitcase into the boot of a car with a woman waiting in the passenger seat.
My father did it, she thought. And I was twelve. And I said never.
Across the road the girl had gone. Daniel was standing alone under the flame tree with his hands hanging empty. He had turned, as if he felt something. His eyes crossed the forecourt, the taxis, the traffic, and she saw them find the little Toyota, and the woman in the front seat.
Time stopped.
She did not wave. She did not move. She sat, with her hands in her lap, and looked at him through the windscreen until his face changed, until she saw him understand exactly how it must have looked. He took a step into the road. A taxi blared its horn. He stopped, with a hand up, and mouthed something she could not hear.
She started the engine.
She remembered afterwards that she had left Grace in the hospital. She had driven four hundred yards along the road, in the wrong direction, before she thought of it, and pulled over, trembling, and sent a text: Sorry, emergency at site, Brian will fetch you. It was the fourth lie. It was no longer even a good one.
He was waiting at the boathouse at six.
She had not intended to come. She had driven to the house at dusk only because it was the one place on earth that she could not stay away from, and found the lawn empty, the veranda dark, Grace not yet back. She walked down the slope in her office shoes with her bag over her shoulder, past the tangle of frangipani, and the boathouse door was open and a lamp burned within.
He stood in the middle of the floor. He had not sat. He had been standing, she thought, for hours. The dinghy lay behind him on her cradle, and the lamplight ran along her new knee, and he held both hands out in front of him, open, palms up, as if offering her an empty bowl.
"It was not what you think."
"What do I think?"
"That I—" He faltered. "That she and I."
"I don't know what I think. I've no idea. I'm a very stupid woman, Daniel. I've been told so by everyone, in so many words, for six months." Her voice was thin and dry. "Who is she?"
"Her name is Brenda."
"I read the badge."
"She's twenty-three. She's in her last year at the nursing school. I pay her fees." He swallowed. "I've paid them for four years. She hates taking it, and she takes it anyway, and I've no right to ask her to hate it less." His voice dropped. "She cried today because her father has been ill, and she thinks she won't be able to sit the exams, and she's ashamed."
"And you kissed her."
"On the forehead."
"In the middle of the road."
"Yes."
"As you kissed me."
"No." It came out of him like a blow. "Not as I kissed you. Ruth, for God's sake. I'd no idea you were there."
"Then what was it? A kindness? A very large, very regular kindness, with a lump sum and an envelope, to a girl who shares a surname with the man my fiancé pays on the first of every month?" She laughed, and it hurt her throat. "I'm an architect, Daniel. I notice when two beams meet. You and Timothy are both paying the same family. And neither of you can tell me why."
"I can't."
"Because it's shameful."
"Because it's not mine to tell!"
"Then whose is it?" She had begun, to her own astonishment, to shake. "Whose is it? Not Timothy's, you tell me to ask him, and he tells me to wait four weeks. Not yours. Not your mother's, who tells me to find out what you paid. Everyone in this house knows something. Everyone's got a secret, and they all love each other, and they're all so noble about it, and I'm standing in the middle of the floor with a ring on my finger, being smiled at." Her voice cracked. "Do you know what that feels like? To be the only one in the room who isn't being told?"
"I know exactly what it feels like."
"Then why do it?"
"Because I made a promise—"
"You're always making promises! To Timothy. To Mama. To a dead man in a study. You are the most promised man I have ever met, Daniel, and you've never once, not once, in six months, chosen anything for yourself." She pressed her fingers to her eyes. "You know what you are? You're a man who has never said out loud what he wanted. You've hidden in a boatyard for eight years and called it sacrifice. But it isn't. It's cowardice. It's easier to be the martyr than to be the man who has to stay and be seen."
She heard the words as they left her. They were unforgivable. She wanted to snatch them back out of the air, but they hung there, shining and cruel, between the boat and the lamp.
Daniel did not move.
Then something in his face went flat and still, and he said, very quietly, "And you? Shall I tell you what you are?"
"Daniel—"
"No. You've said yours." He put down his hands. "You picked the safest man in Uganda. You told me so yourself, in the rain, with a lamp on your face. Loyal. Never late. Never raises his voice. You picked the one man you were certain would never leave, because you could not bear to be your mother, and you called it love. And now you're standing here in front of me, on fire, shaking with it, and you want me to hand you the one thing that will give you permission. A reason. A villain. Somebody to blame, so you don't have to choose." He drew a breath. "I won't be your reason. I won't be your excuse to leave him, or to stay. You'll have to do that yourself. You'll have to want it."
She stared at him.
"I wanted you," she whispered.
"I know."
"And I've never in my life asked anyone for anything, and I asked you, and you said no."
"I said not yet."
"It's the same."
"It isn't." His voice broke. "It's never been the same."
The lamp flickered. A moth had come in at the door and was beating itself softly against the glass.
"I'm going to find out what it is," said Ruth. Her voice was perfectly steady now, and very far away. "Since nobody will tell me. I'm going to find the name, and I'm going to look at it, and then I'll decide what I think of both of you."
"Ruth. Please. Wait until the fourth."
"You said that about the funeral, I'd imagine. Wait. Wait. Wait until the right time." She picked up her bag from the floor. "There's never a right time, Daniel. There's only whether someone's still there when the light goes."
It was his own sentence. She saw it strike. He took half a step back, as though she had touched him with a hot iron.
She walked out. She did not run, because she would not give the night that. She walked up the slope with her back as straight as a plumb line, and the lawn went dark and cool under her shoes, and behind her in the lamplit boathouse nobody said a word. Nobody called. Somewhere in the garden, a cicada took up a thin, endless note.
At the top of the slope she stopped. The house loomed in front of her, windows black, the veranda swing creaking faintly in the wind.
She had said she would find out. She thought, with a numb practical clarity, Where do you begin? And the answer came to her at once, as the answer to a structural problem did, from the bottom, from the foundations.
A girl in a blue uniform. A lanyard. A name.
She got into the car, and sat for a long moment with her forehead against the wheel, and then drove to Entebbe Hospital to find Brenda Okello.