Chapter 15
Confrontation
The blessing of the Kasozi house took place on a Saturday afternoon of such flawless weather that Mzee Kibuuka said it was suspicious.
The sky was cloudless. The lake lay blue and glittering. The lawn had been mown to velvet, and along the drive Grace had placed forty white chairs, on each of which sat, by two o'clock, a person of consequence in their Sunday best: the chairman of the bank in a cream suit, his wife in a hat like a small galleon, the two old shareholders, three men from the Ministry, a regional party official, a photographer from a Kampala paper, and a Pentecostal pastor with a magnificent baritone and a microphone he did not need. There were children running in and out of the mango tree. There was a tent with sodas. At the foot of the veranda stood a block of grey granite on a pedestal of fresh cement, draped in a white cloth, awaiting its plaque.
Ruth stood beside it, in the green dress, with her hands folded and her heart going like a pump.
She had slept for two hours. She had dressed with great care, and put on the ring, and then, for ten minutes, sat on the edge of the bed in her flat looking at it. Then she had put it back on, because it was not yet time to take it off. She wanted, very badly, to do the thing properly. It seemed to her that she had done so much of it badly, and that the one decent act left was to finish it with her eyes open.
"You look like a woman about to be hanged," said her mother, at her elbow.
"Thank you, Mama."
"I'm only saying. Smile. There's a camera." Joyce Nakitende had come on the early bus again, with a fresh basket of passion fruit and a new navy hat, and she had said nothing about the dressmaker's, or the brother, or the pale face in the mirror. She stood now at her daughter's side with her handbag in both hands, upright as a pole, taking in the whole scene with her dry schoolmistress's eye. "It's a lovely house."
"It's a lovely house."
"It's a great deal of work, for people who say they've nothing to hide." She patted Ruth's arm. "Breathe."
On Ruth's other side, Esther was standing with Moses and the twins, who had been bribed into good behaviour with three biscuits each. Esther's face was tense. She said nothing, only slid her hand into Ruth's and squeezed. It was a hard, warm, lawyer's grip, and Ruth held on to it as a swimmer holds a rope.
Timothy came down the veranda steps.
He wore a charcoal suit, a white shirt, a tie the colour of old wine. His hair had been cut. He looked very handsome, and extremely pale. In the sunlight she could see a faint glaze of sweat at his temples, and when he reached her and took her free hand, his fingers were as cold as stones.
"You look wonderful," he said.
"So do you."
"I feel like a man at his own trial." He tried to smile. "Don't answer that. It was a joke. After this, I'll—" He lowered his voice. "I've told Mama. I mean, I've told her that we'll want the study, after the guests have gone. That I need to speak with you privately. She said, of course." His eyes went to hers, very wide and clear, and full of something that cracked her open. "I'm not going to run, Ruth. I've decided. Whatever happens, I'm going to stand in that room and say it."
"I know."
"You can't know." He pressed her hand. "But thank you for saying so."
He stepped back as the pastor tapped the microphone, and the garden settled.
It was a long ceremony. Ruth was to remember it, afterwards, in fragments, like the pieces of a dream. The pastor's resonant voice rolling out over the lake: Lord, bless this house and all who walk in it; let it be a house of truth. Grace in a lilac gown and a small pearl hat, seated in the front row, with her back as straight as a rule and her hands in her lap, looking at nothing. Gordon Ssebaggala's speech, which was short, and the polite laughter. A boy of six who fell off a chair.
Rob Mugisha, in a grey suit, stood to say a few words. He was a small, round, shining man, with a gold watch and an expression of boundless benevolence, and he spoke for five minutes about heritage, and family, and the Kasozi name. "A name," he said, "that means something in this town. A name without a stain." He smiled round at the audience. "And I'd like to say, in confidence, though there are cameras, that Entebbe Municipality could do a great deal worse than to be represented by a son of this house."
Applause.
Timothy, beside Ruth, did not move. She felt him go rigid, like a post.
"A name without a stain," Rob repeated happily. "That is what the people want, my friends. In a time of such doubt. A family that has done nothing but good."
At the end of the back row, standing alone with his hands folded behind him, Daniel closed his eyes.
She saw it. She saw it, she thought, and no one else did. He was in his father's grey suit, with his back against the trunk of the mango tree, a little apart, as he had been at every gathering since March. He did not open his eyes for several seconds. Then he did, and looked across the whole length of the lawn, over forty heads, at her.
He did not smile. He did not nod. He only looked, and she understood that he was telling her something: I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Whatever he says tonight, whatever you say, I'm here.
Somewhere, behind her, Mzee Kibuuka coughed.
When the cloth was drawn from the stone, it revealed a brass plaque, polished and new. KASOZI HOUSE. Built 1958. Restored 2026. In memory of Dr. Samuel Kasozi, and for all who return.
For all who return. It was Timothy's wording. She had not seen it until now. She stood there reading it with the sun in her face, and found that she had to put her hand against the granite to stay upright.
The guests left at six.
It took an hour. There were the thank-yous, the kisses, the photographs, the long half-drunken farewells at the cars. Rob Mugisha embraced Timothy and murmured, loudly, "Think about it." Marjorie Ssebaggala kissed Ruth and said, "My dear, the bride is positively translucent." Joyce Nakitende shook hands with Grace for a long and unreadable moment. Esther took the twins, and at the gate she turned and looked back at Ruth, one searching look, and mouthed something that might have been call me. By seven the last car had gone, and the lawn lay littered with plastic cups and paper napkins and the sad confetti of a party that has finished.
Grace stood on the veranda, looking at it.
"I'll be in my room," she said, to no one. "I'm very tired. You must do as you like." She turned. For an instant she looked at Ruth, a swift, bright, terrified look. Then she went in, and shut the door, and the house took her like a mouth.
"Shall we?" said Timothy.
The study was in half-dark. He had not put on the lamp. Light came in from the bay window in a slant of dying copper, laid across the desk, the glass-fronted bookcases, the cupboard door with its rows of pencil marks. On the sill the paraffin lamp stood cold. Timothy shut the door behind them. He took off his jacket and hung it over the chair, and then stood with his back to her, looking out at the garden, for a long time.
"I had a speech," he said.
"I thought you might."
"I've written it eleven times. The first was on a napkin. The best was on a flight to Nairobi, and I lost it." A small cracked laugh. "I thought I'd have it all in order. I had the whole thing as a sequence. Chronological. And now I stand here and there's nothing."
"Tim."
"No. Let me." He turned. His face, in the amber dusk, was calm and ruined. "I want to say it in the plainest words. I think if I use any other kind, I'll never stop."
She sat down, on the edge of the old doctor's chair. She folded her hands in her lap. She had said, to herself, a hundred times in the dark of the last few days: Let him say it. Let him say it all. Don't rescue him. And she saw, now, in his face, with a hot sting behind the eyes, how much it would cost her to keep that promise.
"Eight years ago," said Timothy, "on the fourteenth of September, I drove my father's car after a family dinner, with four glasses of whisky in me, down the Entebbe road, and I hit a man on a motorcycle."
His voice did not shake. It was dry, flat, remarkably level. It was the voice of a man reading a sentence from a bench.
"His name was Francis Okello. He lost his right leg below the knee. I stopped. I did stop, I should tell you that, I'd like to be able to say I ran but I stopped, and I knelt in the road and I rang my brother." A breath. "He came in ten minutes. He told me what to do. He said he would say that he'd been driving. I said no. And then I said it again, a bit less. And then I stopped saying it."
He looked at the floor.
"They gave him eleven months. In Luzira. I sat in the family sitting room and watched them take him away, and I said nothing. And Papa said, in front of me, I have no son called Daniel, and I said nothing. I said nothing at the trial. I said nothing at the funeral, two years ago, when Danny didn't come, and Mama stood at the grave in her black hat looking down the road. I have said nothing for eight years. I have paid a man eight hundred thousand shillings a month, on the first, without fail. I have gone to his house at Christmas and sat in his yard. And all the time I have let my brother be what he is." His voice thinned. "And I've let you love me. That's the worst. I let you love a man who isn't real."
He had come to a stop. He stood with his hands loose, in the dark gold light, like a man at the bottom of a staircase who has been told that there is no more.
"That's it," said Timothy. "That's the thing. I wanted you to know before the wedding. I thought you ought to have the chance to say no."
The silence went on. Out on the lawn, someone was stacking chairs.
"I know," said Ruth.
He did not understand it at first. She saw that. His face stayed quite blank, polite, like a man who has been addressed in a language he almost speaks. "I'm sorry?"
"I know. All of it." She stood. Her legs were not entirely steady. "I went to Katabi, Tim. On the Tuesday. Brenda Okello took me to her father. He told me the whole night, from the road to the hospital, to the lawyer, to the funeral." She drew a breath. "I've known for four days. I'm sorry. I wanted you to say it yourself. I didn't want to take it from you."
For a long time he said nothing.
She watched it reach him, slowly, a stone sinking through water. The colour went from his face. Then, to her astonishment, something else came into it, not horror, not anger, but a vast and shaking relief, like that of a man who has been holding a very heavy door for a very long time and has just felt someone, on the other side, lean in.
"You went to Francis," he said, in a whisper.
"Yes."
"And you're still—" He could not finish. He sat down abruptly on the edge of the desk, as though his legs had been cut. "You've known for four days. And you came. You put on a green dress and stood next to me, and held my hand, and listened to Rob say a name without a stain." His eyes were wet. "Ruth, what kind of woman does that?"
"A bad one."
"No."
"Yes, Tim." Her throat closed. "Because I have to tell you mine."
He stared at her.
The room had gone dim. The copper light was almost gone from the floor, and what remained lay in a single band across the pencil marks on the cupboard, the little D. and T., the boys running upward through their Septembers. She stood with her hands clenched in front of her. She had planned it in a hundred ways: gently, carefully, at length. In the end it came out in a single breath.
"I've been with Daniel."
"With—"
"Since August. Since the night you were in Nairobi." The words went on, a rapid, dreadful monotone. "I didn't plan it. That isn't an excuse. I want you to know I did it with my eyes open. I could have gone home. I walked down the garden myself. I wore your ring. I have lied to you for two months and I have been in love with your brother since—" She stopped. "I don't know since when. I'm so sorry. I'm sorrier than I've ever been. I'm telling you because you've just given me the most honest thing I've ever heard, and I won't be less honest than you."
Timothy sat quite still on the edge of the desk.
It was impossible to read his face. She had thought she knew it. She had looked at it for a year and a half, over breakfast, in bed, across the table, and she had believed there was nothing in it that she could not translate. But now it was a stranger's, drained and blank and very white, with two spots of colour burning on the cheekbones, and she saw it begin to change, from the eyes, in tiny stages, like a building being slowly emptied.
"Danny," he said.
"Yes."
"My brother." He said it again, as though to hear it. "My brother, who took the blame." A short, terrible sound came out of him, not quite a laugh. "He gave me eight years and a name and a clean bank account. And then he—" He broke off.
"Tim—"
"Don't."
"I'm so—"
"Don't." He stood. He was shaking all over now, in long hard shudders, and he put both hands up against his face and dragged them down. When he lowered them, she saw that the thing she had expected, the thing she had braced for, the quiet nod, the I see, was not going to come. "I need to be—I need to go and be—" He looked wildly round the room. "I'm sorry. I can't. I can't be in here."
He went to the door. She said his name. He did not turn. The door slammed behind him, and she heard his feet on the stairs, fast, uneven, going down.
Daniel was in the boathouse.
He had been waiting there since the guests left, in his father's suit, with the jacket off and the sleeves rolled, sanding the knee for the dinghy as if his life depended on the grain. When the door crashed open he did not look up at once. He saw the shadow on the boards, and he knew the step. He set down the sandpaper. He turned.
His brother stood in the doorway with his tie hanging and his chest heaving, and the last of the daylight behind him made him a black cut-out, rimmed in gold.
"Tim," said Daniel.
"You."
"I thought you might—"
"You." Timothy came across the floor. He did not slow down. Daniel saw the fist coming, with a kind of dull recognition, as one sees a bus approaching a long way down a road, and he did not raise his hands. It caught him on the cheekbone. The world burst white. He staggered against the hull of the Nambi, and felt it thump, and slid, and caught himself on one knee.
"Get up," said Timothy. His voice was a sob. "Get up."
"No."
"Get up and hit me!"
"No."
"You took it!" He was weeping now, in great ugly gasps, standing over his brother with both fists clenched. "You took all of it! I stood by and let you. For eight years. I let you be the criminal and I let you be the saint, and I was so grateful, God help me, I was so grateful I could hardly breathe. And now you—" He swung again, wildly. This time Daniel put up a forearm, and the blow glanced off, and Timothy half fell against him, clutching his shirt. "You took her. You took the one thing. The one thing I'd got right. I'd got it right, Danny, she was mine—"
"I know."
"Don't tell me you know!"
"I'm not going to say I'm sorry." Daniel's voice was thick. There was blood on his lip. He knelt in the lamplight with his brother's hands twisted in his collar, and looked up into his face. "I'd like to. I've tried. I've stood here for three nights trying to find a way to say it. But it would be a lie. I love her. I love her so much I can't see for it. And I'm sorry that it's you, God knows I'm sorry it's you, I'd have given an arm for it to be anyone else. But I am not sorry for her."
"You bastard."
"Yes."
"You should have hit me. Eight years ago. You should have hit me in that road and taken the keys and told me to go to the police." Timothy's voice cracked wide open. "I'd have gone! I think I'd have gone! You made it so easy, Danny, you always make it easy, you just stand there and let people do the worst thing and then you forgive them for it, and I can't—I can't—"
He let go of the collar. He put both hands over his face and slid down onto the floor, against the side of the boat, and sat there with his knees up, rocking, while his shoulders shook.
Daniel moved. He did not decide to. He crossed the three feet of boards on his knees and took his brother in his arms.
It was an awkward embrace, desperate and ungainly. Timothy fought it for a moment, a fist against his chest, a muffled curse. Then he gave, and turned his face into his brother's shoulder like a small boy, and wept. They knelt together in the lamplight, in the smell of tar and wet cedar, and Daniel felt his own tears come, hot and silent, and put his hand on the back of his brother's head, where the hair was cut short from the barber's, and held it, as he had held it once in a hospital car park in the grey before dawn.
"I'm sorry," said Timothy, over and over. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
"I know. I know you are."
"I'd have given—"
"I know."
They did not hear the door.
"Enough," said a voice.
It was not loud. It was small, and cracked, and absolutely level, the voice of a headmistress in a corridor at the end of a very long day. Both men looked up.
Grace Kasozi stood in the doorway of the boathouse in her lilac gown and her pearls, with a shawl over her shoulders. She had come down the slope in the near-dark with no stick, and no torch, and her face in the lamplight was greyer than Ruth had ever seen it. Behind her, at a respectful distance, stood Ruth herself, with one hand over her mouth.
"Mama," said Timothy.
"I heard you from my window. The whole house heard you." She came in, slowly, and stood looking down at the two of them, kneeling on the floor like boys. Her eyes went from the blood on Daniel's lip to the tears on Timothy's face, and something in her own face, which had been held rigid for eight years, did not so much break as simply let go. "Stand up. The both of you. Stand up and tell me."
"Mama, you don't—"
"Tell me." Her voice shook. "I will not be told by my daughter-in-law. I will not hear it from a stranger in a hat. I am the mother of this house, and I want it said to my face, in plain English, by the person who did it."
Timothy got to his feet. He stood in front of her with his head down, a grown man in a ruined suit, and told her.
He told it quickly, in short flat sentences, as he had told it in the study. The whisky. The road. The telephone. The pale shirt. When he came to the part about the lawyer, she shut her eyes. When he came to the trial, she put out a hand, blindly, and found the edge of the dinghy's cradle, and held it. She said nothing. She did not once look at Daniel.
When he finished, nobody spoke.
The lake whispered at the slip. The lamp guttered. Out on the lawn, someone laughed, far off, a gardener, a night watchman, unaware.
"I knew," said Grace.
Timothy lifted his head.
"I knew that night." She was staring at the planks of the floor, with the shawl clutched in both hands. "I was up at one in the morning. I heard the car come in. I went down to the kitchen, and you were there, in the dark, standing at the sink. In a pale shirt." Her voice was nearly inaudible. "There was blood down the front of it. Not yours. And you looked at me, Timothy, and I looked at you, and neither of us said a word. And then I took the shirt, and I washed it, in the basin, in cold water, as I'd been taught, so the stain wouldn't set. And I burnt it in the incinerator in the morning. And at nine o'clock, the police came for your brother."
Daniel closed his eyes.
"I told myself I didn't know," said Grace. "I told myself that I had seen a boy who had cut his hand. I told myself that Daniel was a wild one, that he was always getting into trouble, that he must have done it. I told myself a great many things. I was very good at it. I had taught school for thirty-one years." A small, dreadful smile. "I let your father disown you. I stood beside him, Danny. In the sitting room. I said nothing. And every night for eight years I put out a plate at your place and told myself I was keeping faith."
"Mama—"
"No." She lifted a hand. The old, small, dry hand, with the swollen knuckles, trembled in the lamplight. "Don't forgive me. Not yet. I haven't earned it, and you must not do a thing out of habit. Your whole life has been doing things out of habit." Her eyes, enormous and wet, rose at last, and met his. "I washed it, Daniel. I stood at that basin and washed a man's blood out of my younger son's shirt, and I let you go to prison for me. For me. I have known it every day. I would be very glad if you would hate me."
"I can't," said Daniel.
"Try."
"I can't, Mama." And then, to his own astonishment, he was crying again, helplessly, with his hands hanging at his sides. "I tried. I tried so hard. I wanted so much to."
Grace Kasozi crossed the floor. She was a very small woman, and she had to lift her arms high to put them round his neck. She held on. Her pearls clicked against his collarbone. She stood there in the lamplight, rocking a little, and said, over and over into his shirt, in a scarcely audible whisper, a word that Ruth, standing in the doorway with the cold night wind at her back, could not make out, but which she thought, in the end, was only his name.