Chapter 16
Consequences
The ring came off on Sunday morning, in the kitchen of the Kasozi house, at ten past six, with nobody watching.
Ruth had not slept. Nobody had. She had sat until dawn in the sitting room in the borrowed dark, with a blanket round her shoulders, listening to the house: Grace's slow footsteps overhead, a door opening, a door closing, the murmur of a man's voice behind the study wall that went on for hours and then stopped. At some point Daniel had come in, his lip split and his cheekbone swelling, and sat on the floor with his back against her chair and his head against her knee. Neither of them had spoken. She had put her hand on his hair and left it there.
At first light she got up and went to the kitchen to make tea, because it was the only thing her hands knew how to do. While the kettle ticked, she looked down at her left hand. The diamond was small, and clear, and lovely. Timothy had chosen it with the jeweller on Kampala Road over three separate visits.
It took some work to get over the knuckle. When it came free, it left a pale ring on the skin, narrow and shining, like the mark of a bandage taken off a healed wound. She stood with it in her palm. She found she was not crying. It seemed beyond that. It simply lay there, small and heavy and entirely innocent.
"Don't put it on the table," said Timothy from the doorway.
He had not slept either. He was in yesterday's shirt, creased and open at the throat, with his tie gone, and his eyes were swollen. But he stood straight. He had washed his face. There was, about the way he held himself, something she had never seen in him before, a kind of bleak, exhausted steadiness, like a house that has been stripped to its frame and found sound.
"Tim—"
"I'd rather you didn't. If you put it down I'll have to pick it up, and I'll hate that." He crossed the floor and stopped an arm's length away. "Give it to me."
She put it in his hand. His fingers closed over it. For a moment neither of them said anything, and the kettle began, softly, to sing.
"I want to say something," he said. "And I don't want you to answer it."
"All right."
"I am not going to say it's all right. It isn't. I'm going to be angry for a long time. I'm angrier than I've ever been in my life, and most of it isn't even at you, which is the worst of it. I've been sitting in that study since two o'clock trying to find someone to blame who isn't me, and I can't." He gave a short broken laugh. "I'm not a fair man, Ruth. I thought I was. I thought I was the good one. But last night I hit my brother in the face for doing the one thing I'd have done myself, if I'd been braver."
"You'd never—"
"I would. I'd have wanted you the same way, if I'd been him. I just wouldn't have let myself." He looked down at the ring. "That's the difference between us. I've spent my whole life not letting myself. I did the right thing every time, and look where it got me."
"Timothy."
"I'm going to go to Francis today. I'm going to ask him what he wants me to do. Whatever he says, I'll do it. If he says the police, I'll go to the police. If he says nothing, I'll—I don't know." His thumb moved over the diamond. "But I'm not going to be the man who stands on a lawn and hears a name without a stain ever again."
Her eyes filled. "I'm so sorry."
"I know you are. And I'm still not ready to hear it." He lifted his head. "Go home. Please. Take your mother. I'll tell Mama what we've decided. And Ruth, one more thing." He swallowed. "I did love you. I love you. I want you to know that wasn't a payment either."
He put the ring in his pocket. Then he walked out through the back door into the grey garden, and she watched him go down the slope toward the lake, a tall man with his hands in his pockets, getting smaller, until the mist took him.
The consequences, when they came, were not dramatic. That was what she found hardest. She had expected thunder. Instead there was only a slow, steady, bureaucratic erosion, like water finding its way through plaster.
On Monday the bank sent a polite letter. Gordon Ssebaggala, on behalf of the board, regretted to inform Nakitende Heritage Works that the funding allocation for the Kasozi House restoration was under review, in light of a change in the family's circumstances, and that further disbursements would be suspended. Nobody had said why. Nobody needed to. By Tuesday the news had run round Kampala's small clever circle like a spark in dry grass, and by Wednesday a municipal clerk who had once written to call her a pleasure to deal with did not return her call.
"They're not saying anything," said Brian, miserably, at the office. He had arrived early and put the kettle on and was standing by the window with his arms wrapped round himself. "They are only not saying it very loudly."
"I know."
"The Jinja man has asked for his deposit back."
"I know, Brian."
"And the museum people say they would like to reconsider the shortlist. That is what they said. Reconsider." He turned. His young face was blotched and angry. "Madam Ruth, I don't know what happened. I don't ask. But I have seen how you work, and I tell you that if they think you have done something wrong, then they are fools."
She smiled at him, a tired lopsided smile. "I did do something wrong, Brian."
"Then you are the kind of wrong that I would work for," said Brian, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.
She went through the accounts that night. She sat at the drawing board with a calculator and a pot of cold tea, and laid out the figures in neat columns, the way her father had once taught her, and by two in the morning she knew that the practice could survive for four months if nothing else went wrong. She knew too that she had spent three years building it, one cornice at a time, and that it might be gone before Christmas.
She did not telephone anyone. She did not ask anyone for anything. There was a clean hard comfort in that, a sort of dry-eyed arithmetic. She had made a choice. She was paying for it. It seemed to her only fair.
The call from the hospital came on Thursday, at a quarter to nine in the evening.
It was Daniel. She knew from the first word that something had changed, because his voice, which was always low, had dropped to a flat whisper.
"It's Mama. She's—it's the heart again. It's worse this time. They've taken her to Mulago. They're going to put in a stent in the morning." A pause. "She asked for you."
"For me?"
"She asked for you by name. She wouldn't take a sedative until I'd promised." His breath caught. "You don't have to come."
"I'm coming."
"Ruth. It won't be easy. Tim's here. His face is the colour of a sheet." A long silence. "And I think she's going to ask you something."
The corridor outside the cardiac ward in Mulago was long and green and smelled of floor polish and boiled cabbage. A television mounted high on one wall was showing a football match with the sound turned down. Along the opposite wall stood a row of orange plastic chairs, bolted to the floor, and on the third from the end sat Timothy, bent forward with his elbows on his knees, staring at a spot on the linoleum between his shoes.
He looked up when she came. He nodded once. There was nothing in it, no anger, no welcome. Only exhaustion, shared.
Daniel stood beside the door of the ward, with his back to the wall and his arms crossed, as he had stood in a thousand rooms. The bruise on his cheekbone had gone yellow-green. When he saw her, he came forward a step, then stopped, remembering where he was and who else was there, and let his hands fall. She saw what it cost him. She saw too that Timothy saw, and looked away.
"She's awake," said Daniel. "She says she wants to see you alone."
The ward was a single room, white and cool and quiet, with a monitor beside the bed that traced a thin green line across a black screen. Grace lay propped on three pillows in a hospital gown, her hair loose on her shoulders, grey and long, a thing Ruth had never seen. Without the pearls and the lilac and the straight back, she was very small. A tube ran from her nose. Her hands lay on the sheet like folded paper.
"Ruth," she said.
"Mama Grace."
"Close the door, my dear."
She did. She crossed the floor, and the old woman's eyes followed her all the way to the chair beside the bed, bright and clear and entirely lucid, with the unsparing clarity of the very ill.
"I have been wanting to ask you something for two months," said Grace. Her voice was a thread. "I did not, because I was a coward. I'm told that I have been a coward about a great many things. I've been going through them, in my head, in order. It is a long list." A ghost of a smile. "I find that I would rather not leave this world with it unfinished."
"You're not leaving."
"Don't be tiresome. I'm sixty-eight with a stent in my future. We both know I'm not immortal." The hand on the sheet turned over, palm up. "Where were you, on the night of the ninth of August?"
Ruth's breath stopped.
She had known it would come. She had known it from the hallway, from the moment Daniel said I think she's going to ask you something. She had known it, in truth, since a grey morning at the end of the garden when she had looked up at a window and seen a curtain, just then, stop moving.
Every right to ask, she thought, distantly. She has every right.
"I was in the boathouse," she said.
"With my son."
"Yes."
"All night."
"Until half past five."
The old woman nodded slowly. The line on the monitor jumped and settled. "I heard the stair," she said. "The fourth one from the top. It has a particular note. I heard you go down at ten to two. I got up and went to the window. I saw you cross the lawn with your shoes in your hand." Her mouth worked. "You had a blue shirt. It looked black in the dark. You stood at the top of the slope for a very long time. I almost came down."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I didn't know what I'd say." The dry eyes held hers. "I thought, she is engaged to my younger son. She is a good girl. If I go down, I shall have to forbid it, and if I forbid it she'll stop, and my elder boy will go back to Mombasa with his hands empty. Again. And I thought: I have taken so much from him. So I let you walk down. Do you see? It was the same thing. It was the washing of the shirt, all over again. I made another decision by standing still."
"You couldn't have known what would happen."
"I knew exactly what would happen. I'm not a fool." She closed her eyes, then opened them. "That is what I wished to ask. I wished to ask whether you were sorry."
Ruth looked at her own hands, at the pale ring on her finger where a ring had been.
"No," she said, quietly.
Grace's eyes widened a fraction.
"I'm sorry for what it did to Tim. I'm sorry for the lies. I'm sorry for every single day I let him go on thinking. I'm sorrier than I know how to say." Her voice shook, and steadied. "But I'm not sorry for him. For Daniel. I tried to be. I tried so hard. I lay awake going through it like a lawyer, looking for the part where I regret it, and it isn't there. I'd be lying if I said so. And I told myself I would stop lying to this family."
For a long time the old woman said nothing.
Then something happened to her face. It was slow, and it began at the corners of the eyes, a small crumpling that spread inward until the whole thin countenance had changed. It was not grief. Ruth realised it with a shock. It was something much more unexpected, a kind of dazed, trembling gladness.
"Thank you," whispered Grace.
"For what?"
"For not saying yes. For not saying you were sorry and begging for pardon, as a girl in a play would. For being, for once, in this family, someone who simply told the truth." Her fingers tightened round Ruth's. "I have wanted to hear a person do that for eight years. I had begun to think nobody could."
"Mama Grace—"
"Listen. I have one more thing." The voice was fading, thin as breath. "You are going to tell my son to go. Not Daniel. Not yet. Tim. You'll tell him that I forgave him in the corridor. I have not yet. I shall. But I wish it said."
"I'll tell him."
"And you will not marry either of them to make it neat." The ghost of the headmistress surfaced, dry and fierce. "It would be very tidy. The elder son redeemed, the younger son punished, the girl in the middle of it all as the prize. I won't have it. You are a person, not a plank to be nailed over a hole." Her lids drooped. "Take your time. Be on your own for a while. It will be good for you. It was the one thing I never learned."
"Yes."
"Good girl." Her eyes closed. "Now send in my sons, I'll be asleep in a minute. And Ruth."
"Yes?"
"The fourth tread," murmured Grace. "It was always the one that lied."
She told them in the corridor, under the green fluorescent light, with the silent football flickering above.
She said it to both of them at once, because there seemed no honest way to say it to one. Timothy looked up at her from his chair, with his hands loose between his knees. Daniel stood against the wall, perfectly still.
"Your mother says I'm not to be a prize," said Ruth. "She's right."
"Ruth," said Daniel.
"Let me." She drew breath. "I've done so much in this family in secret. I've done it in the dark, in the middle of the night, with my shoes in my hand. I want to do the next part in the open. I want to do it slowly. I want to go home to my own flat, with my own plants, and my own mother on the telephone, and I want to stand in a room by myself and find out who I am without the two of you." Her voice cracked. "I'm not leaving you. I want you to hear that. I'm not saying goodbye. But I'm not going to walk out of one man's life and into another's, in the same week, with the blood hardly dry. That's what my father did. That's how it's done."
"I wouldn't ask you to—"
"I know. That's why I'm saying it." She turned to him. "I love you. I think I've loved you since a laminated photograph on a veranda. But I need to know that I'm choosing you with my eyes open, and not because I'm running. And you need to know that too. You've spent eight years running. We can't both do it at once."
He was looking at her as he had looked in the boathouse on the night of the storm, with that raw undefended gaze. His throat moved.
"How long?" he said.
"I don't know."
"A month? Six?"
"I don't know, Daniel."
"All right." He nodded, slowly. "All right. I'll wait. I'm good at it. It's the one thing I've had practice at." His smile was crooked and bright with unshed tears. "I only ask one favour. If you're going to stand at a window, make it a nice one."
She laughed, and it came out as a sob. "I'll see what I can do."
Timothy rose from the chair. He crossed the corridor, and stood in front of her, and held out his arms, awkwardly, like a boy not sure he is permitted, and she stepped into them. He held her for a long moment, hard, and she felt his chin against her hair.
"Be well," he said, into it. "Please."
"You, too."
"I'll try."
When he let go, he did not look at Daniel. But as he turned toward the ward door, he put out a hand, in passing, without a word, and gripped his brother's forearm just above the old burn, once, and let go. Daniel closed his eyes.
Then the two of them went in to their mother together, and the door swung shut.
Ruth stood alone in the green corridor, under the buzzing light. On the television, someone scored, and a crowd in a distant stadium opened its mouth in silent joy. She watched it for a while without seeing. Then she picked up her bag, and went out into the night, and for the first time in many months she did not know where she was going, and was not afraid.