Chapter 18
Storm
Timothy cooked.
He cooked, as he did everything, from a plan: a sheet of paper taped to the kitchen cupboard, with times written in the margin in his small square hand. 16:00 Matooke on. 16:30 Groundnut sauce. 17:15 Beef (NOT before!). Grace, enthroned in a kitchen chair with a rug over her knees and an expression of fierce restraint, was permitted to advise but not to touch. By half past five the room was a battlefield of steam and pots and splashes of red oil, and her younger son, in an apron that said KISS THE COOK in letters of faded pink, stood at the stove with his sleeves rolled and sweat running down his temples, stirring a pot with the grim concentration of a man defusing a bomb.
"You are burning it," said Grace.
"I am not burning it."
"I can smell it."
"That's the onions. They're meant to smell."
"They are meant to smell of onions, Timothy. Not of regret."
Ruth, who had come at four with a bunch of white lilies, an apology, and a bottle of ginger beer, leaned in the doorway and watched. It was a Friday, the twelfth of December, and the whole house was alight with a strange, brittle, humming cheerfulness, the kind that settles on a place where everyone has agreed not to look at the clock. Outside, the sky was a heavy pewter. The air had a tightness to it, a sense of weight pressing on the lake, and the mango tree stood perfectly still.
"There's weather coming," said Daniel, behind her.
She hadn't heard him come in. He stood in the kitchen door with a sack of charcoal on one shoulder, in a clean shirt, the sleeves turned back. He had put on a little weight in the last weeks. The lines had eased in his face. He looked at her over the top of the sack and she felt it in her ankles.
"How bad?"
"Mzee says the lake's holding its breath. He's gone to tie down the boats." He set down the sack. "It'll be a big one. Not before midnight."
"Good," said Timothy, without turning. "It'll be over by the morning."
Nobody answered. The pot bubbled.
They sat down to dinner at seven, eight at a table meant for fourteen.
Ruth had known there would be guests. Timothy had asked her, in a text, whether she minded, and she had written back Of course not, without knowing whom he meant. She understood only when the knock came at the door, a little before seven, and Grace rose from her chair, put aside the rug, took her stick, and went to open it herself.
Francis Okello stood on the veranda, in a dark suit and a clean white shirt, holding a bunch of bananas wrapped in newspaper. His daughter was beside him in a plain blue dress with her hair loose, looking as though she might be sick. He leaned heavily on his stick. The artificial leg clicked as he crossed the threshold.
"Mrs. Kasozi," he said.
"Mr. Okello."
"I have brought bananas. It is not enough. But in my culture one does not come empty-handed."
"In mine, either," said Grace. She took the bananas in both hands and looked at them as if they were a sacred object. Her voice, when it came, was not quite steady. "You are very welcome in my house. I should have said so eight years ago."
"It is not too late to say it."
"No." She drew herself up, very small, very straight. "Come in. We have laid a place for you. I hope you will not mind where."
She led him down the passage, past the long wall of photographs, past the dark wood frames with their generations of Kasozis. She led him into the dining room and to the head of the great mvule table, where, in the lamplight, stood the tall maroon chair with the arms. Nobody had sat in it since the day the doctor died. A clean plate had been laid before it. A glass. A folded napkin.
"That chair," said Grace, "has been empty for too long."
Francis Okello stopped dead.
"I cannot," he said, softly. "Madam. It is Dr. Kasozi's."
"It is my husband's, and he was wrong about a great many things. He is not here to object." She turned to look at him, and her eyes, in the soft light, were bright and wet and perfectly resolute. "I have spent eight years setting a place at this table for the wrong person. I should like very much to see it used by the right one."
For a long moment nobody breathed.
Then he nodded. He crossed the floor, with his slow, clicking step, and drew out the chair, and lowered himself into it with a small sigh. His hands, on the carved arms, were thin and brown and perfectly steady. From the foot of the table, Timothy made a sound in his throat, and bent over his plate.
It was a strange evening. Ruth would remember it for a long time, not for any one thing but for the grain of it, its odd, trembling texture, like a thread pulled very fine. The food was only fair. The matooke was heavy, the beef was overcooked, the sauce had a faint taste of char. Nobody minded. Brenda, seated between Daniel and Mzee Kibuuka, who had been summoned to eat and had arrived in a clean shirt and a tie like a hangman's noose, said nothing for half an hour, and then began to talk. She talked about the hospital, and the exams, which she had passed, and a ward sister who kept a goat in her yard. Mzee Kibuuka contributed a number of ruinous anecdotes about Dr. Samuel in his youth. Grace laughed until she had to put down her fork.
At one point Francis Okello, holding up his glass of passion-fruit juice, said, with grave courtesy, "I should like to say something."
The table fell quiet.
"I do not have a speech." He looked down at his hands. "I only wish to say that I have eaten at a great many tables, since my wife died. None of them has been this honest." A pause. "I do not say it is a comfortable honesty. I think we are all a little sick with it. But I think it is the first meal I have had in eight years that did not taste of money."
Timothy lifted his head. His eyes were running openly. He did not wipe them.
"Thank you," he said.
"No. It is I who thank you." The old man's smile was slow and kind. "You were a boy in a road. I was a man who took what he was given. We have been very foolish, the both of us. Tomorrow we will be a little less foolish. That is all that can be asked."
He raised the glass. After a moment they all did.
The Okellos left at ten, in the car that Daniel had hired to take them home. Brenda hugged Grace on the veranda, hard, like a child, and Grace held her face and said something in her ear that made the girl laugh through tears. Francis shook Timothy's hand and held it for a long moment without speaking. Then he got in the car, and it went away down the drive, its tail-lights small and red, and the first low roll of thunder came across the lake like a door being closed in a distant house.
"Bed," said Grace. She was grey with fatigue and radiant. "All of you. I won't be argued with. Ruth, the guest room is aired."
"Mama Grace, I could drive—"
"In that?" She jerked her stick toward the sky. "Don't be foolish. And you're not to go to the boathouse," she added, with a look at Daniel that could have scorched paint. "Either of you. I am an old woman and I have a very sharp ear for stairs."
"Mama!"
"I'm only saying."
Ruth, to her profound annoyance, blushed to the roots of her hair. Grace patted her cheek with a dry hand. Then she limped away up the stairs, one at a time, with a hand on the banister, and the sound of her door closing was very soft.
They stood in the hall, the three of them. Nobody spoke. The thunder rolled again, nearer, and the shutters on the lake side gave a quick dry rattle, as if the house itself had shivered.
"I'll lock up," said Timothy. He looked young, and very tired. "You two go on."
"Tim," said Daniel. "Are you all right?"
"I'm better than I've been in eight years." He smiled. "I'm going to sit in Papa's study for a bit. I want to look at the wall." He put out a hand and squeezed his brother's shoulder. "Don't fuss. Go to bed."
She did not sleep.
She lay in the iron bed in the pale green room, listening to the wind get up. It began as a sigh in the mango tree, and grew, by slow degrees, into a long hoarse roar. The shutters banged. The ceiling creaked as the roof took the weight of it. At half past midnight the rain arrived, and with it the lightning, huge sheets of white light that laid the whole room bare, the wardrobe, the washstand, her own hands on the coverlet, and snatched it away again.
She thought about the last time she had lain in this room. She thought about a blue shirt in the dark, and about shoes in her hand.
At ten past one, a floorboard spoke.
She sat up. It was not the fourth tread. It was somewhere downstairs, in the passage, a light, quick, unsteady step, and then the soft click of the back door. She waited. The rain thundered on. In the black pause between two flashes, she heard, very faintly, through the wall of wind, the shriek of the boathouse hinges.
Daniel, she thought. And then: No. He'd come to me.
She was out of bed before she had finished thinking it. She threw her coat over her nightdress and ran barefoot along the passage and down the stairs, through the pitch-dark kitchen, to the back door. It stood open. The garden was a black howling maelstrom of rain. Through it, down at the foot of the slope, she saw a small yellow glow, and then it moved, and she understood that someone was carrying a lamp.
Behind her, a voice said hoarsely, "Ruth?"
Daniel stood at the foot of the stairs in his undershirt and trousers. His hair was on end. He looked at her face, and then at the open door, and went absolutely white.
"Tim," he said.
He ran.
He ran as he had not run since he was a boy, down the slope in the dark, slipping on the wet grass, with the rain driving into his face like thrown gravel and the lightning showing him the way in flashes. He heard Ruth's footsteps behind him. He heard his own breath. In his head, quite clearly, a voice that was not his own was saying eight years, eight years, and under it, like a drum, a single thought. Not again. Not this. I won't be too late.
The boathouse door banged back and forth on its hinge. He stopped in the doorway and the lamp on the bench showed him the room.
The cradle was empty.
The Nambi was gone. The great doors on the lake side stood wide, flung open to the storm, and beyond them, between the black posts of the slip, the water was white. A coil of mooring rope lay cut on the boards. On the bench, beside the lamp, lay a folded sheet of paper weighted with a mallet, and a single glass, and a bottle of Dr. Samuel's whisky, uncorked, three-quarters empty.
He took in everything at once. The paper. The glass. His brother's jacket thrown over a thwart-rack, soaked.
"Oh God," said Ruth, in the doorway. "Oh, Daniel. Is he—"
"He's taken her out."
"In this?"
"He's not been out since he was seventeen." He snatched the paper off the bench. His eyes ran over it, three lines in a small square hand, and he crushed it in his fist without finishing, and flung it down. "I'm taking the canoe."
"Daniel, the lake—"
"Get Kibuuka. Get the pickup's lights down to the slip, as bright as they'll go, and keep them on the water. Ring the police. Ring the marine unit at Kisubi." He was already tearing at the covers of the old fishing canoe on its rack, the narrow dugout with its ancient outboard that the gardener used for tilapia. "Ruth. Go."
She went.
The lake was a nightmare.
It rose in black, hissing walls, higher than he had known it could, with the foam streaming white from every crest. The little outboard screamed. Spray hit him in the face like a fist. Twice the canoe nearly broached, and twice he threw his weight across the gunwale and felt her come back, shuddering. The shore had vanished. There was only the roar of the water and the long erratic strobing of the lightning, which showed him in every flash the same terrible image: a vast black plain of waves, and nothing on it.
Tim, he thought. Tim, you fool, you stupid, stupid boy.
He had pictured it so many times, in Luzira, in the first nights. A white face in a car. A man in a road. He had imagined every possible ending, and had made his peace with all of them but this, the one that now came up out of the dark with a sick lurch: his brother gone, and the paper on the bench, and the question that would be asked for the rest of his days. Why didn't you see? Why didn't you stay?
"TIM!"
The wind took the name and flung it away.
He steered by the lightning. A flash, and he saw, a long way to his right, a pale triangle on the water, a sail, torn, flapping like a wing. Another flash, and it was lying on its side. A third, and he saw it clearly, the honey-brown hull, upside down, riding the swell, the white mast trailing like a broken arm.
"TIM!"
There was a shape clinging to the keel.
He opened the throttle to the stop. The canoe leapt. He came in under the lee of the capsized hull and cut the engine and flung himself across the thwart, and the shape turned its head, and he saw his brother's face in the next flash: grey, streaming, eyes huge, mouth open, one hand locked on the keel and the other around nothing.
"Danny," said Timothy. He was laughing, or sobbing. "Danny, it's gone over. I didn't—I wasn't going to—I only wanted to—"
"Give me your hand."
"I can't. I can't feel it."
"Give me your hand!"
He reached out. The canoe pitched. Their fingers touched, slid, caught. Daniel threw his whole weight backward, and for a moment the canoe stood on its side and the black water came over the gunwale in a wave, and then Timothy came free of the keel, all at once, a heavy sodden length of cloth and bone, and hit the bottom of the canoe in a flood of lake and tangled limbs.
"I've got you," said Daniel, over and over, through his teeth, with his arms locked round his brother's chest. "I've got you. I've got you. I'm not going to let go. Do you hear me? I'm not going to let go."
"I wasn't going to—"
"I know."
"I'd had a drink, Danny. I'd had so many. I wanted to feel it, I wanted just to be on the water one more time, as a person, before—I swear to you, I wasn't—" He was shaking so hard his teeth rattled. "I'd written it down. In case. I didn't do it, I wrote it in case I did—"
"Shut up, Tim."
"I'm so afraid."
"I know." Daniel put his forehead down against his brother's wet hair. The rain beat on his back. The canoe lurched and wallowed, half full, and the capsized dinghy knocked softly against the hull like a thing asking to be let in. "I know you are. I was afraid, too. But you don't get to leave me holding it. Do you hear? You do not get to walk away and leave me with the bill."
A sound broke out of Timothy that was neither a laugh nor a cry.
"No," he said. "No. I'm sorry."
"Good."
"I'm sorry."
"Then hold on." Daniel reached back for the cord of the outboard, and found it, and pulled. The motor coughed. Pulled again. It caught. "Hold on to me. We're going home."
On the shore, Ruth stood in the rain with her hand over her mouth, and watched two small yellow lights come out of the storm.
Mzee Kibuuka had backed the pickup to the very edge of the slip, with its headlamps on full, two long white beams laid across the water like arms. The gardeners were there. The cook was there, in her nightgown, clutching a paraffin lamp. Brian, who had been fetched from nobody knew where and had run the whole way from the road, stood at the end of the jetty with a coil of rope. The lightning made them all into white statues and then blotted them out. The wind screamed in the reeds. Behind her, on the bank, a small bent figure in a lilac dressing-gown and a pair of gum boots, who had come down the slope on no one's arm, was whispering something over and over to the dark.
"They're coming," said Kibuuka, with a fierce, shaking joy. "Eh! Look! Look!"
The canoe came in low and heavy, wallowing, with the little engine popping. A wave caught it side-on and she thought it would turn, and then Daniel was in the water to his waist, hauling, and the gardeners ran down and the rope went out, and a dozen hands were on the gunwale, dragging, shouting, and the hull ground up onto the stones.
They lifted Timothy out between them. He was grey and limp and streaming. Ruth ran down the slip into the shallows and took his face in her hands. It was cold as marble. His lips were blue. His eyes were open.
"Tim," she said. "Tim. Look at me."
He looked. He blinked slowly, and something moved in his face, and his mouth shaped her name.
"Ruth," he said. "I broke the Nambi."
"You did not. She's floating." She was laughing and crying at the same time, kneeling in the freezing water with his head in her lap. "She's upside down, you fool, but she's floating. Daniel will fix her."
"Daniel can fix anything."
"Yes."
"He's the best of us."
"I know."
"I thought he'd be angry."
"He was." She looked up. Daniel was standing over them, knee-deep in the surf, with his arms hanging and the water streaming off him in sheets, and he was weeping without any shame whatever. "He's still angry. He's going to be angry for years."
"Years," said Daniel, in a cracked voice. "Decades."
And Timothy, lying in the arms of the woman he had meant to marry, in the roar of the storm, with the headlamps burning white across the water and his mother's small figure stumbling down the bank toward him in gum boots, began to laugh. It was a thin, wild, ragged sound, and it went on a long time, and then it turned, as such sounds do, into something else, and he turned his face into Ruth's wet shoulder and shook.
The storm broke at four. It went as it had come, suddenly, rolling away north across the water with a last grumble of thunder, and left behind a sky washed clean and a silence so deep it rang.
By then they were all in the kitchen. Timothy sat by the stove in a blanket, with a mug of sweet tea between his hands and Grace on the stool beside him, one arm round his shoulders, refusing to let go. A doctor had been telephoned. A young woman from the clinic at Kitoro had come in a borrowed car, listened to his chest, shone a light in his eyes, and pronounced him bruised, chilled, mildly concussed, drunk, and alive. Mzee Kibuuka had gone home to bed in a state of tearful triumph. Brian lay asleep on a bench with his head on his arms.
At ten to six, as the east began to pale, Timothy put down his mug.
"I'd like to go now," he said.
Nobody spoke.
"I know it's early." He looked round at them. His eyes were reddened and unsteady, but they were clear. The brown of them, in the lamplight, was exactly the colour of his brother's. "I'd like to go while I'm still frightened. I think if I wait for the sun to come up I'll find a reason." He tried to smile. "It's the right day. Esther said I could do it in the suit."
"You're ill," said Grace.
"I'm sober, Mama. It's the first time in eight years." He covered her hand with his own. "Please. Let me."
She looked at him for a long time. Her mouth worked. Then she bent her head, very slightly, and kissed his temple, where the hair was still damp.
"Go with God," she said. "Come home when you can."
He stood. The blanket fell from his shoulders. In the grey light he looked taller than he had, thin and white, like a man who has been through fever. He turned to his brother, who sat at the table with his chin on his fists.
"Will you drive me?"
"Yes," said Daniel.
"You don't have to come in."
"I know."
"I'd understand, if you—"
"Tim." Daniel stood up. He crossed the kitchen floor, and put an arm round his brother's neck, and drew his head down against his own, and said, very low, something that Ruth did not hear and was not meant to. Then he straightened, and wiped his face with the back of his hand, and smiled, the old crooked smile, with all the weariness and tenderness of the world in it.
"I'm not going to wait in the car," he said. "I'm going to walk in beside you. It's about time somebody did."
She watched them from the veranda.
The grey pickup went away down the drive in the first light, with the two men side by side in the cab, one in a creased navy suit, the other in a borrowed jacket, neither looking at the other. The mist was lifting off the lake in slow pale coils. The grass was bright. A hornbill began to complain in the mango tree.
Grace came out and stood beside her, wrapped in a shawl.
"The third step," she said, "has been repaired."
"I know," said Ruth. "I checked."
"My son did it. Not the one you think." The old woman's voice was small and dry. "The one in the truck. He did it in November. He came out one night with a hammer and fixed it, and never said. I found the nails on the veranda in the morning." She was quiet for a time. "He wanted to leave you a house that would hold."
"He did."
"Yes." Grace sighed. "Well. We'll see."
The pickup reached the gate, and turned, and was gone. The sun came over the roof of the boathouse and laid a long gold bar across the lake. And far out on the shining water, small and brown and upside down, with her white mast dragging, the Nambi rode the swell like a wounded bird, waiting to be brought home.