Chapter 2
Glances
Timothy arrived at seven, in the grey car, still in his bank suit, with a bunch of yellow roses that he had clearly bought on the way and thought about for exactly as long as it took to be sure they were the right ones.
Ruth watched him come up the veranda steps from the window of the sitting room. He took them two at a time and skipped the third without looking down, a man who had grown up in this house and carried its map in his legs. He paused at the door to straighten his tie. He did it every time. She had once found it endearing, and some days she still did: the small ritual of a man who wanted to arrive correctly.
"There she is," he said, coming in, and the warmth in it was real. It always was. Whatever else might be said about Timothy Kasozi, and Ruth had lately found herself wondering what that might be, he had never once, in eight months, been careless with her. He kissed her forehead, then her cheek, and pressed the roses into her hands as if she were the one who had been away. "How was it? Did my mother behave? Did she show you the cupboard with the hundred and four teaspoons?"
"I counted a hundred and six."
"Then she's been shopping." He smiled and touched her face briefly, a thumb along the cheekbone, a gesture so habitual it had stopped registering as touch. "You look tired. You've been on your feet all day."
"I've been on a roof, mostly."
"Of course you have." He laughed. Then, quite casually, looking at the roses rather than at her, he said, "And my brother. How was he?"
It was a very light question. Ruth, who spent her days listening to what buildings said when they were pretending to say nothing, heard the weight under it.
"Rude," she said. "And right."
"About what?"
"The fascia. And the nails in the ridge. And a step." She hesitated. "He didn't say who he was. I thought he was the caretaker."
"Danny would like that." Timothy's smile did not change, but it seemed to Ruth to settle, to become something put there on purpose. "He always did prefer to be taken for somebody he wasn't. It saved him from being questioned." He looked up at the ceiling, at the old rose-and-cream cornice running along the join of wall and plaster. "He's very good with wood. He always was. When we were boys he could look at a plank and tell you where it would split."
"He seems to know the house."
"He grew up in it." A pause. "Did he say anything else?"
"About what?"
"About anything." And he laughed again, quickly, and shook his head at himself, and slid his hand into hers. "Forgive me. I've waited eight years for him to walk through that door, and now that he has, I can't seem to stop interrogating the evidence. Come. Mama's put out the good plates. She hasn't done that since Papa."
The dining room was long and low-ceilinged and had been, once, the centre of the house. A mvule table that could seat fourteen ran down the middle of it, polished by sixty years of elbows. At the head stood a tall chair with arms, upholstered in a dull maroon, and no one sat in it. Nobody mentioned this. Mama Grace had laid the table with six places, though there were only four of them, and Ruth, counting, understood after a moment that the extra two were not a mistake. One was for the absent father. The other, she thought, with a small lurch, was for the absent son, set eight years ago and left out ever since in a kind of stubborn faith.
Tonight it was occupied.
Daniel had washed. He had changed into a white shirt that was too crisp to be his, probably one of Timothy's, a little tight across the shoulders, and he sat with the extra care of a man wearing borrowed clothes in a house that had once been his. He did not look at the table as people look at a table. He looked at it the way a person looks at a floor when he has been told there are loose boards.
"You will eat," Grace announced, setting down a dish. "All of it. You've gone thin. They don't feed you on those ships."
"I haven't been on a ship for four years, Mama. I build boats now."
"Then they don't feed you in the boatyard."
"They feed me fine."
"They feed you fish."
It was, Ruth thought, the first genuinely funny thing she had heard in that house, and she saw Daniel hear it as well. His shoulders loosened by half an inch. He looked down at the plate his mother had loaded with matooke, groundnut sauce, beef stew, greens, a hill of rice so tall it needed its own buttress, and said, with great seriousness, "I can see I've been misinformed about the quantities."
"Eat."
He ate. And Ruth, who was seated opposite him, between Timothy and the empty chair, found that she was not looking at the food. She was watching him eat. She was doing it covertly, she told herself, as one watches a stranger on a bus. He ate like someone who had been without something for so long that he had forgotten he was hungry for it. Slowly at first, almost wary, and then with a plain unguarded pleasure that he seemed to realise only when he looked up and found his mother watching him, a hand pressed against her mouth, her eyes full.
"Mama," he said, softly.
"It's the pepper," said Grace, and fled to the kitchen.
An odd silence followed. Timothy cut his meat into precise squares. Daniel put down his fork. In the quiet, Ruth heard the ceiling fan creak on its bearings, the rustle of the mango tree against the window screen, the small clink of ice in the glasses.
"Wine?" said Timothy, lifting the bottle.
"No. Thank you."
"It's a good one. Rob gave it to me, from the Ministry dinner."
"I'm all right."
"One glass wouldn't kill—" Timothy stopped. It was only a fractional stop, a hiccup in the sentence, but it was very noticeable, because everything else about Timothy's manners was so perfectly smooth. He set down the bottle. "Of course. Sorry. Water, then."
"Water's good."
Neither of them looked at the other. Ruth, who had looked up from her plate at precisely the wrong moment, caught Daniel's eyes across the table, and in them she saw something she could not name. It was not resentment. Resentment she would have recognised; she had been raised by a woman who made a household art of it. This was something quieter and far less comfortable: a kind of braced mercy. The look of a man deciding, again, not to say something.
He gave her the briefest of nods, as if she had asked a question. Then he turned and asked Timothy about the bank.
Over the next hour Ruth learned a number of things about Daniel Kasozi, none of which he told her.
She learned that he used his left hand when he thought no one was watching and his right when he knew they were, and that the left was the one with the burn. She learned that he listened to people with the whole of his face, which was unusual in a man, and that when Timothy described the new development loan portfolio he nodded in all the right places while his eyes travelled, quite deliberately, up the walls, along the cornices, over the lintel of the door to the veranda, reading the house like a letter he had not been permitted to open for years. She learned that he did not look at the photographs.
There were a great many of them. They hung in the passage and the sitting room and the dining room, in dark wood frames, in the exact order of the family's life: Dr. Samuel Kasozi receiving a medical degree, Dr. Samuel Kasozi at the hospital's opening, Dr. Samuel Kasozi with a very young Timothy on his shoulders on the lawn, laughing, a small fat hand in his hair. There was a wedding picture. There was Timothy's graduation. There was a school photograph of two boys, three years apart, in matching blazers, squinting into the sun, the older with an arm slung around the younger's neck. It hung beside the sideboard at eye level. Daniel had passed it three times in the evening, to carry plates, to hold a door, to fill his mother's glass, and each time his gaze had slid off it like water off a waxed car.
After that picture, Ruth realised, there were none of him. The wall simply went on without him. Graduations, christenings, a cousin's wedding, the old doctor's retirement. A whole decade of the family at their best, arranged by a woman who had decided, at some point, that the story should continue and that its gaps were nobody's business.
"Ruth's team starts the structural survey on Monday," Timothy was saying. "She's going to have the whole roof opened up. I told her, whatever it needs. It's going to be the best event house on the lake."
"It's already the best house on the lake," said Daniel.
"It will be the best business."
"Ah." A faint pause. "Is that what we're calling it?"
"What else would you call it?" Timothy's voice was easy, but something in his neck had gone taut. "It's too big for Mama, and it's costing money to keep standing. Papa wanted it kept. This is how it's kept."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking it."
"I was thinking," said Daniel evenly, "that I'd like to see what the architect thinks."
And he turned his head and looked directly at Ruth.
It was a mistake, she thought afterward, for both of them. Not the look itself, which was perfectly civil, but its timing, because the table had gone quiet and Timothy was beside her and the fan was turning above them, and the whole room had narrowed to the space between his eyes and hers. She had been asked a straightforward professional question. She should have answered it in a straightforward professional voice.
Instead she found, for a long, stupid moment, that she could not remember what she thought.
"I think," she said slowly, "that a house can be a business and still be itself. If you do it honestly. The danger is when the business starts to decide what the house is allowed to be."
"And how do you tell?"
"By whether it still has things you can't put a price on." She heard her own voice grow softer. "The third step. The way the light comes through the shutters in the afternoon. A pencil mark where somebody measured a child against the door frame."
Daniel's face did not change. But he went very still, in that particular way he had, and she saw his hand tighten fractionally on his glass.
"There's one in the study," he said. "By the window. If nobody's painted over it."
"No one has," said Timothy, a little too quickly. "Mama wouldn't allow it."
"Good."
"I'll show you, Ruth, after dessert."
"I'd like that," she said. But she was still looking at Daniel, and he was still looking at her, and neither of them had stopped, and it came to her with a clean small shock, the way you notice at the top of a stair that there is one fewer step than you were counting on, that this had gone on longer than courtesy permitted. That Timothy, beside her, had noticed. That the ice was ticking softly in her glass.
She took a sip of water and looked down, and found that her hand was not quite steady.
It's the heat, she thought. It's been a long day. It's a house full of ghosts and everyone is being very careful, and I have been on a roof since seven.
Afterward she helped Grace in the kitchen, because it was the only way to get a plate out of the woman's hands. The room was warm and smelled of onions and charcoal and cardamom. Through the window over the sink she could see Daniel on the lawn in the failing light, standing alone near the old mango tree with his hands in his pockets, looking at the lake. Timothy was on the veranda, taking a call, one palm pressed flat to the rail.
"He came back for my heart," said Grace, drying a cup that was already dry.
"I'm sorry?"
"The doctors say it is nothing. A small thing, a flutter. I told them it was a flutter. But Timothy telephoned him, and he got on a bus and a plane and another bus, and here he is." She put the cup down very carefully. "Eight years, and it took a flutter."
Ruth said nothing. Some silences were better than answers.
"He will leave again," Grace went on, in the same level voice, "as soon as I am well. He has told me so. He has told me three times since lunch. I have decided to let him say it, because it makes him feel safe." She turned, and her bright hard eyes found Ruth's. "You are very kind to him. I noticed. You asked him about the house. Nobody has asked him about anything in this house for a very long time."
"I didn't mean to—"
"No, no, it was good. It was good." Grace patted her hand, briskly, twice. "Only don't become attached to him, Ruth. He is like that old swing seat. Everyone sits on it and says how beautiful, and then they get up and go in, and it is left swinging."
It was such an odd thing to say that Ruth laughed. Grace laughed too, a little too long, and they both looked out of the window again at the man by the mango tree.
He had turned. He was looking at the house, at the lit kitchen, at the two women in it. At her. Perhaps he could not see her through the glare. Perhaps he was only looking at his mother. Ruth stood with a tea towel in her hands and felt a slow, absurd heat climb up from her collar.
Then he lowered his eyes and walked away down the dark slope toward the water.
She drove home at ten, along the Entebbe road, with the window down and the night air full of woodsmoke. Behind her, in the rear-view mirror, the lights of the town thinned out and merged into the black mass of the lake. Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat. She let it ring until the traffic light at Abayita Ababiri, and then picked it up.
Thank you for being so kind to him today, Timothy had written. It meant a great deal to Mama. And to me. I know he can be difficult. Sleep well, my love.
She read it twice at the red light. It was a perfectly good message. It was, in fact, a lovely one.
She could not have said why it left her feeling as though she had been thanked for something she had not done. Or why, when the light changed and she drove on through the dark, the thing she was seeing was not Timothy's tender, anxious, handsome face, but a man's hand closing round her elbow on a rotten step. And the second afterward, the long and not-quite-innocent second, in which he had not yet let go.