Chapter 20
Together
The creek at Tudor was the colour of strong tea, and it smelled exactly as he had said it would: tar, rope, brine, and fish.
Ruth stood at the gate of the boatyard at ten past noon on the twelfth of August, with a small bag over her shoulder and a cardboard tube under her arm, and tried to remember the speech. She had written it on the plane. She had revised it over Voi, and again above the long white line of the coast, and finally on the back of a sick-bag as the aircraft banked in over the glittering sea. It had been a good speech. It had had three parts and a conclusion. Standing now in the white glare, with the heat coming up off the dust in waves and a boy of ten staring at her from the top of a pile of timber, she found that she could not remember a single word of it.
"Madam?" said the boy. "You are looking for someone?"
"I'm looking for Daniel Kasozi."
"Ah! The Ugandan." He grinned. "The one who talks to wood. He is in the big shed. With the Zanzibar Queen. He will not hear you. He has not heard anything for three days. Come, I will show you."
She followed him, between stacks of drying planks and rusting anchors and a great hull propped on blocks, blue-painted, with the eyes of a fish on her bow. Men looked up from their work and looked back at her bag and her city shoes, with polite curiosity. An old man with one eye repairing a net lifted two fingers in greeting. A radio somewhere was playing taarab, wailing and sweet. The sun beat on the iron roofs. Her blouse stuck to her back.
The big shed was open on the creek side. It was dim after the glare, and cool, and enormous, a cathedral of rafters and shadows. In the centre of it, on a cradle of timbers, stood a ship.
She had not expected it to be so beautiful.
Eighty feet of dhow, sleek and high-sterned and dark with oil, her great curved hull shaped like the bowl of a drinking cup, planked in a golden wood that glowed in the dimness as though lit from within. Her mast lay along the deck. Her transom was carved, a deep intricate lattice of leaves and flowers and Arabic script, and a ladder ran up the side. Scaffolding crowded round her. And high on the scaffold, working on the stern with a mallet and a small bright chisel, with his back to the shed and his shirt off and his hair tied back in a rag, was a man.
She stood in the shadow of the door, and for a long time did not move.
She had seen him work before, a hundred times, but never like this. It was not the delicate, absorbed, almost tentative work of the shed at home. It was easier than that, and larger, and freer. He moved on the scaffold like a man on his own deck. The mallet fell, and rose, and fell, in a slow patient rhythm, and the chisel bit and curled, and the shaving came away in a pale spiral and floated down through the dusty light. He was humming. She could not hear the tune. She saw only the movement of his shoulders and the line of his back, the long muscles flexing under the skin, and she felt something in her throat gather and widen and fall, as a wave gathers and falls on a shore it has been travelling toward for years.
It's only wanting, she had told herself once, on a lawn, in the dark, with her shoes in her hand.
She looked at him now, in the clean light of a Tuesday noon. She was thirty-four years old, hot and tired and sweating, with a speech she had forgotten. There was no ring on her finger. There was no one in the world to be careful of. There was nothing to hide, and no one to lie to, and no night to put it under. And what she felt, standing in the door of that great shed, was exactly what she had felt in the boathouse, and in the loft, and on the veranda on the first morning with a laminated photograph in her hand; only now it was entire, and awake, and in daylight.
Wanting is a door, she thought. You go through it. I did.
It's what you find in the room.
"Daniel," she said.
The mallet stopped.
He did not turn at once. She saw his shoulders go still, and the chisel hang in his hand, as if somebody had called his name from the bottom of the sea. He stood there with his back to her for what felt like a month. Then he put the mallet down on the scaffold, very slowly, very carefully, and turned.
His face did what it had always done. It opened. But it opened more slowly than before, wary, almost afraid, like a man looking at a door he has been told is a painting.
"Ruth."
"I wanted to say something."
"You're in Mombasa."
"I took the nine o'clock flight."
"You're in my yard."
"I know." Her heart was beating so hard that her voice shook. "I had a speech. I wrote it on the plane. It had three parts. I've lost it."
He came down the ladder. He came down slowly, rung by rung, with his eyes on her face, and stepped onto the dirt floor, and stood there with sawdust on his shoulders and the shaving still caught in his hair. Close to, he was thinner, and browner, and a good deal more tired than he had looked in March. The old pale scar on his forearm shone in the half-light. He looked at her as one looks at a mirage in the desert, with a hunger so naked that she almost looked away.
"Tell me what you remember," he said, hoarsely.
"That I came to tell you," said Ruth, "that I have spent eight months being alone. I did it as well as I could. I got quite good at it. I have a fern. It's alive." She swallowed. "I learned that I can eat rice standing up. I learned that I can sleep in a flat with no one in it. I learned that I don't need to be rescued, or chosen, or forgiven, or approved of. I can do my own work, in my own name, and when it goes wrong I can fix it myself. I wanted you to know that I'm quite all right."
"I never doubted it."
"Good. Because I'd like to say the rest of it from there."
"From where?"
"From a place where I don't need anything." She took a step toward him. "That's what I couldn't have said in October. I was too frightened. I'd have taken you the way I took the others, because I was drowning and you were a plank. And you'd have known, and you'd have let me. You're so good at letting people." Her eyes brimmed. "But I'm not drowning. I'm standing in your yard on my own two feet, and I want you anyway. I want you the way I want to be alive. And that's what I came to tell you. I tried to find out whether it was only desire. I took everything away. The ring. The lies. The guilt. The dark. The house. I took the whole load off the beam, the way you do, to see if it would stand."
"And?"
"It stood," said Ruth. "It's still standing."
He did not speak.
She saw it reach him, and what happened to his face then, she would remember for the rest of her life. It did not crumple. It lit. It lit from the inside, from the throat upward, as the lake lit at dawn, a slow rising gold that spread across every line of him until the tired man in the sawdust was gone, and in his place stood a boy of nine, in the middle of a lawn, with the wind in a sail.
"Ruth," he said.
"I'm not finished."
"I'm sorry."
"I wrote a conclusion." She laughed shakily. "I've remembered it. It's very short. It says: I love you. I would like to stay in the room."
For a moment there was only the sound of the creek slapping at the slip, and the radio wailing far off, and a gull. Then he crossed the floor in three strides and took her face in his two scarred hands, and she felt them shake, and he said her name once, against her mouth, in the voice that she had heard him use in a lit boathouse on a night of rain, and kissed her.
It was not a kiss with weather in it. That was the thing she would try, afterwards, to explain to Esther, who had demanded the whole account over a bottle of wine. It had no thunder, no furtiveness, no storm. It was slow and sure and unhurried, the kiss of two people who know the house and are in no doubt about the door. It tasted of salt and sweat and tea. She wound her arms about his neck. She felt him smile against her lips, and lift her off her feet, and turn, once, in a circle, in the dust and the light, with the great hull of the dhow standing over them like a benediction, and somewhere behind them in the yard a dozen men let out a long delighted whistle.
"Eh!" shouted the one-eyed man. "At last!"
"Be quiet, Hamisi!" said Daniel, into her hair.
"I have been saying for eight months!"
"I know!"
She was laughing so hard she could scarcely stand. He set her down. Her bag had fallen. The cardboard tube had rolled away across the floor, and stopped at the foot of a crate. He went after it, and stooped, and picked it up, and looked at it with an odd expression, half bewilderment, half dawning wonder.
"What's in this?"
"Open it."
He pulled off the cap. He drew out a thin roll of white wood, a long smooth strip of cedar, the length of a man, planed on one face and pencilled all the way up with fine horizontal lines. Beside each line, in a careful hand, was a tiny letter. D. D. T. T. D. T. And the dates, one after another, the Septembers of two boys, climbing the plank year by year.
At the very top, in the ink of a different pen, was a new line. It was blank.
"I had Kibuuka take the door-frame off the cupboard," said Ruth. "Very carefully. He said it was the greatest sacrilege of his life. He's put a new one in, with a copy, so Mama won't know. He said to tell you that if you drop it in the creek he'll curse your grandchildren."
"Ruth." His voice cracked. "You took my father's pencil marks."
"I took your pencil marks. They're yours. He stopped drawing them, but you haven't stopped growing." She took the pencil from her bag. It was the stub of a carpenter's pencil, flat and red, with a bitten end. "I thought, for the next ones, I'd like to be the one holding it. If you'd let me. If you'd stand up straight. You've been slouching for eight years."
He was laughing and crying at once. He put the strip carefully against the sail-loft door, and set his back against it, and drew himself up to his full height, chin high, hands at his sides, a thirty-nine-year-old man with sawdust in his hair, grinning like a fool in the middle of a boatyard in front of a dozen delighted spectators.
She laid the flat of her hand on his head. She felt the shape of his skull under her palm, the warm coarse hair. Then she drew the line, a firm, level stroke, across the cedar. Beside it, with her tongue between her teeth, she wrote a letter and a date. D. And beneath it, after a moment, in a smaller hand, a second letter. She did not need to explain it. He looked at the plank, and then at her, and reached out one finger and touched the little R as if it might be wet.
"I'm not very good at staying," she said. "I'd like to learn."
"I'll teach you."
"Is it hard?"
"It's the hardest thing about the work." His voice had a rough tenderness she knew by heart. "Not forcing it. You just carry it."
Lillian Achola arrived at the yard gate at half past four in a red Corolla with a bag of mangoes on the passenger seat and a man in a captain's cap beside her, who was introduced, with a flourish and a blush, as the harbour master of Kilindini.
"I told you I had news," said Lillian to Daniel, over the roof of the car. "I did not say I had news. I said I had a thing to tell you, and that it would be better in person. And then I thought: Lillian, it's a fine thing to say goodbye to a friend over a plate of fish. But a better one to say it with your fiancé." She was laughing, her broad dark face alight. "Hassan, this is the man I told you about. Daniel, Hassan. Hassan, don't be afraid of him. He's quite gentle. He talks to boats."
"I am pleased to meet you," said Hassan gravely, and shook his hand with the air of a man crossing a river.
"And this," said Lillian, and turned.
She stopped.
She looked at Ruth, who stood a pace behind Daniel with her hand still locked in his, her hair in disorder and a long smear of tar across one cheek. For a moment, her expression was entirely unreadable. And then she put her head back and let out a great peal of laughter, warm and gravelly and delighted, and flung her arms about the astonished Ruth and squeezed until her ribs creaked.
"I knew it," she said. "I knew it. I told her, Daniel, in the ladies' room at the Serena. I said, there's a woman with nice shoes who's going to be extremely inconvenient."
"You said you wouldn't hate me," said Ruth.
"I said it was inefficient." She drew back, holding Ruth by the shoulders, and her eyes were wet. "I said I'd bring mangoes. I have. Two dozen. Now you must eat every one, and be very happy, and invite me to the wedding."
"There isn't a wedding," said Ruth, startled.
"Not yet," said Lillian, and winked.
Daniel went red to the ears.
They sat that night on the deck of the Zanzibar Queen.
She had been floated on the evening tide, with a skeleton crew and the owner's grandson watching from the quay, and moored at the end of the yard jetty. She was not finished, and would not be for months. But the deck was laid, and the mast was stepped, and a tarpaulin had been rigged over the stern. Daniel had carried up two crates and a lamp, and a flask of tea, and a plate of Lillian's mangoes, cut in the Mombasa way, cheeks scored into little cubes and turned inside out. Above them the sky was a great black bowl pierced with stars. Beyond the jetty, the creek ran silver. A night heron called from the mangroves.
She sat with her back against the mast and her bare feet on the warm boards. He sat beside her, shoulder to shoulder. Neither of them said anything for a long time. It was one of the things she had learned, in the letters: the silence between them was not an absence of speech, but a room.
"Tell me about the part you left out," said Daniel, at last. "Of the speech."
"There wasn't a part."
"There's always a part."
She smiled in the dark. "I was going to say that I'd wondered, for a year, whether it was only desire. That I'd lie awake and ask myself. It seemed such a very large question for something so small, a hand on an elbow, a look in a roof. And I thought: if it's only that, it will pass. It will thin out. I'll wake one morning and wonder what the fuss was."
"And?"
"And I woke up every morning for eight months, and it hadn't thinned. It had thickened. Like a sauce." She heard him laugh, softly, beside her. "It was different from the beginning. It wasn't that I wanted you less. I want you exactly as I did, I think about it more than is dignified. But there's all this other stuff. I wanted to know whether your mother was walking. I wanted to know whether you'd eaten something that wasn't fish. I wanted to tell you about a fern. And I thought: the wanting could have found anyone. But this part could only have found you."
"What part?"
"The part that wants you to be all right." She turned her head. "Even if I'm not there. Even if it's Lillian. I was jealous of her in July, you know. At the Serena. I wanted to push her off a balcony. And last week, when Grace told me you were having dinner with her, I felt a pang, a small one. But under it was something else. I thought: I hope he's laughing. And I realised that I'd stopped counting what I'd get."
He took her hand in the dark.
"That's what it is," she said. "The difference. I looked it up. For a year I couldn't find a word for it. It's not a feeling, really. It's a decision with a feeling inside it. Desire takes. It's honest, it's lovely, I don't despise it, I'd not for the world have missed it. But it only ever asks, what do I get? And the other thing asks, what do you need?, and then it stays in the room long enough to find out."
For a long moment Daniel did not speak. A small wind had got up from the sea. It lifted a strand of her hair, and he tucked it behind her ear, with a thumb that lingered on her cheek.
"I had a version of that," he said. "I never found the words. In Luzira, in the yard, I used to think about her, you know. Before I'd met you. A woman I couldn't imagine. I'd think: if I ever get out of here, and if I ever want something again, I'd like it to be a person who tells me the truth." He smiled. "I got you instead. A woman who stood at the top of a ladder and told me my survey was wrong."
"It was your survey."
"It was a terrible survey."
"You were right about the fascia."
"I was right about everything," said Daniel gravely. "It's a considerable burden."
She laughed, and leaned her head against his shoulder, and felt his arm come round her, warm and solid, a thing she could put her weight on. Far out on the creek, a fisherman's lamp rocked gently on the black water.
"What do we do?" she said. "Now. In practice."
"I don't know. I've got a boat to finish. You've got a hospital wing."
"Brian could run it for a month."
"Brian could run it for a year, he's frightening." He kissed her hair. "I thought we might begin with Kampala. A flat with a view. A small one. I'd like to come home at night to someone who's drawn on the walls."
"You'll have to move your tools."
"I'll build you a bench."
"And Mama Grace?"
"Mama Grace," said Daniel, "has been planning our wedding since the morning she watched you stand on her veranda arguing with a fascia." He grinned in the lamplight. "I've been told there's a very large marquee going spare."
She hit him, gently, on the shoulder.
"I'm only passing on information."
"Don't you dare propose to me on a boat."
"I wouldn't dream of it. I've got a plan." He was suddenly serious. His thumb moved over her knuckles, over the pale narrow line on her ring finger where, in the course of eight months, the skin had at last gone brown. "I thought I might do it properly. In a few months. In the open. At the house, on the veranda, at four in the afternoon, with Kibuuka as a witness and all forty-two shutters open." His voice dropped. "I'd like to do it where everyone can see."
Her eyes filled.
"In daylight," said Ruth.
"In daylight."
"All right."
"You haven't been asked."
"I know. I'm answering in advance." She tilted her face up. "It saves time."
He kissed her. Behind them the Zanzibar Queen moved a little on her moorings, with the long unhurried creak of a thing that has found its water. The lamp burned on. The tide came up the creek, silently, pushing the silver before it, and lifted the whole slow weight of the vessel with a patience that did not need to be hurried; and under the stars, on the warm decking, in the smell of tar and cedar and mango and the sea, there were no more questions to ask.
Much later, in the narrow cabin under the deck, with the lamp turned low and the hull rocking gently on the tide, he laid her down on the bunk as though she were something he had spent his life learning to build. There was no hurry in it, and no guilt, and nothing in the world to listen for. She undid his shirt herself, button by button, taking her time, and he stood still and let her, trembling a little, watching her face. His skin was warm and salt. She kissed his chest, his stomach, the hard line of his hip, and heard his breath break, and felt his hands shake in her hair. "Ruth," he said. "Ruth, I have been so patient." "I know," she said, and smiled against him. "You can stop now."
He laid her back and loved her slowly, with his mouth and his hands and his whole body, in the swaying dark, until she was gripping the edge of the bunk and begging him in a voice she did not recognise. When he came into her at last they both went still, foreheads together, eyes open, and she felt it everywhere, the closeness, the weight and heat of him, the sheer astonishing rightness. Then they began to move with the tide, slowly at first, then deeper, her heels at his back, his lips at her throat, every breath shared, until the whole boat seemed to rise and fall with them. She said his name over and over. He said hers. When the wave finally broke she cried out into his shoulder, and he held her through it, shaking, whispering that he had her, that he had her, and followed her over with a low broken sound that she felt right down to her bones.
They lay afterwards in the lamplit hush, sticky and spent and laughing softly at nothing, his arm heavy across her waist, the creek lapping at the hull. Somewhere a night heron called. She turned her face into his neck and breathed him in.
She did not look at the clock. For once in her life, she did not need to know the time.