Chapter 5
Rain
The storm came in from the lake without warning, the way the best and worst things did on that shore.
It was a Saturday in the middle of May, and Ruth had come to the house alone, because Brian was at his cousin's wedding and the labourers were off, and because Timothy was at a bankers' retreat in Naivasha that would keep him until Monday. She had meant to spend an hour in the boathouse photographing the roof trusses. It was the one building on the property she had not yet entered, and Grace had said, with an odd flat note, that Daniel had the key.
He had been waiting at the door when she came down the slope, a key on a loop of string in his hand.
"I wasn't sure you'd want company," he said.
"I need someone to tell me which beams to trust."
"I'll tell you honestly. None of them."
"That's very encouraging."
"I've been told it's a gift."
He unlocked the padlock and shouldered the door, which swung inward on a shriek of rusted iron, and Ruth stepped into the dim.
The smell hit her first: tar, old rope, damp cedar, the sweet decay of lake water. Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw the boat.
She sat on a cradle of timber blocks in the middle of the floor, under a canvas cover that Daniel had folded half back, and even in the half-light she was extraordinary. Fifteen feet of clinker-built hull, each plank overlapping the next like the feathers of a bird, the whole shape curving up to a high pointed bow. Most of the paint was gone. Where it had flaked, the wood showed through, honey-gold and dark red, polished by sixty years of weather. Along one side, a new strip of timber, paler than the rest, ran from stem to midship like a fresh scar.
"Nambi," said Daniel.
"It's her name?"
"My grandfather built her in 'sixty-one. Named her for his mother. He used to say she was the only woman who never argued with him." He put his hand on the sheer strake, lightly, a man resting his palm on the neck of a horse. "She's been under that tarp since Papa stopped sailing. Thirty years, near enough. I got the garboard plank in last month. It's the one at the bottom, the one that matters. If it fails, the rest is decoration."
"You've been working on her secretly."
"I've been working on her quietly. It's different."
"You said that about the fascia."
"It was true about the fascia too." He looked at her. "I'd have told you, if you'd asked."
"I'm asking now."
"Then I'm telling you." And he smiled, at last, completely, so that something in her chest gave a small quick shift like a bolt sliding free. "I'm going to sail her. Once. Before I go. I told myself it was too much to hope for, a year ago, in Mombasa. Then I came here and saw the garboard was sound, and Mzee Kibuuka said the mast was in the rafters, and I thought, well. It would be a shame."
She was about to answer when the first thunder broke over the roof.
It was a sound like a giant dropping a table. The tin shook; the dust fell from the rafters in a soft grey rain; the light through the high windows turned, in the space of a breath, from afternoon gold to the dull bruised green of a sky about to burst.
"That's not forecast," said Ruth.
"Nothing here is forecast. We just have weather." Daniel glanced up at the roof, and she saw the instant calculation cross his face: distance, wind, the long soaking walk back to the house. "We'll stay put. It'll pass in an hour."
"An hour?"
"Perhaps two."
The rain began then, and she understood that he was being optimistic.
It did not fall so much as arrive. It hit the corrugated roof in one long continuous roar, like a train driving through the building, so loud that when she tried to speak she could not hear her own voice. Through the gap under the doors water came in sheets. The lake, a few yards off, went white and furious. Lightning cut the windows into blocks of blue, and every time it came the whole interior of the boathouse leapt into sudden hard relief: the cradle, the hull, the rack of oars, Daniel's face turned toward her, pale and unreadable.
And then the electricity, such as it was, went out.
He found a paraffin lamp in a cupboard, with a box of matches wrapped in oilcloth, and it took him three tries to light it, because the damp had got into everything. When it caught, a small steady glow rose in the roaring dark, and the boathouse shrank to a warm and private circle: the boat, the bench, two people, the lapping black water beneath the slip.
"You're soaked," said Daniel.
She was. She had stood too long near the gap under the door, and the spray had found her. Her cotton shirt clung to her shoulders and the thin stuff of her trousers was plastered to her knees, and she was shivering in earnest now, in short helpless tremors that made her teeth click. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to look dignified.
"I'm perfectly fine."
"You're blue."
"I'm brown, I couldn't possibly be blue."
"Your lips are blue." He had already crossed to the shelf, and was pulling down a bundle of grey wool: a heavy old sailor's jersey, moth-eaten at the cuffs, and a square of dry canvas. "Take this. It's mine. It's not clean, but it's dry, and I'll turn my back."
"I can't take your—"
"Ruth." Quietly. "Please."
It was the please that did it. She took the jersey. He turned, with elaborate deliberation, and faced the wall, and she stood behind the hull of his grandfather's boat and peeled off her wet shirt in the lamplight with fingers that would not work, her skin pebbling in the cold. Her heart was pounding. It was absurd. There was nothing improper in it: a man had turned away, and she was changing behind a boat. But she was aware of the sound of each movement in the half-dark, of every rustle of cloth, and she was aware that he was aware too, because his shoulders had gone rigid, and his hands, held loosely at his sides, were clenched.
The jersey came down over her head. It smelled of salt, and tar, and a faint clean smell underneath that she knew by now was simply him. It hung to her thighs. The sleeves covered her hands. For a moment she stood still in it, with her eyes closed, absurdly close to tears, and thought, I have not been held by anything this warm in a very long time.
"Done," she said, hoarse.
He turned. And whatever he had been about to say, he did not say it.
She stood in his jersey with her wet hair in her eyes and her bare feet on the boards, and he looked at her for one long, unguarded second, and she saw it. Not the polite attention, not the careful lids, but the thing itself, direct as a hand laid flat against her breastbone. Raw, startled, almost frightened. The look of a man who had spent years teaching himself not to want, and had just found, with horror, that the lesson had not held.
Then he looked at the floor.
"That's better," he said. His voice was rough. "Sit. By the lamp."
They sat on the edge of the slip, with their feet a few inches above the black water and the canvas around her shoulders, and listened to the storm. The rain eased and gathered, eased and gathered. Lightning came and went, farther off each time. In between it there was a close dark silence full of small noises: the ticking of the cooling tin, the lap of water, the settling of the old boat on her blocks.
"Tell me about Mombasa," said Ruth.
He was a long time answering. When he did, he spoke slowly, as if each word had to be lifted from somewhere.
"It's a yard on the creek at Tudor. Eleven men. Dhows, mostly, some old fishing boats, a few yachts for the Italians who think they want something authentic." A breath of a smile. "I live in a room above the sail loft. It's very small and it smells of rope. I get up at five. I work until the light goes. I eat fish."
"Everyone knows about the fish."
"Everyone does." The smile faded. "It's a good life. It's an honest one. I don't owe anyone anything there."
"And someone to come home to?"
She had not meant to ask it. It simply fell out, in the dark, a pebble from her pocket.
He turned his head. In the lamplight his face was all planes and shadows, the long straight nose, the shut mouth.
"There was a woman," he said. "Lillian. A doctor. She works the ships out of Kilindini, the cargo vessels, she's—" He searched for it. "She's the best person I've ever known. She was patient with me for two years. She wanted to marry me, and I could not do it. I told her I wasn't a man who could promise a future. I didn't tell her why."
"Why couldn't you?"
"I didn't think I was entitled." He said it quite simply, without drama. "She's still my friend. She calls on Sundays. She asks if I'm eating."
"Fish?"
"Fish."
Ruth laughed, and he looked at her, and something eased in the space between them, then tightened again almost at once. The wind threw a handful of rain against the high window. It sounded like fingers.
"And you?" he said. "The man you're going to marry."
It was a wall. She recognised it as one the instant he laid it: a courteous, deliberate brick set between them with his own hands. He was giving her the chance to build on it. She understood that he was, in a strange way, being kind.
"Timothy," she said.
"Tell me about him."
"What do you want to know?"
"Whatever you like." His eyes had gone to the water. "I've been away a long time. I know the boy. I don't know the man."
She thought about it. She truly did, because she wanted to be fair. The rain beat down on the tin, and the lamp burned steady, and she looked for the words that would describe the man who had been so unfailingly good to her for a year and a half.
"He's loyal," she said slowly. "He remembers things. My grandmother's name day. The way I like my coffee. When she died, last year, he was in my flat before I had finished telling him. He cooked. He did the funeral arrangements. He held my mother's hand for four hours at the burial because she couldn't stop shaking." She paused. "He's never been late. He's never raised his voice. He plans everything. And when I told him my father had left, he went quiet, and then he said, 'I will never do that to you,' and I believed him. I still do."
"He'll be good to you," said Daniel.
"Yes."
"He's good at being good." It was said without edge, almost with a kind of sorrow. "It's what he's always been trying to be. It's a gift, and a burden."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing." He shook his head. "I mean he'll keep his word, Ruth. Whatever it costs him. That's the kind of man he is."
She looked at him. The jersey was too big for her; her hands were lost in the sleeves. She heard her own voice come out smaller than she intended.
"And do I make you uncomfortable?" she said. "Is that why you keep looking at the floor?"
The question lay between them in the dark, bare and trembling. The rain had slackened to a thin steady drizzle, and in the new quiet she could hear, with terrible clarity, his breathing.
"Yes," said Daniel.
"Why?"
"You know why."
"I don't. Not exactly." It was not true, and they both knew it. "Tell me."
"Ruth."
"Please. I'd rather know than guess."
He drew a long breath. He did not look at her. He looked at his hands, hanging open between his knees, big scarred shapely hands that she had watched coax a curl of wood from a plank, and when he spoke, it was in a voice she had not heard from him before, low and level and terribly honest.
"Because I haven't wanted anything in eight years," he said. "I didn't miss it. I thought that part of me had been cut away, like a bad plank. A clean job. And then you walked up the gravel in your flat shoes with a laminated photograph and told me I couldn't touch a fascia, and I thought: oh." A short, helpless breath of a laugh. "Oh. There it is. It was only sleeping."
She could not speak.
"I'm not telling you for any reason," he went on. "I'm telling you because you asked, and because I won't lie to you, whatever else I do. I have no right to feel it. You're engaged to my brother. You're going to be my sister in December. I'll go to Mombasa and you'll marry him and this will be a thing that I carried and never set down, and I'd like to think that I can do that without making a mess of anyone." He looked up, finally, and his eyes were full of lamplight and misery. "But you asked. So that's why I look at the floor."
The drizzle ticked on the tin. Somewhere out on the lake, thunder rolled once, low, almost kind.
She should have said: Thank you for telling me. We'll say no more of it. She should have stood up and gone to the door and walked the long wet way home. She knew exactly what the sensible woman would have done, and she could see that woman clearly, a clean, upright figure in the doorway, and she felt for her a pang of sorrow, like seeing an old friend across a railway platform as the train begins to move.
She did not stand up.
Instead she turned toward him, in the lamplight, with his jersey hanging from her shoulders, and said very quietly, "I haven't been asked a question like that in a long time."
"I didn't ask one."
"No." Her voice shook. "Perhaps that's why."
He moved. Not toward her; he moved his hand, lifted it slowly from his knee, as if the gesture were taking all his strength, and she watched it come toward her face. She did not breathe. His fingers stopped an inch from her cheek and hung there. She could feel the heat of them. She could feel her own skin leaning, very slightly, towards the place where they were not.
"Tell me to stop," said Daniel.
"I—"
"Tell me, Ruth."
And her phone rang.
It rang from the pile of her wet things behind the boat, loud and bright and ordinary, a cheerful electronic trill that tore through the storm-dark like a plate dropping on tile. They both flinched. His hand fell. She sat with her heart slamming against her ribs, her face burning, as the tone went on and on, until she scrambled up on shaking legs and found the phone in the pocket of her sodden trousers.
Tim.
For three rings she stood with it in her hand, looking at the name. Then she pressed the green button.
"Hello?"
"Ruth! I've been trying you for an hour, are you all right? There was a storm warning on the radio. Where are you?"
His voice was so full of concern, so warm, so unmistakably his, that her eyes stung. "I'm at the house. I came to check the boathouse. I'm just waiting it out."
"Oh, thank God. I thought you might be on the road. Is it bad?"
"Bad enough. I'm fine. I'm dry. I'm—" She heard herself, from far away. "I'm perfectly fine."
"Is Mama there? Is Danny?"
She turned. Daniel was on his feet, at the far end of the slip, with his back to her, his head bowed against the doorframe, and the lamp threw his shadow up the whole wall of the boathouse, huge and slumped.
"Somewhere about," said Ruth.
It was a very small lie. It was not even, strictly, a lie. Her mouth shaped it so smoothly that she scarcely felt it go, and it was only afterward, long after the storm had passed and the water stood in bright puddles on the lawn and Daniel had walked her up to the house in silence with an umbrella neither of them used, that she understood what she had done. The first lie. Not a deed, or a word, but a gap. She had stood in the dark with the man she was going to marry on one end of a line and the man she should not want at the other, and she had made a small neat space in which the two of them did not touch, and she had left it standing.
It would not be the last. She knew that, too, even as she said goodnight at her car door, even as he said, in the half-dark, "Ruth," and she said, "Don't."
Don't what, she could not have told him.
She drove home with his jersey still on, under her damp coat, and did not take it off until morning.