Chapter 6
Fiancé
Timothy Kasozi had once drawn up a spreadsheet to plan a marriage proposal.
It had eleven tabs. There was a tab for venues, a tab for the ring, a tab for the weather, and a tab, which he was privately rather proud of, called Contingencies, with sub-headings including Rain, Her Refusal and Mother Turns Up. He had worked on it for four months. He had consulted her best friend, her draftsman and a jeweller on Kampala Road who had said, after the third visit, "Sir, she will say yes, you may relax." He had not relaxed. He had stood on a small jetty at Ggaba at sunset last July, a ring in his pocket and three hundred and forty words of speech in his head, and when Ruth had turned to him in the gold light and said, "Why are you sweating?" every word had left him at once.
"I wanted to ask you something," he had said.
"I know. You've been practising in the car."
"How do you—"
"You were moving your lips." She was laughing, with her hand against her mouth, her eyes bright and a little wet. "Tim. Just say it."
So he had knelt on the splintery boards, in his good trousers, and said, "Marry me, please," and it had been the least eloquent and most honest sentence of his life. And she had gone quiet, and looked at him for a long moment with an expression he had not been able to read, and then said, "Yes," in a small, steady voice, as if she were signing something.
He remembered thinking: I have been given a second chance.
He still thought it, most days. It was a thought he held close and examined rarely, like a coin one has been told is very old.
On the Saturday after the storm he stood in front of the bathroom mirror at his flat in Kololo, tying a tie, and ran through the guest list one more time.
The dinner was Ruth's idea, in a way. She had said, in March, that she would like to meet the people who would be paying for the restoration, and Timothy had seen in this an opportunity. There were four of them: Gordon Ssebaggala, the bank's chairman; his wife, Marjorie; and two elderly shareholders with a taste for heritage. And Rob Mugisha, from the Ministry, who was not an investor but who mattered more than all the rest of them together, because Rob had been dropping hints for six months that the party was looking for a young candidate for Entebbe Municipality, someone clean, someone with a good family name and a good-looking wife. Someone, as Rob had put it, whom nobody could find anything on.
Nobody could find anything. Timothy adjusted the knot. His hands were perfectly steady. He had learned that long ago, to keep them steady, and over the years he had grown so good at it that it had ceased to be an act of will and become an ordinary fact, like the colour of his eyes.
He did not look at the mirror's edge, where, as always, a small cardboard receipt was tucked into the frame: a bank slip, printed in a faded purple, dated the first of every month. It was not really a receipt. It was a reminder. He had placed it there himself, years ago, and renewed it each time with the same neat movements, and he did not think of it as a secret. It was more like a prayer he had never learned to stop saying.
He picked up his phone. Ruth's last message said: Running late, sorry! Will meet you at the house. Don't let your mother start without me. There was a small heart.
He smiled, and was surprised by how much it hurt.
The house on the lake was lit from top to bottom, every window gold, and from the drive it looked like a ship. Timothy parked beside the mango tree and sat for a moment with the engine ticking down, looking at the long lit veranda.
Daniel was standing on it.
He stood a little apart from the others, near the swing seat, in a dark jacket Timothy had lent him, with a glass of juice in his hand. He was listening to Gordon Ssebaggala with an expression of grave attention, nodding at intervals. It was a perfect imitation. If you had not known him, you would have thought him a man at ease. But Timothy had known him for thirty-five years, and he saw the muscle in the jaw and the faint grey colour under the tan and the way the brown hand holding the glass was held away from the body, as if ready to set it down and go.
He came, Timothy thought. He came for me.
It was a hard thought to hold. He walked up the steps slowly, as one climbs toward a weight.
"Tim," said Daniel, as he reached the veranda.
"You came."
"I said I would."
"I know. I only—" He stopped. They were of a height, but his brother's shoulders were broader, and he had always, somehow, seemed larger: a thing Timothy had spent his adolescence resenting and his adulthood trying to repay. "Thank you. It means a great deal. Gordon thinks you're a naval engineer."
"Ship's engineer."
"He thinks you've worked on destroyers."
"I'll nod when he says so."
Timothy laughed, and Daniel, after a moment, did too, and for the space of a breath it was as if the room had warmed. Then Timothy glanced to the left, and saw the car pull up at the foot of the drive, a small dented blue Toyota with a bumper held on by wire, and saw a woman climb out of it in a green dress, pushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and something in him lifted, helplessly, the way a man's heart lifts when he sees his own front door.
"There she is," he said.
He said it aloud, to no one. And so he did not notice, in the half-second that followed, that his brother, at his shoulder, had gone entirely still.
The dinner was a success. Timothy was good at them. He knew how to seat people, how to keep Marjorie Ssebaggala away from the subject of her gallbladder, how to steer Rob Mugisha to the end of the table where Ruth sat with her drawings and let the two of them talk. He caught the exact moment when Ruth, in the middle of describing the lime plaster she wanted for the north wall, forgot to be nervous and began to shine, her hands moving through the air, her voice dropping into the rapid absorbed register he loved best. He loved watching her talk about buildings. It was when she looked most like herself.
"And you can't just use a modern render," she said. "It sounds like the same thing, but it traps the water. The wall can't breathe, so the damp goes up and the whole structure starts to rot from inside. The old builders knew. Everything had to be able to move."
"Remarkable," said Gordon, who was on his third whisky.
"It's not remarkable, it's physics. It's just that nobody asks." She smiled, a quick sidelong gleam. "I'm sorry. I do go on."
"Never apologise for being interesting, my dear," said Marjorie, and patted her hand.
Timothy caught Ruth's eye across the table and winked. She lowered her lashes, pleased, and he felt a small proprietary glow. Mine, he thought, with the pure, unambitious pride of a man who has done one thing right. She's mine. I got it right.
Then, glancing down the table, he saw his brother watching her.
It was only a look. Daniel was seated at the far end, between a deaf shareholder and a bowl of fruit, and he had turned his head when Ruth laughed, a natural movement, anyone's. But he did not turn it back. For three, four, five seconds he looked at her with an expression that Timothy had seen on his face exactly once before: in a hospital car park, eight years ago, in the grey light before dawn, when he had said Let me do this. Don't argue. Let me.
It was the face of a man who had decided that something was already lost and was memorising it.
Timothy looked down at his plate. His wine glass was in his hand, and it was full, and for no reason he could name he put it down.
It's nothing, he thought. He's been in a boatyard for eight years. She's the first woman he's talked to who doesn't smell of varnish. It was almost funny. He told himself it was funny. He was a reasonable man, and it was a thing a reasonable man would say, and the old sour little knot in his stomach did not loosen in the slightest.
Afterward, when the guests had gone and the plates stood in stacks and Ruth was upstairs helping his mother out of her good shoes, he found Daniel on the veranda swing seat, in the dark, with his elbows on his knees.
The night had cooled. A smell of wet grass and charcoal drifted up from the lawn. Below them the lake lay as flat and black as a poured floor, with one long line of light across it where the moon had caught.
"You were good," said Daniel. "In there."
"I'm always good in there. It's out here I fall apart." Timothy lowered himself onto the step, with his back to the pillar. "Rob thinks I should run. He's not subtle. He asked whether my brother would be at the wedding."
"What did you say?"
"That you would."
A silence. The swing creaked, once, and was still.
"Tim," said Daniel at last, with great carefulness, "I'm not here for the wedding."
"I know."
"I'm here until Mama's better. Then I'm going home."
"I know that, too." Timothy turned his head. "You don't owe me any more, Danny. I've said it before. You owe me nothing. If there is a ledger, it's me who's—"
"Don't."
"I will, though. One day. I'll say it all."
"I told you not to." The voice was quiet. It was the voice of a man holding a very heavy door shut with his shoulder. "I don't want it said. I don't want it spoken. You'll be a good man, and a good husband, and a good member of parliament if they'll have you, and that's all. That was the arrangement. That's what I paid for."
"It wasn't an arrangement. You never gave me the choice."
"I know." And then, with a sudden raw weariness: "I know I didn't."
They sat in the dark. The mango tree dripped steadily on the gravel. Timothy thought about the first month after, the long lunatic stretch of days in which he had sat in the family sitting room, with his mother weeping and his father silent, and the whole house had held its breath and looked at Daniel, and he, Timothy, had said nothing. Not one word. He had sat in a leather chair with his hands in his lap and watched his brother be led out through the front door in handcuffs, and he had thought: I will fix it. Tomorrow. Next week. When Papa's calmer. When I've got the nerve. And then the tomorrows had piled up, and the doors had shut, and in time he had come to understand that what he had done was no longer a decision but a fact, a load-bearing wall in the structure of his life, which could not now be taken out without bringing the roof down on everyone he loved.
He had been twenty-seven. He had been very frightened. He would have given a great deal to be able to say that he had been something worse.
"I want to say one thing," Timothy said, "and you can hate me for it."
"I don't hate you."
"Then you can be annoyed." He swallowed. "Be careful with Ruth."
The swing seat stopped moving.
"She's—" Timothy fumbled. "She is not what she seems. I mean, she's all the things she seems, she's clever and decent and brave, but she's fragile, Danny, in a way she hides. Her father walked out on her. She's built her whole life round the idea that she'll never be left, and never be the one who leaves. She would not forgive herself for anything that smelled of it. I don't want her hurt. I couldn't—" His voice caught. "She's the only good thing I've done that wasn't a payment."
For a long time Daniel said nothing.
"Neither do I," he said finally. His voice was very even. "Want her hurt."
"I know. I know you don't. I'm not accusing you of anything." Timothy laughed, a short, wretched sound. "I just wanted to say it. In case. Because you look at her, sometimes, and I'm not sure you know how it looks."
"How does it look?"
"Like a man watching a house he used to live in."
The wooden swing began, very softly, to move again. Back, and forward, and back. Timothy waited for his brother to say something. He waited for the denial, the tight reassurance, the crooked humour that Daniel used as a shield. It did not come. And in the long silence that followed, he understood that his brother was not going to lie to him, and that this was, in its way, worse than if he had.
"Goodnight, Tim," said Daniel.
"Goodnight."
"Thank you for the jacket."
"Keep it."
The swing seat creaked. Footsteps went down the veranda, and round the corner of the house, toward the garden and the black water. Timothy sat where he was, with his arms around his knees, in the borrowed dark of his father's house.
Upstairs, a light went on. He heard, through the open window, the low murmur of two women's voices, his mother's thin and brisk, Ruth's warm and rueful, and a short laugh. He listened to it as one listens to music from the next room.
Then he took out his phone, opened the banking application with a thumb that did not shake, and checked, as he did at the end of every month, that the standing order had gone through. F. OKELLO. UGX 800,000. SENT. It had. It always did. It was, he thought, the one thing in his life that had never once been late.
He sat there, looking at the small green word, until the screen went dark by itself and the night closed in around his face.