Chapter 7
Temptation
"Say it plainly," said Esther. "Slowly. For the record."
They were at a plastic table outside a café on Acacia Avenue, in the thin white glare of a Tuesday lunch hour, with two untouched plates of chicken and chips between them and a very small child's sock on the seat beside Esther's handbag, which she had not noticed and which Ruth had not had the heart to mention. Esther Nalubega was thirty-four, round-faced and fierce, with an advocate's habit of folding her hands when she wanted to hear the worst. She had been folding them for eleven minutes.
"Nothing happened," said Ruth.
"Define nothing."
"Nothing happened. We were in a boathouse. It rained. He gave me a jersey."
"A jersey."
"It was cold."
"It's twenty-eight degrees in Entebbe in May."
"It was a very wet jersey situation, Esther." Ruth pushed a chip across her plate, and then pushed it back. She could feel her friend's eyes on her face, level, patient, merciless. "He told me something. And I didn't say what I should have said. That's all. I'm not saying it's a crime. I'm saying it was a conversation, and I let it go on."
"What did he tell you?"
"That he—" Ruth stopped. The sentence would not finish. It was one thing to carry the words in her own head, where they could be turned and examined like a stone, and quite another to hear them laid on a plastic table in the midday sun. "That it was hard for him to be around me."
"Oh, Ruth."
"I know."
"Oh, my darling."
"Don't. Please. If you're going to look like that I'll go back to the car."
"I'm not looking like anything." Esther unfolded her hands, picked up the sock, and stared at it with no recognition whatever. She put it in her handbag. "I'm looking like your friend. I'm looking like someone who's been very quiet for five weeks while you said his name in every second sentence, and decided that it wasn't my business." She leaned forward. "It's my business. I'm making it my business. What did you say back?"
Ruth looked at the traffic. A boda-boda passed with a family of four on it, the smallest child asleep against his father's back with his mouth open. A woman in an orange headscarf was selling roasted maize from a brazier across the road, and the smell of it drifted over: smoke, salt, burning corn.
"I said I hadn't been asked a question like that in a long time."
Esther closed her eyes.
"Then the phone rang," said Ruth. "It was Tim."
"Thank heaven for small mercies."
"I lied to him. Not a big one. He asked if Daniel was there, and I said somewhere about." She was surprised at how steady her voice was. "I've been over it a hundred times. I keep trying to find the part where I did something wrong. And I can't. I didn't touch him. I didn't say anything that couldn't have been said in front of Mama Grace. But I know that I did, Esther. I know it, the way you know when you've left the stove on. Something's happened to me, and I'm not at the house any more, I'm in the thing that happened. And Tim doesn't know. He rang that night and I told him I loved him, and I meant it, and it was also not entirely true, and I can't work out how both of those things can be."
Esther was quiet for a time. When she spoke, her voice had changed. It was low, and the lawyer had gone out of it.
"They can both be true," she said. "That's the awful part. That's what nobody tells you. You can love someone, properly, and still be stood in front of by someone else. It doesn't mean the first thing was a lie. It only means you're a person."
"It feels like a failing."
"It's an event. Failing's what you do after." Esther reached out and took Ruth's hand across the table, and held it hard. "Here is my professional advice, and then I'll get on with being your friend. One. Do not do anything for six weeks. Two. Get Brian to take over the site. You're the principal, you're entitled to delegate. Three. If you can't stay away, you need to tell me, and if you can't tell me, you need to tell Timothy. Not about the jersey. About the thing underneath."
"I don't know what the thing underneath is."
"Then you'd better find out," said Esther, "before somebody else does."
She took the advice for nine days.
It was not as hard as she had feared. She had a great deal of work. There was the Nakasero warehouse conversion, and the museum tender, and an indignant letter from a client in Jinja who believed his Victorian cornice had been looted by someone's cousin. She was at her desk by seven and at the drawing board by eight, and she sent Brian to the Kasozi house with the laser measure, a sealed folder and instructions to call her at once if anything alarming occurred.
He called her on the third day to say that nothing alarming had occurred, but that Mr. Daniel had asked whether she was unwell.
"What did you tell him?"
"That you were at the office, ma'am. Very busy. He said: Of course. Then he said nothing for a long time and went to sharpen a chisel." Brian paused. "He sharpened it for forty minutes. I think it was already sharp."
She put down the pen. "Thank you, Brian."
"Madam Ruth?"
"Yes?"
"Is it a bad thing, what's going on?"
"There's nothing going on," said Ruth, and rang off.
She worked until nine that night, then went home and cooked rice she did not want and ate it standing at the counter, and then lay awake until three, with the window open and the sound of the city a long way off, and made, over several hours, a number of firm decisions. She would finish the survey. She would hand it to Timothy. She would let Brian run the site. She would see Daniel only at family dinners, with Grace in the room, and she would be warm to him, in a sister's way. Next month the wedding invitations would go out and she would have the deposit to pay for the marquee, and the dress fitting, and the long list of small domestic tasks that, accumulated, would carry her to December like a current. In January, he would be gone.
It was a good plan. It had the shape of a real one. It was only that she kept waking in the dark with her hand curled against her face, as if she had been holding something that had just slipped away.
The crack gauge saved her.
Or damned her; she could never quite decide which. It was a small plastic device the size of a credit card, two overlapping plates, one marked with a grid, one with a cross-hair, that she had fixed in April across the long diagonal crack in the gable wall of the Kasozi house. It told her whether the crack was moving. Most were not. Most old cracks were fossils, the record of some settlement long ago, healed by time and lime and neglect. But she had put it there because she had not liked the sound of that wall, and because Daniel had put his palm on it and said, quietly, "Seventy-one. It's been going ever since."
She had meant to read it on Friday. But on Wednesday night the rain came, a real June deluge, eleven hours of it, and at ten p.m., lying in bed in Nakasero with the water roaring in the downpipes, she sat bolt upright and thought: The gable.
She did not telephone anyone. That was the worst of it, later, when she turned it over. A sensible woman would have telephoned Brian, or Mzee Kibuuka, or Timothy, or anyone at all with a working torch. She took her keys and her raincoat and drove to Entebbe through the flooded dark with her wipers going like frightened wings, and parked on the gravel at midnight, in a thin grey drizzle, under a house that was dark from end to end.
Except for one window.
It was the study. A low lamp burned in the bay, and when she let herself in at the kitchen door with the key Grace had given her, she heard, from the floor above, the rasp of a plane on wood.
He's working, she thought. At midnight.
She stood in the dim kitchen with the rain dripping off her coat, and listened. It was an old and settled sound, regular as breath. Whatever else might be said of Daniel Kasozi, he did not sleep, and he did not waste the hours he did not sleep. She understood suddenly that he had been up here every night this fortnight, working alone in his father's study, with his father's plane, because it was the only way he knew to be in a room with his own life.
She went up the stairs, avoiding the fourth tread from the top.
He was at the desk. He had taken off his shirt in the heat and wore only an old undershirt, grey with age, and his forearms were pale with shavings to the elbow. A piece of dark wood lay clamped on the desk, a slim thing, curved, nearly finished, and he was drawing the plane along its edge in long, delicate passes. The lamp threw his shadow across the pencil marks on the cupboard frame. He did not hear her until she spoke.
"What are you making?"
He turned. The plane stopped in mid-air. For a moment she had the satisfaction, or the torment, of seeing his face before he had time to arrange it: unguarded, startled, wide open, like someone woken from a dream in which she was already standing in the room.
"Ruth."
"I came to read the gauge. I should have called."
"You're soaked."
"It's the one thing I'm consistently good at."
He set the plane down very slowly. "It's a knee," he said. "For the dinghy. The old one's rotted. It's a curved piece that braces the thwart against the hull. It's," and he seemed to hear himself, "not important. At midnight. It's a very dull thing to do at midnight."
"I'm at a house in the rain with a crack gauge. I think I'm in no position to judge."
They looked at each other across the lamplight. The room seemed very small. In the silence she could hear, with an animal's attention, every sound: the drip of her coat on the boards, the ticking of the house's old bones, the long exhale of his breath.
"Why did you stay away?" he said.
"Because you told me why you look at the floor."
"I shouldn't have."
"I'm glad you did. I'd rather have been told than had to guess." She heard her own voice and was astonished at its calm. "But I'm engaged, Daniel. I mean to marry him. I've spent nine days saying so. I came tonight to read a gauge, and I would like to read it, and go home."
"Then read it."
"I will."
"The north gable's in the corridor. I'll show you."
"I know where it is."
"I'll show you anyway," said Daniel, "because I'd rather not be alone with the thing I'm making."
The corridor at the top of the house was dark and narrow, with a long window at the far end where the rain ran down in sheets, and the gable wall rose on the left, whitewashed and cold. He held the lamp. She crouched at the foot of the crack, where the plastic gauge was screwed to the plaster, and angled her torch across it, and felt the breath go out of her in a small hiss.
"What?"
"It's moved."
"How much?"
"Three millimetres." She straightened slowly. "In nine weeks. That's—" She did not need to finish. It was not a settling crack any more. It was a crack that was going.
"The ridge," said Daniel. "The water. I told you." He stepped closer to see, and the lamp swung, and for a moment the wall, the gauge, the whole corridor jolted into yellow brilliance and out again. "It'll want shoring. Tomorrow. Mzee will say today."
"It'll hold tonight."
"Will it?"
"I think so. I'd stake my—" She laughed, helplessly, with her hand over her eyes. "I'd stake my reputation, and I notice that is exactly the thing I've been putting at risk. Oh God, it's been moving all this time, and I wasn't looking."
"You were looking at the right thing. It's only that the right thing was slow."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"It's supposed to be true."
She dropped her hand. He was very near. She had not heard him step in; he stood a pace away with the lamp held low, and its light came up under his face and made it into something bigger and older and sadder than it was in daylight. Water dripped off the end of her hair onto the floor. She was cold again, and wet, and tired to the very bones, and he was the one warm thing in the corridor.
"Ruth," he said. "I'm going to go back to Mombasa on Monday."
It struck her in the middle of the chest like a stone from a sling.
"Mama's fine," he went on, steadily. "The tests are good. I've told the yard I'll be back. I can't stay in this house, working next to you, being decent about it. I'm not made for it. I'm not as strong as I look." A faint, ruined smile. "I thought I might manage until the wedding. But I find I'm a coward."
"Don't."
"I have to."
"Don't," said Ruth, and heard her own voice crack. She had not known it would. She had not known, until that very syllable, that she had been holding her breath for nine days, for three months, perhaps for a great deal longer. "I don't want you to go."
"You don't mean that."
"I don't know what I mean."
"Then you can't say it."
"I'm saying it."
He put the lamp down on the floor. She watched him do it, the long deliberate bend, the slow rise, and her heart began to hammer so fiercely that she thought the whole house must hear it. He came toward her. He did not hurry. He raised both hands and framed her face, with the damp curl of her hair against his wrists, and his thumbs stopped just beneath her eyes. They were warm. They were shaking, very slightly. He rested his forehead against hers.
Neither of them moved. Rain drummed on the roof. She breathed in the scent of cut wood and tobacco-stained plaster and him, and closed her eyes, and felt the whole length of her body lean forward like a boat toward a pier.
"I could kiss you," said Daniel, against her skin. "I could. It would be so easy. You'd let me. We both know it."
"Yes."
"And then it would be done." His voice was a thread. "It wouldn't be a thing I could give back. And you haven't decided anything, Ruth. You've been told a thing, and you're tired, and wet, and standing in the dark with somebody who's been looking at you for three months. You'd be deciding by accident." His thumbs moved, once, across her cheekbones. "I won't be an accident. Not to you. I couldn't live with it."
"That's a very noble speech."
"It's a very cowardly one."
"It's both." She was crying, a little, without sound. "You're the most infuriating man I've ever met."
"I've been told."
"I came here to read a gauge."
"I know."
"I wanted to read it, and go home, and be good."
"You are good." He lifted his head. His eyes were bright, and his mouth was not steady. "That's the trouble. You're so good, it makes me want to be."
He kissed her forehead. A hard, brief, shaking press, the kiss of a man tearing a plaster off his own skin. Then he let go of her face, and stepped back, and picked up the lamp.
"Go home, Ruth," he said. "Please. Before I forget what I just said."
"Daniel—"
"I'll tell Mzee about the gable. Tomorrow. First thing." He turned and began to walk away down the corridor, and the light went with him, and the dark closed in behind it, until she was standing alone in front of the wall with the cold gauge under her hand and the rain loud on the roof and the faint, fading sound of his footsteps going downstairs.
She stood there a long time.
When she finally turned on her torch again, the crack gleamed in its small bright circle, running up the white wall like a river on a map: old, slow, unarguable. Three millimetres in nine weeks. A thing that had been there all along, growing in silence, until it could no longer be called settling.
She wrote the number in her notebook, in a hand that did not look like her own, and underlined it twice.