Chapter 8
Distance
The call came at ten past four on Sunday morning, and for a long, confused moment Ruth thought it was the alarm.
She fumbled for the phone in the dark. Tim, said the screen. His voice, when she answered, was so tight and so unlike itself that she was sitting up and reaching for her trousers before he had finished the first sentence.
"It's Mama. She's—I don't know. She woke Danny at three, she said there was a weight on her chest, and he put her in the car, he didn't even wait for the ambulance, he's driven her to Entebbe Hospital. I'm on my way. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know who else—"
"I'm coming."
"You don't have to—"
"Tim. I'm coming."
Entebbe Hospital at dawn was a long, low, yellow-lit corridor smelling of floor polish and antiseptic and the sour breath of the sick. A night nurse with swollen ankles directed her to a pair of double doors marked Cardiac, and she pushed through them with her bag clutched against her chest, and saw him.
He was sitting on a plastic chair against the far wall with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He had put on a shirt, inside out; the white seam ran down the centre of his back like a scar. His shoes were unlaced. When he heard the door he looked up, and she saw that he had not simply been afraid. He had been waiting for a verdict, and he had been waiting, she suddenly understood, for a second one in the same room: for the thing he believed was owed to him, the old arithmetic of a man who thought every disaster was a bill delivered in his name.
"She's stable," he said, before she could ask. "They're giving her something. It's angina, they think, not an attack. They're doing an ECG. I don't know. They won't tell me anything, I'm not next of kin, I haven't been, I've—" He stopped. "Sorry. I'm babbling."
"You're not."
"I am."
"Then babble." She sat down beside him. Not close. A chair's width, which she had measured, with the part of her mind that was still measuring, as the width of a safe space. "Tell me what happened."
He told her, haltingly, looking at the floor. He had been awake, in the study, with the plane, when he heard her cry out. She had been sitting up in bed with one hand pressed to her breastbone and her face grey, saying It's nothing, it's nothing, don't wake your brother, and he had stood in the doorway and understood, quite calmly, that she was going to die in his father's house with her pearl earrings in. "I got her in the car. I don't remember the road. I think I broke a few laws." A cracked, shaky laugh. "I'm a recidivist. They'll lock me up."
It was a joke. The word fell out of him as jokes did, light and sideways. But a shadow crossed his face as it left his mouth, and Ruth, listening, felt something cold turn over in her chest.
Recidivist.
She said nothing. She was beginning to learn that with this man the important things arrived between sentences, like the soft knock of a pipe in a wall.
At that moment the doors swung open and Timothy came in, with his tie in his pocket and a jacket thrown over striped pyjama trousers, his hair on end, his eyes enormous. He took in the corridor in one glance. His shoulders dropped.
"Is she—"
"Stable," said Daniel and Ruth at once.
Timothy made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, and crossed the corridor in three strides, and she stood to meet him. He folded her into his arms, hard, his face against her hair, and she felt him shaking, and put her arms around him and held on. It was the most natural thing in the world. She had held him like this a hundred times. She smelled the soap on his neck, the faint sourness of fear, and felt a love so true and so uncomplicated that for a moment it blotted everything else out, like a hand over a window.
"Thank you," he whispered. "Thank you for coming."
Over his shoulder, she saw Daniel stand and turn to the wall.
They sat for three hours in that corridor. Dawn came up grey and then white behind the high windows, and a trolley rattled by with a stack of covered trays. A cleaner mopped the floor around their feet in slow impersonal arcs. At six the doctor came out, a tired young woman with a ponytail and a stethoscope round her neck, and said that Mrs. Kasozi's ECG was acceptable, her pain was settling, she would be kept for observation and could not have visitors for an hour. "She's asking for her sons," she added, and smiled, and went away.
Daniel went to find tea.
Ruth followed him, after a moment, without quite deciding to. The canteen was a bare hall with a serving hatch and four plastic tables, empty at that hour except for a man asleep with his head on his arms. Daniel stood at the hatch with two paper cups in his hands, and when she came to stand beside him he did not look round.
"You should be with Tim."
"He's on the phone to the bank."
"Ah."
"He'll be a minute." She took a cup from him. The tea was gold, scalding, oversweet. "Daniel."
"Don't."
"I only want to say that you saved her."
"I drove a car."
"You drove a car at the right time, in the right direction, with the right person in it." She turned to face him. "Listen to me. I know what you said on Wednesday. I know you have a plane ticket. I know you're going to hate me for saying it. But Grace nearly died this morning and you were the one who was in the house, and I'd have been in bed in Kampala. I'm just saying thank you. Not for me. For her."
He looked at her for a long time, with the paper cup sagging in his big hand.
Then he said, very quietly, "I haven't been thanked for anything since I was thirty."
"Then I'm sorry it's taken this long."
She did not plan what came next. Her hand moved on its own: she put it over his, on the edge of the metal counter, her palm over the back of his scarred fingers, and left it there. She felt him go entirely still. A slow tremor ran through the muscles of his wrist, and then stopped. His skin was warm. The tendons moved beneath her touch like cables under cloth. For one second, two, three, they stood in the grey canteen light with their hands together and the tea going cold, not looking at each other, not breathing.
"There you are," said Timothy from the doorway.
They separated. It was not sudden, nor sharp, nor guilty. It was something worse than guilt, a smooth, quiet withdrawal, like two people stepping back from the same painting. Timothy stood with the telephone in his hand and an exhausted smile on his face, and he had not seen anything. Ruth was nearly sure he had not seen anything. He crossed the floor and took the third cup from the counter, and drank it in two swallows, grimacing, and said, "God, that's vile. Do you know, I think I could sleep standing up."
"Sit," said Daniel, and pulled out a chair for him.
He sat, between them, and took Ruth's hand without looking at it, and leaned his head against her shoulder, with a long shuddering exhale. His hair smelled of sleep. He was warm, and heavy, and entirely trusting, like a child. She stroked his hair with the free hand and looked straight ahead, at the cheap blue wall of the canteen, and felt the room fill up with a pain so exact and so clean that she could have drawn it.
She was holding Timothy's hand. Across the table, Daniel was holding nothing.
I have done a wicked thing, she thought, with perfect clarity. And I have done nothing at all.
Grace was propped against three pillows in a narrow bed by the window, in a cotton hospital gown printed with faded blue diamonds, her grey hair brushed flat and her glasses perched, as always, on top of her head. She looked about eleven years old. A drip ran from the back of her hand to a bag on a stand. She greeted her sons with irritation and her future daughter-in-law with a shy wave.
"It was nothing," she said. "A bit of wind. They're all fuss. I told them. I said, I've had indigestion since 1974."
"Mama," said Timothy.
"I did."
"You frightened us."
"I'm told so. I'm told by three nurses and a junior doctor." She waved an imperious hand. "I'm well. Go and have breakfast. All of you. You look like wet washing."
They went. They were halfway down the corridor when Grace's voice, thin and carrying, said, "Ruth. Stay a moment, my dear."
Timothy glanced at her. "I'll wait."
"No, no, go on, get something to eat. I'll catch you up."
She went back in and shut the door behind her. The room was white and quiet, with a thin gold line of morning along the sill. Grace had turned her head on the pillow, and in the bare light her face looked suddenly very old: the high cheekbones, the papery skin, the slack line of the mouth that she normally held so tight.
"Come here," said Grace. "Sit."
Ruth sat on the edge of the visitor's chair.
"I am going to say something," said Grace slowly, "and I want you not to answer it."
"Mrs. Kasozi—"
"Grace. You're nearly my daughter." She held up a hand, with the tube trailing from the knuckle. "I was a headmistress for thirty-one years. I know a child who has been told something and doesn't know what to do with it. I have seen that expression across a thousand desks." The bright eyes held hers. "You have it now."
Ruth went cold from head to foot.
"I'm not asking what it is. Do not tell me. I don't want to know, because if I know, I shall have to do something about it, and I am sixty-eight years old with a bad heart and a house that is falling down." There was a dry flicker of humour in her face, and it was more terrible than tears. "I only want to say this. There are things a mother knows and refuses to know. It is the only way to keep a house standing. I have done it for years. I know the cost of it better than anyone."
"I don't understand."
"No. You're meant not to." Grace's hand found hers on the blanket. It was dry, light and astonishingly strong. "But there are two men out there I love, and I have been a very poor mother to one of them, and I have been too good a mother to the other. And you are standing between them with a ring on your hand. You are a good girl. I have watched you. You are kind, and you are honest, and you do not like mess. I would give a great deal to say to you: it will all come right, my dear, just keep your head down and your hands full." She drew a rasping breath. "I can't. Because I think that you are going to be asked for a thing that is more than kindness. And I would like to ask, as an old woman, that when you're asked, you will answer truthfully. To everyone. Including yourself. Before the invitations go out."
Ruth could not speak. The drip chimed softly in its bag.
"Daniel," said Grace, and her voice cracked on it, "is not what my husband thought he was. I have known that for some time. I have not been brave enough to say so. If you can find out what he really is, Ruth, before it is too late for me to say sorry, then I would be," she faltered, "I would be very much in your debt."
"Mama Grace. What did he do?"
"That is not the question."
"Then what is?"
"What did he pay," said Grace, and closed her eyes. "I will sleep now. Go and eat. And do not tell Timothy I said any of it. He is so tired, that boy. He has been tired for eight years."
Daniel did not leave on Monday.
Nobody mentioned the plane ticket. It had lain in an envelope on the dresser of his old room, Ruth heard later from Mzee Kibuuka, for twelve hours, and then in the morning it had been gone, and so had the envelope, and in its place on the dresser was a small neat pile of pine shavings. He moved back into the house. He slept in the narrow bed beside his mother's room, on the first floor, with the door ajar, so that he could hear her breathe.
Ruth saw him at the shoring. It took four days. Mzee Kibuuka ran the work with the grim exhilaration of a general, and Daniel did the heavy lifting: the great steel props wedged against the gable, the temporary timbers, the long sweating hours up the scaffolding in the sun. He worked without a shirt in the afternoons. He did not look at her. He was punctilious in his courtesy, never failing to say good morning and goodnight, never failing to ask whether she needed anything, never failing to step half a pace back when she came near. It was like being shut in a very fine, very polite glasshouse with someone she could see perfectly clearly through the pane.
She, in turn, was a model of professional composure. She directed. She measured. She consulted her notebook with great attention while the sweat ran down his back, and she did not once look at the way the muscles shifted under his skin when he lifted a prop; and in the evenings she went home and cried, briefly and angrily, in the bath, like a girl.
On Thursday, Timothy took her to dinner in Kololo, at a small Italian restaurant with candles in wine bottles. He was in a wonderful mood. Their mother was home and well. Rob Mugisha had called to say the party was very impressed. And he had a surprise, and she was to guess.
"A holiday."
"Better."
"A new car."
"Colder." He reached into his jacket, with a flourish, and laid a card on the tablecloth: heavy, cream-coloured, embossed, the sort of thing that cost a thousand shillings a copy. "The stationery. They've printed the samples. Timothy Kasozi and Ruth Nakitende request the pleasure of your company..."
She looked at it for a long time.
It was beautiful. It was exactly what she had chosen: a restrained serif, a pale green edge, a small drawing of the veranda in the corner, which she had drawn herself, one night in the winter, in a spirit of such innocent happiness that now, looking at it, she felt something crumple inside her chest. The date stood at the bottom in raised black ink: Saturday, the thirteenth of December.
"They need approval by Monday," said Timothy. "Or the first batch won't be ready for August. What do you think?"
Before the invitations go out, Grace had said.
Ruth lifted her eyes. The man across the table was smiling at her, tired and tender and full of hope. Candlelight softened his face. He was handsome, and good, and entirely in earnest, and his hand lay on the cloth between them, palm up, waiting for hers.
She took it.
"It's perfect," she said. "Send them."
It was the second lie. This one had a sound.