Chapter 9
Jealousy
Lillian Achola arrived on the first Friday of July, in a rented Corolla, with a suitcase full of medical journals and a bag of Mombasa mangoes she had carried personally across three borders.
Ruth saw her from the scaffolding. She had been up on the north gable since seven, checking the shoring props with a spirit level, and from that height she could see the whole sweep of the drive: the gravel, the mango tree, the long glittering stripe of the lake. A small red car came in through the gate and stopped. The door opened. A woman got out.
She was tall, perhaps thirty-seven, in a yellow linen dress and sandals, with the kind of face that does not photograph well and is impossible to forget. It was a broad, humorous, high-boned face, framed in short natural hair already greying at the temple, and she carried herself with a loose, easy authority, as if she had spent a great many years walking along the decks of ships in a swell. She stood for a moment shading her eyes, looking up at the house. Then she turned her head, toward the garden, and smiled.
Daniel had come around the corner of the kitchen with a wheelbarrow of sand.
He stopped dead. The wheelbarrow tipped, spilled a little sand across the path, and he let it go. He said something Ruth couldn't hear. The woman said something back and laughed, and then, in a swift easy movement, as if it had been done a hundred times, she crossed the gravel and put both her arms around his neck.
He held her. Ruth could see it from fifteen feet up, with a clarity that seemed to belong to another sense: his hand spread wide across the woman's back, his eyes shut, his chin resting for a moment on the top of her head. He looked, in that second, as he had looked in the study when she had said I'm sorry about your father. Like a man who had been carrying something alone for so long that he had almost forgotten there was a way to put it down.
Lillian, thought Ruth. The doctor. The one who calls on Sundays.
She was holding the spirit level in both hands, and it occurred to her, in a distant, scholarly way, that her knuckles had gone white. She set it down on the plank with great care. The bubble slid, and settled, and showed her, with perfect impartiality, that the prop was true.
It's not a crime, she told herself. You have a fiancé. You have no claim on this man. You have no right to the sensation you are experiencing, which is, I believe, jealousy, and which is the least dignified of all the feelings and the only one you have never been able to afford.
She climbed down very slowly, and did not look at the house.
"I won't pretend I'm not curious about you," said Lillian, over lunch.
It was a long table under the mango tree, laid by Grace with a gingham cloth and a great deal of food. Grace herself, three weeks out of hospital and enjoying it, sat at the head in a wicker chair and held court. Timothy was at the bank. Mzee Kibuuka had been summoned to eat and was devouring a plate of matooke with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. Brian, who had come to deliver a drawing and been fed, sat at the foot with the dazed look of a boy who has found out that adults can be funny.
"Of me?" said Ruth.
"Daniel said you were the architect." Lillian smiled over the rim of her glass. She had a slow, warm, gravelly voice with a Luo lilt in it, and it sounded as though everything she said had been thought about first. "He said it three times in the car from the airport. Then he said she's engaged, and then he said it again, which was unusual. In two years, I never heard Daniel Kasozi say anything three times."
"Lillian," said Daniel, from the other end of the table, in a warning tone.
"I'm only repeating the evidence."
"You are being very Lillian."
"It's the only thing I know how to be." She did not look at him. She was looking at Ruth, steadily, pleasantly, with large dark kind eyes, and Ruth understood that she was being weighed, and that the scales were very fair.
"I love the house," said Lillian. "I've seen photographs. He has one pinned above his bed in Mombasa, the veranda in the sun. He thinks I haven't noticed."
"Hasn't he ever brought you here?"
"He has never brought anyone here." It was said lightly. "That's rather the point."
Mzee Kibuuka put down his fork. "Eh," he said, to nobody. "That is true. Eight years. Not even a postcard."
"Mzee," said Daniel.
"I only say it is a good thing that someone has come to remind you."
"Of what?"
"That you are a person." The old man took a sip of passion-fruit juice and fixed Daniel with an eye like a drill bit. "You don't eat enough, you don't sleep, you talk to wood. A woman should come and look at you."
It was meant as a joke, and everyone laughed, and Ruth laughed too, a fraction late. She was looking at her plate. She was aware, with the particular awareness of a woman who has had a tooth drilled, of the exact distance across the table at which Lillian's hand rested on the cloth near Daniel's. Six inches. A hair's breadth. An inch.
When she looked up, Daniel was watching her.
It was a short look, steady and miserable, and it said, as plainly as if he had spoken: This is not what you think. And then he looked down, and something quick and ugly and fiercely unreasonable in her chest said, Isn't it?
The gala was the following night.
It was the bank's annual benefit, held at the Serena Hotel on the edge of Kampala, in a ballroom with chandeliers and a string quartet and four hundred of the city's most successful people, all talking at once. Timothy had been working toward it for months. It was where Rob Mugisha would introduce him to the party's regional chairman. It was where the Kasozi name, with its tidy history and its good-looking couple, would first be tried in public. He wore a black dinner jacket and a bow tie that she had tied herself, and when he looked at her in the hall mirror, in the pale green dress she had chosen, his whole face glowed.
"You look," he said, "like a woman who has never lost an argument."
"I've lost nearly all of them."
"I wouldn't know. I'm always on your side." He kissed her. "Mama's coming. And Danny."
"Daniel?"
"He said he would. For her sake. He's bringing Lillian." He turned to adjust his cuff. "I think it's good for him. To see people. She's a wonderful woman. I've always thought they'd be—I mean, if he'd only, you know." A small, rueful gesture. "He's had so little."
"Yes," said Ruth, and went to find her shoes.
It was a mistake to attend. She knew it as soon as they went in, through a high white archway into a roar of chandelier light, the floor already crowded with silks and tuxedos, and a smiling attendant tapped her arm and murmured Madam, your table. It was the table nearest the dance floor, round, set for ten, and the last two chairs were already occupied.
Daniel was wearing a suit.
She had never seen him in one. It was dark grey, a little old, with a collar that fitted his throat badly; it must have been his father's, altered in a hurry. He had shaved, and his hair was wet, and his hands, resting on the cloth, were scrubbed to the wrists. He looked, she thought, like a boy about to be sent to the headmaster. He looked beautiful. It was a thing she had known for weeks and not admitted, and the admission arrived now in the middle of four hundred people with a quiet, devastating clarity, like a letter dropped through a door.
Lillian sat beside him in dark red silk with her shoulders bare. She was talking to Grace, and she turned as Ruth approached, and held out a hand.
"You look wonderful," she said.
"So do you."
"I look like a woman who has not been to a dinner in three years, in a borrowed dress. It's you who looks wonderful." The smile was warm, direct and gently teasing. "Daniel. Stand up and tell her."
"Good evening," said Daniel, standing.
"That's not telling her."
"It's—" He flushed. "Ruth. It's a very nice dress."
"Thank you," said Ruth, and sat down between Grace and a deaf cousin, and spent the first course not looking.
She was a good deal better at the not-looking than she had expected. She ate her soup. She conversed with Marjorie Ssebaggala about a hip replacement. She laughed at Gordon's story about a minister's goat. But in the broken, shifting reflections of the glass wall opposite, where the whole room was repeated in blurred gold, she could see the table, and she could see him, and what she saw was this: Lillian bent toward him to say something in his ear, and his face relaxed. Lillian reached up and straightened his lapel. A small, intimate, unthinking gesture, such as a wife makes. And he let her. He sat quite still, and let her, with a faint tender smile.
The soup went to wax in her mouth.
That's what it looks like, she thought, quite calmly. When someone fits.
She had never felt anything so distinctly in her life, and she did not for a moment like it.
It was Timothy who danced with her first.
The quartet had given way to a band, a polished, plausible six-piece with a saxophone, and the lights had gone down, and the floor had filled with couples moving in the warm syrup of the music. He led her out with a hand at the small of her back, and she let him, and was held, and turned. He danced well. He had been taught as a boy. His palm was warm and sure and he led with an unobtrusive authority that she had always found restful.
"You're very quiet," he said into her hair.
"I'm concentrating."
"On what?"
"Not stepping on you."
"You've never stepped on me."
"I've been planning to." She made herself smile. Over his shoulder, across the shifting gold dark, she could see the table. Lillian had stood and was holding out both hands to Daniel, and Daniel, who clearly hated dancing, who stood like a man being fitted for a coffin, was allowing himself to be drawn towards the floor. He was shaking his head. Lillian was laughing. In a moment she had him in her arms.
Ruth's step faltered.
"Careful," said Timothy.
"Sorry."
"I like seeing him with her." Timothy had followed her gaze, and his voice was warm and pleased and utterly unaware. "Look at that. He's smiling. When did he last do that, in public? Three months? Eight years?" He laughed softly. "Thank goodness for Lillian. I was afraid he'd be on his own."
The room turned. The saxophone sighed. Ruth looked at the other couple, at the long hand spread on the red silk and the face bent attentively toward a woman's face, and understood, in a flat cold moment of insight, that there was nothing whatever wrong with it. It was lovely. It was what a decent person would want for him. If she had been a good woman she would have been glad.
"I need some air," she said.
The terrace ran along the whole length of the ballroom, a long marble balcony above the hotel gardens, lit at intervals by tall bronze lanterns. A warm wind was blowing off the golf course. Below her, in the dark, sprinklers hissed across a lawn. She leaned both hands on the balustrade and shut her eyes, and breathed, and told herself in a voice she hardly recognised: You are a grown woman. You are standing on a terrace at the benefit of your fiancé's bank. You are not in a film.
She heard the glass doors open and close behind her.
She did not need to turn. She knew his step by now, the weight of him on a floor, as she knew the creak of the fourth tread from the top. She stood still with her eyes shut and the hot wind on her face.
"You left," said Daniel.
"I was warm."
"You were white."
"It's the dress."
"Ruth."
"What?" She opened her eyes and turned. He was standing three paces off, in his father's suit, with his hands at his sides, and the lantern behind him made a dark halo of his head. "Go back in. Lillian will think you've been kidnapped."
"She sent me."
"How thoughtful."
"She said, and I quote, go and find the woman who has been glaring at my back for half an hour."
"I haven't been glaring."
"You've been burning a hole in it."
"I've been polite," said Ruth, with a ragged little laugh that came out wrong. "I've been the most polite person in that room. I discussed hip replacements. I've been so well-behaved that I may need to lie down."
"Ruth, you have to know—"
"I don't have to know anything. She's lovely. She's warm, and funny, and she knows you, she knows what you take in your coffee and she can straighten your collar without asking. I like her. I like her enormously. And I'd like to push her off this balcony." Her voice broke. "Isn't that disgraceful?"
He took a step toward her.
"I haven't any right," she said. "That's the part I can't bear. I haven't any right. I'm the one wearing the ring. I'm the one who said send them about the invitations. I can't be jealous, can I? It's a thing for people who are allowed to want something. And I'm not allowed. I'm just standing on a terrace, in a dress, wanting a man not to look at someone else the way he looked at her. And you can't even tell me not to, because you've got nothing to be sorry for." She pressed a hand over her mouth. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm being a child."
"You're not."
"I am."
"You're a woman who is being very honest in a place where honesty is not convenient." Daniel's voice was low. He had come close enough that she could see his throat move. "And since we're being honest, let me tell you what I saw tonight. I saw you walk in, in that dress, and I forgot my own name. I saw my brother put his hand on your back and I wanted to break it. I've never wanted to break anything but wood. I stood in that ballroom, with a woman who has been good to me for two years, and I looked at the one person in the room who doesn't belong to me and I could think of nothing else." His mouth twisted. "I'm not proud of it. It's jealousy, I think. It's a very old, very ugly thing, and I haven't had it since I was nine and Tim got the bicycle."
"You can't have it."
"No."
"I can't either."
"No."
"Then what do we do with it?"
"I don't know," said Daniel. "I thought you might."
They stood with the width of a hand between them, in the lantern light, with the whole bright clamour of the ballroom behind a glass door and the sprinklers whispering in the dark. He did not touch her. She did not touch him. It was, she thought, quite possibly the most intimate conversation of her life.
Lillian found her afterwards in the ladies' room.
It was a pink marble place with a bank of mirrors and an attendant dozing in a chair. Ruth was standing at a basin, running cold water over her wrists, and she saw the red silk appear in the glass behind her, and braced.
"Don't be alarmed," said Lillian. "I'm not going to shout."
"I wish you would."
"I know. It would be easier." She leaned against the next basin, arms folded, with her head a little on one side. In the harsh light she looked tired and humorous and a good deal older than in the gold of the ballroom. "I'm leaving tomorrow. The conference ends at noon. I thought I would come and say it to you straight, since the others are too proud."
"Lillian—"
"I came to see who it was," said Lillian. "Two years I've known Daniel Kasozi. I've never once seen him look at a thing the way he looks at your back when you go out of a room. So when he rang on Sunday, I thought: ah. Somebody has been found." She smiled, wryly. "I've been dreading and wanting it for a long time. I'd decided I would hate you. I find it's an inefficient thing to do, to hate someone with nice shoes."
"There's nothing—"
"Please don't say there's nothing. I'm a doctor. I know what nothing looks like. It looks like a man who eats his dinner." She straightened. "I'm not asking what you've done. I don't think you've done anything. I think you're both fools, and honest ones, which is the worst kind. But I'm going to tell you something he never will."
Ruth turned off the tap.
"He's a good man," said Lillian. "That's a poor phrase, I know, it's the sort of thing one puts on a gravestone. But he's good the way old timber is good. He'll carry whatever you put on him, until the night he gives. And he is carrying something. I don't know what. He never told me, though I asked him for two years. I don't think it's a crime. I think it's a debt." She paused. "If you're going to be in his life, then be in it in daylight. And if you can't, then go, now, and let him heal. But don't do the thing in between. Hidden things rot the person who keeps them. I've watched it in ship's holds. The cargo's never the problem. It's what gets in behind it."
"I'm engaged to his brother," said Ruth, very low.
"I know."
"I'm going to marry him."
"Are you?" said Lillian, gently, and picked up her small red bag from the marble. "Then I shall be very happy for you both. I'll bring mangoes."
She went out. The door swung shut behind her on its brass hinge. Ruth stood alone in the pink room with her wet hands held out in front of her, and looked in the mirror at a woman in a pale green dress with a ring on her left hand and a look on her face that she had last seen, long ago, on her mother, at a kitchen window, with a plate.
She dried her hands. She went back into the ballroom, and found her fiancé, and kissed his cheek, and danced.