Prologue
Prologue
At ten minutes to two in the morning, Ruth Nakitende stood at the edge of her fiancé's mother's lawn with her shoes in one hand and understood that she was about to become a person she had spent thirty-three years promising herself she would never be.
The grass was wet. It had rained at dusk, briefly and without conviction, the way it did at the end of the dry season, and now the whole garden gave off the smell of turned earth and frangipani and the lake, which lay beyond the wall like something large that had agreed, for the moment, to sleep. A dog barked once, far off, toward Kitoro. Then nothing. Even the generator at the neighbouring hotel had been switched off for the night.
Below her, at the bottom of the slope, the boathouse had one window lit.
It was a small yellow square, no brighter than a candle from this distance, and she had been looking at it for almost a full minute without moving. She was aware of that. She was aware of everything. The cold of the ground coming up through the soles of her feet. The ring on her left hand, which she had not taken off, which was the whole problem, and which caught what little light there was whenever her fingers shifted, as if it wanted her to remember it. The pulse in her throat. The small, ridiculous fact that she had put on her good linen shirt, the blue one, and that she had done it in the dark, in the guest room, with her hands not entirely steady, and had known exactly what that meant even while she buttoned it.
Nobody had forced her out here. That was the part she would find hardest, later, when she tried to explain it to herself and then to others and then, in the worst of the months that followed, to a woman in a hospital corridor who had every right to ask. No one had tricked her. No one had lied about what waited at the bottom of that slope. Twice that evening, once on the veranda in front of everyone and once alone in the kitchen with the tap running, the man in the boathouse had told her to go home.
Go home, Ruth. Please.
He had said it quietly, like someone asking a favour. And she had stood there in the kitchen with a wet glass in her hand and found, to her astonishment, that she could not remember where home was meant to be.
She had always been sensible. It was the quality people mentioned first when they described her, usually with approval, sometimes with the faint disappointment of those who had hoped for something more entertaining. Ruth is so sensible. Ruth never makes a scene. Ruth reads the contract. She had built a career out of knowing what could bear weight and what could not, out of walking into old buildings that other people found romantic and seeing, immediately, the crack behind the paint. She could tell you from the sound of a floor which joist was going. She could tell you, standing in a doorway, whether a house would hold another fifty years or come down in the first heavy rain.
She had not known, until this year, that she was capable of looking at the crack and walking toward it anyway.
The light in the boathouse moved. A shadow crossed it, tall, broad through the shoulders, then stopped, as if whoever cast it had come to the window and stood there, looking up the slope at the dark house. Looking, she thought, for her. Or hoping very hard not to find her.
Her heart did something she could only have described, if pressed, as a lurch of recognition. As though her body had known for months a thing that her mind had refused to put into words.
It's only wanting, she told herself. It passes. It always passes. People want all kinds of things they would never be fool enough to take.
But she had never lied well, and it was already too late to start. Because wanting did not follow a man into your thoughts when you were drawing the same staircase for the fourth time. Wanting did not know what he took in his tea or which of his hands was stiffer in the mornings or how he went silent, completely silent, when somebody was kind to him. Wanting did not sit with you in the dark and ask what you were afraid of and then wait, truly wait, for the answer.
Whatever this was, it had a name, and she did not yet dare to say it.
She tried to find the exact moment it began. She went back through the year as one goes back through a house looking for the point where the water first got in. Perhaps it was the afternoon in March when she had shaken his hand, thinking him nobody, and felt nothing wrong at all. Perhaps it was the rain. Perhaps the dinner, or the shutters, or the long evening with the sawdust on her forearms and his voice very close behind her ear telling her to let the plane do the work.
It was not tonight. She was sure of that much. Tonight was only the bill.
Somewhere behind her, in the dark house, a floorboard spoke. Old mvule, laid in 1958, honest as a bell. She knew its note by now as she knew her own name. Whoever had stepped on it had stepped on it softly, and had stopped. Nobody came down the stairs. Nobody called out.
She did not turn around.
The ring was cold against her finger. The lake breathed in and out beyond the wall. And at the bottom of the garden the lit window waited with the awful patience of something that would still be there in the morning whether or not she came.
Ruth Nakitende, who always read the contract, drew one long breath, and walked down the slope to the boathouse.