Chapter 6
A Man with a Car
The wedding was held in a hall with a glass roof, and the first thing she saw when she walked in was herself.
She was in the wall. It was a long mirror, framed in gold, running the whole length of the entrance hall, and in it a girl in a green satin dress was walking toward her, very straight, with her hands clasped in front of her and her chin held high in the way you hold it when you are afraid. The dress was too big at the waist and had been pinned, invisibly, with four safety pins. It swept the floor. The back was open to the middle of her spine. Shamim had put gloss on her mouth and a little gold on her eyelids and had pinned her hair up in a careful twist, with two curls left loose at her neck. She had given her a pair of gold sandals one size too small and a clutch bag with nothing in it.
She stopped, in front of the glass.
Is that me?
She did not recognise the face. It looked older, and sleeker, and very calm, with large, dark, dramatic eyes. It was the face of a girl on the cover of a magazine. The collarbones stood out, thin and elegant. The throat was long. In the soft light of the chandeliers, she looked like a person who had never in her life counted shillings.
"Close your mouth," said Shamim, at her elbow. "You look like a fish."
"I look like someone else."
"You look like yourself. Finally." She was in red, a skin-tight crimson gown with a slit to the thigh, and she was holding two glasses of something pink. "Here. Drink. It's only juice. I'm not trying to corrupt you."
"It's very big."
"The room? Wait until you see the cake."
It was the biggest room Nabirye had ever been in. It was a great white marquee, hung with swags of silk and strings of tiny lights, with round tables in the hundreds, each with a centrepiece of white roses. A band played on a stage at the far end, in matching purple jackets. Waiters in black waistcoats moved through the crowd with trays of tiny, shining, unfamiliar things on toothpicks. A fountain, in the middle of the floor, was lit from underneath in changing colours, gold and then blue and then gold, and round it moved four hundred people in the most beautiful clothes she had ever seen. Women in glittering gomesis with stiff puffed sleeves. Men in kanzus of white and cream. A girl of eight in a tiny silver dress, running between the tables with a hoop.
And everywhere, the smell. It was a smell of perfume and food and flowers and warm bodies, rich and dizzying. It hit her like a wave. She stood there in her borrowed shoes and felt her whole body go slack.
So this is where it all is, she thought. This is what everyone was talking about.
She was not angry. That surprised her. She had thought she would be. She had thought she would walk in and feel the cold, clear, righteous disapproval of a girl from a village, who had counted the cost of every grain. Instead she felt something far worse. She felt a hunger, very large and soft and entirely without shame.
I want to belong here.
She did not say it. She was not even sure she knew it. But she drank the pink juice in one go.
They sat at a table near the back, with a collection of Shamim's cousins and a very old aunt who ate nothing and watched everyone. There was rice. There was matooke, in an elegant little pyramid. There was beef stew, and chicken, and a dish she could not name, in cream, and a salad in which each leaf seemed to have been placed with tweezers. Nabirye ate like a person who had been told she would be shot at dawn. She did not look at anyone. She did not speak. The cousins talked about houses and weddings and a woman who had left her husband for a pastor, and she nodded in the right places and kept her eyes on her plate.
It was when the speeches began that she noticed him.
She could not have said why. He was not the tallest man there, or the loudest, or the best dressed. He was at a table across the aisle, near the front, a man of about thirty-five in a navy suit and a pale blue shirt with the collar open, sitting very easily with one arm over the back of his chair. He had a short, neat beard. He had a broad, open, good-humoured face, with a deep dimple in one cheek. He was laughing at something a man beside him had said, with his head back and his whole body, and for one second, by chance, as he turned his head to wipe his eye, his gaze fell across the hall and met hers.
She looked away.
She looked back.
He had not looked away. He was watching her, over the heads of the guests, with the corner of his mouth lifted, and in his eyes there was no assumption in it, no leer, only a warm, direct, delighted curiosity, like a man who has seen something unexpectedly lovely in a window and wants to know if it will let him look.
She turned her head and picked up her fork. Her pulse was going in her throat.
"Who is that?" she said, as lightly as she could.
"Who?"
"The one in blue. With the beard."
Shamim followed her eyes. She did not say anything for a moment. Then she gave a long low whistle.
"That," she said, "is Sam Kigozi."
"Who is Sam Kigozi?"
"Kigozi Motors. Ggaba Road. He has a showroom the size of a football pitch." Shamim leaned in, and dropped her voice. "He sells cars. Nice ones. To ministers. He is thirty-four, he is not married, he has no children, and he is the cousin of the groom's best friend." She took a sip of juice. "I told you. I did not plan this."
"I'm not interested."
"Of course not."
"I'm here for the rice."
"Of course you are." Shamim was smiling at her glass. "But I'll say one thing, as a friend. He is a nice man. I have known him for three years. He has never once been rude to a waiter. That is a very rare quality."
"I'm not interested."
"I know."
"I have an exam on Monday."
"You do." Shamim's smile widened. "Look. He's coming."
He came across the hall with his hands in his pockets, in no hurry, in the way of a man who has never in his life been told he is not welcome. People greeted him as he passed. An old man shook his hand. A girl in a gold gomesi said, "Sam!" and he kissed her cheek. Nabirye sat with her fork halfway to her mouth. The distance closed. She could see the dimple. She could see the small gold chain at his throat. She could see that his shoes, which she examined carefully, as Ssenga had instructed, were polished but not new.
He stopped at the end of the table.
"Good evening," he said, to the whole table, and then, with a small bow, to her. "I hope I'm not intruding. I wanted to say that your table is the only one in the room that is having a good time."
"We are," said Shamim, grandly.
"I know. I could hear you. It's why I came." His voice was low and warm, with the faintest trace of English schooling in the vowels. "Shamim, how are you? It's been a year."
"Eight months."
"Eight months. Of course. My apologies." He took her hand and kissed it, extravagantly, and she shrieked. He turned. "And your friend?"
"This is Nabirye."
"Nabirye." He said it slowly, as if he were tasting it. "That is a Busoga name."
"My father's people."
"It's beautiful. It means... a twin, doesn't it? The first one born?"
"Yes. I wasn't a twin. It was a name from an aunt."
"A name does not have to be accurate." He smiled. The dimple deepened. "May I sit?"
"It's a free table."
"I'd say it was the most expensive table in the room." He pulled out a chair, and sat, not close, a respectful distance away, with his elbows on his knees. He did not stare at her. He looked at the dancers, and the cake, and the very old aunt, to whom he spoke for two minutes in fluent, courteous Luganda, asking after her knees, until the old woman, who had not smiled all evening, put her hand to her mouth and tittered. Then he turned back, as if there had been no pause.
"You don't talk much," he said.
"I'm eating."
"I noticed. You are a person who takes a meal seriously. It is a mark of character."
"Is it?"
"In my experience." He rested his chin on his hand. "What do you do, Nabirye?"
"I'm a student."
"Of what?"
"Nursing and midwifery. At St. Veronica's."
"Ah." He sat up. For the first time his easy, amused face went still, and something very real came into it. "Truly?"
"Yes."
"My mother was a nurse."
She had not expected that. She looked at him, startled.
"She worked at Mulago for thirty years. On the children's ward. She had hands like angels and a temper like a thunderstorm." He gave a short, quiet laugh. "She died six years ago. I was twenty-eight. I did not get to say what I wanted. I was in Dubai, on business. She had a stroke on a Tuesday."
"I'm so sorry."
"It is all right. It was a long time." He turned his glass in his fingers. "But I'll tell you. When I see a girl in a room like this, in a dress like that, and she says nursing and midwifery, I... I find I am a little moved. It is the rarest thing. Most of the girls here study marketing."
"What is wrong with marketing?"
"Nothing. It's only that it does not save anybody." He smiled, with a trace of embarrassment. "I am sorry. I am talking too much. It's the wine."
"You're not drinking wine."
"No." He looked at his glass. It was water. "No, I'm not. I haven't, in six years. Not since the funeral. I've found it makes me say things I mean."
Nabirye did not know what to say. She sat with her hands in her lap and her heart doing something awkward and unaccustomed, a lurch, a settling. She looked at his hands. They were large, brown and square, with clean nails. He wore no ring. He did not move them much. They lay on his knee, still, one over the other, like a pair of animals that have been told to wait.
Look at his hands, my dear, said Ssenga's voice. Not his mouth.
She looked. They were the hands of a man who did not need to prove anything.
She was wrong. She was entirely wrong. But she would not know it for a very long time.
He did not ask her to dance. He did not ask for her number. That was the thing she thought of afterward, lying awake, going over it with a ruler. A man who wanted only one thing would have asked. He would have had a smooth line and a hand on her waist. Instead he sat at the table for forty minutes, talking about nothing, the cake, the traffic, a funny incident at a car auction in Nairobi, and at the end of it, when the band struck up a slow song and the floor filled with couples, he stood, and bowed to the table, and said, "I have been too long in your company. It is time I let you eat."
"We have finished," said Shamim, a little crossly.
"Then I will let you dance." He turned to Nabirye. "It has been a pleasure. I hope you will forgive an old man a rude monologue."
"You're not old."
"Thirty-four is ancient. In the car trade." He smiled. "May I leave you my card? In case you ever need a ride to the hospital. Or a lift to a wedding. Or a very bad opinion about a Toyota."
He took a small white card out of his breast pocket and laid it on the cloth beside her plate. He did not put it into her hand. He laid it down and stepped back, a gesture so small and so courteous that she found, to her surprise, that she wanted to pick it up.
KIGOZI MOTORS, it said, in small, plain, black print. Samuel Kigozi, Director. A phone number. An address on Ggaba Road. And at the bottom, in a very small and elegant italic: Honest cars for honest people.
"Goodnight, Nabirye," said Sam Kigozi.
He walked away across the floor. She watched him go, between the dancing couples, a broad man in a navy suit, with a dimple and a straight back and a gift for leaving. At the edge of the marquee, he paused, and spoke to a waiter, and the waiter nodded.
A minute later, a tray was set down in front of her. On it, on a white plate, was a thick wedge of the wedding cake, with a sugar rose on top, and a small silver fork.
"From the gentleman," said the waiter.
She stared at it.
Shamim made a small, strangled noise. She put her head in her hands and her shoulders shook. When she looked up, her face was scarlet with silent joy.
"Honest cars," she wheezed. "For honest people."
"Stop it."
"I did not plan this."
"You did."
"I did not." She wiped her eyes. "But I would like it on record that I am a genius."
He did not call for four days.
She had not expected him to. She did not look at the card. She put it in the green exercise book, between two pages, and shut it, and went to the ward, and took a thermometer, and wrote down a patient's temperature in a neat slanting hand. She sat her test on Monday. She got seventy-one. She went to chapel on Wednesday, and knelt with her eyes closed, and prayed for her mother, and Kizito, and Mercy, and the cow, and found herself, in the middle of the Our Father, thinking of a dimple.
Stop, she told herself.
On Thursday, at four, she was crossing the quadrangle with a stack of files in her arms when a tall man at the gate lifted a hand.
"Excuse me," said Sam. "Do you know where I can find the director of this establishment? I have a pressing question about a Toyota."
She laughed. She had not meant to. It came out all at once, a loud, startled, unladylike bark, and she clapped her hand to her mouth. He stood on the pavement beside a small silver car, with his hands in his pockets and his shirtsleeves rolled and a face of such grave, solemn, elaborate innocence that she laughed again.
"What are you doing here?"
"I was passing."
"The school is not on the way to anywhere."
"It's on the way to you." He said it lightly, and without any pressure at all, and she felt it go through her. "I hope you'll forgive me. I made a rule. If I did not hear from you in four days, I would come and see for myself, and I would give you the chance to say no. So. I am here. And you may say no."
"No what?"
"To a cup of tea."
"I have a ward at five."
"Then to a cup of tea for forty minutes." He glanced at his watch. "I have counted. It will be tight. But I will drive carefully."
She looked at the car. She looked at him. She looked at the sky, which was a hard bright white, and the hot dust, and the nuns on the lawn, with their hands in their sleeves. She thought of Ssenga, and her mother, and a tin box with a lion on the lid.
It's only tea.
"Forty minutes," she said.
It was forty minutes. He kept his word.
He took her to a small café on Nsambya Road, with a tin roof and four tables, where a woman in an apron brought them two cups of sweet milky tea and a plate of mandazi still hot from the oil. They sat at a table by the window, in the shade of a pawpaw tree, with the traffic going by outside. He asked her questions. He asked about the ward, and the sisters, and her first week, and what she had learned. He listened to the answers. It was a thing she had not known she was starved of. Nobody, in Kampala, had asked her a question that was not about money.
She told him about Sister Agatha. She told him about Mercy. She did not mean to. It spilled out, as she stirred her tea, in a low rapid voice, the white patches and the rash and the large clear eyes. "She said, I'm not catching. And she smiled. I don't know why that has stayed with me."
"Because it was brave."
"Yes."
"It's the bravest thing there is. To reassure the person who is afraid of you." He was looking at his cup. "I am sorry. That's a very hard thing to see."
"It's what I'm here for."
"I know. But still." He lifted his eyes. "I think you have something rare, Nabirye. A kind of... steadiness. You walk into a room and it gets quieter."
"I'm not steady."
"You are to someone who is not."
She did not know what he meant. He did not explain. He drank his tea. And when the forty minutes were up, and he had paid, he walked her back to the gate, a courteous step behind her, and did not take her arm, or touch her, or ask her to the car. At the gate he stopped.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what?"
"For letting me say the whole thing. About my mother. I haven't, in a long time." His voice was very low. "I don't make a habit of it. I'm usually the man with the joke. I think I wanted you to see the other one."
"Why?"
"I don't know." He smiled, a little ruefully. "Because you looked as though you could."
He took a step back. He seemed about to say something else, and did not. He lifted a hand in a small farewell.
"May I call you?" said Sam.
She stood in the gateway in her blue uniform, with the files in her arms, and the white light on her face, and the weight of a watch, her father's, on her wrist.
Say no.
It is only a man who sells cars.
"Yes," said Nabirye.
It was one syllable. It cost her nothing. It was the lightest thing she had ever said, and it went out of her mouth like a bird from a cage, and she watched it go.
She did not hear what it left behind.