Chapter 10
My Mother's Excuses
Grace Nankya had a habit that she did not know she had.
It was a small one. She did it when she was alone, in the kitchen, in the middle of the day, with the house empty and the radio off. She would stand at the sink, with her hands in the basin, and look out of the window at the garden, and without noticing, she would begin to count. She counted the roses. She counted the plates on the rack. She counted, under her breath, the number of days until the first of the month. And then, because she could not stop, she counted the other things. The tins in the cupboard. The notes in the envelope. The number of times, that week, that she had said the word fine.
She had said it eleven times.
She stood with her wet hands on the edge of the basin and let the figure sit there. Eleven. It was not a large number. She had said it to the neighbour who asked after her health, and the pastor's wife, who asked about the house, and the woman at the market who asked, with a particular bright sidelong look, how her daughter was getting on. She had said it to her sister, on the phone. She had said it to her own face in the mirror.
Fine, she had said. We are very well.
And it was not true, and she knew it, and she had said it so often that the knowing had begun to feel like something that happened to somebody else.
She had not meant to marry a man she did not love.
That was what she would have said, if anyone had asked. And nobody did. She had said it to herself, in the early weeks, in the dark, with her husband's arm across her waist, as one says a prayer that one does not believe. I did it for Sarah. It was true. It was perfectly true. She had looked at the whole of the long grey road ahead of her, in the spring that Joseph died, and had seen that there was no way down it but this. And she had taken the way.
She had not known what she would find at the end.
She had known Peter Ssemanda for six weeks when she agreed to marry him. He had come to her sister's house for lunch. He had been grave, and courteous, and well-dressed. He had spoken of his late wife with a decent reticence. He had a shop and a house and a good name. He had said, over a plate of matooke, very quietly, "I think you have been very brave." And she, who had not been called brave by anyone in four months, who had been called poor thing and the widow, who had stood on a step in a borrowed black dress and watched the earth go over her husband's coffin without once being allowed to scream, had put down her fork and wept.
It was as simple as that.
He had said a kind thing. He had said it at the right moment. She had been so tired, so cold, so frightened, that she would have followed the first person who put a hand on her shoulder. She knew that now. She knew it as she knew the shape of her own hand. She would look back at that woman, in the grey dress, at the table, and feel for her a bitter, weary, exasperated pity. You fool, she thought. You fool, you poor fool. It was only a plate of food.
But she did not regret it. She could not. To regret it was to say that she had had a choice.
She had not always been afraid.
There had been a time, a long time ago, in a village called Bukalagala, in a house with a mud floor, when Grace Namutebi had been a bold child. She had climbed trees. She had fought the boys. She had had a laugh that carried across the valley, and a habit of answering back, and her father had called her my little lion. He was a farmer, a small proud man with a limp, who grew coffee on a hillside and talked about politics. He had died of malaria when she was eleven.
She did not like to think of what came next.
It was not that it was terrible. It was only that it was very plain. Her mother, left with four children and no land (it had gone, in a week, to a brother-in-law, who came with a paper), had walked from relative to relative, with a bundle, begging for a room. She remembered it as a series of doors. A door in Masaka, where a cousin had said, with real regret, that there was no space. A door in Mbarara, where an aunt had said, Only the boys. A door at which a man in a white shirt had looked her mother up and down, from the dust on her feet to the knot of her scarf, and said, in a voice of sweet reasonable contempt: Mama, a woman without a man is a woman without a roof.
She had been twelve.
She had stood behind her mother, in the road, in the white sun, holding the hand of her little brother, and watched her mother's back. It was very straight. It did not bend. It was the stiffest, the proudest, the most dreadful thing that she had ever seen. And she had thought, with a hard clear child's logic, in the dust: I will never be that.
I will never stand in a road with a bundle.
I'll never be at somebody's door.
She had worked. She had won a bursary, and gone to a teachers' college, and married a quiet clerk with large ears, who made her laugh. She had built, brick by brick, a small safe life. She had thought that she had done it. She had thought that she was out of the road. And then a man in a white coat had said the word stroke, in a hospital corridor, with his eyes on his clipboard, and she had found herself at the back of a crowd, in the dust, in black, with a child, and a landlord, and a brother-in-law with a tape measure.
Not again.
It was the only thought she had been capable of. She had not been able to think about love, or grief, or right and wrong. She had lain in a hard bed, in a rented room, in the dark, with her fists clenched, and thought of a man in a white shirt saying a woman without a man. She had thought, I am going to be my mother.
I will not.
I'll do anything.
Anything.
It was a very simple vow. It had gone down in her, under all the others, like a stone through water. It had come to rest at the bottom, where it had been lying, still, for thirty years. And when Peter Ssemanda came up the path with a sack of rice, she had looked at him, and felt the stone shift.
It was not hard, in the end, to make herself not see.
She would think about that, in the long months to come. She would try to find the moment when she had decided. And she would not be able to. There had been no moment. There had been only a long series of small adjustments, each of which, taken singly, had seemed reasonable. It was a thing she knew about, from the nursery. If you move a child's chair an inch a day, in a month she is in a different room, and has no idea how she came to be there.
She had heard what Sarah said.
She would not pretend otherwise, even to herself. She had heard it in the lamplit bedroom, with her finger on a Bible verse, and she had felt it, in her stomach, like a blow. For a moment, a single white terrible moment, she had understood perfectly what she had been told. She had seen it, as a picture, with her whole mind. She had seen her daughter's face. And she had heard, in the passage, the sound of a man whistling.
It is true.
She had known it.
She had known it, as one knows that the sky is above one. She had stood in the garden, two days later, on her knees among the roses, and said, A misunderstanding, and heard her own voice, from a long way off, like the voice of somebody reading a lie from a script.
I said it because I could not say the other thing.
That was what she would not think. It lay at the bottom of the pile, under the others, under the money and the roof and the stone. It was only this. That if it was true, then she had brought him into her house. She had opened the gate. She had put her own child, with her own two hands, into a room with a man she did not know, and shut the door.
And I'd have to do something.
And I do not know what.
She did not know. That was the whole of it. She had stood at the sink, many times, in the long afternoons, and gone over it. She could go to the police. She would be asked what she had seen. She could go to her sister. Specioza would say, with that firm tender terrible practicality, Think what you'll lose. She could go to the pastor. He would look at her kindly and say, Pray. She could take Sarah, and go.
Where?
There was nowhere. There was no door. She had run it through, a hundred times, in the dark, like a woman feeling along a wall. Aunt Harriet had a spare room, and four grandchildren. Her sister's house had two beds and nine people. There was a rented room in Lwanda, for a hundred and fifty thousand, and she had no money, and no job, because she had left it, at Peter's request, on a Saturday in October. You do not need to work, he had said. I will provide.
And she had let him.
Why did I let him?
She had not seen it, then. She did now. She saw it, as one sees a trap from the inside, with a flat sick lucidity. He had taken the wages first. Then the work. Then the key to the money, and the key of the house, and the roof, and the school, and the food. He had not done it all at once. He had done it a little at a time, with a smile, saying, Rest, my dear, and each time, she had said yes. And now she was standing at a sink, in a house that was not hers, with nothing in her pocket but a few notes that he had given her, and a girl in the next room who would not look at her.
I am my mother.
I'm standing in the road.
She took her hands out of the basin. She dried them on her apron, slowly, finger by finger. A drop fell on the tile. She looked at it, a small dark spot, spreading, and did not move.
It will stop, she thought.
She said it as she had said it a hundred times. It will stop. He is only a man who does not know how to be a father. He will learn. He is kind to me. He is good to the poor. He gives to the church. A man like that, he cannot... it must be a misunderstanding. She is so young. She has had such a hard time.
If I do not look at it, it will stop.
If I do nothing, it will go away.
It will stop when she finishes school.
It was the last one. It was the thing that she held on to, in the end, like a plank. It's only till she finishes. It is two more years. Eighteen months. She will go to the university. She will be away. She will be safe. She laid it, in her mind, like a rug over a hole. She stood on it. She said, Eighteen months, and the floor held.
She did not ask herself what it was holding over.
"I do not understand why she has to be so difficult," said Peter.
He was at the table, in the evening, with a plate of beef stew and a glass of beer. He had said it in a tone of mild perplexity, with his eyes on his food, as a man might remark on the price of eggs. The lamp threw a warm yellow ring on the cloth. Sarah was in her room. The house was quiet.
"She is not difficult."
"She does not speak to me. She doesn't look at me. She goes about with a face like a funeral." He cut a piece of meat. "I have been nothing but good to that girl, Grace. I've put her through school. I bought her a chain. I gave her a room."
"I know."
"I treat her as my own."
"I know that you do."
"Then why?" He put down his fork. He looked at her, with a sorrowful, bewildered, patient expression, and the lamplight shone on his round dark forehead. "I am a man who is trying, my dear. I'm trying so hard. I wanted this to be a happy house. And I come home, every evening, to a child who looks at me as though I had struck her."
"She's still grieving her father."
"It has been two and a half years."
"Some people take longer."
"Some people take advantage." He said it gently. He picked up the glass. "I do not say that she is doing it deliberately. But I wonder. I wonder if she knows what she does. If she knows how it makes you feel. I see you, Grace. I see how you look. You are tired. You have lines. You have lost weight. And I think, what is it that is making her so unhappy? And I think, it is Sarah." He sighed. "It is not for me to say. But a mother, I think, has a duty to her husband."
She sat very still.
She had heard it before. She had heard it in other forms, in other voices, in the long slow persuasive whispers of a man who knew exactly where to put his hand. She knew the shape of it. You owe me. Think what I have given. What would become of you? It came in a hundred disguises, tenderly, regretfully, with a warm hand on her arm. And every time, it was the same, and every time, she felt the same thing. She felt the cold clear dreadful drop of the stone.
"I'll speak to her," she said.
"Would you? I would be so grateful." He smiled. It was a tender, weary, grateful smile. He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. "I do not like to be harsh. I want her to be happy. But you know, my dear, that I would not be able to go on, if I felt that I was not wanted here."
"You are wanted."
"Am I?"
"Of course."
"I'd hate to think that all I've done was for nothing." His thumb moved over her knuckles. It was gentle. "I would hate to think that we had made a mistake. That I'd have to reconsider."
She did not breathe.
"But I know you will not let it come to that," said Peter. He patted her hand, twice, and took up his fork. "Eat your stew. It is getting cold."
She ate.
She ate every mouthful. She sat at the table, in the lamplight, with the stew like ashes in her mouth, and her husband whistling softly under his breath, and thought, clearly, with a small cold flash of something that was almost clarity:
He is telling me.
He is telling me what he will do.
And he is telling me in such a nice voice that I'll be ashamed to have noticed.
She looked at his hands. They were large, dark, and clean. They cut the meat with great neatness. They were the hands of a respectable man.
He knows, she thought. He knows that I know.
And he is not afraid.
She came upon Sarah in the kitchen at night.
It was the end of June, and a chill had come with the dark. A thin dry wind was moving in the mango tree. The house was unlit, but for a single bulb, over the sink, and in the narrow tiled room, among the shadows, a tall girl in a faded blue T-shirt was standing at the table, with her back to the door, peeling matooke.
She had not heard Grace come in.
She worked with a small sharp knife, the short black-handled one that Grace herself used, with quick, neat, mechanical strokes, laying the pale peeled fruit in a basin of water. She did it very quickly, with her head bent. Her hair was tied up, and the line of her neck, above the collar, was thin and pale and rather long. She did not look like a girl. She looked like a person who had grown up in a single night, as a tree grows in a dream, and stood now, in a kitchen, with a knife, waiting.
She is seven months from eighteen, thought Grace.
She stood in the arch, with her shawl round her, and watched.
She had thought, for a moment, that she would go away. She had thought that she would back out, quietly, into the passage, as she had done a hundred times. But something held her. It was the sight of the thin shoulders, and the lowered head. It was the stillness. It was the way Sarah peeled, with an economy of movement, as if conserving something, a kind of fierce tidy frugality, like a woman who has been told that there will not be enough.
My daughter, thought Grace.
I do not know her.
"Sarah."
The knife stopped.
It did not drop. It did not shake. It simply stopped, in mid-stroke, in the air, with the blade a few inches from the fruit. Sarah did not turn. She stood rigid. And Grace, watching, saw the long back go still in a particular way, a gathering, a settling, like a cat that has heard something in the grass.
"Yes, Mama?"
"I wanted to speak to you."
"Now?"
"If you have a moment."
"I'm busy."
"It will not take long."
The knife went down. Sarah laid it on the table, very gently, beside the basin, and wiped her hands on a cloth. She turned. She leaned back against the table, with her palms flat on the wood behind her. Her face, in the single yellow light, was expressionless. She looked at her mother, steadily, without hostility, with large dry eyes.
"Well?"
"Peter is concerned about you."
"Is he?"
"He says you do not speak to him."
"I speak to him."
"He feels that you are... cold."
"I'm polite."
"You must try to be warmer."
There was a silence.
It was not a long one. It lasted perhaps three seconds. But in it Grace saw something go across her daughter's face, very slowly, like the shadow of a cloud across a field. It was not anger. It was not contempt. It was something much worse. It was a kind of dreadful, patient, tired amusement, as of a person who has been given a very familiar riddle.
"Warmer," said Sarah.
"I only mean..."
"I know what you mean."
"He is trying very hard. You must see. He has done so much. For both of us." She heard her own voice, hurrying, high. "I only ask that you give him a chance. He is not a bad man, Sarah. He has been alone a long time. He doesn't know how to speak to a girl. He may seem... he can seem abrupt. But his heart is good."
"Mama."
"If you would only try..."
"Mama," said Sarah. "Why haven't you protected me?"
The kitchen was very still.
The bulb hummed. The tap, over the sink, dripped. Out in the dark of the compound, a night bird called, once, and was silent. Grace stood in the arch with her shawl clutched in both fists and felt the question go into her like a nail. It was asked gently. It was asked in a low, level, steady voice. It was not an accusation. It was a question, simply put, as one asks the time.
"I... what?"
"I told you. Two years ago. In your bedroom. I said it was happening. I told you what he did." Her eyes did not leave her mother's face. "And nothing has changed. Nothing has changed at all. I'm still here. So I am asking. Why?"
"It is not so simple."
"I think it is."
"You do not understand."
"Then explain."
"You cannot understand." It came out hot and rough. She had taken a step forward. She was shaking. "You're a child. You have never had to... you do not know what it is, to keep a house. To be responsible for everything. To lie awake at three in the morning, adding up. To stand in a market with fifty thousand shillings and decide whether to buy beans or a school book." She pressed her knuckles against her mouth. "You think it is easy. You think that I could just walk out of the door. I could not. I had nowhere. Do you hear me? I have carried this house, on my back, since the day your father died. Every beam of it. Every nail. And I am so tired. And I have done it all for you."
"I didn't ask you to."
"That's what you always say!"
"It's true."
"You do not know what you are asking!"
"I'm not asking for the house!" It was not loud. It was low, and clear. But it cut across the kitchen like a wire, and Grace stopped. "I never asked for the house, Mama. I would have lived in a hole. I would have lived in Aunt Harriet's cowshed. I do not care about the roof, or the fees, or the beans." She drew breath. "I'm asking why you made me pay for it."
Grace could not speak.
"You say you carry this house. You say it is on your back. Well, I live in it too." Her voice shook, for the first time, a fine thin tremor. "I'm in it every night. I'm the one who lies awake. You are not the only one who is tired. You do not know what it is to... you don't know." She stopped. She gripped the edge of the table, hard, behind her. "I'm in the same house, Mama. We both live here. And I am the one who is suffering."
The tap dripped.
Grace stood in the arch.
She stood with her mouth open and her hands pressed to her chest, and looked at her daughter. She looked at the long thin frame, the white face, the large dry eyes. She saw, with a clearness that was almost physical, like a blow to the chest, the whole of it, the whole of the two years, laid out in a row, in a bright cold light. She saw the girl, at the door of her room, with her fist raised. She saw her at breakfast, eating nothing. She saw her, in a school photograph, with a smile like a thing pinned on. She saw a girl of sixteen putting a tin of gravel against a door.
I did not know about the tin.
I knew about the tin.
She had seen it. She had seen it, one morning in March, when she went in to wake her, and found it propped against the handle, with a length of string. She had stood and looked at it. She had thought: Why would she...? And she had not finished the thought. She had set it down, very quietly, on the floor, and gone out, and closed the door.
She heard a small thin sound. It was herself.
"I... I am doing my best," said Grace.
It was the most pitiful sentence in the world. She knew it as she said it. She heard it fall, in the silence, flat, like a coin on a stone.
Sarah looked at her.
It was a long look. It went on for a very long time. And in it, slowly, as water settles in a glass, Grace saw the thing that she had been dreading. It was not hatred. She could have borne hatred. It was not even anger. It was something that came and went in the large dark eyes like a light in a window as a lamp is turned down. It was a letting go.
"I know you are," said Sarah.
It was said with great gentleness.
She picked up the knife. She turned back to the table, and took up a matooke, and began, once more, with quick small strokes, to peel. Her back was to her mother. It was very straight. It did not shake.
"Go to bed, Mama," she said. "It is late."
Grace did not move.
She stood in the arch, in the light of a single bulb, three feet from her daughter's shoulder. She could have touched her. She could have put out a hand and laid it on that thin back. They were so close that she could smell her, the sweet green smell of the fruit, and the faint clean scent of soap in her hair. They were in the same small room. They were breathing the same air.
And she had never in her life been so far from her.
It was like standing on one side of a river, at night, and seeing, on the other bank, a lit window, and a figure moving behind it, and knowing that there was no bridge. She wanted to call out. She did not know what she would say. She stood with her hands pressed to her mouth, and the tears running through her fingers, and watched her child peel a banana, with her back turned, as one watches a stranger in a house one has once lived in.
I should say it.
I should say, I'm sorry. I should say, I believe you. I should say, we are going.
I should say it now.
She did not.
She turned away. She went back down the long dark passage, past the room with the daisy cover, past the bathroom, to the carved bed, where a man lay on his side with his back to the door, breathing slowly, with his hand under his cheek, like a child.
She got in beside him.
She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. In the kitchen, a long way off, a knife went on striking the board, small, steady, regular, patient, like a clock.