Chapter 18
The Mother Who Looked Away
It was her mother who asked to meet, in the end. It took her three weeks to find the nerve.
The message came on a Thursday in the middle of April, by way of Aunt Specioza, who delivered it with an air of strained and wounded dignity, in a long phone call that began, I am only the messenger, and went on for twenty minutes. Sarah listened to the whole of it, on the veranda of Aunt Harriet's house in Masaka, with the phone pressed to her ear and a mug of tea going cold in her other hand. She did not interrupt. When it was over, she said, "Please tell her I will think about it," and put the phone down, and sat for a long time looking at the garden.
She was not the same person as she had been in March.
She could feel it, in small ways, like the first thin shift of a limb coming back after it has been numb. She slept now. Not well, and not for long, but in the dark, with her eyes shut, without the tin or the chair, in a small clean room with two beds and a window onto a pawpaw tree. She woke at three, most nights, with her heart going, and lay there, listening. But the house was quiet. Aunt Harriet's step on the boards was slow and heavy, and always announced itself, with a cough, or a hum, like a person approaching a nervous animal. There was a bolt on the door. It was a good one. It was on the inside, and it was hers.
She ate. She had gained two kilos. Miriam, who came on Saturdays, by taxi, with a loaf of her mother's bread, had stood in the kitchen, and looked her up and down, and said, with deep satisfaction, "You've got a chin."
She went, twice a week, to see a woman called Sister Dorothy.
It was a plain room, in the annexe of a hospital, with a table and two armchairs and a box of tissues. The woman was grey-haired, solid, and patient, in a pale blue cardigan, with a way of waiting that was like a hand held out. She did not say much. She asked questions, now and then, in a low voice, and wrote nothing down. She said, in the second week, "I'd like you to know that you're allowed to feel more than one thing at once." And Sarah, who had been sitting in the chair with her arms folded, staring at a picture of a lake, had begun, quietly, to cry.
More than one thing.
It had been the most useful sentence of her life. She carried it about with her, like a pebble in a pocket. She took it out in the night, when she woke, and held it. I am afraid. And I am relieved. And I'm sorry that he is hurt. And I'm glad that I did it. They did not cancel. They simply sat there, side by side, in her chest, like four animals in one bed.
And I love her. And I cannot be in a room with her.
Both.
"I'll see her," she said, to Ms. Nalwoga, on the Friday.
"You are sure."
"No."
"Then why?"
"Because I need to hear what she says." She was sitting in the little office in Masaka, with a mug of tea, in the afternoon sun. "I've been imagining it for three weeks. In the night. I know all the versions. I have written her speech, and mine. And I do not know which is true."
"They won't be true."
"What?"
"The versions. Nobody has ever said what you imagine." The small advocate smiled, a little ruefully. "It is the one thing that I've learned. Real people never do. They are always worse. Or much more ordinary."
"Will you come?"
"If you wish."
"I'd rather you did not." She thought. "I would rather Aunt Harriet was in the house. In the kitchen. Where she can hear if I shout."
"You may shout."
"I do not think I will."
"Good." Ms. Nalwoga leaned forward. "I'll say one thing. As your lawyer. Not as your friend. You are not obliged to meet her. And nothing you say in that room will be privileged. If she goes back to the Detective Inspector and says, My daughter told me this, it can be used."
"I know."
"Say only what you would be content to hear read out in court."
"I'm not going to say anything that I haven't already said."
"Then you will be fine." She hesitated. "And Sarah."
"Yes?"
"You are allowed to stop. At any moment. You can stand up and walk out. You do not have to wait for her to finish."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I think so." She looked into the tea. "It's a new thing. To be allowed."
She came on Sunday, at three, in a taxi.
It had rained that morning, in a great clean sweeping fall, and the yard of Aunt Harriet's house was still wet. Everything shone. The pawpaw tree dripped. A hen was strutting in the puddles. The sky was washed, enormous, a deep pale blue, with the sun in it like a coin, and the whole garden gave off a thick sweet heady smell of earth and leaves and drying dust. It was the sort of afternoon on which one ought to feel hopeful.
Sarah was sitting on the veranda, in a cane chair, in a clean cotton dress.
She had chosen the dress with care. It was a plain one, in dark blue, with a high neck and long sleeves, that Aunt Harriet had cut down from one of her own. It had no pattern. She had thought about it for an hour. She did not want to be pretty. She did not want to be small. She wanted a thing that would stand up, like a wall, behind which she could sit.
She heard the taxi stop.
She heard the door slam, and the engine drive off, and a pair of shoes on the wet path. They came slowly. They stopped at the foot of the veranda steps. She did not look round at once. She sat still, with her hands on her knees, and her eyes on a pot of geraniums, and counted three.
"Sarah."
"Mama."
"May I come up?"
"Yes."
Her mother came up the three steps. She came slowly, with one hand on the rail, as a woman does who is not sure of her legs. She was in her good grey dress, and she looked, Sarah thought, about ten years older. It was not any one thing. She had not changed her hair. She had not become thin. But something had gone out of the shape of her. She stood on the boards, in the green shade, holding her handbag in both hands, and seemed to have been very slightly folded.
"Sit," said Sarah.
She sat, on the other cane chair, a little away, with her bag on her knees.
For a while neither of them spoke.
The hen strutted. A bee drifted over the geraniums. Somewhere in the house a tap was running, and a woman's voice, very low, was humming. It was a hymn. It was Tukutendereza. It stopped, as if cut with a knife, and a door shut.
"Harriet is a kind woman," said Grace.
"Yes."
"I'm glad that you've been with her."
"So am I."
"Is the room all right?"
"It's very nice."
"And the food?"
"It's fine."
"You've gained weight," said Grace. "I can see it. In your face."
"A little."
"Good." Her voice cracked on the word. She looked at her hands. "I am very glad."
It was the oldest conversation in the world. It was the one they had had in a hundred kitchens. Have you eaten? What did you have? Is it clean? Sarah sat and listened to it go by, quiet and polite and empty, like a procession of well-dressed strangers, and felt the old, soft, terrible tug. It would have been so easy. She could have said, Yes, Mama. I am eating. She could have let it carry her. It was a river, and she knew every bend.
Don't.
Not this time.
"Why did you come, Mama?" she said.
The thin shoulders jerked.
"I... wanted to see you."
"You've seen me."
"I wanted to..." She stopped. She pressed her lips together. She turned her face aside, and looked at the garden, and said, in a different voice, low, and rapid, and strange, "I wanted to explain."
"All right."
"May I?"
"Yes."
"I do not want you to stop me."
"I won't."
"Even if you..." She swallowed. "Even if it's hard."
"I'll listen."
Her mother drew a long breath.
She sat still for a moment, with her hands tight on the clasp of her bag, and her eyes on a place a long way off. And then she began to speak, in a voice that Sarah had never heard her use. It was flat, and slow, and without colour, like the voice of a person reading from a book that she has read many times and does not like.
She told it all.
She told it in order. She had, Sarah saw, thought about it a great deal. She had it laid out, like clothes on a bed. She told her about a village called Bukalagala, and a house with a mud floor, and a small proud farmer with a limp. She told her about a road, and a bundle, and a man in a white shirt who had said, in a voice of sweet reasonable contempt, Mama, a woman without a man is a woman without a roof. She said it exactly. She had kept it for thirty years.
She told her about the doors.
"I stood behind my mother," she said. "In the dust. I was twelve. I was holding your uncle Moses by the hand. He was five. He was crying. He wanted a drink. And I stood there, and I looked at my mother's back." She was staring at the wet path. "It was very straight. It did not move. She did not say a word. And I thought, I will never be her. I will never stand in a road. I'll never go from door to door. I will never ask."
"I know."
"You don't."
"You told me. In the kitchen. Last year. You said you stood in a road."
"I did not tell you all."
"No."
"I did not tell you that I was ashamed." It was barely audible. "That's what I couldn't say. I was ashamed. Of her. Of how she looked. She had a patch on her dress. She kept bowing. She said please to everyone, a hundred times, to every person who shut a door. And I thought, stop it. Stop. Stand up. Don't beg. And I hated her. For a year, I hated her. For being poor."
Sarah did not move.
"And she died," said Grace. "When I was twenty. Of a fever. In a back room, at my aunt's. I came in, and she was lying on a bed, and she looked so small. I had not spoken to her for two weeks. We'd had a quarrel. About a dress. I said that she had embarrassed me, in front of my friends. I said it in the kitchen. And she looked at me." She stopped. "She did not say anything. She just looked. As though she'd been expecting it."
"Mama."
"I have never been able to forgive myself for that."
The sun lay on the floor.
"So when your father died," said Grace, "I thought, It is my turn. It was a kind of... I do not know. A kind of sentence. I stood at the grave, and I thought, Now it is me with the bundle. Now I have to stand in the road. And I looked at you." Her voice cracked. "You were so tall. You were so clever. You had your father's forehead. And I thought, I cannot let it happen to her. I cannot let her stand behind me in the dust and watch my back. I'll do anything. I swore it. In my head. I swore it on the grave."
"I know that you did."
"Then you must see."
"What?"
"That I did it for you." She had turned. Her eyes, very wide and dark, were fixed on Sarah's face, with a kind of terrible pleading. "Every single thing. The marriage. The... the house. I looked at him and I thought, He'll keep her from the road. I did not love him. I never pretended that I did. But he was a roof. He was food. He was a school. And if I had to... if I had to look away from some... some small thing, I thought, It is only for a while. It's only until she finishes. And then she'll be free."
"A small thing."
"I did not mean it like..."
"You said it."
"It was only a way of... of speaking."
"No, Mama." Sarah's voice was very quiet. "It was how you thought."
Her mother stopped.
The hen had wandered off. The garden was very still. A faint breeze stirred the leaves of the pawpaw, and sent a shower of bright drops pattering down on the iron roof of the shed. Sarah sat in her cane chair, with her hands folded, and her back straight, and looked at the woman across from her. She felt perfectly calm. It was a strange, high, cold, crystalline calm, like the air on a hill in the morning, in which every edge is sharp.
"I believe you," she said.
"You do?"
"I believe that you were afraid. I believe all of it. The road. Your mother. The man in the white shirt." She said it slowly. "I've thought about it for three weeks. I think that I can see it. I think I even understand how you got there." She drew a breath. "I would like to say it. So that you do not think that I haven't listened."
Her mother's face had softened. It had begun to open, a little, like a door ajar. A faint, fragile, painful hope was dawning in it.
"But I want to say something else," said Sarah.
"Yes?"
"It doesn't change anything."
The hope stopped.
"It does not change what happened," she said. "Not one night of it. I'm sorry for your mother. I am sorry about the dress. I think it is one of the saddest things I have ever heard." She looked down. Her hands were steady. "But I was fifteen. I was in your house. I told you the truth, in your own bedroom, in words that a child could understand. And you looked at me, and you decided."
"I was frightened."
"Yes."
"I did not know what to do."
"I know." She raised her eyes. "You were afraid of losing the man who fed us. I was afraid of the man who lived with us." Her voice did not shake. "You had the power to protect me, Mama. And I was a child."
It was said very simply.
It fell into the afternoon like a stone into a deep well. For an instant, nothing happened. The leaves dripped. The tap ran, somewhere. And then Sarah saw it reach the bottom. She saw it go into her mother's face, slowly, as a blade goes into water, without a sound, and the whole structure of the thing, the careful, rehearsed, layered, aching structure of explanation, quietly give way.
"I..." said Grace.
Her mouth opened. It stayed open.
"That is not... I did not..."
"You had the power."
"I had nothing."
"You had a voice," said Sarah.
"A voice! What use is a voice? To a woman with no money? No house? No..." She stopped. She flung up a hand. It was trembling. "Do you think I did not think of it? I thought of nothing else! I thought of it every hour! I lay awake! I went to the church, and I prayed, and I said, Show me what to do. And I could not see. There was no... there was nowhere. There was no door."
"There was Aunt Harriet."
"She had four grandchildren."
"She'd have found a bed."
"I could not ask."
"Why not?"
"Because I'd have had to say."
It was a cry. It broke out of her, high and cracked, and echoed across the wet garden. She was on her feet. She had risen without knowing it, and stood, with her bag fallen, and her hands pressed to her mouth.
"I would have had to say it! To her. To anyone. To say the words. My husband. My daughter. I could not. I could not say it! Do you understand? If I said it, it'd be true!"
The silence rang.
Sarah did not move.
"There," she said, softly.
"What?"
"That's the thing." She was looking at her mother. Her eyes were wet. She did not know when that had happened. "That is what it was. Not the money. Not the road." She swallowed. "You could not say it. Because then you would have had to know."
Her mother stood still.
She stood in the green shade of the veranda, with her fists against her face, and her shoulders drawn up, and her whole body rigid, and made no sound. She did not speak. She did not cry. She stood there, and Sarah saw, on her face, as on the face of a clock, the slow terrible turning of a hand.
She is going to say it.
She is going to say it now.
"Mama?"
A long breath went out of her.
"I knew," said Grace.
It was the smallest sound.
It was a whisper. It was a crack in a dry throat. It came out of her mouth like a thing that has been held there for so long that it has lost its shape, and falls out, crumpled and damp, onto the floor. It was only two words. She said it to the boards. She did not lift her head.
"I knew."
Sarah did not breathe.
"I knew," said Grace again. She had put her hands down. She was staring at them, at her own two hands, hanging open, as if they belonged to someone else. "I knew in the bedroom. I knew when you said it. I knew in a second, in the first sentence, before you'd finished. I heard it and I knew that it was true. And I thought..." Her voice broke. "I thought, Oh, God. What have I done?"
"You said, what do you mean, touched?"
"I was trying to... to find a way..."
"You said it was a misunderstanding."
"I know."
"You said I had a dream."
"I know." It was a whisper. "I know what I said."
"You told Ms. Namusoke that you had never been told."
"Yes."
"You told the police."
"Yes."
"You told them three weeks ago, on a bench."
"I said that you'd had a bad dream." She shut her eyes. "I heard myself. I heard it come out of my mouth. And I thought, This is the lie. This is the one that I have been telling. For three years. It has been in my mouth all this time." A tear ran down her face, and fell on her dress. "I did not know I was going to say it. It simply came. It was the only thing I had. It was like a... like a coat that I put on every morning."
Sarah sat still.
She looked at her mother. She looked at the thin grey figure in the doorway of the afternoon, with its hands open, and its eyes shut, and its face wet. She had waited for this. She had waited for it, in some form, for three and a half years. She had imagined it in the dark. She had thought that when it came it would feel like a door opening. She had thought that she would feel the whole of the house fall in, the roof and the walls and the weight, and the sky come in.
She did not feel it.
What she felt was something much smaller, and much colder, and much worse. It was a sort of grey dull weary sorrow. It was the feeling of a person who has been looking for something for a very long time, and finds it at last, and sees that it is smaller than she thought, and cracked, and of no use.
"Why?" said Sarah.
Her voice sounded strange.
"Why did you do it? If you knew?"
"Because..."
"Because of the road?"
"Yes."
"Because of the money?"
"Yes. And..." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "And because I was weak. Because I'm a coward. Because I'd looked, once, at the whole of it, and I could not bear it, and I thought, If I look away, I will not have to carry it." It came out in a rush. "That's all. That's the whole of it. It isn't a good reason. It's no reason at all. I know that. I knew it then. I'd go into the kitchen and I'd look at you, at the table, doing your homework, and think, She is being so brave. And I thought, She'll be all right. She is strong. She is like her father." Her face crumpled. "I told myself that you were strong, so that I would not have to be."
The words hung in the air.
It was an astonishing thing to hear. It was so plain. It was so mean, and so small, and so entirely human, that Sarah felt, for an instant, something that was almost pity. She saw it. She saw the whole shape of it, like a map. She saw a woman at a stove, in a green dress, with a spatula, at six o'clock in the morning, looking at the back of a tall thin girl, and thinking, She's strong. It was a kind of prayer. It was the oldest prayer in the world, said by people on the edge of a cliff. Let someone else be strong.
And I was.
I was strong, because I had no choice.
And you used it.
"You used my courage," said Sarah. "To avoid using yours."
It was not an accusation. It was an observation, quiet and clear and entirely level. It was simply the truth, laid on the table, like an exhibit.
Her mother flinched as if she had been struck.
"Yes," she said.
"For three and a half years."
"Yes."
"And you let me go on."
"Yes."
"Every night."
"Yes!" It was a moan. She had sunk back into the chair, and covered her face, and begun to rock. "Yes. Yes. God forgive me. Yes. I let you. I heard the... I heard the footsteps. I lay beside him in the bed, and I heard him get up. I heard the slippers. I knew where he was going. And I lay there, with my eyes shut, and I said, It's the toilet. It is only the toilet. I said it to myself, over and over, like a... like a rosary." She was sobbing. "And in the morning you came to breakfast. And your face was so white. And I gave you tea."
"You gave me tea."
"I put in the sugar. So that you would not have to stir."
It was the cruellest thing she could have said.
It was cruel because it was true. It was cruel because it was tender. Sarah sat, with her hands locked in her lap, and her face white, and the old mean small unbearable love went through her like a knife. She saw it. She saw a thin hand putting a spoon of sugar into a cup, in a bright kitchen, in the morning, with such care. She saw the small private patient gesture of a woman who has no other way of saying that she is sorry.
She did love me.
She loved me the whole time.
And she put in the sugar.
And it did not help.
"I know that you did," said Sarah, quietly.
Her mother lifted her head.
"I knew it was you. I thought, She's remembered that I do not like to stir. I used to sit there, and drink it, and I'd think, She knows. I thought that it was a sign." She drew a breath. "I used to think that it meant that you were going to do something. That you were working up to it. That one morning you'd say, Come, we're leaving." Her voice trembled. "I waited for it. For three years. Every day. I looked at you over the cup."
"Sarah..."
"It never came."
"I was going to."
"When?"
"I do not... I meant to. I meant... when you finished school." She was shaking her head, helplessly. "I thought, a little longer. I thought, just till the exams. And then it was another term. And another." She wiped her face on her sleeve. "It was never the right time."
"There's never a right time, Mama."
"I know."
"That is the whole point."
"I know."
"Tomorrow," said Sarah. "It's always tomorrow. I did it too. For years. I will tell. I'll leave. I'll do it when I'm ready." She almost laughed. "It's the most dangerous word in the language."
Her mother stared at her.
She sat still, with her wet face, and her wild eyes, like a person who has been struck by something she does not understand. And Sarah, looking at her, saw, with a distant, grave tenderness, that she had said it wrongly. She had spoken as if she were an equal. She had talked as one adult talks to another, across a table, with a certain weary kindness. And she was not. She was eighteen. She was a girl. And the woman in front of her was her mother.
I should not have to do this.
I should not have to be the one who says it gently.
The thought came up in her, clean and angry and without doubt. It was the first real anger that she had felt, in that long afternoon, and it was a relief. It was like the first stir of blood in a frozen hand.
"I'm not going to make this easy for you," she said.
Grace looked up.
"I want you to know that. I'm not going to say, It's all right. I'm not going to say, I understand. I do understand. It is not the same as it being all right." She had risen. She stood with her back to the geraniums, in her plain blue dress, tall and straight, with her hands at her sides. "I'm not going to take your guilt from you. I'm not going to say, Don't cry, Mama. I'm not going to put my arms round you and tell you that you did your best."
"I don't expect..."
"You didn't do your best."
"No."
"You did the easiest thing."
"Yes."
"And I paid for it."
"Yes," said Grace. It was a gasp. "Yes. You did. I know that you did. I'll know it every day. Every day that I live." She was sobbing openly now, bent over, with her arms wrapped round her stomach. "I can't give it back. I can't undo a single... I can't give you back one night. Oh, God. Sarah. I do not know what I'm supposed to say. I do not know how to say I'm sorry. It isn't a big enough word."
"It's not."
"What would be?"
"I don't know."
"Tell me."
"I don't know," said Sarah.
It was almost a shout. It rang off the iron roof. She stood there, shaking, with her fists clenched, and her heart pounding, and heard the sound of her own voice go out over the garden, loud and raw and cracked, and was astonished. She had not raised it in her life. She had not dared. She stood and listened to it fade, and the sky did not fall.
I shouted, she thought. I shouted at my mother.
And I'm still standing.
She drew a long slow breath.
"I do not know what would be big enough," she said, in a lower voice. "I do not think there is a word. I think... I think it might be a thing that takes years. That you do. Not say." She was shaking. "I cannot tell you what. I'm not the one who has to work it out. It isn't my job."
"No."
"I'm not going to hold your hand through this."
"I wouldn't ask."
"Good."
"I only wanted..." Grace lifted her face. It was ravaged. It was grey, and swollen, and old, and utterly naked. "I only wanted you to know that I know. That I'm not going to say it was a dream. Not any more. I'll tell them. The Detective Inspector. The court. Whoever asks." Her voice broke. "I will say that you told me. And that I did nothing. I'll say it in front of Peter."
Sarah looked at her.
It was the most important thing that she had said. She knew it. She knew that it was no small thing, for a woman who had sat in a house for three and a half years, with her eyes shut, to say, I will say it in front of him. It was a step off a cliff. It would cost her everything that she had been so afraid to lose. And she stood there, on a wet veranda, with her hands hanging, and her bag on the floor, and she said it.
It is something.
It's something real.
It is not enough.
She held the two thoughts in her head, side by side, as Sister Dorothy had taught her, and found, to her surprise, that she could. They did not fight. They lay there together, still, like two stones.
"Thank you," she said.
"Do not thank me."
"I am not thanking you for the past." She said it carefully. "I'm thanking you for the court. It will matter. It will help." She paused. "It won't change what I feel."
"I know."
"I don't know what I feel."
"I know."
"I think that I'm very angry. And I think that I love you. And I think that I'm so tired that I could lie down on this floor." She smiled, a small cracked smile. "I cannot sort it out. Not today. Maybe not for a long time."
Her mother nodded.
She did it slowly. It was the nod of a woman who has been told the sentence, and finds, with a dreadful relief, that it is no worse than she expected.
"Will you let me see you?" she said.
"Sometimes."
"Where?"
"Here. Or at Ms. Nalwoga's office. Somewhere that is not a house." She looked out at the garden. "I'm not ready to be in your house. Or anywhere with a... with a door that doesn't lock. I do not know if I'll ever be."
"I understand."
"I'm not saying never."
"I know."
"I'm only saying, not yet." She turned. "Being your daughter does not mean that I have to pretend. I can't pretend any more, Mama. I am done with it. I have done it for three and a half years, and I have no more pretending in me."
"I would not ask you to."
"Then we might manage."
"We might."
"We might not."
"Yes." A faint, wet, broken smile. "We might not."
It was an absurd thing to find funny. But Sarah felt it, rising in her, low and strange, and she looked at her mother's face, with the tears running through the smile, and it cracked. A small breath of laughter went out of her. It was not mirth. It was only a kind of release, like the sigh of a pot taken off a fire.
"You look terrible," she said.
"I know."
"You've not been sleeping."
"Not since March."
"Eat something. I'll ask Auntie to... there's a pot of beans."
"I could not."
"Mama."
"A little." She almost laughed. "A very little."
They stood, a yard apart, on the veranda, in the green wet light, and looked at one another. It was a long look. It was a look that took in everything, the wet face, the clenched hands, the dress, the bag lying on the boards, the geraniums, the drip of the roof. It had no forgiveness in it. It had no resolution. It had no ending. It was simply two people looking, honestly, for the first time, at what lay between them, across a very wide river.
There is no bridge, thought Sarah.
There might be, one day. If both of us build.
But it will not be built today.
And she turned, and went to the door, and called, in a clear voice, into the cool dark of the house, "Auntie? Is the tea hot? There are two of us."
It was the first time that she had said us in that sentence, and meant a mother, since a January evening in a house in Kasaana, with a cake. She heard it go out, small and flat and ordinary, into the afternoon, and thought, Well.
That is a start.
It's all it is.
But it's a start.