Chapter 3
A House That No Longer Felt Like Mine
They were married on the last Saturday of August, in a small brown church in Lwanda, and Sarah wore the dress that her mother had chosen.
It was a pale yellow one, with a round collar, bought in the market by Aunt Specioza for thirty-five thousand shillings and altered on the spot by a tailor who held pins in his mouth. It was a nice dress. It fitted. She stood in front of the cracked mirror on the morning of the wedding and looked at a thin tall girl in a yellow frock with her hair pressed and her hands hanging, and thought that she looked like somebody's idea of a bridesmaid.
"Smile," said her mother.
"I am smiling."
"With your face."
She made her face smile. Grace, in a cream suit and a small hat, with a spray of white flowers pinned to her lapel, looked at her for a moment with a strange helpless tenderness, and reached out and straightened the collar, and said, very low, "I know. I know it is hard. I only ask that you try."
"I'm trying."
"For me."
"I said I am trying, Mama."
It was a short ceremony. There were about forty people. They sat in the plain wooden pews of St. Luke's, with its green paint peeling and its tin roof ticking in the heat, in their best clothes, fanning themselves with programmes. Aunt Specioza had cried from the first note of the hymn. Uncle Edward, in a black suit, sat at the back with his arms folded and an expression of dignified disapproval, as one who has been robbed and is too well-bred to say so. Aunt Harriet had come from Masaka. She sat in the third row with her handbag on her knees, very upright and silent, and when Sarah looked round she caught her eye, and Aunt Harriet gave a small tight nod, and no smile at all.
At the front, in a dark suit, stood Peter.
He looked magnificent. That was what people said afterward, in low warm voices, in the compound, over soda and meat. What a handsome couple. What a lucky woman. He stood with his head bent, very straight, with his hands folded in front of him, and when her mother came up the aisle on the arm of Aunt Specioza's husband, he lifted his eyes and looked at her with such plain, grave, naked tenderness that half the women in the church put their hands to their mouths.
"Do you, Peter Ssemanda, take this woman..."
"I do."
His voice rang out in the little church, deep and clear, without hurry. It was the voice of a man who meant every word.
I do.
Sarah stood in the front pew in her yellow dress, and watched her mother's face. It was lit from within. It was the face of a girl. It had not been that face, she thought, since the day that Taata came up the path with a cake. And she felt something rise in her chest that she could not name, a great confused swell of love and grief, and she did not know whom for. For her mother, perhaps, who was so happy. For her father, who was under a hill. For herself, standing between them, in the wrong dress, in the right place, not knowing where to put her hands.
It is all right, she told herself. Look. She is happy. This is good.
This is what it is supposed to look like.
"I now pronounce you," said the pastor.
There was a great rustle. The women began to ululate, a high bright trembling cry that went up into the iron roof and rang there. The men clapped. And Peter, turning to his bride, with a smile of gentle triumph, bent and kissed her on the cheek, and then, straightening, searched the pews with his eyes, until they found Sarah. He held out one hand. He beckoned.
She did not move.
"Go," whispered Aunt Harriet, behind her.
"No."
"Child. Everyone is looking."
She went.
She walked up to the front, in the yellow dress, in the glare of forty people's eyes, and he put an arm round her shoulders. It was a heavy, warm, firm arm. He turned her gently to face the congregation. And he said, in a voice that carried to the back of the church, with a small catch in it that brought a murmur of sympathy:
"I did not only marry a wife today. I have been given a daughter."
The church sighed.
Sarah stood within the circle of his arm, and smiled with her face, and felt, along the length of her back, where his hand rested, a stillness so complete that it was like being held by a stone.
The house was on Kitende Close, at the top of the town.
It was a good house. Everyone said so. It stood in the middle of a walled compound, behind an iron gate painted green, with a mango tree in the corner and a tidy patch of lawn and a row of roses along the path. It had four rooms and a veranda, a tiled floor, glass in the windows, and a proper bathroom with a tap, which ran with water at the turn of a handle, hot, if you lit the heater, and for the first time in her life, Sarah stood under a shower and let it run over her head, and wept.
She did not know why. It was only water.
There was a kitchen, a separate block, at the back, with a gas ring and a sink and a back door that opened on the yard. There was a sitting room with a settee and a glass-fronted cabinet full of china. There was a master bedroom, at the front, with the carved bed. And at the end of the passage, beside the kitchen block, in a corner of the house that had once been a store, there was a very small room with a window, and a bed, and a cupboard, and a lamp on a table.
"This is yours," said Peter.
He had shown her himself. He had led her through the house on the day they moved, on the first of September, a Sunday, with her mother walking ahead with her hands clasped, exclaiming. He had opened every door. He had said, Here is the sitting room, here is the bathroom, here is the place for the television, with an air of tender pride, and she had followed, behind him, carrying her school bag and a cardboard box. And at the last door he had stopped, and turned the handle, and stood back, and smiled.
"I prepared it myself. I painted it."
It was white. It smelled of fresh paint. It was very clean, and very bare, and the bed had a pink cover with a pattern of daisies, which she thought, with a flicker of misery, must have been bought for a child. On the table, in a vase, was a bunch of yellow flowers.
"It's lovely."
"Is it all right? I did not know what you would like." His face was anxious. "I can change it. If you want blue."
"No. It's perfect."
"Good. I am glad." He put his hand on the doorframe. "I want you to feel at home. This is your house, too. I mean it. You are not a guest."
"Thank you."
"And you must never call me Mr. Ssemanda. I'd like to be..." He hesitated, and smiled, with a little embarrassed shrug. "Well. Not Taata. I would not ask that. Nobody can replace your father. But perhaps Uncle. Or Peter. As you like."
"Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Okay, Peter."
"Good girl." He patted the frame, twice. "Now. Unpack. And come and eat. Your mother has made a feast."
She stood in the doorway for a moment after he had gone.
It was a small room. It was not much bigger than a cupboard. But it had four walls, and a window, and a bed. She put down her box on the floor. She looked at the daisies, and the flowers, and the new white paint. And she thought of the room in Kasaana, behind a curtain, with a child's courtroom on the wall, and a small flat stone on the shelf, and a smell of old smoke.
I am going to be happy here, she told herself.
She said it firmly, as one tells a lie to a child. She said it twice.
And she turned, to shut the door, and noticed what was missing.
There was no bolt.
It was an ordinary wooden door, with a handle. It had a keyhole, empty, with no key. But where a bolt would have been, on the inside, at shoulder height, there was a row of four small neat holes in the wood, plugged with filler, and painted over. You could see them if you looked. They were like the marks of stitches on a healed cut.
She ran a finger across them.
It's nothing. There would have been a reason. A latch that was broken. A bolt that was too old. He had painted the door himself, he had said. He would have taken it off to paint, and forgotten to put it back.
I'll ask him.
She did not. She was fifteen, and she was a guest, and she was afraid of being rude.
It began with small things.
That was what she would say, afterward, to the woman with the notebook, in a plain room with a box of tissues on the table, in the voice of someone describing a long illness. It began with very small things. She would say it slowly, looking at her hands. I did not know it was beginning. I thought it was only how he was.
The first was the rules.
There were a great many of them, and they appeared gradually, one after another, like stones coming up out of a ploughed field. She was to be home by five, from school. Not five-fifteen. Five. She was not to have friends in the house. She was not to go to anybody's home without asking. She was not to wear her school skirt rolled at the waist, or her hair loose, or her sleeves above the elbow, in the house, because a girl should know how to present herself. She was not to answer back. She was not to sulk. She was not to leave a plate unwashed in the sink, or a light burning in an empty room, because electricity, he said, did not grow on trees.
"It costs," said Peter, mildly. "Everything costs. And somebody must pay."
"I know."
"Do you? You've never had to."
"I'm sorry."
"You need not be sorry. You need only be careful." He was sitting at the head of the table in his vest, with a newspaper, in the evening, with her mother putting a plate in front of him. "I am not complaining. I'm teaching. A girl who is not taught will be a fool. And I would be a poor father if I let you grow up a fool."
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"Yes, Peter."
"Good." He turned a page. "Sit. Eat."
It sounded reasonable. That was the trouble with it. Every single thing he said, on its own, in his warm slow voice, sounded reasonable, even kind. It was what a careful man would say to a young girl in a new house. And her mother, passing the salt, smiled with relief, and said, "You see? He is only strict," and Sarah, who had grown up in a house where the rules were shouted from the veranda and broken ten times a day, looked down at her plate and thought, Maybe this is what a proper house is.
It was only the other things that she could not explain.
He would be in the passage when she came out of her room. He did not appear to have been waiting. He would be reading a letter, or looking at the clock, or hanging up a coat. But when she opened the door, he was there, a heavy shape, between her and the light, and she had to say, Excuse me, and he had to move. He moved a little. Not enough. She learned to turn her shoulder, and go through sideways.
He would call her to come and sit with him, in the sitting room, on the settee, in the evening, after supper. He would say, Come, my daughter, come and talk to me, in a kind voice, and pat the cushion. When she sat at the other end, he would shift. It was nothing. It was the movement of a big man getting comfortable. He would be a little nearer. And a little nearer. And if she moved, he would say, with a gentle puzzled smile, "What is it? Am I frightening you?" and she would say, "No," and sit very still.
He would put a hand on her shoulder.
That was all. A hand on her shoulder, when she was bending over her books, at the table, in the evening. Warm and broad and heavy. He would say, How is the work going? or You are doing well, in a voice of such quiet approval that she could hear her mother in the kitchen stop humming to listen. And the hand would stay. It would stay there while he looked at her page. It would stay a very long time. And then it would move, slightly, as one adjusts a thing that does not sit straight, and she would sit with her pencil frozen above the paper and her whole back turned to wood.
It is only a father's hand, she thought.
It is what fathers do.
But her father had not done it. She knew that. She knew it with a small sick certainty that she would not look at. Her father had touched her shoulder perhaps three times in her life, quickly, at moments of great pride, as one brushes a fly. He had said, with a wave, Well done, Counsel, from the other side of the room.
He was different. He was shy.
This is only a different kind of man.
She tried, once, to say something.
It was in the second week of September. She had come in from school at five, on the dot, with her bag on her shoulder, and found the house quiet. Her mother was at the nursery, on a late shift. Peter was in the sitting room. He was on the settee, in his socks, with a glass of beer, and the television on, and he had looked round when she came in, and said, "There she is," in a voice that was a little thick.
"Good evening."
"Come and sit."
"I have to wash."
"Come and sit for a minute. It's quiet." He patted the cushion. "I never get to speak to you. You are always in your room."
"I have homework."
"On a Friday?"
"It's Tuesday."
"Ah." He laughed. It was not a loud laugh. It was a little slow. "You are so serious. You should relax. You are becoming..." He looked at her, up and down, with his head on one side, and she saw the quick wet gleam of his eyes in the blue light of the screen. "Well. You're not a child any more, are you?"
She did not answer.
It was a strange sentence. It was an ordinary one. It hung in the air of the room, among the china in the cabinet and the hum of the television, like a smell. She stood in the doorway with the strap of her bag in her fist and felt her mouth go dry.
"I am fifteen," she said.
"Of course."
"I have to wash."
"Of course you do." He smiled. "Go on. I'm only joking. You must not be so..." A little flourish with the glass. "Stiff. It's not good for a girl."
She went.
She walked down the passage, to the bathroom, and went in, and shut the door. There was a handle, and a latch, a small brass one, on the inside. She slid it across. It was loose, and it did not seat in the catch, and it clicked, and she held her breath, and looked at it.
It is only a latch.
She turned on the tap. She stood with her hands under the running water, and her head down, and her heart going so hard that she could feel it in her teeth.
What did I think?
What did I think he was going to do?
She did not know. That was the whole of it. There was nothing to say. She turned it over and over in her mind, in the steam, in the sound of the water, and there was nothing there, no act, no word, no touch, that she could put on the table and say, Look. This. There was only a feeling. It was a feeling like standing in a field on a hot afternoon, when the air goes still and yellow, and the birds stop, and the whole sky seems to be listening.
I am imagining it.
I am being silly.
He is my mother's husband.
She dried her hands. She went out.
"Mama," she said, that night, in the kitchen.
It was after ten. They were alone. Peter had gone to bed with a headache, and the house was dark, but for the light over the sink. Her mother was washing the last of the plates, in a basin, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She had a pleasant tired flush on her face. She was humming, a hymn, very low.
"Mm?"
"Can I ask something?"
"Of course."
"Does Peter... does he mind that I... that I'm..."
"That you're what?"
"That I'm here."
Her mother put down the plate. She turned, drying her hands on her apron, with a puzzled frown. "What kind of question is that?"
"I don't know. I just..."
"He adores you. You see how he is. He talks about you all the time." She smiled. "He says you have a very good mind."
"He says other things."
"Like what?"
"He... he says I'm not a child any more."
"Well. You are not."
"But the way he says it."
"What way?"
She opened her mouth.
The light hummed overhead. A moth was tapping on the window. Her mother stood with her hands in her apron, looking at her, with her head on one side, tired, and kind, and a little confused, in the plain yellow light, with a smear of soap on her cheek. She looked so happy. It had been four months since Sarah had seen her look like that. She looked like a person who has been climbing a long steep hill for a very long time, and has at last, with her whole body aching, come up onto a flat place, and sat down, and is looking at the view.
If I say it, she will not be happy any more.
It was a very simple thought. It came to her whole, like a stone in the hand. She looked at her mother's face. She thought of a sewing machine on the back of a boda boda. She thought of a slip of white paper. She thought, If I say it, and it is nothing, I will have broken this.
"Nothing," said Sarah.
"Nothing?"
"I'm tired."
"Ah." Her mother's face cleared. "You are tired. Of course you are. It is a new house. It takes a while." She came across the kitchen and put a damp hand on Sarah's cheek. It smelled of soap and onions. "Be patient with him, Sarah. He is trying so hard. He is a man who has been alone for a long time. He is not used to a young person in the house." A small pause. "And he is paying for all this, you know. For the school. For the roof. We must be grateful."
"I know."
"Be grateful. That is all I ask. And respectful."
"I am respectful."
"Yes." She patted the cheek. "Yes, you are. You are a good girl. Go to bed."
She went.
She lay in the small white room, in the dark, on the daisy cover, with the new smell of paint in her nose. The window was open a crack. She could hear the crickets, and a dog barking in the valley, and the far-off hum of a lorry on the trunk road. She could hear, through the wall, the house settle. A tap dripped. A board creaked. Somewhere in the front of the house a door opened, and a pair of slippers went flat and slow along the passage, and stopped.
She lay without moving.
The slippers did not go on. They did not return. They stood, a long way off, at the other end of the house, outside a door that was not hers, and after a time a toilet flushed, and the slippers went back the way they had come.
She breathed out.
She had not known she was holding it. She lay there with her eyes open in the dark, looking at the ceiling, and her hands, on the cover, were curled, tight, into two small hard fists.
I am being silly.
She turned her face toward the wall.
There, on the shelf above the bed, in the light of the one bar of moon that came through the window, she could see the small flat grey stone from the stream at the bottom of the hill. She had unpacked it herself. She had put it next to the photograph, the little one in a tin frame, of a thin tall man in a crooked tie, laughing at something outside the picture. She looked at it for a long time.
Taata, she thought.
She did not say anything else. She did not know what she would have said. She lay there, in a house that smelled of paint, in a room with no bolt, in the dark, and thought of a hymn, humming up a slope, hunting for a note it had lost. And for the first time since a Sunday in February, soundlessly, she began to cry.
She stopped almost at once.
She put the cover over her mouth, so that no sound would carry.
It was a lesson. It was only the first. She would have to learn it a great many more times, in a great many more nights, until it was as easy as breathing. But she had learned, that evening, the thing it would take her three years to unlearn.
Make no sound.
Whatever happens.
Make no sound at all.