that the marriage that had looked good to Ana's father in Portugal looked less good in Africa, and he had become full of resentment.
Ana knew the stories that were told about her father. She said, when we began to talk about these things, “It was true, what they said. But it was only part of the truth. I suppose when he was in Portugal he thought, apart from everything else, apart from the money, I mean, that it would help him, going out in a privileged way to the new country. But he wasn't made for the bush. He was never an active man, and his energy level fell when he came here. The less he did, the more he hid in his room, the lower his energy fell. He felt no anger for me or my mother or my grandfather. He was just passive. He hated being asked to do very simple things. I remember how his face would twist with pain and anger. He really was someone who needed help. As a child I thought of him as a sick man and his bedroom as a sickroom. It made my childhood here very unhappy. As a child I used to think, about my father and my mother, ‘These people don't know that I'm a person, too, that I too need help. I'm not a toy they just happened to make.'”
In time Ana's parents began to live separate lives. Her mother lived in the family house in the capital, looking after Ana while she was at the convent school there. And for many years no one outside the family knew that anything was wrong. It was the pattern in colonial days: the wife in the capital or one of the coastal towns looking after the education of the children, the husband looking after the estate. Usually, because of this repeated separation, husbands began to live with African women and have African families. But the other thing happened here: Ana's mother took a lover in the capital, a mixed-race man, a civil servant, high up in the customs, but still only a civil servant. The affair went on and on. It became common knowledge. Ana's grandfather, near the end of his life now, felt mocked. He blamed Ana's mother for the bad marriage and everything else. He felt her African blood had taken over. Just before he died he changed his will. He gave to Ana what he had intended to give to her mother.
Ana was now at a language school in England. She said, “I wanted to break out of the Portuguese language. I feel it was that that had made my grandfather such a limited man. He had no true idea of the world. All he could think of was Portugal and Portuguese Africa and Goa and Brazil. In his mind, because of the Portuguese language, all the rest of the world had been strained away. And I didn't want to learn South African English, which is what people learn here. I wanted to learn English English.”
It was while she was at the language school in Oxford that her father disappeared. He left the estate house one day and never came back. And he had taken a fair amount of the estate with him. He had used some legal loophole and had mortgaged away half of Ana's estate, including the family house in the capital. There was no question of Ana paying back the money he had raised; so everything that was mortgaged to the banks went to the banks. It was as though the overseers and everybody else who for more than twenty years had doubted her father had in the end proved right. That was when she had called her mother and her lover to live on the estate. She joined them after the language school, and there had been happy times until one night the lover had tried to get into the big carved bed with her.
She said, “But I told you that in London, in a disguised way.”
She still loved her father. She said, “I suppose he always knew what he was doing. I suppose he always had some kind of plan like that. It would have taken a lot of planning, what he did. There would have been many trips to the capital, and many meetings with lawyers and the banks. But his illness was also real. The low energy, the helplessness. And he loved me. I never doubted that. Just before I met you I went to see him in Portugal. That was where he ended up. He had tried South Africa first, but that was too hard for him. He didn't like doing everything in a foreign language. He could have gone to Brazil, but he was too frightened. So he went back to Portugal. He was living in Coimbra. In a little flat in a modern block. Nothing too grand. But he was still living off the mortgage money. So in a way you could say he had struck gold. He was living alone. There was no sign of a woman's hand in the flat. It was all so sparse and bare it clutched at my heart. He was very affectionate, but in a dead kind of way. At one stage he asked me to go to the bedroom to get some medicine for him from his bedside table, and when I went and opened the drawer I saw an old Kodak 620 snapshot of myself as a girl. I thought I was going to break down. But then I thought, ‘He's planned this.' I pulled myself together, and when I went back to him I was careful to let nothing show on my face. He called one of the two bedrooms his studio. I was puzzled by that, but it turned out that he had begun to do little modern sculptures in bronze, little figures of half-horses and half-birds and half-other things, one side green and rough, one side highly polished. I actually loved what he did. He said it took him two or three months to do a piece. He gave me a little hawk he'd done. I put it in my bag and every day I would take it out and hold it, feeling the shine and the rough. I actually thought for two or three weeks that he was an artist, and I was very proud. I thought that he had done everything he had done because he was an artist. Then I began to see bronze pieces like his everywhere. It was souvenir stuff. The work he was doing in his studio was part of his idleness. I felt ashamed of myself, for thinking that he might have been an artist, and for not pressing him more. Asking the questions I should have asked him. That was just before I met you. I think you will see now why your stories spoke to me. All the bluff, the make-believe, with the real unhappiness. It was uncanny. It was why I wrote.”
She had never been so explicit about the stories, and it worried me to think that I might have given away more of myself than I knew, and that she had probably always known who and what I was. I didn't have a copy of the book; I had wished to leave all that behind. Ana still had her copy. But I was unwilling to look at it, nervous of what I might find.
I had brought very little with me in the way of papers. I had two exercise books with stories and sketches I had done at the mission school at home. I had some letters of Roger's in his lovely educated handwriting; for some reason I hadn't wanted to throw them away. And I had my Indian passport and two five-pound notes. I thought of that as my get-away money. Ana had taken me as a pauper, and it was as though from the very beginning I knew I would one day have to leave. Ten pounds wouldn't have got me far; but it was all the spare money I had in London; and in the corner of my mind where with some kind of ancestral caution I had made this half-plan or quarter-plan I thought it would at least get me started. The ten pounds and the passport and the other things were in an old brown envelope in the bottom drawer of a heavy bureau in the bedroom.
One day I couldn't find that envelope. I asked the house people; Ana asked. But no one had seen anything or had anything to say. The loss of the passport worried me more than everything else. Without my passport I didn't see how I could prove to any official in Africa or England or India who I was. It was all right for Ana to say that I should write home for another passport. Her idea of bureaucracy was of a strict, impartial thing, grinding slowly, but grinding. I knew the ways of our offices—easy for me to re-create in my mind's eye: the pea-green walls shiny with grime at the levels of head and shoulders and bottom, the rough carpentry of counters and cashiers' cages, the floor black with dirt, the
Ana said one morning, “I've been talking to the cook. She thinks we should go to a fetish-man. There is a very famous one twenty or thirty miles from here. He is known in all the villages. I've asked the cook to call him.”
I said, “Who do you think would want to steal a passport and old letters?”
