in Portugal, and she had sold at the top. Estate prices, which had been falling because of the guerrilla war in the north and west, had risen again, in an irrational way, because certain influential people in Lisbon had begun to say that the government and the guerrillas were about to come to an agreement.
So Luis and Graca were going to be on the move again. The property company wanted the estate house for their own directors when they came out “on tour” (the company apparently believed that the colonial order, and colonial style, were going to continue after the war). But things were not all bad for Luis and Graca. The company wanted Luis to stay on as estate manager. They were going to build a new house for him on a two-acre plot; and after a few years Luis would be able to buy the house on easy terms. Until the house was built Luis and Graca would continue to live in the estate house. It was part of the deal Carla had made with the company. So Ana was both right and wrong. Carla had (in a small way) used Luis and Graca to add to her fortune, but she had not forgotten her school friend. Graca was very happy. Since she had left home she had never had a house of her own. It was what she had dreamt about for years, the house and the garden and the fruit trees and the animals. She had begun to think it would never come, but now in a roundabout way it had.
Very soon after the sale the property company, doing things in its grand way, sent out an architect from the capital to build Graca's house. She could scarcely believe her luck. An architect, and from Portugal! He stayed in one of the guest rooms in the estate house. His name was Gouveia. He was informal and metropolitan and stylish, and he made everyone in our area seem old-fashioned. He wore very tight jeans that made him look a little heavy and soft; but we didn't think of criticising. He was in his thirties, and everybody in the estate-house circle fawned on him. He began to come to our Sunday lunches. We assumed that because he came from Portugal and was working for the property company, which was buying up old estates, gambling on the past continuing, we assumed that he would speak against the guerrillas. But he did the other thing. He spoke with relish of the blood to come, almost in the way Jacinto Correia used to talk in the old days. We decided he was a white man pretending to be a black man. It was a type we were just beginning to get in the colony, playboy figures, well-to-do, full Portuguese, people like Gouveia, in fact, who could cut and run or look after themselves if there was any real trouble.
After a week or so word got around that Gouveia had a liaison with an African woman in the capital. As always when new people came it was as though somebody was doing research, and in the next few days we began to hear stories about this woman. One story was that she had gone with Gouveia to Portugal, but had refused to do any housework because she didn't want people in Portugal to think she was a servant. Other stories were about her servants in the capital. In one story the servants were always quarrelling with her because she was an African and they had no regard for her. In another story somebody asked her why she was so hard on her servants, and she said she was an African and knew how to deal with Africans. The stories sounded made-up; they looked back to the past, and no one really believed them or found comfort in them; but they did the rounds. And then the woman came from the capital to be with Gouveia for a few days, and he brought her to the Sunday lunch. She was perfectly ordinary, blank-faced, assessing, self-contained and silent, a village woman transported to the town. After a while we saw that she was pregnant, and then we were all ourselves like mice. Afterwards somebody said, “You know why he is doing that, don't you? He wants to curry favour with the guerrillas. He feels that if he has an African woman with him when they come they won't kill him.”
We made love in the house, Graca and I, as it was being built. She said, “We must christen all the rooms.” And we did. We carried away the smell of planed wood and sawdust and new concrete. But other people were also attracted to the new house. One day, hearing talk, we looked out of a half-made wall and saw some children, innocent, experienced, frightened to see us. Graca said, “Now we have no secrets.”
One day we found Gouveia. I could see in his dark shining eyes that he had read our purpose. He explained in a showing-off way what he was aiming to do with Graca's house. Then he said, “But I want to live in the German Castle. Houses have their destiny, and the destiny of the Castle is that it shall belong to me. I'll do it up in the most fabulous way, and when the revolution comes I'll move there.” I thought of the house and the view and the German and the snakes and he said, “Don't look so frightened, Willie. I'm only quoting
Early one night, when the lights were still jumping, Ana came to my room. She was distressed. She was in her short nightdress that emphasised her smallness and the fineness of her bones.
She said, “Willie, this is so terrible I don't know how I can talk about it. There's excrement on my bed. I discovered it just now. It's Julio's daughter. Come and help with the sheets. Come and let's burn everything.”
We went to the big carved bed and stripped it fast. The lights blinked; and Ana became more and more distressed. She said, “I feel so dirty. I feel I have to bathe and bathe.”
I said, “Go and have a shower. I'll burn the sheets.”
I took the great bundle down to the dead part of the garden. I poured gasoline on it and threw a match at it from a distance. The flame roared up, and I watched it burn down, while the generator hummed and the lights in the house dipped and rose.
It was a bad night. She came to my room, wet and shivering from the shower, and I held her. She allowed herself to be held, and I thought again of the way she had allowed herself to be kissed in my college room in London. I also thought of Julio's daughter, who as a young girl had tried to make polite conversation with me; who had stolen my passport and papers; and whom I had seen but not acknowledged in one of the places of pleasure.
Ana said, “I don't know whether she put it there. Or whether she squatted on the bed.”
I said, “Don't think like that. Just think that you're getting rid of her in the morning.”
She said, “I want you to stand by in the morning. Don't show yourself, but stand by, in case she turns violent.”
In the morning Ana was composed again. When Julio's daughter came, Ana said, “That was a vile thing to do. You've been in this house since you were born. You are a vile person. I should have you whipped by your father. But all I want is that you should leave now. You have half an hour.”
Julio's daughter said, with the pertness she had picked up in the places of pleasure, “I am not vile. You know who's vile.”
Ana said, “Get out and don't come back. You have half an hour.”
Julio's daughter said, “It's not for you to tell me not to come back. I may come back one day, and sooner than you think. And I'll not be staying in the quarters then.”
I had been standing in the bathroom behind the half-opened door. I felt that Julio's daughter knew I was there, and I thought, as I had been thinking all night, “Ana, what have I done to you?”
At our Sunday lunch that week there was a man from the local mission who had come back from the mission's outposts in the north. He said, “People here and in the capital know nothing of the war in the bush. Life here has gone on just as it has always done. But there are whole areas in the north now where the guerrillas rule. They have
