might understand that the Indian stories in which she had seen aspects of her own African life had been borrowed from old Hollywood movies and the Maxim Gorky trilogy from Russia. Willie didn't want the woman to be let down. He wanted her to stay an admirer. This line of thinking led him the other way, to worrying about himself. He began to worry that the woman might not find him good enough for the book he had written, not attractive enough or with presence enough.
But as soon as he saw her all his anxieties fell away, and he was conquered. She behaved as though she had always known him, and had always liked him. She was young and small and thin, and quite pretty. She had a wonderfully easy manner. And what was most intoxicating for Willie was that for the first time in his life he felt himself in the presence of someone who accepted him completely. At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for their circumstances. In England he had grown to live with the idea of his difference. At first this feeling of difference had been like a liberation from the cruelties and rules of home. But then he had begun in certain situations—with June, for instance, and then Perdita, and sometimes when there was trouble at the college—to use his difference as a weapon, making himself simpler and coarser than he was. It was the weapon he was ready to use with the girl from Africa. But there was no need. There was, so to speak, nothing to push against, no misgiving to overcome, no feeling of distance.
After half an hour the spell didn't break, and Willie began to luxuriate in this new feeling of being accepted as a man and being in his own eyes complete. It might have been the book that made her look on him in this unquestioning way. It might have been Ana's mixed African background. Willie didn't wish to probe, and what Ana gave him he returned in full measure. He was entranced by the girl and over the next few weeks learned to love everything about her: her voice, her accent, her hesitations over certain English words, her beautiful skin, the authority with which she handled money. He had seen that way with money on no other woman. Perdita always got lost when she looked for money; big-hipped June waited until the very end of a transaction before taking out and opening a small purse with her big hands. Ana always had money ready. And with that air of authority there was her nervous thinness. That thinness made him feel protective. It was easy to make love to her, and he was tender then in the way that was natural to him, with nothing of the aggression Percy Cato had recommended; and everything that had been hard before, with the others, was pure pleasure with her.
The first time they kissed—on the narrow sofa facing the electric heater in his college room—she said, “You should look after your teeth. They are spoiling your looks.” He said, as a joke, “I dreamt the other night that they had become very heavy and were about to drop out.” And it was true: he had been careless of his teeth since he had been in England, and he had altogether neglected them after the Notting Hill riots and Percy Cato's disappearance and the dismissing paragraph about his book in Richard's wretched catalogue. He had even begun to take a kind of pleasure in the staining, almost now the blackness, of his teeth. He tried to tell her the story. She said, “Go to the dentist.” He went to an Australian dentist in Ful-ham and told him, “I have never been to a dentist. I feel no pain. I have no problem to talk to you about. I've come to you only because I have been dreaming that I am about to lose my teeth.” The dentist said, “We're ready even for that. And it's all on the National Health. Let's have a look.” And then he told Willie, “That wasn't a dream with a hidden meaning, I'm afraid. Your teeth really were going to fall out. Tartarlike concrete. And horribly stained—you must drink a lot of tea. The lower teeth mortared together, a solid wall