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