how, and never wanted to ask—and when she came among us she came in a wheelchair, which her husband pushed. They came into our half-and-half world with the gentlest air of condescension. They knew the country, and they knew where they stood and where we stood. It was possible to feel that they were breaking the rules only because the lady was disabled and had to be humoured. But the fact was that they came among us because of Mrs. Noronha's special gifts. She was a “mystic.” Her husband, the man of birth, was proud of this side of his wife. When they made their entry at an estate-house Sunday lunch he pushed her big wheelchair with a noticeable arrogance in his thin, peevish face. No one, not even Ana, ever told me directly that Mrs. Noronha had this mystic gift. The gift was simply allowed to make itself felt, and it did so in such quiet ways that for the first few times I noticed nothing. To spot the gift at work, you had to know about it. Someone might say, for instance, “I want to go to Lisbon next March.” Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, would say softly, to no one in particular, “It's not a good time. September would be better.” She would say no more, offer no explanation; and we wouldn't hear any more about a trip to Lisbon in March. And if—just for the sake of the illustration—if I, ignorant at that time of the lady's gifts, had said, “But March in Lisbon would be lovely,” Mr. Noronha would say, with distaste for the contradiction showing in his watery eyes, “There are reasons why it's not a good time,” and his wife would look away, with no expression on her pale face. I felt that her mysticism, together with her disablement and her husband's birth, made her a tyrant. She could say anything; she could be as harsh and disdainful as she pleased; and for three or four or five good reasons no one could question her. I could see that from time to time she had spasms of pain, yet I couldn't help feeling that as soon as she and her husband got back home she might get out of her chair and be perfectly all right. She gave full mystical consultations. They were exclusive and not cheap; and these visitations among the half-and-half estate people, who were susceptible in more than one way, helped beat up custom.
Ana and I would also have had our characters. And, since no one can really see himself, I am sure that we would have been surprised and perhaps even wounded—just as the Correias and Ricardo and the Noronhas would have been surprised and wounded—by what the others saw.
This style of estate life would have begun in the 1920s, after the wartime boom. It would have become well established during the Second World War. So it was comparatively new; it could have been contained within the lifetime or even adulthood of a man. It didn't have much longer to go now; and I wonder whether in our circle we hadn't all (and not only the theatrical Correias) been granted some unsettling intimation, which we might have brushed aside, that our bluff in Africa would one day be called. Though I don't think anyone could have guessed that the world of concrete was going to be so completely overwhelmed by the frail old world of straw.
Sometimes we went for Sunday lunch to the rough weekend restaurant on the coast. It offered fresh seafood simply done, and it began to do well. It became less rough. When we went one Sunday we found the floor being tiled, in a pretty blue and yellow arabesque pattern that made us exclaim. The tiler was a big light-eyed mulatto man. For some reason—perhaps for not finishing the job on time—he was being abused and shouted at by the Portuguese owner. With us, and his other customers, the owner was as civil as always; but then, switching character and mood, he went back to abusing the tiler. At every shout the big light-eyed man lowered his head, as though he had received a blow. He was sweating; it seemed to be with more than heat. He went on with his delicate work, laying out the thin, fast-drying mortar, and then pressing and lightly tapping each pretty Portuguese tile into place. The sweat rolled down his pale-brown forehead and from time to time