was pulled down after she died.'” And having told her story, which was really about her own powers, Mrs. Noronha turned her head to one side, against her shoulder, like a bird settling down to sleep. And, as often with her when she was soothsaying or storytelling, we couldn't tell at the end how we had got to where we had got. Everybody just had to look solemn and stay quiet for a while.
Bad time or not, the Correias went off to Europe, to see their children and then to do other things. They stayed away for many months.
*
I GOT TO KNOW their estate manager. I saw a lot of him in the town. He was a small and wiry mixed-race man in his forties with an educated way of speaking. Sometimes he could overdo it. He would say, for instance, about a Portuguese or Indian shopkeeper with whom he had been having trouble, “He isn't, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, what you would call a gentleman.” But his speech limbered up when he saw more of me. He became full of mischief, and at the same time quite trusting, and I felt I was being drawn into a series of little conspiracies against the Correias. We tried the new cafés (they opened up and closed down all the time). We got to know the bars. I got to know the new flavour of the military town, and I liked it. I liked being with the Portuguese soldiers. There was sometimes an officer with a long memory muttering about Goa and the Indians. But the Indian takeover of Goa had happened seven or eight years before. Few of the young conscripts knew about it, and the soldiers were generally very friendly. There was as yet no war in the bush. There had been stories about guerrilla training camps in the desert in Algeria and later in Jordan; but these stories had turned out to be fanciful: a few students from Lisbon and Coimbra playing at being guerrillas in the vacations. In our military town there was still peace and a great deal of civility. It was like being in Europe, and on holiday. It was for me like being in London again, but with money now. My excursions to the town took longer and longer.
Álvaro, the Correias' manager, said to me one day, “Would you like to see what they do?” We were in a café in the capital, having a coffee before driving home, and he lifted his chin at a group of brightly dressed African women, brilliant in the mid-afternoon light, who were passing in front of the café window. Normally the afternoon view was of torpid begging children, very dusty, who leaned on walls or shop windows or posts, opened and closed their mouths in slow motion all the time, and seemed not to see anything. Even when you gave them money they seemed not to know; and they never went away, however much you gave them; you had to learn to ignore them. The women were not like that. They were quite regal. I supposed they were camp-followers, and I said to Álvaro that I would like to see what they did. He said, “I'll come for you tomorrow evening. It's much better in the evenings, and it's much better at the weekends. You'll have to find some way of making your excuses to Madame Ana.”
Álvaro made it sound easy, but I found it hard. In ten years I hadn't lied to Ana; there hadn't been the occasion. In the beginning, in London, when I couldn't see my way ahead, I had fabricated things, mainly about my family background. I don't know how much of that Ana believed, or whether it meant much to her. In Africa I had after a while let those London lies drop; in our half-and-half group they seemed to have no point. Over the years Ana had picked up the truth about me. It wasn't too different from what she had always believed; and she had never made me feel small by reminding me of the stories I had told her. In Africa we were very close, and that closeness seemed natural. She had given me my African life; she was my protector; I had no other anchor. So I found it hard to make my excuses to her. It spoilt the next day. I began to work out a story. It felt like a lie. I tried to