at me. He said, “It's a spitting cobra. They can blind you from fifteen feet. They aim for shiny things. They will aim for your watch or your glasses or your eyes. If you don't wash it off fast with sugar and water you are in trouble.”
On the way back I said to Ana, “It was terrible. I was glad you told me about the showing off. I didn't mind that. But the snake—I wanted to break that bottle.”
She said, “My own flesh and blood. To think of him there all the time. That's what I've had to live with. I wanted you to see him. It is what you might leave behind.”
*
I LET IT PASS. I had no wish to quarrel with her. She had been very good and delicate with her half-brother, very good in a bad situation; and old love and regard for her had welled up in me. Old love: it was still there, it could even be added to at moments like this, but it belonged now to another life, or a part of my life that had run its course. I no longer slept in her grandfather's big carved bed; but we lived easily in the same house, often ate together, and had many things to talk about. She no longer sought to rebuke me. Sometimes when we were talking she would pull herself up and say, “But I shouldn't be talking to you like this.” And a little while later she would start again. On estate matters and the doings of estate people I continued to trust her.
And I wasn't surprised when news came that Carla Correia was selling her estate. Ana had always said that this was what Carla was going to do; that in spite of the talk of charity to a school friend, Luis and Graça had been put in the estate house only to keep it in good order until it could be sold. Carla had sold to a big property company 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 Graça 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 Graça. 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 Graça 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 Graça to add to her fortune, but she had not forgotten her school friend. Graça 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 Graça'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