The Lagos airport was similarly odoured in jet fuel, warm bread in the cafe, the slight bit of metallic odour of rain on tarmac.  They got out of the plane into the end of afternoon heat which enclosed them in welcome arms.Luca passed between Julian and Lila, the burlap-wrapped sapling of mango in his shoulder, the sapling being carefully carried in both hands.  He said nothing till they were past immigration and exposure, and outside, where the mlee and mew of arrivals invariably awaits: signboard holders, waving families, taxi-hacked touts crying fares.And he stood on the curb, and gazed into the sky--dark-gray with impending rain, but bright at the ends.It is noisier than I can remember, he said.Lila smiled.  "It always is. Welcome back."Their hired driver was there--a silent man called Chidi who knew them last time.  He assisted me in the bags, opened doors, made no questions.The ride hom

The place that they discovered was the house on a small headland in southern Portugal, where the Atlantic joined the red rock cliffs and the wind blew salt all the year round.  Whitewashed walls.  Blue shutters.  A terrace was tiled, and commanded only sea and sky.They went within the week of April, when spring is indecisive, wild flowers emerging through cracks of the pavement.  No grand announcement.  Only a silent lease in Faro, one van with all their books, and with all the equipment of Luca and the two little potted mango-trees that they had tended throughout the customs at the airports, and over a lengthy drive south.The trees had now been put in big terracotta pots on the terrace, one very old and one very young, one on a side like sentinels.  Luca had suspended the bells to a wrought-iron trellis which Julian had welded during the first week.  As the sea breeze swept by the sound was

The house on the headland had lost itself within the seven years that followed--years characterized not by headlines but by little, intractable changes: how the wild rosemary grew into the walk and the new cracks in the terrace tiles that Julian repaired every spring, the gradual extension of the potted mango-trees until their leaves met the trellis and set the bells ringing on a windless day.Luca was twenty-eight now.  He spent a good portion of his time in the sunlit corner office although he did not travel as frequently every year.  The platform he had created, Vento Aberto had become quietly powerful: it had been adopted by six national anti-corruption agencies, formed part of the curriculum of three university courses, was cited in policy papers in Brasilia to Bangkok.  Breaking stories was no longer his pursuit.  He instructed others on where to locate them.Two summers before he had met some one, a woman called Marina

The crib Julian had constructed was complete in the little room which they had painted pale blue the previous spring.  Oak, plain lines, the two mango leaves cut in the headboard and now smooth where little fingers would some day follow them.  Further above it was one bell--little, silver, the first that Luca had ever brought out of Scotland.  It fell on the morning sun through the eastern window, and sprinkled soft flecks upon the walls.Sofia came in the beginning of May--little, dark, lungs full of protest at the cold hospital air.  Marina was embracing her to her chest and Luca was standing near the bed with one hand on the shoulder of his wife, and the other hand just brushing the cheek of the baby as though she would disappear back into nothingness if he moved too quickly.Three days later they took her home.The house waited--quiet, ready.  Lila had hung fairy lights of white, along the railing of the

The headland house was now twenty-five, in the silent manner of old houses--new roof-tiles where the sea wind had blown away the old, new white-wash after every third spring, a small array of solar panels on the south slope, which hummed their way through many summer days.Sofia was seventeen.She was tall as her father was, and the kid had the eyes of her mother, and the hands of Julian, and the ear of Lila, who could hear people out to the last word they had yet to discover how to say.  The data science of the environment at Lisbon--she got there by train three days a week and the rest of the time at home.  She continued to speak to the bells where nobody could hear.It was on a late June evening, when the sun was still high, and the air reeking with rosemary and salt, that they were sitting on the terrace when the light changed to gold.Sofia was the last to come, with the backpack on one shoulder, and her hair blown all tangled b