All Chapters of The Son-in-Law Contract: Chapter 41
- Chapter 50
63 chapters
Home Again
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
Years that Followed
Five years went as pages in a book which no one felt in a hurry to complete.The Lagos house had developed roots of its own. The initial mango tree was now in the half-shade of the courtyard; the second, which they had had when they came home to Scotland, was nearly as high, and their branches were almost touching each other, like old acquaintances. There were now dozens of them, of various sizes, various tones, one or other had been acquired in various cities they had visited on brief business trips: Accra, Dakar, Cape Town, even a tiny silver one, of Reykjavik, when Luca had gone to a conference there over the winter.Luca was twenty-one. High enough, he had to cringe under the veranda beam. Voice deeper. Eyes unchanged--mute, attentive, benign.He had completed his university studies in Ibadan, which was two years ago first-class honours in computer science with a minor in data ethics. Hi
The Coast Road
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 Sea that Remembers
It was a gentle Portuguese winter, gray skies, rain which struck not so much as it beat, wind which smelled of pine and salt. The dwelling on the headland seemed smaller during the short days, closer, like the walls of the dwelling had been drawn nearer to contain the warmth within.What a silent commanding post in the office of Luca. Three now, two chairs, the other one was occupied by the rare visitor who flew in at Lisbon or Berlin. The bells were still suspended on the trellis before his window; and at the tempest nights they clanked and harmonised like music nebulously unequivocal.He was up to something new, such as not tracing shadows but creating light: an open stage on which citizen auditors in new democracies will perform. Real-time public spending mapping tools. Dashboards which had transformed dry budget lines into readable stories by ordinary people. Vento Aberto he referred to as Open
The Light at the Top
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 Bell
The headland house was now a time place. The mornings were received in the same gray light, through blue shutters. Evenings were closed as before and the same low fire in the fireplace, the same clicking of the glasses on the terrace table, the same soft ring of bells when the wind was offshore.Luca was thirty now. As a slight ceremony on the cliffs, two summers before, Marina was made Marina Mercer--there were no guests, only the four of them, and an officiant of the place, and the sea itself. She still learned how to calculate the tides; he still invented instruments that revealed hidden money. The house was their home most and they only went out when they were summoned to work and were never late to get home before the first autumn storm.The workshop where Julian worked was no noisier these days. He was slower in his works, took months to select the projects rather than weeks. His
The Child that Listened
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
Sofia was Seven
In the manner houses do the house on the headland had become fifteen years old, small mending, some new paint on the shutters, a broken tile here and there. The mango trees had long ago grown far beyond the pots in which they were placed, and they were now firmly established in the garden-soil, with their branches loaded every summer. The bells in dozens, tarnished, others shining, hung to the trellis and the low stone wall which fringed the road leading to the sea.Sofia was seven.She possessed the black hair, the silent eyes of Luca and the obstinate chin of Julian, the curiousness of Lila. She ran with naked feet on the terrace, and gathered shells in a broken blue bucket, and addressed the bells as though they should be able to hear.One crisp October morning--sea-salt and pine-trees stinging in the air--she was in the workshop one morning, and Julian was there.He was polishing the weapons of a new rocking chair--
The Bells that are Left
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
The sound of tomorrow
The headland house had become thirty-one in the patient stone and timber do--new beams where the salt had eaten the old ones, a broader terrace now that Sofia was beginning to bring friends home at university, solar panels that render the electricity bill a thing of the past. The mango-trees were monsters--stump trunks, the broad canopies of which shaded the courtyard so grey even at noon. The bells had swarmed into some silent constellation, a few were rusted soft silver, the rest were still shiny, and hung in loose circles over the trellis, the wall, a few even on the low boughs, so that even the trees were singing.Sofia was twenty-three.The previous spring she had completed her master’s in Copenhagen thesis on the predictive modeling of coastal erosion and it had already been mentioned in two EU policy briefs. She was now a remote employee of a small NGO which advised island countries on how to adapt to climate changes- da