I Like It Here

him to be having a look at the last of England. There are some moments, it occurred to him, that no amount of dramatisation can quite purge of drama. This was one, even though the drama was a trifle more self-regarding than it commonly was, or was acknowledged to be. Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again, he thought to himself without really meaning to, with nought of hope left, but with less of gloom. (He excused himself for falling a victim to intimations of culture by remembering that his last reading of Byron had been aimed at eking out his review of a new biography, and thus could not fairly be classed as voluntary.) With less of gloom … Well, that overdid things rather, though it was true that Bennie’s visit had bucked him up no end, and that duty-free bar prices were still a virgin field of research, a whole new world.
The point where Bowen felt he parted company with self-exiled Harold was in the latter’s assertion that where roll’d the ocean, thereon was his home. Reluctantly, Bowen looked at the ocean. Even at this stage there was a fair quantity of it, and clearly there was plenty more to come, going down a long way as well as spreading out a long way. The rail on which he was trying to bring himself to lean had one other rung below the top one and an upright every here and there. It was a rail up which sixteen-month-old Sandra would very likely climb if she got the chance. Bowen drew a deep shuddering breath, an action he was to repeat at every recurrence of this image.
Some time after all five Bowens were safely back in England he happened to mention the business to his wife. She said it had worried her too, but she had worked out that, since everybody came up three times before they drowned, she would have been able to get to Sandra at her first, or certainly at her second, reappearance. She had done life-saving with full-size people, so keeping a small child afloat would have given her little difficulty. She did not mention the only reality in her scheme: that in that situation nothing could have stopped her jumping overboard.
Her explanation caused a sort of conditional and retrospective vertigo to seize him. Uttering a snuffling cry, he felt sweat starting out on a brow already amply bedewed at the thought of the television interview with Iris Murdoch he was to conduct later that evening. A car, he reflected when next he was able to, will kill people as surely as drowning; so will a simple domestic accident. But these possibilities did not terrify, they merely incited the taking of precautions. It was the unfamiliarity and the mere size of the surroundings that magnified reactions. He conceived a new respect for the occupants of the Mayflower (by all accounts a far less stable ship than the ones currently on the Portugal run), especially for those who took their families with them.
Standing now at the rail, Bowen was asked, in a civil but halting manner, whether that was please the Isle of Wight. He replied that he thought it was, but was not sure. In fact he had no grounds even for supposition. Realising this abashed and mortified him in some way. The clamour of what he recognised as French and what must be either Spanish or Portuguese or both was increasing as more and more of his fellow-passengers finished settling in and came on deck. He noticed that quite small children were speaking one or other of these languages, and getting results by doing so. One of them, a boy of about nine and of unjustifiable appearance, was looking at him. He decided to go and see how Barbara was getting on, and then to find out the score on this three-mile limit thing.

4
WHEN THE BOAT put in at Cherbourg Bowen was sitting in the lounge, drunkenly trying to read This Rough Magic. He had got to page 188, by which time it seemed that the author had gone some way towards finding out what initial situation he proposed to deal with. Those involved were an old painter who was doing a lot of wondering about whether he ought to stop painting now that he considered he was getting much worse at painting, his wife who was frequently described as passionate without it being revealed what she was passionate about or at, and a young man with doe-like eyes who was hanging round the other pair. There was much uncertainty as to whether the young man was interested in the wife or the husband and, if the latter, as to exactly what his focus of interest was. It was uncertain whether this uncertainty existed in the mind of the painter (through whose eyes the action, what there was of it, was viewed) or in that of the young man, or perhaps—the evidence was piling up that way—in that of the author. The first two chapters had been enlivened by the presence of a successful actor, whose person, dress, demeanour, habits, house, father and grandfather had all been conscientiously described, and who now, after talking a good deal about the theatre (that at any rate, Bowen reflected, was well observed), had disappeared from the story, never to return, as far as could be judged from a quick look through the pages that remained.
Bowen yawned. Barbara and the children had been in bed for quite a time. The thought of that cabin, with luggage and children’s effects filling such space as was unoccupied by the bunks and Sandra’s cot, decided him to get a bit tireder and drunker before joining them. He looked out of the window at what could be seen of France: a bit of wall, a drum or tub of something, a van. But this appearance of inertia did not deceive him. He knew that they were all there really, all on duty demonstrating