I Like It Here

to one another their capacity for logic, their wit and grace, their responsible and informed interest in politics, their high regard for Poe and Charles Morgan. God, yes …
His mind drifted back to the time when he had been too hard up to resist an invitation to Birmingham, where some foreign persons needed to be addressed on CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELISTS (vi): Graham Greene. There was a brief prelude in an underground canteen with fluorescent-strip lighting and lino; the coffee was the prescriptive liquorice with a lacing of varnish. Surrounded by blue-eyed, tanned young men in open-necked shirts, slim-waisted girls with white blouses and no make-up, and a selection of middle-aged bit-players from French films, he felt several times like apologising for the inroads which both décor and victuals must be making upon these sensitive continental psyches. But they all chattered away gaily, even a little loudly, throwing down the horrible draught with abandon and stubbing out their cigarettes on the barbaric wooden tables in a spirit of careless ease. Two of them had addressed him in English, and he had answered them, for he saw it as his duty to help foreign guests practise being in Great Britain. The only bad moment came on the way upstairs, when he caught sight of a figure in priest’s garb and “Christ, a Jesuit” was his panicked thought. But a snatch of Dublin drollery, audible an instant later, calmed him.
The lecture was all right. After it there was talk of the views, the attitudes, the obsessions, the values of Grim-Grin. One question seemed at first to relate to the face of Grim-Grin, and he was at a loss to frame an answer until they all assured him that the fellow was really on about the faith of Grim-Grin. Bowen gave them the treatment on that. Then a woman with a lot of beads said:
“We have been hearing of your Grim-Grin and his Power and the Glory.”
He agreed that this was the fact.
“But we have been surprised that we have not been hearing of your Edge-Crown.”
“Oh, really ?” He searched his brain frantically. Grim-Grin he had been ready for, together with Ifflen-Voff, Zumzit-Mum and Shem-Shoice. This was new. “Could you amplify that a little?” He ran through the possible variants—Adj-, Ash-, Each-, Age- … Some foreigner? But no; it had been his Edge-Crown.
“Sickies of sickingdom,” the woman explained irritably.
“Yes …. of course … Well …” He began nodding his head with little hope of ever having reason to stop.
After a brief explanatory uproar he was enabled to wonder aloud what had led his questioner to detect a resemblance between The Power and the Glory and The Keys of the Kingdom, by A. J. Cronin. “I think I’ve done enough talking for a bit,” he added, smiling hard and turning his face slowly to and fro for everyone to see, in the hope of suggesting that he was not to be taken altogether seriously. “Perhaps one of you would like to have a shot at that.”
One of them at once did, saying in a baritone growl:
“There is a priest in both.”
He had got out of it somehow. He had pondered occasionally ever since whether that brilliant Fluellen allusion, given added sting by his own Welshness, had been meant to deride his stupidity or that of the woman with the beads. But of course the point of the experience was not that, nor did it merely illustrate the fact, sadly neglected of recent years, that foreigners talked funny. What life had been trying to say (as Barbara would express it) emerged rather more clearly from the query put to him in excellent English after the lecture: would he please name some of the more important English critical works on A. J. Cronin. (He had got out of that one, too.) Yes, the way the French went overboard about chaps like old Cronin—nothing much wrong with him on another level—did seem a sort of minor national madness, one which gravely damaged their claim to be running European civilisation. At least the English never made such howlers. They judged a foreign writer on the basis of the amount of fuss made about him by the foreign Press, or by the writer himself. The latter kind of authority was the one they followed in judging their own writers, so there was consistency there. Well, good luck to them, Bowen thought, in their stout efforts to find Gide and Mauriac worth reading.
He glanced up to find a man watching him. This man, was small, elderly and ferocious-looking. He said in a hoarse, American-accented voice: “You British?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. Mind if I sit here?”
“Not in the least. Would you like a drink?”
“Thank you, in a little while. We just got on board.”
“Oh yes? On holiday?”
“Well, I don’t know as you could call it a holiday exactly. We’re never going there again, I do know that.”
“You mean to France?”
“Sure, France, that’s what I mean, France. You know France?”
“Not well, no.”
The American leaned closer and began talking rapidly and with few variations of pitch. “Madeira where we’re going is bad enough in all conscience, but by God you almost begin to appreciate a place like that when you get up in this part of the world. There’s only one thing they’re interested in hereabouts and that’s your money. They make no secret of it, I’ll give them that. Yes, I’ll say that for them, they leave you in no doubt on that score. Gimme gimme gimme, that’s their theme song. I thought the Spaniards were on top in that league, but by God these French have certainly got ‘em whipped. Take the service in these hotels of theirs. They’re so understaffed they’re run off their feet —they’re exhausted, absolutely exhausted. But if the management try to take on more staff they won’t have it, they walk out. Why? Because they’d have to split their tips more ways, that’s why. And this Algeria business and the Reds gaining all the time. Ah, the whole country’s