I Like It Here

than ideological: perhaps he had been frightened as a child by a nasty manager of something. At any rate, he had never been able to book a room in a hotel without wishing he could produce a certificate of general probity signed by a doctor, a justice of the peace and a person in holy orders. Usually he tried, often successfully, to make other people act for him in all these matters. But that would not do today.
“Darling, do calm down,” Barbara said, grinning. She looked entrancingly neat in her white T-shirt with the thin horizontal navy stripes and her calf-length plum slacks, so much so that, given the chance, he would not only have performed the old marital rites but might have felt impelled to go on and eat her as well.
“Why did he say he was coming and then not come? Eh? Eh? Eh?”
“Now don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” She had apologised humbly to him on the morning after their how-do-I know-I-know-I-know-you dialogue, and had been a very good girl ever since, carrying on nobly through her bouts of feeling seasick without any hint of self-consciousness. “Look, there go the Marchants.”
These were a couple some years older than the Bowens, fond of talking and laughing, who they had met in the lounge on the second evening. Alec Marchant, a solicitor who practised somewhere in Essex, had endeared himself to Bowen by claiming a terrified ignorance of abroad. Bowen watched him now as he bustled round the taxi he had secured, hurrying the baggage-porter along, supervising the stowage of every item, gesturing freely and even apparently talking to the driver, getting in at last with a satisfied nod. Class traitor, Bowen snarled to himself at the sight. Imperialist lackey. Social chauvinist.
While he was listening to Barbara’s reassurances, meditating on the deficiencies of his character and wondering what the Portuguese for “I don’t understand” was, the five Bowens were moving in loose formation towards the Customs shed: it could not be put off any longer. The first notable action they saw performed on foreign soil—apart from the thunderous anti-aircraft practice at Vigo the previous day—was a full-scale hawking-and-spitting demonstration by a handsome middle-aged man in an expensive suit. Both halves of the process went on for a long time and were very loud. David Bowen and Mark Bowen were fascinated; Sandra Bowen, who had fallen and grazed her knee, stopped crying. Garnet Bowen felt cheered enough to say to himself: “My God, I’m abroad. Abroad. What about that, eh?”
All the Customs officers were distinguished-looking men who wore their grey alpaca uniforms with an air and yet with a hint of injured merit, like cashiered generals starting again at the bottom. The one Bowen got obviously felt his loss of status keenly, but between them they soon evolved an Anglo-Franco-Portuguese patois which, eked out with a bit of Latin on Bowen’s side, served their purposes. Where was Oates, then? Bowen paid the baggage-porter, first ransacking the entire dock area for change. Bowen tipped the baggage porter, giving him a number of escudo things that worked out, he supposed, at about three bob. The porter swept off his hat and bowed. Bowen was to find out later that this was not just Lusitanian courtesy (though it must have been partly that), but a recognition of the fact that one escudo (threepence) was the usual thing. Indeed—Bowen was told later—it would have been ample, quite in accordance with working-class wages; giving more would help to spoil the market.
“Where’s Oates, then?” Bowen asked his wife again, visualising by now a mapless journey into the unknown. There could not have been more than ten hours of daylight left.
“He can’t have gone to the wrong ship, can he?”
“There must be very few ships called Rio Grande arriving here this morning. He’s forgotten. He never meant to come. Are we sure this is Lisbon?”
“Cheer up, bogey, everything’s going to be all right, I know it is, I can feel it.”
Bowen said quickly: “I wonder if that chap’s him.”
“Ask him. He looks as if he’s looking for someone.”
“No, you ask him. I’m tired of asking people things.” Barbara threw back her head with a gentle yell. She was sitting on the rail of a sort of cattle-pen arrangement inside which, an hour and a half earlier, Bowen had talked to a lot of different men about the car. Most of the time since then she had spent trying to bend Sandra into an appropriate position on her lap. She now made a gesture designed to call this to Bowen’s attention. “No, you ask him,” she said. Bowen asked him and had to admire the sincerity of his regret at not being Oates. Then Bowen drove his sons away from an inexplicable pile of straw they had started to distribute over the quay. “Why don’t you play with Sandra?” he asked them.
“What at, Dad?”
From where he was standing he could see quite a lot of Lisbon, if it was Lisbon. The buildings were a pleasant colour in the strong sun, bright green trees showed among them, and the whole thing looked inviting and rather historical. It was a pity that so many non-and non-native speakers of English lived there.
He rejoined his wife, who was groaning a little to herself. “Why don’t you put her down?”
“She runs straight out of sight if I do. Why’s it so hot?”
“Where’s Oates, then?”
“Hadn’t one of us better start asking about the place where he lives? He might be ill.”
“Look, I thought you were keen on the heat, and you haven’t been in the place three hours before you start complaining.”
“He must be on the phone. See if you can give him a ring.”
“It’s going to get a good bit hotter than this, you know. It’s early yet.”
“Or that pal of Olivia’s certainly would be. Can you remember his name? You wrote to him, didn’t you?”
“I mean it’s not only early in the day, it’s comparatively early in the year.”
“What was it? Herries or