I Like It Here

how long she’ll stay down. She hasn’t finished her bottle yet.”
“Oh dear. How are her guts?”
“Only three times since this morning. Can I have a fag, sweet?”
“Sorry, I’ve only got Portuguese ones.”
“Never mind, I can’t stand that brilliantine taste. I wish I could explain about Sandra’s food to Rosie,” she said, meaning Oates’s wife. “The meat’s always so rich. And why do they put olive oil in everything?”
“It’s just a way they have. Did you try again?”
“Yes, only we’re a bit stuck with anything more complicated than Yes and No. Why don’t you try some French with her? Titus was saying she knows a bit of French.”
“I expect she does, but I’m not much good at Portuguese French. Ordinary French would be bad enough.” He sat down and picked up the postcard from old Buckmaster (or Strether) inviting them to call the following day. It would be a run of a dozen miles or so inland, he had worked out. He ran his eye over the card for the twentieth time, trying to solve the problem of what sort of man had written it, and also the rather more immediate problem of what that man had thought he meant by the map he had tried to draw on it. Revelation was withheld. Bowen went on: “I hope those sores of Sandra’s are going to be okay.”
“I’ve put some of that penicillin stuff on them.”
“Good for you. Where are the boys?”
“Off playing by the woods somewhere.”
Bowen made his way through a thin cloud of flies to the window. The sun, no longer intense, beat down on the splendid view of Estoril and Cascais with their palms and red roofs. Good stuff, Bowen thought. Even at this distance he could see the change in tone where the Tagus met the Atlantic. Running inland were the hills among which Sintra lay. The old wandering outlaw of his own dark mind had looked in there once, hadn’t he? Bowen picked out the boys by their white shirts, trotting round and round each other in some gyration that was no doubt bung-full of meaning for them. He hoped they would not run across the fierce goat that had tried to butt one of them the day before. They were near the woods now where Oates sometimes took his gun of an evening to shoot at pigeons and what he called sparrows. (He hit them, too, as a recent lunch had acceptably testified.) One of these days it might be nice to accompany him. Looking nearer at hand, Bowen realised with some surprise that he had set eyes on an olive-grove. This might have had the effect of recalling one or two abroad-slogans, but this time what entered his head, for some reason, was that an olive-grove had been the scene of the surrender of Demosthenes’s party towards the end of that unfortunate business in Sicily. When had that been? 415? 413? He had known once. Well, whenever it had been exactly, Sicily had been all right while Thucydides was on about it. That condition no longer held.
Bowen discontinued this and went on looking. A destroyer, doubtless part of the local navy, was standing out to sea. One or two canoes were still moving to and fro off the beach at Estoril, almost hidden by houses. Some fishing-boats were doing something in the approaches to Cascais harbour. He tried unsuccessfully to remember what Oates had explained to him about the way they auctioned the catch there. Oh yes, there was plenty to be got hold of in what he saw, if only one knew how. And if only, in addition, one could find some other jumping-off point than Titus Oates’s house.
The minuteness of this house could still, after ten days, fill Bowen and Barbara with sincere amazement. The area of its ground (and only) floor could not have been much more than that of half a badminton court. In that space were assembled a lot of rooms. There was a dining-room with two large sideboards and a large table in it. Nearly all the pleasure Bowen had had since entering the house had taken place at that table, eating and drinking things that were on it. There, too, he had passed darker hours, working in the mornings at Barbara’s instance on that awful play. His daily horror at what he had written the day before was topped up by the air-display put on by the flies that shared his occupancy. Roused to erethism by the heat, a pair of buzzing, copulating bodies fell every few minutes into his typewriter or hair—still, better that than into his soup or wine. He had had a wonderful half-hour with Oates a couple of evenings previously, syringing the bastards; now and then Oates had let him borrow the squirter for a couple of goes. The flies had suffered frightful losses, but replacements had begun to move into the line within twelve hours.
The two senior Bowens shared a dark, wardrobe-ridden bedroom with their daughter. It had been ornament-ridden too until, ten minutes after their arrival, she had broken a richly-engraved scent-spray. The Oates’s bedroom, piled with copies of Tit-bits, Everybody’s and an old-fashioned-looking local effort with what could have been daguerreotype illustrations, had turned out to be also the “own sitting-room” the Bowens had been promised. They had actually sat in it on their first day. But now they were sitting, as they often did, on the beds in the boys’ bedroom. Through a very thin wall was the kitchen. At the moment the two maids were cackling in it. Sometimes they quarrelled in it instead, or were denounced in it by Rosie Oates. They kept going on one or the other fourteen hours a day, while the baby of one of them sucked its dummy or slept, like an old man in the sun, with a cloth over its face. There was also the closet-like hall which doubled as the bed-chamber of the childless maid—so much for the opulent overtones