I Like It Here

of “maid living in”. Last but very far from least, there was the bathroom-cum-lavatory. This it was the will of God that Bowen should now enter.
The rising graph of its smell seemed today to be reaching the steep part of the curve. Human effluxes formed the main theme, but there were decorative passages derived, less unmistakably, from decomposing talcum-powder, Oates’s hair-oil, the gas from the monolithic geyser, exotic disinfectants, Oates’s fly-squirter, damp towels and the formidable orange-rubber enema-engine draped in glistening coils round the little cabinet. Wet sand from the children’s feet gritted under Bowen’s shoes. What air there was was hot. He wished the window had been made to open, he wished he could answer Oates’s repeated reminder that they must say if they didn’t like anything with a two-thousand-word (fifteen minutes’ running time) harangue about the lavatory, he wished many things. Well, he told himself consolingly, it was no use expecting too much; after all, they were on holiday.
While making the stride that would take him back to the boys’ bedroom, Bowen heard a childish wail through the clamour from the kitchen, where Rosie Oates was dealing out what he took to be denunciations and, it seemed, getting them back as well—with interest, as they say. “She’s awake,” Bowen said mournfully to his wife.
“Not surprising with all this row, I suppose. You know, I wonder how much longer we can stand it here.”
Barbara had begun wondering that on the fourth day and had been wondering it more and more often ever since. “Do you want me to go this time?” Bowen asked quickly.
“Oh, would you be an angel?”
Sandra was standing up in her cot. Her face had a high polish and an expression of theatrical reproach. Placing it so that it looked over his shoulder, Bowen gave her Ride a Cock-Horse in a light mezza voce baritone. He had a theory that he could make it into a sleeptrigger by systematic diminuendo and rallentando, gradually introducing a slack, enfeebled intonation and so on. After fifty trips to the door and back he had almost succeeded in getting himself off to sleep, but not his dear little daughter who, catching sight of him in the mirror of the most immense of the wardrobes, gave a loud, hilarious snigger. He wondered how long it had taken old Pavlov to get the salivation going when he rang his bell.
Just then he heard Oates’s motorbike come popping down the road and in at the gate, rev up mightily (as usual) under the window where Sandra’s cot was, then recede up the path into the garage. The dog Blackie, a resident of the chicken-run, flung himself to the end of his chain, barking like a fool. The hens fluttered and protested. Oates called some foreign matters to the gardener who came in for an hour in the evenings. Why he came in Bowen never quite discovered, for the two squares of barren reddish clods that made up ninety per cent of this “garden’ ‘—the existence of which had been another selling-point of Oates’s in his letters to Bowen—never altered throughout their stay.
Female cries of “Bôa tarde, senhor”—quite the old feudal touch—greeted the master of the house on his three-yard progress through the kitchen. Bowen could track him to his bedroom by the furious creaking of his co-respondent’s shoes. He had never heard such a row. It was as if Oates had a little amplifier-and-loudspeaker circuit wired up in each heel. After a moment Bowen could hear Rosie come out of the dining-room, her forty-minute task of laying the dinner-table completed or suspended, and go in search of her husband. Her sound was the shuffling clop of the loose fur-trimmed slippers she wore. It was available at any hour of the day and many of the night, and it managed to generate a really impressive charge of ennui. These two aural gaits, Bowen considered, had a good deal to say about the characters of their owners, like recurring sound-effects in some intellectual film.
Time passed. Oates arrived in the dining-room, turned the wireless on at something like concert-hall volume, and regaled the household with the strains of an American song about Spain being sung in German —a current favourite, this, on the Roman Catholic station in Lisbon patronised by him. The bawling and shrieking seemed to appease Sandra. Bowen laid her down and crept away.
More time passed. During this section of it the boys, having had their tea in the kitchen (egg and bacon for the tenth time in five days),were bathed and driven into bed. Here they began a long, bitter protest at having their parents sitting, so they alleged, on their feet. The wireless was now yelling what could have been a news bulletin. It all sounded as if it was very good news.
When Rosie appeared, did her shy, breathy smile and said “Soup”, the Bowen couple followed closely at her clopping heels. They greeted Oates, who smiled back with the air of inwardly suppressing the effect of some discreditable rumour about them he had picked up in Lisbon during the day. Then, frowning intently, he assembled what he would need immediately after the meal: his lighter, his packet of High-Life cigarettes (made from cigar tobacco or, more likely, cigar-butt tobacco), the coffee-machine with flask, trivet, burner, snuffer and bottle of spirit, the coffee-tin that had a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh’s face on it, the special Coronation coffee-mug—most of these on a little table beneath a picture of Queen Elizabeth II’s face. Rosie raised her soft moan, far different from her denunciation-screech: “Lucia. Sopa, faz favor.” Now it only needed Oates to give an upward touch to the volume of the wireless, already relaying a girls’ choir at a volume of a couple of bels, and the meal could begin.
It was an abundant and, to Bowen rather than Barbara, delicious meal. This was usual. Not before time Bowen experienced the onset of wellbeing. Soon afterwards they got his favourite radio commercial,