I Like It Here

get abroad, that’ll teach you.”
“It will be lovely, won’t it?” his wife said, brightening up again. “All that sun. And you getting some real work done.”
“Lovely, yes.”
At the moment, this expressed Bowen’s feelings. Being pushed more or less willy-nilly out of the country in this way had, rightly considered, its points. He had a go at rightly considering these when, half an hour later, he left their South Kensington garden flat and made his way towards the centre of things. Under his arm were three books destined for return to the library. They were the translated work of three French nationals on whom, without knowing quite how this circumstance had arisen, he had recently been lecturing. Cosmopolitanism lay on every hand that morning.
“Malraux,” he had been saying the other week to his night class, “as opposed to Montherlant.”
They had looked at him with the glum mistrust they normally reserved for his occasional announcements that, having outlined one possible approach to a subject, he was now going to indicate another, quite different from the first. The curious visiting Egyptian had glanced round at his neighbours and grinned, hunching his shoulders. At the same moment Bowen had realised that the tall dark man at the back, whom he had always taken to be a refrigerator electrician called Noakes, might instead be the French assistant from one of the London University colleges who was conjectured to be attending some parts of that terrible little Modern European Literature course. This realisation had embarrassed Bowen and made him feel thirsty.
“Sorry,” he had said forcefully. “Mowl-roe and Mont-along.” After glaring for a time he had spelt the names out to them. Some of them had copied them down, letter by letter and glancing continually at one another’s notebooks, like air-crews at a vital briefing. The curious visiting Egyptian and the tall dark man had not done this; they had written down nothing at all.
Bowen now reflected, as he got on to a bus, that trying to pronounce even a few syllables of French set off in the inexpert a most complex and deep-seated network of defensive responses. It did in him, anyway. He had a couple of days ago read a travel supplement in some weekly or other which explained that the French, although charming and so on, didn’t like hearing their language spoken incorrectly or with a bad accent. (There was something similar wrong with all other nationalities too according to the supplement, which was perhaps the work of some syndicate of British tourist associations.) Bowen made up his mind with real regret that France was out. How he wished he had shown more foresight at school. Why, at his little school, had he not spent the periods set aside for the B.B.C. Schools programmes in learning how to say the French nasal sounds instead of how to make paper aeroplanes (which in any case he had long forgotten how to do)? Why, at his big school, had he neglected L’Attaque du Moulin and Les Oberlé in favour of hiding behind the cupboard or making a book on how many times Mr. Pritchard would say “of course” and “and so on” in the space of an hour? Education, Bowen decided, ought to be a putting-in, not a drawing-out.
While he paid his fines at the library he thought briefly about his play. There was a whole act of it, all done out in proper red and black typing, lying under his notes on Ivy Compton-Burnett in his green filing cabinet (a birthday present from his wife). He had not looked at this dramatic fragment for several months, supposedly in order to “come fresh to it” at such time as he should come to it again, but really in order to go on not looking at it. Playwrights he had heard or read about sometimes reported difficulty in getting their characters plausibly off the stage. He was all right at that part; with his characters the trouble lay in getting them plausibly on to the stage and finding things, plausible or implausible, for them to say once there. Bowen shook his head and sighed. What he needed was a bloody theme. But they didn’t grow on trees, did they? No, that was not what they did.
“You’re looking fit,” Bennie Hyman said to him when they met.
“Really? That’s a comfort. Yes please. One just like you’ve got.”
“Barbara all right?”
“Yes, full of… full of fun.”
“And the kids?”
“Oh, tremendous.”
“Good.” Hyman then talked for ten minutes about how nasty being a bachelor was. It was sincere but failed to grip. When it was over he said: “Anything new on that trip abroad you were thinking of?”
Bowen gave a throttled cry. “Yes, lots. We’re going all right. Can’t get out of it now.” He explained about the American commission. “See? It’s like being deprived of your citizenship.”
“Is it, now? Is it? With finances fixed and a car laid on? You’re in a bad way all right. You know what I’m going to say now, don’t you? Well, here it is. I wish I could turn it all up and get away abroad for a bit.”
“Ah, but I don’t. I like it here, you see. And anyway, it’s my mother-in-law’s car, you fool. And look, it’s just struck me: how do they mean, mother-in-law? What law? What law says she’s my mum?”
“I’ll explain it to you if you don’t watch out. What I don’t see is why it shouldn’t be your mother-in-law’s car. A car can’t hurt you, can it? What’s wrong with it?”
“As a car, nothing. Only it’s her way of reminding me that she’s about. Not near necessarily, a thousand miles away perhaps, but about. And she’s thought up another way of doing that. She’s practically made it a condition of lending us the car that I take dozens of photographs of us abroad and the bits of abroad we see and us looking at them and so on. So she can share it all with us. That’s right. So I