I Like It Here

before he came along just had no idea—getting the country into debt the whole time. The place had no sort of a future in those days. It has now. There’s no doubt the Portuguese have every reason to be grateful to Salazar.”
When Oates was feeling his Englishness, as he clearly was tonight, his accent was as good as Bowen’s (in fact rather better in some ways) and he talked about “the Portuguese”. At such times he would compare the local navy disadvantageously, in, point of size and quality, with the Royal one, disparage the country’s music, point to the rudimentary stage its industry had reached, and be amused at such quirks as the recent decision that Lisbon, a compact city with no suburbs to speak of, should have an underground railway like any other capital. At other times he discarded the fact of his British birth and gave the Bowens a dose of his adopted nationality. This alter ego spoke English almost as idiomatically, but with what must have been a Portuguese accent, though it also carried a strong and perplexing flavour of the Rhondda. Such was the subpersonality he adopted when he lectured Bowen, with abundant illustrations, on the post-war decline in the quality of British exports and in British business enterprise and reliability, or when he wanted to contrast British readiness to “give away” India with the firmness that the Portuguese (who now became “we”) had shown over the Goa question. These and other opinions seemed dictated by his membership of Portugal’s small, recent and—Bowen supposed—philistine and illiberal middle class. But the conflict in his mind, however partial and intermittent, between his Britishness and his Portugueseness made him more interesting to Bowen than that, and the neat symbols of that conflict, the souvenir-stall coffee-tin on the elegant traditional-pattern cloth Rosie had embroidered, seemed not only absurd.
“It makes me a bit fed-up,” Oates was going on, “to think of all these attacks in the foreign Press by people who don’t know the country. Salazar runs the place, admittedly, but it won’t do to start comparing him with Franco. Franco’s a real dictator—we know all about him in Portugal—he’s very conceited, you know, having parades and things the whole time. Of course, the Spaniards quite like that, they’re fond of ostentation and so on, always gone in for uniforms and flag-waving. From what I know of the Portuguese I’d say they wouldn’t stand for that sort of nonsense—they’re more like the British in that way. But in any case they don’t have to put up with it, because there isn’t any. In all the years I’ve been in Lisbon I haven’t seen a single parade, apart from the Army, but that’s different. And Salazar himself is pretty well a hermit, you know, lives very quietly. Yes, I support the régime all right, and so do my—well, my colleagues and friends.”
Barbara now startled her husband by asking a question. In company she tended to be silent, usually quite contentedly, sometimes—he thought this in his more querulous moments, when perhaps a policy statement from her had provoked him into a silent bum-recital— with the air of resting up until she could get him on his own again. She said to Oates: “Is there a Labour party here ?” By now they had reached the liqueur stage, and she was drinking ginja, a kind of high-octane cherry brandy.
Oates laughed with predictable tolerance. “If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s the sort of question which only a person from England could ask.” He glanced at Bowen with raised eyebrows, perhaps to see if he minded him saying so; then looked at his guest’s glass, which happened to be empty. Blinking thoughtfully, he got up and creaked sideways round the back of Barbara’s chair to the smaller sideboard, along which were ranged the cinzano, the ginja, the two bottles of port, the faísca, the bottle of fruit extract for the children, and the real fine eau de vie. This last he picked up and, after making sure that Bowen wanted another drink and that this was the drink he wanted another of, poured him a respectable tot, managing well in the small polygonal space allowed him by the configuration of the furniture. “You take this chap Gaitskell,” he said as he replaced the bottle—he never put it on the table unless de Sousa and Bachixa, his two motorbike-owning friends, dropped in for a chat. “Now you can’t imagine him cutting people’s throats, can you, or blowing up a bridge, taking money from a foreign power or anything like that?”
Bowen agreed, with some inward regret, that this would be wholly untypical. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rosie take her translation of Hall Caine from the drink-sideboard and open it at a religious-looking bookmark.
“In other words he’s a respectable character,” Oates was saying. “Just as loyal to the Queen as anyone else. But the people who oppose the Government out here aren’t like that. Fortunately there aren’t very many of them, and these Portuguese are pretty efficient at police work, so they don’t get a chance to do much damage or kick up much of a row. But you take it from me. They’re awful people.”
“I see,” the Bowens said simultaneously.
“Yes, when you really come to weigh it up, you know,” Oates said, lighting another High-Life, “there just isn’t any practicable alternative to this Government. Or any desirable one, either. It’s got strong ties with the Church, which is as it should be in a country like this.”
His manner had lost its assurance and Bowen wondered whether he was going to bind them to silence and throw off the mask, reveal he was shortly booked to rush off on his ginger-coloured motorbike and help to dynamite the casino at Estoril. But no: something in his immediate environment was troubling him. As he looked questingly about him it occurred to Bowen that perhaps it was the flies which were the matter—Bowen would be