I Like It Here

with him there, having had a courting couple fall into his vinho branco earlier. No again, which was a pity, for another drive with the squirter would have livened the evening up no end. His glance fell now on the wireless, which was quietly playing the slow movement of Haydn’s “Emperor” quartet; one of the great sane tunes of the world, as Bowen’s programme-note expert (the doubt-horror-and-despair merchant) had no doubt felt bound to characterise it. Oates’s frown, which had been comprehensive, became specific. He approached the instrument and with great stringency turned it off.
“This is pretty weird stuff,” he said.

7
NEXT DAY WAS Buckmaster day, and as full of splendidly straightforward sunshine as ever. At about eleven the Bowens piled into the car—all five of them, because although only one, or at most two, of them had any reason at all for wanting to see Buckmaster, there was nothing else to be done with the other three. Noting that Mrs. Knowles’s upholstery was already starting to age rapidly, Bowen felt at first a mechanical compunction, then a directed glee, for her last letter had contained a sentence enjoining her daughter to “keep Garnett up to the mark”. This reminded him not only of the laughing moralistic vigour which she exuded at all contact, but of how her long-established misspelling of his name managed to taunt him with affected singularity, as if he kept insisting on spelling himself Robyn or Edmond or Donauld. Why was he too nice to point out her mistake every time, as she would have done in his shoes?
Sandra sat on Bowen’s lap, though not at his suggestion. He soon began thinking about beer. He wanted a pint of English beer, but not because of its nationality or anything like that. Although Portuguese beer tasted much less of bone-handled knives than other continental beers, it still wasn’t as nice as English beer. He thought of the time when Barbara, after a bad night with Sandra, had accused him at two hundred words a minute of pretending to like beer because he thought it was working-class, British, lower-middle-class, Welsh, anti-foreign, anti-upper-class, anti-London, anti-intellectual, British and proletarian. He had replied more slowly that she was mistaken if she thought he would deny himself large gins-and-tonic or magnums of sparkling red Burgundy just because nasty people liked them too. (How he thrilled to both the idea and the name of sparkling red Burgundy. Other entities had this same strange double appeal: rhythm and blues, dinotherium, deposit account. Little article there?) He had added to Barbara that beer was cheaper while still sharing with gin and Burgundy the property of making him drunk. This last factor had received insufficient acclaim. He thought to himself now that if ever he went into the brewing business his posters would have written across the top “Bowen’s Beer”, and then underneath that in the middle a picture of Mrs. Knowles drinking a lot of it and falling about, and then across the bottom in bold or salient lettering the words “Makes You Drunk”.
The car emerged from among some big trees with very green leaves into a declivity between some flowering shrubs on one side of the road and some squat bushes, arranged as if for ease of cultivation, on the other. Bowen liked seeing all this, and only wished he knew the names of the trees and the shrubs and the bushes, so that he could enjoy them more. Here and there were small houses, which he took to be the dwellings of the peasantry. Some members of this social group were almost continuously to be seen, working in the fields, strolling along the roadside or sitting round what he thought must be sort of well or pump arrangements. He inspected them as closely as he could for signs of instinctive wisdom and the rest of it, but all he could make out for certain was that they looked foreign, dowdy and on the whole rather amiable: some of them had even waved as they passed. He hoped they would stay amiable when he started asking them the way, as he would soon have to. They might turn grim then, a reaction which the obtruded contrast between their condition and his own would certainly justify.
When it came to the point, a signpost and a single mention of a casa inglesa (as rehearsed under Oates many times the previous evening) did the trick. Bowen felt quite the globe-trotter as Barbara turned the car aside on to an unmade track that curved away from the road. He proposed to regard the coming encounter as no more than exploratory, rather as it was regarded by Barbara, whom he had sold the idea that he was going to gather information which would help Bennie Hyman to launch a difficult book (this being a field in which she was mercifully vague), as well as, perhaps, getting material for a possible article of his own. A few years ago he would have felt a bit panicky at what was ahead of him, but now he didn’t: those of his arrestingly varied and extensive shortcomings that failed to involve Barbara directly had come to appear to him as harmless quirks, even endearing little ways, like fear of cats or inability to mend a fuse. The most that he really felt was resignation at the prospect of being confronted by yet another practitioner of the arts. For Buckmaster was presumably the author of One Word More even if of nothing else.
The house, visible the next moment, seemed partly raised off the ground by wooden pillars. Everything was painted white, including a flight of steps with a handrail that had a creeper growing up it. A veranda looked as if it ran all the way round. Here a human figure stood, half hidden in strong shadow, apparently waving. It also apparently had a glass in its other hand. That was good.
While Barbara was halting the car in a small paved courtyard, Bowen was