I Like It Here

telling himself that he wasn’t a spy, but a man doing a job. By the time he had leapt zestfully out of car, burning his hand rather on some hot metal-work, and had turned to meet the man who was coming down the wooden steps, he was telling himself that he was a man doing a job and a spy too. Well, either way he might as well watch carefully.
“My name is Wulfstan Strether,” the man said, as at the start of one of those films where the hero does a running commentary as well as chatting to the other characters. “And you, no doubt, are Garnet Bowen. And Mrs. Bowen. And these are your children. I am very glad to welcome you all here.”
Bowen’s first thought was Yes, claim upheld. Visually the fellow measured up: he was tall, slightly stooping, with almost white though abundant hair, and with a bearing, a nose, a mouth, a pair of eyes that could be unhesitatingly pigeon-holed as authoritative, hawk-like, sensitive, piercing. This was to ignore, perhaps, the properties of his ears (elongated, red), hat (staringly white), shirt (damask, extra-zonal, unwise), and his dialogue recalled Charles Morgan rather than anything Downing College would approve—though the distinction was admittedly a fine one. But all this was countered by the quality of his voice (the statutory reedy tenor) and its accent (older speakers’ upper-class, with even a scintilla of hyah about the word here). He looked about sixty and, while amiable enough, a terrible old crap.
“Shall we go up?” he asked pleasantly. “I think I can guess what bulks largest in your mind at the moment. A comfortable chair and a long cool drink. This heat, though not in any sense extreme, is, I know, or can be, not without a certain debilitative quality in its impact upon those unaccustomed to it.”
Barbara, carrying Sandra, dilated her eyes at Bowen and mounted the steps. Bowen, following with the boys, decided not to risk trying to warn them against saying, for example, “Ergh, what’s that ?” in reference to their host, as they had recently said in reference to a fairly distinguished poet he had brought home for tea. He hoped it would not be as hard to avoid calling the old boy “Buckmaster” as it was to avoid calling Oates “Titus.”
They moved along the veranda. In some extraordinary way, Bowen found himself expecting some tall curvilinear beauty, golden-skinned and with blackbird-plumage hair (not to mention grace, pride, disdain— but with a hint of lurking voluptuousness—poise, etc.), to come forward and greet them. The woman who did had golden skin, yes, but it was old gold and accompanied by none of the other requisite attributes except disdain. She had that all right, and had it in the pure state, free from any voluptuary taint, thank God.
The room they entered was Maugham-like, but of the Far East and not the Riviera sub-type. Any whisky-sodden tea-planter or homicidal adulteress would have felt at home here in a moment, what with the venetian blinds, the hanging bowls with greenery trailing from them, the vaguely bogey-bogey wooden images (from Brazil, Bowen was told later), the magazines and novels from England—a promising field for investigation, these last. But was all that going to matter? Bowen felt now that within a few minutes, probably, Buckmaster would have produced some letter or other object which would establish his claim to being Strether. If it didn’t come of its own accord, as it easily might, it shouldn’t be hard to coax it out of him. Good. And drinks were on the way. Better. And, it suddenly occurred to him, no amount of spying could damage the old boy unless he was a phoney. Best.
The production of drinks was interrupted while Buckmaster went in search of ice. David and Mark had swept the room with a glance, found it void of entertainment material, and rushed out. Barbara had removed Sandra to less vulnerable ground. Bowen had the room to himself. He glanced along the bookshelves, which were of a pretty pinkish wood, unvarnished. A copy of The Custom of the Country early presented itself, but he set his teeth and went gamely on. Under Western Eyes bim barn a bomber bum. Then Portrait of a Lady. Oh, Christ. Uncontrollable laughter was the only dignified response to that. He vented some.
Buckmaster came back in the middle of it, naturally. Carrying an engraved silver bowl, he said that he saw that something was amusing Bowen.
“I don’t know why, but seeing Portrait of a Lady on the shelf here reminded me of that time, you know, when old James made that comment on the shadowplay or whatever it was.” This remark sounded disagreeably knowledgeable to its author, who reassured himself by remembering that only a train-journey to Leicester (to hold forth on “Crisis in the Modern Novel”) and a shortage of reading-matter had led him on to the page of the Sunday Times where the shadowplay comment had been quoted.
“Oh yes. Yes indeed, one of the Master’s choicest thrusts. ‘A remarkable economy of means and of effect,’ eh? What? HERM? MM?”
The surge of interrogatives was not unfamiliar to
Bowen as a means, popular with elderly or academic persons, of underlining a jest, though it was a novelty to hear it used of another’s jest. He smiled politely, thinking that a knowledge of Jamesiana, plus the possession of Jamesian texts, certainly befitted an indisputably major talent. Claim further upheld? No, for even a false Strether would be of this persuasion. A retired light-heavyweight, a devotee of Louis Armstrong or Pee Wee Russell would not aspire to be taken for a novelist of international repute. A pity, that, and a grave impoverishment of cultural life.
“Shall we venture on to the veranda, Mr. Bowen? I think we shall find it cooler there. Is there anything you need, Mrs. Bowen, for the, er, the baby ?” Having successfully brought off this audacious colloquialism, he sat them all down and, tremulously and with excessive haste,