I Like It Here

Perhaps he would try it some time.
As they swung down the dusty lanes, passed the barracks with its ill-clad sentry and moved towards the coast road, Bowen was meditating. Fleas were the object of his contemplation. He considered them an integral part of abroad, so much so that their occasional presence in the United Kingdom might well be the result of successive importations from the Continent. Perhaps it was a flea of Latin origin that had made half a term at Swansea memorable for him. He was in digs at the time, where the presence of four ginger cats, one of them called Ginger, had already tried him a little. The reign of the flea began when he was just about coming through on the other side of a thirty-six-hour stomach-ache. He was also attending a course of lectures on some piece of orang-utan’s toilet-requisite from the dawn of England’s literary heritage— The Dream of the Rood, perhaps, or The Fall of the Angels. He felt it would only take one more visit from the dough-faced Christian physicist who lived upstairs, or one sight of a soccer forward-line embracing one another after the scoring of a goal, to send him straight into whatever international brigade might be available at the time. Instead, he got the flea.
There was the bathing, the changes of clothes, the dosing of his bed with the Atomic Insect Destroyer (“They Are Paralysed—Then DIE”) which turned the sheets into hot sandpaper. The flea stayed alive and biting. He lay nude in bed with the light on and a wet cake of soap in his hand. Nothing happened. He knew now that fleas, like colds, acne and lumbago, belong to a part of the natural order where there are no cures and the only thing to do is to wait for them to go away. This flea fed and roamed freely for weeks; then, after keeping himself to himself rather longer than usual, he crawled down on to his host’s wrist while the latter was drinking a Guinness in the upstairs bar of the Bryn-y-Mor. Bowen blew at him and he vanished. He never saw or heard of him again.
When the fleas began in Portugal Bowen felt, as one who finds Mont Blanc impressive or sees a knife drawn in a Shanghai bar, that tradition was reasserting itself. He should also perhaps have taken warning from Oates’s revelation that, before he and Rosie came along, their house had been occupied by awful people; but what could he have done? Anyway, the Bowens counter-attacked fiercely: lots of baths and bathes for all five, frequent and diligent inspection of the kids, he and Barbara dashing into their bedroom several times a day to strip, as if assailed by intolerable lust. They gained ground slowly and unsurely; it all contrasted interestingly with the war of movement on the fly front. Bowen’s first kill was a big insect with an important, matriarchal appearance. About that time, acting on the principle that suffering is the raw material of art, he began devising a flea episode (later rejected) for his play. A man called Bellow was going to catch the flea that had been devoting its attentions to him and somehow convey it to the person of the villain. After a couple of happy days spent watching his enemy scratching and cursing, Bellow was destined to pass an amorous afternoon with his young lady. That night, finding the flea back in residence, he was to spend in scratching and gloomy speculation. Thereafter invention along this line had failed.
If Bowen had acquired his Portuguese fleas in the course of roughing it, being put up by a brigand in a cave, dossing down on straw in a tavern yard, that kind of thing, he considered that he would have felt differently about them. They would have become a troublesome but distinctive token of manhood, like sabre-cuts or venereal disease. That was how some of his friends seemed to regard fleas and other “little inconveniences” you found abroad. But as things were the fleas had come to him, not he to them. He had just been quietly minding his own business. Shame as from a boil on the neck, nostalgia for the neat little South Ken. bathroom, decreased tolerance for Oates’s creak and Rosie’s clop— ever in his heart, these.
They reached the café. Barbara had stopped mentioning Strether and integrity in the same sentence and only chaffed him now about the business. She was looking fine this evening, trim and brown and larger of eye than ever. Bowen rather wished she wasn’t: the wakefulness of Sandra in the same room, the readiness of the springs of their bed to click and twang at the slightest movement, had been restricting their married life a good deal.
Soon after their first drinks arrived a man who said he was called Gomes came over to their table. “Do excuse me for intruding,” were his first words, “but I heard you mention things about London and I couldn’t resist coming and talking to you. Tell me, what’s the old place like these days? I haven’t been there since before the war.”
By this time he was sitting down, offering cigarettes and signalling for another drink all round. It very soon emerged that he had been educated at Oxford; either that or he had taken some trouble to be able to impersonate one who had. His face and—apart from his cream shirt and lavender tie—his dress were of a clerical sobriety, but his demeanour was not. He had a brilliant mirthless smile with clenched teeth and a trick of nibbling the inside of his lower lip. Bowen could guess his age (fiftyish) and his income-level (highish). He told them nothing about himself beyond his name and the fact of his English education.
They moved off London after Bowen had tried to tell him what the old place was like these days. Gomes said: “It doesn’t sound like my London. But isn’t that rather true of