I Like It Here

and pulled the place apart again. That sort of thing would make you smile, perhaps. It makes me feel sad.”
Saying this in a noticeably buoyant tone, as before, he ordered drinks from the waiter and, it soon transpired, coffee and cakes as well. Bowen took the chance of moving his eyebrows and head in such a way as to ask his wife if she wanted to leave. She didn’t. When Gomes had finished his negotiations, she said:
“Someone was telling us the other day that Salazar has done a lot for the country. Do you think there’s anything in that?”
“Well, my dear, the hospital situation is less of a crying scandal now, yes. A few clinics for syphilis, just here and there. But it’s all window-dressing really. Our fine feathered friend Salazar must keep well in with England and America now, since they didn’t become defeated by Hitler as he’d hoped. He wants money from the democracies, you see, so Lisbon, at any rate, must be brushed up a little, there must be some evidence of welfare. It’s paid him well in all sorts of ways. That fine new road, now, running east from Lisbon to Evora and Spain—that’s an American road. It’ll take up the supplies to the NATO armies in Spain when they try to stop the Russians at the Pyrenees.”
Bowen gave a light, devil-may-care laugh under his breath at this prospect, then ran a finger round under his collar. It stayed hot late in Estoril.
“He gets money inside Portugal easily enough,” Gomes was going on, glancing without affection at a group of rich adolescents, all white shorts, T-shirts and red jockey caps, who were fooling about round a British-made sports car at the kerb. “Anything he wants, from a church to a cruiser, he just blackmails the big firms: if you won’t buy it for me, then no more Government contracts for you, my fine fellow. Money is the key in Portugal. Or the spending of money. In England or America, if a man makes a good pile he goes on working, making more, and continuing to give employment, which is a thing your Socialist friends leave out of account, if I may say so. Here he just spends it with as much fuss as possible, piling his wife and his lady friend with diamonds and furs and so on, and making spoiled brats of his children—like that crowd of imbeciles there.” One of the T-shirt bunch, a pretty, nasty boy of about fourteen, was displaying the abandoned, single-minded ferocity of a toddler as he demanded something from a smaller replica of himself. “In England, it’s from the sons of the rich men that you draw so many of your splendid public servants, your officials in the colonies, your administrators, and your novelists and poets too. But these—they think of nothing but cars and new clothes and entertaining themselves. They’re like women. Here in Portugal we have conscription, as you have in England. But these bright lads will never join the Army; their pappas will see to that, bribe some fashionable doctor to give a medical certificate that they’re unfit. You imagine if that was tried in England. Your Queen herself joined your women’s Army. You imagine the row which would be kicked up if some rich Englishman tried to keep his son from conscription. No, my dear fellow. The rich men of a country, if they have the sense of responsibility, can be everybody’s salvation. Without that responsibility they bring shame and ruin. Have a cigarette.”
The parts of his discourse were too neatly dovetailed not to make Bowen suspect that it had been delivered, in substance at least, many times before. It was easy to sympathise with him. Beyond talking like this to strangers he could have few outlets, given a muzzled Press, the presence of Himmler’s graduates and the absence of political parties. Bowen could not visualise him tying himself up with Oates’s awful people for a spot of bridge-demolition, but he had met hardly anyone whom it was easier to visualise blowing up a bridge if it came to the push and given the right company.
Gomes lit their cigarettes with an apparently gold lighter the size of a pocket dictionary. “It may interest you to know,” he said vivaciously, “that I’m now engaged in breaking the law.”
“By talking to us like this?”
“That too, yes. If you were a journalist I should get a stiff sentence. But I hardly think that the discretion of English people leaves me anything to fear. However, I was referring to the lighting of your cigarettes. That’s illegal, you see. Oh yes. I can pass you my lighter and permit you to light your cigarette with it. Or I can light a scrap of paper with my lighter and light your cigarette with the flame of the paper. But I mustn’t do what I’ve just done if I want to remain on the right side of the law. This is incredible to you, but it’s a fact. It nearly baffles me. It’s connected with the efforts of Salazar to make it difficult for the owners of lighters. The makers of matches complained that their trade was going downhill, because of so many lighters, and Salazar had to pacify them for his own ends without offending the lighter people too much. So the owner of every lighter must have a licence, for which he must pay, and there are all these other rules.”
“It sounds fantastic.”
“Yes. But this country is full of such fantastic things. A few years ago there was a new law which made it compulsory for every bathroom and lavatory to contain a bidet. I think Salazar must have had a friend who made the things. He must have known that the facilities were inadequate for most of them to be connected up with running water, not enough skilled labour and so on. So he just made no reference in his law to connecting them up. And now all over