I Like It Here

Portugal there are thousands of bidets in the lavatories, all standing in splendid isolation.”
“So that’s it.” The Bowens exchanged grimaces. One mystery (but not the most urgent) about the fittings of Oates’s lavatory was solved. Perhaps if they hung on long enough they would pick up a hint or two on how Oates got hot water from the geyser to the washbasin, in order to shave there, in the absence of any hose or visible container. At that time Bowen was coming round to the view that Oates must carry on his person some kind of collapsible jug.
Gomes had fallen silent. His face hung down in a depressed way while he nibbled its interior; then it brightened with what might have been triumph at the sight of the pretty, nasty boy bawling tearfully as he pursued, with an out-of-condition, slacker’s gait, his retreating companions. Bowen felt his own face giving itself over to a spiteful grin.
After a moment Gomes said: “I’m afraid I’ve been letting myself go. Do forgive me for talking so endlessly. It’s a great fault of mine, I know.” The Bowens’ protestations failed to stem a prolonged flood of eloquent and documented self-deprecation. He defended himself tentatively by suggesting that it was good for English people to hear what he had to say. Far outdoing him in vigour, the Bowens aided this defence. He got up in the middle of it, put some money on the table and said abruptly: “I hope you’ll enjoy your stay in Portugal. For the tourist there are many attractions; for the resident, not quite so many.” He softened this rather cinematic apophthegm with a cordial handshake and a warmer version of his smile. His final wave, delivered from the driving-seat of one of the most unnecessarily large of all the unnecessarily large cars on view, was also cordial.
As Gomes drove violently away he seemed to be leaving behind him the impression that his audience had failed him in some way. Not having had a couple of armoured divisions (with sea and air support) to place at Gomes’s disposal, Bowen could not see how this could have been avoided in large part. Still, a penumbra of trivial insularity had been pretty effectively cast over British domestic squabbles about housing policy or the next round of wage claims. This endemic drab-ness would no doubt be dissipated, Bowen reckoned, if Tories could actually be witnessed in the course of jubilation over something or other to do with capital gains, if Labour could arrange to televise a bona fide very fat man occupied in watering the workers’ beer. But as things were, Gomes seemed to have provided yet another excuse for people like Bowen to be politically apathetic at home.
Bowen himself was beginning to wonder if apathy might not be defended by pointing out that too little of it could bring a nation (France) to the edge of chaos, when his wife said: “Well, that was jolly good copy for you, anyway.”
“Yes. Don’t know whether I can use it, though.”
“Whyever not? You could alter everything about him so that Salazar and his friends would never know it was him.”
“Yes, but you could never be sure it wouldn’t put them on to him. I shouldn’t like taking that sort of risk.”
“And yet you were quite ready to spy on poor old Strether. You are funny. I shall never work you out.”
“The two things are completely different, dear.”
“You think they are. Because talking to Gomes or whatever his name was was like something out of Goodbye to Berlin and the Strether business is just to do with a lousy old writer that people have got no business to be reading anyway. According to you.”
Bowen raised his eyebrows. “There may be something in that.”
“Well, if there is, don’t just say so and go on as you were before. You’re getting much too good at doing that.”

9
BOWEN WAS THINKING what a dreadful thing the theatre was as, a couple of mornings later, he unshipped his typewriter on Oates’s dining-table. His “rough draft”, now unavailingly headed “Final first draft”, had got to page 19 again, the point where twice before he had ripped it up. The present version differed from the earlier ones chiefly in the number of transparent patches, formed by the cream Barbara used to alleviate flea bites, which mottled its surface. He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed:
GREGORY: But this is really quite farcical.
Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed:
(Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are “underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action” like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like “Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory” or putting any more expression into it than as
if
you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after “quite” or saying “fusskle” instead of ‘farcical”.)
Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed:
GREGORY: You’re just pulling my leg.
Then he got up and stumped round the room for a bit, clawing like a science-fiction monster at the flies which wove about him their delicate flight-patterns.
All right, why was he writing this thing? Partly because he could not simultaneously join in the forenoon watch of wasp-evading and Sandra-chasing on the