I Like It Here

can feel her breathing down my neck every time I click the shutter. I’ve even had to promise—and I mean promise—to stick the bloody things in an album as we get them developed so they shan’t get lost or damaged or out of order. What about that, eh? It’s enough to drive you up the wall.”
“So I see. Decided where you’re going yet?”
“It’s all the same to me, if you know what I mean.”
“Mm. Well, why not try Portugal, then? Lots of sun, not overrun with Yanks and British, cheap as hell. And the national poet was put on the skids back in the sixteenth century or whenever it was and there’s been sod-all since. That should appeal to you.”
“What about that filthy Fascist government?”
“Ah, get stuffed, what’s that to you? Give you something to go for in your piece for the New York boys. No, seriously, Garnet, you think it over. Good place, Portugal. An uncle of mine went there a year or two ago and was pissed all the time on about ten bob a day.”
“What about another of those while we’re on the subject?”
“No, let’s go in.” Hyman got up, revealing himself as ridiculously athletic in figure as well as exaggeratedly Nordic in face. He looked very unlike a successful young publisher. But he was. This fact was familiar enough to Barbara Bowen, and so was the related fact that her husband read an occasional manuscript for the firm. A third fact, that Bowen was trying to get Hyman to get the firm to give him a job, was unknown to her. Bowen had often thought that not getting this job would carry the consolation prize of not having to tell Barbara anything about it. She had a way of viewing regular salaried employment as somehow inimical to integrity. She had said as much pretty often in the first stages of their courtship, less often in the latter stages, not at all for about a year after their marriage, and pretty often again during the seven years after that. Many of her views had described that parabola.
Bowen followed Hyman into the restaurant. It was a rather expensive one and Hyman always gave you lunch there, whether he was going to try to get you to do something for him, explain that he was not going to do something for you, or just give you lunch. Bowen wondered which sort of Hyman lunch this was going to be. Then he felt he knew.
They were drinking their coffee when Hyman said:
“I suppose you’ll be flying over, will you? On your trip, I mean?”
Bowen gave another throttled cry. He remembered very clearly what that climbing turn had felt like the day one of his R.A.F. pals took him up to show him Cader Idris from the air. He decided it would be hard to discriminate the horror-potential of the terms “plane” and “immediate mobilisation”. Nothing would ever get him into the air, not even a life-contract with the Times Literary Supplement. He put this view to his friend.
Hyman sniffed. “You’ll have a long time at sea otherwise.”
“I shan’t mind that. But wait a minute: why will I?”
“Lisbon’s three days from Southampton, that’s all.”
“Oh, I’ve got to go to Lisbon, have I?”
“No, but there’s one thing you can do there that you can’t do anywhere else.”
“I’m always game for a new thrill. But I’m taking Barbara along, and it’d be a bit hard to work up an alibi when I …”
“Quiet now,” Hyman said, looking round for the waiter. “I’ve got something rather interesting to tell you, but you must promise to keep it under your hat. Let’s try a little experiment. Wulfstan Strether. What’s your reaction?”
“Boredom, chiefly. I never seem to get on with great novelists.”
“Don’t you? I can’t help thinking I remember a talk on the Third a year or two ago on the twentieth anniversary of Rapid Falcons coming out. Or wasn’t that you?”
“I’m afraid it was me, but only because old Cyril got ill at the last moment and couldn’t do it. I was just filling in to oblige.”
“You fascinate me. Anyway, what do you know about Strether himself, as distinct from his stuff?”
“Nothing at all. I thought that was the whole point about him. But, after all, you published him, didn’t you? You must have some dope on him, surely. No point in coming to me.”
“We still do publish him. All five of his novels have been in print ever since the day they first appeared. That’s, what, ten years, isn’t it? or more, from the last one, which was that, Mad as the Mist and Snow?”
“No, This Rough Magic was the last one, in ‘46. Don’t you remember all that Prospero stuff at the end about drowning his book ?—pity he didn’t. And how everybody decided it must mean he was packing it in?”
“Of course,” Hyman said. “Same again? Go on, it’ll do you good. Yes, that’s right. And he did pack it in, you see, or so it appeared. Anyway, you know no more than that about the one indisputably major talent to have arisen since the death of Conrad?”
“D. H. Lawrence, you mean. Well, I know the rumours about him really being some industrial magnate, or that he’s a bloke in a monastery who can’t afford to let the Father Superior know he’s been writing novels in the firm’s time. Oh, and all that business round about 1950 about him being dead. Was anything ever established about that? You ought to know.”
“Yes, I ought to, oughtn’t I? I think all that was based on some more stuff in the Rough Magic thing.”
“Entirely based on that, was it?”
“That’s another thing I don’t know. Listen, I’ll put you in the picture, Garnet. All Strether’s stuff was handled by old man Hiscock in person. He even used to address Strether’s letters and take them to the post himself. Conscientious old bird, Hiscock. Or I suppose you might call him literal-minded. Anyway, Strether wanted his identity kept