I Like It Here

the rounds of the advertising world or public relations. You won’t be spying, you owl. You’re just going to look him up and let me know how he strikes you. Well?”
“All right, provided I can sell Barbara the idea of Portugal.”
“That’s your problem, brother. Thank you.” He took his hat and donned it, for they stood now in the foyer. “As soon as I hear definitely from you I’ll get the cheque made out.”
“Oh yes, how much will it be? Twenty-five?”
“Not less than twenty, anyway. Good. We’ll have another chat before you go. Right, all the best then, Garnet bach. See you.”
“Thanks for the lunch, Bennie. Mazel tov.”
Hyman began walking away, then stopped, doubled up, and turned. “Just the thing for you, this, isn’t it? You and your sham-detecting lark. Be nice to see what happens. A sort of test, in a way.”

2
THE TEST THAT interested Bowen in the next few hours concerned not Strether or pseudo-Strether but the miniature evacuation of his homeland that lay ahead of him. Would he be able to make it? And what would he do all the time if he did, apart from writing his play and hoping not to be addressed in a foreign tongue? He thought of this before, during and after his visit to the offices of a literary journal he sometimes contributed to. The only books he was allowed to take away were a work on the decline of Western culture (800 words by next Thursday), a lavishly-illustrated volume about dinosaurs (for his elder children) and a handsome affair to do with flowers of hedgerow and woodland (for flogging). But he cheered himself up by extracting a promise to print a short article, when the time came, in the journal’s “European Notebook” section. He was now well over a hundred pounds up on the day. A little treat tonight, then.
At his local wine-shop in search of the little treat, he looked with great interest and lurking dread at all the manifestations of abroad that were to be seen around him: France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Algeria, Jamaica, Holland, the Union of South Africa, Poland, Chile—he closed his eyes at the memory of the epilogue to a Chilean-burgundy party last Christmas—Australia, Portugal. Yes, Portugal. Mm. Oh well. It was still rather moving to think of all those citizens of distant lands working so hard to make it possible for him to be drunk here in London. He got a nice Moselle for himself (“rather like a Barsac, sir,” the man said, “if you know your wines”) and some Golden Sweet Malaga and a bottle of pop for his wife. As he walked along to the flat he thought hard about abroad, as he was often to do in the next few weeks.
For someone like him, he reasoned, deportation was a long-standing need. He pleaded with himself that he was getting into a rut and that it was no defence to say that he liked ruts. Everything had gone too easily for him: the first in English at Swansea, the three years on the local rag and at wing-forward for the All-Whites, emigration to London and subbing on the national daily, the last two and a half years freelancing and still on the up-and-up, with even a book behind him. (It was a collection of tarted-up reviews called No Dogmas Allowed, and he looked forward to its getting further and further behind him.) Anyway, he had come off pretty well compared with the two other people who had got firsts in his year: richer, freer and working less than poor Menna Talmadge, who was still teaching in the Midlands, and freer than Fred Rogers, who helped to do publicity for a car combine. Yes, Bowen thought, a good shaking-up is what I want. Want? Well, need. Need? Well, ought to have, then.
A children’s party of some kind seemed to be going on in the flat when he got to it; at any rate, there was more noise than he could easily imagine his own three making. He therefore went up to his study, a room that deserved the name of “den” more than most by reason of its hole-like aspect and the remarkable gamey smell coming from the wallpaper. It was on the half-landing and Bowen had established himself in it as a result of an ambiguity in the agreement with the landlord, who lived on the upstairs floor with a person conjectured by Bowen to be his boy-friend. The landlord was of wild appearance, with a lot of scuff on his eyebrows, and gossip at the pub on the corner had it that he was supposed to be a sculptor. The quality and tendency of this supposition was one of the many minor reasons why Bowen disliked being supposed to be a dramatist. Apart from occasional arguments about Bowen’s right to the den, he had had no contact with the landlord at all since an evening in the autumn when the fellow, looking wilder than usual, had met him in the street and taken him into a neighbouring back-garden to show him the gridded top of an alleged ventilation shaft from the underground Railway. Later that night the Bowens had heard a two-hour quarrel raging overhead. They had failed to work out what part, if any, was being played in it by the ventilation shaft.
Bowen sat down in the crackling basket-chair and picked up the new Graham Greene. He had nothing against that author either personally or aesthetically, but wished he would die soon so that his lecture on him would not keep on having to have things added to it every eighteen months or so. Perhaps it would be better in the long run to set his teeth and make the switch to E. M. Forster. The new Graham Greene, like most of the old Graham Greenes, was about abroad. Extraordinary how the region kept coming up. There must be something in it: not all the people who thought so