I Like It Here

were horrible. A couple of months there would be like learning to drive or making a determined start on Finnegans Wake—an experience bound in itself to be arduous and irritating, but one which could conceivably render available a rich variety of further experiences. And he knew he would never have taken such a step voluntarily; it had taken a team made up of Barbara, Barbara’s mother and the staff of See magazine, with Bennie Hyman as first reserve, to bring him to this point.
Bowen told himself that he suffered from acute prejudice about abroad. Some of this he thought he recognised as unreasonable, based as it was on disinclination for change, dislike of fixing up complicated arrangements, and fear of making a fool of himself. One of his many archetypal images of abroad was of a man inquiring about his luggage in dumb-show while a queue formed behind him—except that of course it wouldn’t be a queue there, but a pushing, jostling crowd. Further, he fancied that he had a long history of lower-middle-class envy directed against the upper-middle-class traveller who handled foreign railway-officials with insolent ease, discussed the political situation with the taxi-driver in fluent argot, and landed up first go at exactly the right hotel, if indeed he wasn’t staying with some contessa, all cigarette-holder and chaise-longue, who called him by a foreign version of his christian name. He tried it over: Garnetto, Garnay, or rather Guhghr-nay. Later, he mused, they went off and dined, exquisitely and madly cheaply, at—that’s right, a little place one or other of them happened to know about, where—yes, you could get the best merluza rellena al estilo de toro in Valencia.
He was musing about what happened when they got back from the little place when his wife came in with a tray. It had their tea on it. Seeing the notes and open book on his lap, the pencil in his hand, she asked with just a dash of incredulity in her childish tones: “Are you busy, darling?”
“Oh no, I haven’t really settled down yet. Had a good day?”
“Fair to middling, you know. How was Bennie?”
“Oh, fine. Damn’ good lunch, as always.”
“What did he want out of you this time? More sweated manuscript-reading?”
Bowen arranged his mug and plate carefully before replying. He would have to go slowly about the Strether project, release only some of the details now and those a bit at a time, allow the idea to merge into the un-regarded furniture of her mind. Otherwise she would get excited one way or the other. Either she would stand over him until and while he wrote to Strether announcing their arrival and offering to bring with them any books, periodicals and general stores he might want, or she would stand over him until and while he rang up Bennie Hyman and told him that, for reasons in some way involving integrity, the deal was off. In a tone which he tried to make sound merely bored, but which in fact suggested a statement made during an interval of the peine forte et dure, he said: “Well … there wasn’t really.., very much.., worth mentioning. I told him our trip was definitely on, and we discussed that…”
“I suppose he suggested Monte Carlo or somewhere, did he?”
“No, he… no, he seemed to think Portugal might be a good bet. He’d heard quite good reports of it, apparently: cheap, you know, and not too… Whatever’s the matter, dear?”
Barbara’s already large eyes had dilated considerably, so that a good deal of white was visible under each pupil. The fact that she had her mouth full of swiss roll and was chewing it vigorously, a normal enough proceeding in itself, made the eye-business rather alarming. “This is extraordinary,” she said, blowing out crumbs.
“What is? Are you all right?”
“I had lunch with Olivia.”
“What a good idea.”
“You know, it really seems as if things are arranging themselves in a very queer way. By the time I left her” —she paused, for effect or to lick her fingers—”I’d more or less made up my mind, subject to your approval of course.., that Portugal was where we ought to go.”
“What a funny thing.”
“It’s more than that, darling. It’s obviously what we’re intended to do, what life’s got in store for us. There’s obviously some reason behind it we shan’t know till we get there. Don’t you see? It’s the next thing to happen to us.”
Bowen lit one of the small Dutch cigars he treated himself to at prosperous periods. He disguised a long sigh as a long exhalation of smoke. Barbara was being mystical again, another habit that, after a few months’ recession around the time of their marriage, was booming these days with all its pristine vigour. It had no basis in religion or even in superstition as it is ordinarily thought of; it had no truck with anything as tangible as stopped clocks, dreams or unlikely coincidences.
Ordinary run-of-the-mill coincidences, such as this Portugal one, were what usually set her off. Bowen had often asked himself what she really thought she meant by this contemporary-style occultism, and in the early days had asked her as well. No good, though. Any reluctance on his part to accept her auguries was likely to earn him a smiling, raised-eyebrow rebuke for surrendering to market-place obtuseness. He cheered up again now as he recognised that at least Portugal would need no selling to Barbara after this; his aim henceforth must be to stop her from trying to arrive there by first light in the morning.
Barbara developed her theme for a minute or two, then suddenly became practical. She was good at being that, much better than he, which was how she got away with being also better at being spiritual than he. “Olivia was telling me,” she said with the ingenuous vivacity that had first attracted him to her, “that the A.A. do it all. I’ll go and see them in the morning and get the details. They even put the car