I Like It Here

on the ship for you.”
“They do, do they? Who takes it off again?”
“Oh, they arrange for a foreign A.A. chap to meet you.”
Many years previously Bowen had read a programme note, rather emotionally worded, on the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky—the old Pathétique. After some talk about the note of hectic defiance to be remarked in the third movement, the writer had characterised the finale as the utterance of a soul stricken by doubt, horror and despair. This little triad later came to fit exactly the state of Bowen’s soul when confronted with what he saw as the basic abroad-situations: those involving policemen, waiters, beggars, hotel clerks, drunks, madwomen, Customs officers, porters, ferry supervisors, car-park attendants and persons who had perforce to be asked the way to the nearest lavatory. As he puffed his Dutch cigar that day a sample version of doubt, horror and despair gave the ulceration of his duodenum a nudge forward at the thought of conversing with, or more likely remarking the absence of, the foreign A.A. chap. “That’s a comfort,” he said.
“Evidently Olivia’s in-laws have got a pal in Lisbon who might help us to get fixed up. She’s going to ask them.”
“What sort of pal?”
“Oh, quite an important pal, I gather. The bits of Lisbon he doesn’t own are more or less not worth having. You know Olivia.”
Bowen did, and said so. The wife of a man who was just stopping being supposed to be an architect and starting being an architect, she used to smile at Bowen sometimes in a way that seemed to point out the impracticability of her ever yielding to his desires, natural enough and even creditable as these were. At other times, though less often since her husband had been given a half-share in doing that infants’ school at Penge, her demeanour suggested moral revolt at the whole concept of Bow en’s fitness to perform the sexual act. Bowen viewed these demonstrations kindly; after all, he reasoned, the forty per cent more chin which might imaginably entitle her to them would also render them unnecessary to her.
“Still, it’ll probably be jolly useful, darling. He can probably get us a villa just by clicking his fingers. And we shan’t be committing ourselves to anything just by letting him help us. One visit to thank him for what he’s done and then we needn’t see any more of him.”
“Exactly,” Bowen said, smiling at her. Both word and smile derived from how he had begun to feel about Portugal. Quite apart from the matter of the Lisbon pal and his finger-clicking potentialities, there was the business about Britain’s oldest ally and the fact that port came from there. It was true that a recent article had named Portugal as the least jazz-conscious country in Europe, but against this could be set something he had once read about everyone there not liking the Spaniards. Good stuff. Bowen felt this to be so even though he thought he recognised intellectually that the Spaniards couldn’t possibly be as bad as the impression of them to be gained from those who lauded them in print, and even though individual Spaniards he had heard of seemed amiable enough—Cervantes, Picasso, Casals and the man who had lent a pair of trousers to a friend of Bowen’s who had been locked out of his flat in his dressing-gown. The lender of trousers had been flying to Madrid the next morning, too. A real hidalgo, that one.
Barbara lit one of her small filter-tipped cigarettes and tucked her legs up under her on the lopsided couch. If some of her ideas could seem unduly self-conscious, her physical demeanour never was. She began talking enthusiastically and vaguely, the black plume of her pony-tail hair-do tossing to and fro, about how they would get to Portugal and what they would do once there. Bowen watched her contentedly, rather drowsily too: Hyman’s lunch, its effects delayed by his afternoon visits, was heavy upon him. He thought what a nice wife he had, and that she would be perfect if she would only take him as she found him, a form of treatment he had long since begun meting out to her. Excess of energy was really her trouble: you could tell a lot from the fact that when she waved her hand to people, as she was always doing, she waved it from the shoulder instead of the wrist, and that when she stirred a pan on the stove she waggled her bottom to the same rhythm— not that he minded that at all. These days her manner to him was one of affectionate banter, lively demonstration of fondness for him which was increasingly accompanied by resolute concern to get him smartened up. Her rehabilitation programme had so far been directed only at the outworks of his personality: clothes, hours, drinking procedures, finance, the institution of a warning system to deal with the sudden cancellations and rearrangements he said his freelance status made necessary. For quite a time he had had no cause to revise his private imitation of how she put her head on one side and stared at his hairbrush before taking it off to wash it, nor the one of how she brightened her tone, like someone reading to a very young or very old invalid, whenever she came out with something like “He sounded a bit het-up over the phone but I told him I was quite certain you were working on it and would get it to him in time.” She was far from being always like that, and going to bed with all that slender brunette beauty continued to be both emotionally edifying and unbeatable fun—as if the Iliad or some other gruelling cultural monument had turned out to be a good read as well as a masterpiece. Fine. But what would happen when she stopped tinkering with his habits and moved inwards to the bedraggled sprawl that was the core of his being? He sometimes thought that the