I Like It Here

Oh yes, easily.”
“As big as a blue whale?”
“Yes, of course, as big as any kind of whale.”
“Bigger?”
“Yes, much bigger.”
“How much bigger?”
“Never you mind how much bigger. Just bigger is all I can tell you. Isn’t there a comic there you can read?”
“Mark’s reading the only one I haven’t read.”
“Mark, can you give David that comic and read another for a bit? That one’s the only one he hasn’t read.”
“It’s the only one I haven’t read too, Dad.”
“Any case, I don’t want to read, I want to chat, Dad.”
“Oh, God.”
“Dad.”
“Yes?”
“If two tigers jumped on a blue whale, could they kill it?”
“Ah, but that couldn’t happen, you see. If the whale was in the sea the tigers would drown straight away, and if the whale was …“
“But supposing they did jump on the whale?”
“… on land it would die very soon anyway, I think I’m right in saying. Or perhaps it’d be dead already. Yes, I think it’d have to be, to be on land. Anyway, it couldn’t happen.”
“But supposing it did?”
“Oh, God. Well, I suppose the tigers’d kill the whale eventually, but it’d take a long time.”
“How long would it take one tiger?”
“Even longer. Now I’m not answering any more questions about whales or tigers.”
“Dad.”
“Oh, what is it now, David?”
“If two sea-serpents …”
Bowen now forbade his elder son all speech under penalty of physical mutilation. A waiver in cases of imminent excretion or vomiting was petitioned for and allowed, but only because all five Bowens were travelling by car at the time. Barbara drove it with concentration and skill, even with a certain dash, punctiliously making with the hand-signals, giving buses right of way, tooting a warning to just the kind of child who might suddenly dash across the road. She also drove in complete silence.
Currency bum, tickets bum and other stray posteriors had been satisfactorily, even creditably, dispatched. Passport photograph nates had given Bowen a chance to behave like a Somerset Maugham character by comparing his new one with the one he had had taken for his only previous civilian trip abroad in 1946. A party that included Barbara, at that time not yet Bowen’s wife (in fact the young lady of someone quite different), had spent three weeks at Remiremont, Vosges, largely because it was the only place in France any of them had heard of outside the realms of history, geography and gossip columns. The food had been good and Bowen had had his hair cut in the village just as if he was French himself.
The comparison of the portraits had been of value and interest. The lad in the 1946 one had looked back at Bowen with petulant, head-on-one-side sensitivity. Wearing a nasty suit, he had seemed on the point of asking Bowen why he wasn’t a pacifist or what he thought of Aaron’s Rod. The 1956 Bowen was twice as wide and had something of the air of a television panellist. His question about Aaron’s Rod would have concerned how much money whoever wrote it had made out of it. It was odd how the two of them could differ so much and yet both look exactly the kind of man he would most dislike to meet or be.
Barbara, on the evidence presented, had changed from the kind of fourteen-year-old one might expect to find hiding in a U.S. Army barrack-room to the kind of concentration-camp wardress who had lampshades made of human skin. The knowledge that this was not so had helped to reconcile Bowen to the petulant sensitive and the television panellist. But both were warnings.
Despite the help he had had, mainly from Bennie Hyman, fixing up the trip had given Bowen much more to do than he had expected even when he had thought he was going to have to do everything himself. Packing bum, accountant bum (including arrangements for payment of income-tax demand buttock), special shopping expeditions (aaoh! aoh! aooh!) bum, and labelling bum (especially that) had all taken their toll. Still, they were now adequately prepared, all the way from the mosquito-repellent—with mosquito-bite ointment in case the outer defences should fall—to completed negotiations for drafts on a Portuguese bank. This bank had given Bowen his only laugh for several weeks by being called the Banco Spirito Santo e Comercial de Lisboa, a synthesis of God and Mammon as arresting as any feature of the Anglo-Saxon Christmas.
In a much longer time than it takes to tell the Bowens had got to Southampton, found the right dock after two or three tours of that part of the county, waited long enough there for both boys to ask almost continuously to be taken back to South Kensington and for Sandra to fall off a bench on to her face, gone on board and been directed to their cabin. The ship seemed nice at a first look but proportioned rather on the lines of an Indian war canoe. Bowen mentioned this to Barbara.
“How do you mean?” she said.
“Well, I mean it’s narrow, that’s all.”
“Oh, I see. Will it matter, do you think?”
“It might, I suppose. I wouldn’t know really.” Bowen thought briefly about the Bay of Biscay, then at more length about the Derry-Brown Stabilisers he had read about in the shipping-company brochure. There had been a diagram of them.
In their cabin they found Bennie Hyman, surrounded by their luggage and drinking a large gin and tonic. Before speaking he pressed the bell at his side. Then he greeted them heartily. Barbara responded less heartily but still fairly heartily. Bowen was delighted, but a little suspicious at the same time. He said: “Christ, it’s good of you to come all this way, Bennie. What is it, seventy miles?”
“Not quite—I was weekending with some people in Winchester, so I thought I might as well pop down and see you safely away on the billow. I got a glimpse of you on the dock, but I thought I couldn’t do any good there, especially not for myself, so I argued my way along here and drank. Feeling