“It will take only five minutes. And I drive very safely.”
“Oh, it isn’t that … Ah, here’s your friend.”
Bowen was overjoyed to see and hear de Sousa rounding the bend on his pale-green motor-scooter and coming to join up with Bachixa, thus restoring the order of things as well as providing a felicitous diversion. As he approached he was already smiling more broadly than many people can manage; when he dismounted he began laughing. In him these two responses had little intermediate ground. Bowing deeply to Bowen, he cackled out “Good evening” in English, then put his bike on its rest, came over and shook hands. As soon as his eye fell on Bachixa’s machine, his demeanour sobered, became scrutinising, even censorious. Pointing at something, he rapped out an expostulatory question. Bachixa retorted vehemently. De Sousa scowled and his voice rose.
They were hard at it when Barbara appeared, all tizzied up for the evening and looking faintly delinquent as a result. De Sousa at once began laughing again. They both said “Good evening” as they shook hands, but Bachixa added “madam” to it.
“Bôa tarde,” Barbara said, blushing slightly.
“Ah, bôa tarde,” de Sousa chuckled to Bachixa, in case he had missed this stroke, then, again bowing, he said it back to Barbara. So did Bachixa. He had started laughing too, perhaps at the fact that de Sousa was doing so much of it, more likely by simple infection. Both of them were dancing about a little. They reminded Bowen of the two students from what was then the Gold Coast whom he had once seen snowballing each other outside one of the Swansea lecture-rooms.
Bowen was soon shaking hands again, first with Bachixa’s substantial cushiony one, then with de Sousa’s delicate gibbon-like one. They both said goodbye, but Bachixa added, not smiling much, that he would drive Bowen another evening. As the car moved off Bowen could see the pair of them returning to the charge by Bachixa’s bike. He wished more than ever that he could speak Portuguese.
The reason for the uniquely early appearance of de Sousa and Bachixa at Oates’s was that they were to have dinner there, a revel made possible by the Bowens’ invitation to dinner at the Pensão Internacional in Estoril. Their hosts were to be Alec and Edith Marchant, the couple from Essex whom the Bowens had met on the Rio Grande. They had exchanged addresses before parting, but a link-up had seemed unlikely until a precarious telephone-call, marked by much repetition of “Como?”, “Que?” and less identifiable particles by operators and other intermediaries, had taken both parties to the Lisbon fair.
The Bowen party had included the Oateses, de Sousa and Bachixa. The last-mentioned had explained that the fair, which ran right through the summer months, was “in favour of the poor”, and Bowen had felt that he himself was, too: he had seen some Lisbon poor by then. In the course of the evening he was first gravely unmanned by a go on the water-splash, which involved an unbanked right-angle turn at about 100 f.p.s. in a small open car affair—and then railroaded into throwing down spiced-beef hot dogs, cream cakes and sparkling, or rather fuming, vim rosé. Just as his stomach seemed on the point of spontaneous combustion, he had heard Alec Marchant yelling his name from the immense tractor-drawn, balloon-tyred limber in which sightseers were towed round the place. Since this equipage could be neither halted nor boarded, Bowen-Marchant contact had been momentary, partial. Barbara had pointed out the existence of the loudspeaker system to a Bowen who felt like a non-rigid lighter-than-air craft; Rosie had taken him across to headquarters. There, eager to practise her English, she had knocked a text together while he belched like a seal. Soon a voice was bawling and rebawling: “Will Mr. and Mrs. Ma-russian … please go to the fez office … big-house Mr. Bone … is wetting for dame.” It had been quite a short wet.
Outside the Pensão Internacional the Bowens speculated briefly about the other people they were to hold themselves in readiness for meeting that evening. There were the Bannions, who were resident in Portugal and had evidently taken the Marchants under their wing; and there were the Parrys, figures of distinctly minor importance who would not attend the meal and might even, it was envisaged, not appear at all. Bowen wondered to what extent the Parrys’ arrival on the scene, if it did indeed take place, was designed by Alec Marchant to slake an imagined thirst on the part of Welsh people for one another’s society. Such a design showed consideration, which was far from negligible, but also a pardonable ignorance of what Bowen had often thought of patenting as Shenkin’s Law. This said that Welshman A encountering Welshman B outside Wales will find that Welshman B is exactly the sort of Welshman that Welshman A left Wales in order to avoid encountering. How did Englishmen get on? He must ask one.
He turned these matters over in his mind while Barbara and he took photographs of each other (result: B.B.—French teenage novelist; G.B.—King George VI enjoying joke; remarks: neither destined for Mrs. Knowles’s album. Disposed of as follows: B.B.—negative and print secreted in G.B.’s desk drawer; G.B.— negative and print torn up small and thrown into R. Tagus). Then they went in.
Alec and Edith Marchant were waiting for them in the garden and introduced them to Isabella Bannion, a smiling bespectacled Goanese lady in a splendid scarlet-and-green sari. The impression she made was of inextinguishable good-nature. “So nice,” she cried, seizing both Bowens in turn; “aha, so nice, so nice. Tell me, are you having a nice holiday, a really really really nice holiday? That’s right. Harry is coming soon, he’ll be down soon, in just a minute. You must sit down, sit here, yes, you here, Mrs. Bowen, and you over there,
