I Like It Here

measure. He made little of it beyond an occasional word like le or je, but it was clearly of a narrative or expository character. Bowen unbuttoned his shirt and scratched a small chaplet of flea-bites on his chest. Why was he standing up when the first armchairs he had seen since getting off the boat were only a few feet away? He went on putting this query to himself until the French left off. Then he went across the room to where a cup of coffee and two glasses of conhaque were waiting for him. He drank them all. The brandy, he noticed, was not Oates’s real fine eau de vie sort, but the ferocious-port sort. He went up to the lavatory.

It was very fine up there: all the usual fittings, including a bidet in evident working order, no dirt of any kind anywhere, and a faint, cleanly smell. He found he was breathing as if he had just run a race. This seemed important to him, but in some way he could not define. He sensed the almost-completed departure of his grasp of detail, and indeed of broad, approximate issues as well. The thought of Strether, totally absent for several days, came to him. He remembered fairly clearly having written to Bennie Hyman explaining the position. That action was about as remote to him now as the onset of puberty. He must think it all over again. Oh, God, how could he? Glancing up he saw that the lavatory, or its cistern, was entitled “The Energetic”. Barbara would have known how to interpret that omen.

11

GETTING UNQUESTIONINGLY into Mrs. Knowles’s car (with no more apparent interval than if it had been parked outside the lavatory) Bowen burnt both hand and lip on a cigar he was smoking. He sat and watched its smouldering end fall somewhere among the many pairs of feet that covered the floor. He was still turning this over in his mind when all the people started getting out again. It was dark, but there were plenty of lights to be seen, especially round an area where a lot of men and women—and children too, he noticed—were sitting at small tables. Around him there was a general movement in that direction. He joined it. On the way he passed between a pale-green motor-scooter and a smallish motorbike with a crimson velveteen saddle-cover. Nearby he made out a ginger-coloured machine that somehow suggested Germany to him. The sight of them surprised him less than he felt it should have done.

Edith Marchant said: “How are you feeling, Garnet? … Oh.”

Isabella Bannion called out: “Harry, Mr. Bowen would like a glass of mineral water. A big big big one. With ice. And then lots and lots of black coffee. Quickly.’ ‘

Dear Mr. Nehru, Bowen thought to himself: hands off Goa. If Goa loses her identity, it will be the end of something unique, something noble and wise.—In another mood, he knew, generous tears would now be coursing down his cheeks.

Time passed while he drank various fluids. Then, as he lifted his head, a scene sprang into view with all the briskness of a television programme coming back on the air after a breakdown. He was at the café in Estoril with his wife and friends around him. He was moved. “Welcome home,” Alec Marchant said.

A small boy touting lottery tickets approached Harry Bannion. “Not tonight, Josephine,” he countered, then twisted in his chair and flung up a hand: “Amigo. Hoy. Amigo. Yes, you. Wake up there. Come and have a drink. Your last chance to take advantage of our great free offer. Pull up a chair. Dress off to the left, now, you women.”

The tennis coach, smiling with conscious but readily forgivable handsomeness, was drawn into the circle and very quickly handed a whisky. Harry Bannion at once rose to his feet and rapped on the table with a coffee-spoon.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said hectoringly, “a little recitation entitled The Charge of the Light Brigade, by William Makepeace Longfellow.”

“This is a good one,” Edith Marchant whispered to Bowen. “We had this at Fatima.”

“… First as recited by our friend the Vicar.

“Hawf a league, dearly beloved brethren, hawf a league,

Hawf a league, oh bless my soul, onward,

All in the valley of the shadow of death

Rode the blessed six hundred.

‘Forward in the name of Jesus

…’”

“Harry,” Isabella Bannion said in smiling reproach.

“All right, my dear, dinna fash yourself.

“Forward in the name of Jesus, the Light Brigade!

Chawge for the guns of hell!’ he said:

Into the valley

…

“What’s this, a variety show?” a voice asked at Bowen’s side.

It was Oates in his best suit and grinning. Behind him were visible Rosie, de Sousa and Bachixa, sitting at a table a few yards away. They all waved in their various modes. There was too much noise for de Sousa to be audible, but it was plain from the movements of his head and body that he was laughing.

The restoration to Bowen’s brain of something like normal service in sound and vision had yet to reach the higher centres of that brain. “Come on, Charlie,” he said vigorously, using for the first time the name Oates had asked to be called by. “Bring ‘em over. Bring ‘em all over. We’ll have a drink. All have a drink.”

“Arf a league, arf a bloomin league,

Arf a bloomin league honward,

Hall hin the valley (wotcher cock) er death

Rode the six undred, eh, mite?

‘Swelp me bob, forward the Light Briggide!’

Cor lovaduck, charge for them blinkin guns

…’”

All the people Bowen had ever met in Portugal seemed to be assembling round the table. It would not have surprised him at all to spot Gomes’s sacerdotal figure, hardly at all to pick out Buckmaster in his chalk-white hat, and little more to find them both accompanied by a representative cashiered general from the Custom House. As Oates entered the area with his party, two people said to be the Parrys came to halt on the other flank. Bowen at once perceived that