After the airlift Bowen had got on a train and gone back down south, where the Bannions had pleaded to be allowed to put him up for a week. It had been a period of wonderful stability, free from the slightest threat of encounters with the unmanageable, full of food and drink and even work. At the end of it the Bannions, with profuse apologies for not being able to go on supporting him indefinitely, were to depart for a month’s stay in Northern Ireland. Room had however been found for him, should he want it, at what Harry Bannion described as “Afilhado’s priests’ place” along at Faro. Details of this place proved hard to extract. Bowen’s imagination flickered between a four-star monastery with chanting and flagellation, where he might have to sleep in a cell or something, and a sort of hieratic training unit in Nissen huts, where he might have to do fatigues or something. Alternatively there was the Pensão Familial down the road, but this would cost money. Money was something Bowen currently lacked. His purse already thinned by Oates’s depredations, he had had to lay out all he had on the airline tickets and borrow from Harry Bannion as well. The shipping company’s refund had covered the loan and put him some distance into the black, but not comfortably far, especially since he had decided to make a shot at repaying the Bannions’ kindness by giving Afilhado a donation for his priests’ place, where no doubt an extra censer-chain or bayonet-sack was always acceptable. In the circumstances he could hardly borrow any more. Why hadn’t he gone back with Barbara? Everywhere he turned there was a reason for asking that. He was in the middle of asking it when the phone rang one night and Buckmaster came through on the line.
Yes, on his return from Coimbra he had had Bowen’s kind letter explaining about their move. Yes, wanting very much to see them again he had rung up the mountain post office and local knowledge of the Bannions had done the rest. What, Bowen’s family had had to return to England? What damnably hard luck. The news of the sick lady was reassuring? Excellent. And what were Bowen’s plans now? Leaving there at the end of the week? Going where? But goodness gracious there could be no possible question but that Bowen should come and spend the rest of the time with him. No, he was sorry but he simply was physically unable to contemplate taking no for an answer. His car would meet the train in Lisbon.
And so Bowen had come to be where he was now, uneasy but in quite tolerable shape on the whole, sitting on Buckmaster’s veranda with a glass of madeira before him and thinking about Barbara. At least officially he was thinking about Barbara, but thoughts of Buckmaster had a way of keeping on breaking in. The line of least resistance, backed up by cloudy visions of gain, had brought him here, rather against both his better judgment and his conscience. His better judgment had ceased to offer effective opposition when it became clear that Buckmaster was after all a tolerable companion: his grandiosity was balanced by his eagerness to please, his gratitude for any interest shown in him, and his insufficiently keen but still impressive anxiety not to be boring. These last qualities had had the effect of bringing up the noise-level of conscience a bit, but Bowen had given that the kick in the teeth by promising himself (i) never to reveal anything that might damage Buckmaster’s claim to be Strether; (ii) if that claim was finally upheld, never to publish a word of his now-voluminous notes on the old boy without his consent. That looked like that, but it wasn’t quite, because it really would be very interesting to know if Buckmaster actually was Strether. And on that one he had no more evidence than when he got out of the Morris on his first visit.
Before Bowen could finally switch his brain on to Barbara, Buckmaster came apologetically on to the veranda. He put the bottle of madeira and a glass on the little table, then sat down opposite Bowen and poured himself a drink. He was sound on the drink question. Smiling affably, he cleared his throat. “The … the calling of the literary critic or reviewer,” he said. “Would you rate it highly, my friend?”
His habit of calling Bowen his friend like this really was rather terrible, but hard to block. Bowen drank some of his own madeira as a means of keeping things at arm’s length. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Why ?” He wondered what he was in for this time. Buckmaster couldn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t, converse; he held forth instead in a series of essays. They had had reflections of an expatriate, the gastronome in Iberia, the economic consequences of the peace, Jane Austen: the first Victorian?, love and marriage (a shortish one, that), Portugal—i: the country, Portugal—ii: the people, Far From the Madding Crowd revalued and, this very lunch-time, the nature and significance of literary creation. Almost throughout that one, and for long stretches of the Austen and Hardy pieces, Bowen had been expecting Buckmaster to make a noise like an asterisk and direct him to the foot of an aural column where there would be details of title, author, publisher and net price. The Sunday Times would absolutely eat this chap.
“Criticism”—the lecturette was well into its stride now— “is doubtless a perfectly valid manifestation of the sensibility and the understanding, as the author of The Spirit of the Age, along with Elia in his less introspective moments, have testified in such happy abundance. Their work was creative, in spite of the fact— perhaps, indeed, because of it—that it seldom bore much relation
