They rounded a bend and a gang of men working on the road were to be seen, just beyond a triangular metal sign that showed a stylised silhouette of such a man. After a moment the Emilia girl touched Bowen on the arm, smiled, pointed with her neatly-hatted head and more or less drew him away from the road into the vegetation area. The going was not easy and he wondered about her stockings. Still, Christ, a girl like this would have a couple of hundred gross more pairs at home, and probably an emergency pack in the car. The same kind of thing must apply to her dresses. The only problem was why they had left the road. Probably it was the road-workers. After about ten hours in this sun being showered with dust from upper-class cars, they could hardly have been blamed for mocking or abusing an upper-class girl in the company of one who, without being upper-class to any immoderate or reprehensible extent, was an obvious foreign swine.
There was shade under the trees, but more heat rather than less. When the girl showed signs of thinking it time to bend their course back to the road, Bowen moved into the lead and took them deeper into the wood. Why, whatever did he want to go and do a thing like that for? All at once he had been struck by the theory that, since he thought he remembered the road taking a big loop round about here, striking through these woodland glades would actually save them time and trouble. This seemed to him important.
Soon they came upon a small clearing where there was turf as short and close as on an English golf-course. Here Bowen halted. So did Emilia, resting a hand on the branch of a convenient tree in a queenly manner. Then she looked at him with the kind of coldness that made him begin to be afraid she might suddenly start doing a dance for him, singing harshly and unintelligibly and with bags of stamping, hand-clapping and finger-clicking, even with a spot or two of the old olé. That was Spanish, he knew, but it might easily prove to be Portuguese as well; you could never be sure. To obviate any of that, he took out his Players (2s. the large packet in Lisbon) and offered them. “Have a fag, tosh,” he said.
She took one docilely. When she bent to his match he saw that her eyelashes grew thick and parallel all the way along, not in the little criss-crossing groups most girls had, then he glanced away over her shoulder, studying the nearby tree with a botanist’s intentness. He really could not have her glancing up at him under those lashes of hers. At the same time he noticed she smelt odd, not with any known female smell nor in the least unpleasantly, but rather as if she had picked up some kitchen ingredient or essence by mistake for the scent-bottle. He had often thought that culinary perfumes—ginger, mango chutney, fried onions— might make a nice change, and this cinnamon or cloves of hers certainly did. It made her no less attractive, anyhow. The same held for the way she put her hand on his while he lit her cigarette.
He lit his own, sat down on the dry grass, blew out a shred of tobacco. He felt, and doubtless looked, like a Bank Holiday tripper in the Forest of Dean. A moment later Emilia helped this on by capping his sniff with a rumbling, snoring one of her own. She too sat down, first carefully examining the ground.
Well chum, Bowen thought, what goes? So far, by an internal holding of telescope to blind eye, he had been keeping off what he was up to. Still keeping off it, what did she think he was up to or ought to be up to? He wished, as often in the past, that he was a really mature man who “knew” things like that “by instinct”. He tried to draw a mental picture of someone who looked like Emilia and who “was just waiting for you to try it on so she could slap your face”, and then of someone who looked like Emilia and who “was bloody sitting up and begging for it”. Both pictures were highly plausible and resembled each other even more closely than they resembled Emilia. Less immediate pictures now presented themselves. One was of Lopes “taking one look and seeing what had happened” and stabbing him. Another was of some uniformed employee of Dr. Salazar blowing his whistle at the pair of them. A third was of a Chilean short-story writer he had met at a party saying: “In my home town there are just the ones who know they’ve got it and the ones who don’t yet know they’ve got it.” That was a specially vivid picture, and in some curious way it modified what he was up to. He was doing very nicely, thank you, just puffing his fag and blowing smoke at the various circling insects.
But he could hardly just go on doing that. “0 sol,” he said to Emilia, pointing up. “Born.”
“Sim,” she said, laughing in a very healthy, out-of-doors way. “Muito born.”
“What? Oh yes, that’s right. Muito bom.”
She went on laughing, then checked herself and said severely: “Escute.” She put her forefinger on Bowen’s lapel: “A jaquêta.”
“What? Oh, I get you. A jaquêta.”
She touched his tie: “A gravata.”
“A gravata.”
“A camisa.”
“A camisa. Are you sure that’s right ?” He checked himself at the last possible moment from breaking wind; some part of his mind must have been reasoning that since he would be doing it in English she wouldn’t understand. “Sorry. As calças.”
Her laughter, which had already returned, became almost continuous when they
