14
JUST AS EMILIA’S shoulders touched the grass Bowen had the feeling that someone had pushed a blunt red-hot needle hard into his flesh between his trouser-cuff and the top of his sock. Bounding up with a yell, he had time to see a thing with stripes like a wasp, only a good bit bigger, buzzing away towards the undergrowth. He got it beautifully with a great swingeing kick before the worst of the pain got him. He stooped down, gasping and wincing. When Emilia burst into an uproar of foreign laughter, he did his best to join in. He was succeeding quite creditably when, a couple of minutes later, they moved off, although his sting was still sodding painful. In that time the contact between them had been limited to her pressing on the affected place a large medallion with an olden-days chap riding a horse on it which she wore round her neck. Even then he hadn’t been able to watch her doing it, not having eyes in the back of his head. In a way he felt content: even the most inordinately mature of men would surely find himself physically and morally incapacitated for a time after a sting from a bastard of a hornet. And, since he could now remember that he had a wife, it was an enormous relief not to have done anything much to Emilia. But he had wanted to do a great deal and had been going to. It was sad to no longer have his cake, in a way, and yet not have eaten it. On the other hand, though, Barbara was never going to know anything about this, so there was no need whatever to worry.
He brushed Emilia’s dress down for her. He thought it looked clean enough to keep Lopes’s knife in his pocket. As he limped off beside her she said surprisingly: “We drink.”
“Yes, that’s what we do.”
Ten minutes later they were sitting outside the café listening to a peasant swearing at his mule. Bowen found it surprisingly easy to gather that that was what the peasant was doing. His tone and gestures helped a lot. Some men inside the café, who were playing billiards on a peculiar pocketless table, looked over at him and laughed. Emilia laughed too, glancing at Bowen without archness. He touched her hand affectionately, thinking what a nice girl she was and how sad it would be when the time came to say goodbye to her. His leg was only itching now, too. When the old woman who threw up the drinks arrived he tried asking for champagne and, after some by-play with shum-puggner, shahm-pahn-yay and so on, got it. It was Portuguese champagne and went down like mother’s milk: he bucked up at the thought that here was yet another field in which French claims to supremacy proved to be unfounded. Emilia made many signs of appreciation as she drank, which was impressively thoughtful of her, considering how many hogsheads of the stuff old Lopes and probably several others must have poured down her throat. He wished he were taking her out to dinner that night.
They were just pouring out the last of the bottle when Lopes turned up. “I see you’ve been doing yourselves pretty well,” he said boisterously from the driving-seat. “I do wish I could join you and have a real drink-up together, only that I’ve said we shan’t be very late home. Thank you for looking after Emilia.” He beamed at Bowen—ironically? There was no way of knowing.
Lopes opened the door for Emilia and she got gracefully into the car. Bowen felt the scene impressing itself on its memory; a nice bit of background music, violins and things, was audible from the wireless in the café. It would have been easy to give in to sentimental melancholy, but his leg was stinging again as well as itching. And something was nagging at his mind, something to do with Buckmaster, something that Emilia had said. But what could an amorous language-lesson have to do with the man who either was or was not the one indisputably major talent to have arisen since the death of that crazy Polish scribbling sea-dog? What, indeed? He shook hands with Lopes. “Goodbye, Bowen old man. Nice to have met you. All the best.”
He shook hands with Emilia. “Goodbye,” she said, unconscious of how nicely she said it. Her thickly-fringed eyes flashed a little signal at Bowen. That was thoughtful of her too.
The car moved off slowly for a few yards, then got going with a monstrous roar. Emilia waved an elegant gloved hand as they rounded the bend. Bowen strolled back to the table and finished up the champagne before starting back to Buckmaster’s. He wondered what it was that Lopes had pulled a couple of inches out of his pocket, just far enough to show Emilia, before he accelerated. It had looked like money. But it couldn’t have been. And why shouldn’t it have been?
