Why hadn’t he gone back with Barbara? This was another of the questions he was sure he would never be sure about. There was the fact that she had insisted he stayed on and “finished his holiday”. There was the fact that, as he felt at the time, he ought to prove to himself that temporary separation from his wife and her support was not immediately fatal to him. There was the fact that being on hand while she nursed her mother was certain to be as profoundly and frenziedly nasty as anything short of armed assault that could happen to him abroad: Barbara’s transformation back into Barbara Knowles, instead of being partial as it was on her ordinary contact with her mother, would become complete. He would have to become Mrs. Bowen as well as Mr. Bowen, at any rate in dealing with the children, and Mr. Knowles on top of that, replacing his late father-in-law as a bulwark against the canvassers, the collectors of discarded clothing, the friends with gifts of allotment-grown vegetables or personally-landed fish, the furnishers wanting to measure the three-piece suite for new loose covers, the milkmen and window-cleaners demanding payment, the bell-pushing schoolchildren, all the diverse grades and categories of those who perpetually milled around on that uncanny little porch with the arrow-slits and stained-glass windows. All that and Barbara impersonating her mother thrown in. Christ. At this distance the fact of what it would be like at Mrs. Knowles’s far outweighed the fact that had seemed so important to him ten days ago, viz, that to accompany his family back to England he would have to get into an aeroplane with them, and a foreign aeroplane at that, and without the inducement of that life-contract with the Times Literary Supplement either. Mm. Still, all that plane stuff was just a joke really.
Many and good as might be the reasons for not being with Barbara at the moment, he felt lonely without her. He also felt, a rather surprising and discreditable amount of the time, like a sailor about to go on leave, a condition which the passes with Emilia had sharpened to that of a sailor just getting really started on his leave. Since his marriage he had never spent more than a few days away from Barbara. So it was no wonder that he missed her. Perhaps it had been worth coming abroad to be got into this instructive situation. But wait a minute, she’d had all three of the children in hospital, hadn’t she? Hadn’t he missed her then, in a way that visiting-hours only made worse? One of the insidious effects of abroad was to delude you into thinking that there were some things you had to come abroad in order to find out. He had squashed that one pretty effectively, he remembered thinking, a couple of times already. And yet here it was again. It just showed how careful you had to be.
He hoped that, if he now put to himself the point that he hated bloody abroad, it would not be taken as implying any disrespect to the Portuguese. Considering their mainland domicile they had been very good to him. They had, it was true, given his large bowel a run for its money and made with the insects rather a lot, but they had not tried to knife him or rob him or break his health down at all permanently. This self-restraint, however, could not alter the essential abroad-ness of the place, the things it must share with millions of square miles between here and Istanbul. All that sun, which made you set out to be colourful and wonderful instead of keeping quiet and getting on with the job. All that geography and biology, which made you behave as if you had invented the country instead of just living in it: All those buildings, either violently architectural and historical or else token and temporary. All that wasted space. All that air of maturity, lack of nervousness and doubt, devotion to serious shouting argument or dedicated gaiety, naturalness which was always an actor’s naturalness. All those revving motorbikes, all those touts, all that staring—which in England would be the mindless inquisitiveness of those whose greyly uniform lives were nourished on mere sensation, but in the sunny South was a frank, free, healthy, open, uninhibited curiosity.
Walking along the track towards Buckmaster’s, Bowen burst into song (tune: She Was Poor But She Was Honest):
“See him gulping
vinho verde,
Scoffing filthy goat’s-milk cheese,
Puffing fags of scent and mule-shit,
While he searches for his fleas,
But he tells ‘em
‘Obrigado’,
Full of courtly foreign grace,
‘Cos he’s got his homeward voucher,
Safely locked up in his case.”
Buckmaster met him on the veranda. “You delivered the man Lopes’s companion to him?”
“Yes, they’re away now.”
“I am much relieved. The man affected to believe he had a claim on me and became abusive when I questioned it. There was some protracted unpleasantness. Eventually I was forced to settle with him so as not to be further persecuted. It was in order to spare you enforced participation in such a scene that I asked you to withdraw. I hope I gave no offence by my abruptness.”
“Not in the least, I quite understand. But you should have let me stay and give you a hand with things.”
“Thank you, my friend. I leave you to yourself until dinner-time. Some mail awaits you on the table in the passage.”
Bowen fetched it and sat on the veranda to read it. Apart from the stuff that Oates and/or Bannion had redirected, there was a letter from Barbara which had come straight here.
Dearest Garnet,
How are you, bogey? Been thinking of you a lot. Things aren’t back to normal here yet but I should be home in time to straighten up before you arrive. Mummy is wonderful after all she’s been through and the rest’s done her a lot of good but I’m
