“Never mind. Anyway, I can’t be sure the chap’ll come unless I go there and make him. Can you write me a note to give him?”
“Certainly. Are you used to continental roads?”
“Oh yes, I learnt to drive on them.” Drove a jeep into the back of a wireless truck belonging to 52 (Lowland) Division on them, in fact. “Now don’t you worry, I’ll be back in less than half an hour, complete with doctor.”
Two minutes later Bowen was sitting feeling terrible in the driving seat. One by one he found his escape-routes closed: key in the ignition, petrol in the tank, all lights working. Well, he was used to the old left-hand drive, anyway. You had your right hand for the gears. And for the handbrake. Yeah, you could say that again.
The engine started first go off, the gear went in with hardly any dentist’s-drill effect. “Again the driver pulls on his gloves,” Bowen said, “and in a blinding snowstorm, pity about that, starts upon his deadly journey, and again the writer runs howling to his art, well anyway.” The car began to creep nervously out of the little garage.
16
“ANYWAY, YOU MADE IT.”
“Oh yes, I made it all right. I practically had to beat the doctor up to convince him I was serious. Then coming back I kept nearly knocking down chaps arrayed in traditional peasant costume, on their way to market, I suppose. It was still pitch dark, or moonlight, rather.”
“Colourful stuff.”
“Oh, colourful as a bastard. What about another of those?”
“No, let’s go in.” When they were settled at their table, Bennie Hyman said: “And how was old Buckmaster when you left him? Funny thing, I can’t seem to get out of the habit of calling him that.”
“Neither can I. Oh, he was in pretty good shape, considering; quite perky and talking like mad. Apparently he hadn’t broken his leg, or not properly. The doctor explained it all to me in Portuguese. He got a nurse in, the morning after it happened.”
“What was she like?”
“Wonderful. I’ve never seen so many gold teeth in one pair of human jaws in my life.”
“I suppose old Buckmaster … Christ, here we go again. I suppose Strether was all over you after that night.”
“You don’t know the half of it, boy. Do you know, he wanted me to write a book about him? I soon crapped on that, as you can imagine. But I shall more or less have to get this article out; I can’t see anything for it. That’s going to be a hell of a chore.”
“A well-paid chore, though. You can sell it to the Yanks too.”
“You bet. Oh yes, the chauffeur turned up again, by the way, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Strether chucked him out of the house straight away. Made him cry.”
“Extraordinary business, all that.”
“I never did find out exactly what was going on. Didn’t like to ask any of the questions I wanted to ask. I reckon the chauffeur was one of the boys all right, but that doesn’t mean to say that Strether was up to any of the old nonsense. It could easily be a son-substitute thing.”
“You’re very charitable all of a sudden. Ah, good morning, Fred.”
“Good morning, Mr. Hyman. Good morning, sir.” When they had ordered, Hyman said: “Thank you for your cable, by the way—the second one, I mean. What put you on to things?”
“It was just something that happened when he and I were having a look at Fielding’s tomb.”
“Cripes, you did have a cultural time, didn’t you?”
“He said he thought he was better than Fielding, you see. He’d carried on in the same sort of way before, explaining he was part of the history of the English novel and all the rest of it, but this was really the pay-off. The way I looked at it, if he was a fake he’d have to be a pretty bright chap, about how people behave, I mean, and how people expect great writers to behave and so on. Because he’d fooled everybody up to then, myself included—I mean I’d been watching him at close range for days. Well then, given that sort of intelligence he wouldn’t have dared to put himself on show as the kind of prancing, posturing phoney who’d say he was better than Fielding. Nothing to be gained by it. And far too much danger of affronting my conception of how great writers behave. He’d have been perfectly safe in sticking to. humility, reverence and what-have-you. But he didn’t. So that meant he couldn’t have been putting on an act.”
“I think I follow you. But don’t you in fact expect great writers to be prancing phoneys or whatever you said?”
“Of course I do, as far as people of the great-writer period are concerned, that is, that’s between … when exactly? Well, say roughly between Roderick Hudson and about 1930, death of Lawrence and the next bunch all just starting off—Greene, Waugh, Isherwood, Powell. Or perhaps 1939. But you couldn’t expect Buckmaster to know I saw it like that. He’d grown up in that period himself, poor old devil. It couldn’t possibly strike him in that way.”
“Was that the only thing that put you wise?”
“No, there was something else.” Bowen explained about Lopes and Emilia, omitting as irrelevant, and open to misinterpretation, the language lesson and its sequel. “What I was trying to remember was that this girl had said ‘Let us drink’ or something in English. It was about the only thing she did say in English, perhaps it was the only thing she could say. But Buckmaster had never seen her before and all he knew was that she didn’t speak much English. Which is a pretty wide concept. She might easily have been able to speak enough to tell me that from
