If that wasn’t another thing you knew already, that is.“
“The old closed mind, eh? It’s a nice mind, but it does sound a bit on the closed side, you must admit.”
“Closed against what? I’m ready for things to happen to me all right, as long as they aren’t too nasty. I can’t stop them, anyway. But they have got to happen and they have got to happen to me. And by the way I don’t object to doing a few things too, just now and then, as well as having them happen to me. But going abroad isn’t going to actually help on any of that. Going and standing on the touchlines of other chaps’ ways of life and telling yourself you’re joining in isn’t very self-aware. Just like going through foreign poetry with the dictionary and telling yourself you’re reading it. If you put in ten years learning the language you can start to be some use at it. But how many people can afford to go into it all properly?”
“I seem to remember you telling me about one or two things that happened to you in Portugal.”
“Yes, but they weren’t specifically abroad things. It would have been quite easy to duplicate my little expedition in search of the doctor in several areas in North Wales, for instance. I know they dress differently there, but people hurt their legs and have to get chaps to help them in much the same way. Still, I shouldn’t like you to get the idea I’m trying to knock Portugal and the Portuguese. It’s a very nice-looking place all round and if you exclude the Government and the upper classes the people are as decent as you’d find anywhere. It’s just that the place is located abroad and the people are foreigners, which for the purposes of this discussion merely means that they and I belong to different nations, so we can’t understand each other or get to know each other as well as chaps from the same nation can. I’m all for international co-operation and friendship and the rest of it, but let’s be clear what we mean by it. My God, is that the time? Can you hurry that chap up, do you think?”
“Sure, if you’ll talk less. How long have you got?”
“I’ll have to be out of here by a quarter to to do it comfortably. So that I can get a bus, I mean.”
“How long have they all been up there?”
“Long enough, really. They were due back the day before yesterday, you see, but something seems to have prevented them from doing that, somehow. Something to do with mother-in-law not wanting them to go or something. Something like that, anyway.”
As they were leaving the restaurant Bowen caught sight of the rear elevation of a female book-critic he knew. It was just doubling itself up to get into a taxi. The need to trot forward and kick it came upon him. There could be no doubt but that the woman was on her way to finish an article commending, or possibly questioning, someone’s ability to convey the veritable tang of Galicia. Still, she had probably lived there for a few months, and if so an austere, stern pity should be lavished upon her. He permitted her to withdraw without molestation. After all, she had to use up her stuff somehow. He vowed to himself never to divulge his knowledge that Salazar and Franco had had to get together to stop the Portugal-Spain soccer matches with their attendant knife-fights, that in Silves the first Christian king of Portugal and Richard Lion-Heart had got together to massacre 30,000 Moors whom they had promised safe conduct.
“I’m sorry about that job,” Hyman said. “Really.”
“Give it a rest. What about getting drunk one evening?”
“You’d better watch yourself, you know. Got to keep in trim for when you have to squire Strether round London.”
“I’ll trim your … I’ll ring you up.”
“Fine. Remember me to the family.”
They took their leave. Bowen got on his bus. He let himself think for a moment about Teach Him a Lesson, which he had read carefully through on the boat and then torn up. It had been bad in the kind of way that he had formerly thought only great writers capable of. But he was going to write something else instead, about a man who was forced by circumstances to do the very thing he most disliked the thought of doing and found out afterwards that he was exactly the same man as he was before. Nobody, nobody at all, was going to hear anything about it until it was finished.
He gazed out of the window. London was looking full of good stuff. Admittedly it, together with most of the rest of the United Kingdom, was the land of Sorry-sir (sorry sir bar’s closed sir, sorry sir no change sir, sorry sir too late for lunch sir, sorry sir residents only sir), but one couldn’t expect to win all the time. He found after a moment that he was thinking of Emilia and the wonderful foreign look she had had that nobody had ever told her about. He realised he had not been quite straight with Bennie Hyman, or with himself, about why he had come to the conclusion that Lopes couldn’t be blackmailing
