I Like It Here Page 2

  “I’m ahead of you, chum, don’t worry. And there’s really no way of telling if it’s genuine?”

  “I’ve passed it round on the quiet to a couple of chaps. Bad Strether, they say, and I agree with them. Fat lot of use that is. Anybody with the kind of mind that wins the literary competitions in the weeklies, plus the necessary energy, could have done it. So could Strether himself, granted that he’s out of practice and a bit past it. And we’re completely on our arse when it comes to deciding which it is, whether it’s genuine or not. You can see the little difficulties that that raises.”

  “I take it Strether and Hiscock had never met?”

  “Too right, sport. There’s no way of checking up on this fellow at all at the moment. Just assume for the sake of argument that he’s a fake. At different times he reads in the papers, (a) that Hiscock was as close as an oyster about the Strether business, (b) your point about them never having met, (c) there’s a fighting chance that the real Strether’s under the sod, and (d) old Hiscock’s death to round it off. Well then, why not try it on? To a certain kind of mind it’d be irresistible.”

  “A disappointed writer who wants to make fools of the literary world? Like that Dutch chap who painted the Vermeers?”

  “Could be; I wouldn’t know. Anyway, we’re all a bit nervous about it. We’ve written straight back, of course, saying how delighted we all are. Always withdraw it later on if we’ve got to. We’re having another look for the Hiscock dope too, naturally, though I doubt if we’ll find anything as late as this. But you see how we’re fixed. We don’t want anyone else to publish this thing if it’s genuine. On the other hand we don’t want to publish it if it isn’t. I say ‘we’. Speaking for myself I don’t think it would matter; we publish enough fakes under their real names as it is. It’s old Weinstein who’s a bit edgy about it, and the others tend to take their time from him. Don’t know whether you remember that book on linguistics we did a year or two ago, turned out to be a thesis the author had pinched from some Belgian or Luxemburger or what-have-you. It’s made poor old Weinstein a bit sensitive about things. You know, a bit niggly. He doesn’t want any more allegations of inefficiency and gullibility and so on for a few months. There’s plenty of time to play with and I’m sure we can get it all sorted out if we put our minds to it. But what old Weinstein’s after just now is someone to go and see the author of One Word More, whoever he may be, and probe him, manoeuvre him into producing something that’ll clinch things, a letter from Hiscock or a bit of fan-mail or something. I told him we hadn’t got to that stage yet. But it would be very interesting if someone could go and see this character and sort of see what the score is, kind of thing. That’s where you come in.

  “Do you know,” Bowen said, “I was expecting me to do that round about here. So whoever it is lives in Portugal, does he? Why can’t he live in England like everyone else?”

  Hyman glared at him as he signed the bill. “Still on that one, are you?”

  “No, just coming back momentarily to that one. Anyway, as they say, what’s in it for me?”

  “Well, obviously, if it turns out to be Strether—and personally I’m pretty sure it will—there’s an article there you’ll be able to name your own price for, once we’ve given you the go-ahead. In the second place we’ll weigh in with your expenses however the business turns out. And then there’s that job with us you’re after. Things aren’t too bright at the moment, but…”

  “But old Jorkins—I mean old Weinstein might look on me rather more favourably if I do this chore for him, is that it?”

  “More or less it, yes. What about it? I thought it might be a bit of fun for you with some financial interest thrown in.”

  “But this bloke won’t want me charging in, will he, if he’s a sort of hermit like they say?”

  “Ah, that’s all changed now. He knows he won’t write anything else now, he says, so he’s abandoning secrecy. Hopes to come to London in a year or so. That’ll be the day. Mind you, it gives you a place to dig. Ask him why he’s changed his line.”

  “Yes. But I don’t much fancy the idea of spying on him.”

  “You know, you’re wasted over here, Garnet. Ought to be in the States, giving your integrity the rounds of the advertising world or public relations. You won’t be spying, you owl. You’re just going to look him up and let me know how he strikes you. Well?”

  “All right, provided I can sell Barbara the idea of Portugal.”

  “That’s your problem, brother. Thank you.” He took his hat and donned it, for they stood now in the foyer. “As soon as I hear definitely from you I’ll get the cheque made out.”

  “Oh yes, how much will it be? Twenty-five?”

  “Not less than twenty, anyway. Good. We’ll have another chat before you go. Right, all the best then, Garnet bach. See you.”

  “Thanks for the lunch, Bennie. Mazel tov.”

  Hyman began walking away, then stopped, doubled up, and turned. “Just the thing for you, this, isn’t it? You and your sham-detecting lark. Be nice to see what happens. A sort of test, in a way.”

  2

  THE TEST THAT interested Bowen in the next few hours concerned not Strether or pseudo-Strether but the miniature evacuation of his homeland that lay ahead of him. Would he be able to make it? And what would he do all the time if he did, apart from writing his play and hoping not to be addressed in a foreign tongue? He thought of this before, during and after his visit to the offices of a literary journal he sometimes contributed to. The only books he was allowed to take away were a work on the decline of Western culture (800 words by next Thursday), a lavishly-illustrated volume about dinosaurs (for his elder children) and a handsome affair to do with flowers of hedgerow and woodland (for flogging). But he cheered himself up by extracting a promise to print a short article, when the time came, in the journal’s “European Notebook” section. He was now well over a hundred pounds up on the day. A little treat tonight, then.

  At his local wine-shop in search of the little treat, he looked with great interest and lurking dread at all the manifestations of abroad that were to be seen around him: France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Algeria, Jamaica, Holland, the Union of South Africa, Poland, Chile—he closed his eyes at the memory of the epilogue to a Chilean-burgundy party last Christmas—Australia, Portugal. Yes, Portugal. Mm. Oh well. It was still rather moving to think of all those citizens of distant lands working so hard to make it possible for him to be drunk here in London. He got a nice Moselle for himself (“rather like a Barsac, sir,” the man said, “if you know your wines”) and some Golden Sweet Malaga and a bottle of pop for his wife. As he walked along to the flat he thought hard about abroad, as he was often to do in the next few weeks.

  For someone like him, he reasoned, deportation was a long-standing need. He pleaded with himself that he was getting into a rut and that it was no defence to say that he liked ruts. Everything had gone too easily for him: the first in English at Swansea, the three years on the local rag and at wing-forward for the All-Whites, emigration to London and subbing on the national daily, the last two and a half years freelancing and still on the up-and-up, with even a book behind him. (It was a collection of tarted-up reviews called No Dogmas Allowed, and he looked forward to its getting further and further behind him.) Anyway, he had come off pretty well compared with the two other people who had got firsts in his year: richer, freer and working less than poor Menna Talmadge, who was still teaching in the Midlands, and freer than Fred Rogers, who helped to do publicity for a car combine. Yes, Bowen thought, a good shaking-up is what I want. Want? Well, need. Need? Well, ought to have, then.

  A children’s party of some kind seemed to be going on in the flat when he got to it; at any rate, there was more noise than he could easily imagine his own three making. He therefore went up to his study, a room that deserved the name of “den” more than most by reason of its hole-like aspect and the remarkable gamey smell coming from the wallpaper. It was on the half-landing and Bowen had established himself in it as a result of an ambiguity in the agreement with the landlord, who lived on the upstairs floor with a person conjectured by Bowen to be his boy-friend. The landlord was of wild appearance, with a lot of scuff on his eyebrows, and gossip at the pub on the corner had it that he was supposed to be a sculptor. The quality and tendency of this supposition was one of the many minor reasons why Bowen disliked being supposed to be a dramatist. Apart from occasional arguments about Bowen’s right to the den, he had had no contact with the landlord at all since an evening in the autumn when the fellow, looking wilder than usual, had met him in the street and taken him into a neighbouring back-garden to show him the gridded top of an alleged ventilation shaft from the underground Railway. Later that night the Bowens had heard a two-hour quarrel raging overhead. They had failed to work out what part, if any, was being played in it by the ventilation shaft.

  Bowen sat down in the crackling basket-chair and picked up the new Graham Greene. He had nothing against that author either personally or aesthetically, but wished he would die soon so that his lecture on him would not keep on having to have things added to it every eighteen months or so. Perhaps it would be better in the long run to set his teeth and make the switch to E. M. Forster. The new Graham Greene, like most of the old Graham Greenes, was about abroad. Extraordinary how the region kept coming up. There must be something in it: not all the people who thought so were horrible. A couple of months there would be like learning to drive or making a determined start on Finnegans Wake—an experience bound in itself to be arduous and irritating, but one which could conceivably render available a rich variety of further experiences. And he knew he would never have taken such a step voluntarily; it had taken a team made up of Barbara, Barbara’s mother and the staff of See magazine, with Bennie Hyman as first reserve, to bring him to this point.

  Bowen told himself that he suffered from acute prejudice about abroad. Some of this he thought he recognised as unreasonable, based as it was on disinclination for change, dislike of fixing up complicated arrangements, and fear of making a fool of himself. One of his many archetypal images of abroad was of a man inquiring about his luggage in dumb-show while a queue formed behind him—except that of course it wouldn’t be a queue there, but a pushing, jostling crowd. Further, he fancied that he had a long history of lower-middle-class envy directed against the upper-middle-class traveller who handled foreign railway-officials with insolent ease, discussed the political situation with the taxi-driver in fluent argot, and landed up first go at exactly the right hotel, if indeed he wasn’t staying with some contessa, all cigarette-holder and chaise-longue, who called him by a foreign version of his christian name. He tried it over: Garnetto, Garnay, or rather Guhghr-nay. Later, he mused, they went off and dined, exquisitely and madly cheaply, at—that’s right, a little place one or other of them happened to know about, where—yes, you could get the best merluza rellena al estilo de toro in Valencia.

  He was musing about what happened when they got back from the little place when his wife came in with a tray. It had their tea on it. Seeing the notes and open book on his lap, the pencil in his hand, she asked with just a dash of incredulity in her childish tones: “Are you busy, darling?”

  “Oh no, I haven’t really settled down yet. Had a good day?”

  “Fair to middling, you know. How was Bennie?”

  “Oh, fine. Damn’ good lunch, as always.”

  “What did he want out of you this time? More sweated manuscript-reading?”

  Bowen arranged his mug and plate carefully before replying. He would have to go slowly about the Strether project, release only some of the details now and those a bit at a time, allow the idea to merge into the un-regarded furniture of her mind. Otherwise she would get excited one way or the other. Either she would stand over him until and while he wrote to Strether announcing their arrival and offering to bring with them any books, periodicals and general stores he might want, or she would stand over him until and while he rang up Bennie Hyman and told him that, for reasons in some way involving integrity, the deal was off. In a tone which he tried to make sound merely bored, but which in fact suggested a statement made during an interval of the peine forte et dure, he said: “Well … there wasn’t really.., very much.., worth mentioning. I told him our trip was definitely on, and we discussed that…”

  “I suppose he suggested Monte Carlo or somewhere, did he?”

  “No, he… no, he seemed to think Portugal might be a good bet. He’d heard quite good reports of it, apparently: cheap, you know, and not too… Whatever’s the matter, dear?”

  Barbara’s already large eyes had dilated considerably, so that a good deal of white was visible under each pupil. The fact that she had her mouth full of swiss roll and was chewing it vigorously, a normal enough proceeding in itself, made the eye-business rather alarming. “This is extraordinary,” she said, blowing out crumbs.

  “What is? Are you all right?”

  “I had lunch with Olivia.”

  “What a good idea.”

  “You know, it really seems as if things are arranging themselves in a very queer way. By the time I left her” —she paused, for effect or to lick her fingers—”I’d more or less made up my mind, subject to your approval of course.., that Portugal was where we ought to go.”

  “What a funny thing.”

  “It’s more than that, darling. It’s obviously what we’re intended to do, what life’s got in store for us. There’s obviously some reason behind it we shan’t know till we get there. Don’t you see? It’s the next thing to happen to us.”

  Bowen lit one of the small Dutch cigars he treated himself to at prosperous periods. He disguised a long sigh as a long exhalation of smoke. Barbara was being mystical again, another habit that, after a few months’ recession around the time of their marriage, was booming these days with all its pristine vigour. It had no basis in religion or even in superstition as it is ordinarily thought of; it had no truck with anything as tangible as stopped clocks, dreams or unlikely coincidences.

  Ordinary run-of-the-mill coincidences, such as this Portugal one, were what usually set her off. Bowen had often asked himself what she really thought she meant by this contemporary-style occultism, and in the early days had asked her as well. No good, though. Any reluctance on his part to accept her auguries was likely to earn him a smiling, raised-eyebrow rebuke for surrendering to market-place obtuseness. He cheered up again now as he recognised that at least Portugal would need no selling to Barbara after this; his aim henceforth must be to stop her from trying to arrive there by first light in the morning.

  Barbara developed her theme for a minute or two, then suddenly became practical. She was good at being that, much better than he, which was how she got away with being also better at being spiritual than he. “Olivia was telling me,” she said with the ingenuous vivacity that had first attracted him to her, “that the A.A. do it all. I’ll go and see them in the morning and get the details. They even put the car on the ship for you.”

  “They do, do they? Who takes it off again?”

  “Oh, they arrange for a foreign A.A. chap to meet you.”

  Many years previously Bowen had read a programme note, rather emotionally worded, on the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky—the old Pathétique. After some talk about the note of hectic defiance to be remarked in the third movement, the writer had characterised the finale as the utterance of a soul stricken by doubt, horror and despair. This little triad later came to fit exactly the state of Bowen’s soul when confronted with what he saw as the basic abroad-situations: those involving policemen, waiters, beggars, hotel clerks, drunks, madwomen, Customs officers, porters, ferry supervisors, car-park attendants and persons who had perforce to be asked the way to the nearest lavatory. As he puffed his Dutch cigar that day a sample version of doubt, horror and despair gave the ulceration of his duodenum a nudge forward at the thought of conversing with, or more likely remarking the absence of, the foreign A.A. chap. “That’s a comfort,” he said.

  “Evidently Olivia’s in-laws have got a pal in Lisbon who might help us to get fixed up. She’s going to ask them.”

  “What sort of pal?”

  “Oh, quite an important pal, I gather. The bits of Lisbon he doesn’t own are more or less not worth having. You know Olivia.”

  Bowen did, and said so. The wife of a man who was just stopping being supposed to be an architect and starting being an architect, she used to smile at Bowen sometimes in a way that seemed to point out the impracticability of her ever yielding to his desires, natural enough and even creditable as these were. At other times, though less often since her husband had been given a half-share in doing that infants’ school at Penge, her demeanour suggested moral revolt at the whole concept of Bow en’s fitness to perform the sexual act. Bowen viewed these demonstrations kindly; after all, he reasoned, the forty per cent more chin which might imaginably entitle her to them would also render them unnecessary to her.

  “Still, it’ll probably be jolly useful, darling. He can probably get us a villa just by clicking his fingers. And we shan’t be committing ourselves to anything just by letting him help us. One visit to thank him for what he’s done and then we needn’t see any more of him.”

  “Exactly,” Bowen said, smiling at her. Both word and smile derived from how he had begun to feel about Portugal. Quite apart from the matter of the Lisbon pal and his finger-clicking potentialities, there was the business about Britain’s oldest ally and the fact that port came from there. It was true that a recent article had named Portugal as the least jazz-conscious country in Europe, but against this could be set something he had once read about everyone there not liking the Spaniards. Good stuff. Bowen felt this to be so even though he thought he recognised intellectually that the Spaniards couldn’t possibly be as bad as the impression of them to be gained from those who lauded them in print, and even though individual Spaniards he had heard of seemed amiable enough—Cervantes, Picasso, Casals and the man who had lent a pair of trousers to a friend of Bowen’s who had been locked out of his flat in his dressing-gown. The lender of trousers had been flying to Madrid the next morning, too. A real hidalgo, that one.