Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  Perhaps it was a mistake to come to the Algarve? In one week last year, he seemed to get to know the town, and they had returned expecting to be celebrities, only to find that last year’s crowd had moved on. But it wasn’t only that. The trouble was within Bowcott himself. As his wirey, ninety-three-year-old mother said, ‘Wherever we go, we take ourselves with us’, and it applied absolutely to Bowcott, just as much as did her other countless sayings: ‘He would go too far… Beyond,’ as she said, using the word in its dark, Welsh sense; and she was right.

  This year again, there was the extraordinary feeling of Welshness which came upon him abroad. At home, the valleys being what they were, if you’d had a dinner jacket before the war, and there hadn’t been a lavatory ‘out the back’ for three generations, you were almost minor nobility. Not to have had anything to do with the pits was blue-blood itself, and since the Bowcott Joneses had been wholesale fruiterers for years, he was a man of property and substance, and had always been so. But get him abroad, and the old ilk was still there, a wildness of spirit and a capacity for living recklessly that was now beginning to shake his fifty-six-year-old frame as much as it delighted his image of himself at the imbibing time. Fan, fair play, was as good as gold normally. A collier’s daughter wasn’t going to moan about a drop too much, or the occasional accident, hygienic or otherwise, but this time, there were additional complications. The world was changing, Portugal and Wales, and Bowcott had suddenly become caught up in a sea of feelings, even ideas, that were strange to him. If only he could remember, he was sure it was all very frightening. Something had happened which placed him on the map. But what was it?

  It was not simply that he had taken too much to eat and drink. Not this time. And he doubted whether his condition could in any way be attributed to Lucas Thomas’ fawning habit of dispensing without prescription. Both of them regarded the valley’s solitary Indian practitioner with some reserve, and for matters of the bowels, Lucas was very good on the whole. But perhaps the streptotriad tablets, advised and dispensed as a prophylactic against gyppy tummy, were too strong. For Welsh mams with filial problems and an aversion to the smell of alcohol, Lucas actually kept animal chlorophyll tablets of staggering breath-cleansing propensities. Perhaps the strepto-what’s-its were also out of Lucas’ VIP draw? Perhaps between them, they had been too clever by far? Was the thin, anaemic figure of Lucas Thomas, pinhead ever bobbing and smiling obsequiously behind his affected Douglas-Home lenses, a guilty figure?

  In fairness, Bowcott did not think so. Lucas had seen him right through a number of marathons in the last two years, Twickenham, Murrayfield, Dublin and even the Paris trip which was an exploder, a real gut-buster, yet Bowcott was still standing after sixty-four hours of playing and drinking time when former Welsh rugby internationals had gone under the table, Triple Crown Championship notwithstanding.

  Talk about Bowcott and you weren’t talking about a cauliflower-eared colliery fitter. As Lucas Thomas said, ‘Old Bowcott knows his Raymond Postgate. Hell of a bon viveur ackshually.’

  But others put it less delicately.

  ‘By God, you’ve got a constitution, Bowcott!’ a former Welsh centre had said when he walked off the plane at Rhoose before they drove into Cardiff. Alone of the party, Bowcott arrived clanking with duty-free booze, fags and perfume for Fan, and walked, what is more, despite an inflamed eye or two, with a spring in his step. He might have been bringing the mythical Triple Crown home in his back pocket.

  ‘I just keep in with Lucas Thomas,’ he usually said with a snide tug at his clipped moustache. ‘One needs a chap to look after one.’ What he really meant was that he couldn’t abide that Indian ghoul who didn’t seem to understand the need for a blowout or the demands of a palate like his own.

  But now he was knackered. The wogs had got him in the guts. He slipped into the vernacular when he felt sorry for himself, and he lay on the bed like an infantry officer who’d been bayoneted against the trench wall. He felt as if they’d done for him good and all, his Triple Crown constitution notwithstanding. Once again, the hoodoo was down below the belt. It felt like snakebite and gave him second thoughts. Perhaps he should have gone to New Zealand anyway and followed the Lions? He would have, but for Fan, although when he read the advertisement, ‘Six hundred pounds and two years to pay’, he’d felt tempted, but then decided against it. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t afford it, but with payment on the never-never, it meant that a right lot would have been going on the trip. Of course, Bowcott was no snob on a rugby trip but, sport apart, he had a position to keep up as a magistrate. ‘Out of town, we South Walians are all much the same,’ he used to say with a twinkle whenever he addressed the Lodge or the Rotarians, but the truth was, New Zealand was too far for Lucas Thomas’ ministrations. Lucas had always been his secret weapon.

  His former adviser, he now thought bitterly. He wanted to think of anything rather than the muddied events of the previous night. But that damned voice returned. That incredible sentence…

  ‘For Chrissakes, the bogey’s got his shooter out!’

  It was a common English voice, but for the moment, he could not put a face to it. He knew the police were involved too, but fortunately not with him. That was a relief. He closed his eyes and tried to trace back the roots of his involvement, but his mother’s voice came back to him. She was always uncannily present after remorse-begetting situations.

  ‘Bowcott, you will always be judged by the company you keep.’

  ‘For Chrissakes, the bogey’s got his shooter out.’

  That was duologue for the record books.

  ‘Your father was a man of substance. Admittedly, he marched with the miners in ’29, but of course, they were a lot of rodneys, half of them, not Welsh anyway.’

  ‘Welsh… Welsh…’ he groaned. What memories on a Portuguese morning! Roots were always a problem, had bothered him when he and Fan had taken up their position at the bar near the swimming pool yesterday. Fan had put on her sundress and he wore the khaki shorts and short-sleeved bush shirt which he still affected on these occasions. He’d also worn a straw fedora and the thick leather belt he’d bought in Malaga two years before. There was, as ever, the District Commissioner look that he cultivated before he let his hair down. Commissioned in the RASC, he’d been in Imphal later in the war and, now and again, let the phrase ‘Wingate’s mob’ drop. It gave an impression that was not strictly accurate, but now most people did not remember, and he’d just qualified for the Burma Star so sucks to anybody who challenged his credentials. He was President of the local British Legion anyway, and his knees were brown enough in the old days. He’s been around, as they said, quite long enough to look after himself.

  Why then, had things gone wrong?

  He cast his mind back to early morning. A shaky day had begun beside the hotel swimming pool where English from Romford had arrived in large numbers. Previously, he and Fan had always found what Fan called ‘a good class of people’ on holiday. She meant rather far-back, posh accents, persons verging on county stock, justices of the peace at least. These, the Bowcott Joneses either accepted or did not. Ex-Indian Army people, they got on well with anybody military who drank an occasional excess if you wanted a definition. In previous years, they’d met a very engaging old boy, Sir Philip Somebody-or-Other, and his wife from Bushey, and she’d also been nice with it. Nice with his full-time drinking, that is to say. In fact, on that holiday, she and Fan had had two spare-time drunks for husbands if you wanted to put it in an unkindly way. It was what they had in common, a circumstance that immediately rose above geography and class. But now both these veterans of the bottle were dead, and over the years, the Bowcott Joneses had noticed that the people who went on package tours had changed, and that was the start of it yesterday by the pool, a decided lowering of the tone.

  The irony was that they could have tolerated a Dai Jones, or a couple of Rodneys. In the previous year, they had taken to an Irish couple and been pleased to show them the ropes,
but the Romford English were quite impossible. They were careful with their money, always checking their change, wrongly suspecting the waiters of robbing them, often shouting with those whining Home Counties accents, sometimes leaving the best part of the asparagus, drinking beer with meals instead of wine, moaning about tipping habits, and making no attempt to speak the language. Bowcott who always called all foreign currencies ‘chips’, tipped lavishly, and when tight, insisted he was Pays de Galles, and had little jokes with the waiters, like announcing as he came into the dining-room, ‘El Presidente arribe!’ or ‘Voilà la Chef de Policia!’ in shoni-foreign language, and the fact that he attempted to communicate delighted everybody. It told everybody that he was a large jokey man, and not mean, and the waiters gave them better service and huge, daily smiles. As at home, he felt a character and was richer for it, but yesterday, for the first time, the Romford lot had put the kybosh on it, and more than anything, their voice infuriated him.

  There was a child with freckles who did nothing she was told and whose parents could not stop talking. You did not take an early morning gin by the bougainvillea to listen to them.

  ‘Emma… Emma, don’t go into the pool.’

  ‘Emma, you’ll get orl red.’

  ‘Emma, if your brother’s bein’ a berk, there’s no need for you to be.’

  ‘You tell him, Dad. If he think’s he’s goin’ to get away with that for change of a hundred ’scudos, he’ve got another think comin’.’

  ‘Go on, Dad, tell him. You was in the Army.’

  ‘Pardon? Pardon? Isn’t the toilets’ system rotten? Pooh…Raw sewage, I could smell. Reelly…’

  Listening, Bowcott had never felt more snobbish. And years ago, if anybody had said Tom, Dick or Harry were coming abroad, he would have protested valiantly, but he sadly realised that now it was true, and felt vaguely ashamed. Unless they were careful, they were going to have a thin time of it. Very well, the thing to do was to cut loose from the package tour and investigate the terrain.

  ‘Emma! Emma, come and put your nix on!’

  That bloody child… To get away from Emma, and Emma’s red-necked parents, Bowcott anchored himself permanently in the far corner of the bar, leaving Fan to snooze under the sun shade. He ordered a second gin and tonic (large), and looked philosophically at the glass.

  ‘Bom dia,’ he managed to the barman.

  The barman smiled, and in response, Bowcott showed him a trick with Worcester sauce. A minute drop cleared the rime from a grimy escudo and the barman was suitably impressed. Thereupon, for devilment, Bowcott sprinkled a little sauce into his third gin and tonic, no more than a drop, but enough to give the teasing, iron-man impression that broke the monotony of the morning. And, after that, he had to have another one to clear the taste away. Then there was the sun. Although his body was shaded by the canopy of the bar, his legs were burning, but the moment he decided to take a dip to cool off, what amounted to a Romford water-polo team arrived and made that impossible.

  ‘To you, Georgie! Georgie! Not out of the pool! Oh, shit, you’ve knocked a bottle over.’

  Bowcott woke Fan under the sunshade. She was a marathon sleeper.

  ‘I think I’ll have a stroll down the Vill’. I don’t think I shall spend much time here.’

  She blinked amiably.

  ‘Be back for lunch?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I should cover the back of your neck if I were you.’

  She sounded like his mother. He nodded, found his fedora, buttoned his wallet pocket, and marched away, four gins down. The hotel, a hastily completed building especially created for the package trade, was surprisingly elegant with marble vistas and lavish copper fittings, reminiscent of the Spanish paradors. It would have been splendid if it weren’t for the people at present in it, Bowcott thought. He now saw the Romford mob flitting in and out of it like fleas, their twanging voices affecting his nervous system so that he actually twitched once or twice. Getting old, he thought. Getting old and finding Buggins everywhere. He was pleased with that phrase. It was rather Army.

  So it was in his District Commissioner mood that he walked down to the village, fat legs, heavy buttocks, belted girth and thick arms swinging as he affected a military gait along the rough, cobbled track. Several burros drawing carts passed him, their aged, black-shirted drivers eyeing him inscrutably. It was a poor country, he noted once more. Every piece of woodwork needed a coat of paint, plaster flaked from the walls of the narrow cottages, and the burnt, arid soil behind them was lifeless and without green. There was not a flower to be seen, and the children ran about bare-footed in the streets while mangy dogs stretched out in the shade, and, here and there, a caged bird sat lifelessly outside the houses. The few Portuguese pedestrians he saw, lowered their eyes when they passed him, or else paid no attention. They were neither surly nor obsequious, just there, passive spectators of the doings of the Lisbon speculators who’d brought the tourists there.

  Poor peasants, Bowcott thought. Sad old men and women in black, unaware of the world that was changing about them. He felt vaguely sorry for them, but he was too much of a man of the world to entertain the idea that anything could be done for them. Two soldiers came around the corner, their shabby red berets, lounging gait and lacklustre boots catching his eye. For a second, he half expected them to salute, but they were just peasant soldiers, homesick boys without a spark of life left in them. He felt sorry for them as well, and at the bottom of the hill where he passed a small infirmary for the tubercular, he felt that half the soldiers he had seen might well have been garrisoned there. Once again, he felt sorry. Fair play, he thought, the old wogs never had much of a chance and didn’t even look inclined to do much for themselves. Perhaps it was the heat?

  By now, the back of his neck was burning. It was August and the wind that blew from Spain stayed there for the month, but he walked on masterfully, tipping the straw hat back. He never wore sunglasses on principle. You could never see what a man was thinking in sunglasses, and he detested people who wore them indoors which was scarcely reason for not wearing them ever, but he did not. The sahibs never did, he seemed to remember, so he did not either.

  Presently, he came to a little square where there was a First World War memorial, and for no accountable reason, he stood for a moment and doffed his hat in memory of the dead. If you’d asked him, he couldn’t remember on whose side the Portuguese had fought in that war, but memorials always affected him. His father’s two brothers had been with the tunnellers of Messines and had not returned, and Bowcott had an immense respect for military ceremonial, often stating that in the period of the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day, he resolutely attempted to remember faces of the dead he had known. It was somehow always an intensely moving experience to him, coupled with the thought of lives that might have been.

  He stood for a full two minutes holding the straw fedora to his chest, then strode to an adjoining bar whose proprietor had noticed his little vigil.

  ‘La Guerra?’ the proprietor said curiously.

  Bowcott gave a stiff military nod and sat astride a bar stool as he ordered a beer. From Omdurman to Mametz Wood, from Monte Cassino to Caen and back to Vimy Ridge, his mind had strayed to the accompaniment of ghostly bugle notes. The faces of the dead… How young they were… Callow boys for the most part, legions of them with no chance of living, the missing generations.

  He switched his attention to the proprietor, erupted into two languages simultaneously, capping them with stern valleys posh.

  ‘Las guerras lo mismo todo el mundo,’ he said portentously.

  ‘Ah, si,’ said the proprietor with a wise nod.

  A few more words, a few more beers, a good tip, and Bowcott was off again, feeling rather better. It always paid to communicate with the locals. He passed the cobbler’s shop where last year the cobbler had encompassed his extravagant paunch with a specially made belt from horse leather. ‘Got a little chap I know in Portugal to run it up one morning,�
� he told Lucas Thomas the Chemist. ‘Did it on the spot. There’s such a thing as service left in the world.’ (‘That Bowcott Jones has been around,’ Lucas told his wife.)

  Bowcott looked in through the cobbler’s doorway, but a different face greeted him, and rather than inquire, he backed away. There was still the same smell of leather and sawdust in the air, but the old man behind the counter was not half as jolly as the jester the previous year. It might have been an omen. But Bowcott went on up the street. He was heading for the English Tavern where an old Kenya Planter had set up a pub, English style, and where, the year before, he had drunk copiously with much good-humoured joss in the company of like-minded fellows of his own age. They were exiles for the most part, chaps who had got out of England for one reason or another. He liked them best because they had given him the opportunity of playing up the Welsh side of his nature. ‘Wouldn’t think of living in England myself!’ he had announced, and with his jokes and quips, the alacrity with which he bought his round, he was eminently acceptable, and indeed, the nights had passed in much the same way as they did in his local at home. The bonhomie of drinkers was an international thing, a safe and comfortable world in which to float.

  The taverner’s name was Matt, late King’s African Rifles, a Kenya wallah with a prodigious thirst, and a joker into the bargain. Then, Bowcott had been Bwana Mc’wber Jones, and Matt was My man, and they’d done a little Forces number, Ten cents a dance, that’s all they pay me! to the delight of the Portuguese waiters. The company of old soldiers was the best in the world, Bowcott proclaimed, and what is more, Matt kept a good house: cockles on the bar on Sundays, always beef sandwiches to order, and it was a cool, clean bar with white-aproned waiters who knew their place, and a Victorian air to the china pumps with engraved fox-hunting scenes and vintage dirty postcards in apple pie order on the notice board. More important than anything else, except the beer, was the lavatory, the cleanest in the Algarve, a shaded white light, English paper and the wholesome smell of disinfectant and none of your damned scent. Eight pints down and you knew you were safe with a beef sandwich to build up your bowels when seafood got a bit too much. Bowcott, like an army, marched on his stomach, and in the previous year, he prided himself that he’d found the only place on the continent where you could drink like an Englishman and not rue the day. He’d told this to Matt who’d made him write it in the visitor’s book. Last year, the lavatory, the pub, the fresh cockles and delicious beer and the primed ale had made it the best holiday Bowcott had ever had and he’d come back with the same expectancy.