The Portuguese Escape by Ann Bridge Page A

saying. What is the Guincho?’
    â€˜A place along the coast beyond Cascais, all sand androcks, with one or two little shacks of restaurants where one gets the most delicious sea-food.’
    â€˜Thank you, I shall love to come,’ said Atherley. ‘I like the Guincho.’
    â€˜Good. Perhaps you’ll bring Hugh, and I will take the Countess.’
    â€˜If Mama has nothing else arranged for me—but I can let you know, if you will give me your address.’
    â€˜Oh, I’ll keep you in touch with one another,’ said Richard, rather hastily. ‘Don’t bother, Julia.’ He made a face at her over Hetta’s head, and Julia obediently put away her card-case—she had become accustomed to the use of visiting-cards during her stay in Portugal.
    Richard drove Hetta back to Estoril. The moment they were in the car she apologised for her behaviour at lunch. ‘To be so angry, and to cry! I am very sorry; I was silly— as silly as a nun!’
    â€˜Are nuns silly?’
    â€˜Only when they come out into the world, and everything is strange. Not in convents.’
    Richard had been startled, and rather upset, by Hetta’s outburst. He was considerably taken with her, little dark thing that she was, with her splendid eyes and her remarkable voice—and he found her freshness of outlook interesting. But Atherley liked a certain ease and smoothness in social intercourse, and he had remembered Julia’s uncomfortable remark about Hetta’s conventual life possibly ‘smothering dynamite’.
    â€˜Oh well, I don’t think you are silly, only a little inexperienced, and perhaps rather too fierce,’ he said, turning and smiling at her. ‘You will have to learn to take people as they come. Tell me,’ he went on, ‘why you don’t like Subercaseaux? You were just going to when the others came.’
    â€˜He is part of it all,’ Hetta said slowly, looking straight in front of her.
    â€˜Part of all what?’
    â€˜This life here. So much is false, I think—the importance of attending the marriage of a King’s child, of being invited to an Embassy—or that politician who sacrifices his principles to gratify his wife’s snobism! I cannot helpit—I have said I am sorry that I burst out at your table— but to me all this is incomprehensible,
despicable
. And for a priest to accept it all, take part in it!’
    â€˜Oh, that’s your quarrel with the Monsignor, is it? Well yes, he does take part, I agree. But can’t he perhaps do good by doing so?’
    â€˜Possibly. Back there, where I come from, compromise is not possible; our priests live in hourly danger. If you knew the risks Father Antal runs!’
    â€˜Is he the priest you cooked for?’ She nodded. ‘What special risks did he run?’
    â€˜Going to see the Cardinal—’ and she told him more of what she had told Townsend, ending up—‘But he at least does not compromise with evil.’
    â€˜But, Hetti,
are
royal weddings and Embassy parties evil? Don’t you exaggerate?’
    â€˜Oh, there are those lovely ships!’ the girl exclaimed, forgetting the argument as the car came in sight of thirty or more big schooners, lying at anchor out in the Tagus. ‘These are the ones which go to catch the salt fish, no?’
    â€˜Yes; all the way to Newfoundland’—and Richard told her about the annual voyage of the Portuguese cod-fishing fleet to the foggy waters of the New World, to catch, salt on board, and bring home
bacalhau
, the dried fish which is a main part of the staple food of the nation, in town and country alike; at the next place they came to he made a détour through side streets to show her the flat triangular bodies hanging up in a grocer’s shop. They were as hard as boards, and Hetta fingered one doubtfully. ‘Is it not very nasty?’ she asked.
    â€˜Yes, if it’s badly