The Portuguese Escape by Ann Bridge Page B

cooked it’s quite horrible, but properly prepared it can be delicious. Next time you come to lunch with me you shall have it; Joaquina does it wonderfully, especially with braised fried onions, buttered rice, and a very mild mustard sauce.’
    â€˜You speak like a cook yourself!’ said Hetta, laughing, as they drove on.
    â€˜Yes, I’m interested in food. I completely agreed with what you said at lunch about the blasphemous nature of bad cooking—I liked you for that,’ Richard said, againturning to smile at her. ‘But do you know’—and he went on to tell her how every spring before the bacalhau fleet sailed the Cardinal-Patriarch of Lisbon said a special Mass for all the men of it, out on the quay-side if it was fine, in the great Jeronimos church at Belém if it was wet.
    â€˜Oh, how I should like to see this,’ Hetta said.
    â€˜Get the Monsignor to take you—he always goes, and he’ll get you a good seat.’
    â€˜This he would
certainly
do!’ the girl said ironically.
    â€˜Hetti, I think you’re taking Subercaseaux up all wrong,’ Richard said. ‘Don’t make up your mind in too much of a hurry. I think he’s a splendid person.’
    â€˜You are fond of him?’ She sounded incredulous.
    â€˜Yes, and I admire him. He adapts himself to his world, of course—which you will have to do, sooner or later—but he
does
do good in it, for that very reason.’ He spoke with unusual earnestness; Hetta was silent.
    Between the small towns strung out along the Tagus there are still open spaces of waste land, for the most part dry and sandy, where occasionally small flocks of sheep or goats, with tinkling bells, crop such scanty herbage as they can find—it is one of the charms of the environs of Lisbon, this artless penetration of the life of the country into the life of the town. In spring these waste spaces are misted over with the flowers of a minute dwarf iris, drifts of blue against the background of yellowish soil. A few moments after Atherley’s last remarks about the Monsignor, which still remained unanswered, the car drew abreast of one such open space—‘Oh,
could
we stop?’ Hetta asked.
    He pulled in to the side at once, by no means unwilling to prolong this tête-à-tête. ‘Of course—what is it?’ he asked.
    â€˜The little lilies—for days I have wanted to pick them, but Mama is always in too much hurry for us to stop.’ She began to get out of the car.
    â€˜They die in five minutes,’ he told her, thinking—How she runs away from a subject! But he did not believe that it was from cowardice—why was it?
    The girl came back after a moment or so with her hands full of the lovely little things; in the car she sat looking at them in silent delight.
    â€˜They aren’t lilies really, they’re irises,’ he told her as they drove on.
    â€˜So? The iris is the rainbow, isn’t it?’
    â€˜I believe so; but it’s this kind of flower too.’
    In a few minutes the small blossoms did indeed begin to wilt and shrivel together, as Richard had foretold; it is a fact that this particular species cannot endure separation from the soil.
    â€˜Oh!—oh! they
do
fade,’ Hetta lamented. ‘But it is so few minutes.’
    â€˜I told you so,’ Richard said, slowing down again; he looked at her as she sat beside him, ruefully contemplating the flowers in her hands, noticing for the first time how strong and shapely those hands were, but also—in spite of nail-varnish and other evidences of careful manicuring— that the skin on the inside of the fingers was still cracked and roughened, from, no doubt, hard kitchen work. They were strange hands to be associated with that pretty dress, the elegant shoes and hat, the careful make-up—somehow they moved him rather surprisingly.
    â€˜They say that if flowers fade quickly on a