Bliss Read online

  She walked twenty-four miles and came home and baked a loaf of heavy dark bread. She cooked it in a flower pot she stole from the garden, muttering to herself while an electric drill penetrated the steel shell of the Cadillac Eldorado in the front garden.

  At half-past seven she showered and washed her hair and applied a dab of Sandalwood Oil.

  Everyone had assembled in the dining room except for Joel who had gone out on some errand of his own. Ken and Lucy had washed their hands in tribute to her. They had rubbed them raw with industrial soap and taken out their Swiss Army knives and cleaned under their split nails with the smaller blade. Ken shaved his battered face and attempted to penetrate his tangled hair with a comb. He put on a white shirt and even stole one of Harry's ties, which he then had to be taught how to do up. Lucy wore a clean white boiler suit. David surprised everyone by wearing an exotic shirt and Gucci sandshoes. He poured the wine, but not before he had given his father the cork to formally approve.

  Not since the family lunch (which had ended less enjoyably than it had begun – the duck caught fire and David put it out with a fire extinguisher) had they spread a cloth on the table and even Bettina, her shoes kicked off her sweating feet, a strong Scotch in her hand, seemed relaxed and happy.

  David engaged his father in an earnest whispered conver-sation on the subject of Argentinian cowboys, something he was exceedingly well versed on, but the details of which, it appeared, he had no wish to share with anyone but Harry.

  'Tell us all,' Lucy said from the other side of the room.

  But David ignored her and Harry, in any case, found it hard to listen. He was too concerned that everyone should like Honey Barbara, who throughout all this strode back and forth, her face serious, her back straight, her wet hair flat on her head, setting odd things to right on the table and in the kitchen refusing all offers of help, as if, Lucy whispered to Ken, they might contaminate the purity of what would be offered.

  There were marigolds in little jars on the table, and a small glass bowl of water with frangipanis floating in it. The wholemeal bread sat on a big piece of tallow-wood off-cut she had stolen from a building site, and around the table, in egg cups, she had placed, as a peace offering, sea salt.

  Bettina was not displeased to see Honey Barbara in the kitchen. She suggested, in a quiet moment when the girl was absent, that Harry turn bisexual and get a chauffeur as well. The joke did not go down well. She drank a solitary toast to the death of humour. She did not like the moony way Harry followed Honey Barbara with his eyes, but she sat herself where she would not have to look at him.

  She liked the way the table had been set. It had, in a naive way, style.

  The Scotch was Bettina's first drink of the day and she let it evaporate somewhere at the back of her throat. She felt good. She had felt good all day, a tight, hard, relentless sort of good feeling, like a well-tuned guitar string. The feeling started after she had delivered Harry to their new offices: cheap warehouse space down by the river which she and Joel had personally painted in long evenings on high ladders until her back had ached and poor Joel, sweating away beside her, had gone to work in the mornings with his hair speckled pink. She had bought the desks from army disposals for eight dollars each and they had sanded and oiled each one. They laid black Pirelli tiles on the floor and painted the walls pink and the window frames Indian Red. The lights were second-hand creamy spheres which hung at regular intervals and even the couches were from a junk shop, re-covered with remnant fabric in an opulent cream.

  It was her first business decision. She had sub-let the old premises with all their expensive old fittings and furniture for a considerable profit. The profit from the old lease would pay all the rent for this one.

  And into this stylish, elegant space she introduced Harry and sat him at his swivel chair behind his army disposal desk. He complained when oil from the desk spotted his suit, but by three o'clock that afternoon he had sold his first campaign and he had something about him, a vitality, an edge, an aggressiveness she had never seen in him before.

  Imagine this: a colour poster thirty inches long and eight inches deep. A photograph of a match, very large, occupies almost the entire length of the poster. Beneath it, in Franklin Gothic type, these words:

  All the wood you need to burn this winter, and beneath that, the logo: Mobil LP Gas.

  All this for stores in country areas, to stick on walls for flies to shit on, for mutants to stare at. But look at it there, lying against the pink wall with its cell overlay: a thing of great beauty destined to take its place in the One Show in New York with these credits:

  Copywriter: Bettina Joy

  Art Director: Bettina Joy

  Typographer: Bettina Joy

  Agency: Day, Kerlewis and Joy

  Client: Mobil.

  All the client had asked for was something cheap and nasty to shut up the country dealers who were complaining about a lack of promotional support. He had not asked for this pristine piece of art lying against the pink wall. It would cost five times as much to print, and there was no reason to spend the extra money, except that the damn poster looked so good.

  It was not an easy sale for Harry Joy. The client had already rejected the poster twice and here he was, being presented with it a third time, and he was already shifting in his seat and unfolding his arms and tapping his pencil when Harry's total reserves of charm, good fellowness and cunning began to work on him and he saw (when it was expressed like that – why didn't they say so before?) the reason for the poster being like it was.

  Bettina, watching this performance, felt ambivalent. She gave him credit for the skill but felt it was a shallow nasty sort of skill and did not really admire him for it. It was a skill like being born beautiful is a skill, in other words not a skill at all. She had never seen him at work before and so could not assess the enormous impact Hell had made on his technique. Gone was that dozy lethargic Harry Joy, the old tell-us-what-you-want-and-I'll-get-it-for-you pragmatist. In his place was a man who felt he must not fail, a cunning, slightly angry personality who hid his aggression behind the natural blanket of his charm.

  Bettina resented all the years he had squashed her and resented the fact that he was now to share her triumph. Yet resentment was nothing new to her and this resentment was of a low-enough order for her to accept, just as she accepted exhaust fumes in the air. She was happy. She sat alone and warmed herself with her Scotch and her triumph.

  'Will we wait for Joel?'

  David was asking her, in that particularly petulant manner that he adopted for all matters relating to Joel.

  'No,' she said, 'start.'

  It was Joel who had stood on ladders and carried boxes of tiles up three flights of stairs, who had worked on a high plank until 3 a.m. Who else would have done that for her? Who else, if it came to that, cared about her?

  Honey Barbara sat next to Harry. Bettina watched them and knew their legs were touching under the table. She felt too tense to taste the soup. Anybody could see that they were touching under the table and his stupid moony face was pathetic. Obviously everybody else was embarrassed too. Why else would they talk about food? Why else would anybody discuss a soup? They took the soup to pieces as if it were a child's puzzle and held up each component and talked about it.

  The woman was a looney.

  She was explaiiling that she'd walked 'six miles' to get spinach from someone who didn't spray it, for Christ's sake.

  Bettina was pleased to see that Lucy was taking the piss out of her with some subtlety.

  'And demineralized water,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara. 'You mean distilled water, with nothing in it but water.'

  'Yes.'

  'You'll still get cancer,' Lucy grinned, 'just like the rest of us.'

  'Shut up,' Bettina said. Once a year she had a complete check for cancer. Her appointment was automatic. She was advised by mail on the week before and the rest of the year she did not think about it.

  There was a silence. Everybody
thought about cancer.

  'I like your food,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara, 'and it isn't boring.'

  'Thank you.'

  'It's very good,' said Ken. 'I used to live wiv a lady who used to make soup like this and this is better soup and hers was very good.'

  It was a long specch for Ken and possibly it would have been longer except that Joel arrived and a fuss was made to make sure he had his soup and his place opposite Bettina.

  He sat down and smiled a calm shiny smile.

  'Joel... ' Bettina said.

  Joel beamed. Sometimes, Harry thought, he looked like a flesh-coloured frog.

  'Are you alright, Joel?'

  Or a waxy image of a Buddha. A marzipan Buddha, Harry thought, nodding politely at his junior partner.

  'Pretty good,' Joel said to Bettina.

  Lucy was looking at him sharply, her dark eyes narrowed, and Ken, as if waiting for something, held his soup spoon in the air. David rested his censorious eyes on Joel's face. Only Honey Barbara, engrossed in the problem of finding a clean soup bowl for him, paid no attention.

  'What happened?' David said.

  'Nothing Davey.'

  Joel began to eat his soup and everyone gave up and began to worry about other things. As was the rule in Palm Avenue it was always easy to get two people to agree on any subject, but never three, so that whatever was mentioned there was always plenty of room for discussion and sometimes enough for a brawl.

  Nobody noticed whether Joel and Bettina actually spoke to one another, whether an interrogation took place and Joel divulged, reluctantly, his secret. They were too busy talking about demineralized water and the high incidence of kidney stones caused, Honey Barbara claimed, by the current craze for mineral water and the high levels of sodium caused pri-marily by excess salt, when they heard Bettina scream.

  It is possible she had asked Joel nothing. It is even likely that when the others became engrossed in the problems of mineral water he had simply smiled a sad resigned doggy smile and opened his suit coat for Bettina to see. The smile would have had an apologetic edge to it, as if he was sorry for causing the trouble, but something, obviously, had to be done.

  For there, protruding at ninety degrees from his blood-stained shirt, was a pearl-handled pocket knife.

  'You fool,' Bettina screamed. 'You damned fool.'

  'They won't be back again,' Joel said. 'I saw to that.'

  Honey Barbara watched with her mouth open.

  'Don't worry,' Lucy told her, 'he does it all the time.' But she did not sound casual.

  'It's your fault,' Bettina screamed at Harry. 'You're such a rock-'n'-roll star, flouncing about the office, you never think how he feels...'

  She would not have an ambulance for him. Ken and David lifted him up and carried him down to the Jaguar. Bettina insisted on taking him to the hospital alone.

  Honey Barbara knew they were going to turn on Harry. She sat and waited for it. They took their time. They complimented her some more on the cooking and she waited.

  Bettina was a powerful witch.

  'Poor Joel,' Lucy said.

  'You've got to hand it to him, he works hard,' Ken said.

  'What did you do to him?' David asked Harry.

  'I didn't do anything,' Harry said.

  Honey Barbara watched, but what was happening was worse than she thought. She did not know that Harry had been, all his life, a protected species. He had not been nipped like this before. He had not been held accountable for anything.

  Yet this was the way it was going to be at Palm Avenue for as long as they all lived there, not just nipping like goldfish in an-overcrowded tank, although that would be common enough, but arguing, shouting, laughing, vomiting, attacking, counter-attacking, all too loud, too late, too abrasively. There was an irritable peevish excitement as if they were only a lie or a conceit away from some big discovery and once it was lanced or cauterized everything would become clear, but what revealed itself was never any more than the hungover morning of another day.

  Tonight Harry would be 'it'. He would not accept any responsibility for Joel and Lucy wasn't going to let him get away with it. She didn't want him to be totally responsible. She just wanted to admit he was partly responsible like they all were. She felt irritated with him, as if he might be a hypocrite, and although it was a strength of her character to allow others to be weak, and flawed without judging them, she now found it difficult to extend this to her own father.

  She only wanted him to admit a little responsibility, then she would leave him alone.

  But Harry didn't see it like this. All he saw was an attack and he sought to defend himself in the best way he knew, the way he always had.

  'I'll tell you a story,' he said and they should have seen that slight lack in confidence, the nervous flick of his eyes around the table as he tested their reaction to the idea.

  Barbara and Ken had never heard one of Harry's stories before and they were, each in their own way, astonished by it, not so much by the content of the story, but rather the way it was approached, and they felt differently about him because of it, just as we feel differently about a man when we discover his secret passion is cabinet-making. There was, in Harry's stories, something of the skill of a cabinet-maker, the craftsman more than the artist. They were not usually stories at all, but incidents to which he applied himself with such dedication that, finally, the thing was like a folly or a carefully carpentered house for pigeons, a rotunda, a series of small pavillions with elegant roofs and perfect dovetail joinery.

  There was something that happened to him when he told a story, a certain way he leaned back in his chairs, folding his hands in his lap, half closing his eyes. If there had been anyone alive who had known Vance Joy they could not help but be amazed at the likeness, particularly certain American pronunc-iations and the slow, confident drawl which had a soothing, almost hypnotic effect on the listeners.

  The words of the story could be of no use to anyone else. The words, by themselves, were useless. The words were an instrument only he could play and they became, in the hands of others, dull and lifeless, like picked flowers or bright stones removed from underwater.

  As usual the story was about and by Vance Joy. It came from the time of Vance's childhood and consisted merely of a journey undertaken by a small boy (Vance) with an old man (his grandfather) from the deep valley where they lived to the plateau country above them. It was called 'Journey to the Sunshine' and it ended with the old man and the boy arriving to see the sun set and the boy misunderstanding the nature of the world outside the valley, for he had never seen a sunset before.

  Yet when it was finished the room was quiet. The candles spluttered a little on the table and you could almost hear Ken nodding his head. Honey Barbara squeezed his hand so hard she might have broken it, to let him know, silently, that she had misjudged his power to throw off devils, and asking him to forgive her for her blindness. Harry, held by the soporific power of his father's story, had become quiet and gentle.

  But Lucy would not let him go so easily. She had waited out the story, just in case. She thought, perhaps, it might have had a moral, or a meaning that related to Joel. But it was just another story, and he was using it to grease away from her.

  'You misuse it,' she said.

  'What?'

  'Your story. You use it to get away from having respons-ibility.'

  'It is about responsibility,' Harry lied. 'It is about love and care, and the father puts his hand around the boy's shoulder.' But he could not look his daughter in the eye.

  Lucy was a little drunk. She didn't know if what he said was true or not. He had thrown sand in her eyes. She had not meant to attack, but to clarify, to remove all doubt, but that all went with the wind and she attacked from another angle.

  'But listen,' she said, and heard meanness in her voice, 'we never touched each other as a family. Aren't you being a hypocrite, telling a story like that?'

  No one had ever talked about Harry's stories like
that. She was shocked with what she'd done.

  'Go easy... ' Ken said.

  'We never did,' she insisted. 'Not like you hug Honey Barbara now. You never sat around hugging Bettina like that, or us.'

  Harry held out his long arm across the table, offering his embrace.

  'No,' she said.

  He looked stung.

  'Go easy... ' Ken said.

  'No.' She did not recognize herself. 'It's too late for that... '

  'What's this got to do with Joel?' David said, and Harry held out his arms towards him.

  'You come to me,' David said. 'I'm not going to you.'

  'You can kiss me, Harry,' Ken said. He meant to make light of it, but the effect was not well calculated.

  Harry stood slowly. He was hurt but not angry. It was their nature to all hurt each other. He bid them all, individually, good night, except Honey Barbara who he kissed silently and tenderly and without ostentation.

  When he had gone they were ashamed of themselves, all except Honey Barbara who was furious.

  'Why did you do that to him?'

  'Well, he gets up himself,' Lucy said sadly. 'But you're right. I shouldn't have.'

  As became the pattern, they had another bottle of wine then, and even Honey Barbara had one more glass of Fleurie.

  It was an old planter's house, designed to cool off quickly in the evening. To this end it was built on high stilts so that air circulated beneath the floor and the walls were only clad on one side, the inside, so that the uprights and cross-bracings became a decorative element in the exterior walls. As a direct result of this construction sound travelled easily from one part of the house to the other and those visitors who had been coy about the movements of their bowels had often left Palm Avenue severely constipated.

  Yet, although everyone had gone to bed when Joel and Bettina arrived home, no one in the upstairs bedroom heard them, unless perhaps it was David Joy who had not yet slid into his labyrinthian dreams of Eldorado.