Bliss (2 page)

He saw Bettina waiting, noted Aldo scowling, and instinctively, with no calculation, chose a route through the pink tablecloths which would take him past a prospective client, who would, he assumed, be eager for news of Harry.

Bettina watched him with qualified pride. She saw that the client liked him but that other people at the table were offended by his over familiar manner. He had no real idea of the impression he made. He would never understand why he offended people, why they thought him too pushy, too loud, or why they would also think him refreshing and clever.

'Hello, Mrs Joy,' he said.

'Mr Davis.' She did not smile. She felt the disapproval of the restaurant, like a slightly off odour, collectively generated. There was discomfort. A glass of wine was spilt at one table, a fork dropped at another.

Joel was busy searching for a waiter.

'It's O.K,' Bettina kicked his shin gently. 'I ordered you a daiquiri.'

He pulled a face. 'You know I don't like daiquiris.'

'How are they at the office?'

The office, like the restaurant, had displayed a certain mute hostility towards Joel as if the whole business had been his fault. They had detected signs of a new pomposity in him. He had 'borrowed' the little Birko jug Harry had kept in his office to make coffee and this, although he didn't know it, had created a minor scandal.

'It's O.K. in the office. Alex is looking for another job already. He doesn't trust me and if Harry ....'

He didn't say 'dies' and she lowered her eyes as if he had imprudently complimented her on the smoothness of her skin.

,And a couple of the girls were crying.'

'Which ones?'

He looked at her and laughed maliciously.

The daiquiri arrived. He sent it back and asked for a martini. He explained to the waiter how he would like the martini made.

'You bastard,' she said.

'What?'

'I ordered the daiquiri for you.'

'I don't like daquiris.'

'I would have drunk it,' she said.

Only after the food arrived did he ask her about Harry, and, just as in any business lunch the entrée is reserved for small talk-and the main course signals the commencement of serious business, it was at this point they began.

'Well ....?' he said.

'He thinks he's going to die.'

'And ....'

'The doctor says he'll be fine. It's a dangerous operation, but he's confident it'll be fine.'

'But he thinks he's going to die? Why?'

'You know Harry, it's like his hives. He decides he's going to get them and ....'

'When he decides he's getting hives, he gets them.'

'I didn't mean that. He looks good.'

'Good.'

'The doctor says there's nothing to worry about.'

'Marvellous,' he said, but kept looking her in the eye, his knife and fork lifted, as if looking for some secret sign. Joel, sometimes, lacked all subtlety.

Neither of them had the will or the strength to actually murder someone, although Bettina would certainly grow in leaps and bounds over the following year, and nor did they have the strength to say they would have liked Harry dead. In truth they wouldn't even look the idea in the face. Instead they flirted with it. They saw it pass sexily out of the comer of their eyes but did not, for a second, turn their heads to stare. They did not allow themselves' to know what they wanted or why they wanted it. They were blind-worms pushing forward, entwining in the dark. One could, unfairly perhaps, imagine them as the instruments of someone else's pleasure.

'Here comes the little monkey.'

He knew she was talking about Aldo and didn't look around. Joel had long ago given up trying to make Aldo like him.

'Mrs Joy,' Aldo looked at her reproachfully, his small dark head on one side, 'you didn't tell me ...'

Aldo did not much care for -Bettina Joy but he admitted to himself that she had something, a strength, a sexiness that was very rare for a slightly dumpy woman with fat legs. Her face was round and smooth and olive-skinned, her hair straight and dark, her eyes impenetrable.

'I'm sorry, Aldo.'

'I understand, I understand.'

'He's in the General. They'll be operating this week.'

'Such a young man. He'll be better though, soon. My brother had a heart attack twenty years ago. He's been healthier since he had it.' He laughed. 'It's probably the best thing.'

'Coronary by-pass surgery', Bettina said firmly, 'is very dangerous, but we all hope it will be fine.'

'Now perhaps he will give up those cigarettes.'

'Perhaps, yes.'

There was a pause and Joel thought: not a damn fool here knows I am fucking her.

('Your meal was enjoyable?')

When, of course, they all knew.

('Yes, thank you.')

They had watched it for months. They had her dull eyes glisten. They had heard her throaty laughter become a fraction shriller They had not talked about the curious
ménage à trois
at the corner table, merely absorbed its possible implications so that later, when everything became obvious, they would realize they had known all the time.

Aldo, strangely irritated, passed around the tables, making his way towards an inept food-writer who had also been sent to haunt him.

Bettina said: 'He's a cretin.' She was being unfair, but she was sick of being patronized by idiots who couldn't tie up shoe-laces. She wanted power success, not through a lover or a husband, but directly, for herself alone. Joel, at least, accepted this in her, and in this respect at least she felt equal with him. There was some perverse honesty she shared with him. She no longer had to pretend to be generous and kind and loving. She didn't want to be good, she wanted to be successful. She explored the border territories of pain and pleasure with him. Smeared with shit and semen she felt herself to be standing at new doorways with new possibilities.

All her were clean pink tablecloths.

Harry Joy was suckled on those long lost days in the little weatherboard house on the edge of town. The world he was born in had been fresh and green. Dew drops full of visions hung from morning grass and old Clydesdales stood silently in the paddock above the creek. Crickets sang songs and everything had meanings.

The sky was full of Gods and Indians and people smiled at him, touched him, stroked him, and brought him extraordinary gifts from the world outside where there were, he knew, exotic bazaars filled with people in gowns, strange fruits piled high, the air redolent with spices, and Jesus Christ, and the Good Samaritan, always dressed in his dusty grey robe with its one red patch on the left sleeve, and the soldier offering the dripping wet sponge of wine to Jesus, and there were small boiled sweets and white sheets and the smell of bread, and floor polish and, far away, New York, its glass towers trembling in an ecstasy of magic which was to become, his father said, one day, after the next flood, a splendid book read by all mankind with wonder.

His father came and went three times, the first to sire him, the second to drain the swamp, the third to see his son with vaguely disappointed eyes.

His father had lain in bed while the Shire Engineer had knocked on the door. He remembered his mother giggling and how happy it made him feel, those sounds like drops of water suspended in sunlight, and how his father, pulling on his tall boots had come to the door laughing, to admit the tight-faced engineer.

'You'll be dead a long time, Brophy,' his father told the engineer. His father was tall and had a big moustache. He had been born in New York State and had travelled the world. When Harry and his mother went to church, his father stayed in bed.

'I can talk to God from here,' he told the child, who never doubted that his father had a special relationship the Almighty. He would have rather stayed in the warm bed beside his father than venture out to the little wooden church with its gothic texts written on the arch above the nave, a cold austere place where people left to drink communion wine and returned with solemn faces and a slightly frightening smell. The church was always nearly empty and only his mother's soft contralto rose like a bird and warmed its empty spaces with its trembling wings.

Here he heard about Heaven and Hell and the tortures of Jesus. He sat aghast at such terrible cruelty and more than once wept in sympathy for the tortured God or fear for what the God might do to him.

He preferred the stories of his father.

'How I met your mother,' his father said, 'is a story you should know, but first you must give me blue bread or a sapphire.'

'I haven't got any,' the boy wailed. 'Tell me the story.'

'Don't tease him, Vance,' his mother said.

'Don't tease me,' the boy said petulantly.

'You must always give something for a story,' his father said. 'Either blue bread made from cedar ash, or a sapphire. That is something I learned from the Hopi. All stories come from the Holy People and you must give something for them.'

'What is a sapphire?'

'A stone.'

The boy ran outside and found a stone, a small brown stone with a white vein in it. He gave it to his father who accepted it solemnly.

'Thank you, now we will sit on the floor.'

'No, Vance, not the floor.'

But they sat on the floor, the father and son, the boy folding his legs the way his father showed him. Occasionally his father would stop the story to feed the wood stove.

'This,' said his father, 'is the story of the Vision Splendid. It had been dry for eight weeks and the whole of the air was full of dust, bright dust that settled on everything. Nobody thought it would ever rain again. And then one afternoon we saw the storm clouds coming from the south and we prayed for it to rain. Your mother, who I didn't know, went to the church and she prayed. And I prayed too, but not in the church. '

'Did it rain?'

'Did it rain? When your mother asks God for rain...'

'Vance,' his mother said, but she giggled.

'Did it rain? The rain poured down. It rained so heavily you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. It rained like all the air was a river and the drains in the main street filled up and then the water, red water, the same colour as the dust, crept out across the main street until there was just a white line going down the centre and red water all around it, and then there wasn't even the white line and the main street was a river three feet deep.'

'Captain's Creek flooded and I went down there with some other fellows to help the shopkeepers. We had old Malachy's clinker boat, half-gone with dry-rot, and when we got to the Co-op it sank on its mooring (we tied it to the verandah post). We were shifting the flour and grain up on top of the counter, away from the water, and I just looked out the door, just glancing up, and that was when I saw the Vision Splendid.'

'What was it?' asked the boy. 'What was the Vision Splendid?'

'It was your mother, lad, her long black hair blacker than coal, standing in the front of a boat which was piled high with all the things from the church vestry. She was standing in front of the boat holding the cross and her eyes, her eyes, my boy. Ah ... ' he stopped. 'All that red water and such luminous eyes.'

It was only a small house and when the February winds blew it rocked on its wooden stumps and it is a measure of their sense of their own specialness that they did not envy their neighbours' larger houses but found theirs in every way superior. To walk into that little cottage was to feel something that was available nowhere else in town: old oiled timbers, mellow lights, curious old rugs, and chipped plates with pretty patterns, which visitors would fondly imagine were the remnants of a misplaced fortune. Where everybody else bought glossy white paint and threw out their kitchen dressers; the Joys were seen removing the last vestiges of paint and fossicking out at the tip for their neighbours' rejected furniture.

They should have been hated, or at least ridiculed, but they weren't. Seen fossicking at the tip they were granted the right to eccentricity normally given only to aristocrats, and there were rumours that they were, in some not very clear way, almost aristocratic. Perhaps Vance Joy's English middle-class accent gave them this idea, or at least provided a core on which other layers of fantasy could be coated, creamy layer on creamy layer. Yet at the heart of it all was this: Vance Joy was a big expansive man with a generous spirit whom it was impossible to dislike; he would never say no to anyone who asked for help; he could, if need be, drink like a fish and, most important of all, knock any man down. Patricia Joy was at once very beautiful and very modest; she was well educated but never displayed it; she taught piano on Thursdays and Saturdays and once did a water-colour copy of 'The Last Supper' for the Sunday School, a work of art so highly valued that a departing clergyman had forever muddied his reputation by taking it with him when he left the town.

As everyone would say, as if expecting the contrary: 'They're hard-up, but not stuck-up.'

The Joys, charming, beautiful, educated, eccentric, played a part in this little game and in ways too subtle for anyone (themselves least of all) to notice, they encouraged it. They did feel themselves to be aristocrats of a sort: free-spirits, moralists, artists, bon vivants; and one must acknowledge, at least, the strength of character required to live their very slightly bohemian life in such a small and often intolerant community and, what is more, to get away with it.

When Harry thought of that house afterwards it would always be night and the wood stove crackled and made dull thumps and hisses and it shifted its burning innards make itself more comfortable. A soft yellow kerosene threw benevolent shadows across the room and his father (who lived in the house for a total of four years and two months) would always be there, telling a story in a languid way, stuffing a pipe with tobacco, feeding a stove, or cooking some unappetizing peasant porridge that he had taken a liking to in India or South America or Oregon.

And stories, always stories: Wood Spirits, lightning, the death of Kings, and New York, New York, New York.

'In New York there are towers of glass. It is the most beau-tiful and terrible city on earth. All good, all evil exist there.' He could say the word 'evil' so you felt it, a cold sinuous thing that could come in under a locked door and push up into your bowels. 'If you know where to look, you can find the devil. That is where he lives. If you keep your eyes peeled you can see him drive down 42nd Street in a Cadillac with darkened windows. He lives in Park Avenue, surrounded by his servants. But New York is full of saints, they ...'