Bliss (7 page)

'You should have let me come into the business,' she said, 'when I wanted to.'

'No.'

It was their old argument, a bitter one for Bettina, now doubly bitter. (But he wouldn't die. Nothing would change on its own.)

'We wouldn't have this trouble,' she said.

Harry regretted not having found someone better than Joel to run the place, but he was not sorry that Bettina had never joined the business. He had offered her enough money to start a little boutique instead, but she did not want that.

'I offered you money,' he said now, years later, on a veran-dah, the night before an operation.

'You should have let me come in.'

'No.'

'I was more clever than Alex.'

'You still are.'

'I'm as clever as Joel'.

'More clever.'

'Then you were wrong.'

'No.' he said, 'you didn't have the experience.' .But the truth was not that, it was painfully simple: he did not want his wife around the office undermining his dignity. He never thought about it like this, but when he imagined her there he became irritated.

'I think,' Harry said, 'the thing to do would be to find an American buyer this year. Don't let them talk you out of it.'

And then he went on, droning on about the provisions he'd made, in his will, the formula to sell on, who was best, and on and on about Joel. She stopped listening. She started to wish he damn well would die.

'Do you understand that?'

'Yes.' she lied. She was bored. She wanted to see Joel. If he dies, she thought, I will run the business and I will run it well and the only shame will be that he's not alive to see it. And then, shocked at her thought, fearful of its magical power, she embraced him.

Leaning across the uncomfortable cane arm of the chair, a lump of loose cane sticking into her breast, she felt his fear. It was gnarled and sour and as she held his handsome head in her hands she found herself handling it as one handles overripe fruit, being careful not to squeeze too hard.

He wasn't ready. He would never be ready. His mind was full of unfolded shapes and twisted sheets and it was too late to put them into order.

He wrote his farewell note on a piece of cardboard torn from the box his slippers had come in. The address was printed on one side: to Bettina and Lucy and David Joy, 25 Palm Avenue, Mt Pleasant. His whole world was contained in those ten words written on grey cardboard. It seemed nothing, a life so pitiful and thin that it was an insult to whoever made him. It was not so much that he had achieved nothing, but that he had seen nothing, remembered nothing. A series of politenesses, lunches, hangovers, dirty plates and glasses, food trodden into carpets, spilt wines, the sour realization that he had made a fool of himself and done things he hadn't meant to.

Yes he had been happy. Of course he'd been happy. But he had always been happy in the expectation that something else would happen, some wonderful unnamed thing which he was destined for, some quivering butterfly dream soaked in sunlight in a doorway.

And now: only this sour dull fear, this lethal hangover.

But he remembered. He remembered the day they went to the bank to sign the mortgage, a rusting gutter he had tried to fix, the lawn, all those weeds he had laboured over, the trees she planted (trees most painful of all), layers of wood, one layer for each year, the cambium, the sap, the roots and those other ones (What were their names? The ones near the bottom fence?) she had planted the first year they were married, the year she lost the twins and he went to see them in their humidicribs, each tiny feature perfect, and went home to change the sheets and blankets on the bed, wet with the broken water from her womb, and those flowers, like bottle brushes, were out then and he took them to her.

They had beautiful clever children but there was no satis-faction in that, no pleasure to remember that he had bathed them and read them stories.

'Now,' the Kodak advertisement said, 'before it all changes.' He had always admired the line but never taken the photographs. Just as well, just as well. Why would details make it any better?

He could hardly write. He had to force himself to spell each word fully. He dug these words in soft cardboard: No farewell. Sorry. Operation today but could not bear to say farewell. Love you all. Fingers crossed. Bless ... Harry.

He pressed the buzzer above the bed.

'Envelope,' he asked, and waved the cardboard.

Denise came from the country. Her father and mother kept poultry. She was used to milking cows and finding eggs under bushes. She looked at Harry Joy with his ash-grey hair, his huge moustache and his piece of cardboard and couldn't imagine how he had been made.

'Wouldn't you like some paper, Mr Joy?'

'No.'

His smile was so painful it made her want to be able to do something, anything. The smile was worse than a scream. In the matron's office she found a huge Manila envelope; nearly sixteen inches long. She brought it to him gently and watched him drop the tattered cardboard inside and write in large careful letters the names of his family.

'Stamp,' he gave her money.

'I'll fix it in the morning, don't worry.'

'Now, please.'

'O.K., stamp now.' And she went plodding off in her soft white slippers and stole stamps for Harry Joy. She covered the envelope with stamps, giving him the only thing she could give. She brought him a pill too and he didn't even ask what it was, but ate it almost greedily, his hand shaking and spilling water down his front.

The pill soon reduced his world to a hazy blur, within which, in the sharpest detail, the seeds of Hell, long ago planted and recently nurtured, began to sprout and unfold their chrome-yellow petals.

Under Pentothal, he tried to name things. He tried to name the garden but could not do it properly. As he went deeper the names were lost and there were only shapes, tied with yellow string, revolving on a Ferris wheel.

He existed with white shadowy forms and sharp astringent odours. He had died again and he waited, fearfully, wondering. Lost, he felt nauseous, a floating feeling, his body without substance.

He closed his eyes, conscious of being handled with mechanisms, an object in space, without time.

Instruments were applied to him cruelly, without love.

He was split by pains, small and sharp, long and monot-onous.

He was pervaded by a full consciousness of punishment and the curious certainty of death enveloped him like a shroud.

Sometimes he cried with self-pity. Frightened as a child, he begged for mercy.

He was on a shuddering railway of merciless steel, voices echoed coldly. There were noises of silver wheels or distant thunder.

He existed nowhere in solitary terror. Visions of days before his death moved towards him and receded: his mother in that dusty street giving him the cheque. 'Now go,' she said, 'now go. I’ve won the lottery.' And in that white empty room, the Sunday School, the single sentence he had carried with him like a limpet since his youth: It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

When he saw the shapes around him it was through grey veils. He was tormented with shifting images of his wife, his children, of Desmond Pearce. Joel circled him. With what intention?

Someone said: 'He will be confused for a while.'

Yes, he thought bitterly, I will be confused; it will not be as they described it. He knew himself to be ripped with huge wounds, a vast punishment down his chest. Thin wires and tubes. A poor weak Gulliver.

He looked bitterly at those around him, forms which became more and more distinct, but he was ready for them before he saw them. He was in a room beside a verandah. Is this what they did to you? He demanded they state his sins although he could already guess them. They never answered directly, never once. 'As they will be men still,' he thought, 'so they will feel and act as men.'

Slowly, during his convalescence from his successful operation, Harry Joy became totally convinced that he was actually in Hell. He watched them, as cunning as a cat, silently indignant that fate should play such a trick on him.