Peter Carey - Bliss

'I'm in advertising,' Harry Joy offered. 'Harry Joy.'

It was enough information for her to be able to place him exactly. He was only twenty-two and he was the Joy in Day, Kerlewis & Joy. He had been made a partner after only eight months when Mr Kerlewis died suddenly. She knew how much he was reputed to earn, what commercials he had written, and the names of three women he had been seen with regularly.

She did not want to tell him she was a receptionist at Ogilvy & Mather. She did not wish to be ordinary. Later, later, she would be exceptional, but now when it was important she was a little Miss Nobody with nothing interesting to say. She looked at him in despair as if he might, at any instant, be snatched from her and she acted quickly, with the outrageous courage of the very shy.

She stood up and put her gloves back on.

'Where are you going?' He looked hurt.

'I'm going to dinner,' she said. 'Want to come?'

'O.K.,' he said as though he was asked out by women every night of the week. Her hands were bathed in nervous sweat and later that night when she kicked off her shoes they stank of all the hopes and anxieties that had never once showed on that smooth olive-skinned face which had so beguiled dear Harry Joy.

On the way to dinner he decided, without consulting her, that he needed petrol.

'No,' she said, 'not here:

But it was too late. They were already parked on the fore-court and Billy McPhee, a stinking rag in his back pocket, was bounding out of the office, his worn red head low, his arms swinging, whistling some piece of nonsense he'd misheard on the radio, and Harry was saying to her: 'Why did you say that?'

'Nothing,' she said. 'It doesn't matter.'

She tried to be invisible.

'Fill 'er up,' Harry said.

'Oil, water, Captain's Daughter?' Billy said, peering into the car but Bettina turned the other way. 'Fix your windscreen?'

She never forgot it. Eighteen years later it could still mike her moan out loud. How could she have betrayed him? How could she, heartless cruel nineteen-year-old, have refused to acknowledge that the man looking at her through the wind-screen was her father?

More than her father. Her mother too, because her real mother had left Billy and Billy had not missed a beat – he just brought her up, right there on the forecourt. He changed her nappies beside the cash register. He parked her pram between the pumps. While the gallons clicked over he talked to her continually. 'You were born into this business,' he told her. 'It's in your blood. You are one hundred and twenty octane.' He had been young once, keen, self-starting, go-ahead, with plans: But somewhere all his energy and his dreams got out of control as he gabbled around the forecourt making plans to buy a block of flats, then two blocks of flats, and then three. But he didn't even own their own flat. He stank of sweat and speed and perished rubber and his pale blue eyes bugged out his unnaturally white skin.

Bettina saw her father through the window. She looked right through him. Something, a spasm, a tic, wrenched Billy's mouth and then his eyes just clouded over and he finished wiping the window and filled up the tank.

'Could you check the tyres?' Harry said.

'Get fucked,' Billy McPhee told his future son-in-law. 'Give me the money and piss off before I punch your ugly head in.'

Later when they knew each other neither of them ever got over the obstacle created by that night.

Bettina McPhee hadn't expected to fall in love with anyone. She hadn't been able to imagine it and it had played no part in her plan. Later, perhaps, in America or somewhere else, but not here and now.

But next thing she knew, she'd done it. Like that. Without even pausing to think. And then everything went out the window and she pursued her love with a reckless sort of enthusiasm and she suddenly didn't give a hoot about being a hot-shot or going to America because she was happy and her happiness seemed so perfect it needed nothing. She applied herself to marriage with wild enthusiasm, as if it might yield up treasures in exact proportion to the energy she plunged into it. She decided to find the town interesting. They bought an old stilted house in Palm Avenue and she became pregnant without even stopping to think if she wanted to be. She went along with the whole mad rush of it and, six months pregnant with David, she was still smashing out a central wall with a jemmy and a sledgehammer and ending her days with bloodied hands and plaster-covered hair.

Billy McPhee's daughter, without a doubt.

She did not abandon her interest in advertising; it was, after all, her husband's business. She read the American trade papers. She bought the new Art Directors' Annuals. She criticized Harry's work with a keen intelligence.

She was shocked when she realized how complacent he was. 'It worked,' he said, defending a television commercial he'd written.

'So it worked;' she said, 'so what. Was it great ?'

'Oh, come on, Bettina... '

'Was it great?'

'Alright,' he said, 'it wasn't great. But it makes us money.'

'To hell with the money,' she said. 'I don't care about the money. All I care about is that you do witty, beautiful won-derful advertisements.'

'You're right,' he said, and she tried to accept that he would never do great ads.

She hadn't been quite so keen to become pregnant the sec-ond time. She was going to be a hot-shot. Each year she told herself that she was still young. And while she waited she became more American than the Americans. She supported their wars, saw their movies, bought their products, despised their enemies. Even their most trivial habits were adopted as articles of faith and there was always iced water on the table at Palm Avenue. She believed in the benevolence of their companies, the triumph of the astronauts, the law of the market-place and the twin threats of Communism and the second-rate, although not necessarily in that order.

By the time Lucy was ten they were having arguments about whether Bettina could come into the business. In Harry's mind they had never been bitter arguments, and, in a superficial sense, he was right. But Bettina had been deeply offended by his refusal to consider it. It was a rejection more painful than any she had ever experienced and she could not forgive him for it.

In Bettina's view, it was that rejection which had produced their present unhappiness. Yet, even now, in the midst of Harry' s madness, in the total ruin of their marriage, there. were days when they would find themselves, almost forgetfully, on the verge of having fun (although something would always go wrong, some irritation would creep in and everything would suddenly go sour and hatreds and resentments would come spilling out of her and lie in a nasty slippery mess along with the water from the sprouts and the spilt pieces of cabbage on the kitchen floor).

'Who cleaned the shoes?'

'Your idiot father.'

Her daughter was the wild, untended variety of the same plant, loose like a dog, her dark hair curling in. masses, her movements still graceful but lackadaisical. She had her mother's almond-eyes but her olive skin was nearly black from the sun. She sat on the kitchen table and watched Bettina rubbing at the glass.

'Have you been swimming again?' Bettina said, puffing a little.

'Yes.'

She worried about the size of her daughter'S shoulders. She turned and gave a crooked mascara look.

'Don't worry, Mum, I'll marry a gorilla.'

'You might have to,' she said drily. 'Have a shower.'

'I can't. Daddy's cleaning out the bathroom.'

'Oh fuck him,' screamed Bettina and ran up the stairs. She gave Harry credit for greater deviousness than he was capable of. She had heard him tell his methods for dealing with difficult clients and she now felt some subtle net was being drawn around her. Why was he polishing the bath in his sarong? Why were there clean shoes' sitting in a line on the back door step? He made her feel like a tart, an adultress, a drunk, a failure. He was humiliating himself in order to humiliate her.