Peter Carey - Bliss

She found him in the bathroom and after she had hit him with the mop she asked him to forgive her. She held him then, and in spite of all her resolutions, all her determination, her ambitions, she felt the old stirrings of a familiar love.

'You won't let me love you,' she said to the man she had decided to leave, who drove her crazy and sent her into wild displays of rage.

She felt him tremble. She liked his body since he had been sick: it was thinner and harder, She even liked the big silky scar on his chest.

'You won't let me get close.' She was damn well seducing him, in the bathroom, with her hand up his sarong. She bit his ear. 'Harry, Harry.' She felt him resist, and then, without a word, he just unknotted, and it was like the old days, the old times when they had stayed in bed on Saturday morning, days before the invention of Joel, and with one hand he was locking the door and with the other he was tearing off her dressing gown.

'Betty, Betty,' he said, 'is it you?'

In the mythology of the family the McPhees were dark, dis-contented, poetic, and the Joys were placid and rather ordin-ary. In this classification it was necessary to forget Harry's eccentric mother and his wandering father. It was equally important to forget Bettina's sad bug-eyed father who had died of an overdose of amphetamines and anger, howling at a customer who wanted a dollar's worth of petrol.

'Dollar's worth,' screamed Billy McPhee, literally jumping up and down beside the pump, 'you expect me to give you a fucking dollar's worth .' And Bettina, paying her guilty last respects, imagined she could detect, amidst the sweet-petalled aromas of funeral flowers, the more familiar perfumes of her youth: oil, petrol, and perished rubber. This pale dead man was not a McPhee.

David Joy was a McPhee, and was teased by his sister because of it: 'How's the master race?'

'You,' Bettina told Lucy, flying in the face of all physical evidence, 'are a Joy.' And, as if to compensate for this mis-fortune, it was always said: 'Lucy is going to be happy.' She made it sound as if there was something dreadfully wrong with being happy in this particular way.

Her mother's elitist attitudes irritated Lucy. 'What's the mat-ter with being ordinary?' she said. 'Why do you want to be special?'

'I couldn't bear to be second-rate.'

'I wouldn't mind being sixth-rate, or tenth-rate.'

'Can't you do something about your appearance?'

'My appearance is fine.' She bit an apple. She accepted herself so completely that she could not help but be beautiful, and ven if her bum was already too big and her ankles too thick, there was something about her that made people calmer and better just to be with her. Men would always be attracted to her as boys were now. She liked fucking them too. Given her appetites it is a wonder – when you consider the provincial nature of the town – that she was not derided for them.

'You are complacent,' her mother said (had said, would say, repeatedly). 'You are going to be a social worker and you'll just get your degree and end up with a line of children and a house in the suburbs.'

'I don't want to be a social worker.'

'Don't you ever say that to your father.'

'Yeah, yeah. I know.'

'What do you want to do?'

But you couldn't tell Bettina McPhee that you were going to overthrow the Americans.

Harry set the table in the dining room. It was Georgian, made from English Ash and imported by a sea captain from a certain Percy Lewis Esq., who surely could not have imagined his table in this room with this monstrously exaggerated view of a mountain like a sugar loaf and a tree that flowered flame. Now, as Harry placed the silver on the table, the clouds slid in over the flat mangrove swamps to the south and, as if aware of the almost unbearable richness of the view, wrapped themselves around Sugar Loaf and covered the gleaming bay beneath.

It was drippingly humid. Lucy and David and Bettina sat out on the wide verandah and fought against or relaxed into the heat, according perhaps to the amounts of McPhee or Joy apportioned them. Bettina, certainly, did not enjoy the heat and collapsed back into her stockman's chair with her eyes shut. David affected the quality he thought proper for a Sunday Luncheon and although he wore a cashmere sweater, looked not in the least hot. Lucy sat on the verandah rail in a white cheesecloth dress and looked at the bangalow palms, which, in the absence of any wind, mysteriously rustled their fish-bone fronds, as if talking to each other.

Today was to be a real family lunch, a re-enactment of some tradition they imagined they had always shared. It had been Lucy's idea; she had guessed, not incorrectly, at the healing power of the ritual.

Harry drifted out on to the verandah with some more Veuve Cliquot and arranged himself in a large cane chair.

'Ah,' he said, and sipped his champagne.

Like a dog who keeps sneaking on to a sofa it is forbidden, it was the nature of Harry Joy that he would always seek out comfort. So here we have him two weeks after his vow to be Good, to fire his largest client, to save his colleague from the tortures of Hell. The client is not fired. The tortures of his colleague, if anything, have increased: now he loses sleep, tosses and turns in unemployed nightmares, and wanders around a house in which neither his wife nor his Pascal can provide him with any comfort. And as for Goodness, it seems to have degenerated into something as silly as setting the table for a Sunday Lunch.

And Harry, meanwhile, can lie back on the verandah of his charming house at Palm Avenue and sip his Veuve Cliquot and wait for the rain to come and try to persuade himself that he may, after all, have been crazy.

Lucy went to sit beside her mother who held her hand contentedly. The lunch might just work, if Betty didn't get too drunk, if Harry didn't start taking notes again.

'What's the first course?' Harry said.

'Escrivée Amoureuse.'

'Ah,' he said.

The rain began to fall, very gently at first, making loud slapping noises on the banana leaves, where it collected in tiny dams which dipped and broke and then reformed. The poinciana, like so many feathery hands held palm upwards, let the rain brush carelessly through its fingers.

The Veuve Cliquot was old enough to have assumed a golden colour, and Harry was rot unappreciative of its beauty, nor was he ignorant of its cost, nor the contribution Krappe Chemicals made towards its purchase.

He had reread his notebooks and found them a little extreme, a little frenzied, not to say unbalanced. And all their evidence, he thought, was insufficient to justify this terrible, risky strategy of Goodness which he viewed, just now, sitting before this gentle curtain of rain, in a little the same way as he might have thought of a slightly embarrassing sexual indiscretion.

But he is not quite ready to deny his notebooks. Even now, as he yawns, stretches, and points his sandalled feet, he .has promised himself One Last Test.

The bar wasn't quite right, but it would do. It was the best bar she knew but in no way equalled the bars she would have liked to sit in. The bars she would have liked to sit in had a chrome rail parallel to the smooth leather bar top. They had elegant art deco mirrors reflecting beautiful people carelessly dressed, and those little lamps with figurines by Lalique, each one valued at something like three thousand dollars.

But here, at least, they did put pistachios on the bar instead of peanuts and they made the Tequila Sunrises from real orange juice and it was the best bar in this town and as long as nobody told her it was a chic and elegant bar (thus forcing her to disagree violently with their provincial judgement) Bettina was very happy there. She didn't mind that Joel was late. She wasn't even mildly irritated. She looked at the bottles on the shelf, felt the shiny dark envelop her, and wondered (raising her eyes to the mirror) whether she mightn't just pick up someone. She looked, she thought, interesting. She was satisfied with her sleek dark hair which now, thanks to Edouard, came in two sleek sweeping pincers beneath the high cheek bones of her rounded face. Her large mouth (Revlon Crimson Flush No. 7) was very red. She did not look nice, or easy, but she did look interesting. She could have been anywhere (Budapest 1923, Blakes Hotel London 1975).