Bliss Read Free

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