Bliss Read Free Page B

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 ...'
    'Vance!'
    'My darling Patricia, you know it's true.'
    'He believes everything you tell him, stop