'Oh yes,' she said, her wide eyes mocking him.
'Does it cause you pain?' He tried to appear disinterested.
'In the arse, yes.'
'Ah,' and he regarded her with interest, his head on one side, scratching his right leg with his left bare foot.
'Come and sit here, old mate.' She patted the chair beside her. It was a term of affection from another time, and Harry, standing on one leg like a shy tropical bird, allowed himself to be induced to sit at the table.
She held his hand and kissed him on his splendid nose. They hadn't made love for two months.
'Harry...'
'Yes.'
'Do you think you're going a bit loopy?'
Harry shrugged. 'All I'm doing… ' but he stopped, not wishing to show his hand.
'What are you doing, old mate?'
'All I'm doing is cleaning windows.'
'So you can make me look like a tart.'
'No.'
'So everyone can see I don't do anything?'
'I'd have thought you'd be glad for me to do it.'
'You're a sarcastic bastard aren't you,' she said good-humouredly, 'Alright, get out.'
'Get out where?'
'Get out of the fucking kitchen and let me get on with it.'
'No, let me clean some more.'
Bettina pointed a single finger and started jabbing him around the edges of his scar. 'Look, you, get out, out.'
He retreated upstairs. He managed to clean half the bath-room before she came and found him.
She was going to be a hot-shot but she met Harry Joy and fell in love with him. They told her he was from the French Consulate and she watched him for a while, not in the least impatient, merely fascinated by him. He wore a beautifully tailored rather loose white suit. He had a huge moustache. He looked Splendid. She watched how he moved, grace-fully, as if his feet hardly touched the floor, the walk of a dancer.
It was a party for a departing Trade Commissioner, full of businessmen with rotary badges. She had come with her boss who ran the local Ogilvy & Mather office.
'Come on, Tina,' he had said, 'grab your hat. We're going to a party.'
She sat in a chair and began to watch Harry Joy. She was shy and had no plan for meeting him. She was happy enough to look and admire.
Even then she was offended by the drabness of the town, its dullness, its lack of style. Her only escape was in her stinking room above her father's service station. Downstairs Billy McPhee burped and farted, wise-cracked, giggled, ran between cash register and pump, pump and cash register; upstairs, his daughter turned the shining pages of the New York Art Directors' Annual.
Men sat beside her and engaged her in conversation but her eyes never left the exotic man in the beautiful white suit. It was not even possible, she thought, that he spoke English.
And then he was standing in front of her.
'You've been staring at me,' he said and he was not French at all, but he spoke with such a low, slow drawl that she was not in the least disappointed.
'Yes,' she said. She couldn't think of anything else. Yet the brevity of her reply probably struck him as bold.
He sat beside her and surveyed the motel room full of grey suits and striped carpet. 'Mmmm,' he said.
She thought he was the most original person she'd ever met.
'It's a beautiful suit,' she said. She was so tense her finger-nails ached.
When he smiled, his eyes crinkled. 'Why are you wearing gloves?'
She was nineteen. She said: 'My hands sweat.'
A smile stirred beneath that vast moustache. 'Are you eccentric?' he asked.
'Yes.'
He called a waiter and ordered vodka. Then he undressed her hands and wiped them with a handkerchief dipped in vodka. He borrowed a towel from the waiter and dried them.
'There,' he said, 'all you need is a splash of vermouth and you could have a very dry vodkatini.' He was twenty-two. He had read about vodkatinis in the New Yorker.
She did not ask him what he did. She detested people who did it to her.
'Ask me in three years,' she'd say.
'Why?'
'Because in three years I'll have something interesting to tell you.'
Even the two men who ran Ogilvy & Mather did not know their secretary, receptionist and switchboard operator held ambitions to be an advertising hot-shot. She probably knew more about the history of American advertising than they did. She owned a total of fifteen annuals from the New York Art Directors' Club and she knew who had written everyone of the Volkswagen ads since the first ones Bill Bembach had done himself. She devoured the American trade papers and knew all the gossip. If there had been anyone to tell she would have told them funny stories about Mary Wells and Jack Tinker but there was only her father, bug-eyed on pills, scattering his own verbal garbage behind him: 'ten out of ten, number one son, go for it Gloria.' She lived in a wreckers yard of works.
'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,
