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
'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.
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
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 –
