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
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.
'Escrivee 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).
When she had finally gone through the agonies of leaving Harry, when she had her own business, she would go to Blakes Hotel in London and sit in the bar there.
She sat at one end of the bar and watched the door with a wonderful sense of expectation as if, at any moment, the most beautiful man might walk through the door, three days' growth on his handsome face, a loose linen jacket thrown over his shoulders, a dark face, sensuous and violent, but an intelligent forehead.
So when Joel came scurrying through at this moment she was, without knowing why, irritated and depressed. She was always disappointed when she saw him: physically he was not quite what she had remembered.
Joel always rushed. He had no cool. Harry had more style than Joel, who almost waddled, and there, there still, were those damn cufflinks he wouldn’t take off.
'Hello, honey.' The bar stool farted when he sat on it. She tried to tell herself it would have happened to anyone. 'I've been getting your husband on to an aeroplane.'
'Do you really have to wear those cufflinks?'
But Joel was ordering a drink. 'He nearly missed the damn plane.'
'If you really want to wear cufflinks why don't you come with me and I'll buy you some.'
'I don't know why in the hell he wants to go down there, we could have done it on the phone. Hey... get your hands off my cufflinks. What are you doing?'
'I'm taking your damn cufflinks off.' Joel sat at the bar with his cuffs flapping at the bottom of his coat sleeves. 'What in the hell do I do now?'
'Pull your sleeves up,' she said and started giggling. 'Did you have a nice day at the office?'
'Hell, honey, that isn't funny.'
Bettina ordered another Sunrise and Joel removed his suit coat, put it fussily over the next bar stool, rolled his shirt sleeves up, and put his coat back on. He sulked for a while and Bettina looked around. In the end he started talking to stop her looking around.
'He's not in a very healthy state of mind?'
'Who, honey?'
'Your husband.'
'Ah,' Bettina waved a ringed hand, 'he's just growing up.'
She liked Harry when she was away from him. He towered over everyone else she knew.
Joel started laughing incredulously, 'Oh that's good, honey, that's really good. Just growing up. He tells me in the car that he is going to be Good. Is that
'It's not your style, darling.'
'What isn't?'
'Being crazy isn't your style.'
'What in the goddamn hell do you mean by that?'
His chin was starting to wobble so she changed the subject. 'Who did you take to lunch?'
'I'm taking George Lewis out to lunch next week. I've got a table booked at La Belle Epoque.'
