Bliss

But Nurse was grinning and shifting around inside his trousers. He thrust the brown paper parcel into Harry's lap. 'There,' he said, 'open it.'

The parcel contained one pair of shoes, one silk shirt, toothpaste, aftershave and hair oil.

'Californian Poppy,' Nurse said holding the bottle of hair oil with a tenderness that Harry Joy had once displayed towards bottles of French wine.

Harry's trousers were smudged with his attempts to use soap on them, but his shirt was magnificent, silk without blemish. His shoes shone. His teeth sparkled. And yet she had chosen that the interview should be across the desk and not in the comfortable armchairs that surrounded the flower-burdened coffee table. She was still in mourning for the imposter. She rocked back and forth in her squeaking chair while fish swam in the aquarium behind her head and she played churches and steeples with her short-fingered hands.

He sat on the edge of his chair and smiled and nodded, raised his eyebrows, inclined his head politely and, when his nose ran, had a pressed handkerchief to wipe it with.

'You will never be the real Mr Joy,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I know that's unfair, but it's true.'

There was a silence. Harry gave her a sly grin.

'There is something, don't you think, about successful men that is immensely attractive, a certain lack of desperation.'

He pushed his shoulders back and let his arm hang loosely.

'I have been reading my back issues of Financial Review, and look, here he is.' She pushed a tom piece of newspaper across the desk (there was no chance for fingers to touch) and withdrew to be closer to her fish. 'Not a good likeness though. Some people take good photographs,' she said. 'My late husband never had a good photograph taken. I regret it now. I always meant to commission a portrait. If you're trying to butter me up with that silly grin you might as well forget it. I can't afford to let you out.'

He rubbed his face, as if slapped.

'And don't try running away.' She took off her pink spec-tacles and cleaned the lenses with a yellow cloth. 'If you try, Jim and Jimmy will bring you back.'

'The boys in white,' he joked weakly.

'Sometimes they wear white, sometimes they wear grey,' she said contrarily. 'Sometimes they wear shorts and white socks and sometimes, should you try in the ·middle of the night, I must warn you, they wear nothing at all. Mr Duval,' she sighed, and while Harry Joy was still flinching from this insult, repeated it: 'Mr Duval, I try not to have favourites. I try not to have personal dislikes, but I'm afraid I do not take to you.'

'I'm sorry.' Surely many romances grew from such unpromising beginnings.

'It is not your fault. You have an unfortunate manner and you are, of course, sick, so it would not have occurred to you how inconsiderate your request is.'

'I'm sorry.' He would begin again, on the right foot this time.

'You don't have to apologize all the time. That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. If you apologized less you might listen more. Then you would ask me why your request was inconsiderate and then I would have told you.'

'Please tell me.'

'I'm not sure that I want to any more.'

'Please, Mrs Dalton.' He summoned up all his reserves of confidence. He had once been told he looked like the God Krishna.

'The nature of growth industries,' she sighed, 'is often cyc-lical. There is under-supply and then, next thing you know, everyone is on the band waggon and there is over-supply. So from a shortage of beds we go to a surplus of beds and people like myself, pioneers in the business, are the first to suffer.'

'But in time,' Harry said (here was his chance to establish himself as a man of intelligence), 'it is bound to pick up.'

'Ah, in time!' she said bitterly. 'In time. But will I still be in business 'in time'? Those nasty little worms in Social Welfare expel my patients or put their clients into the cheapest place they can find. And believe me, there are some very cheap beds being offered, not the luxury we have here. Even the cancer patients don't make up the shortfall.'

'Cancer patients? Here?' he asked. She was softening. He raised his eyebrows with great interest. Ah, he told himself, you greasy genius!

'They become quite upset poor dears. I advis~ you, by the way, to stay well away from L Block. They can become very violent while they've still got their strength, although as anyone knows, it's their own fault.'

'Sorry. I don't follow you.'

'Their fault,' she said impatiently, her voice rising in pitch, 'their own fault. Anyone who reads the papers knows what causes it.'

'Ah, cigarettes.'

'Cigarettes!' She swung in her chair and for a moment he thought she was about to leave the room. She put her thin arms along the arms of the chair and held them tight. 'Cigarettes.' Her eyes swam behind her glasses like gold fish. 'Alice, you are being intolerant,' she said. She bestowed upon him a smile which was obviously intended as a gift of some munificence. 'I thought the press had covered it quite adequately,' she said with buttered patience. 'But it is generally recognized by more advanced members of the profession that cancer is caused by emotional repressions. Now if they would use us as a therapeutic, preventative force...'

Liar! Fart-face!

It was not the lie that did it. It was the weeks, the months of slights, insults as fine as razor cuts across his undefended ego. But it was at this moment, at this particular lie, that anger came to him.

He had known the quiet superiority of being a Good Bloke. But beside this there was a nagging doubt that something was missing from him, that he suffered an impotence. For instance, when he saw a chair raised above a head in a movie he felt both excitement and resentment that this passion was denied him. When Bettina became angry he felt a jealousy. When she threw a plate, he envied her.

When he should have become angry, he got hives instead.

And now, like a dream in which one can fly, he was angry.

A wall of wax had gone, a blockage removed, and the feeling of anger flooded through him and it was better than it had been described, was more like he knew it must be. It was pleasant. It was a gift, a drug as wonderful in its way as sexual pleasure. It made you feel bigger, stronger, taller, invincible.

But still he hid it, holding it like a hot chestnut in a cupped hand.

'Saccharine causes cancer,' he said. He tugged at his moustache.

'Are you a Communist, Mr Duval?'

'No.' He ran his hands through his California Poppy hair.

'That sounds very like a Communist to me. The Americans are a very fine race of people, Mr Duval, but they have filled their government agencies with Communists and liberals and they will not get rid of them.'

The muscles around his neck were knotted into hard lumps and his eyes were red. Tendons stood out on his neck like lumps of straining rope.

'These people hate business,' the liar was saying. 'They are jealous of people with power, successful men who have made a name for themselves.'

He stared at her, his eyes bulging.

'Perhaps I talk too much,' she sighed, trying to consider her complicated character with some objectivity.

Harry Joy clasped and unclasped his hands.

He would have liked to strangle her with his bare hands. He would have liked to break her neck and jump on her head till her brains oozed out her earholes. He could have broken up her desk with an axe and eaten her vases for breakfast.

With a purr of pleasure, he opened his hands and let her escape.

He walked down the steps in a daze, surprised to find sunlight and myna birds scavenging behind the kitchen. He was so angry, he wanted to sing.

Jim and Jimmy were talking to a female patient. The female patient was about twenty-seven and dressed in baggy white pants and a yellow T shirt. She had a wide straw hat with a scarf around its brim, but not even' that could hide the luminosity of her big dark eyes.