makes better sunsets.'
'That seems pretty negative to me,' Honey Barbara said. 'You should be trying to change it.' An uncharitable observer may have noted a slight primness in Honey Barbara's mouth.
'It's too late,' Lucy said.
'With herbal tea?' Ken said.
'We are the last,' Lucy said. 'It was always going to end. We are the first people to come to the end of time.'
Ken .rolled the joint. He was the one whose 'Catalogue of good things about the end of the world,' an ever- expanding loose-leafed opus, had set Lucy off on her Apocalyptic Holiday.
'Our Cadillac will do ten miles to the gallon,' Lucy said. 'Dig it.'
'How do you sleep at nights?' Honey Barbara said, in no way cut by Ken's jibes about changing the world with herbal tea.
'We fuck,' Lucy grinned, 'until we can't do it any more.'
And they all laughed and Honey Barbara, in spite of her resolution not to, shared their dope with them.
'Well,' Ken said, 'why are you crazy? Why do you treat food like shit?'
He was not being unkind but he had tapped a serious flaw in Honey Barbara's character: she could not joke about food. She divided the world into people who ate shit and people who ate good food.
'This food is shit,' she said, 'and if I'm going to live here, Harry and I are going to eat good food.'
'What do you think is Good?' Lucy said, leaning over her folded arms.
'If you don't know, how can I tell you?'
'No salt? No sugar? No meat? No white flour? That sort of thing?'
'Fucking right,' Honey Barbara said, standing up and transferring her attention to the refrigerator.
'Sounds boring to me,' Lucy said. (Ken started bundling up his dope.)
Honey Barbara emptied the fridge in five quick throws, saving only the chilled alarm clock from destruction.
'Come back at dinner time, smart arse,' she said to Lucy, 'and we'll see how bored you are.'
Lucy grabbed a can of Coke from the garbage can. 'I'll be there,' she said.
She made spinach soup with spinach and potatoes and onions and spiced it with a little nutmeg. She baked potatoes in their jackets, pumpkin, onion, and stuffed mushrooms. She braised the cabbage with onion and apple and garlic and (eager not to lose her first engagement) threw in a little red wine she found in the cupboard. When challenged about the presence of wine later, she denied it all.
She steamed the sugar peas and planned to serve them in a big bowl.
I'll give you boring.
She made her famous apple and rhubarb crumble and sweetened it with the Rolls Royce of honeys. She said 'boring' out loud, like an incantation. She cooked with love and venom in almost equal quantities, the sweetness of one managing to offset the bitterness of the other.
She walked twenty-four miles and came home and baked a loaf of heavy dark bread. She cooked it in a flower pot she stole from the garden, muttering to herself while an electric drill penetrated the steel shell of the Cadillac Eldorado in the front garden.
At half-past seven she showered and washed her hair and applied a dab of Sandalwood Oil.
Everyone had assembled in the dining room except for Joel who had gone out on some errand of his own. Ken and Lucy had washed their hands in tribute to her. They had rubbed them raw with industrial soap and taken out their Swiss Army knives and cleaned under their split nails with the smaller blade. Ken shaved his battered face and attempted to penetrate his tangled hair with a comb. He put on a white shirt and even stole one of Harry's ties, which he then had to be taught how to do up. Lucy wore a clean white boiler suit. David surprised everyone by wearing an exotic shirt and Gucci sandshoes. He poured the wine, but not before he had given his father the cork to formally approve.
Not since the family lunch (which had ended less enjoyably than it had begun – the duck caught fire and David put it out with a fire extinguisher) had they spread a cloth on the table and even Bettina, her shoes kicked off her sweating feet, a strong Scotch in her hand, seemed relaxed and happy.
David engaged his father in an earnest whispered conver-sation on the subject of Argentinian cowboys, something he was exceedingly well versed on, but the details of which, it appeared, he had no wish to share with anyone but Harry.
'Tell us all,' Lucy said from the other side of the room.
But David ignored her and Harry, in any case, found it hard to listen. He was too concerned that everyone should like Honey Barbara, who throughout all this strode back and forth, her face serious, her back straight, her wet hair flat on her head, setting odd things to right on the table and in the kitchen refusing all offers of help, as if, Lucy whispered to Ken, they might contaminate the purity of what would be offered.
There were marigolds in little jars on the table, and a small glass bowl of water with frangipanis floating in it. The wholemeal bread sat on a big piece of tallow-wood off-cut she had stolen from a building site, and around the table, in egg cups, she had placed, as a peace offering, sea salt.
Bettina was not displeased to see Honey Barbara in the kitchen. She suggested, in a quiet moment when the girl was absent, that Harry turn bisexual and get a chauffeur as well. The joke did not go down well. She drank a solitary toast to the death of humour. She did not like the moony way Harry followed Honey Barbara with his eyes, but she sat herself where she would not have to look at him.
She liked the way the table had been set. It had, in a naive way, style.
The Scotch was Bettina's first drink of the day and she let it evaporate somewhere at the back of her throat. She felt good. She had felt good all day, a tight, hard, relentless sort of good feeling, like a well-tuned guitar string. The feeling started after she had delivered Harry to their new offices: cheap warehouse space down by the river which she and Joel had personally painted in long evenings on high ladders until her back had ached and poor Joel, sweating away beside her, had gone to work in the mornings with his hair speckled pink. She had bought the desks from army disposals for eight dollars each and they had sanded and oiled each one. They laid black Pirelli tiles on the floor and painted the walls pink and the window frames Indian Red. The lights were second-hand creamy spheres which hung at regular intervals and even the couches were from a junk shop, re-covered with remnant fabric in an opulent cream.
It was her first business decision. She had sub-let the old premises with all their expensive old fittings and furniture for a considerable profit. The profit from the old lease would pay all the rent for this one.
And into this stylish, elegant space she introduced Harry and sat him at his swivel chair behind his army disposal desk. He complained when oil from the desk spotted his suit, but by three o'clock that afternoon he had sold his first campaign and he had something about him, a vitality, an edge, an aggressiveness she had never seen in him before.
Imagine this: a colour poster thirty inches long and eight inches deep. A photograph of a match, very large, occupies almost the entire length of the poster. Beneath it, in Franklin Gothic type, these words:
All this for stores in country areas, to stick on walls for flies to shit on, for mutants to stare at. But look at it there, lying against the pink wall with its cell overlay: a thing of great beauty destined to take its place in the One Show in New York with these credits:
Copywriter: Bettina Joy
Art Director: Bettina Joy
Typographer: Bettina Joy
Agency: Day, Kerlewis and Joy
Client: Mobil.
All the client had asked for was something cheap and nasty to shut up the country dealers who were complaining about a lack of promotional support. He had not asked for this pristine piece of art lying against the pink wall. It would cost five times as much to print, and there was no reason to spend the extra money, except that the damn poster looked so good.
It was not an easy sale for Harry Joy. The client had already rejected the poster twice and here he was, being presented with it a third time, and he was already shifting in his seat and unfolding his arms and tapping his
