pencil when Harry's total reserves of charm, good fellowness and cunning began to work on him and he saw (when it was expressed like that – why didn't they say so before?) the reason for the poster being like it was.
Bettina, watching this performance, felt ambivalent. She gave him credit for the skill but felt it was a shallow nasty sort of skill and did not really admire him for it. It was a skill like being born beautiful is a skill, in other words not a skill at all. She had never seen him at work before and so could not assess the enormous impact Hell had made on his technique. Gone was that dozy lethargic Harry Joy, the old tell-us-what-you-want-and-I'll-get-it-for-you pragmatist. In his place was a man who felt he must not fail, a cunning, slightly angry personality who hid his aggression behind the natural blanket of his charm.
Bettina resented all the years he had squashed her and resented the fact that he was now to share her triumph. Yet resentment was nothing new to her and this resentment was of a low-enough order for her to accept, just as she accepted exhaust fumes in the air. She was happy. She sat alone and warmed herself with her Scotch and her triumph.
'Will we wait for Joel?'
David was asking her, in that particularly petulant manner that he adopted for all matters relating to Joel.
'No,' she said, 'start.'
It was Joel who had stood on ladders and carried boxes of tiles up three flights of stairs, who had worked on a high plank until 3 a.m. Who else would have done that for her? Who else, if it came to that, cared about her?
Honey Barbara sat next to Harry. Bettina watched them and knew their legs were touching under the table. She felt too tense to taste the soup. Anybody could see that they were touching under the table and his stupid moony face was pathetic. Obviously everybody else was embarrassed too. Why else would they talk about food? Why else would anybody
The woman was a looney.
She was explaiiling that she'd walked 'six miles' to get spinach from someone who didn't spray it, for Christ's sake.
Bettina was pleased to see that Lucy was taking the piss out of her with some subtlety.
'And demineralized water,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara. 'You mean distilled water, with nothing in it but water.'
'Yes.'
'You'll still get cancer,' Lucy grinned, 'just like the rest of us.'
'Shut up,' Bettina said. Once a year she had a complete check for cancer. Her appointment was automatic. She was advised by mail on the week before and the rest of the year she did not think about it.
There was a silence. Everybody thought about cancer.
'I like your food,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara, 'and it isn't boring.'
'Thank you.'
'It's very good,' said Ken. 'I used to live wiv a lady who used to make soup like this and this is better soup and hers was very good.'
It was a long specch for Ken and possibly it would have been longer except that Joel arrived and a fuss was made to make sure he had his soup and his place opposite Bettina.
He sat down and smiled a calm shiny smile.
'Joel... ' Bettina said.
Joel beamed. Sometimes, Harry thought, he looked like a flesh-coloured frog.
'Are you alright, Joel?'
Or a waxy image of a Buddha. A marzipan Buddha, Harry thought, nodding politely at his junior partner.
'Pretty good,' Joel said to Bettina.
Lucy was looking at him sharply, her dark eyes narrowed, and Ken, as if waiting for something, held his soup spoon in the air. David rested his censorious eyes on Joel's face. Only Honey Barbara, engrossed in the problem of finding a clean soup bowl for him, paid no attention.
'What happened?' David said.
'Nothing Davey.'
Joel began to eat his soup and everyone gave up and began to worry about other things. As was the rule in Palm Avenue it was always easy to get two people to agree on any subject, but never three, so that whatever was mentioned there was always plenty of room for discussion and sometimes enough for a brawl.
Nobody noticed whether Joel and Bettina actually spoke to one another, whether an interrogation took place and Joel divulged, reluctantly, his secret. They were too busy talking about demineralized water and the high incidence of kidney stones caused, Honey Barbara claimed, by the current craze for mineral water and the high levels of sodium caused pri-marily by excess salt, when they heard Bettina scream.
It is possible she had asked Joel nothing. It is even likely that when the others became engrossed in the problems of mineral water he had simply smiled a sad resigned doggy smile and opened his suit coat for Bettina to see. The smile would have had an apologetic edge to it, as if he was sorry for causing the trouble, but something, obviously, had to be done.
For there, protruding at ninety degrees from his blood-stained shirt, was a pearl-handled pocket knife.
'You fool,' Bettina screamed. 'You damned fool.'
'They won't be back again,' Joel said. 'I saw to that.'
Honey Barbara watched with her mouth open.
'Don't worry,' Lucy told her, 'he does it all the time.' But she did not sound casual.
'It's your fault,' Bettina screamed at Harry. 'You're such a rock-'n'-roll star, flouncing about the office, you never think how he feels...'
She would not have an ambulance for him. Ken and David lifted him up and carried him down to the Jaguar. Bettina insisted on taking him to the hospital alone.
Honey Barbara knew they were going to turn on Harry. She sat and waited for it. They took their time. They complimented her some more on the cooking and she waited.
Bettina was a powerful witch.
'Poor Joel,' Lucy said.
'You've got to hand it to him, he works hard,' Ken said.
'What did you do to him?' David asked Harry.
'I didn't do anything,' Harry said.
Honey Barbara watched, but what was happening was worse than she thought. She did not know that Harry had been, all his life, a protected species. He had not been nipped like this before. He had not been held accountable for anything.
Yet this was the way it was going to be at Palm Avenue for as long as they all lived there, not just nipping like goldfish in an-overcrowded tank, although that would be common enough, but arguing, shouting, laughing, vomiting, attacking, counter-attacking, all too loud, too late, too abrasively. There was an irritable peevish excitement as if they were only a lie or a conceit away from some big discovery and once it was lanced or cauterized everything would become clear, but what revealed itself was never any more than the hungover morning of another day.
Tonight Harry would be 'it'. He would not accept any responsibility for Joel and Lucy wasn't going to let him get away with it. She didn't want him to be totally responsible. She just wanted to admit he was partly responsible like they all were. She felt irritated with him, as if he might be a hypocrite, and although it was a strength of her character to allow others to be weak, and flawed without judging them, she now found it difficult to extend this to her own father.
She only wanted him to admit a little responsibility, then she would leave him alone.
But Harry didn't see it like this. All he saw was an attack and he sought to defend himself in the best way he knew, the way he always had.
'I'll tell you a story,' he said and they should have seen that slight lack in confidence, the nervous flick of his eyes around the table as he tested their reaction to the idea.
Barbara and Ken had never heard one of Harry's stories before and they were, each in their own way, astonished by it, not so much by the content of the story, but rather the way it was approached, and they felt
