Bliss

them and behind them. And Harry followed, holding Honey Barbara's embroidered white silk dressing gown around himself.

God knows what they expected.

It certainly wasn't this: Joel flat on the kitchen floor, his pants around his ankles, surgical dressing around his chest, and Bettina on top of him, taking her last pleasure stroke while the kettle on the stove screamed with delight.

*

The winters at that latitude were like European summer. It was in winter that there was plenty: avocados, custard apples, new oranges and lemons, and even papaya, though these last would be pale yellow and sometimes a little sour in the winter, depending on where they stood and how they were fertilized. The vegetable gardens were also full of food: cauliflowers, cabbages, potatoes, peas, beans, spinach, tiny tomatoes, lettuces, artichokes. Winter was an easy time, Honey Barbara thought. The honey would have been spun, and the jars stacked and distributed. In the winter you could spare honey for your tea and you could spoon it on to your bread. The hard time was later, in the wet, and food would be scarce then and it would be pumpkins and cucumbers, papaya, watermelon, marrow, zucchini, wet squashy things which were fine for a while, but depressing later.

The first thing Honey Barbara did at Palm Avenue was begin the vegetable garden. While Ken and Lucy worked on the Cadillac on the front, she took to the back lawn with a spade and turned it into something useful. She added blood and bone by the bagful and started a compost heap. She ordered spoilt hay and mulched with it. She bought seedlings from Garry at the Zen Inn and soon had a garden going. Not everybody admired it.

She cleaned the house, helped with that Cadillac, wrote letters home and cooked the dinner and participated in those terrible nights around the table. To her shame she developed a taste for expensive wine and four weeks after her arrival could be found nosing a claret with some knowledge, not to say style, and holding the glass up to the light to judge the colour, in spite of which early elegance she still found herself becoming as loud and argumentative as the others.

So Honey Barbara was sucked into the madness which took place around the dining room table at Palm Avenue. The conversations often sounded more like the last moments of a wool auction with everyone screaming out their bids for salvation, attention, laughter or forgiveness, and if it was late, which it usually was, Bettina would be found sitting up on the mattress on the floor which she now shared with Joel, either asking them to shut-up or to pay attention, demanding Joel's presence or his absence, or simply screaming good-natured abuse at her daughter.

They always meant to move Bettina's bed (it hadn't been Joel's bed since she moved in). They discussed it. They argued about it. Plans would be made for the morning when it was to be shifted to the landing upstairs. A caravan was to be rented, a new wing built, a storey added, a cellar dug, a hotel room leased. But in the morning it always seemed more important to move the empty bottles and so the mattress remained on the floor and suffered spilt wine and cigarette ash and the irritations of its inhabitants.

Honey Barbara's marvellous eyes were becoming dulled and she found ways to avoid her gaze in the mirror. She made excuses for herself, the most practical one was that Harry was giving her money to send home. What alarmed her silent Victorian heart was that she was starting to enjoy the life. She was enjoying shouting and arguing which would have been considered boorish at home. She used salt in her cooking to make them happy. She complained triumphantly about her hangovers.

'At least they're alive,' she told herself. At least they were not sitting back zonked out on dope asking each other ques-tions about their gardens. She wrote long letters home giving detailed instructions for the care of the bees and demanding to know who was looking after them and requesting a personal account from those concerned. The letters weren't answered.

'I don't believe all this rubbish about cancer.' Bettina jabbed the table with her little finger. 'But I am prepared to discuss it. I am terrified of it but I will talk about it.'

'You just get it,' Lucy said, 'don't worry. You either do or you don't.'

'You don't just get it,' Honey Barbara said.

'It's lies,' Bettina said.

'You said 'discush',' Joel told her. 'You're prepared to discush it.'

'My mother,' Lucy said, 'has swallowed the whole thing. She believes the whole American myth. She believes General Motors are nice people. She thinks Nixon was unlucky. She thinks I.T.T. wouldn't lie. She believes in what she does.' And she gave Bettina a hug and a kiss. 'She is the real article. She is not a cynical manipulator.'

'Get off,' Bettina said, but just the same she was pleased.

'How you live,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara, 'might be fun.'

'You don't know how I live,' said Honey Barbara.

'No one knows,' Harry said proudly.

'We know,' Ken said.

'We guess,' Lucy said. 'We guess how you live.'

'Lived.'

'And will live again. But it is no better than this is. This society is fucked. You'll go down with it too. You won't escape.'

'No!' Bettina stood up. She looked as if she wanted to propose a toast. Her chair fell backwards with a crash. 'You're all so negative.'

'I agree with you,' said Honey Barbara, rising and clinking her glass against Bettina's. Thus alliances were made and, in a similar fashion, broken.

Lucy and Bettina agreed that Honey Barbara was full of shit about food. Lucy and Honey Barbara agreed that everyone would get cancer. Honey Barbara and Bettina then agreed they wouldn't, but as Honey Barbara explained she only meant it for people who were careful with their food and where they lived, whereas Bettina was convinced that the whole cancer theory was a Communist conspiracy.

Joel always agreed with Bettina and when he spoke they all had to be quiet out of respect for Bettina. He was very boring but it was not permitted to shout him down. Bettina, watching him talk, smiled proudly and Harry, normally tolerant to a fault, allowed his moustache to reveal the sarcastic cast of his mouth.

Ken stood up and began to declaim Cavafy's poem. 'Waiting for the Barbarians'. His voice was as rasping as his teeth were jagged and he recited from memory as if his finger was dragging along printed lines, but there was a force in his rusty voice and David, for one, was impressed to hear things he did not understand.

'What are we waiting for all crowded in the forum?' Ken declaimed, struggling to his feet and glaring around the table. He held a finger high.

'The Barbarians are to arrive today,' he answered.

'Within the Senate House why is there such inaction?

The Senators make no laws, what are they sitting there for?

Because the Barbarians arrive today. What laws now should the Senate be making?

When the Barbarians come, they'll make the laws.'

Bettina began to smell petrol in the second verse. She did not realize what it was and she was only aware of being depressed.

She listened glumly and when Ken finished she said: 'No one talked like this before. All this gloom-doom business. It's since you came,' she told Honey Barbara, 'you encourage all this.'

'It's not her,' Lucy said, 'it's Harry. He used to be see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil.'

But Harry did not speak. He sat, as he always did, and listened. He was a sponge in their midst.

'He used to stop us saying bad things,' David said. 'I think he was right.'

'I can smell petrol,' Bettina said.

'I washed,' Lucy said.

'I washed too,' Ken said.

It was the smell of her childhood, the fumes drifting up from the forecourt and in her open window. It was the smell of her father when she embraced him and, she swore, you could still smell the petrol coming from his coffin when he was lowered into his grave.

A dirty rag was found out on the verandah, and the subject of petrol was avoided by David who, eager to contribute some-thing, told the table the entire plot of a spy thriller he had seen at the drive-in the night before.