So the matter of petrol, the Cadillac, Lucy's refusal to work, her wasted education, were saved for another night when it would take a predictable form, something like this:
'You are going backwards,' Bettina would tell Lucy. 'That's why we gave you an education, Lucy.' She looked disapprovingly at Ken. 'So you would not get involved with stinking petrol.'
'You never told me,' Lucy grinned.
'Please-get a job,' Bettina said.
'I don't want to be a boss.'
'Be a worker.'
'I don't want to be a slave.'
And Lucy could paint a very convincing picture of the cruelties and iniquities of Hell. Harry listened to her describe the economic system, the blindness of profit seekers and so on.
'You are spoilt children.'
'We are waiting for the Barbarians.'
'You should learn how to feed yourself and protect yourself,' Honey Barbara said sternly.
'No one will survive,' Ken said, filling Harry's glass with Cabernet Sauvignon.
'I will survive,' said Honey Barbara. 'And Harry will survive. The rest of you are fucked.'
But in the morning her eyes in the mirror were small and grey, and there were black marks like tiny freckles around her eyes: blood vessels she had burst vomiting.
As the weeks went on, the structural flaws in their relationship became apparent to Honey Barbara. It was, she thought, like being in a hut with a leaking rusty roof: you keep living in it, you try to ignore it, you mark the leaking parts with chalk and promise yourself you'll make temporary repairs with bituminous paint, but then, when it's dry, you forget about it. In the wet you live amongst plinking buckets but never enough of them, and you kick them over anyway, and everything becomes damp, and mould and mildew grow everywhere, even in your bed, until, in the end, it all becomes too much and you find your ladder and, just as the sunlight strikes the roof and the steam starts rising from it, you rip the fucker to pieces and the rusty iron disintegrates as easily as a dead leaf in your hand. Underneath it you find fat cockroaches, wooden battens white with rot,·leaves, mulch, decay, mice, a tree- snake with a yellow belly and some peculiar ice blue fungi growing from the rotten wood: a whole eco-system built on lethargy and failure.
In short, she knew she should have left him but she couldn't. She was doing what she had done years before with Albert (Peugeot Albert, American Albert), finding herself in the mid-dle of a situation she disapproved of, living with a man who was fucked, but who she stayed with anyway, like some novice board rider who tries to stay with a bad wave to its painful end.
She sought refuge in the garden and in the bedroom where she painted the frames of the three windows three different colours: blue, red, purple. (Bettina sucked in her breath but said nothing.) She began a mural above the bed but didn't finish it. It showed a part of a small hut with blue, red and purple window frames, and an old Peugeot, rust brown, which she intended to cover with creeper and long grass. On the verandah outside the red window she installed a hammock and sometimes, when Harry was more drunk or aggressive than usual; she would sleep out there. She had five yards of muslin for a mosquito net: she wrapped them around the hammock and lay there until the morning when he would come with red-eyed remorse and entice her back to bed and they would make peace and fuck until their eyes were wide and their mouths full of pillow.
With Bettina and Joel, Harry had formed a gang. Nightly they reported successes. They walked in the door clinking bottles and shouting. They had won this Account or that Account. They had sold a campaign. She could not be happy for them, although she had tried.
There was no joy in their triumphs, only anger, revenge, nose-thumbing, name-calling, and although Bettina provided the emotional tone, Harry followed it willingly and even lent to this unpleasant cocktail a dominant flavour of fear. She saw him encouraging these negative things in himself, as if by letting them expand and take over he would be better assured of success.
It was Honey Barbara who had instructed him in the use-fulness of money, but now, a month later, when she questioned its value as a measure of worth, she was irritated to see what his moustache did not quite hide – his you're-only-saying-that-because-you-haven't-got any smile.
She tried to make the bedroom a peaceful place. She made cushions and bought candles and tried to forget it was Harry's money. She lit incense and put wind chimes out on the verandah where she did her Tai Chi exercises every morning and night.
But still they argued. It seemed there was nothing that could be done to prevent the discord. No meditation, exercise, massage, or even prayer. Nastiness would creep in between them and push them apart. He defended fear and anger as necessary emotions and mocked her when she said there must be another way.
'How?'
'With love.'
He laughed.
'It doesn't work like that.' He lay against the pillows with a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle in the other. He was not the same person she had met in the Hilton. 'You've got to be angry,' he said. 'It gives you strength. You commit yourself to win. Because if you don't get them, they get you. See?' He jabbed his finger. 'You understand?'
'Christ,' she said despairingly, 'you know it's shit.'
'Of course I know it's shit.'
She compressed her lips.
'Don't you look so superior,' he said.
She didn't answer.
'You drink my wine. You drive the Jag.'
'I'd rather not.'
He put his wine glass and bottle down and leaned towards her in such a way that she thought he was going to kiss her and her lips were already moving towards his when she felt the wine glass wrenched from her hand. He threw it out the window and she heard it shatter.
She was too tired to be angry. She hugged herself and felt cold.
He leaned back on the pillow. 'If you don't want it, don't drink it.'
After a moment or two he said: 'Do you know how much you cost me?'
'A lot of money.'
'You cost me a fucking fortune,' he said, 'so don't say you don't love me.'
She wasn't even astonished. 'You're getting poisoned with this shit you're doing Harry. You can't fuck around with it. You're catching it. You're becoming one of them.'
She went and sat beside him. He stroked her hair sadly.
'It's what I've got to do,' he said.
A silence.
'Come home with me,' she said.
He stopped stroking her hair. More silence.
'It's safe there,' she said softly. 'We'll be fine.' She touched the lambswool shoulder with the ends of her fingers.
'It doesn't sound safe to me.'
Another silence (because he had never said this before and he was becoming angry and she felt betrayed).
'It is very beautiful,' she said gently. 'There is no shit at all.'
'But not safe.'
How could he sound triumphant?
'Yes, safe.'
'But you're the one who's been to jail. I haven't been to jail. I haven't spent half my life worried about the police. They don't come here harassing us. My kids didn't grow up setting their alarm clocks for four in the morning.'
'Maybe they should learn.'
And it was, of course, with retorts like this, that she allowed herself to be drawn into it. He had become like
