Bliss

She looked at him with alarm. 'Maybe you should see a psychologist.'

But he did not appear to hear her. He began speaking very quickly, with none of the grace notes, none of the velvety drawl that he would bring to a story; he rushed through the events of his death and described to her, exactly, who had stood where on the lawn, who had carried his body, what the doctor had worn, the details of everything that had happened while he was dead.

'It was a warning,' he said finally. 'I saw Heaven and Hell. There is a Heaven. There is a Hell.'

'It was lack of oxygen,' she insisted, but he shook his head with uncharacteristic stubbornness.

'I'll get him fired,' she said firmly.

'Who?'

'The doctor. He's a clumsy fool. No wonder you're frightened.'

'It's nothing to do with the doctor.'

'He's got sausage fingers.'

'I know.'

'He drops things.'

'I know.'

She moved her chair closer to the bed and patted his hand.

'You won't go to Hell, Harry. You're too nice to go to Hell.

If anyone’s going to Hell it'll be me.'

And Harry, not for the first time, failed to recognize the resentment in her voice.

When he was about to die in a foreign country, years later, Harry's son would tell his captors that he had been born in an electrical storm. Like so many of the things he had said throughout his short life, the story was not quite true.

David Joy remembered the night his father took him to see lightning. It was his first memory.

He could still remember the stale musty smell of the rain-coat wrapped around his tiny body. It was hard and nasty and would always make him associate mildew with terror. His father held him and laughed. His great moustache had tickled his face.

How the earth had shaken! What monstrous shapes the lightning showed.

'Lightning.'

Could he speak? Did he answer? There was only the memory of mildew, tobacco, and rain needles on his uncovered head.

His father always maintained that he had not cried, that he had pointed with pleasure and gurgled with delight, but that was not quite true either, not at all true, but reflected what Harry would have wanted of his son.

No, he had not gurgled, he had stared with big dark eyes full of terror.

His mother said he screamed, yet he did not scream until, in the middle of a rolling thunder clap, a monster came rushing through the night and seized him from the precarious safety of his father's arms. And then he screamed. Held tightly in the foreign arms he was transported through the storm.

It was only when they entered the house that he saw the monster was his mother, her face white, her eyes wide with fear and anger. With what urgency she kissed him, with what fierceness she hugged him. He knew something terrible had happened. He smelt sheets drying by the fire, warm and sweet, and his father, standing, smiling, saying: '1 was only showing him the lightning.'

And his mother, wrapping him in a milk-soft towel: 'Oh you fool, you fool'

When he was older he would go and stand in the lightning by himself. They told him he was like his father. He was pleased. He did not confess that the lightning had always filled him with fear. He stood in raincoats of different colours, with different smells, and forced himself to confront the most violent storms of the monsoon. Seven seconds between thunder clap and lightning meant the lightning was one mile distant. He stood and counted, his wet lips moving. He stood rigid and confronted Mount Sugar Loaf while the lightning hit its peak and danced like a devil around its dark dead shape. He stood while it marched closer, surrounded by mildew, alone in the storm.

But later, in the warm house, he would be told he was like his father and he would look with masculine superiority at his mother who drew the curtains to cut out the storm.

David grew tall and thin and they said he was like his father. They did not notice the dark eyes that trembled with dreams, the smooth olive skin of his mother. It was better to be like his father, that was what they all wanted. He went to his father's office and sometimes, if there was an empty desk, sat in a big chair and wrote advertisements like his father did. Did they never notice that he was in no way like his father, that he did not make friends easily and was full of secrets?

At school he told lies. They found him out. He told them that he had been to New York. He stood up in the classroom and described it as his mother had described it to him. He mentioned bars where people drank a wonderful green drink (his own invention) from tall thin glasses he had quietly stolen from Bettina's Vogue. Yet when Lucy came home and told his mother, while he stood and listened, rigid with panic, bright with shame, no one had reproached him seriously.

'Ah,' Bettina said, cutting shortbreads, 'he is like his father, always telling stories.'

Yet the dreams that shone most brightly in his imagination were often gathered from his mother who, without really meaning to, taught him about the meanness, the insignificance of the town he lived in, the smallness of his life and thus, in her own perverse way, showed him the beauty of the world or, at least, the beauty of Other Places.

He read adventure books and bought an atlas with money stolen from his father's bedside table.

When Harry told him Vance Joy's story of the Beggar-King he heard the story with his mother's ears.

'There was a king,' Harry said, 'a long time ago in a country full of tall mountains. The winter was full of ice and the summers were so hot that children and old people died. There were many beggars in the country,' Harry said, repeating, thirty years later, the exact words of the story, 'and the king felt sorry for them. At night he could not sleep. He lay awake thinking of the beggars. Like all kings,' Harry said, forever ignoring the political implications of what he said, 'it did not occur to him to give away his wealth, but rather he wished to punish himself for being rich.' (Don't you remember, Harry, the lovely ice-thin malice in your father's voice, or were you too young to hear it?)

'One day he decided to dress as a beggar and go out amongst the people.'

At this stage of the story it was necessary to pull a coat or a woollen sweater around the head, to cover the face, to wander dolefully around the room. (But don't you remember how your father did it, how he managed to get that unbeggarly strut into his walk so that beneath that old brown sweater you knew there was a king pretending to be a beggar?)

'He had a dark cloak made and wandered the streets. He didn't fool anyone. They all knew he was the king, even the little children knew it was the king. When he came down the street in his dark robe calling piteously for alms they rushed from their houses and gave him gold.

'Each day the king returned to his palace laden with wealth. When he counted his gold and saw how much one beggar could make in a day, he became very angry. He felt that the beggars had tricked him and so he made a law forbidding them: anyone found begging would be put to death, by the sword.

'All that winter,' Harry said in his father's doleful voice, 'the beggars slowly starved to death and when the spring came there were no more beggars to be seen.'

And that was the story, in Harry's hands a poor directionless thing, left to bump around by itself and mean what you wanted it to, although it was not without effect and young David Joy sat silently before its sword-sharp edges.

'But why?'

Harry felt uncomfortable before such questions. 'It's just a story.'

'I will be rich,' his son said, 'and have jewels.'

Can we blame this story for David’s avarice? Hardly. He was already stealing from his father's bedside table when he was six (To young, you say? Not a bit of it.) and one should not think him lacking in sympathy for the beggars, quite the opposite: he brimmed full of emotion and saw that sharp-edged sword come down on the pitiful skin of their blue, cold necks.

As he became older, people came to think of him as cold, yet he was so full of emotions he could not speak. He dared not reveal his destiny.