Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It’s nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that . . . Swing low in your weep ship, with your sob probes and your tear scans, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, ‘What is it?’ And then men say, ‘Nothing. No it isn’t anything really.’

Just sad dreams.

Richard Royce was crying in his sleep. The woman beside him, his wife, Gina, woke and turned. She came up on him from behind and laid hands on his shaking shoulders. There was a professionalism in her blinks and frowns and whispers: like the person at the poolside, master of mouth-to-mouth; like the figure surging in on the blood-spattered zebra, a striding Christ of first aid.

‘What is it?’ said Gina.

Richard raised a bent arm to his brow. The sniff he gave was complicated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls in his lungs.

‘Nothing. It isn’t anything. Just sad dreams.’ Or something like that.

 

Richard awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed. Richard felt tired, and not just underslept. Local tiredness was up there above him – the kind of tiredness that sleep might lighten; but there was something else up there over and above it, like a concentration of gravity. That higher tiredness was not so local. It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. No nap or cuppa would ever lighten it. Richard couldn’t remember crying in the night. He lay there now, awake, dry-eyed. He was in a terrible state – that of consciousness. Some while ago in his life he had lost the ability to choose what to think about. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to find some peace. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to get a little rest. He was forty tomorrow, and reviewed books.

In the small square kitchen, which stoically and uncritically awaited him (they had both seen better days), Richard engaged the electric kettle; then he went next door and looked in on the boys. These dawn visits to their room had been known to comfort him after nights such as the one he had just experienced, with all its unwelcome information. His twin sons in their twin beds. Marco and Marius were not identical twins. And they weren’t fraternal twins either, Richard often said, in the sense that they showed little brotherly feeling. But that’s all they were, brothers, born at the same time. It was possible, theoretically, that these boys had different fathers. They didn’t look alike, and were unusually dissimilar in all their attributes and proclivities. They didn’t even have the same birthday: a sanguinary summer midnight had interposed itself between the two boys and their (again) very different parturitional styles: Marius, the elder, subjecting the delivery room to a systematic and intelligent stare, its negative judgement suspended by decency and disgust; while Marco just clucked and sighed to himself contentedly, as if after a successful journey through freak weather. Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug. Richard contemplated the two boys, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in sleep, and reef-knotted to their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm’s way, perennially humid with innocuous libido–there are neutral eagles out on the window-sill, waiting, offering protection or threat.

Sometimes Richard did think and feel like an artist. He was an artist when he saw fire, even a match head (he was in his study now, lighting his first cigarette): an instinct in him acknowledged its elemental status. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. The difficulty began when he sat down to write. The difficulty, really, began even earlier.

Richard looked at his watch and thought: I can’t call him yet. Or rather: Can’t call him yet. For writers’ thoughts now waive the initial personal pronoun, in deference to Joyce. He’ll still be in bed, not like the boys and their abandonment, but lying there personably, and smugly sleeping. For him, either there would be no information, or the information, such as it was, would be good.

For an hour (this was his new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled. Richard Royce wasn’t much of a hero. Yet there was something heroic about this early hour of flinching, flickering labour, the pencil-sharpener, the Tippex, the vines outside the open window sallowing not with autumn but with nicotine. In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (a terrible red Escort), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted and, eventually, Unconceived.

 

At eleven o’clock Richard Royce dialled the number. He felt the hastening of excitement when Gwyn Barry himself picked up the telephone.

‘Hello?’

Richard exhaled and said slowly, ‘You fucking old wreck.’

Gwyn paused.

‘It’s all over,’ said Richard. ‘You’re dead.’

Then the elements came together in Gwyn’s laugh, which was gradual and indulgent and even quite genuine. ‘Richard,’ he said.

‘Don’t laugh. You might break your neck. Forty today. Jesus.’

‘Listen,’ said Gwyn, ‘are you coming to this thing?’

‘I am but I don’t think you’d better. Sit tight, by the fire. With a blanket over your lap. And an old-boy pill with your hot drink.’

‘Yes, all right. Enough now. Are you coming to this thing?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so. Why don’t I come to you around twelve-thirty and we’ll get a cab.’

‘Twelve-thirty. Good.’

‘Christ,’ said Richard. ‘You fucking old wreck.’

Richard wept briefly and then paid a long and consternated visit to the bathroom mirror. His mind was his own and he accepted full responsibility for it. But his body. The rest of the morning he spent backing his way into the first sentence of a 2,000-word piece about the new and expanded edition of the Nabokov-Wilson Letters. Like the twins, Richard and Gwyn Barry were born only a day apart in time. Richard would be forty tomorrow. The information would not be carried by The Times: The Times, the newspaper of record.

 

Just past noon Richard rang the bell on Holland Park Avenue and preened himself – it felt more like damage control – for the security camera, which jerked round affrontedly at him in its compact gantry above the door. He also strove to prepare himself mentally. The state he sought was one of disparity-readiness. He never found it. Gwyn’s set-up always flattened him. He was like the chinless cadet in the atomic-sub movie, small-talking with one of the guys as he untwirled the lock (routine check) on the torpedo bay – and was then floored by a frothing cock of seawater. Deep down out there, with many atmospheres. All that Gwyn had.

To take a heftily looming instance, the house itself. Its mass and scope, its reach and sweep, he knew well, because for a year he had gone to school in an identical building across the street and eight or nine doors up. The school, a cosmopolitan crammer, which was dead now, like Richard’s father, who had struggled and scrimped to send him to it, had accommodated a staff of thirty and over 200 pupils; five days a week he had swirled and slumped among them, an ecology of oestrogen and testosterone, Swedes and Turks, bum-fluff, flares, fights, fancyings, first loves. That tiered rotating world was vanished. But now in a place of the same measurements, the same volume, lived Gwyn and Demeter Barry. Oh yeah. And the help . . . Richard moved his head around as if to relieve neck pain. The camera continued to stare at him incredulously. He tried to stare back at it. Richard wasn’t guilty of covetousness, funnily enough. In the shops he seldom saw anything that looked much fun to buy. He didn’t want all that stuff. But he didn’t want Gwyn to have it either.

The door opened, and Richard was shown upstairs, not of course by Demeter (who at this hour would be unguessably elsewhere in the great house), nor by a maid (though there were maids, called things like Ming and Atrocia, shipped here in crates from São Paulo, from Vientiane), nor by any representative of the home-improvement community (and they were always about: the knighted architect, the overalled stiff with a mouth full of nails): Richard was shown up the stairs by a new order of auxiliary, an American coed or sophomore or grad student, whose straightness of hair, whose strictness of mouth, whose brown-eyed and black-browed intelligence was saying that whatever else Gwyn might be he was now an operation, all fax and Xerox and preselect. In the hall Richard saw beneath the square mirror a shelf so infested with cardboard or even plywood invitations . . .

 

Gwyn Barry was nearing the climax of a combined interview and photo session. Richard entered the room and crossed it in an uneven diagonal with one hand effacingly raised, and sat on a stool, and picked up a magazine. The room – Gwyn’s study – was very bad. While in this room it was Richard’s usual policy to stare like a hypnotist into Gwyn’s repulsively Messianic green eyes, for fear of what he might otherwise confront. He didn’t really mind the furniture, the remoteness of the ceiling, the good proportion of the three front windows. What he didn’t like seeing were Gwyn’s books: Gwyn’s books, which multiplied or ramified so crazily now. Look on the floor, look on the table, the desk, and what do you find? The lambent horror of Gwyn in Spanish (3eo edicione) or an American book-club or supermarket paperback, or something in Hebrew or Mandarin or cuneiform or pictogram that looked innocent enough but had no reason to be there if it wasn’t one of Gwyn’s. And then Gallimard and Mondadori and Livro Aberto and Brombergs and Zsolnay and Magveto Konyvkiado. In the past Richard had had several opportunities to snoop around in Gwyn’s study, on Gwyn’s desk. These opportunities he had readily embraced. Are snoopers in search of pain? Probably. TriStar’s terms are, we feel, more than generous. Quite a rarity for a living author to have any, let alone several, works in the Livres de Poche edition. The judges were unanimous. Please find enc. a photograph of the inside of my cunt. I am beginning to be translating your. Her Royal Highness. Richard stopped flipping through the magazine on his lap (it had an interview with Gwyn Barry in it), and stood, and surveyed the bookshelves. They were fiercely alphabetized. Richard’s library wasn’t alphabetized. He never had the leisure to alphabetize it. He was always far too busy looking for books he couldn’t find. He had books heaped under tables, under beds. Books heaped on window-sills so they closed out the sky.

Interviewer and interviewee were winding up some guff about the deceptive simplicity of the interviewee’s prose style. The photographer was a woman, a girl, black-clad, Nordic, leggy – how she crouched and teetered for her images of Gwyn. Richard looked on. Being photographed, as an activity, was in itself clearly not worth envying. What was enviable, and unbelievable, was that Gwyn should be worth photographing. Then the boy interviewer said: ‘A lot of people think that, because you’re the figure you now are, that the obvious next step is politics. What do you … ? Do you . . . ?’

‘Politics,’ said Gwyn. ‘Gosh. Well I can’t say I’ve given it that much thought. Thus far. Let’s say I wouldn’t want to rule it out. As yet.’

‘You sound like a politician already, Gwyn.’

This was Richard. The remark went down well – because, as is often pointed out, we are all of us in need of a good laugh. Or any kind of laugh at all. The need is evidently desperate. Richard dropped his head and turned again. No, this really wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to say. Ever. But Gwyn’s world was partly public. And Richard’s world was dangerously and increasingly private. And some of us are slaves in our own lives.

‘They’re not incompatible, though, are they?’ said Gwyn. ‘Novelist and politician are both concerned with human potential.’

‘This would be Labour, of course.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course.’

Of course, thought Richard. Yeah. Of course Gwyn was Labour. It was obvious. Obvious not from the ripply cornices twenty feet above their heads, not from the brass lamps or the military plumpness of the leather-topped desk. Obvious because Gwyn was what he was, a writer, in England, at the end of the twentieth century. There was nothing else for such a person to be. Richard was Labour, equally obviously. It often seemed to him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that everyone in England was Labour, except the government. Gwyn was the son of a Welsh schoolteacher (his subject? Gym. He taught gym). Now he was middle class and Labour. Richard was the son of a son of a Home Counties landowner. Now he was middle class and Labour. All writers, all book people, were Labour, which was one of the reasons why they got on so well, why they didn’t keep suing each other and beating each other up. Not like America, where spavined Alabaman must mingle with Virginian nabob, where tormented Lithuanian must extend his hand to the seven-foot Cape Codder with his true-blue eyes. By the way, Richard didn’t mind Gwyn being rich and Labour. Richard didn’t mind Gwyn being rich. It is important to establish the nature of the antipathy (to free it from distractions), before everything gets really awful, all ripped and torn. He made me hit my little one, thought Richard incensedly, for the twentieth time that morning. Rich and Labour: that was OK. Having always been poor was a good preparation for being rich – better than having always been rich. Let the socialist drink champagne. At least he was new to it. Anyway, who cared? Richard had even been a member of the Communist Party, in his twenties, for all the fucking good that did him.

The interviewer had concluded his official business. He was now staring at his tape recorder with what seemed to be incredulous sorrow, but then nodded to himself and got to his feet. Richard understood: he too had spent a lot of time staring at tape recorders. Round about here the photographer’s presence started to gather and expand – her height, her health. She said, ‘Now if I could just have three minutes of your time over on that window seat over there.’

‘I don’t pose,’ said Gwyn. The deal was you snap away while we talked. But no posing.’

‘Three minutes. Oh please. Two minutes. The light’s so perfect there.’

Gwyn acquiesced. He acquiesced in the manner of someone who had similarly acquiesced many times before, perhaps too many: the well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry.

‘Who’s coming, Richard?’ Gwyn called, from beyond, as the photographer’s strap and pouch-swathed figure interposed itself between the two men.

‘Not sure.’ Richard named some names. ‘Thanks for coming along. On your birthday and everything.’

But now without turning to him the photographer with frantic fingers was making quelling gestures behind her back and saying, ‘Good, good. I’m getting something. That’s very good. Hold it. Higher. Stay. Oh, wow. That’s very good. That’s very good. That’s beautiful.’

On the way out they encountered Demeter Barry in the hall. She was twenty-eight, and comparatively disorganized for someone with so much money. Like Gina Royce, she had no connection with literature other than marriage to one of its supposed practitioners.

She said, ‘Hello Richard.’

‘My dear Demi,’ said Richard, giving a brief stiff bow before kissing her on either cheek.

 

An hour into lunch in this fish restaurant for rich old men, and something extraordinary was about to happen. Nothing from the outside world. It was just that Richard was on the verge of passionate speech. Yes: passionate speech.

You don’t think that’s extraordinary? Oh, but it is, it is! Try and think of the last time you did it. And I don’t just mean ‘Well I think it’s absolutely disgraceful’ or ‘You’re the one who brought it up in the first place’ or ‘Get straight back into your room and get into bed.’ I’m talking speech: passionate speech. Speeches hardly ever happen. We hardly ever give them or hear them. See how bad we are at it. See how we fuck it up. We salivate and iterate. Women can do it, or they get further, but when the chance of tears presents itself they usually take it. Not having this option, men just shut up. They are all esprit de l’escalier. Men are spirits on the staircase, wishing they’d said . . . Before he spoke, there in the buttoned plush, Richard hurriedly wondered whether this had been a natural resource of men and women–passionate speech–before 1700 or whenever Eliot said it was, before thought and feeling got dissociated. The sensibility of men was evidently much more dissociated than the sensibility of women. Maybe, for women, it just never happened. Compared with men, women were Metaphysicals, Donnes and Marvells of brain and heart.

So: his passionate speech. Passionate speech, which unrolls, with thoughts and feelings dramatized in words.

The place. A private room full of food and drink and smoke – full of mouths. Someone rich paying.

The company. Financier, male columnist, female columnist, publisher, diarist, photographer, captain of industry, Shadow Minister for the Arts, Gwyn Barry.

The alcohol consumed. Richard had been very good, managing to get through a Virgin Mary and a lite beer before his pre-lunch whisky. Then a ton of wine.

The provocation. Considerable, some might think. Sufficient, in any case.

London’s weather was bound to play an important part: a hot noon gloom. Like night falling on the interior of the church, the lunchers gathered . . . Gwyn Barry had his photograph taken. The financier had his photograph taken. Gwyn Barry was photographed with the financier. The publisher was photographed with Gwyn Barry and the captain of industry. The captain of industry was photographed with the Shadow Minister for the Arts and Gwyn Barry. Two speeches were given, read from pieces of paper – neither of them passionate. The captain of industry, whose wife was interested enough in literature for both of them (Gwyn often dined with them, Richard knew), gave a speech in praise of Gwyn Barry on this, his fortieth birthday. That took about ninety seconds. Then the financier gave a speech during which Richard smoked three cigarettes and stared tearfully at his empty glass. So the financier was trying to get his money’s worth. It wasn’t just going to be a free meal with some slurred shop over coffee. The financier spoke about the kind of literary magazine he would like to be associated with – the kind of magazine he was prepared to be the financier of. Not so much like magazine A. Not so much like magazine B. More like magazine C (defunct) or magazine D (published in New York). Gwyn Barry was then asked about the kind of magazine he would like to be associated with (the kind that had high standards). Ditto the captain of industry, the Shadow Minister for the Arts, the female columnist, the male columnist. The diarist was not consulted. Neither was the photographer, who was leaving anyway. Neither was Richard Royce. Richard found that he was being consulted only on technical matters (print runs, break-even points and so on); he found, moreover, that he knew nothing about these things, or about anything else, though his answers were fluent and bold. Rather, Richard found that he was increasingly absorbed in the many minor tragedies that were unfolding inside his body, his body, and nobody else’s.

Would there be any point, the financier, Sebby, was saying (and his general popularity owed a great deal to this bandied diminutive: never mind, for now, all the fellow sharks and bastards he had left shivering over their visual display units), would there be any point in getting some market research underway? Richard?

Richard suddenly looked rather worryingly short-necked. He was in fact coping with a digestive matter, or at least he was sitting there until the digestive matter resolved itself one way or the other.

‘What, reader profile stuff?’ he asked. He had no idea what to say. He said, ‘Age? Sex? I don’t know. The TLS did something like that and it just made everyone incredibly depressed.’

‘Oh? Why?’

‘The only thing they found out was that all their readers were ninety years old.’

Sebby paused, as if waiting for more, and then said, ‘This would be more prospective, obviously. I thought we might press a questionnaire on, say . . . students reading English at London? Something of that kind?’

‘Find out what they’re looking for,’ said the publisher.

‘Targeting,’ said the male columnist, who was about twenty-eight and sparsely bearded, with a school-dinner look about him. The column he wrote was political. ‘Come on, this isn’t America. Where, you know, the magazine market is completely balkanized. Where they have magazines,’ he said, already looking round the table to garner any smiles that might soon be cropping up, ‘for the gay South Moluccan scuba diver.’

‘Still, there are more predictable preferences,’ said the publisher. ‘Not many men read Ms.’

There was a silence. To fill it, Richard said, ‘Has anyone ever established whether more men or women buy literary magazines?’

‘Oh please. What is this?’ said the female columnist. ‘Men or women? This is a literary magazine for God’s sake!’

Even when he was in familiar company it sometimes seemed to Richard that those gathered in the room were not authentic selves–that they had gone away somewhere and come back not quite right, half remade or reborn by some blasphemous, cack-handed and above all inexpensive process in a sinister circus or horror-flick funhouse. All flaky and carny. Not quite themselves. Him included.

Richard said, ‘Is all this without interest? Nabokov said he was “frankly homosexual” in his literary tastes. I don’t think men and women write the same way. They go at it differently. I don’t think they read the same way either.’

‘And I suppose,’ she said, ‘I suppose you think Africans and Chinese read and write differently too.’

‘Probably. Almost certainly. Yes.’

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I thought we came here today to talk about literature. What’s the matter with you? Are you drunk?’

He turned his senses on her, which were indeed pretty sclerotic by this time in his life, old and dimmed and thin. (He didn’t really want to do this. And he didn’t really want to talk in that antique editorial voice.) The woman: gruff, sizeable, stalely handsome, always barging through to her share of the truth. Richard knew the type – because literature knew the type. Like the smug boiler in the Pritchett story, the Labour politician, up north, proud of her brusqueness and her good big bum.

The Shadow Minister for the Arts said, ‘Isn’t this what literature’s about? Transcending human difference?’

The female columnist said, ‘Exactly. Me? I don’t give a damn whether people are male, female, black, white, pink or polka-dotted.’

‘Don’t say that,’ said Richard. ‘No. No. Don’t say that.’ And he looked up at Gwyn, not for rescue but for acknowledgement of pain.

Addressing the Shadow Minister for the Arts, Gwyn said: ‘I don’t think in terms of men or of women. I think in terms of. . . people.’

It was that little rapt pause before people that did it. Richard exhaled in the consensual silence and began, ‘A very low-level remark, if I may say so. Shall I tell you what you remind me of? A quiz in a colour mag–you know, Are You Cut Out To Be a Teacher? Final question: would you rather teach: (a) history, (b) geography, or (c) children. Well of course you’re going to be teaching children. You don’t get a choice about that. But there is a difference between history and geography. It must be a great relief to deny all the evidence of your faculties and say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing and what matters is being a person. Hey, how about being a spider, Gwyn, you Taff dunce? Say you get away with your life after your first big date and look over your shoulder and there’s the girlfriend eating one of your legs like it was a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You’d say: I don’t think in terms of male spiders or of female spiders. I just think in terms of spiders.’

He sank back, rhythmically sighing or whinnying with all that this had cost him. He didn’t have the will to look up, to look up into that unanimity of downward-revision. So he stared at the tarnished tablecloth, and saw only the rising – no, the plunging – seahorses that lived behind his eyes.

 

Gwyn had been quiet in the cab going home. The light outside, the sky, was the same as the driver’s treated windscreen, the upper half all charcoal and oil, the lower palely glowing. Richard pulled the side window down to validate this; and of course the glass loomed slowly up again, interposing its own medium. Here perhaps was the only way to see London truly, swinging low over it in a cab, in darkness-at-noon July. How beautiful it made the colour of the traffic lights, he thought, beneath their meshed glass: the anger of their crimson, the jaundice of their amber, the jealousy of their green.

‘Could you believe that woman,’ said Richard. ‘You know – she really thinks she’s authentic. Whereas . . .’ He paused. Whereas to him she had seemed almost horrifically otherwise. ‘Unmarried, I assume. She reeked of spinst.’

Gwyn turned to him.

‘Spinst. Like unmarried men reek of batch.’

Gwyn turned away, shaking his head slowly, sadly. ‘You can’t say such things. And not just for public reasons.’ Richard assumed (perhaps wrongly) that Gwyn meant something more like: you can’t say such things because the whole area has been seen to be contaminated, fouled by men who really do hate women.

Anyway Richard went ahead and said, ‘Great gusts of spinst. A miasma of spinst.’

‘Would you just pull in at the corner here please.’

Nothing. Gwyn was just buying an evening paper from the boy. He left the door open when he slid out. Jesus, the light looked like the end of London, the end of everything; its guttering glow was livid now, and something you wouldn’t want to touch, like the human-hued legs of pigeons beneath their dirty overcoats.

Gwyn sank back as the cab resumed its endless journey – its journey of hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. He opened the paper and turned to the Diary and eventually said, ‘Well there’s nothing about it here.’

Richard was staring at him. ‘Nothing about what?’

‘About the lunch. Your little outburst.’

Richard stared harder. ‘Relieved about that, are you?’

Gwyn spoke with restraint. He said: ‘It’s quite a while since anyone talked to me like that.’

‘Is it? Well this time you won’t have so long to wait. Get ready, because someone’s going to talk to you like that again. That’s the lunchtime edition. You think the guy just phones it on to the news-stands? It’s lucky no one knows how fucking thick you are. That really would be a scoop.’

‘Nothing about the job offer either,’ said Gwyn, his bright eyes still scanning the page.

‘There wasn’t any job offer.’

‘Yes there was. While you were making one of your visits to the toilet. I turned it down of course. I mean, as if I… ‘

The first drop of rain greyly kissed him on his baldspot as he climbed out of the cab and into the shoplit dungeon of Marylebone High Street. The clouds cracked: they could hold it no longer. And then it all came down.

 

Round about now, in time, the emotions lose lucidity and definition, and become qualified by something bodily. Something coarse and coarse-haired in the fury, something rancid and pulmonary in the grief, something toxic and long-toothed in the hate . . . Richard put his thoughts in delivery order, as a writer might: stuff to be got in. And at the same time he experienced one of those uncovenanted expansions that every novelist knows, when, almost audibly to the inner ear, things swivel and realign, they transform (the cube comes good), and all is clear. You don’t do this. Your talent does it. He sat up. His state was one of equilibrium, neither pleasant nor unpleasant in itself, but steady. He gave a sudden nod. It was all so simple now. At last Richard had found a literary project that he passionately believed in and could deeply commit himself to.

He was going to fuck Gwyn up.

 

And of course after that he felt so full of life that he got up and went out to the Canal Diner and drank seven Zombies . . . That’s it, said the barman. Uh-oh, said the bedroom floorboard beneath the sleeping wife. Tsk tsk, said the watch by his ear . . . That night he cried in his sleep again. Gina didn’t hear it. Nobody knew: only the sleepless, the omniscient, the someone watching over him. Why do the men cry?

Why do the men cry in their sleep? Because of fights and feats and preferment, because of jobs and money, because of all that men have done. Because they can’t be happy or sad any more–only smashed or nuts. And because they don’t know how to do it when they’re awake.

And then there is the information.

 

The next day it was his turn: Richard turned forty. Turned is right. Like a half-cooked steak, like a wired cop, like an old leaf, like milk, Richard turned. And nothing changed. He was still a wreck. Richard Royce – I mean, Richard Royce was a wreck.

Who’s who?

At twenty-eight, living off book reviews, social security and copywriting for ad firms, pale and thin and interestingly dissolute, most typically to be seen wearing a collarless white shirt and jeans tucked into misshapen brown boots–looking the kind of ex-public schoolboy who, perhaps, drunkenly carpentered or landscape-gardened for the good and the great – with his fiery politics and his riveting love affairs in which he was usually the crueller, Richard Royce published his first novel, Aforethought, in Britain and America. If in order to arrive at a consensus you homogenized all the reviews (still kept, somewhere, in a withered and thinning brown envelope), allowing for the many grades of generosity and IQ (the flailing turk, the frowning has-been, the one who likes everything or at least dislikes nothing, the one who dislikes everything including the regular exceptions he pretends to like), then the verdict on Aforethought was as follows: nobody understood it or even finished it, but, equally, nobody was sure it was shit. Richard flourished. He stopped getting social security. He appeared on Better Read: the three critics in their breakfast nook, Richard behind a desk with an unseen Gauloise fuming unseen in his trembling hand–he looked as though his trousers were on fire. Three years later, by which time he had become books and arts editor of a little magazine called the Little Magazine (little then, and littler now), Richard published his second novel, Dreams Don’t Mean Anything, in Britain but not in America. His third novel wasn’t published anywhere. Neither was his fourth. Neither was his fifth. In those three brief sentences we adumbrate a Mahabharata of pain. He had plenty of offers for his sixth because, by that time, during a period of cretinous urges and vacillations, he had started responding to the kind of advertisements that plainly came out with it and said, we will publish your book and authors wanted (or was it needed?) by london publisher. Of course, these publishers, crying out for words on paper like pining dogs under a plangent moon, weren’t like normal publishers. You paid them, for example. And, perhaps more importantly, no one ever read you. Richard stayed with it and ended up going to see a Mr Cohen in Border Mews off Marylebone High Street. He came out of there, his sixth novel still unplaced, but with a new job, that of Special Director of the Tantalus Press, where he went on to work about a day a week, soliciting and marking up illiterate novels, total-recall autobiographies in which no one ever went anywhere or did anything, collections of primitive verse, very long laments for dead relatives, crackpot scientific treatises and, increasingly, it seemed to him, ‘found’ dramatic monologues about manic depression and schizophrenia. Aforethought and Dreams Don’t Mean Anything still existed somewhere, on the window-sills of seaside boarding houses, at the bottom of tea chests in storage, going for ten pee in cardboard boxes at provincial book fairs . . . Like the lady who was of course still there between the mortar board and the prosthetic legs (and what a moving acceptance speech she gave), like the laughing athlete who, after that mishap in the car park, awoke to find himself in life-choice traction and now runs a network of charities from his padded rack, Richard had to see whether the experience of disappointment was going to make him bitter or better. And it made him bitter. He was sorry: there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t up to better. Richard continued to review books. He was very good at book reviewing. When he reviewed a book, it stayed reviewed. Otherwise he was an ex-novelist (or not ex so much as void or phantom), the literary editor of The Little Magazine and a Special Director of the Tantalus Press.

Bitter is manageable. Look how we all manage it. But worse happened, and the real trouble began. It was a viscous autumn, and Richard had stopped dating girls (he was married now), and Gina was expecting not just one baby but two, and the rejection slips were coming in on novel number four, Invisible Worms (does it merit these italics, having never been born?), and his overdraft practically trepanned him every time he dared think about it: imagine, then, Richard’s delight when his oldest and stupidest friend, Gwyn Barry, announced that his first novel, Summertown, had just been accepted by a leading London house. Because Richard at least partly understood that the things you hate most always have to go ahead and happen, he was ready for this – or was expecting it, anyway. He had long been an amused confidant of Gwyn’s literary aspirations, and had chortled his way through Summertown–plus a couple of its abandoned predecessors – in earlier drafts. Summertown? Summertown was about Oxford, where the two writers had met; where they had shared, first, a set of rooms in the mighty hideousness of Keble College and, later, a rude flatlet off the Woodstock Road, in Summertown, twenty years ago. Twenty years, thought Richard, forty today: oh, where had they all gone? Gwyn’s first novel was no less autobiographical than most first novels. Richard was in it, clumsily and perfunctorily disguised (still the promiscuous columnist with his poetry and his ponytail), but affectionately and even romantically rendered. The Gwyn figure, who narrated, was wan and Welsh, the sort of character who, according to novelistic convention, quietly does all the noticing–whereas reality usually sees to it that the perspiring mute is just a perspiring mute, with nothing to contribute. Still, the Gwyn figure, Richard thought, was the book’s only strength: an authentic dud, a dud insider, who brought back real news from the dud world. Summertown duly appeared, to modest sales and (Richard again) disgracefully unmalicious reviews. The following year a small paperback edition limped along for a month or two … We might have said that Richard was tasting fresh failure, except that failure is never fresh, and always stale, and weakly fizzes, like old yoghurt, with his sixth novel when Gwyn sent him a bound proof of his second, entitled Stumbling on Melons. If Richard had chortled his way through Summertown, he cackled and yodelled his way through Stumbling on Melons: its cuteness, its blandness, its naïvely pompous semi-colons, its hand-me-down imagery, the almost endearing transparency of its little colour-schemes and tinkertoy symmetries. What was it ‘about’, Stumbling on Melons? It certainly wasn’t autobiographical: it was about a group of fair-minded young people who, in an unnamed country, strove to establish a rural community. And they succeeded. And then it ended. Not worth writing in the first place, the finished book was, in Richard’s view, a ridiculous failure. He was impatient for publication day.

With this mention of patience, or its opposite, I think we might switch for a moment to the point of view of Richard’s twin sons – to the point of view of Marius, and of Marco. There was in Richard a fatherly latitude or laxity that the boys would, I believe, agree to call patience. Richard wasn’t the one who went on at them about duties and dress codes and, above all, toy tidying–Gina had to do all that. Richard didn’t scream or storm or spank. Gina had to do all that. On the contrary, with Richard in sole charge, they could gorge themselves on ice-cream and packets of Wotsits and watch TV for hour after hour and wreck all the furniture, while he sat slumped over his desk in his mysterious study. But then Daddy’s patience changed . . . Stumbling on Melons had been out for about a month. No stir had been caused by it, and therefore no particular pall had fallen over the Royce maisonette. The reviews, while hardly the pyrotechnic display of sarcasm and contempt for which Richard hoped, had nonetheless been laudably condescending, and unanimous, and brief. With any luck, Gwyn was finished. It was a Sunday morning. To the boys this meant a near-eternity of unmonitored delectation, followed by an outing to Dogshit Park or better (the zoo or the museum, with one or other tranced and speechless parent) and at least two hired tapes of cartoons, because even Gina was TV-patient on Sunday nights, after a weekend in their company, and was often in bed before they were.

So. Daddy in the kitchen, enjoying a late breakfast. The twins, their legs further slenderized by the baggy bermudas they both sported, were to be found on the sitting-room carpet, Marius ably constructing sea- and space-faring vessels with plastic stickle-bricks, Marco more dreamily occupied: with the twinned cords of the telephone and angle lamp which shared the low round table by the fireplace, Marco was ensnaring and entwining various animal figurines, here a stegosaurus, there a piglet, with transformation on his mind, thus arranging things – how did the fable end? – so that the lion might lie down with the lamb . . . The boys heard a loud, bedraggled wail from across the passage. This sound, its register of pain or grief, was unconnectable with their father or anyone else they knew, so perhaps some stranger or creature? Marco sat back, thus tugging at his tangle of duckling and velociraptor, and the little table slewed; his eyes had time to widen before it fell, had time to glaze with tears of contrition and pre-emption before Richard came into the room. On patient days he might have just said, ‘Now what have we here?’ or ‘This is a sorry tangle’ or, more simply (and more likely) ‘Jesus Christ.’ But not this Sunday morning. Instead, Richard strode forward at about the speed that one recoils from the touch of flame and with a single swoop of his open hand dealt Marco the heaviest blow he had ever felt. Marius, sitting utterly still, noticed how the air in the room went on rolling, like the heaving surface of the swimming-pool even after the children had all climbed out.

Twenty or thirty years from now, by which time the twins would have become grown men themselves, this incident would be something they could lie back and tell their psychiatrists about: the day Daddy’s patience went away. And never returned, not fully, not in its original form. No one except Richard will ever know what happened that Sunday morning, the ragged wail, the fiercely crenellated lips, the rocking boy on the sitting-room floor–though Gina might have pieced it together, for the same night Richard was impotent with her and never really got that back either. What happened that Sunday morning was this: Gwyn Barry’s Stumbling on Melons entered the bestseller list, at number nine.

 

But before he did anything else, before he did anything grand and ambitious like pressing on with Untitled or rewriting his review of the new Swift biography or getting started on fucking Gwyn up (and he had, he thought, a good opening move), Richard had to take the vacuum cleaner in . . . That’s right. He had to take the vacuum cleaner in. This is how I account for the darkness, the melancholy and the alienation of twentieth-century literature: in a servantless world, writers are always having to do things like taking the vacuum cleaner in. When she proposed the errand to him, Gina used the words ‘nip’ and ‘pop’: ‘Could you nip round to the electrician’s and pop the Hoover in,’ she had said. But Richard’s nipping and popping days were definitely over. He stood in the passage staring at the vacuum cleaner for perhaps half a minute. Then his eyes closed slowly . . . The visit to the electrician’s would also involve him in a visit to the bathroom (to shave: he was too mired internally now to let the world see him with his surface unclean; he too much resembled the figure he feared he would become: the terrible old man in a callbox wanting something very badly–cash, work, information). In the bathroom mirror, of course, he would be reduced to two dimensions; so the bathroom mirror was no place to go if what you wanted was depth. By the age of forty everyone has the face they deserve. Like the eyes are the window to the soul. Good fun to say, good fun even to believe, when you’re eighteen, when you’re thirty-two. Looking in the mirror now, on the morning of his fortieth birthday, Richard thought that no one deserved the face he had. No one. No one in the history of the planet. There was nothing on the planet it was that bad to do. What happened? Oh, what have I done? His hair, scattered here and there over his crown in assorted hanks and clumps, looked as though it had just concluded a course of prolonged and nauseating (and entirely futile) chemotherapy. Then the eyes, each perched on its little blood-rimmed beer gut, beneath luxuriantly piebald brows. If the eyes were the window to the soul then the view stopped at the window, which was walled up behind rusty wire netting. All over his body there were whispered rumours of pain. His cough sounded like a wiper on a dry windscreen. These days he drank and smoked largely to solace himself for what smoking and drinking had done to him – but they had done a lot to him, so he smoked and drank a lot. He indulged, furthermore, in any other drug he could get his hands on. At any given moment, whatever he was doing, at least two of his limbs were immovably numb. In fact, physically, at all times, he felt epiphanically tragic. His doctor had died six years ago – and that, in Richard’s mature opinion, was definitely that. He had a large and weirdly lucent lump on the back of his neck. This he dealt with himself, by the following means: he kept his hair quite long, so no one could see it. If you told Richard Royce he was in denial, he would deny it. But not hotly.

Nevertheless, he still had to take the vacuum cleaner in. He had to take it in, because even Richard (who was, of course, being a man and everything, a prodigious slob) could tell that the quality of life, in 47 Calchalk Street, had dramatically declined without it. Oh, you know: dust of such feathery ubiquity that it made Richard suspect, quite wrongly for a change, that he was due another liver attack; Gina’s grieving reminders; Marco’s life-threatening allergies. By the time he had wrestled the vacuum cleaner from its sentry box beside the boiler Richard had long been weeping with rage and self-pity. By the time he was out of the apartment with it he was wondering if he had ever suffered so. By the time he reached the hall downstairs he was busy concluding that Samuel Beckett, at some key juncture in his life, had been obliged to take a vacuum cleaner in. Richard gave himself a loud breather while he looked through his mail. His mail he no longer feared. The worst was over. Why should a man fear his mail, when, not long ago, he had received a solicitor’s letter from his own solicitor? When, rather less recently, in response to a request for more freelance work, he had been summarily fired, through the post, by his own literary agent? When he was being sued (for advances paid on unwritten books) by both his ex-publishers? Most of the time, though, his mail was just junk. Once, in the street, on an agitated April afternoon, on his way back from lunch with some travel editor in some tragic trattoria, he had seen a city cyclone of junk mail – flying fliers, circling circulars – and had nodded, and thought: me, my life. And a lot of the time he got no mail at all. Now, on the morning of this his fortieth birthday, he received one small cheque and two large bills–and a brown envelope, hand-delivered (no address, no stamp), featuring his own name in tortured block capitals, with the accurate but unfamiliar addendum, ‘MA (Oxon)’. He put it in his pocket, and once more shouldered his load.

A vacuum cleaner is designed to cruise grandly round a carpet. It is not designed to be humped half a mile through a wet London Wednesday, with the cars trailing their capes of mist. Cruelly encumbered, Richard staggered on, the brown base under his arm as heavy as a soaked log, the T-shaped plastic adjunct in his free hand, the tartan flux-tube round his neck like a fat scarf, and then the plug, freed from its broken catchlet, incensingly adangle between his legs. The ‘freshness and sheer optimism’, the ‘unembarrassed belief in human fulfilment and, if not “perfectibility”, then at least robust improvement’ for which Stumbling on Melons was now being retrospectively praised would presumably reach new orders of flame-eyed unction when its successor appeared later in the year – now that Gwyn Barry no longer had to take the vacuum cleaner in. Richard lurched sideways into Ladbroke Grove. The plug and lead snarled his ankles like a hurled bolero. The tartan tube clutched his neck in a pythonic embrace.

Once in the shop he let the whole contraption crash down on to the low counter. Behind it stood a tall young man who looked at the vacuum cleaner and then its owner with an inexpert eye before reaching for a foolscap document. Richard sobbed out his name and address. Make, model, registration number. Eventually they came to the section headed type of malfunction. The young man said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Richard. ‘It doesn’t clean carpets. It cuts out all the time and it makes this screeching sound and the bag leaks so all the crap keeps coming out the back.’

The young man considered Richard, and this information. His eyes returned to the form, where, after due thought, under type of malfunction, he wrote: ‘Not working.’

‘Yeah,’ said Richard. ‘Yeah, well that ought to cover it.’

In the streets outside the old divisions of race and class were giving way to the new divisions: good shoes as opposed to bad shoes, the paleface as opposed to the redskin (blocked pallor versus the visage far fierier than any Tabasco), different preparedness for the form that urbanity was currently taking (the city-tuned as opposed to the starer, the secular holyman, the marooned rustic). The young man stared at Richard, with weak hostility, or pain. Looking into these eyes, eyes as dim and marginal as the lights of a cheap car left on all night, Richard was presented with another divide, the universal, to do with words, and words are all we have. Richard had provoked this stare but he couldn’t meet it, not today: the display fixtures on the wall, decorative or labour-saving, white cones and spheres – and then in the back of the shop, valved like the wet city, all the junk that wasn’t working, the unrecompleted, the undescribed, the unwritten.

On the way home he stopped at a stall under the Westway and ordered a cup of tea to accompany the cigarettes he was trying to smoke in the dousing rain. He took from his pocket the brown envelope – MA (Oxon) – and took from it a single sheet of paper that might have been torn from a child’s exercise book: blue-lined, softly creased, an air of much effort, little progress. The letter had been heavily corrected by another pen in another hand, but it still said:

Dear Richard

You are the writer of a ‘novel’. Aforethought. Congratulations! Nice one. Hows it done. First you get the topic. Next, you package it. Then comes the hipe.

I am thinking of becoming ‘an author’. Snap. If you want to meet and discuss these issues over a few ‘jars’ feel free to give me a bell.

Yours sincerely,

N. Bishop

Well-known writers get this kind of letter every other day. Usually more sensible; sometimes less sensible, all about devils and electricity. But Richard was not a well-known writer, and he got this kind of letter every other year (and they were normally about book-reviewing anyway). So he looked at it with rather more care than a well-known writer would have done. And his scrutiny was rewarded. In the lower left-hand corner of the half-filled sheet, half hidden by the fringe of the rip, were the letters: TPO. Richard turned the page over.

I know the wierd girl, Diva. Shes the one they all wan’t. Christ what a looker. You’re mate Gwyn Barry, is in love with her of TV fame.

This was puzzling, but sounded, on the whole, like excellent news. What he was looking at, here, might turn out to be a good plan B. Though as it happened he was feeling exceptionally upbeat about plan A. With the intention of getting moving on it Richard finished his tea and his cigarette and sloped off home through the leaning rain.

 

 

Richard’s opening move, in his plan to ruin Gwyn’s life, was not intended to be in itself decisive, or even dramatic. On the other hand it did demand from Richard a great deal of trouble and expense – and internal wear (slow, disaffected, heavy-footed, life-ruining: the stuff that brings about all the bread-and-butter deaths). All these phone calls and stunned crosstown journeys, and talentless grapplings with brown paper and string . . . Nonetheless, he was decided. He even raised his chin for a moment in quiet pride, and inhaled richly. Richard had resolved to send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times. With a note. And that was all.

He was quite clear about it in his own mind . . . Richard sat at his desk; he had just put Untitled away for the morning, after completing a hysterically fluent passage of tautly leashed prose, and was now assembling his notes (which were widely dispersed) for a 700-word review of a 700-page novel by a prize-winning Panamanian. In the interim he was taking his own pulse. Meanwhile too his smaller son Marco, who had failed Gina’s dawn fitness test and was taking another day off school, was at his father’s side, balancing a rubber troll or goblin on various roughly horizontal surfaces: Richard’s forearm, Richard’s shoulder, Richard’s baldspot. And from outside through the shivery window came the sound of fiercely propelled metal as it ground against stone, shearing into the sore calcified struts and buttresses with sadistic persistence: the house, the street, the whole city, taking it deep in the root canal.

For instance, it had to be the NYT. The LA Times was even bigger, Richard knew, but in his judgement Gwyn wasn’t quite nuts enough for the LAT. But he was surely nuts enough for the NYT. Richard would have staked his reputation on it. If Gwyn wasn’t nuts enough for the NYT then Richard was losing his grip. Now he reached backwards for his jacket, hooked over the chair, and dug out the frayed cheque book on which he hoped he might have written a few words about the big novel from Panama. He had: epic sheep-dip scene p.536ff. The cheque-book joined his other notes, loosely gathered on the heaped desk: a credit-card slip, a torn envelope, an empty matchbook. And the slab of the novel itself. He hated it as a physical object. He had read every page (in such matters Richard was psychotically conscientious) and he had hated every page. But now he just hated its solidity and mass. Turning to the back flap, intending to energize himself with a glimpse of the obscenely handsome author, he disturbed the empty matchbook, which fell to the floor. Marco retrieved it and repositioned it, sighing carefully.

‘Helping Daddy,’ said Marco, ‘in whatever he does. Each day.’

The idea was this: Richard would send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday NYT, all of it, that forest-slaying suitcase of smeared print, accompanied by a typed note that would read, in its entirety:

Dear Gwyn,

Something in here to interest you. The price of fame!

Yours ever,

John

There would, of course, be no indication of where this interesting something was to be found. Sitting back, sitting back in the alphabet soup of his study, Richard imagined Gwyn opening the package, frowning at the note, looking first, with a slight smile, at the Books section, then, rather less equably, at the Arts section, then . ..

‘Marco, what’s the point of doing that?’

Either Marco didn’t hear or he didn’t understand. He said: ‘Wot?’ There is of course this difficulty of rendering childish speech. But how do you get around it? Marco didn’t say ‘What?’ He said ‘Wot?’ – definitely a humbler and shorter word, and entirely unaspirated.

‘Balancing that toy on my arm,’ said Richard. ‘Why? What for?’

‘Does it bolla you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that bolla you?’ he asked, balancing the toy on Richard’s head.

‘Yes.’

‘Does that bolla you?’ he asked, balancing the toy on Richard’s shoulder.

The ups and downs of a Panamanian goatherd, thought Richard, don’t obviously demand . . . can’t be said to cry out for the epic frame, but Enrique Murillo in this, his seventh and longest. . . How would he deliver the NYT! Leave it on the doorstep?

 

Richard rang the London offices of the NYT. They did keep a copy of the Sunday paper, and Richard was free to come in there to consult or admire it; but he couldn’t take it away. They told him, rather, to go to International Dispatches in north Islington, which was known to sell copies of the Sunday NYT, which cost lots of money. With his mac and his hangover and his book (a biography of William Davenant, Shakespeare’s bastard: 700 words by Thursday week), Richard embarked at Ladbroke Grove, changed at Notting Hill Gate and Oxford Circus, and rode in the slatted light to Islington, whose streets he roamed for fifty-five minutes in tears of rage before stumbling upon International Dispatches where an old man in what looked like a crofter’s cottage thatched with Frankfurter Zeitungs and El Países and India Todays and many other journals daubed in exclamatory Farsi or Sanskrit told him that they no longer stocked the SNYT: only the daily. Pressure of space. Richard came home again. A couple of days later, when he had calmed down, he rang the London offices of the NYT: they told him to ring the distributors, in Cheapside. He rang the distributors: they said that such copies of the SNYT as came their way were all subscription copies, though occasionally (true) there was a spare . . . Richard used all his charm on the young woman at the other end of the line. But the trouble was that he didn’t have any charm, not any longer, and she told him he would just have to turn up one Monday morning on the off-chance, like anybody else. So began his weekly journeys to the warehouse in Cheapside, where they would typically pass him round from Portakabin to van mouth to storage room and back again, before sending him on his way (to the Little Magazine, in fact, where in the dawn he would start subbing the book reviews over a papercupful of tomato soup). It was on his seventh visit that he revealed, to the assistant manager’s intense sneer of puzzlement, that he didn’t necessarily want a copy of that week’s SNYT. Any Sunday NYT would do. Contritely Richard followed the assistant manager to another storage room, one never seen before; here, any number of SNYTs lay about in stacks and heaps, along with unwanted Sunday Boston Globes and Sunday San Francisco Chronicles. Richard listed faintly on his feet. In the pleasure and nausea he felt there was an element of straightforward incomprehension, at the sadness and greyness and dampness and deadness of old newsprint–and at human profligacy and clamour. Christ: shut up! Anyway, he cracked, and went for size. That day he came home with the Sunday LA Times cradled tenderly in his arms . . . Brown paper and a ball of string took about a week each to purchase and assemble. Then Richard was ready to move.

 

Before he delivered it, but after he had wrapped it, Richard was struck by an unpleasant thought: what if there was something to interest Gwyn Barry in this particular issue of the Sunday LA Times? An eight-page symposium on his work, for example. Or a whole Gwyn Barry section. As in the UK, Stumbling had first been a flop, then a sleeper and finally a smash in the United States. Brought to Richard’s attention by a patriotic item in a London newspaper, this wound still out-throbbed all others: the general battering meted out by the book’s evident popularity in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Japan, which he got to hear about through Gwyn’s offhand complaints about foreign camera crews, sudden five-city whistle-stop tours and so on. Such information drew Richard’s mind to a place where it didn’t want to go: to the universal. He dealt with it as follows. Had Gwyn found that voice which speaks to and for the human soul, in all places, in all times? No (Richard argued): he had just stumbled on the LCD. The multitudes of the humourless, the well-intentioned, the bland, the abashed: they had stopped reading Herman Hesse and started reading Gwyn.

It was seven o’clock in the evening. Richard had actually cleared a space on his desk for the package containing the LAT – in itself a stunning achievement. His desktop was so untidy that his desktop phone often stopped ringing before he found it. Now he eyed the great brown knapsack, weakly supposing that he had better glance through its contents, prior to delivery. True, it would require incredible skill, but if he could slip the thing out while preserving at least some of the wrapping … He picked at the fused knot of string; he worried the folds of the creased paper: in the end he tore it all apart with a roar so savage that his children, in the next room, looked up from their GI Joes and stared at one another with clean round eyes and shrugged theatrically, palms opened at right angles to the wrist.

With care and dread Richard inspected Book World (including Briefly Noted, Points of Interest and Information, Please), Arts and Entertainments (in case something of Gwyn’s had been harrowingly translated to screen or stage), the main Magazine (a profile, perhaps, or Faces to Watch, or Bedside Reading), and the Week in Review (the Gwyn Barry phenomenon). In a rather more relaxed spirit, he then thoroughly skimmed the Update section, the Style section, the Briefing section, the Flair section, the You section and the Poise section. Feeling, by now, laughably rigorous (and hugely vindicated), he checked the Op-Ed page of the News section: multiculturalism? the redefined syllabus? whither publishing? The Business sections, the Fashion section, the Appointments section, the Lawnmower pull-out and the Curtain Rail supplement: these he disdainfully ignored.

At midnight Richard was deciding that the last five hours had been pleasurably and profitably spent. If Gwyn Barry was such a big cheese, you wouldn’t know it from the LAT. Richard never doubted that Gwyn was nuts enough to read the whole thing at least twice, right down to the recipes and the crossword clues. He imagined his friend three weeks from now, drinking instant coffee and rubbing his eyes as he readdressed himself to the opening pages of the Deckchair section . . .

As he was putting the paper back together again Richard mysteriously ran out of whisky and went to the kitchen to find something more to drink. Anything alcoholic would do. He experienced a thud of surprise, from temple to temple, when instead of the usual striplit void he confronted his wife. She was not a large woman, but the size of her presence was dramatically augmented by the lateness of the hour. And by marriage, and beauty, and neglect. Her hair was up and back; her face glowed with half-assimilated night-cream; her towel dressing-gown revealed an inverted triangle of rosy throat. Richard abruptly realized what had happened to her, what she had done: she had become a grown-up. And Richard hadn’t.

‘How many hours a day,’ she said, ‘do you spend on your novels?’

‘What?’ said Richard, who had his whole head in the drinks cupboard.

‘How many hours a day do you spend on your novels?’

‘I don’t know. Depends.’

‘You usually do it first thing, don’t you? Except Sundays. How many hours, on average?’

‘Two. Maybe three.’

Richard realized what this reminded him of, distantly: being interviewed. There she sat across the table with her pencil and her notebook and her green tea. Pretty soon she would be asking him if he relied, for his material, on real life or on the crucible of the imagination, how he selected his subjects and themes, and whether or not he used a word-processor. Well, maybe. But first she asked: ‘How much money have they earned you? Your novels.’

‘In my life?’

She nodded.

Richard thought he had better sit down. The calculation didn’t take him very long. There were only three figures to be added together. He told her what they amounted to.

‘Give us a minute,’ she said.

Richard watched. Her pencil softly slid and scraped, then seemed to hover in thought, then softly scraped again.

‘And you’ve been at it for how long?’ she murmured to herself: good at sums. ‘Right. Your novels earn you about sixty pence an hour. A cleaning lady would expect to make seven or eight times that. From your novels you get a fiver a day. Or thirty quid a week. Or fifteen hundred a year. That means every time you buy a gram of coke – which is what?’

Richard didn’t know she knew about the coke. ‘Hardly ever.’

‘How much is coke? Seventy? Every time you buy a gram of coke . . . that’s more than a hundred man hours. About six weeks’ work.’

While Gina gave him, in monotonous declarative sentences, a précis of their financial situation, like something offered to test his powers of mental arithmetic, Richard stared at the tabletop and thought of the first time he had seen her: behind a tabletop counting money, in a literary setting. His blood had slowed and wearied with hurt. He was so hurt he wasn’t even drinking.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘When was the last time you received actual payment for your novels?’

‘Eight years ago. So I give them up, right?’

‘Well it does look like the one to go.’

There followed a minute’s silence – perhaps to mark the passing of Richard’s fiction. Richard spent it exploring his own numbness. He was impressed by its density. Emotion recollected in tranquillity, said Wordsworth, describing or defining the creative act. To Richard, as he wrote, it felt more like emotion invented in tranquillity. But here was emotion. It would fill the sky if there was a sky to fill, instead of a kitchen. Upstairs, Marco was pleading in his sleep. They could hear him – pleading with his nightmares.

She said, ‘You could review more books.’

‘I can’t review more books.’ There on the table lay a slablike biography of Swinburne. Richard had to write 2,000 words about it for a famously low-paying literary monthly, by next Friday. ‘I already review about a book a day. I can’t review more. There aren’t enough books. I do them all.’

‘What about all this non-fiction you keep agreeing to write? What about that Siberia trip?’

‘I’m not going.’

‘I don’t like to say this, because at least it’s regular, but you could give up the LM.’

‘It’s only a day a week.’

‘But then you spend forever writing those “middles”. For nothing.’

‘It’s part of the job. The literary editor has always written the middles.’ And he thought of their names, in a wedge, like an honours board: Eric Henley, J. C. Partridge, Roland Davenport. They all wrote the middles. Richard Royce. Surely you remember J. C. Partridge’s controversial attack on the Movement poets? J. C. Partridge was still alive, unbelievably. Richard kept seeing him, in Red Lion Street, in the callbox, staring with terrible purpose at the student-clogged entrance of the language school. Or flapping around on his hands and knees in the passage behind the Merry Old Soul.

‘For nothing,’ said Gina.

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘No one reads the LM.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

One of Richard’s middles had been about writers’ wives–a typology of writers’ wives. The pin was a biography of Hemingway, who, Richard argued, had married one of each. (Stoutly or fogeyishly resistant to clever headlines, Richard had in this case submitted to the inevitable ‘For Whom the Bells Toll’.) How did they go? The Muse, the Rival, the Soulmate, the Drudge, the Judge . . .

‘You can’t give up the Tantalus thing, which is pretty decent as well as regular. You tell me. You could give up smoking and drinking and drugs. And clothes. It’s not that you spend. You don’t earn.’

‘I can’t give up novels.’

‘Why not?’

Because . . . because then he would be left with experience, with untranslated and unmediated experience. Because then he would be left with life. Christ. . .

‘Because then I’d just have this.’ The kitchen–the blue plastic tub filled with the boys’ white pants and vests, the stiff black handbag on the chair with its upturned mouth open wanting to be fed, the bowls and spoons and mats laid out on the table for the morning and the eight-pack of cereal boxes in its Cellophane: all this became the figure for what he meant. ‘Days. Life,’ he added.

And this was a disastrous word to say to a woman–to women, who bear life, who bring it into the world, screaming, and so will never let it come second to anything.

Her breasts and her eyes–for a moment they all swelled up. Then she blinked and said, ‘The alternative is I go full time.’ She told him what they would pay her: a chastening sum. ‘That means you get the twins up every morning and get them down every night. I do weekends. You shop. You clean. And you cook.’

‘I can’t cook.’

‘I can’t either.’

‘Jesus.’

‘That way,’ she said, ‘you’ll be getting plenty of life. You won’t be going short on life.’ Gina paused. ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘How near are you to finishing the one you’re doing now?’

Richard creased his face. One of the troubles with his novels was that they didn’t really get finished. They just stopped. The new one was already very long. ‘Hard to say. Couple of months?’

‘OK. Finish that and see if it makes any money. Then we’ll decide. What’s it called?’

‘Untitled.’

‘When will it be?’

‘No, it’s called Untitled.’

‘You mean you can’t even think what to call it?’

‘No. It’s called Untitled.’

‘How can it be called Untitled?’

‘It just is. Because I said so.’

‘Well that’s a bloody stupid name for it. You know, you might be a lot happier, without them. It might be a big relief. Gwyn and everything. That’s not you. That’s a whole other story. Demi says it’s frightening how the money comes in. I wonder if you still really believe in it. Your fiction. Because you never . . . Because what you … Ah I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

Because you never found an audience–you never found the universal. Because what you come up with in there, in your study, is of no general interest. End of story: your story.

 

Using a kilometre of string and about four rolls of Sellotape, as if in a field hospital, Richard bandaged his package together. The LAT was now ready to go. Over a contemplative cognac he squared up to the fateful, exalted challenge of delivery.

 

The heat was stiffling, read Richard. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

The heat was stiffling. Moodly he looked out of his bedroom window. Yes, the day was far too hot to be sleepy. The time had come. He had to chose.

Richard wasn’t reading this in a speculative spirit. He was marking it up for the printer. He said, ‘Now there’s a first sentence that gets you by the lapels. The heat was stiffling.’

Balfour Cohen came and looked over Richard’s shoulder. He smiled understanding^ and said, ‘Ah yes. That’s his second novel.’

‘Did we publish his first?’

‘We did.’

‘How did that start? Let’s think. It was biterly cold.’

Balfour smiled understandingly. ‘It’s probably a pretty good yarn.’

Richard read on:

He had to chose. To win, to suceed, would be incredulous. But to fail, to loose, would be contemptuous!

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Richard, ‘is what these people have against dictionaries. Maybe they don’t even know they can’t spell.’

As he said this he found he was sweating, and even crying. Another thing he didn’t understand was why he had to correct the spelling. I mean, why bother? Who cared? No one was ever going to read this stuff, except the author, and the author’s mum. What if it was alphabet soup?

‘I’m amazed he spelt the title right.’

‘What is the title?’

‘Another Gift from Genius. By Alexander P. O’Boye. That’s assuming he spelt his name right. What was his first one called?’

‘One moment.’ Balfour tapped his keys. ‘A Gift from Genius,’ he said.

‘Jesus. How old is he?’

‘Guess,’ said Balfour.

‘Nine,’ said Richard.

‘Actually he’s in his late sixties.’

‘Pitiful, isn’t it? What’s the matter with him? I mean is he insane?’

‘Many of our authors are retired. This is one of the services we perform. They have to have something to do.’

Or something to be, thought Richard. Sitting in the pub all day with a dog on your lap would be more creative, and more dignified, than nine-to-fiving it on the illiterate delusion. He glanced sideways. It was possible that Balfour regarded Alexander P. O’Boye as one of the flowers of his list. He was always more hushed and pious when it came to the fiction and the poetry. In any case it was Richard who was now Fiction and Poetry Editor at the Tantalus Press. He didn’t have to do what Balfour did, which was mark up the biographies of pet goldfish and prize gherkins, the thousand-page treatises that supposedly whipped the carpet out from under Freud and Marx and Einstein, the revisionist histories of disbanded regiments and twilit trade-union outposts, the non-fictional explorations of remote planets, and all the other screams for help.

‘One should remind oneself,’ said Balfour, as he said every week, ‘that James Joyce initially favoured private publication.’ Then he added: ‘Proust, too, by the way.’

‘But that was … Wasn’t that just a manoeuvre. To avoid a homosexuality scandal,’ said Richard carefully. ‘Suggested by Gide. Before Proust went to Gallimard.’

‘Nabokov,’ suggested Balfour.

‘Yeah, but that was just a book of love poems. When he was a schoolboy.’

‘Nevertheless. Philip Larkin. And of course James Joyce.’

Balfour was always doing this. Richard expected to learn that Shakespeare got his big break with a vanity press; that Homer responded to some ad whining for fresh dross. The Tantalus Press, it went without saying, was not a springboard to literary success. The Tantalus Press was a springboard to more of the same: to Another Gift from Genius. ‘Private’ publishing was not organized crime exactly, but it had close links with prostitution. The Tantalus Press was the brothel. Balfour was the madame. Richard helped the madame out. Their writers paid them to publish – or at any rate print – their trex. And a writer should be able to claim that he had never paid for it–never in his life.

‘What have you got?’ said Richard.

‘Second World War. It looks rather controversial.’

‘The myth of the six million?’

‘He goes further. He argues that the concentration camps were run by Jews and that the prisoners were all Aryan Germans.’

‘Come on, Balfour. You’re not taking that, are you?’

Had he been around for the Holocaust in which all four of his grandparents were enslaved and then murdered, Balfour would have been dead half-a-dozen times over. Pink triangle, yellow star: it would have been a complicated badge he wore, in his last days. Racially subhuman (Jewish), sexually perverted (homosexual), mentally unsound (schizophrenic), physically deformed (club-footed) and politically deviant (communist). He was also a vanity publisher; he was also entirely uncynical. Furthermore – and as it were disinterestedly –Cohen was a serious collector of anti-Semitic propaganda. Look at him. There never was a gentler face, Richard thought: the bald brown head, the warm brown eyes, the humour and humanity gathered in the creases beneath his all-forgiving orbits.

‘It’s not my business to question an author’s views or his findings.’

‘Findings? What findings? Oh, think how horrible he must be. It’s amazing,’ Richard offered, ‘the urge to get the Jews wrong. No one sends you stuff about, I don’t know, Stalin devoting his life to handicapped children. Or blacks putting white Alabamans to work in the cottonfields.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Anyway, don’t publish it. Destroy it unread.’

The office was comfortable, even tasteful, but diligently unluxurious (Balfour enjoyed saying, as an ordinary publisher would not enjoy saying, that his operation was non-profit-making), and you were allowed to smoke in it. A communist could hardly forbid smoking. As well as communists, sick people, the racially inferior – the unnecessary mouths, the life unworthy of life–the German state killed malingerers, trouble-makers, shirkers and grumblers. But not smokers. Richard might have faced the ultimate penalty for grumbling, but not for smoking. Hitler disapproved of smoking. Stalin didn’t, apparently. When the Russians were repatriating the wanderers of Europe, when the war was over, every itinerant under their care was granted an astonishingly – almost an unsmokably–generous allowance of tobacco: even children, even babies. Balfour paid Richard very generously for his one day a week.

‘I think we might have found a rather promising poet. Rather striking, for a first collection.’

‘Sling it over,’ said Richard.

Who was aware that if he worked here two days a week instead of one he would be finished, humanly, within a year. Braced at first by the Saharas and Gobis of talentlessness which hourly confronted him, Richard now knew this stuff for what it was. It wasn’t bad literature. It was anti-literature. Propaganda, aimed at the self. Richard’s novels might have been unreadable, but they were novels. Whereas the finished typescripts, print-outs and flabby exercise books that lay around him here just hadn’t made it out of some more primitive form: diary, dreamjournal, dialectic. As in a ward for the half-born, Richard heard these creatures’ cries, and felt their unviewable spasms, convulsed in an earlier version of being. They shouldn’t be looked at. They really shouldn’t be looked at.

Balfour said with infinite circumspection, ‘And how is your–how is your latest?’

‘Nearly done.’ And he didn’t go on to add – because he couldn’t see that far ahead, because men can’t see further than the next fight or fuck – that his latest might be his last. Not just couldn’t see: couldn’t look. That couldn’t be looked at either.

‘If for any reason you don’t find a home for it, I would of course be proud to publish it under the Tantalus imprint.’

Richard could see himself ending his days with Balfour. This presentiment was becoming more and more common–habitual, reflexive. Endings his days with Balfour, with Anstice, with J. C. Squires, that bus-conductress, that postman, that meter maid. Richard the haggard and neurotic ex-prettyboy, in an airless pool of batch or spinst, sparing and unpredictable with his sexual favours, vain, hideous and sullen, and very fussy about his China tea.

‘I know you would, Balfour.’

‘We could do it on subscription. Make a list. Starting with your friends.’

‘Thanks. Thanks. But it’s got to take its chances. It’s got to sink or swim.’

Sink or swim in what? In the universal.

In the octagonal library, seated in a French armchair, Gwyn Barry frowned down at the chessboard. Frowned down at it, as if some gangly photographer had just said, ‘Could you like frown down at it? Like you’re really concentrating?’ Actually there were no photographers present. Only Richard, who, seated opposite, and playing black, made a move, N (QB5)-K6 in the old notation, N(c4)-e5 in the new, and let his peripheral vision feast on the Sunday LAT, which lay on a nearby sofa in encouraging disarray. The room was tall and narrow, something of a miniature folly; it felt like the chamber of a beautiful gun or antique missile – the six facets of inlaid bookcases, and then the two facing windows, like blanks. Now Richard gave Gwyn’s hair an exasperated glance (so thick and pewtery–the hair of a palpable charlatan) before his eyes returned, in brief innocence, to the board. He was a pawn up.

‘Do you take the LAT?’ he said wonderingly.

Gwyn seemed to lose the tempo, or the opposition – he paused awkwardly before replying. Richard’s last move was of the kind that presents the adversary with a strictly local, and eventually soluble, problem. An adequate – a more than adequate – answer was available. Richard had seen it as his fingers retreated from the piece. Gwyn would see it, too, in time.

‘No,’ said Gwyn. ‘Some stupid bugger sent it to me.’

‘Why?’

‘With a note saying, “Something here to interest you.” No page-number, mind. No marks or anything. And look at it. It’s like a bloody knapsack.’

‘How ridiculous. Who was it?’ said Richard.

‘I don’t know. Signed “John”. Big help that is. I know loads of people called John.’

‘I always thought it must be quite handy being called John.’

‘Why?’

‘You can tell when you’re going nuts.’

Gwyn looked at him.

‘I mean, a real sign of megalomania, when a John starts thinking that “John” will do. “Hi. It’s John.” Or: “Yours ever John.” So what? Everybody’s called John.’

Gwyn found and made the best reply. The move was not just expedient; it had the accidental effect of clarifying White’s position. Richard nodded and shuddered to himself. He had forced Gwyn into making a good move: this seemed to happen more and more frequently, as if Richard was somehow out of time, as if Gwyn was playing in the new notation while Richard toiled along with the old.

‘It being LA,’ said Gwyn, ‘I thought there may be an item about the movie deal. On Stumbling.’

‘What “movie” deal?’

‘TCT are doing it.’

‘. . . Gwyn. That’s Welsh for John, isn’t it?’

‘No. Euan. That’s Welsh for John.’

‘Spelt?’

‘E, u, a, n.’

‘How perfectly disgusting,’ said Richard.

He looked down at the sixty-four squares – at this playing field of free intelligence. Oh yeah? So the intelligence was free, then, was it? Well it didn’t feel free. The chess set before them on the glass table happened to be the most beautiful that Richard had ever used, or ever seen. For some reason he had neglected to ask how Gwyn acquired it, and anxiously assumed it was an heirloom of Demi’s. For surely Gwyn, left to his own devices (his taste, and many thousands of pounds) would have come up with something rather different: in which the pieces consist of thirty-two more or less identical slabs of quartz/onyx/osmium; or else are wincingly florid and detailed–the Windsor castles, the knights with rearing forelegs and full horsebrass, the practically life-sized bishops with crooks and pointy hats and filigreed bibles. No. The set was in the austere measure, the chessmen delightfully solid and firmly moored on their felt (even the pawns were as heavy as revolvers), and the board of such proportion that you did indeed feel like a warrior prince on a hilltop, dispatching your riders with their scrolled messages, and pointing through the morning mist, telescope raised. And not a drop of blood being shed. That’s how the valley had looked two minutes ago: Field of the Cloth of Gold. Now it resembled some sanguinary disgrace from a disease-rich era, all pressed men, all rabble, the drunken cripples reeling, the lopped tramps twitching and retching in the ditch. Richard was now staring at what any reasonable player would recognize as a lost position. But he would not lose. He had never lost to Gwyn. He could go on smoking and drinking and failing and hating for decades yet, and never lose to Gwyn.

They exchanged knights.

‘So what happened? I suppose you could have just chucked the whole thing out . . . The LAT. What’s the matter with you?’

In formulating this last question Richard had slightly stressed the personal pronoun. For Gwyn was doing something that he did more and more often, these days, something that made Richard’s neck throb with sudden mumps of loathing. Gwyn was inspecting an object – in this case, the black knight – as if he had never seen it before. With infant wonder in his eyes. As a writer might. Richard really couldn’t sit there: opposite someone pretending to be innocent.

‘It’s a chess piece,’ said Richard. ‘It’s a knight. It’s made of wood. It looks like a horse.’

‘No,’ said Gwyn, placing the piece with his other captures, ‘I found it in the end.’

‘Found what?’

Gwyn looked up. ‘The thing about me. The thing that was meant to interest me in the LAT.’

Richard ducked back to the board.

‘My glance just fell on it. Luckily. I could have been slaving through that thing all bloody week.’

Demi was entering the room, or crossing it: the library lay between the two drawing-rooms. She moved past them with reverent stealth, actually tiptoeing for the central few strides, with knees naively raised. Big, blonde, unbohemian, unsatirical, but not quite the other thing either (unburnished, unrefined), Demi performed her tiptoe without ease and without talent. Like the not so natural parent, playing a children’s game. Richard thought of the flash accountant he had unnecessarily and temporarily hired, after the American sale of Aforethought: how, during the appointment at his place, he had made a show of jovially chasing his daughter from the room, with a jangle of keys and coins, with knees raised, past the modern first editions and the texts of tax . . . She paused at the far door.

‘Brrr,’ said Demi.

‘Hi, Demi.’

‘It’s not very warm in here.’

Gwyn turned her way, his eyes bulging uxoriously. To Richard he looked like a clairvoyant who, as a matter of policy, was keen to demystify his profession.

‘Why not put a cardy on, love.’

‘Brrr,’ said Demi.

Richard got his head down and, with infinite grief, started working to a different plan.

 

For the next ten days, with almost unprecedented clarity and focus, Richard worked hard: reading the LAT.

No, he didn’t get Gwyn’s copy off him (‘Are you finished with that?’), nor did he crouch each midnight by the Barry dustbins, waiting for the significant ten-gallon bag. He was of course prepared for such stratagems. Instead he went and bought another one, incurring the familiar inconvenience and expense, down in Blackfriars.

He knew the thing backwards by now anyway. But here it came again. Books, Arts, Entertainment. Real Estate, Appointments, Sports. Poise, Style, Flair. Where next? He read everything from the cookery column (egg and chips à la mode de Gwyn Barry?) to the crossword clues (Wry grab stumbles to NY? 4,5). Every ten or fifteen minutes with a bedraggled gesture he flung aside whatever section he happened to be busying himself with, convinced that he had been rumbled and finessed – that the LAT was innocently, was poutingly Gwyn-free. And the little Taff had pulled a flanker on him. But Richard persisted. During this period he reviewed no books: not a single slim volume, or tremulous novella, no quickie socio-cultural pamphlet, no brief life.

Late in the evening of the tenth day he found it. Page eleven, column three: the personals page, in Classified. It went like this:

‘Stephanie’. Pet Adoptions. Rottweiler 1 yr. Gentle girl.

Summertown. Wanted. First ed. of novel by G. Barry.

Swap-Meet Garage Yard Sale. All welc.

 

Photograph © Simon Norfolk