Heavy Water and Other Stories

He signed it and sealed it. He stalked out and posted it. On his return he haughtily threw off his drenched clothes. The single bed felt enormous, like an orgiast’s fourposter. He curled up tight and slept better than he had done all year.

So it was a quietly defiant Alistair who the next morning came plodding down the stairs and glanced at the splayed mail on the shelf as he headed for the door. He recognized the envelope as a lover would. He bent low as he opened it.

Do please forgive this very tardy reply. Profound apologies. But allow me to move straight on to a verdict on your work. I won’t bore you with all my personal and professional distractions.

Bore me? thought Alistair, as his hand sought his heart.

I think I can at once give the assurance that your screenplays are unusually promising. No: that promise has already been honored. They have both feeling and burnish.

I will content myself, for now, by taking Offensive from Quasar 13. (Allow me to muse a little longer on Decimator.)

I have one or two very minor emendations to suggest. Why not telephone me here to arrange a chat?

Thank you for your generous remarks about my own work. Increasingly I find that this kind of exchange—this candor, this reciprocity—is one of the things that keep me trundling along. Your words helped sustain my defenses in the aftermath of Matthew Sura’s vicious and slovenly attack, from which, I fear, I am still rather reeling. Take excellent care.

“Go with the lyric,” said Jim.

“Or how about a ballad?” said Jeff.

Jack was swayable. “Ballads are big,” he allowed.

It seemed to Luke, toward the end of the second day, that he was winning the sonnet battle. The clue lay in the flavor of Joe’s taciturnity: torpid but unmorose.

“Let’s face it,” said Jeff. “Sonnets are essentially hieratic. They’re strictly period. They answer to a formalized consciousness. Today, we’re talking consciousnesses that are in search of form.”

“Plus,” said Jack, “the lyric has always been the natural medium for the untrammeled expression of feeling.”

“Yeah,” said Jeff. “With the sonnet you’re stuck in this thesis-antithesis-synthesis routine.”

Joan said, “I mean what are we doing here? Reflecting the world or illuminating it?”

It was time for Joe to speak. “Please,” he said. “Are we forgetting that ‘ ’Tis’ was a sonnet, before the rewrites? Were we on coke when we said, in the summer, that we were going to go for the sonnet?”

The answer to Joe’s last question, incidentally, was yes; but Luke looked carefully round the room. The Chinese lunch they’d had the secretary phone out for lay on the coffee table like a child’s experiments with putty and paint and designer ooze. It was four o’clock and Luke wanted to get away soon. To swim and lie in the sun. To make himself especially lean and bronzed for his meeting with the young actress Henna Mickiewicz. He faked a yawn.

“Luke’s lagged,” said Joe. “Tomorrow we’ll talk some more, but I’m pretty sure I’m recommitted to the sonnet.”

“Sorry,” said Alistair. “Me yet again. Sorry.”

“Oh yes,” said the woman’s voice. “He was here a minute ago.… No, he’s there. He’s there. Just a second.”

Alistair jerked the receiver away from his ear and stared at it. He started listening again. It seemed as if the phone itself were in paroxysm, all squawk and splat like a cabby’s radio. Then the fit passed, or paused, and a voice said tightly but proudly, “Hugh Sixsmith?”

It took Alistair a little while to explain who he was. Sixsmith sounded surprised but, on the whole, rather intrigued to hear from him. They moved on smoothly enough to arrange a meeting (after work, the following Monday), before Alistair contrived to put in: “Mr. Sixsmith, there’s just one thing. This is very embarrassing, but last night I got into a bit of a state about not hearing from you for so long and I’m afraid I sent you a completely mad letter which I…” Alistair waited. “Oh, you know how it is. For these screenplays, you know, you reach into yourself, and then time goes by and…”

“My dear boy, don’t say another word. I’ll ignore it. I’ll throw it away. After a line or two I shall simply avert my unpained eye,” said Sixsmith, and started coughing again.

Hazel did not come down to London for the weekend. Alistair did not go up to Leeds for the weekend. He spent the time thinking about that place in Earls Court Square where screenplay writers read from their screenplays and drank biting Spanish red wine and got stared at by tousled girls who wore thick overcoats and no makeup and blinked incessantly or not at all.

Luke parked his Chevrolet Celebrity on the fifth floor of the studio car park and rode down in the elevator with two minor executives in tracksuits who were discussing the latest records broken by “’Tis he whose yester- evening’s high disdain.” He put on his dark glasses as he crossed the other car park, the one reserved for major executives. Each bay had a name on it. It reassured Luke to see Joe’s name there, partly obscured by his Range Rover. Poets, of course, seldom had that kind of clout. Or any clout at all. He was glad that Henna Mickiewicz didn’t seem to realize this.

Joe’s office: Jim, Jack, Joan, but no Jeff. Two new guys were there. Luke was introduced to the two new guys. Ron said he spoke for Don when he told Luke that he was a great admirer of his material. Huddled over the coffee percolator with Joe, Luke asked after Jeff, and Joe said, “Jeff’s off the poem,” and Luke just nodded.

They settled in their low armchairs.

Luke said, “What’s ‘A Welshman to Any Tourist’ doing?”

Don said, “It’s doing good but not great.”

Ron said, “It won’t do what ‘The Gap in the Hedge’ did.”

Jim said, “What did ‘Hedge’ do?”

They talked about what “Hedge” did. Then Joe said, “Okay. We’re going with the sonnet. Now. Don has a problem with the octet’s first quatrain, Ron has a problem with the second quatrain, Jack and Jim have a problem with the first quatrain of the sestet, and I think we all have a problem with the final couplet.”

Alistair presented himself at the offices of the LM in an unblinking trance of punctuality. He had been in the area for hours, and had spent about fifteen quid on teas and coffees. There wasn’t much welcome to overstay in the various snack bars where he lingered (and where he moreover imagined himself unfavorably recollected from his previous LM vigils), holding with both hands the creaky foam container, and watching the light pour past the office windows.

As Big Ben struck two, Alistair mounted the stairs. He took a breath so deep that he almost fell over backwards—and then knocked. An elderly office boy wordlessly showed him into a narrow, rubbish-heaped office that contained, with difficulty, seven people. At first Alistair took them for other screenplay writers and wedged himself behind the door, at the back of the queue. But they didn’t look like screenplay writers. Not much was said over the next four hours, and the identities of Sixsmith’s supplicants emerged only partially and piecemeal. One or two, like his solicitor and his second wife’s psychiatrist, took their leave after no more than ninety minutes. Others, like the VAT man and the probation officer, stayed almost as long as Alistair. But by six forty-five he was alone.

He approached the impossible haystack of Sixsmith’s desk. Very hurriedly he started searching through the unopened mail. It was in Alistair’s mind that he might locate and intercept his own letter. But all the envelopes, of which there were a great many, proved to be brown, windowed, and registered. Turning to leave, he saw a Jiffy bag of formidable bulk addressed to himself in Sixsmith’s tremulous hand. There seemed no reason not to take it. The