THE INFORMATION

he makes has to be functional. It has to be honest.' Q: 'Do you actually do any carpentry or work with your hands?' 'Yes. I have a kind of workshop area where I potter about. I find it very therapeutic.'

The next time Richard saw him (this was some months ago), Richard said, 'What's all this bullshit about you and carpentry? Do you do any carpentry?'

'No,' said Gwyn.

'It's a worthless metaphor for writing anyway. They have nothing in common.'

'Sounds good, though. It makes writing more accessible to people who work with their hands.'

'Why do you want to make writing more accessible to people who work with their hands?'

A couple of weeks later Gwyn took Richard down to his basement to show him how the wine cellar was coming along. Richard noticed a workbench under the stairs. There was a vise, a plane, a saw, even a spirit level. There were also several blocks of wood which someone had perfunctorily savaged with chisel and mallet. 'So you do do carpentry.'

'No. I just got worried that some interviewer might ask to see the place where I did carpentry. Look. I even bought this handmade stool so I could say I made it.?

'Good thinking.' 'I even cut my hand.' 'How? Doing carpentry?'

'No. Messing around with that chisel to make it look like I did carpentry.'

'Fucking up that chair to make it look like you made it.' 'Exactly.'

It was midnight. Richard sloped out of his study and went to the kitchen in search of something 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. Gina was not a large woman, but the mass of her presence was dramatically augmented by the lateness of the hour. And by marriage, and by other things. He looked at her with his infidel's eyes. Her oxblood hair was up and back; her face was moist with half-assimilated night cream; her towel dressing gown revealed a triangle of bath-rouged throat. With abrupt panic Richard realized what had happened to her, what she had done: Gina had become a grownup. And Richard hadn't. Following the pattern of his generation (or its bohemian wing), Richard was going to go on looking the same until he died. Looking worse and worse, of course, but looking the same. Was it the kids, was it the job, was it the lover she must surely have by now (in her shoes, in her marriage-if Richard was married to Richard, he'd have one)? He couldn't object on grounds of ethics or equity. Because writing is infidelity. Because all writing is infidelity. She still looked good, she still looked sexual, she even still looked (you had to hand it to her) … dirty. But Gina had made a definite move toward the other side.

'I was thinking we might have a progress report,' she said. 'It's been a year.'

'What has?'

'To the day.' She looked at her watch. 'To the hour.'

Relief and recognition came together: 'Oh yeah.' He had thought this might have something to do with their marriage. 'I got you,' he said.

He remembered. A close and polluted summer night, crying out for thunder, just like this one. A late emergence from his study in search of drink, just like this one. A dressing-gowned and surprise-value manifestation from Gina, just like this one. There were probably one or two differences. The kitchen might have felt a little brighter. There might have

been more toys about. Gina might have looked a day or two younger, back then, and definitely un-grown-up. And Richard might have looked a bit less like shit than he looked now.

That time, a year ago, he had had a very bad week: the debut of Gwyn Barry in the bestseller list; the striking of Marco; Anstice; and something else.

This time he had had a very bad year.

'I remember.'

He remembered. A year ago to the hour, and Gina saying, 'How many hours a day do you spend on your novels?' 'What? Spend?' said Richard, who had his whole head in the drinks cupboard. 'I don't know. Varies.'

'You usually do it first thing, don't you. Except Sundays. How many hours, on average? Two? 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 actual experience 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 your life.' He sat down. Richard wanted to take this sitting down. The calculation didn't occupy him for 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 slid and softly 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 pee 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?' He 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 precis 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.

'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, whose density impressed him. There were surf sounds in his ear. 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. In his room across the hall, 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 Fanny Burney. Richard had to write two thousand 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 wow-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 Little Magazine.'

'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 honors board: Eric Henley, R. C. Squires, B. F. Mayhew, Roland Davenport. They all wrote the middles. Richard lull. Surely you remember R. C. Squires's controversial attack on