THE INFORMATION

Richard went downstairs in his shorts. He felt cold and it looked like rain. 'Go for it Daddy,' said Marius. 'Just do it.'

He stood outside waiting for the biker sent to collect his review. Who was prompt. Here he came, complacently speeding through the torment of his brutish raspberry, his black body cocked with the biker's spurious urgency, as if what he was doing was so clearly more important than what you were doing. Was it his crash helmet that went on fizzing and squawking at him, like a fat old earphone? Biker and book reviewer bawled 'Cheers' at each other and did the thing with the clipboard and the ballpoint, these two eyesore deviants, the biker in his city scuba gear, thebook reviewer with bare legs beneath the cold skirt of his raincoat. Book reviewers would be around for a while, but bikers would soon be gone, or would all switch to pizzas and baked potatoes-casualties of the fax.

At the Warlock Sports Center he parked the dusty Maestro next to Gwyn's new Swedish sedan, which was still gulping and chirruping, Richard noticed, as its computer ticked off the final security checks. Then, abruptly without intelligence, the car seemed to settle back into its silent, sullen crouch, and its sullen vigil. Leaving the Maestro unlocked (it contained nothing but banana skins and the fading carbons of dead novels), Richard strode through the car park and its exemplary diversity of stilled traffic, like an illustration of all you might meet on the contemporary road with its contraflow and intercool: hearse, heap, dragster, dump truck, duchess-wagon, cripple-bubble. He duly sighted Gwyn, strolling, with slowly swinging sports bag, along the brink of the bowling green, where sainted figures in white shirts and white hair archaically bent and straightened on the shallow yellow lawn. The protective affection that a nice person is expected to feel when observing another nice person who is innocent of this scrutiny-such affection, Richard found, was not absent in the present case so much as inverted or curdled: his face was all glints and snickers, and he felt briefly godlike, and exhaustingly ever- hostile. Just then, over the black slope of the tudoresque clubhouse, a loose flock of city birds reared up like a join-the-dots puzzle of a human face or fist . . . The gap between the two men closed. Richard broke into an ankle-lancing trot and was no more than a racket's reach from Gwyn's shoulders when, with a blat of the side door, they exchanged the late-summer air for the dense breath of the clubhouse.

All men are faced with this. But wait… First we have to get past the hatch of the booking office and the sexual indifference of the pretty girl who worked there, then the notice boards with their leagues and ladders (dotted with multicolored drawing-pins and one dying, throbbing wasp), then the aggressive levity of the Warlock manager, John Punt. 'Gwyn,' said Richard, as they stepped on into the clubhouse proper and the greater bar. And? There it lay: the pub of life. Eighty or ninety souls, in knots and echelons; and here came the familiar moment, a dip in the sound, a gulp, a swallow and a selection of profiles turning full face, as if on a rap sheet. All men are eternally confronted by this: other men, in blocs and sets. Equipped with an act, all men are confronted by an audience which might cheer or jeer or stay silent or yawn rancorously or just walk out-their verdict on your life performance. As Richard remembered, he and Gwyn used to be equally unpopular here at the Warlock,never directly addressed, quietly sneered at. As Gwyn, with his pewtery hair, his body as tall as his sports bag was long, moved past the low tables to the tag board there were cries and croaks of greeting, of 'Still scribbling?' and 'Sold a million yet?' The acceptance world. As if Gwyn was suddenly visible now, adjudged not to have been wasting his time; TV had democratized him, and made him available for transference to the masses; the life performance was seen to be worthy of sagacious applause. Whereas Richard, as a figure, was still entirely alien. For one thing, nobody could bear his habit, while on court, of shouting shit in French.

'I won't be much good to you today,' said Gwyn (they had ten minutes to kill). 'What with this Profundity thing.'

'What with this what?'

'Profundity thing. Haven't you heard about it? It's a literary stipend, awarded every year. Administered out of Boston. Called a Profundity Requital.'

'Don't tell me,' said Richard cautiously. 'Some loo-paper heiress. Looking for a tony way of dodging tax.'

'Far from it. They're already calling it the mini-Nobel. The money's ridiculous. And you get it every year. For life.'

'And?'

'I'm told I'm on the shortlist.'

John Punt, his face scalded and broad-pored from the sun-ray lamp, often referred to the Warlock as a dinosaur. By which he meant: no Jacuzzis, no parasols, no quiche counter, no broccoli juice. Instead: unhealthy fare served all day long, smoking allowed and even encouraged, continuous and competitive drinking and strict non-exclusivity. Anyone could join the Warlock, cheaply and right away. Within the outer bar was an inner bar, an antiworld where many men and few women sat in arcs staring at hands of cards or kwik crosswords or architect's drawings or lawyers' briefs or escape routes, where bankruptcies and bereavements were entrained by a twingeing shake or nod of some great ruined head, and where, at this moment, behind a mephitic banquette of cigarette smoke, his back turned, Steve Cousins sat talking the higher shop with three bronzed pocked mug shots: the most exalted vil-lainspeak (no detail, just first principles) about getting back what you put in and this being life and this being it . . . Gwyn and Richard stood between the two arenas, in a latticed passage that was also an amusement arcade: golf video, Bingomatic, Poker Draw, and, of course, the Knowledge Machine. Instead of a jukebox there stood a black upright piano on which, after lunch, drowsy criminals would occasionally interpret sometremulous ballad. The clubhouse acoustics had a funny tilt to them; voices sounded warped or one-way, as many mouths nuzzled the necks of cellular telephones; many an ear was plugged with Walkman or hearing aid, nursing its individual tinnitus.

'A Profundity Requital,' said Richard pensively. 'Well. We know one thing.'

'What's that?'

'You're not going to get it.'

Gwyn, who was wrong, flexed his forehead and said, 'A million people can't be wrong.'

Richard, who was also wrong, said, 'A million people are always wrong. Let's play.'

Anyone who shared the common belief that the decline of British tennis was a result of the game's bourgeois, garden-party associations would have felt generally braced and corrected, at the Warlock Sports Center, to hear the ragged snarls and howls, the piercing obscenities and barbaric phonemes which made the wired courts seem like cages housing slaves or articulate animals in permanent mutiny against their confinement, their lash-counts, their lousy food. On the other hand, anyone watching Gwyn and Richard as they prepared to play would at once agree that Richard's clear superiority owed everything to being middle class. Gwyn was encased in a new track suit that looked as though it had been designed and marketed that morning; its salient feature was a steadily contoured bagginess, a spacesuit or wind-bubble effect, reminding Richard of the twins' salopetts and the padded boiler beneath the stairs. Richard himself, more subtly, and more horribly, for once, in a way, was dressed in wrinkly khaki shorts and, crucially, an off-white top-which was old, which wasn't modern, which glowed with its prewar sour-milk light (numb and humble now, against the burnished ease of the T-shirt), the light of longjohn seams, old surgical tape, old field hospitals, old triage. Even his shoes were intolerably antique: beige, canvas, intended to enfold the thoughtless trudge of explorer or humorless imperialist. You expected him to carry a wooden racket in a wooden press and a plastic shagbag full of bald balls pried free from the under-gardener's lawnmower.

Through the window of one of the Warlock's games rooms (not in use at present: after six it became a grot of darts) Steve Cousins watched the two novelists begin their game and wondered what they'd be like at his sport. In other words he was wondering what they'd be like at fighting- or, even more simply, what they'd be like to beat up. This involved him in pseudo-sexual considerations, because, yes, the truism is true, andfighting is like fucking (proximity alone sees to that, plus various texture tests and heft assessments you wouldn't otherwise be making); and, while we're at it, the truism is true, and the criminal is like an artist (though not for the reasons usually given, which merely depend on immaturity and the condition of self-employment): the criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-