THE INFORMATION

three-quarters profile and said, 'Oh. You know. Thinking about things. The new book. And what it might be like. Not being a writer …' Yeah, it would be tough, not being a writer. He wouldn't be able to spin Gina any more lines like that one …

In the octagonal library, seated on 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 Los Angeles Times, 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, so uniform, so accurately barbered-the hair of a video vicar) before his eyes returned, in brief innocence, to the board. He was a pawn up.

'Do you take the Los Angeles Times?' 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-response 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?'

'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.'

'Sorry? I don't follow.?

'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 in the old.

Richard said, '… Gwyn. That's Welsh for John, isn't it?'

'No. Euan. That's Welsh for John.'

'Spelt?'

'E,u,a,n.'

'How definitively base,' 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 consisted of thirty-two more or less identical slabs of quartz/onyx/osmium; or else were wincingly florid and detailed-the Windsor castles, the knights with rearing forelegs and full horse-brass, the practically life-sized bishops with crooks and pointy hats and filigreed Bibles. No. The set was in the austere Staunton measure, the chessmen delightfully solid and firmly moored on their felt (even the pawns were as heavy as Derringers), 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. It used to be that Richard was better at everything: chess, snooker, tennis, but also ait, love, even money. How casually Richard would pick up the check, sometimes, at Burger King. How thoroughly, and with how many spare magnitudes, did Gina outshine Gilda. How good Dreams Don't Mean Anything had looked, in hard covers, when placed beside the weakly glowing wallet of Gwyn's crib-notes to The Maunciple's Tale . . . They exchanged knights.

'So what did you do? I suppose you could have just chucked the whole thing out… The Los Angeles Times. What's the matter with you?'

In formulating this last question Richard had lightly stressed the personal pronoun. For Gwyn was doing something he did more and more often these days, something that brimmed Richard's neck with mumps of hatred. Gwyn was inspecting an object-in the present case, the black knight-as if he had never seen it before. With infant wonder in his widened eyes. Richard really couldn't sit there: opposite somebody pretending to be innocent. Maybe Gwyn had got hold of some novel, by a woman, about a poet, and thought that this was how dreamers and seekers were meant to behave. Another possible explanation was what Richard called the Maggot Theory. According to the Maggot Theory, Gwyn had a maggot in his brain, and every frown, every pout, every pose was directly attributable to the maggot's meanderings and its maulings and above all its meals. Watching Gwyn now, Richard felt the Maggot Theory gaining ground.

'It's a chessman,' said Richard. 'It's a knight. It's black. It's made of wood. It looks like a horse.'

'No,' said Gwyn dreamily, placing the piece with his other captures, 'I found the thing in the end.'

'Found what?'

Gwyn looked up. 'The thing about me. The thing that was meant to interest me in the L.A. Times.'

Richard ducked back to the board.

'My glance just fell on it. Luckily. Look at it. I could have been slaving through that thing all bloody week.'

'Now this calls for some serious thought,' said Richard in a higher and frailer register. 'Around from the king side,' he said. Behind him a door opened. 'And see what we can find,' he continued, 'on the queen side.'

Demi was entering, or crossing: 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, blond, unsatir-ical, 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 very 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, withjangle of keys and coins, with knees raised, past the modern first editions and the texts of tax . . . Demi paused at the far door.

'Brrr,' she said.

'Hi Demi.'

'It's not very warm in here.'

Gwyn turned her way, his eyes bulging uxoriously. To Richard he looked like a