THE INFORMATION

source of the seal-house or dolphinarium sound effects (the hooting and squealing, the egregious belly-flops) which issued from the half-landing toilet. It was his ballet critic: Cosmo. Then he entered the literary department. His secretary came forward and helped him off with his mack.

'Thank you. Well, Anstice?'

Anstice, with her head dipped, told him what he needed to be told. He didn't need to be told about the opera critic or the ballet critic-or the radio critic, who stood nearby with his head out the window, rubbing his eyes and panting rhythmically, or the art critic who sat at the books table weeping into his drenched hands. Richard asked about the film critic, who, very ominously, had slipped out some hours ago for a packet of cigarettes. But he was pleased to hear that the theater critic, who was writing the lead review that fortnight, was emplaced in his usual nook farther up the stairs. Very shortly Richard went to see how he was doing. There Bruno sat at his little table, his bearded face immersed, as usual, in his typewriter keys. Richard reached out for a firm handful of his crackling hair, and tugged: thus he saw that Bruno, before losing consciousness, had very nearly completed the first word of his piece. What he had written, so far, was 'Chehko.' And Richard happened to know that Bruno's subject that fortnight was a new production of The Three Sisters. He regained the literary department in time to see the film critic mount the stairs in such a fury of dissimulated torpor that he would surely have hurled himself into the far wall beyond Anstice's desk. But the kneeling figure of the ballet critic was there to check his stride. Richard stepped over them and went to the editor's office on the floor above, which he always hid in when the editor wasn't hiding in it.

What he wanted to know was this. Why had he received no word from Gal Aplanalp? Why wasn't the telephone bouncing on its cradle? Where was the long, favorable and riveted critique of Untitled? And how high were Steve Cousins's rates? Richard wondered what was stopping him from just going ahead and ringing Gal Aplanalp. Pride, he sup-posed; and a sense of his own artistic worth. So he lit a cigarette and went ahead and called Gal Aplanalp.

'It's all going forward,' she said. 'In fact it's placed.'

She was referring, of course, not to his novel but to his projected five thousand-word profile of Gwyn Barry, which had inspired broad and competitive interest. Gal named a sum of money which exactly corresponded to Richard's annual salary at The Little Magazine. After a silence he said,

'What about my book?'

'I know. I've cleared the weekend for it. I'm taking it home tonight. Gwyn says it's remarkable.'

'Gwyn hasn't read it.'

'Oh,' said Gal Aplanalp.

Having said good-bye and hung up, Richard managed to apply himself to some constructive work. Ringing round various publishers, he identified and called in three books for review. One was by Lucy Cabretti. One was by Elsa Oughton. One was by Professor Stanwyck Mills. These authors, we might remember, were the judges of the Profundity Requital. Ringing round various contributors, Richard then entrained three favorable notices. We must trust him on this. He had his reasons. Richard was about to get up and go and find her when Anstice slowly put her head round the door. Her face blinked at him.

'Is there anything I should be worrying about, Anstice?'

'Oh no. I expect we shall soldier through.'

'Cosmo seems much improved. So does Hugo.'

'You know, I really respect Hugo for the way he's getting to grips with it. No, it's Theo.'

'Oh?'

By a long-established anomaly, the last page of the books (it was the batched fiction review) was put to bed on the same day as the arts. Now you expected no trouble whatever on the batched fiction review. It was The Little Magazine's plum job, often squabbled and feebly brawled over: he who wrote the batched fiction review ended up with perhaps a dozen new hardbacks to sell to the man in Chancery Lane. Richard wanted to write the batched fiction review. Even the editor wanted to write it.

Anstice said, 'He wants to know if he can fax it in.'

'He hasn't got a fax. We haven't got a fax.'

'That's what I told him.'

'Well tell him to get out of bed and get dressed and get on the bus and bring it in. Like he always does.'

'He sounded a bit…?

'No doubt he did.' Richard told her that if she could bear it-and if indeed Theo had written it-she should simply phone him up and have him slur it in. Before she went he said, 'How are you?'

'Pretty well, really. For a ruined woman. One roughly used and then cast aside. R. C. Squires was in here.'

'How horrible. Is he coming back?'

'I don't know. Will I be seeing you later?'

'Of course, Anstice,' he said.

She left. She left slowly, her presence reluctantly receding from him. When it was there no longer his head dropped suddenly like a weight. It hung, at right angles to the sheen of his paisley waistcoat. Having dropped about forty-five degrees … Which is a lot, on some scales, by some reckonings. For example, Barnard's Star, as it is called, crosses 10.3 seconds of arc per year. This is a quarter of the Jupiter pinpoint-about a sixth of a degree: per year. Yet no other heavenly body shows so great a proper motion. This is why it is called the Runaway Star … And just by dropping his head like that Richard was changing his temporal relationship with the quasars by thousands and thousands of years. He really was. Because the quasars are so far away and getting farther away so fast. This is to put Richard's difficulties in context. The context of the universe.

Eleven hours later he was emplaced with Anstice in the Book and Bible. The paper had been put to bed. To put to bed was what you did with children-whereas grownups took each other there.

Crooned at and lullabied, given snacks and glasses of water, its fears assuaged, The Little Magazine had been put to bed. Bruno, the theater critic, had finished his major piece on The Three Sisters. Unfortunately it proved to be only thirty words long. The opera critic, Hugo, had failed to write anything at all, despite spending the afternoon in a sinkful of iced water and despite engaging, with Anstice, in a program of deep-breathing exercises which reminded Richard of the classes he had attended with Gina: the adults sitting around on the floor and gazing up at teacher like the children they would shortly bear. Otto, the radio critic, finished his piece and then tore it up and threw it out the window. Several heads slewed round, at first in dismay and then in hard suspicion, when Inigo, the film critic, said through his tears that he was betraying his poetry by writing for money. You mean someone around here was getting money'? Towards dusk it looked for a while as though Richard and Anstice would be faced with another Black Friday. This was the occasion on which all seven arts writers-grouped about the place in varying postures of weary contemplation-had produced not a syllable betweenthem. And Richard had hurled together a ragged quilt of house ads, overmatter, crosswords and killed chess columns.

'Inigo was amazing,' said Anstice, finishing her white wine.

'Inigo was incredible,' said Richard, finishing his scotch.

Inigo was also lying on the carpet at their feet. A man of great and curdled abilities, as they all were, kind of, Inigo had written 7,500 largely coherent words about a Bulgarian cartoon-the only thing he had seen, or remembered seeing, over the past two weeks.

Piously Anstice dipped her head. Richard stared, as he often stared, at the center-parting of her hair. Here, it seemed, two opposing forces met and with bristling difficulty contended. Oh dear, oh my: those people you see on streetcorners, when their hair is not just bad but wrong, too obviously comprising individual and uncoordinated strands, not just curled but bent, twisty, and propagating at all the wrong