THE INFORMATION

twisted construct of embittered immortals. Richard walked on into the bowels of the building, past chained fire exits and beneath seeping ceilings, until the penultimate door, with a soft flap, like an internal valve, seemed to admit him and exclude all else, and there was the marked entrance-GENTS-at the bottom of the bending steps . .. He paused, listening. Only the eternal

toilet trickle, sharp and sour, like the rumors of its odors. Slowly he

leaned on the door. The room let him in and then closed again.

His first thought was that he, Richard, had disappeared. He faced an arrangement of toilet furniture (double rows of basins, double roller- Gwyn said, 'Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?'

'Than what?'

'My lady…'

'Don't,' said Demi.

'Ah, she's embarrassed! I love it when she blushes like that. Mmmm.' He hummed it, thoughtfully. 'Mmm. Let's not go to the pictures. Let's go home and make love. We go home. You go home. And make love.'

Richard said, 'It does you good-I already got the tickets-does you good every once in a while to come down from the palace and mingle with your people. As one of them. In disguise.' This sounded like, and was, a routinely bitter reference to Gwyn's new outfit, which he had already itemized to his listeners: russety suede jacket (Milan), brown Borsalino (Florence), dove-gray brogues (Siena). 'Get that down you. One more pint. Quick.'

'I've hardly got going on this.'

'Another half. Get it down you.'

'I'll spend the whole film in the lav.'

Yes. You might very well do that, thought Richard. As he helped Gina with her coat she whispered in his ear: 'I hate him.' And Richard frowned, and nodded and felt close to vindication . . .

During the first half hour in the dark, he found his mind very difficult to control. It didn't matter what the film was-who directed it, whether it was in Japanese or black and white. This had mattered earlier. The film needed to be the kind of film that Gwyn, ever obedient, if you remember, to the wanders and gambols of his maggot, was currently saying he liked. And it really was Gwyn's kind of thing: innocent, rural, questing. A sensitive historical piece about a group of intelligent and long-winded adolescents shifted out of London to Cumbria during the Blitz-it was almost a cinematic prequel to Amelior. Richard, if he had been watching it, would have found it excruciating. But he wasn't watching it. He wouldn't have been watching it even if it was the kind of film he liked: a billion-dollar bloodbath. He wasn't watching it. Seated between the two novelists, and without looking down ever, childishly, the women shared their popcorn.

Lone male figures seated in movie theaters have about them, Richard thought, a madman or mongoloid intensity of privacy. I mean what are they? Frowning cineasts? Tramps? Movie theaters were surely much too expensive, now, for tramps to come and stink up. Richard knew that when he was a tramp there would be a lot of things he needed a lot more than stinking up a movie theater. In a full house the identity of the audience would have undergone gravitational collapse, and become oneIt was Sunday and the boys boldly roamed the flat. Marius happened to be passing. He entered the room and came up close and carefully peered at his father's face.

'Ouch,' he said.

'Yeah yeah.'

Richard went next door and sat at the kitchen table with a half-thawed porkchop pressed to his right eye. By crossing this small distance he passed from the monitorship of Marius to that of Marco. Through two doorways and over the width of the thin passage Marco watched his father sitting there, in shirtsleeves and plum bow tie, but still wearing his fuzzy checked slippers. As so often Marco wanted to ask, in pleading wonderment, why Richard's slippers, unlike his own, spurned the opportunity of sporting an attractive likeness of some kiddie-book character or TV superhero-or just an animal. Nor was Daddy taking the obvious and rewarding course of reading the back of the cereal packet .. . Ember-lidded, his hair sparsely stirring and twitching in the cold breeze from the open window, Richard sat there in full realism: healing himself. But to Marco (gazing now, if you remember, with his one good eye) Richard seemed to resemble a figure in a cartoon: he had about him the faint deep buzz of electricity. If he walked off a ledge or a cliff he could get back again so long as he turned promptly and whirled his legs; if someone hit him on the head with a hammer he would grow a pointy red bump but it would soon go down again. Marco was of course wrong about all this: in both of his scenarios Daddy would have died instantly of shock. He was right, though, about the electricity. The time Richard struck Marco across the head with the flat of his hand, the time when it all started to happen-when Gwyn's book danced on the best-seller list (his career-speed reaching escape velocity), and Richard danced, and jolted-it was as if an electric cable ran from Holland Park to Calchalk Street, bringing electric pain from one man to the other.

Illness, summer days spent at home, younger-brotherdom and a consciousness that just by being who he was he caused anxiety and exasperation-and desperate fatigue-in his parents (he understood, even when times were very bad, that it was not him they hated but the things inside that made him cough and smolder and effloresce, and cry at night after dreams had left him inconsolable; he -was inconsolable; he could not be consoled): all this had made Marco more vigilant, more sensibly watchful, than a six-year-old would normally have need or reason to be. Adults

were not other to him. Not remote and massively autonomous and alive only insofar as they maintained his domes of pain and pleasure. He knew that adults, too, were small, and pushed and tugged by many forces.

towels on the walls, double striplights above) so symmetrical that intuition demanded that a mirror stood at its center. But there was no mirror: only two of everything, opposed to a counterpart. Richard squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. No mirror, so no reflection; and he was a vampire, momentarily, denied its natural simulacrum, and fearing death by running water. Palpably, the Coronet toilet was the scene of a very recent gastric catastrophe: but it was the scene of nothing else. He moved sideways and quickly bent to look under the saloon doors of the cubicles: no quivering flounce of brown corduroy, no tortured dove-gray brogues. Richard was disappointed and Richard was relieved. He moved toward the urinal and was bending forward and breathing in (searching for purchase on his zipper toggle) when a voice said, 'Nice smell in here.'

And Richard's mind, which was always looking for pain, had time to feel hurt at this, had time to take this personally, as a sarcastic reference to himself. To himself, and not to the incredible smell of shit everywhere. He turned.

'Wait,' he said. 'This isn't me.'

'I just wandered out. Get some fresh air. I told Demi. Didn't you notice I was carrying my hat? Between you and I I went back to the Slug for a quiet pint.'

'Between you and me. Not a quiet Campari and soda?'

'I had a pint.'

'What was the matter with the film?'

'It was getting on my wick, all that stuff about the barn. And the cows. The way they all kept on banging on.'

'You're supposed to like all that. Fields. No sex. Civic-minded discussion. Nothing happening.'

Outside the study window the clematis was tinged with yellow and gold-autumn, and Richard's cigarettes. He often smoked with his head on the block of the windowsill, facing skyward, to spare Marco's lungs. Out there, birds still fluttered and agitated, and they sang. The uncoil-ings, the slipping twists of sound. Say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were