THE INFORMATION

He said, 'Leave it out is it.'

Lizzete was 14, 13 knew. 14 at the oldest. As always when he was with her 1- on-l, 13 was struggling to keep his relationship with Lizzete on a professional footing. He still had his shirt and his sateen wind-cheater on-but his trousers were down there. Lizzete had taken her pants off. She had even taken her chewing gum out. And stuck it on the speedo . .. Professional footing. Pleasure doing business with her. For example, he set Lizzete to knock on doors. Anyone home at that number: 'You have a girl called Mina living here? … Sorry to bother!' Worked well. Don't want to be going in there blind. Don't want to be doing a creeper. Tiptoe is it. Anything comes down and you have to give someone a tap: Aggravated. Statutory: you're 4-walling it for 3 years. End of story. 3 years: 24-7, 24-7. Jesus: 60-60, 24-7, 52, 52, 52. Time I come out, Lizzete be 17. No worries. Take her down the Paradox.

'Here you are,' said Lizzete, though it sounded like 'eeh-ah' or 'E-R.'

'Yat,' said 13. 'Ooh intense.'

He had a white man in his head. At this sexual moment, his head had a white man in it: Scozzy. Who'd said he'd be out straightaway or might be some time. Covertly 13 peered over Lizzete's shoulder: Giro's body was gathered steeply in sleep, like an ancient hassock. (His other mode was all floppy and invertebrate, like a vast dog omelette or even a huntsman's rug made from his own coat.) So, yeah, they could slide in there easy, between the dog and the gardening tools, which 13 was selling on. Ten minutes. If Minder came out he could hide her behind Giro. Bung a blanket on her. Still, you didn't want to be taking it too far with a 14-year-old that wanted to get pregnant. 13 knew that Lizzete was jealous of her 15- year-old sister Patrice, who was pregnant and no mistake. Who was out here. They thought it got them council flats, having a youth, but it didn't, not anymore. They wouldn't listen. Tories or whatever. Her mum'd kill him.

ist, subliminally trained to reveal character through action, duly contorts his narrative to provide cute walk-ons for the next spoonerism, mala-propism, pleonasm. Better, in my view, just to make a list.

So Demi said 'vicious snowball' and 'quicksand wit' and 'up gum street'; she said 'worried stiff' and 'beyond contempt' (though not 'beneath belief); she said 'on its death legs' and 'hubbub of activity' and 'what's with it with her?' and 'tell him no flat out'; she said 'none of my luck' and 'when it comes down to the crunch'; she said 'grease-boat' (as opposed, presumably, to 'dreamball'); she said 'he lost his top' and 'she blew her rag'; she said 'he coughed up' (he confessed) and 'she fluffed it' (she killed herself). Once, just once, she murmured, 'Sorry. I was talking aloud.' Demi also pronounced her rs as ids, but I don't think I'm even going to begin to attempt that.

I said at the outset that Demeter, like Gina, had no connection with literature other than marriage to one of its supposed practitioners. This isn't quite true. This is never quite true. We all have our connections with literature, wittingly or not so wittingly. How else do we explain the intensity of Richard's interest? Everybody knew that he was going down to Byland Court to spend the weekend with Lady Demeter. His wife knew; her husband knew; the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet knew. But nobody knew how Demi filled his mind, sometimes-how he burned across town at her.

If you could gather together all a man's past lovers (the lovers of a modern midlifer, averagely promiscuous) and line them up in chronological order, as in a catalogue raisonne, as in the long passage of a gallery or museum: for the retrospective . . . You would begin with shocking diversity, with the wide-sweep eclectic. Moving along the line the viewer's eye would jump up, down, start back, all heights, all weights, all colorings. Then after a while a pattern would establish itself; the repetition of certain themes would eventually situate you in one genre or another, until you came to the last woman in the show, the crystallized: and that's your wife. So things had gone, more or less, with Richard. The arrow of obsession pointed to Gina. All the girls, all the women, got bendier and coilier and craftier-until you came to Gina. Her eyes, her mouth, the turn of her waist: these were his Collected Poems. Whereas members of the subgenre that Demi roamed, the big round baby-powder blondes, were never numerous and petered out a long way back down the line. Though he had been awfully pleased to see them at the time. Richard was forty. He paid many visits to this passage. His life was this passage. The world was this passage.

because she is a pretty blonde (with a full bosom) who is related to the Queen, nor yet because she kept various ponies and was addicted to cocaine and heroin and slept with one or two black men. In the Queen's extended family, being a junkie, like keeping a pony, is standard stuff: the landscaped grounds of the higher-priced detox clinics are like lawn parties at Sandringham. Sleeping with black men, on the other hand, shows us Demi's more adventurous side. Girls of every other class do that, perhaps because, among other less elusive attractions, it's the only thing left that their mothers haven't done. But girls of the nobility, with exceptions, don't sleep with black men. I can't think why not, if it's half as much fun as everyone says it is. We noted earlier that the black man, very commonly, serves as a sexual thought-experiment for his white counterpart: he is your gifted surrogate; he is your supersub. I myself have a bro in my head-Yo!-who, after much ritual handslapping, takes over when I'm tired or can't come, or on those nights when I've got a headache or I'm washing my hair. (The polite phrase for this habit is imaginative delegation: whoever he is-masterfully glistening, in the fantasy, over your wife or girlfriend or pin-up or pick-up-he isn't you.) . . . Otherness is exciting. Miscegenation is exciting. So, with all this going for it, why don't the girls of the nobility do it more? Racial guilt, egalitarian guilt, is exciting: it excites compassion in the female breast. But maybe this guilt only works when it's vague-a presentment, an unease. With the nobility, maybe, the guilt is all too palpable and proximate. The De Rouge-mounts were famous alike for their piety and rapacity. Demi's great-granddad, with his 'extensive interests' in the West Indies. Demi's granddad, with his South African diamond mines. And then the polluting, scorching, forest-razing, rubble-bouncing speculations of Demi's father, thirteenth Earl of Rieveaulx. The guilt is still real. The spell is still fast and good.

Representationally, though, this isn't the difficulty. The representational difficulty posed by Demi has to do with the way she speaks: the way she puts sentences together. For some reason it is the destiny of Richard Tull to be surrounded by idioglots. Idioglots, with their idiolects.

Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like 'Up you!' or 'Ballshit!' For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase-Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context. But here's the difficulty. In fictional prose the idiolect spells trouble because the novel-They come at me. They come at me like information formed in the night. I don't make them. They're already there.

'Where you been then?'

'Party. Office party.'

'Party? Time of year. Parties. It. You do.'

'Yeah.'

These minicab drivers who ferried Richard about, over Christmas, to and from the diaspora of old Fleet Street-these minicab drivers were every hue of Asian brown, but they all spoke the same language. Clearly they had learned their English from small-hour conversations with their customers, people like Richard or people in similar condition.

'Nice talking to you,' slurred Richard, climbing out on Calchalk Street, under a slanting moonman and a city star or two. 'What's that?'

'Uh, that's. Let's. It. Call it six-fifty,' slurred the minicab driver.

'Take seven.'

'… Phanks. Cunt.?

Still, aristocratic lineage, great wealth, comparative youth, an air of vulnerability, a full bosom: wouldn't that about cover it, universally? Did Demi need anything literary, to ignite Richard's passion?

Yes. First, the big parties she used to throw for writers. Deliriously, ravenously, Richard sent his mind back to the napkin-scarved bottles of old champagne tipped his way by tuxedoed athletes