THE INFORMATION

frosted field, the tall fir, the gibbous moon, the slice of cloud, the spire. The spire did indeed look like a thing that had some business pointing heavenward, unlike the berkish bulk of office block, of highrise. It pointed, with its tapered tentativeness .. .

'That's St. Bodolph's in Short Crendon. See? There's a cloud passing over it. I used to take my pony Hester there and back every evening. It was as far as they'd let me go. And I always used to think that if I got there and back before Nanny Smith laid the table for tea …'

'What?'

'Oh. You know. That I'd have a happy life.'

This was romance but they were doing it in winter.

Richard said, 'You want some coke?'

Just as there are genres of skies, and car alarms, and many other things, so there are genres of the hangover. Tragic treatments, enriched with various amounts and shades of irony. The epic frame, which finds the hero, toward evening on the second day, still sitting there wiping his eyebrows with his fingertips and still saying to himself things like dear oh dear. There are futuristic hangovers, there are chillers and tinglers, there are thrillers. There are bodice-rippers. Probably there are sex-and-shopping hangovers: there are hangovers made of junk and trash. There are hangovers as dull as rain .. . Not all genres, on the other hand, correspond to a hangover. For instance there are no Western hangovers. In life, hangovers usually cleave to a genre which literature finds hard to do and rarely attempts: tragicomedy. Murphys and Metamorphosises, Third Policemans, Handful of Dusts …

At first it seemed that Richard's hangover might find a relatively comfortable generic home: the country-house mystery. Every hangover, after all, is a mystery; every hangover is a whodunit. But as soon as he reared and swiveled from his bed, and placed a plumply quivering white sole on the lino, it was amply and dreadfully clear what genre he was in: horror. This horror was irresponsibly absolute, yet also low-budget: cheaply dubbed, ill-lit and hand-held. Outside, the courtyard, the cold stamp of the hooves' iron. A couple of centuries ago, Richard had raped the director's girlfriend. He was now the cursed painting of a staked viscount,

kept in a secret attic. Or else he was the ruined stableboy, all drained and scorched and peed-on, and left for dead in the owly hovel, under a heap of old straw. Something good had happened and something bad hadRichard had recently read about (sitting there with a twin on either side of him) had fled such a tower by climbing down her own hair: the big-hair princess. In his own fantasies of escape, he often saw himself clambering from that bedsit in Blackfriars-that eyrie of spinst-on the rope ladder of Anstice's crackling rug . .. For some mysterious or even magical reason, their little belfry, as Demi said, was 'lovely and warm.' It had served as the bedroom of one of the household's fabled nannies, long deceased. They sat side by side on her narrow cot, whose springs, presumably, had never creaked in passion.

'This thing Gwyn does,' said Richard, adjusting his notebook, 'when he stares at things in that rapt way, like an orange or a pencil. As a child might. When did he start doing that?'

'He used to get very fed up when people said how simple his writing was. He said it was as if he'd written a children's book. Anyway he started doing it around then.'

'… This carpentry thing. He doesn't actually do carpentry, does he?'

'Never. Except he did a bit… He told somebody that writing was like carpentry so he thought he'd better get some carpentry stuff in case people asked if he did carpentry, and then he did a bit of carpentry just in case.'

Women's foreheads, sometimes, provide the punctuation for their speech: underlinings, accents grave and aigu, the puzzled circumflex, sad umlauts, wistful cedillas.

'What made you fall for him?'

Unlike Richard, Demi had changed for dinner: a tight gray cardigan, a light gray skirt. Her shoes lay on the floor, still imitating her characteristic stance: heel-to-heel, obtuse-angled. Her legs were tucked up beneath her, but now she unfolded herself and slid up onto her knees, and turned, folding her arms on the narrow vent of the windowsill. Richard stared: the two lanes of Demi's thighs, entering the tunnel of her skirt. Where is the middle of women, he wondered; where is the center of their gravitational pull? In different places. In the color of the mouth's interior, in the breathy and gulpy laxity of the lungs. In the gap or wake between the thighs, where no flesh is, a flute of air the shape of a cocktail glass, where he sensed the invisible quicksilver of gin … He put down his pen and pad and moved up beside her. Their cheeks were almost touching as she said,

'I could always come up here and know everything would be just as it had always been. People think that people like me don't have to struggle. But I have struggled. Oh, I could tell you a couple of tales or two, don't you worry. I got… so lost for a while. I'm still lost. I still have to take it one day at a time. One day at a time.?

Parfait Amour. The evening had finally vanished down the long vistas of De Quinceyan visions: visions of the success that Untitled might yet enjoy (that coke, he now concluded, must have been some really good shit). Richard also remembered sitting in the dark dining room, his chin sticky with spiritous distillment, and listening to the Labrador as it whinnied in nightmare or labor, and hoping that no one would come down to tend her, and feeling the comfort of the community of pain . . . Richard twitched. So violently that one of his ears gulped open. He waited. He was feeling warmer and had even stopped shivering. The log fire fumed purposelessly, yet a gentle liquid heat seemed to be suffusing his nethers. Perhaps, if he sat there incredibly quietly, attempting in a while, say, a salubrious cigarette . . .

The great doors opened. Richard turned, with diffidence. And what did he see in the cold bright morning but life, the colors of health and youth that make the dying thing shrivel tighter in its lair. Horse haunch and hot horse breath, and the jodhpured brides and the grinning grooms and, ever onward, the caravan of prams. Demi was upon him. With the blue and white of her eyes and the white and pink of her mouth she made it clear that he had to hurry; Mr. Bowyer-Smith himself had agreed to give Richard the full forty-room tour. With a difficulty that knew no theoretical upper limit, he climbed to his feet. And now at last everyone-the world-was looking at him appropriately, with decorum, with pity, with terror. He followed their stares and looked down: at himself. From crotch to knee Richard's trousers were steeped in purple blood. But not to worry! No matter! It was just the Labrador's afterbirth he'd been sitting in! And so what if this was his only pair! Demeter led him to a side passage where she delved deep among gym shoe and windcheater until, half a minute later, he was shown into a room full of plastic tubs of laundry and quaking washing machines, there to slip into his oatmeal flares. The Labrador lay in the corner, on a raft of cardboard. She didn't notice him. She was busy with biology, licking her moley young.

He did the forty-room tour and came back and sat in the kitchen while all the children who could walk trooped past him and inspected his black eye like a file of little generals reviewing the lone squaddie- disgraced, and on kitchen patrol. And you know what the world did to him then? I can't believe they're doing this to me, he said to himself, in the van with Urania and Callisto and Persephone. He felt he was pleading- with whom? With the Labrador's puppies, blind, burrowing, and

wet with their newborn varnish. Oh, Christ, how can they do this? To me, me, so lost, so reduced, and sniveling for sustenance. A soul so sick of sin, so weary of the world's shadows and figments. Jesus, they're notreally going to do this, are they? They are. They're taking me to nicking church.

In the village square the van opened up, and let him out.

'A girl called Girl called.'

Richard reared round. 'A girl called Girl called?'

'Someone called Girl. She called.'

'Could it be Gal?'

'Yes. Or Gal.'

His interlocutor was Benjy-husband to Amaryllis. He held in his hand a scrap of