THE INFORMATION

paper ripped from an exercise book, and then scrawled on, with Darko-like difficulty. Richard snatched it from him and said,

'May I see?'

'The old man took the message. Rather to his irritation. Then of course they got cut off. The telephone never works here and we're not allowed to bring our mobiles. House rules. She said she had news. What was it?'

'What's that say. What's this word say?'

'Position?'

'No it's an adjective.'

'Perverse? Uh- pervious?'

'Could it be positive?'

'Yes, that's it. I think that was it. Positive news.'

It was Sunday evening, and everyone was drifting away into the perennial dreadfulness of Sunday night. Into the motorway, and Monday. Gal had positive news. What could that mean? Everyone was positive that they didn't want to publish Untitled? Gal was positive that Untitled was unpublishable? No. Positive was the opposite of negative. A positive was what two negatives made .. .

'Come on,' said Demeter, and took his arm. 'Time to meet the old man.'

Men wear trousers all the time, even in bed, and women wear trousers about half the time they're up, but it's women who wear culottes and pantalettes and pantaloons and hot pants and knickerbockers and buckskins, and cycling pants when they aren't cycling and sweatpants when they aren't sweating and jodhpurs when they aren't riding and buckskins when they aren't rustling, while men just wear

trousers-strides, jekylls-and that's that. So Richard might have taken

some pleasure, really, in his oatmeal flares: rejoiced in the novelty of them. Their wrinkliness, for example. How they swung low on the hip and pranced high on the ankle. The playful way the seat kept gatheringand wedging itself in his bum crack. And they itched-these old jekylls tickled and prickled, all over, but most mortifyingly in the inner thigh, beginning at the knee and burning worse and worse until they went at his groin like a riot of crabs. And, yes, the hairy rope between his buttocks also crazingly bristled. So Richard hated his trousers. He had hated them all day because they made him old. An old man staring out from the doors of the snug of the Slug, the wrinkly in his wrinklies, in his charity flares.

'Demi,' he said giddily, 'I was looking in my notebook this morning. And I just want to check a quote with you.' She was leading him through the dark across a courtyard to the nursery wing above the coach house where (she explained) the Earl and the Countess had sequestered themselves these last seven years. 'You did say, didn't you, that Gwyn can't write for toffee?'

After a pause she said, 'Yes. Well he can't, can he.'

'No. He can't.'

'It's as clear as a pikestaff, isn't it.'

'Exactly,' said Richard.

'Up we go.'

He now stood, finally, in the presence of the Earl of Rieveaulx. The old bloodsucker sat upright in a functional armchair before a slit-faced paraffin stove. His surroundings were characterized by wipeable surfaces, lined bins, plastic tablecloths, and an undersmell of carbolic and Sunday-best batman BO; here, geriatric praxis was still in its infancy. So the old slavedriver was making his last preparations, was shedding worldliness . .. The Countess, his junior by a lustrum or two but also his senior in mortal time, seldom left her bedroom: had good days, had bad days. He addressed his daughter with a classicist's pedantry and relish: with the three long es. Richard sometimes managed Demeeter; but it fell to the old tariff-hiker to manage Deemeeteer.

Demeter addressed her father by a familial diminutive that Richard had never heard before. It began with p and rhymed with khazi. The other word it rhymed with was mhazi, whom Demi announced her intention of looking in on.

'This is Richard Tull,' she repeated as she left the room. 'He's a very good friend of Gwyn's.'

The old sanctions-buster sat there, his skin bricklike in hue and

breadth of pore. He didn't extend a hand. There was intransigent vigor

in the way he wagged his crossed right leg.

'How do you do,' said Richard, and sipped on the schooner of piercingly sweet sherry that Demi had given him. The stormlit valleys of hishangover were beginning to settle and heal. Mortal fear was general, now, rather than clinical.

'What are you?'

He means my profession, Richard decided, and thought of something like, I ply, sir, the scrivener's trade. What he said was, 'I write. I'm a writer.'

Writing, like dying, wasn't worldly, wasn't quite of the world. Would that be held in its favor? The old rent-gouger was perhaps considering this question, his narrow chin upraised, his smeared and bloody blue eyes loosening in their orbits. His head, which was idling like a spool on a spindle, now tightened into a steadier quiver.

'So! You grace us with a second visit. We thank you for your condescension. Tell me-what keeps you away? Is it that you are happier in the town? Is it the lack of 'hygienic facilities'? Is it all the children and babies, is it the progeny, you abhor?'

Richard was wondering how the old kaffir-flogger had had time to get to dislike him. But he remembered Demi saying that her father's eyesight and hearing were not of the keenest. He didn't dislike Richard, not personally. He just thought he was Gwyn.

'Well it's as you say,' said Richard, glancing over his shoulder and stepping forward. Waste not want not. Cut your coat according to your cloth. 'Partly it's the dirt. The filth everywhere. And the babies too. I can't bear babies. And I'm a writer, do you see. I have higher things on my mind.'

Was that enough? Would that do? No. It was coming on him again- the desire for passionate speech. This could be the chance of a lifetime: God-given. He leaned into the rockpool gaze of the Earl of Rieveaulx, saying, 'Writers are sensitive types. Me, I happen to be very worried about the state of the planet. Which is all the poorer, wouldn't you say, for your depradations. But you don't want to think about that now. It never happened. That-that Vatican of swag you've got next door. It never happened. It's just you and God now, right?' He moved yet closer. 'Tell me something I've always wanted to know. Your God: how far does his influence stretch? All across the universe, or just around here? How big are his lands? About the same size as yours? Or do they go all the way to Short Crendon and the church spire? Let's make a deal. No more grandchildren from me. And no more gamekeeper God for you. No

more kids' stuff. Oh yeah. Don't you know who Persephone was the

daughter of? Deemeeteer. Look at you. You even fucked that up.'

After an inhalation, a sigh, a few old beats of oldster time (themselves an adventure in hatred), the old man's gaze settled-on Richard'strousers … It then took about half a minute for his refreshed disgust to gather, to solidify, to come to a head. In minute detestation he ran his eye from Richard's doubled-over waistband, down the wizened shank to the bobbing hems. And Richard felt by now that the Earl-in conceit with these terrible jekylls-was finally winning. How the strides burned, and cringed, and miserably itched. Oh men, oh trousers, what they cover, what they hide, the tanned rump, the bush torched off behind the black bikesheds, the braggings and debaggings, the billion bullybags …