THE INFORMATION

'Get them off.'

Richard stopped breathing. He searched for sarcasm in that shattered visage and saw only woundedness and even the seep of bleeding tears. Was he wearing-was he stealing-the old man's old strides?

'Get them off,' he said, on a rising scale, with that final whoof of dogged rage. 'Get them off. Get them off.'

Did he want them, did he covet them? Round about, all renounced, lay forty rooms and four hundred years of pocketed knickknacks, of trousered loot-yet did he pine for his oatmeal strides?

'Off! I said get them off.'

Demeter reentered the room. She looked quickly around at the silence.

'I'm afraid your father,' said Richard, 'has been bearding me about these trousers.'

She sauntered up to him, shaking her head in playful reproach, and put a hand on his shoulder. 'He may be the oldest,' she declared with a cock of the head, 'but he's still the brightest.'

'… What?'

'I said you may be the oldest but you're still the brightest.'

'The what?'

'The brightest.'

'What?'

'The brightest.'

'The broadest?'

'The brightest!'

'The what?'

'I said you may be the oldest but you're still the brightest.'

'The widest?'

'The brightest!'

'The lightest?'

'No, the brightest.'

'The what?'

Richard had backed off with his glass. From the courtyard below hecould hear the van, revving-revving against the cold and damp. It was almost over.

He got back to Calchalk Street at six o'clock the next morning. Prominently displayed on the kitchen table was a couriered package from the offices of Gal Aplanalp. It contained a bottle of champagne and an envelope, which he opened in turn. The letter said:

Although there has as yet been no response here in England, we have positive news from America. Untitled has been accepted by Bold Agenda, Inc., of New York. This is a small imprint, recently launched; they are unable to offer an advance, but the royalty percentage will be correspondingly readjusted in your favor. Roy Biv, your editor there, is very enthusiastic and hopes that we can all get behind the book. They want Untitled in their spring list: of course, you will be there, with Gwyn, for publication. This could turn out well for you. I hope you're pleased.

Richard did what Gina did when he asked her to marry him: he assented with a sneeze of tears. An hour later he still had his face in his hands when his wife came lightly down the stairs, and carefully approached. He looked up. A weekend in the country had reduced him to the condition of a barely usable scarecrow. Black-eyed, flare-trousered, and rigid. All night he had juddered, as if in vibrant motion, on the ice- locked rails.

'Oh, what have you done to yourself?'

Behind her, across the passage, Marius and Marco were waking. You could hear them croak and stretch.

'No it's all right, it's all right. I don't know quite how it happened. But I think everything's going to be all right.'

I saw the yellow dwarf today. Not the one up there (the weather has been bad). But the one down here (the weather has been bad). A single picture said it all.

The thing was, I think she had a date. Short skirt, high heels, new hairdo. Of course, any description of her appearance and get-up immediately involves you in niceties of scale. Any skirt, on the yellow dwarf, would have been short, and any heels would have been high. Nevertheless, short was her skirt and high were her heels. And her big-hair hairdo, similarly, seemed doubly big-prodigiously, recklessly big . ..

For a moment, for that flashbulb snapshot of time, before the pathetic sepia had a chance to form on the plate-I felt usurped. Me, myself: / was big enough to show the yellow dwarf a big time in, say, Big Top Pizza. Now wait. She stood in a doorway, with others, a hole in the wall between the enchained off-license and the appliance emporium to which, and from which, Richard Tull sometimes staggers, furled in the tartan coils of his vacuum cleaner. The yellow dwarf, with others, was sheltering from the rain; the crowded doorway dankly steamed-with cooling vapor, with the dark breath of traffic, and with the trailing edge of one of those London mists made entirely of respiratory betrayals and the gasps of asthmatics. She looked down: her puckered shirt, her ruined shoes. She looked up, with maximum defiance, through the gap in the sodden hedge of her hair.

It so happens that I know quite a lot about dating-down at that end of the scale. As a man who stands five-feet-six-inches tall (or five-feet-six-and-one-half-inches, according to a passport I once had), I know about dating and size. In my early teens I was at least a foot shorter. My mother kept telling me I would 'shoot up.' I was still asking her, at the age of twenty: 'What's all this about me shooting up?' (It never happened; but I grew; and I have no complaints, anymore, about five-feet-six.) Thirty years ago my very slightly older but very much taller brother would sometimes arrange foursomes for my benefit: my brother's girlfriend would be asked to bring a girlfriend along-or a sister. And I would wait, in a doorway, while he made a rendezvous and then report back, saying, 'Come on. She's tiny'-or else (shaking his head), 'Sorry, Mart.' In which case I would perhaps follow him at a distance and watch him rejoin the two sixty-inch giantesses at the entrance to the milk bar or under the lit portals of the Essoldo or the Odeon, and then numbly make my way home in the probable rain.

But this rain, probably, almost certainly, was just ordinary rain, and not the Old Testament deluge that had engulfed and ruined the yellow dwarf. She stood in the doorway, with all the other flashflood amphibians. The makeup, the get-up-the tide-marks round her ankles, like socks; and her face in full defiance under the flattened hedge of the big hair. And I had to think: this is awful. But you tried to make too little go too far. You tried to make so very little go so very far.

. . . The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start

saying bye,

PART THREE

Of the pressures facing the successful novelist in the mid-1990s Richard Tull could not easily speak. He was too busy with the pressures facing the unsuccessful novelist in the mid-1990s-or the resurgent novelist, let's say (for now): the unproved novelist. Richard sat in Coach. His seat was non-aisle, non-window, and above all non-smoking. It was also non-wide and non-comfortable. Hundreds of yards and hundreds of passengers away, Gwyn Barry, practically horizontal on his crimson barge,