THE INFORMATION

Under a ton of chandelier Richard stood with ovals of light streaming at an angle across his face. This made him look like a creature on some riverine mission or vigil: it imparted an amphibian-no, a reptilian- quality to his unvarying stare. And it was with reptilian patience, a croc-like consideration of the percentages, the rot-rates and backlash factors, that Richard watched and waited, and waited and watched. Gwyn was doing his thing on Lucy Cabretti: Lucy Cabretti, who in Richard's hearing had been referred to by the publicity boy (the publicity boy was big on game plans) as Profundity One. For the first hour or so they'd stationed Gwyn at the door, working the arrivals: a succession of sodden wayfarers (they seemed to form a subscription audience of the local sociocultural), with their snow-capped umbrellas and slithering galoshes. Effusive enough when introduced to Lucy in the hall, Gwyn was now concertedly loving her up-on a sofa beneath the mullioned window, against a galaxy of lamplit snow. She was laughing with her small head thrown back, a hand placed on Gwyn's arm to ward off further hilarity. Under the trembling chandelier Richard maintained his reptilian vigil. He wondered what Gwyn had going for him, these days, in terms of sexual charm. Gwyn never used to have any; but since then he'd thrown some money at his appearance (need Richard adduce the tinted contacts?), and of course he had the entree now. Success revamps you. It must keep you young. Because failure sure makes you old.

For largely accidental reasons (an international conference, plus culture week at the White House, according to the publicity boy), several American writers were present, none of Richard's outright heroes but a fair selection of middleweights, hallowed background figures, on cautious exhibit. Had they been here, their British counterparts would have been sitting in a clump, cheerfully monolithic and practically indistinguishable. Yet the carved idols of American letters kept their distance, the nuclei of their own inner circles. And Richard had circled these circles, earlier on, appreciatively sensing the repulsive force that kept them apart. Why did they hate each other? It was obvious. To exaggerate: here was a two-foot Alabaman with his face in a bucket of hooch: there was a towering Virginian belle with her mint julep and her honeysucklevowels; here was a gnashing Jew from Dneopropetrovsk: there was the writhing moustache of the wandering Lebanese; here the granddaughter of an African slave, here a Boston brahmin, here a Swedish hippie from Duluth. America is like the world. And look at it, the world. People don't get on. And writers should hate each other, Richard naturally believed. If they mean business. They are competing for something there is only one of: the universal. They should want to go to the mat.

'Excuse me, are you Lucy Cabretti? Richard Tull. Literary Editor of The Little Magazine, in London. I wonder if you saw the review we ran of Double Dating.'

'No! I didn't see that.'

'I was told you'd be here so I brought along a copy of it. Look at it later. An interesting review, as well as a favorable one. / thought too that you found the most tenable position. You make the legal situation very clear, without losing sight of the fact that we're talking about real men and women.'

She thanked him. Richard had skimmed Double Dating: Yes and No, Lucy's how-to book about not getting raped by all your friends. He had agreed with her arguments, while simultaneously wondering why anyone would need to hear them. Who could explain the fact that 'My Way' was the anthem of modern America? Americans didn't want to do it their way. They wanted to do it your way.

'I'm actually traveling with Gwyn while he's touring here. I'm writing it up. We're very old pals. Yes, we shared rooms at Oxford. Scholarship boys. I came up from London, and there he was, fresh in from the Welsh valleys.'

'How romantic.'

'Romantic? Yes. Well.'

'I'm sorry. I'm a disgusting Anglophile.'

'He was from Wales, not England,' said Richard, who thought it extraordinary that Anglophilia was still staggering around the place. 'Imagine it as something like Puerto Rico.'

'Even more romantic.'

'Romantic? Well, Gwyn was certainly a ferocious … A 'ladies' man' is I suppose a polite way of putting it.'

'Really?'

'A very polite way of putting it,' he said, realizing that he was about

to get carried away. 'Let's go and sit over there. Let's get a drink. You'll

need it.'

Richard had not, so far, found much to do in Washington, which was only the center of the world. All afternoon he reclined on his hotel bedin a trance of cunning. While Gwyn had done four photo sessions and six interviews in a variety of mediums, while also finding time to visit the Phillips Collection, the Senate, the Library of Congress, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Richard had succeeded only in washing his hair. Oh yes. And in throwing in a call to the Lazy Susan (this was arduous), where he was eventually told that they had two copies of Untitled in stock. Washing his hair was no formality either. Again he found himself riveted to the bathroom mirror, immersed in the question of how the same human being could look so bald and so shaggy. In the end, after a visit to the pharmacy, he smothered himself in mousses and conditioners. It hadn't worked out, and, for the time being at least, Richard's hair was basically in deep shit… He made his own way to the party. Because of the weather, or the zone system, his cab kept picking up new passengers, all orphans of the loosening Milky Way, all starred and kissed by the six-faceted snowflakes. Richard sat zestlessly in the back while the driver idled them all over town, along the unbarricadable boulevards, through the bare snowfields of American history; the cab glass creaked to the sharp switches of the winds, but the many-eyed Capitol seemed to loom no bigger however close you got to it; they did Georgetown, the Hill, Du Pont Circle, following the city's large design which was accessible only to a higher being. He climbed out at last, in the embassy district. And Gwyn was there to greet him at the door.

'There's probably a medical term for it now,' Richard was saying. 'Satyromania or some such.'

'Well he has a certain style,' Lucy said tolerantly. 'And all those pretty students . ..'

'Oh no. It wasn't with the students. All those little paragons from Somerville and St. Hilda's. With as many O-levels as freckles on their noses. No no. He'd never get the turnover he needed. It wasn't the students. No.' Richard paused and said, 'It was the college servants that friend Barry looked to for his sport.'

Lucy frowned: a small frown under her dark ringlets. As a parting gesture, Richard conjured up a genuine memory from his first year at Oxford: himself, crashing in at two in the morning, after some debauch in some bedsit at the secretarial school, to find Gwyn, in his earphone sideburns, still bent over his books, inching down that long road toward his bad Second. Every other weekend Gilda would bus herself in from Swansea. She used to cower in the little bedroom. On Sunday mornings, after breakfast in Hall, Gwyn would bring a bun back for her hidden in his pocket. She liked marmalade. Anyway, marmalade was what she got.

'He was notorious for the way he went after the scullery maids. Inthose days, the college servants, or 'gyps' as we used to call them-unbelievable, isn't it?-were almost slave labor. They were sacked en masse at the beginning of the long vacation and hired in the autumn, after a summer of breadlines and doss houses. So if a young gentleman wanted to take advantage …' Richard moved his head upward and sideways, in pained recollection. 'There was one particularly unfortunate incident involving a kitchen maid of barely sixteen. A touching-looking girl. Dark ringlets. Just a child, really. Some said she was a Gypsy girl-a foundling.' Richard tried to pull himself together. His eyes were stinging at his own fiction. 'Gwyn … Gwyn and one of his fellow bloods contracted a wager. I'll spare you the details. Gwyn won, but his friend- Trelawney his name was-refused to pay up. A matter of a few guineas.'

'Guineas?' said Lucy Cabretti.