THE INFORMATION

'A unit of currency. Favored by gamblers.' He lurched on, raising his voice. 'And so Gwyn forced Trelawney's hand. He nailed up her-he nailed up a section of her underwear onto the notice board of the Junior Common Room. With full details of the hazard.'

'Then what? Trelawney pays up, right? Pays Gwyn the gwyn-the guineas. How much is a guinea?'

'Twenty-one shillings.' He thought it had probably been a mistake about the guineas.

Lucy folded her arms and sighed. She said, 'You know, your story is really hard to believe.'

'Oh? Why's that?'

'He seems so nice and normal. And his books. That Amelior stuff. He writes like such a whuss.'

'A what?'

'You know. A real pooch. As if all he wanted to do was not offend anybody. I mean it's pleasant enough, that stuff, but it's just dead.'

Richard was happy and proud. But he could see that he didn't need to waste any more time on Lucy Cabretti. He stood up, saying, 'It's been nice talking to you. And I hope you like that review.'

'Thanks. You too. Wait. What happened to the girl?'

'What girl?'

'The serving girl. The foundling.'

He paused. He actually had one foot in the air-about to begin its ponderous journey to the door. Pregnancy? Prison? Thrown out into the wind and the rain, naked, without a groat to her name? But she thought Gwyn's stuff was shit anyway, so all he said was, 'Who knows? Once they've been used and cast aside-who knows what happens to these poor girls??

When he got back to the hotel Richard rang home and spoke to Lizzete, Marius and Marco, Gina being elsewhere … Then he sat down at the desk and coerced himself into facing up to something: biography. As he had long suspected, the ring road of his reviewing schedule was all freezing fog and black ice, all sideswipe and whiplash: he faced a catastrophe of deadlines. Richard was actually reviewing more books than ever before. It remained true that he was partly resuscitated as a novelist; but novels still showed no sign of earning him any money. This had taken a while-and many reminders from Gina-to sink in. He turned in his chair. Biographies were scattered . . . No. Biographies were stolidly installed around the room, each of them as heavy as a cinder block. Richard felt dizzy and that was strange, because he'd been very good at the party and had carefully counted his drinks: he'd had seventeen. There were several more biographies in his suitcase: his suitcase, which he would never unpack; his suitcase, gravid with heavy lives.

It was ten o'clock. Lucy Cabretti was home by now. And she, too, was reading. Richard was on page five of The Mercutio of Lincoln's Inn Fields: A Life of Thomas Betterton. Lucy was on page 168 of Come Be My Love. Within minutes she would finish Come Be My Love and would begin Magenta Rhapsody. Lucy read chain-store romances at a rate of three or four a day. This had no effect on the stern probity with which she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment; it did not color her speeches and lectures on economic equity; in no wise had it vitiated her non-anecdotal and dryly legalistic best- seller on sexual mores. But she read chain-store romances at the rate of three or four a day. Lucy was in bed, alone. Her handsome and sagacious boyfriend was in Philadelphia, visiting his sister. As she read on (with his cane, his snorting mastiff, Sir William was stalking Maria through the hayricks), her eyes swelled fearfully, and her hand sought her glowing throat. Maria was a serving girl, small, pretty, with dark ringlets.

Midnight. Richard was on page seventy-three. He was also drinking from the mini-bar, which sounds comparatively prudent of him. Given a free hand, he might have been drinking from something bigger. Richard was drinking beer from the mini-bar only because there was nothing else left in the mini-bar, except for mixers and snacks. Slowly Richard's head jerked back. He stared at his drink with indignation. The softly humming liquid seemed disturbingly bland to his tongue. The suspicion formed that it contained no alcohol. Under the light he peered closely at

the bottle until he found some small print warning that its contents

might rack up pregnant women. And so he drank on, calmly nodding, mightily reassured.

The next day they were flying south.

Clearly there was a spiritual bond-a covenant, a solemn sympathy- between airports and junk novels. Or so it seemed to him.

Junk novels were sold in airports. People in airports bought and read junk novels. Junk novels were about people in airports, inasmuch as junk novels needed airports to shift their characters round the planet, and airports served, in junk novels, as the backdrop to their partings, chance encounters, reunions and trysts.

Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then, you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Movies based on junk novels were, of course, heavily reliant on the setting of the airport. So why wasn't one always seeing, at airports, junk novels being made into movies? Perhaps there really was a whole other airport, called, perhaps, Junk Novel Airport, or with a fancier name like Manderley International Junk Novel Airport, where they did them all. This wouldn't be a real airport but a mock-up on a soundstage somewhere, with everything two-dimensional and made of plastic and tinfoil and other junk.

Even when they found themselves in airports, characters in junk novels didn't read junk novels. Unlike everyone else in airports. They read wills and pre-nups. If they were intellectuals, connoisseurs, great minds, they were sometimes allowed to read non-junk novels. Whereas real-life people who read non-junk novels, even people who wrote non-junk novels, read junk novels if, and only if, they were in airports.

Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven't been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.

Richard, as he made his way through all these airports, toting his mail sack of Untitledsand his burden of biographies, wouldn't have minded trying the odd junk novel, but he was too busy reading all this crap about third-class poets and seventh-rate novelists and eleventh-eleven dramatists-biographies of essayists, polemicists, editors, publishers. Would the day dawn when he reviewed a book about a book reviewer? Or a paper-clip salesman or a typewriter repairer. You didn't have to do much in the literary field, he thought, to merit a biography. So long as you knew how to read and write … Quite a few of the amblers and hurriers and sprawlers in these airports were sporting copies of Amelior Regained. This puzzled him. In Richard's view, certainly, Amelior Regained was junk. But it wasn't a junk novel. It was a trex novel. But it wasn't a junk novel. The heroes and heroines of junk novels, even when they were car-dinals or novitiates, remained ravenously secular. And look at Gwyn's little troupe of trundling dreamers, none of whom had any money or sex or facelifts or cool cars, and never went anywhere near airports.

Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way-yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.

Now, wearing woolen jacket, and bow tie, and two nicotine patches, and chewing (or sucking) nicotine gum, and smoking a cigarette, and feeling like something in a ten-gallon bag behind a nuclear power plant, humbly awaiting its next dreadful atomic declension, Richard lounged on a lounger: before