'Research. When I'm playing snooker with Richard, or tennis, or chess, when I'm-'
'I wish you wouldn't.'
'Wouldn't what?'
'Play games with Richard. You always lose and it puts you in a vile mood.'
Gwyn paused stoically. 'When I'm out playing snooker, I'm doing research. When I'm asleep, I'm doing research. When I go out hunting or gambling with Sebby, I'm doing research. When I'm having sex next door with Pamela, I'm doing research.'
'She's your research assistant.'
'Demi, that's rather good. We research in the missionary position. We research in the doggy style. We research with her on top: the cowgirl.'
'But there isn't any sex in your novels.'
'You may or may not have noticed,' said Gwyn, letting his head drop (so might Richard let his head drop when, for the thirtieth time in fifteen minutes, Marco mistook a d for a b, or a q for a g) but also realizing, in that instant, that he could never leave Demeter, because only with herdid he wield this thrilling and frightening eloquence, this drolly rolling periodicity, 'that there isn't any snooker in my novels either. It doesn't work like that. It works like this. The prose is given tautness and burnish precisely by what it deliberately excludes. Picasso's abstracts gain their force from the . . . from the representational mastery he holds in check. Something held back. Or held in harness. Just as the coachman, with the reins in one hand and the-'
'Or the carpenter.'
'What about the carpenter?'
'There aren't any children in your novels either. Half the men have had vasectomies. Shouldn't that mean that we ought to have children? So you can deliberately exclude them?'
'Don't try to be clever, love. It doesn't suit you. Well. I see we have returned to base. And I say unto you: Go on the pill, Demi. Get a coil fixed, Demi. Get a cap. This is 'against your religion,' you will say. Unlike taking cocaine and fucking black pushers. Or is all that for your religion? God moves in mysterious ways. Thou shalt take cocaine. To get more cocaine, thou shalt…'
Demi got out of bed and went toward the bathroom, saying, 'There was only one black pusher.'
'Congratulations. Were there pushers of other creeds and hues? White, say, and Church of England?' He raised his voice, to make himself heard; but his tone did not change. 'Richard rang. He's preparing his major piece about yours truly. Something tells me it's going to be very hostile. I wouldn't be surprised if he puts all that in.'
She came back to the doorway. Her arms were folded. 'All what in?'
'About you fucking black pushers.'
'… He can't. What can I do about it?'
'I don't know. Perhaps you'd better go round and fuck him.'
At ten-thirty or thereabouts Gwyn stepped into his study: the three tall windows, the inlaid bookcases, the heavy wealth. His great work station-mahogany dining tables, French desks-formed a broad arc in the center of the room, slabbed with the thick shapes of processor, printer, copier. Here the two cultures, Gwyn believed, were attractively reconciled: the bright flame of human inquiry, plus lots of gadgets. Give Gwyn a palatinate smoking jacket, as opposed to a pair of tailored jeans and a lumberjack shirt, and he could be Captain Nemo, taking his seat at the futuristic bridge of the sumptuous Nautilus.
His morning coffee was there, laid out by Paquita. His morning newsprint was there, laid out by Pamela: all the non-tabloid dailies, threeweeklies, one fortnightly, two monthlies, and a quarterly. On the French desk lay an Italian notebook, open on the front page, where Gwyn had written, in longhand, The Road from Amelior? The Road to Amelior? Beyond Amelior? The house was utterly silent: a silence of tiptoe, and finger to the lips. Like the house of his grandfather, who worked all night and slept all day.
Gwyn relied on two different agencies for his press clippings. His publishers used an agency, and they sent him stuff. And he'd made do with that, for a while. But he kept coming across extra references to himself, over and above what they sent him. And he didn't like that. So now he employed a rival outfit, giving them the broadest possible brief; and still he would encounter stray mentions of his own name, unduplicated in the agency envelopes. Now he sat himself down.
In the early days he had confined himself to reviews of his contemporaries, in which the example of Gwyn Barry might reasonably be invoked. Then he branched out, reading reviews of the novels of younger, and indeed older, novelists. Before he knew it, he was reading all fiction reviews. Reviews of Panamanian allegories, Japanese thrillers; reviews of reissues of Don Quixote, Humphrey Clinker. It was the same with literary criticism. Reading all reviews of books about modern writing quickly developed into the habit of reading all reviews about any writing whatever (poetry, drama and travel had long since climbed on board). Pliny, Nostradamus, Elizabeth David, Izaak Walton, Bede. The besetting interest in contemporary fiction expanded not only upward but also sideways. He started reading reviews about contemporary art, and then non-contemporary art; contemporary sociology, architecture, economics, jurisprudence, and then non-contemporary ditto. And then again: it seemed natural enough that reports on contemporary agriculture would eventually contain some lighthearted reference to the pages in Amelior that dealt with, say, crop rotation. And this happened, it came to pass; and from that day forth Gwyn found himself helplessly committed to agriculture, as something to follow, plus hydroponics and so on, all in the same sheep-dip and turnip-swagging prose. Now, new interests struck him suddenly, and at tangents. One morning he was reading a piece (idly, almost disinterestedly, with no secure hope of seeing fresh news about Gwyn Barry) on the property page by a guest writer who had experienced supposedly comical difficulties in selling his small flat; the flat was small and the writer, evidently, was big, which made the small flat seem even smaller. 'Better to be a titch like Gwyn Barry,' he wrote, 'rather than a-' And here he cited a playwright of celebrated obesity. After that, Gwyn was reading everything he could find about propertyand, a little later, everything he could find about size: cars, holiday accommodation, clothes, prison cells. Pretty soon-and you could see this coming-he was reading everything about everything. Not in itself a bad idea, if information was what you sought. But we see accidents, everywhere, on the information highway. We see hazard lights and freezing fog. We see jackknife and whiplash.
There was a time, about fifteen years ago, when Richard Tull was so worried by alcohol, so worried that he might be an alcoholic, that he became almost as interested in alcoholism as he was interested in alcohol, which was plenty interested. And, when he read, his eyes would mutiny. He was of course transfixed by any incidence of the word alcohol, and all its cognates and synonyms and homonyms; and innocent words, innocently used, came to rivet him: words like stout and punch and sack and hock and mild and bitter; 'high spirits,' 'small beer,' 'in the drink.' He knew he had gone about as far as he could go with this when one day he veered in on the word it. He was thinking, he realized, of gin-and-it, or gin-and-Italian vermouth. So even it, not to mention Italy, was all fucked up for him. Alcohol, naturally, retained its suzerainty. And any word that looked anything like it. Anabolic. Laconic. Interpol. Uncool. School. Any word that had an / and a c in it, or a c and an h, or an o, or an a. Richard was less interested in alcohol now, largely because he was an alcoholic . .. Analogously, Gwyn Barry's scannings and skimmings (and what was his mood when he read? Puzzlement, mainly: a desert of patient disgust, with infrequent oases) were Gwyn Barry-seeking. All that kept him from lecteurial chaos were those two capital letters, G and B, the twin sentinels of his sanity. How many times had his eyes bumped into George Berkeley and
