THE INFORMATION

'Good news,' corrected Gina. 'Good.'

'Gina!'

'So at least that's all over.'

'What?'

'You know.'

'You know. How?'

'She told me.'

'Who?'

'Who do you think? It happened while I was at my mother's, right? When I came back there was a nine-page letter waiting for me. With all the details.'

'Nothing happened. I was impotent, I swear.'

'Well I can believe that… But it isn't what she said.'

Gina made it clear that Anstice, in her letter, and on the telephone, and in person, one Friday, over coffee here in Calchalk Street, had consistently portrayed Richard as a Lionheart, a Tamburlaine, a veritable Xerxes in the sack.

'Oh sure. So likely. It was a one-night fiasco.' Yeah: just one of those crazy things. 'One night. Instantly regretted.'

'Still. You tried.'

'I tried … What did you do? You know. In the way of counter-measures.'

'Ask me no questions,' said Gina, 'and I'll tell you no lies.?

'It's the Town Crier, isn't it? Dermott. Or did you revive one of your poets? Is it Angaoas? Is it Clearghill?'

'Ask me no questions,' said Gina, 'and I'll tell you no lies. We're quits. How could you? I mean. What a dog. And what a drag, too. Bloody hell. She used to call me twice a day until I told her to bugger off. Now go and do the boys.'

Doing the boys-something he did plenty of-was nothing like as bad, moment for moment, as it used to be even a year ago. Their status was no longer that of royal exiles, of imperial prisoners under house arrest. Now they were treated like extravagantly distinguished, headstrong, and senile VIPs in, say, a Stalin-era sanatorium or retirement home (from their window they could glimpse a scrapyard full of twisted excavators and, beyond, an envenomed canal the color of a green traffic light). Their beds were made, their towels warmed; the badges and medals of high office were laid out before them and cleared away after them; their many mishaps, breakages, and self-soilings were tactfully and skillfully smoothed over. At the sanatorium, these days, the inmates might detect in their more lucid intervals the symptoms of a new laxity: the result of forced economies, or ideological revision, or merely the male meanness of the male nurse. For example it was no longer thought necessary to carry them down to breakfast or even lead them there by the hand; the simple provender would be ready on the table but they were now expected to feed themselves (though of course they could continue to be as messy as they liked). Privilege loss was something the inmates were forgetfully growing accustomed to. Occasionally it seemed that they remembered how it used to be, and they struggled weakly, fitfully-and they wept for shame … But the male nurse sits at the kitchen table, hearing their cries. His singlet, his newspaper, his coffee mug, his idle toothpick…

One thing about being a househusband: it gave you plenty of time to search your wife's bedroom. You could go up there with a cup of tea and make an afternoon of it. Richard had the leisure. The children were at school all day. Soon it would be half term, and the children would be at home all day. He kept thinking there were other things he ought to be doing. Reading a biography, talking to Anstice, writing modern prose. But Richard had the leisure.

He found: a shoebox containing all the letters he had ever written her, chronologically arranged, all of them opened, all of them read. They bore traces of her body scent, he believed.

He found: a polaroid of Gina and Lawrence, sitting on a wooden bench in some seaside pub. His arm round her shoulders, the pale mid-morning sunlight, the dusty wash of pubs.

He found: in a gray plastic zip-up folder, letters written to her by other writers, and poems written to her by the poets: none of them recent.

He found: under the floorboards, in her closet, four soot-coated brown envelopes each containing twenty fifty-pound notes. He thought he might have to borrow some of this and give it to Steve Cousins, depending on when he got paid for the Profile.

With the savaging of Gwyn's physical being now well entrained, Richard's mind could soar free and contemplate something higher: the savaging of Gwyn's literary reputation.

The way he figured it, in his soaring insomnias (with Gina breathing steadily and neglectedly at his side), there were only three ways that writers could get into serious trouble-on the page. Obscenity was one, and blasphemy was another; and both afforded little hope. There wasn't any love or sex or swearing in Amelior. As for blasphemy, Gwyn's stuff was incapable of giving offense even to the people who were all wired up and hair-triggered to receive it-the people who lived to take offense. But there was, he believed, a different way. The whole thing came to him like this.

Richard stood over his desk at the Tantalus Press. He was smoking. He exhaled fatalistically. A week ago he had resigned as Books and Arts Editor of The Little Magazine. Now he did an extra day and an extra morning a week for Balfour Cohen, and also took work home. Furthermore, he was turning down book reviews. Assistant Literary Editors all over town were left staring into their telephones-as Richard turned down book reviews. Would he like to write three hundred words on a three- volume life of Isaac Bickerstaffe? No. The definitive critical biography, perhaps, of Ralph Cudworth, of Richard Fitzralph, of William Courthope? No. In terms of time and motion, in terms of money, it would work out in his favor. Correcting the trex of the talentless, for private publication: this was better paid, was more highly prized by the world, than the disinterested perusal of on the whole passionately conscientious studies of minor poets, novelists, and playwrights. Books about duds, and written by duds: but not trivial. With book reviewing, Richard strolled the temperate climes of mediocrity. At the Tantalus Press he entered the Wirral of florid psychosis. Given a two-word account of how things had gone in America, Balfour had taken him off fiction and put him on nonfiction-more specifically, the Study of Man. From which Richard learned that there were crazed old wrecks crouched in attics all over England, revolutionizing twentieth-century thought.

They saw off Marx. They turned Darwin on his head. They yanked the carpet out from under Sigmund Freud.

'Jesus,' said Richard, at his desk. He said it all day long. That morning Richard had agreed to let his name appear on the letterhead and in the literature of the Tantalus Press . .. He exhaled fatalistically. His teeth were grinding their way to the end of yet another five-hundred-page fool's errand by yet another pompous (and vicious) old dunce (and arse-hole) who, in this case, and without much apparent effort, had found the missing link between genetics and General Relativity. Richard wrote ENDS under the author's final exclamation mark and tossed the typescript into his Out tray.

Balfour Cohen stirred tolerantly in the background and said, 'Ah. Here's your poet.'

'Horridge?'

'Horridge.'

'Ah.'

The distinctive manila envelope favored by Keith Horridge; the distinctive paperclip; the distinctive bite of his manual typewriter. Richard was trying to persuade himself that it might be reasonably satisfying: to find a poet. To seek out the pleasures, if any, of the literary middleman. Horridge's envelope contained a note and three poems. The first, 'Ever,' began:

In the Gnostic cosmogonies The demiurgi knead and mold A red Adam who