THE INFORMATION

love's very imprimatur. Ah, but you were wed, with your two bonny boys!Now I venture into another night, alone, without your hugeness inside me. No regrets, my love. Adieu.

Richard put his speech aside and looked at his watch and lit a cigarette. Upstairs the rumor of carousal was now diversified by sounds of breakage. Self-injury, dissolution, in the name of love: so innocent, so period. And literary, as opposed to televisual. TV trained women not to be victims. I mean (he thought), with Gilda you could kind of understand it: years of contiguity, in tiny beds, in tiny rooms. But Anstice. Anstice, who topped herself for a no-show… It took him ten minutes to speed-read the second half of Love's Counterfeit. Beautiful provincial (Meg) comes to London, to work as secretary to fiery composer (Karl). He smolders, and attempts to seduce. She smolders, and resists. For Karl is an emotional tyrant, devoted to his art; he also has a wife, a volcanic diva based in Salzburg. No kids. Smitten, desolate, Meg does a deal: one night of love. She would give Karl her body and then go back to Cumbria-to the hills, the valleys, the healing sheep-dips … Their big night got a chapter to itself and was rendered entirely in terms of metaphor- musical metaphor. Richard lit a cigarette. He was prepared for a muted performance. Say a scherzo for second piccolo. But this was a power symphony, with full jingoist hysterics from brass and strings and with buffalo stampedes from the kettledrums. On the last page Meg is standing in a puddle in Cumbria when Karl's cream sedan appears at the end of the lane. Happy ever after. The volcanic diva has killed herself-about something else.

There was a knock at the door and R. C. Squires entered the room. For the second time in half an hour Richard felt alarm unqualified by surprise: one or two other distinguished ex-occupants of Richard's chair had already arrived. R. C. Squires entered his old office with a misleading swagger. He doffed his hunting hat with the tweed earflaps and brandished his stained umbrella and shouted,

'Any advance on seventy thousand pounds?'

People who made big entrances, Richard had decided (now that he sometimes thought of making them himself)-people who made big entrances did so as a diversionary measure: to distract you from how terrible they looked, how old, how ill. R. C. Squires: his shattered visage, the color of Parma ham, his hair as soft as winebar sawdust. For fifteen years, unbelievably, he had written judicious and elegant 'middles,' on Courtly Love, on Shakespeare's women, on Rosicrucianism and Panti-socracy, on Donne, on Keats, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was possible, presumably, to think of looking to R. C. Squires for mentorship.

He showed Richard the future and the past: his own available future, and the marginal literary past. Something could presumably be learned, at the Hush-Puppied feet of R. C. Squires.

'Seventy thousand pounds! Or do I hear eighty?'

It turned out that he was referring to the debts bequeathed by Horace Manderville (another distinguished predecessor), whose liver had finally exploded that spring. Richard had seen the filler-sized obituaries.

'How did he get people to lend him all that money?'

'Banks! He had rich wives.'

R. C. Squires turned to the bookshelves. You could tell that he was translating their merchandise into gin-and-tonics. His eyes were gin-and-tonics, pleading for more gin-and-tonics. Earlier in the year Richard had come across R. C. Squires leaning on a broken jukebox in some barnsized pub loud with canned rock. Contemplating Richard with the stalest disgust, R. C. Squires inflated himself with several lungfuls of air, and began. The attempted denunciation sounded almost pre-verbal. Just a few glottal stops here and there.

'Why don't you go on up? You can hear them up there. I'll be along in a minute.'

'Sorry about-Anstice. Anstice! Poor girl. Later we'll talk. I want a word with you.'

'What about?'

'About your destiny.'

Left alone, Richard reread his farewell speech, which seemed much too long. It wasn't often he had an audience-one that couldn't get away. For the last time he left his chair, the chair that had cupped the buttocks of Horace Manderville, of John Beresford-Knox, of R. C. Squires . . .

As he passed the outer office he saw a figure leaning over the book table (her hat, her scarf like a rope of hair, her angle of dutiful inquiry)- and death brushed past him. Death with its nostril hairs, its nicked and narrowed lips concealing a skeleton staff of teeth. But it wasn't Anstice. Anstice was dead.

'Demi. How sweet of you to come. No Gwyn, I see.'

'No Gina?'

'It's Friday. Gina likes to have Fridays to herself.'

He helped her off with her coat and when she turned to face him he thought for a moment that both her eyes had been blackened or bruised. But now her eyes widened, contradicting him, and she said abruptly,

'Gwyn seems to think you're going to say something about me in your piece. Something mean. Are you??

'No. I don't think so. I'm just going to say what you said about his stuff. That he can't write for toffee.'

'Well that's a relief. He shouldn't mind that.'

And Richard wondered for the first time how Demi could tell that Gwyn couldn't write for toffee. But all he said was, 'Let's go on up. I've got a speech to make. Wish me luck.'

They went up the stairs to where all the noise was coming from. Except there wasn't any noise, not anymore. Side by side they moved down the corridor to the conference room. He reached for the handle and pushed. The door gave an inch or two. He leaned on it but it gave no further. All he could hear was a single anguished sigh. All he could see was a single sandy suede shoe, which quivered for an instant, then twitched, then stretched and straightened in death or repose: the olden Hush-Puppy of R. C. Squires.

Meanwhile, Richard had 'finished' Amelior-in the novelist's sense. He hadn't finished reading it. He had finished writing it. Had he become Gwyn Barry? Was this the information?

Having written it, Richard was now obliged to christen it. What he really wanted to call it was Dogshit Park. Another possibility was Idylland-his rather slapdash substitute for that sylvan Utopia, that newer, better world. In the end he settled on a nice plump phrase from Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden.' Stumbling on Melons.

Having named the book, he now had to name the writer. It might be cute, he thought, to anagrammatize 'Andrew Marvell.' And make it a woman. With his crossword skills, it shouldn't… Ella something looked promising. Ella Rumwarden, Ravella Drew, M.D. No. Velma . .. Jesus. Drew la Malvern. Wanda Merverl. Leandra Wrelmv. This is pathetic. Marvella Drewn …

Having tried and failed to anagrammatize 'Andrew Marvell,' he now tried to anagrammatize 'The Garden.' And make it a man. There was no sex in Amelior, and there was no gender either. Gwyn didn't write like a man. Gwyn didn't write like a woman. It wasn't personal: he wrote like something in between. 'The Garden' . . . Gren Death? Grant Heed? Garth Dene?

Stumbling on Melons. By Thad Green. Yes.

The business of writing Amelior had of course involved reading it, again, and with rare attention. It was, in Richard's view, without merit. A straightforward armpit-igniter. You could come home, after a full day at the Tantalus Press, and Amelior could still gnarl your toes. But at last he thought he knew what Gwyn had done and how he had done it.

Plagiarism was good. Plagiarism was just punishment. Richard Tull was going to make it look as though Gwyn Barry had stolen Amelior. And Gwyn had