by Martin Amis
At first it seemed that Richard's hangover might find a relatively comfortable generic home: the country-house mystery. Every hangover, after all, is a mystery; every hangover is a whodunit. But as soon as he reared and swiveled from his bed, and placed a plumply quivering white sole on the lino, it was amply and dreadfully clear what genre he was in: horror. This horror was irresponsibly absolute, yet also low-budget: cheaply dubbed, ill-lit and hand-held. Outside, the courtyard, the cold stamp of the hooves' iron. A couple of centuries ago, Richard had raped the director's girlfriend. He was now the cursed painting of a staked viscount,
kept in a secret attic. Or else he was the ruined stableboy, all drained and scorched and peed-on, and left for dead in the owly hovel, under a heap of old straw. Something good had happened and something bad hadRichard had recently read about (sitting there with a twin on either side of him) had fled such a tower by climbing down her own hair: the big-hair princess. In his own fantasies of escape, he often saw himself clambering from that bedsit in Blackfriars-that eyrie of spinst-on the rope ladder of Anstice's crackling rug . .. For some mysterious or even magical reason, their little belfry, as Demi said, was "lovely and warm." It had served as the bedroom of one of the household's fabled nannies, long deceased. They sat side by side on her narrow cot, whose springs, presumably, had never creaked in passion.
"This thing Gwyn does," said Richard, adjusting his notebook, "when he stares at things in that rapt way, like an orange or a pencil. As a child might. When did he start doing that?"
"He used to get very fed up when people said how simple his writing was. He said it was as if he'd written a children's book. Anyway he started doing it around then."
"… This carpentry thing. He doesn't actually do carpentry, does he?"
"Never. Except he did a bit… He told somebody that writing was like carpentry so he thought he'd better get some carpentry stuff in case people asked if he did carpentry, and then he did a bit of carpentry just in case."
Women's foreheads, sometimes, provide the punctuation for their speech: underlinings, accents grave and aigu, the puzzled circumflex, sad umlauts, wistful cedillas.
"What made you fall for him?"
Unlike Richard, Demi had changed for dinner: a tight gray cardigan, a light gray skirt. Her shoes lay on the floor, still imitating her characteristic stance: heel-to-heel, obtuse-angled. Her legs were tucked up beneath her, but now she unfolded herself and slid up onto her knees, and turned, folding her arms on the narrow vent of the windowsill. Richard stared: the two lanes of Demi's thighs, entering the tunnel of her skirt. Where is the middle of women, he wondered; where is the center of their gravitational pull? In different places. In the color of the mouth's interior, in the breathy and gulpy laxity of the lungs. In the gap or wake between the thighs, where no flesh is, a flute of air the shape of a cocktail glass, where he sensed the invisible quicksilver of gin … He put down his pen and pad and moved up beside her. Their cheeks were almost touching as she said,
"I could always come up here and know everything would be just as it had always been. People think that people like me don't have to struggle. But I have struggled. Oh, I could tell you a couple of tales or two, don't you worry. I got… so lost for a while. I'm still lost. I still have to take it one day at a time. One day at a time.?
Parfait Amour. The evening had finally vanished down the long vistas of De Quinceyan visions: visions of the success that Untitled might yet enjoy (that coke, he now concluded, must have been some really good shit). Richard also remembered sitting in the dark dining room, his chin sticky with spiritous distillment, and listening to the Labrador as it whinnied in nightmare or labor, and hoping that no one would come down to tend her, and feeling the comfort of the community of pain . . . Richard twitched. So violently that one of his ears gulped open. He waited. He was feeling warmer and had even stopped shivering. The log fire fumed purposelessly, yet a gentle liquid heat seemed to be suffusing his nethers. Perhaps, if he sat there incredibly quietly, attempting in a while, say, a salubrious cigarette . . .
The great doors opened. Richard turned, with diffidence. And what did he see in the cold bright morning but life, the colors of health and youth that make the dying thing shrivel tighter in its lair. Horse haunch and hot horse breath, and the jodhpured brides and the grinning grooms and, ever onward, the caravan of prams. Demi was upon him. With the blue and white of her eyes and the white and pink of her mouth she made it clear that he had to hurry; Mr. Bowyer-Smith himself had agreed to give Richard the full forty-room tour. With a difficulty that knew no theoretical upper limit, he climbed to his feet. And now at last everyone-the world-was looking at him appropriately, with decorum, with pity, with terror. He followed their stares and looked down: at himself. From crotch to knee Richard's trousers were steeped in purple blood. But not to worry! No matter! It was just the Labrador's afterbirth he'd been sitting in! And so what if this was his only pair! Demeter led him to a side passage where she delved deep among gym shoe and windcheater until, half a minute later, he was shown into a room full of plastic tubs of laundry and quaking washing machines, there to slip into his oatmeal flares. The Labrador lay in the corner, on a raft of cardboard. She didn't notice him. She was busy with biology, licking her moley young.
He did the forty-room tour and came back and sat in the kitchen while all the children who could walk trooped past him and inspected his black eye like a file of little generals reviewing the lone squaddie- disgraced, and on kitchen patrol. And you know what the world did to him then? I can't believe they're doing this to me, he said to himself, in the van with Urania and Callisto and Persephone. He felt he was pleading-with whom? With the Labrador's puppies, blind, burrowing, and
wet with their newborn varnish. Oh, Christ, how can they do this? To me, me, so lost, so reduced, and sniveling for sustenance. A soul so sick of sin, so weary of the world's shadows and figments. Jesus, they're notreally going to do this, are they? They are. They're taking me to nicking church.
In the village square the van opened up, and let him out.
"A girl called Girl called."
Richard reared round. "A girl called Girl called?"
"Someone called Girl. She called."
"Could it be Gal?"
"Yes. Or Gal."
His interlocutor was Benjy-husband to Amaryllis. He held in his hand a scrap of paper ripped from an exercise book, and then scrawled on, with Darko-like difficulty. Richard snatched it from him and said,
"May I see?"
"The old man took the message. Rather to his irritation. Then of course they got cut off. The telephone never works here and we're not allowed to bring our mobiles. House rules. She said she had news. What was it?"
"What's that say. What's this word say?"
"Position?"
"No it's an adjective."
"Perverse? Uh-pervious?"
"Could it be positive?"
"Yes, that's it. I think that was it. Positive news."
It was Sunday evening, and everyone was drifting away into the perennial dreadfulness of Sunday night. Into the motorway, and Monday. Gal had positive news. What could that mean? Everyone was positive that they didn't want to publish Untitled? Gal was positive that Untitled was unpublishable? No. Positive was the opposite of negative. A positive was what two negatives made .. .
"Come on," said Demeter, and took his arm. "Time to meet the old man."
Men wear trousers all the time, even in bed, and women wear trousers about half the time they're up, but it's women who wear culottes and pantalettes and pantaloons and hot pants and knickerbockers and buckskins, and cycling pants when they aren't cycling and sweatpants when they aren't sweating and jodhpurs when they aren't riding and buckskins when they aren't rustling, while men just wear
trousers-strides, jekylls-and that's that. So Richard might have taken
some pleasure, really, in his oatmeal flares: rejoiced in the novelty of them. Their wrinkliness, for example. How they swung low on the
hip and pranced high on the ankle. The playful way the seat kept gatheringand wedging itself in his bum crack. And they itched-these old jekylls tickled and prickled, all over, but most mortifyingly in the inner thigh, beginning at the knee and burning worse and worse until they went at his groin like a riot of crabs. And, yes, the hairy rope between his buttocks also crazingly bristled. So Richard hated his trousers. He had hated them all day because they made him old. An old man staring out from the doors of the snug of the Slug, the wrinkly in his wrinklies, in his charity flares.
"Demi," he said giddily, "I was looking in my notebook this morning. And I just want to check a quote with you." She was leading him through the dark across a courtyard to the nursery wing above the coach house where (she explained) the Earl and the Countess had sequestered themselves these last seven years. "You did say, didn't you, that Gwyn can't write for toffee?"
After a pause she said, "Yes. Well he can't, can he."
"No. He can't."
"It's as clear as a pikestaff, isn't it."
"Exactly," said Richard.
"Up we go."
He now stood, finally, in the presence of the Earl of Rieveaulx. The old bloodsucker sat upright in a functional armchair before a slit-faced paraffin stove. His surroundings were characterized by wipeable surfaces, lined bins, plastic tablecloths, and an undersmell of carbolic and Sunday-best batman BO; here, geriatric praxis was still in its infancy. So the old slavedriver was making his last preparations, was shedding worldliness . .. The Countess, his junior by a lustrum or two but also his senior in mortal time, seldom left her bedroom: had good days, had bad days. He addressed his daughter with a classicist's pedantry and relish: with the three long es. Richard sometimes managed Demeeter; but it fell to the old tariff-hiker to manage Deemeeteer.
Demeter addressed her father by a familial diminutive that Richard had never heard before. It began with p and rhymed with khazi. The other word it rhymed with was mhazi, whom Demi announced her intention of looking in on.
"This is Richard Tull," she repeated as she left the room. "He's a very good friend of Gwyn's."
The old sanctions-buster sat there, his skin bricklike in hue and
breadth of pore. He didn't extend a hand. There was intransigent vigor
in the way he wagged his crossed right leg.
"How do you do," said Richard, and sipped on the schooner of piercingly sweet sherry that Demi had given him. The stormlit valleys of hishangover were beginning to settle and heal. Mortal fear was general, now, rather than clinical.
"What are you?"
He means my profession, Richard decided, and thought of something like, I ply, sir, the scrivener's trade. What he said was, "I write. I'm a writer."
Writing, like dying, wasn't worldly, wasn't quite of the world. Would that be held in its favor? The old rent-gouger was perhaps considering this question, his narrow chin upraised, his smeared and bloody blue eyes loosening in their orbits. His head, which was idling like a spool on a spindle, now tightened into a steadier quiver.
"So! You grace us with a second visit. We thank you for your condescension. Tell me-what keeps you away? Is it that you are happier in the town? Is it the lack of 'hygienic facilities'? Is it all the children and babies, is it the progeny, you abhor?"
Richard was wondering how the old kaffir-flogger had had time to get to dislike him. But he remembered Demi saying that her father's eyesight and hearing were not of the keenest. He didn't dislike Richard, not personally. He just thought he was Gwyn.
"Well it's as you say," said Richard, glancing over his shoulder and stepping forward. Waste not want not. Cut your coat according to your cloth. "Partly it's the dirt. The filth everywhere. And the babies too. I can't bear babies. And I'm a writer, do you see. I have higher things on my mind."
Was that enough? Would that do? No. It was coming on him again- the desire for passionate speech. This could be the chance of a lifetime: God-given. He leaned into the rockpool gaze of the Earl of Rieveaulx, saying, "Writers are sensitive types. Me, I happen to be very worried about the state of the planet. Which is all the poorer, wouldn't you say, for your depradations. But you don't want to think about that now. It never happened. That-that Vatican of swag you've got next door. It never happened. It's just you and God now, right?" He moved yet closer. "Tell me something I've always wanted to know. Your God: how far does his influence stretch? All across the universe, or just around here? How big are his lands? About the same size as yours? Or do they go all the way to Short Crendon and the church spire? Let's make a deal. No more grandchildren from me. And no more gamekeeper God for you. No
more kids' stuff. Oh yeah. Don't you know who Persephone was the
daughter of? Deemeeteer. Look at you. You even fucked that up."
After an inhalation, a sigh, a few old beats of oldster time (themselves an adventure in hatred), the old man's gaze settled-on Richard'strousers … It then took about half a minute for his refreshed disgust to gather, to solidify, to come to a head. In minute detestation he ran his eye from Richard's doubled-over waistband, down the wizened shank to the bobbing hems. And Richard felt by now that the Earl-in conceit with these terrible jekylls-was finally winning. How the strides burned, and cringed, and miserably itched. Oh men, oh trousers, what they cover, what they hide, the tanned rump, the bush torched off behind the black bikesheds, the braggings and debaggings, the billion bullybags …
"Get them off."
Richard stopped breathing. He searched for sarcasm in that shattered visage and saw only woundedness and even the seep of bleeding tears. Was he wearing-was he stealing-the old man's old strides?
"Get them off," he said, on a rising scale, with that final whoof of dogged rage. "Get them off. Get them off."
Did he want them, did he covet them? Round about, all renounced, lay forty rooms and four hundred years of pocketed knickknacks, of trousered loot-yet did he pine for his oatmeal strides?
"Off! I said get them off."
Demeter reentered the room. She looked quickly around at the silence.
"I'm afraid your father," said Richard, "has been bearding me about these trousers."
She sauntered up to him, shaking her head in playful reproach, and put a hand on his shoulder. "He may be the oldest," she declared with a cock of the head, "but he's still the brightest."
"… What?"
"I said you may be the oldest but you're still the brightest."
"The what?"
"The brightest."
"What?"
"The brightest."
"The broadest?"
"The brightest!"
"The what?"
"I said you may be the oldest but you're still the brightest."
"The widest?"
"The brightest!"
"The lightest?"
"No, the brightest."
"The what?"
Richard had backed off with his glass. From the courtyard below hecould hear the van, revving-revving against the cold and damp. It was almost over.
He got back to Calchalk Street at six o'clock the next morning. Prominently displayed on the kitchen table was a couriered package from the offices of Gal Aplanalp. It contained a bottle of champagne and an envelope, which he opened in turn. The letter said:
Although there has as yet been no response here in England, we have positive news from America. Untitled has been accepted by Bold Agenda, Inc., of New York. This is a small imprint, recently launched; they are unable to offer an advance, but the royalty percentage will be correspondingly readjusted in your favor. Roy Biv, your editor there, is very enthusiastic and hopes that we can all get behind the book. They want Untitled in their spring list: of course, you will be there, with Gwyn, for publication. This could turn out well for you. I hope you're pleased.
Richard did what Gina did when he asked her to marry him: he assented with a sneeze of tears. An hour later he still had his face in his hands when his wife came lightly down the stairs, and carefully approached. He looked
up. A weekend in the country had reduced him to the condition of a barely usable scarecrow. Black-eyed, flare-trousered, and rigid. All night he had juddered, as if in vibrant motion, on the ice-locked rails.
"Oh, what have you done to yourself?"
Behind her, across the passage, Marius and Marco were waking. You could hear them croak and stretch.
"No it's all right, it's all right. I don't know quite how it happened. But I think everything's going to be all right."
I saw the yellow dwarf today. Not the one up there (the weather has been bad). But the one down here (the weather has been bad). A single picture said it all.
The thing was, I think she had a date. Short skirt, high heels, new hairdo. Of course, any description of her appearance and get-up immediately involves you in niceties of scale. Any skirt, on the yellow dwarf, would have been short, and any heels would have been high. Nevertheless, short was her skirt and high were her heels. And her big-hair hairdo, similarly, seemed doubly big-prodigiously, recklessly big . ..
For a moment, for that flashbulb snapshot of time, before the pathetic sepia had a chance to form on the plate-I felt usurped. Me, myself: / was big enough to show the yellow dwarf a big time in, say, Big Top Pizza. Now wait. She stood in a doorway, with others, a hole in the wall between the enchained off-license and the appliance emporium to which, and from which, Richard Tull sometimes staggers, furled in the tartan coils of his vacuum cleaner. The yellow dwarf, with others, was sheltering from the rain; the crowded doorway dankly steamed-with cooling vapor, with the dark breath of traffic, and with the trailing edge of one of those London mists made entirely of respiratory betrayals and the gasps of asthmatics. She looked down: her puckered shirt, her ruined shoes. She looked up, with maximum defiance, through the gap in the sodden hedge of her hair.
