by Martin Amis
In for their tea now. He thought: only time it gets lively round here is when the tennis. Scozz could see but not hear the girls being summoned, the mum's voice failing at the windbreak of the garden wall. The three of them now at the kitchen table. He used his binoculars: yack yack yack. Diandra was holding up a comic. Mum giving Desiree the wagging finger . . . He knew exactly how quickly and radically he could transform this scene. Scozzy had a chaos organized in his mind, and ready to go. You're coming into their place but really you're taking them to your place: which is the world of fear. Which you know like the back of your hand. And they've never been there before, even though it's home. This wouldn't be business. Business was over. It wouldn't be business. It would be the other thing. Still, Scozzy had no intention; the option was duly waived. And they were that close to what he wanted to hurt. Wrong size? Wrong color? He didn't know. But something was wrong with them.
He reached for the keys, staring out through the glass, itself alive with the riotous reflections of maddened foliage. Here came that nun again. Jesus, he thought: look at the state of her boat-the ridged mouth, the mineral eyes. Nuns, in his personal Utopia, wouldn't be allowed out unless they daubed themselves an inch thick. Then at least you could tell they were meant to be women. And not runty results in cross-dress mourning gear. "Don't look at me that way," he whispered. "You think I don't have time for you? Look at me that way, and I'll have time for you. I know nuns. Brides of Christ." Steve Cousins: Barnardo boy. "God wants me for a sunbeam too."
The orange van came noisily and dirtily to life. Scozzy pulled out (piece of shit) and, after a couple of lefts, joined the chain-gang of the traffic, back London way.
"D mate," he said into the phone. "Tomorrow, mate." He listened) seeming to stare over his own cheek, top teeth bared, eyes dimmed. "Gimme … Gimme Styx.?
If you wanted someone picked up off the street, say, if you wanted them quelled with a stare, a hand on the shoulder, you'd opt for a couple of schwartzers every time. D and Styx. Big Dread and Wisely. Thelo-nius. Netharius. It wasn't just their blackness, their density and mass. It was their otherness and the severity with which they imposed it. You stepped into a new etiquette, into unreadable conventions.
A minute later he got D again and said he'd changed his mind. He didn't want a bro on next. It might create a false impression. So put Styx on hold and give him . .. Gimlet. "Yeah," said Scozzy. "Gimme Gimlet."
And then he called Agnes Trounce.
Gwyn was in the octagonal library, reading-or vetting-a piece about Etruscan pottery in The Little Magazine. Demi came in and served him his drink (a dry sherry) in its crystal capita. And she lingered, arms folded, with her long glass of Perrier. He had stopped being nice to Demi. On account of information conveyed to him by Richard, he hadn't looked at her for two days. And for two mornings he had taken his breakfast in the visitors' room, with Pamela.
"How was your lesson?"
"Good," said Gwyn. "Positive."
"Maybe I'll go to him. He could teach me a few tricks or two."
"… What?" It was quite an effort, asking a question without looking up.
"Just a thought."
"Teach you what?"
"Some tricks."
"You said 'a few tricks or two.' It's 'a few tricks.' Or 'a trick or two.' Not 'a few tricks or two.' "
Demi shrugged and said, "Um-'Pamela' told me about your incident. How very unpleasant. Are you sure you're all right?"
His face formed the expression that meant: work. Research. Demi apologized and left the room. Gwyn started reading-or vetting-a piece from the recruitment methods of Albrecht Wallenstein (1583-1634). This piece fell into the (by now capacious) category where it was the very distance of the subject from his own concerns that claimed his interest. Things were either pleasant or unpleasant, after all, and, if pleasant, they might be compared to the world of Amelior, and, if unpleasant, they might be contrasted with it.
Three hours earlier: Gwyn, hunkered down courtside with the great Buttruguena, in the vast fridge of the Oerlich.
The great man looked even older than he looked on TV-when they picked him out in the royal box or the celebrity enclosure, or when he stepped forward, as he did every year, to congratulate the champion at Roland Garros. Older, and less benign. In fact he looked almost as savage and stupid as some carnivorous ray or eel of the deep-after a more or less satisfactory kill (no poisons-yet; no impenetrable carapaces). Gwyn didn't feel any of this. He was a busy man with an immediate purpose. And if, in the mind of Richard Tull, there was always a kind of blues playing, with Gwyn the signature tune was much more upbeat; it was usually easy listening. The two men were introduced by affable Gavin in the bar, and had then walked slowly and silently down a long bunker of a passage whose walls were studded with framed photographs of famous tennis players and of famous people playing tennis, newscasters, soap stars, mountaineers, royals (Gwyn spent much of his time at the Oerlich wondering when Gavin was going to get out his camera. But maybe there wasn't any room). When he walked, the sole of the great Buttruguena's right gym shoe was almost fully exposed to the air. His right foot seemed to be upside down.
"We'll hit," he said. And they began.
In terms of trajectory and weight, there was no difference between the forehand and the backhand of the great man, the forehand hit flat, the backhand with a slice that made the ball hum as it crossed the net. Without apology or embarrassment Gwyn skipped and twirled around the baseline, his game a disastrous miscellany. Steadily the great man reduced the power and the depth of his drives. After ten minutes he pointed to the bench and limped toward it shaking his head.
"I don't understand," he said, staring at the net post. "You have no talent."
"I know there's a long way to go."
Using his forehead only, the great Buttruguena shrugged: traduced, trifled with. "It's quite hopeless."
"I know there's a lot to do."
"What you want? Spend a fortune to be one percent better?"
Buttruguena sat there, fierce, old, handsome, sour. He had won the French on clay and the Australian on grass. He had been a star in the days before the star system. Now he taught nineteen-year-olds who had their own airplanes.
"The thing is, there's only this one player I want to beat. I thoughtyou might be able to-you know, give me a few tips."
Buttruguena showed interest.
"He's not a whole league better. He beats me 6-3, 6-4. His backhand is pretty weak but it's-"
Buttruguena erased all this with his hand. "Okay. We can do it in five minutes right here and then we walk off the court. Okay?"
"Perfect."
"Are you richer than him? Who buys the balls?"
Afterwards, with his hair still wet from the shower, Gwyn had a Danish and a cup of espresso, more out of a sense of duty (duty to the expensive amenities) than hunger or delectation. Next he went and pretended to look around the pro shop: here you got a good view of the girls who policed Reception, shell-suited blondes from Sweden and South Africa, their tans growing lusterless under the striplight of public relations. He moved past them with his smile, his jerked nods, his colossal sports bag.
Outside he turned right, under the tube track where members such as himself were allowed to park. There was the builders' yard, there was the dead pub (peer through the glass: it looked as though it had been wiped out by some criminal knees-up, thirty years ago). He walked on. He hesitated, and walked on. A big black guy in a big black leather coat was leaning on the driver's door of Gwyn's Saab. Now what? Gwyn approached briskly, producing his keys: a busy man with an immediate purpose.
"Excuse me. My car."
They smiled at each other. The black guy didn't move. He announced: "Tennis."
"That's right," said Gwyn. "Just had a lesson."
"No you ain't."
"Excuse me?"
He unfurled his leather coat. There was a pouch sewn into the lining which contained a baseball bat. He lifted it out between finger and thu
mb and lowered it to the ground.
Gwyn felt the impulse to run, but the impulse was youthless; it wouldn't get him anywhere.
"You want a baseball lesson?"
"No thanks," he whispered.
The black guy stepped aside saying, "Nah. You don't want any of this. You don't want any of this …"
He had to step forward. He could feel the back of his own head, the hair cringing, or trying to grow-to pad and cover the helpless egg of his skull. As he beeped the lock-release and opened the door he could hearthe swathes cut by the bat through the surprisingly heavy resistance of the air.
The time had come for him to share the good news with Gina.
"Bad news," he said. "You know Anstice? Brace yourself. She's dead. Sleeping pills. She just went home and did it."
Of course, it wasn't all good news, and Richard had been wretched at first. Say she'd fingered him in some suicide note and Gina found out about it. Say the police came round-with the diary he knew she kept. But he seemed to have got away with it okay. And that was that. It was done. And nothing would ever persuade him that Anstice was having a worse time dead. On the other hand, he was free to wonder why so many writers' women killed themselves, or went insane. And he concluded: because writers are nightmares. Writers are nightmares from which you cannot awake. Most alive when alone, they make living hard to do for those around them. He knew this now-now that he wasn't a writer. Now that he was just a nightmare.
"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 wrot
e 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 cannot stand Alone.
Now wait a minute. It was overcompressed, maybe, but wasn't that kind of good? Like Yeats at his grandest and raciest?
To be immortal
Is commonplace, except for man. All creatures are immortal, being Ignorant of death.
Wasn't that something that the heart assented to-already knew? At this point "Ever" became obscure, or more obscure; but it seemed to end strongly. Richard lit a cigarette. He could see himself, twenty-odd years from now, on the TV screen (unimaginably old and, of course, rollickingly hideous), saying, in a senescent singsong, Yes, well it was clear to me at once-one always knows, do you see-that Keith Horridge was something rather . . . The second poem, "Disappointment," was Horridge at his most compressed ("Glue, gluten, gum / Just half-made always, / Soup-sup and ooze-thaw . . ."): what you would do was steer him away from the opacity of the sprung rhythm, toward the-
"I've got a feeling," he said, "that Horridge just might be the real thing."
Balfour's swivel chair gave its squeak. "Really? The question is whether he's got enough for a first collection."
"Enough poems or enough money?"
