"At the Warlock. You play with the other writer."
"Gwyn."
"Gwyn Barry. Best-seller."
"That's him."
"Numero uno. Beyond meteoric. Quite an achievement."
"Yes, it is. Quite an achievement. When what you write is unadulterated shit."
"Total crock."
"The purest trex."
"Complete crap."
Richard looked at him. The eyes lit but narrowed. The bent slot of the mouth. A violent maniac who hated Gwyn's stuff. Why weren't there any more where he came from?
"With the junkie wife."
"Demi? Demeter?"
"Who has a distinct liking for—for our colored brethren."
"Oh come on."
"Do you or do you not know how it goes? First off: she was a classic coke rat. In and out of those deluxe dryout joints. NA. All this. A big blond Lady who likes black stuff. You think that don't get around?"
"When was this? Why didn't it get around?"
"See, it's face. It's face. You're lying on a floor somewhere, right? All blissed out. The reason you're feeling so good is that Lance or whoever has just come in with the white bag and helped you pump it up your nose. And there's this great big solemn schwartzer staring down at you and holding out his hand the way they do." He held out his hand the way they do, with palm slowly upturned. "Everyone else, okay, they're half
out of it, but not Lance, who touches nothing stronger than Lilt. You
telling me she's going to say no to Lance? 'No thanks, mate'? With the political pressure on her? Half them pushers are only in it for the flip." "The what?”
"The skirt. The women."
Making it clear, making it entirely clear, how the young man felt about flip: how he felt about women. Often accused of this sin himself (though never by his wife), and largely innocent of it, in his view (in his view he was just candidly and averagely semi-fucked-up, along the usual male lines), Richard could spot genuine woman-hatred at twenty paces. It was something in the eyes or something in the mouth. The mouth, which would soon be thickly salivating as it began the joke about the skunk and the knickers. Again Richard cautioned himself. The young man contained sexual complication. But he wasn't a type. And his mouth wasn't going to start telling the joke.
"Her dad's the Earl of..."
"Rieveaulx," said Richard, supplying the simple duosyllable—and intercepting (he imagined) the young man's Polack tonguetwister.
"Big connections. With the so-called press barons. He kept it quiet. This was five years ago. Drug orgies with schwartzers. The Queen's twentieth cousin twice removed. You couldn't keep it quiet now."
"Fascinating," said Richard, who, at this stage, was sleepily considering the lunch he might soon arrange with Rory Plantagenet.
Steve had straightened up. He was looking shrewdly at the copyright page of Dreams Don't Mean Anything: there, opposite the pristine borrowing form. If Richard offered to sign it (which, as it happened, he never got round to) Steve would say that he'd fished it out of a cardboard box on the Portobello Road and paid thirty pee for it. He didn't know about literary pride, about literary face: not yet.
"I see—I see it was published . .. way back. What? You uh ..."
"This very morning I delivered the new one. Breaking a long silence, as they say."
"Yeah? What's it called?"
Richard readied himself. "Untitled."
"Nice. Here's to it. Cheers."
"Cheers. All this with Demi." He was thinking: Demi doesn't drink. He was thinking of Demi at dinner, covering her empty wineglass with her hand. "That's all over now. I mean look. There she is. Happily married."
"My arse. Public relations that is. Don't want to believe everything you see on TV"
"How do you know all this?"
"You remember a Mrs. Shields? Cooks for them. Or did."
"Yeah," said Richard, with slow emphasis but without commitment. "That's my brother's mum." "... Your mum."
"Half brother."
"Same dad," said Richard, who unfortunately chose this moment to look at his watch. If he had gone on looking across the table he would have known for sure that the young man didn't have a half brother. Or a mum. Or a dad.
"She said she'd never seen a newlywed cry so much."
"And why would that be?"
"She wants kids: Catholic. And he won't have them."
Richard sipped his Rattlesnake with some wariness. He was wondering how good at walking he was going to turn out to be, when the time came. There was still a pretty good guy in here, he reckoned. But his voice was slipping from baritone to bass; and he knew the signs. He said,
"What do you do?"
"You've forgotten my name, haven't you? You've forgotten it."
"Yes. Come to think of it. I've completely forgotten it."
Again the hand was flexed out towards him, tense, vertical—the shot card.
"Steve Cousins. What do I do? Well I could say 'this and that.' As some do. 'Me? Ah you know. This and that.' You know. 'Bit of this. Bit of that.' Thing is I'm in a more fluid thing now. I don't need to interact now, financially. Semiretired if you like. My main activities now are what you'd call recreational."
For a moment they studied each other: quid pro quo. To Richard (who was "pixelated," and thoroughly, in the old sense), Steve looked like a white-and-gray chessboard: like a forensic suspect on TV, his face smeared into squares. To Steve (who was Sunday-best sober, as always), Richard looked like an artistic two-dimensionalization of himself, hollow, wavery, approximate and rendered with minimum talent: the work of a court portraitist. Richard was a witness. Richard was a character witness.
"So?" said Richard. He sipped and waited.
And Scozzy shrugged and said, "I fuck people up."
Richard turned in his seat. He felt that this called for another Rattlesnake.
The Little Magazine now lived in Soho, where it had only recently arrived and would not long remain. The Little Magazine had seen better days. The offices of The Little Magazine were little offices, and the rent was overdue.
The Little Magazine was born and raised in a five-story Georgian town
house next to the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields (1935-1961). Dusty decanters, hammocklike sofas, broad dining tables strewn with books and learned journals: here a handsome philanderer in canvas trousers bashing out an attack on Heinrich Schliemann ("The Iliad as war reportage? The Odyssey as ordnance survey cum captain's log? Balderdash!"); there a trembling scholar with his eleven thousand words on Housman's prosody ("and the triumphant rehabilitation of the trochee"). From the swards of Lincoln's Inn The Little Magazine—increasingly nomadic and downwardly mobile—had made its way to Fenchurch Street, to Holborn, to Pimlico, to Islington, to King's Cross (1961-1979). It slept in attics, in spare rooms, it dossed down on the floors of friends; it was always seeking cheaper lodgings. There used to be something reassuringly Edwardian, something defiantly scapegrace, in these compulsive changes of address (1979-1983). No longer.
The Little Magazine, for many years now, had lurked and lurched across town with the ruddily averted face of bum or bag lady. Evicted often and forcibly from this or that blighted flatlet, it sometimes lingered in the dark behind the beaten door like a reeking squatter in his vest. The money was running out. The money was always running out. Its identity—the only thing it had plenty of—was patrician; its owner and editor, despite the desperate squalor of his surroundings, always wore a monocle and took frequent pinches of snuff. Prodigiously inefficient and self-pitying, The Little Magazine drained money from anyone who went anywhere near it. Push your way past its hardboard door, in your silk hat and cashmere overcoat, and after a couple of weeks you too would be sleeping rough. On the other hand The Little Magazine really did stand for something. It really did stand for something, in this briskly materialistic age. It stood for not paying people. And when it did pay people, it paid them little and it paid them late. Printers, landlords, tax-m
en, milkmen, contributors, staff: it paid them next to nothing and always at the very end of the eleventh hour. No one knew what happened to the "contributions"—the minor loans, the royal ransoms—which The Little Magazine impartially processed: the dole-checks and dowries, the nest-eggs, the five-generation brewing fortunes. Some magazines were success stories, but this magazine was a sob story: even Richard Tull, after a year of unremunerated labor in its offices, found himself writing out a check for a thousand pounds, made payable to the monocled thren-odist in the editor's chair ... Richard edited the back half. He often edited the front half too. Every other Monday he went in and did the books. Every other Friday he went in and did the arts. All the rest of the time, it seemed, he spent writing the "middles"—unpaid, of course, and also unsigned, although "everybody" (in fact a select company) was supposed to know he had written them.
Today was Friday. Here came Richard. Umbrella, bow tie, portly biography wedged into the armpit, cigarette. He paused, on Frith Street, as he approached the triptych of doorways which The Little Magazine shared with a travel agent and a shop that sold clothes to the very tall and the very fat—he paused, and looked down. He looked down because the tramp he was stepping over (who intently ate dog food from the can with a plastic spoon) bore a close resemblance to his opera critic. So close that Richard even said, "Hugo?" But the tramp wasn't Hugo. Or Hugo wasn't the tramp. Not yet: not this week. Richard went inside and was relieved to see Hugo lying facedown on the stairs to the first-floor office. He stepped over Hugo and paused again in a marveling attempt to identify the source of the seal-house or dolphinarium sound effects (the hooting and squealing, the egregious belly-flops) which issued from the half-landing toilet. It was his ballet critic: Cosmo. Then he entered the literary department. His secretary came forward and helped him off with his mack.
"Thank you. Well, Anstice?"
Anstice, with her head dipped, told him what he needed to be told. He didn't need to be told about the opera critic or the ballet critic—or the radio critic, who stood nearby with his head out the window, rubbing his eyes and panting rhythmically, or the art critic who sat at the books table weeping into his drenched hands. Richard asked about the film critic, who, very ominously, had slipped out some hours ago for a packet of cigarettes. But he was pleased to hear that the theater critic, who was writing the lead review that fortnight, was emplaced in his usual nook farther up the stairs. Very shortly Richard went to see how he was doing. There Bruno sat at his little table, his bearded face immersed, as usual, in his typewriter keys. Richard reached out for a firm handful of his crackling hair, and tugged: thus he saw that Bruno, before losing consciousness, had very nearly completed the first word of his piece. What he had written, so far, was "Chehko." And Richard happened to know that Bruno's subject that fortnight was a new production of The Three Sisters. He regained the literary department in time to see the film critic mount the stairs in such a fury of dissimulated torpor that he would surely have hurled himself into the far wall beyond Anstice's desk. But the kneeling figure of the ballet critic was there to check his stride. Richard stepped over them and went to the editor's office on the floor above, which he always hid in when the editor wasn't hiding in it.
What he wanted to know was this. Why had he received no word from Gal Aplanalp? Why wasn't the telephone bouncing on its cradle? Where was the long, favorable and riveted critique of Untitled? And how high were Steve Cousins's rates? Richard wondered what was stopping him from just going ahead and ringing Gal Aplanalp. Pride, he sup- posed; and a sense of his own artistic worth. So he lit a cigarette and went ahead and called Gal Aplanalp.
"It's all going forward," she said. "In fact it's placed."
She was referring, of course, not to his novel but to his projected five thousand-word profile of Gwyn Barry, which had inspired broad and competitive interest. Gal named a sum of money which exactly corresponded to Richard's annual salary at The Little Magazine. After a silence he said,
"What about my book?"
"I know. I've cleared the weekend for it. I'm taking it home tonight. Gwyn says it's remarkable."
"Gwyn hasn't read it."
"Oh," said Gal Aplanalp.
Having said good-bye and hung up, Richard managed to apply himself to some constructive work. Ringing round various publishers, he identified and called in three books for review. One was by Lucy Cabretti. One was by Elsa Oughton. One was by Professor Stanwyck Mills. These authors, we might remember, were the judges of the Profundity Requital. Ringing round various contributors, Richard then entrained three favorable notices. We must trust him on this. He had his reasons. Richard was about to get up and go and find her when Anstice slowly put her head round the door. Her face blinked at him.
"Is there anything I should be worrying about, Anstice?"
"Oh no. I expect we shall soldier through."
"Cosmo seems much improved. So does Hugo."
"You know, I really respect Hugo for the way he's getting to grips with it. No, it's Theo."
"Oh?"
By a long-established anomaly, the last page of the books (it was the batched fiction review) was put to bed on the same day as the arts. Now you expected no trouble whatever on the batched fiction review. It was The Little Magazine's plum job, often squabbled and feebly brawled over: he who wrote the batched fiction review ended up with perhaps a dozen new hardbacks to sell to the man in Chancery Lane. Richard wanted to write the batched fiction review. Even the editor wanted to write it.
Anstice said, "He wants to know if he can fax it in."
"He hasn't got a fax. We haven't got a fax."
"That's what I told him."
"Well tell him to get out of bed and get dressed and get on the bus and bring it in. Like he always does."
"He sounded a bit...”
"No doubt he did." Richard told her that if she could bear it—and if indeed Theo had written it—she should simply phone him up and have him slur it in. Before she went he said, "How are you?"
"Pretty well, really. For a ruined woman. One roughly used and then cast aside. R. C. Squires was in here."
"How horrible. Is he coming back?"
"I don't know. Will I be seeing you later?"
"Of course, Anstice," he said.
She left. She left slowly, her presence reluctantly receding from him. When it was there no longer his head dropped suddenly like a weight. It hung, at right angles to the sheen of his paisley waistcoat. Having dropped about forty-five degrees ... Which is a lot, on some scales, by some reckonings. For example, Barnard's Star, as it is called, crosses 10.3 seconds of arc per year. This is a quarter of the Jupiter pinpoint—about a sixth of a degree: per year. Yet no other heavenly body shows so great a proper motion. This is why it is called the Runaway Star ... And just by dropping his head like that Richard was changing his temporal relationship with the quasars by thousands and thousands of years. He really was. Because the quasars are so far away and getting farther away so fast. This is to put Richard's difficulties in context. The context of the universe.
Eleven hours later he was emplaced with Anstice in the Book and Bible. The paper had been put to bed. To put to bed was what you did with children—whereas grownups took each other there.
Crooned at and lullabied, given snacks and glasses of water, its fears assuaged, The Little Magazine had been put to bed. Bruno, the theater critic, had finished his major piece on The Three Sisters. Unfortunately it proved to be only thirty words long. The opera critic, Hugo, had failed to write anything at all, despite spending the afternoon in a sinkful of iced water and despite engaging, with Anstice, in a program of deep-breathing exercises which reminded Richard of the classes he had attended with Gina: the adults sitting around on the floor and gazing up at teacher like the children they would shortly bear. Otto, the radio critic, finished his piece and then tore it up and threw it out the window. Several heads slewed round, at first in dismay and then in hard suspicion, when Inigo, the film critic, said
through his tears that he was betraying his poetry by writing for money. You mean someone around here was getting money'? Towards dusk it looked for a while as though Richard and Anstice would be faced with another Black Friday. This was the occasion on which all seven arts writers—grouped about the place in varying postures of weary contemplation—had produced not a syllable between them. And Richard had hurled together a ragged quilt of house ads, overmatter, crosswords and killed chess columns.
"Inigo was amazing," said Anstice, finishing her white wine.
"Inigo was incredible," said Richard, finishing his scotch.
Inigo was also lying on the carpet at their feet. A man of great and curdled abilities, as they all were, kind of, Inigo had written 7,500 largely coherent words about a Bulgarian cartoon—the only thing he had seen, or remembered seeing, over the past two weeks.
Piously Anstice dipped her head. Richard stared, as he often stared, at the center-parting of her hair. Here, it seemed, two opposing forces met and with bristling difficulty contended. Oh dear, oh my: those people you see on streetcorners, when their hair is not just bad but wrong, too obviously comprising individual and uncoordinated strands, not just curled but bent, twisty, and propagating at all the wrong angles. Anstice's hair grew with futile force; here was the ponytail, as weighty as old navy rope, reaching to the gathered lap of her smock. Her hair looked never-washed, Rasta-like. She lifted her head and smiled at him slowly with that flicker of apologetic tenderness.