THE INFORMATION

"What made you fall for him?"

Unlike Richard, Demi had changed for di

"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 whi

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 gri

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 pere

"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 i

"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.