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.