Now came half term, and Richard's week of Sole Charge.

It was a time of great revelations. It was a time of ceaseless discovery. Who would have thought it? In a scant five days, while he went about his simple tasks in the company of those two young souls, more genuine illumination came his way than in as many years of cloistered endeavor, bent over his books and all their fust and dust. ..

By midmorning on Tuesday Richard knew why women never did anything and were no good at anything and never amounted to anything and never contributed anything to anything. To anything permanent, that is to say. It wasn't having children that did it, necessarily. It was hanging out with children that did it. Whatever you thought of this arrangement, it had something to be said in its favor: it demanded no further inquiry. And it wouldn't be getting any-not from him. Why waste valuable time when you could be untangling a shoelace or picking up crumbs or tripping over a squeaky toy or slapping some slice of trex onto a frying pan or going down on your hands and knees to search for a weapon component under the sofa or the bunk bed or the oven? Gina came home at six. Richard went into his study and began his review of a new Life of Warwick Deeping. After forty minutes he had something like-

This is a long book. This book has pictures. I like pictures. Pictures are good. There is a picture of a man. There is a picture of a house. There is a picture of a lady. You have to read pages but you don't have to read pictures. I like pictures because pictures are good.

On Wednesday morning, first thing, he escorted the twins to the video store and the three of them returned with a sack of cartoons. Mar-ius boycotted these, and pleaded for stronger fare. By Thursday the boys were watching anything they liked so long as the movie wasn't actually called Snuff. By Friday they would both have thick and fluent American accents, spurning strawberry jam at breakfast, for example, and inflexibly insisting on peanud budder. With the children parked in front of some ghoul or Nazi Richard made progress with his review, managing to add that the book contained a picture of a dog and that he liked pictures of dogs because pictures of dogs were good. He seriously considered typing this out and biking it in. Because he knew that even his book-reviewingdays were numbered. A slow contamination would be seeping out from the Tantalus Press. The appearance of his name on its letterhead, and in its ads (the Tantalus howled to the talentless: the talentless howled back), this would be seeping out. . . And Richard accepted it. Here there was no cognitive dissonance. He felt fully contaminated. He thought of clear liquids, of saline solutions. He wanted people in white to gather round him and wash his blood . .. On Thursday afternoon he came out of his study, drawn by a squall of salvos and screams. Eating jellybabies, the boys were engrossed in a billion-dollar bloodbath called Decimator.

"I could practically go to jail for this. Jesus. Don't tell Mummy. Why can't you watch something nice?"

"Like?" said Marius.

"I don't know. Bambi."

"Bambi's quap."

"How can you say that?"

"There's one good bit in Bambi."

"What bit's that?"

"When Bambi's mother gets killed."

"Let's go to Dogshit. Marco? Marco's asleep."

"No he's not. He's pretending. He's scared of violence but he won't admit it."

"Come on. Let's hide the videos."

"Marco! Dogshit!"

Dogshit-that verdant world, that ghost of Eden, so late our happy seat.. . From a distance the grass had a layer of silver or pewter in it: the promise or the memory of dew. Up close, its green was as municipal as paint. And then there were the formal flowers, the pudding blooms, the gladioli in their thin old-lady overcoats; the flower bed was Dogshit's flower hat. People, park wanderers, provided other colors, from other countries: spice and betel.

Suddenly he knew what London children looked like. London children, those of London raising-they looked like crisps. They looked like Wotsits. Which wasn't to say that they all looked the same. There were genres, even here. This one looked like cheese-and-onion. This one looked like beef-and-mustard. This one looked like salt-and-vinegar.

Three black women moved through them, across the playground. The two grown girls with their African height and verticality, and behind them the old lady, in a white smock and a dark sash, round, rolling, like a pool ball waddling to the end of its spin.

It seemed to him that all the time he used to spend writing he now spent dying. His mind was freer now. Alas. He no longer did his "mid-dies" for The Little Magazine-where he got his hands on the first-echelon talents, great men, great and childless women. He no longer solaced the childless Anstice by telephone for hour after hour. He no longer wrote. Boredom and sordor used to be asked to be seen as interesting and beautiful, and you could do it, with your energy. Transformation would occur. It seemed to him that all the time he used to spend writing he now spent dying. This was the truth. And it shocked him. It shocked him to see it, naked. Literature wasn't about living. Literature was about not dying.

Suddenly he knew that writing was about denial.

Suddenly he knew that denial was great. Denial was so great. Denial was the best thing. Denial was even better than smoking.

He came to think of denial as a fashionable resort, a playground for the rich, in a prose borrowed from Gina's brochures.

On Friday, she was home. So they had to be out. Colossally girding himself, Richard promised the children a trip to the zoo. On the bus he took his head out of his hands and said,

"Where shall we go first? The reptile house?"

Marius shrugged. He was working on this shrug, palms loosely out-thrust from tight elbows. Five years ago he was practicing his reflexes. Now he was practicing his gestures-his shrugs.

Richard said, "The aquarium?"

"The gift shop," said Marius.

"You're very quiet, Marco. What are you sitting there thinking about?"

And Marco came alive and said, "My secred idendidy!"

In the zoo there were many kinds of animals for the people to look at. But there were only two kinds of people for the animals to look at. Children. And divorcees.

He was not a divorcee, he knew. At night, in the arid fever and miserable magic of the dark, he would whimper up to his wife, and hold on. He wasn't seeking warmth. He was trying to stop her going away. Which she wouldn't do, so long as he held on. More than this: in the depleted menagerie of their bed he could sense certain rumors of beasthood, not the beast of old, which was a young beast, but a new beast, which was an old beast. Something patched together, something inexpensively revamped. In the mornings, too, especially at weekends: watching her as she showered and dressed, and then looking up through the skylight at the clouds, their paunches, their ashen love-handles … I will arise and go now, with a suitcase, to the callbox. He thought of the fame-ruined lines from "The Second Coming," about the rough beast, its hour comeround at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. What would it look like, this beast of his? Yeah. Rough. Now he was impotent again but without his excuses. And what is a man, without his excuses? There was nothing for Gina to stick around with. There was nothing for Gina to leave. Richard no longer cried in the night. He thrashed, and gnashed-but he no longer wept. Because he did all that in the day. The day, and the dusk. He wasn't crying in front of anyone yet, as women do. Crying in front of people was part of their catharsis. He was determined never to cry in front of the boys, as he had that one time, in front of Marco, long ago.