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?"
"Enough poems," said Balfour. "And enough money."
"You know, I think he's too good for us. I think he could walk into any list. Why don't we just publish him? Five hundred copies. It's only poetry. He'd only expect about seventy-five quid."
Richard was reading Horridge's covering letter (and reminding himself to keep it somewhere safe). "How was America? Welcome back." Enclosed, wrote Horridge, were three "newborns": "Ever," "Disappointment," and "Woman." " 'Woman,' " Horridge went on, "is a departure for me, and possibly a breakthrough. Here for the first time I cast off all influences and speak in my own voice."
And here it was-"Woman":
Yesterday my woman, this girl I care about more
Than anyone else on the face of this earth, said
That
She
No
Longer
Wants
To
See
Me
Again.
There was more. The lines got longer again, as Horridge licked his wounds, and then got shorter, as Horridge girded himself to "Try/To/Win/Her/Back/Once/More." Richard looked around for his wastepaper basket. But of course you didn't do that here. You didn't reject stuff-you didn't stomp it into the trash. What you did was publish it. You held it in front of you and with your red pen you wrote, center title and set as verse.
"It's something to think about," said Balfour.
"No it's not. Forget Horridge. Let's just take all his money and never talk about him again."
If literature was the universal, then all you'd ever get in here was space trash. A slowly twirling door panel from some old Telstar. A scorched waste-chute from some old Sputnik. "Woman" was what Horridge sounded like when he cast off all influences and spoke in his own voice. And "Disappointment" was what he sounded like when he was fucking around with his thesaurus. And "Ever" … The authors published by the Tantalus Press were in the habit of giving themselves credit for things, but most people weren't, and Richard wasn't. Otherwise he might have been gratified by the way his memory now went to work-the way its tumblers swiftly recombinated. In the Gnostic cosmogonies the demi-urgi knead and mold a red Adam who cannot stand alone. To be immortal is commonplace, except for man. Jorge Luis Borges-and from something impregnably famous like "The Library of Babel" or "The Circular Ruins." He looked at Horridge's shining margins and saw all the thumb prints and palm sweat. And it came to him.
It came to him. Obscenity, blasphemy: Gwyn Barry's novels had survived any such booby trap. But there was a third hazard, one that could sneak up on you, at whatever time. Richard reached for his desktop dictionary and read: "L. plagarius a kidnapper; a seducer; also, a literary thief." Plagiary: it was an ugly word.
"Balfour. There's something I want you to help me with."
Having heard him out, Balfour said, "You're not planning to do anything rash, I hope."
"How long will it take? And how much will it cost?"
He waited at the school gates for his sons in the rain.
Thence to the video shop, whose windows were as thick with steam as the windows of Mick's Fish Bar across the street. The damp dogs had to wait outside in the wet but the damp dogs were what the video shop smelled of. At this hour the place was full of other adults and other children. Richard thought that the adults looked like child-murderers, and so did the children, with their hairdos and earrings and their shallow, violent eyes. Marius and Marco were crouched under HORROR, in pious supplication, but they would eventually have to settle for CHILDRENS with no apostrophe. Then he took them across the road (don't tell Mummy) to Mick's Fish Bar for their fries.
When he got home he installed the boys in front of Tom and Jerry. Two or three years ago they used to watch Tom and Jerry with fullattention but with no amusement, as if it was a simplified and stylized but essentially truthful representation of how an average cat got on with an average mouse. Nowadays, though, they found it funny. And Richard found it funny. He found everything funny. Listening to their laughter, he sat at his desk, a room away. He wasn't writing. He was typing-typing Amelior. And not word for word. But making little changes (sometimes for the worse if he could contrive it, sometimes unavoidably for the better) as he went along.
"Now, son," said the great O'Flaherty, "how old would you be?"
"I'll be forty-one next month," said Gwyn, as if expecting this news to cause considerable surprise.
"Now you won't be giving up your day job, I hope. I fear you'll starve!" O'Flaherty shrugged-so lightly, so gently. "You see, it's your cueing. And your eye, son. Your eye."
For the second time O'Flaherty talked, at some length, about snooker being a game of visual imagination. Earlier, Gwyn had perked up, thinking he ought to be pretty good at that. But the experiments O'Flaherty had had him conduct (with an additional white ball placed against the object ball at various set angles and then removed) seemed to make the game no easier.
Gwyn interrupted him, saying, "The thing is, there's only this one player I want to beat. And he's no good either."
Soft-faced, still, at sixty, but with a protuberant ironic prow to his upper lip, the great O'Flaherty patiently inclined his head. "Now if I was to take your cueing apart," he said, "you'd lose for a long time before you won."
"Yeah and I can't have that."
"But think. In a while you'd be knocking in breaks of thirty. Thirty-five!"
"No I want to beat this guy now. What I'm here for are some tips. About how to win."
O'Flaherty inclined his head, not sadly, but with professional docility. To him, the game stood for temperance and fair dealing; it stood for civilization. He had twice been runner-up in the World Championship in the days when you got ten bob for winning it. And he'd got five bob for losing it. In contrast, though, to the great Buttruguena, who spent every waking moment wondering why he wasn't a resident of Monte Carlo, the great O'Flaherty did not mourn the Marbellan holiday home-did not mourn the personalized number plate.
"If it was down to me I'd advise you not to bother. But I am in your employ…"
"That's true," said Gwyn with emphasis.
He straightened up. "Now you both have your own sticks?"
"Yes. But mine's much more expensive.?
"The purchase of a chamois cloth is usually worth a couple of blacks, initially. Then you could go further. The cue extensions, the half-butt, and so on. The little rest-extension gadget."
"So you're saying that just getting more equipment helps?"
O'Flaherty inclined his head. "Initially. For a little while."
Gwyn offered a suggestion.
With a twist of the wrists the great O'Flaherty sundered the two sections of his cue. "That probably ought to do it."
It was not a snooker hall, nor a cave of pool, that Gwyn had now to take his leave of; and Gwyn was glad about that. Snooker halls, with their darkness, their pyramids of light over the green-decked slabs of lead-snooker halls were places where violence might traditionally lurk. But no. The lesson had taken place in one of the public rooms of the Gordon Hotel on Park Lane. It was here that O'Flaherty gave his trick-shot displays for the instruction and delight of corporate gatherings (it was Sebby, in fact, who had put Gwyn in touch with the Irish magician). Now he took out his wallet and asked what the damage was, but it had all been taken care of at the other end, and O'Flaherty didn't even want Gwyn's tip.
The Boy from the Valleys: A Life of Gwyn Barry was no good because Barry chimed with Valley and he wanted to stop reminding people he came from Wales. Allegorist was quite nice and more modest than Visionary. Gwyn Barry: Troubled Utopian was far from ideal, and too gloomy, though he liked the notion that being Utopian wasn't as easy as it looked. A Better Way: Gwyn Barry and the Quest for . . . Really he would prefer plain old Gwyn Barry or even, simply, Barry. American writers had those good surnames-gruff, rasping, unassimilated. You didn't seem to get that here. Pym. Powell. Greene.