"Politics," said Gwyn. "Gosh. Well I can't say I've given it that much thought. Thus far. Let's say I wouldn't want to rule it out. As yet." "You sound like a politician already, Gwyn."
This was Richard. The remark went down well-because, as is often pointed out, we are all of us in need of a good laugh. Or any kind of laugh at all. The need is evidently desperate. Richard dropped his head and turned away. No, that really wasn't the kind of thing he wanted to be saying. Ever. But Gwyn's world was partly public. And Richard's world was dangerously and increasingly private. And some of us are slaves in our own lives.
"I think writing'll do me," said Gwyn. "They're not incompatible, though, are they? Novelist and politician are both concerned with human potential."
"This would be Labour, of course." "Obviously." "Of course." "Of course."
Of course, thought Richard. Yeah: of course Gwyn was Labour. It was obvious. Obvious not from the ripply cornices twenty feet above their heads, not from the brass lamps or the military plumpness of the leather-topped desk. Obvious because Gwyn was what he was, a writer, in England, at the end of the twentieth century. There was nothing else for such a person to be. Richard was Labour, equally obviously. It often
"Thank you very much," said the interviewer, in a tone of mild surprise. For a moment he hesitated and stared desolately at his tape recorder, but then nodded and got to his feet. Now the photographer's presence started to gather and expand-her height, her health.
"If I could just have three minutes over in the corner there."
"I don't pose," said Gwyn. "The deal was you snap away while we talked. But no posing."
"Three minutes. Please. Two minutes. The light's so perfect there."
Gwyn acquiesced. He acquiesced, Richard thought, in the manner of someone who had similarly acquiesced many times before, conscious both of his magnanimity and of its limits. The well and all its sweet water would surely one day run dry.
"Who's coming to this thing?" Gwyn called, from beyond, as the photographer's trussed and pouch-swathed figure interposed itself between the two men.
"Not sure." Richard named some names. "Thanks for coming along. On your birthday and everything."
But now without turning to him the photographer with frantic fingers was making quelling gestures behind her back and saying,
"Good: I'm getting something. I'm getting something. Higher. Stay. That's very good. That's very good. That's beautiful.?
On the way out they encountered Lady Demeter Barry in the hall. She was twenty-nine, and had the abstracted and disorganized air you might expect from somebody who was related to the Queen. Like Gina Tull, she had no connection with literature other than marriage to one of its supposed practitioners.
"Got a lesson, love?" said Gwyn, moving up close.
Richard waited. "My dear Demi," he then said, giving a brief stiff bow before kissing her on either cheek.
The orange van was still out there-the soiled orange van, with its soiled white trim, and its soiled cream curtains fringing the windows side and back. Steve Cousins sat there, alone but for Giro, having sent 13 off for more Tings.
A monkey. A pony. Cockle and hen: ten. Why the animal imagery for proletarian money? Lady Godiva: fiver. Then the back slang. Rouf, nevis: sounds stupid. A carpet stood for three (and its multiples). And six was half a stretch, and a stretch was twelve, and a double carpet was thirty-three, and sixty-six was a … Jesus. That was type talk, and prison talk, and you shouldn't use it. And Steve had never gone to prison. He had never gone to prison, being (as many lawyers on many occasions had wearily reminded many courtrooms) of stainless record … At this juncture Steve was reading a magazine called Police Review but he also had a book on the dash: Crowds and Power, by Elias Canetti. Funnily enough, in Steve's circle (and Steve's circle was elliptical and eccentric), reading books like Crowds and Power was tantamount to a proclamation that you had gone to prison-and for a very long time. Beware the convict with his Camus and his Kierkegaard, his Critique of Pure Reason, his Four Quartets…
Steve. Steve Cousins. Scozz.
Scozz? Scozz had dyed hair, worn spiky-the color of syrup or even treacle; but the roots were black (sedimentary dye from a slightly earlier phase). His hair resembled damp ripe hay that had undergone reckless chemical enrichment. Where the colors merged they looked like the creases between a smoker's teeth. Scozzy didn't smoke. You don't smoke: what you do is stay fit and healthy. His face was long, despite the absence of chin (his chin was about the same size as the Adam's apple on which it perched); and in certain lights his features seemed to consist of shifting planes and lenses, like a suspect's face "pixelated" for the TV screen: smeared, and done in squares; blurred, and done in boxes. Scozzy wore two wire-thin silver rings in either ear. His pre-violence stare featured the usual bulged eyes-but the lips also widened and parted in avidity and amusement and recognition. Not tall, not stocky: he surprised peo-
Unsmilingly Scozzy rotated his neck muscles as 13 slid the door open and climbed back inside. Giro, lying further back now in his huge fur coat, sighed hotly in sleep.
13 said, "He come out?"
"Both did. Hopped in a cab. Account."
"Size of that racking gaff."
Scozzy turned to him, and exhaled, and said indulgently, "Oh, Thirt. Thirt, mate. What do you think we're here for? Think we come to screw it? Run round the house nicking stuff and fucking everything up?"
13 smiled with lowered head. He had had something of the sort in mind.
"Get a life. Get a century."
"Hey."
"Hold up."
They watched.
"The wife," said Scozzy, with conviction. "Off to her lesson."
"Big girl," said 13. "Yat," he added, with admiration.
Yeah: Lady Demeter certainly looked like a brother's dream pulclass="underline" blonde, rich, stacked. But she wasn't Steve's type. No human woman was. No, nor man, neither.