I said at the outset that Demeter, like Gina, had no connection with literature other than marriage to one of its supposed practitioners. This isn't quite true. This is never quite true. We all have our connections with literature, wittingly or not so wittingly. How else do we explain the intensity of Richard's interest? Everybody knew that he was going down to Byland Court to spend the weekend with Lady Demeter. His wife knew; her husband knew; the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet knew. But nobody knew how Demi filled his mind, sometimes-how he burned across town at her.
If you could gather together all a man's past lovers (the lovers of a modern midlifer, averagely promiscuous) and line them up in chronological order, as in a catalogue raisonne, as in the long passage of a gallery or museum: for the retrospective . . . You would begin with shocking diversity, with the wide-sweep eclectic. Moving along the line the viewer's eye would jump up, down, start back, all heights, all weights, all colorings. Then after a while a pattern would establish itself; the repetition of certain themes would eventually situate you in one genre or another, until you came to the last woman in the show, the crystallized: and that's your wife. So things had gone, more or less, with Richard. The arrow of obsession pointed to Gina. All the girls, all the women, got bendier and coilier and craftier-until you came to Gina. Her eyes, her mouth, the turn of her waist: these were his Collected Poems. Whereas members of the subgenre that Demi roamed, the big round baby-powder blondes, were never numerous and petered out a long way back down the line. Though he had been awfully pleased to see them at the time. Richard was forty. He paid many visits to this passage. His life was this passage. The world was this passage.
because she is a pretty blonde (with a full bosom) who is related to the Queen, nor yet because she kept various ponies and was addicted to cocaine and heroin and slept with one or two black men. In the Queen's extended family, being a junkie, like keeping a pony, is standard stuff: the landscaped grounds of the higher-priced detox clinics are like lawn parties at Sandringham. Sleeping with black men, on the other hand, shows us Demi's more adventurous side. Girls of every other class do that, perhaps because, among other less elusive attractions, it's the only thing left that their mothers haven't done. But girls of the nobility, with exceptions, don't sleep with black men. I can't think why not, if it's half as much fun as everyone says it is. We noted earlier that the black man, very commonly, serves as a sexual thought-experiment for his white counterpart: he is your gifted surrogate; he is your supersub. I myself have a bro in my head-Yo!-who, after much ritual handslapping, takes over when I'm tired or can't come, or on those nights when I've got a headache or I'm washing my hair. (The polite phrase for this habit is imaginative delegation: whoever he is-masterfully glistening, in the fantasy, over your wife or girlfriend or pin-up or pick-up-he isn't you.) . . . Otherness is exciting. Miscegenation is exciting. So, with all this going for it, why don't the girls of the nobility do it more? Racial guilt, egalitarian guilt, is exciting: it excites compassion in the female breast. But maybe this guilt only works when it's vague-a presentment, an unease. With the nobility, maybe, the guilt is all too palpable and proximate. The De Rouge-mounts were famous alike for their piety and rapacity. Demi's great-granddad, with his "extensive interests" in the West Indies. Demi's granddad, with his South African diamond mines. And then the polluting, scorching, forest-razing, rubble-bouncing speculations of Demi's father, thirteenth Earl of Rieveaulx. The guilt is still real. The spell is still fast and good.
Representationally, though, this isn't the difficulty. The representational difficulty posed by Demi has to do with the way she speaks: the way she puts sentences together. For some reason it is the destiny of Richard Tull to be surrounded by idioglots. Idioglots, with their idiolects.
Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like "Up you!" or "Ballshit!" For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase-Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context. But here's the difficulty. In fictional prose the idiolect spells trouble because the novel-
"Where you been then?"
"Party. Office party."
"Party? Time of year. Parties. It. You do."
"Yeah."
These minicab drivers who ferried Richard about, over Christmas, to and from the diaspora of old Fleet Street-these minicab drivers were every hue of Asian brown, but they all spoke the same language. Clearly they had learned their English from small-hour conversations with their customers, people like Richard or people in similar condition.
"Nice talking to you," slurred Richard, climbing out on Calchalk Street, under a slanting moonman and a city star or two. "What's that?"
"Uh, that's. Let's. It. Call it six-fifty," slurred the minicab driver.
"Take seven."
"… Phanks. Cunt.?
Still, aristocratic lineage, great wealth, comparative youth, an air of vulnerability, a full bosom: wouldn't that about cover it, universally? Did Demi need anything literary, to ignite Richard's passion?
Yes. First, the big parties she used to throw for writers. Deliriously, ravenously, Richard sent his mind back to the napkin-scarved bottles of old champagne tipped his way by tuxedoed athletes (even the help was hip, was hot) and bims in ra-ra skirts offering canapes made of dodo G-spots and hummingbird helmets, in the octagonal library, where he had mingled with the knowers and philosopher kings of the living word-while all the agents and editors and publishers cowered in their nimbus of pelf and preferment: men and women who shunned him; men and women whose secretaries hung up on him without blinking; men and women whose letters he opened like some Soviet janitor getting a personal summons from Stalin . . . Hoping to impress Gwyn Barry (or, more honestly, hoping to depress him), Richard had taken his friend to the salon of Lady Demeter de Rougemount. And look what happened.
Other than that, Richard had information on Demi now, and information always points to the vulnerable-the hidden. Secrets, female secrets, tend to the poetic, like the birthmark that her rumpled shirtcol-lar sometimes failed to conceaclass="underline" Demi's port-wine stain, which rose and glowed when she was flustered or distressed. Really she was offering the world only an excerpt of the truth. Demi had gone from the grottolike chapel at Byland Court to the cash machine on the high street at midnight (making two withdrawals, at 11:59 and 12:01: this was drugs knowledge). The element that rescued her face from mere youth-dependant prettiness was the appetite, the taste for disobedience and dissolution. It put depth into her eyes and made them humorous and propitiatory; it complicated her mouth, her teeth; it meant that her hair couldn't quite conform to its sheen and bob. Her appetite was not vulpine; it was loose and shrugging. She was hurt, she was sorry. That was just how she was. Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded. She and her husband slept in separate beds, in separate bedrooms. Richard understood. He and Gina still turned in together; but they were sleeping in separate beds. Richard understood. An I for an I.
The representational difficulty remains. My suspicion remains. Demeter's dimensions are one short of the three. It does happen. Gina, too, maybe. If writers drain life out of those around them, if writers are vampires, are nightmares … To be clear: I don't come at these people.