The van dropped him off in a rear courtyard and he was directed toward the kitchen-where Demi was, and where all her sisters were: Lady Amaryllis, Lady Callisto, Lady Urania, Lady Persephone. With his small but respectably battered suitcase Richard entered a room where, against all expectation, he was greeted with mandatory informality: the four sisters, the four titled dairy maids each with a tided tit out and a baby at the end of it, and six or seven additional infants with their eternal cadences of weariness and demand, plus crunchy coughs, pi-dog sneezes, hiccup pulses, hold-everything retchings and of course the many scales of infant grief. These sounds were eternal, but louder here, and richer in eructation, because of the incredible squalor, as Demi explained.
"It's not just the babies," she said. "Everyone who comes here spends most of their time in the loo."
And you could hear it, you could hear it, the whoop and whoops of baby burp, fart and gag, continuous and cartoonish, like a baby one-man band, the perpetual motion of air.
"You'll be at it too. Can't you just smell all the dead mice?"
He drank his coffee, among the staring eyes and streaming noses and dangling, bootied feet. This was olfactory forgiveness-olfactory deliverance. Richard sat there, sniffing his fingertips; but his nose, he liked to believe, was finally on the mend. He seldom thought he smelled of shit. He seldom thought, even, that he smelled of batch. What he thought he smelled of now was spinst. And that just couldn't be right. Spinst, he said to himself (and it was quite a riff by now). Come on. Spinst. How obvious has it got to get that your nose is dicking you around? Spinst: what clearer proof could there be that your nose is absolutely full of it?
"Richard's writing a long piece about Gwyn."
The sisters turned to him with considered expressions.
"You're not going to get a tape recorder out or anything?"
"No no. You just do what you'd do anyway. And I'll observe. Sleepily. What I'm really here for," said Richard, "is to sleep.?
"I've always thought that was a strange response-to being worried about the state of the world." Richard had just woken up, so he spoke reasonably innocently. He did think it was a strange response. Signs of major ferment, down the road, in the human story-and the first thing you do is go and have your cock off. Or go and have it out: a slightly more complicated (and more expensive) operation, which he felt might be necessary in the unusual case of Richard Tull.
"That's not for your piece," she said.
"Of course not."
She felt for his hand. She said, "We ought to change."
Richard felt something stir within him. The seduction of Lady Deme-ter: how paltry, how mean, how puerile. He hereby assigned himself a higher goal. Seducing Demi would indeed be a hollow victory. The real clincher would be to get her pregnant.
A succession of headlights now poled and peered its way through the dark and dust of this room of books. Here came the husbands, arriving in four-Porsche formation, from the City. How had they spent their Saturday? Buying and selling, Richard assumed, and sleeping with women who hadn't had any children. Car doors slammed, seeming to entrain further illumination from the courtyard lamps and lanterns. He could see them through the window. He could even see their teeth, their slab-like teeth, dripping with avidity.
Dinner was unforgettable, and Richard would remember it for the rest of his life. At the table each place was furnished with a name tag and a silver salver and a drawerful of cutlery; also, in squat crystal (the size and shape of a diner ketchup-squirt), an individual carafe of red wine. Which were not to be replenished. Richard found this out early on, because he was wiggling his decanter over his glass well before the bruised avocados were served. Demi gave him hers, and that helped him through the next five minutes. Then, two hours later, after the women had left the room, he ground it out with the husbands in exchange for two thimbles of port . . . Beaming boys in beaming shirts, the husbands, so far as he could ascertain, were forthright, friendly, loudly clued-up about the workings of the world and by no means agonizingly stupid.
So: intensely sober, in a permanent panic attack of sobriety, Richard now sat on a bed with Demi, in a dark tower: a dark tower that wore a
witch's pointy hat. They had crossed two frosted lawns to get there, and
climbed a curling stone stairway, and had entered this spherical turret by means of a damp and heavy key. The kind of tower from which wronged princesses traditionally craved escape or rescue. One princess whom
The day cleared. Its roof of cloud began to leak, like a colander, and the poles of refracted fire looked splay-legged, as if their apex lay at airplane height-nineteen thousand yards, perhaps, and not ninety million miles. Without changing his clothes, and using a wooden racket, he played tennis with Demi, Urania, and Callisto on a court so rich in excrescences and asperities that his choice of groundstroke-forehand or backhand-necessarily depended on the ball's right-angled bounce. Then, with his hands on his hips, he admired the swimming pool. Ther-mals of yeasty activity rose from its mantle of peat-thick green. Richard didn't want to swim in it; he wouldn't have minded drinking it, but he didn't want to swim in it. Side by side he and Demi walked down freshly dripping avenues. They visited conservatories and hothouses, grottoes and gazebos, bowers and arbors, follies and wildernesses; Richard's notebook was in and out of his pocket, signaling his professional interest, as Demi told tales of lost kittens, beloved ponies, myxomatotic marmots, rabid rabbits, and so on, and apostasies and conflagrations and wartime commandeerings and royal visits . .. Listening is good, he thought; listening is always good. They approached the kitchen, through the kitchen garden. She lost her footing on the path and he reached out to steady her. Richard was biding his time.
He found a gym-sized library that contained not a single readable book, not even any Trollope. So he went to sleep in it. The room was dark when Demi woke him with a cup of tea, and a biscuit. She remained at his side, on the tasseled sofa, holding her teacup with both hands as if it contained something sacramental like incense or holy warmth; her blue-jeaned thighs were widely and rigidly parted, her feet erectly tensed on their toes. He watched her face in its offered profile, how it wavered and resolved itself-the bitten underlip, the tremors. Of course it seemed obvious enough what the immediate trouble was. Unborn babies were swirling round her head, like flocks of putti.
"You're the middle sister."
"I'm an aunt twelve times over. Gwyn is very worried about the state of the world."
"Well he could have fooled me."
"He's even talked about having that operation.?
They both swallowed. She said,
"Look."
He looked. He looked out through the arrow-slit and its web of churchy glass: the frosted field, the tall fir, the gibbous moon, the slice of cloud, the spire. The spire did indeed look like a thing that had some business pointing heavenward, unlike the berkish bulk of office block, of highrise. It pointed, with its tapered tentativeness .. .
"That's St. Bodolph's in Short Crendon. See? There's a cloud passing over it. I used to take my pony Hester there and back every evening. It was as far as they'd let me go. And I always used to think that if I got there and back before Nanny Smith laid the table for tea …"
"What?"
"Oh. You know. That I'd have a happy life."
This was romance but they were doing it in winter.
Richard said, "You want some coke?"
Just as there are genres of skies, and car alarms, and many other things, so there are genres of the hangover. Tragic treatments, enriched with various amounts and shades of irony. The epic frame, which finds the hero, toward evening on the second day, still sitting there wiping his eyebrows with his fingertips and still saying to himself things like dear oh dear. There are futuristic hangovers, there are chillers and tinglers, there are thrillers. There are bodice-rippers. Probably there are sex-and-shopping hangovers: there are hangovers made of junk and trash. There are hangovers as dull as rain .. . Not all genres, on the other hand, correspond to a hangover. For instance there are no Western hangovers. In life, hangovers usually cleave to a genre which literature finds hard to do and rarely attempts: tragicomedy. Murphys and Metamorphosises, Third Policemans, Handful of Dusts …