MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

They held hands all the time (they were "inseparable"). He called her love all the time. She gave him kisses on the cheek all the time. They were the fond, they were the ideal-they were the dream. Even Richard had to admit it: it was absolutely nauseating. Social diarists like Rory Plantagenet noted their practice, at parties and functions, of releasing each other "lingeringly" as the dynamics of the convivium urged them apart. Gwyn was known to fall into a reverie when his wife was several partygoers from his side: "Just gazing," he would say, when roused, "at my lady." (Richard, if he happened to be present and nearby, would similarly drift into a brown study: the sledgehammer in the alleyway, the poked chisel on the dark basement steps …) Literary interviewers and profilists marked how Gwyn's face would "light up" when Demeter parted the double doors of the drawing room, bearing a tea tray on which Gwyn's favorite Chocolate Olivers were infallibly arrayed. (Reading this, Richard would light up too. Through the sigh of his cigarette smoke he would see the sidling berk with his tire tool, the jagged neck of the smashed beer bottle.) In "The Seven Vital Virtues, 4: Uxoriousness" the Barrys were lensed as they strolled past the squirrels and mazelets and mantled pools of Holland Park, with arms interlocked and fingers interwoven; then, too, you saw the author's wife frowning interestedly over the author's shoulder as the author smiled and murmured at his desktop display screen; next you copped them at their "local" French restaurant, during the dessert course, feeding each other dripping spoonfuls of goopy ice cream. Gwyn spoke to camera about the need for a constant exchange of presents-"little things, but always a little bit too expensive." (Richard, gagging weakly at the TV, would also be pushing the boat out on this one: the hired fist, the chartered army boot.) She was rich. But so was he now. He was intelligent. And now she was too. Her father, with his stick, in the coach-torn grounds of the stately; his father, the trunked Taff on the sluiced duckboards. Love melds. Blood meets brains, in High Bohemia. Just look at the clippings file. "I think the world of her"-Gwyn. "I simply feel incredibly lucky"-Demi.

Gwyn: "She's the best thing that ever happened to me." Demi: "People ask me what it's like being married to a genius, and I say it's completely brilliant."

And there was Richard, jackknifed over his sickbag, searching for assassins in the Yellow Pages …

He rang the London offices of The New York Times. They did keep a copy of the Sunday paper, and Richard was free to come in there to consult or admire it; but he couldn't take it away. They told him, rather, to go to International Dispatches in North Islington. With his mack and his hangover and his book (a biography of William Davenant, Shakespeare's bastard: six hundred words by early next week), he embarked at Ladbroke Grove, changed at Paddington and Oxford Circus, and rode in the slatted light to Islington, whose streets he paced for fifty-five minutes, wringing his hands, until he stumbled upon a lone old man, walled in with information, a crofter in a cottage thatched with Frankfurter Zeitungs and El Paises and India Todays and many other journals daubed in exclamatory Farsi or Sanskrit. The old man told him that he no longer stocked the Sunday New York Times; only the daily. Pressure of space. Richard came home again. Haifa week later, when he had calmed down, he rang the London offices of the The New York Times: they told him to ring the distributors in Cheapside. He did so. They told him that such copies of the Sunday New York Times as came their way were subscription copies, though occasionally-true-there was a spare . . . Richard used all his charm on the young woman at the other end of the line. But the trouble was that he didn't have any charm, not any longer, and she told him he would just have to turn up on Monday morning on the off chance, like anybody else.

So began his weekly journeys to the warehouse in Cheapside, where they would typically pass him round from portakabin to van mouth to storage room and back again, before sending him on his way-to The Little Magazine, in fact, where in the dawn he would start subbing the book reviews over a papercupful of tomato soup. As well as a very bad reality, that papercupful of tomato soup was always a very bad sign . . . It was on his fifth visit that Richard revealed, to the assistant manager's intense sneer of puzzlement, that he didn't necessarily want a copy of that week's Sunday New York Times. Any Sunday New York Times would do. In full contrition Richard followed the assistant manager to another storage room, one never seen before, where any number of Sunday New York Timeses were lavishly and promiscuously heaped, along with countless Sunday Boston Globes, Sunday San Francisco Chronicles, and so on. Richard listed faintly on his feet. In the fever and vertigo he felt there was now an element of everyday incomprehension-at the sadness and grayness and dampness and deadness of disregarded newsprint; and at human profligacy and clamor. Christ, can't everyone shut up. Anyway, he cracked, and went for size. That day he came home with the outrageous bulk of the Sunday Los Angeles Times carefully cradled in his arms. It wasn't just bigger than the Sunday New York Times. It was much bigger.

Brown paper and a ball of string took about a week each to purchase and assemble. Then Richard was ready to move. That day he picked through the corpses of his old typewriters until he found one that was capable of saying, "Dear Gwyn, Something to interest you here. The price of fame! Yours ever, John."

On his desk lay another letter, smudged, crumpled: second-class. Nothing much gets affected by the second-class mail. You don't expect your life to be changed by the second-class mail. This letter said:

Dear Richard,

So then? No reply from the man. Well you said it, Dreams don't mean Anything. Gwyn Barry loves Belladonna, and Darko love's Belladonna but who does Belladonna love. She is deadley.

What about that "jar."

Yours, DARKO

How would you find out about a marriage? How would you find out? Because all marriages are inscrutable. I can tell you everything there is to know about the marriage of the Tulls (I can even tell you what their sheets smell of: they smell of marriage); but I don't know anything, yet, about the marriage of the Barrys. A close scrutiny of "The Seven Vital Virtues, 4: Uxoriousness" would disclose, perhaps, that Demeter was less happy about everything than Gwyn-or less happy about being happy on TV But how would you find out? Richard, at his desk, fondling Darko's letter, fondling Demi in his thoughts, had a couple of ideas. Steve Cousins, in his Cosworth, had a couple of ideas too. But he was far more practical. Scozz was going to find out -he was going to find out something or other. And he was going to do it today: right now. First he had to fetch 13.

When he at last emerged, coming out between the pillars and walking solemnly down the steps of Marylebone Magistrates' Court, 13 had the proud, moistened, middle-distance stare of a man who believes himself to have been gravely and perhaps insupportably traduced. He always looked like this on his way out of court, unless, for one reason or another, he'd got off. As Steve proceeded in the Cosworth down Edg-ware Road, in a series of short bursts and long waits, he glanced at 13's profiled face: too youthful, too rounded, for the stunned and bitter glaze it wore.

"What you get?" "Six months suspended." "And?"

13 sighed and belatedly fastened his seatbelt. "Fines." Steve nodded. 13 drew in breath: he was about to give voice-and in the high style. His intention, plainly, was to speak not just for himself but for all men and women, in all places, in all times-to remind the human heart of what it had once known and had now long forgotten.