MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"Yes, well I was all over the bloody shop today. Couldn't get my backhand working."

Richard was enjoying his breather-and breather was definitely the word he wanted. "You haven't got a backhand. It's just a wound in your side. It's just an absence. Like an amputee's memory of a vanished limb. You haven't got a forehand either. Or a volley. Or an overhead. That's the trouble with your game. You haven't got any shots. You're a dog on the court. Yeah. A little Welsh retriever."

He put a cigarette in his mouth and, as a matter of silent routine, offered one to Gwyn, who said,

"Just couldn't concentrate. No thanks." Richard looked at him. "I packed it in." "You what?"

"I stopped. Three days ago. Cold. That's it. You just make the life choice."

Richard lit up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn't really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. This move of Gwyn's was a heavy blow. Almost the only thing he still liked about Gwyn was that Gwyn still smoked. Of course, Gwyn had never smoked seriously. Just a pack a day. Not like Richard with his carton-eons, his suede lungs, his kippered wisteria . . . Richard was reminded of another inexpiable exchange he'd had with Gwyn, on the same court, on the same green chair, under the same gut-colored sky and the same summer moon. A year ago, when Amelior was taking off and all the other stuff was coming down, Gwyn turned to him, courtside, and said abruptly: "I'm getting married." Richard replied, at once, "Good. About time." And he meant it. He was as they say "genuinely pleased." Pleasure came to him in the form of voluptuous relief. Yes, good. About time Gwyn shackled himself for ever to that speechless pit-pony, Gilda; his teenhood sweetheart,

invisible Gilda. Even now Richard could close his eyes and see her small shape in a dozen different bedsits and flatlets, her averted face damp with steam as she served up yet another bowl of spaghetti, her pale hair and sore and coldly upper lip, her (or maybe his) functional underwear on a curved string above the fibrous white tubes of the gas fire, her phobic humility, her unpoetic sadness, her lumpy, childish emerald-green overcoat that came from another time and another place. "Great. I bet Gilda's thrilled. Is Gilda thrilled?" Gilda was good. Richard didn't fancy her. He didn't even want to fuck her once. So we must imagine his moodswing when Gwyn paused and said, "No. Not so's you'd notice. No, I think we can say that Gilda is definitely not overly chuffed. Because I'm not marrying her." Gwyn wasn't marrying Gilda Paul. He was marrying Lady Demeter de Rougemount, a celebrated knockout of limitless fortune and imperial blood whom Richard knew and admired and had recently taken to thinking about every time he came. "There it is," said Gwyn. Richard failed to offer his congratulations. He stalked off, ostensibly to locate and solace Gilda. In fact he just drove away in his Maestro and parked it somewhere and sat in it sobbing and swearing and smoking cigarettes.

"You bastard," said Richard. "I thought we were in this together."

"Three days ago. Hark at you gasping away. Couple of years I'll be having you six-love, six-love."

"What's it like?"

Richard had imagined giving up smoking; and he naturally assumed that man knew no hotter hell. Nowadays he had long quit thinking about quitting. Before the children were born he sometimes thought that he might very well give up smoking when he became a father. But the boys seemed to have immortalized his bond with cigarettes. This bond with cigarettes-this living relationship with death. Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn't be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn't being met.

"Actually it's a funny thing," said Gwyn. "I gave up three days ago, right? And guess what?"

Richard said long-sufferingly, "You haven't wanted one since."

"Exactly. Well, you know. Time. The future."

"You've thought about it, and you'd rather live for ever."

"Isn't that what we scribble away for, Richard? Immortality? Anyway, I think my duty to literature is plain."

One more male ordeal awaited them: the changing room. The changing room had the usual hooks and benches and too few coat hangers, and steamy mirrors for men to lean backwards and comb their hair at, if they had any, and much effortfully evaporating male sweat (stalled in this process, and forming a furtive mist which slowed the air) together with competing colognes and scalp gels and armpit honeyers. There was also a shower stall full of pulsating backsides and soused and swinging Johnsons which of course forbade inspection: you don't look. Gwyn's new affectation of staring at things with childlike wonder remained unexercised in the changing room. You don't look, but as a man you mentally register yourself, with inevitable and ageless regret (it would have been so nice, presumably, to have had a big one) … Naked, Richard watched Gwyn, naked, and vigorously toweling his humid bush. Richard was excited: Gwyn was unquestionably nuts enough for the Sunday Los Angeles Times.

They walked back through the bar, which gave them time to start sweating again, and out into the late afternoon. Richard said carefully,

"You were saying? About immortality?"

"Well, I don't want to sound pretentious .. ."

"Speak as your heart tells you."

"Milton called it the last infirmity of noble minds. And-and someone said of Donne when he was dying that immortality, the desire for immortality, was rooted in the very nature of man."

"Walton," said Richard. He was doubly impressed: Gwyn had even been reading about immortality.

"So you know. You're bound to have such thoughts. To flesh out the skeleton of time."

"I have been looking again," said Richard, even more carefully, "at Amelior …"

The unspoken wisdom between them was as follows. The unspoken wisdom was that Richard, while taking a hearty and uncomplicated pleasure in Gwyn's success, reserved the right to keep it clear that he thought Gwyn's stuff was shit (more particularly, Summertown, the first novel, was forgivable shit, whereas Amelior was unforgivable shit). Oh yeah: and that Gwyn's success was rather amusingly-no, in fact completely hilariously-accidental. And transitory. Above all transitory. If not in real time then, failing that, certainly in literary time. Enthusiasm for Gwyn's work, Richard felt sure, would cool quicker than his corpse. Or else the universe was a joke. And a contemptible joke. So, yes, Gwyn knew that Richard entertained certain doubts about his work.

"First time through," he went on, "as you know, I didn't really think it came off. Something bland and wishful. Even ingratiating. And programmatic. An insufficient density of elements. But . . ." Richard glanced up (they had reached their cars). No question that Gwyn had been patiently waiting for that but. "But second time through it all came together. What threw me was its sheer originality. When we started out I think we both hoped to take the novel somewhere new. I thought the way forward was with style. And complexity. But you saw that it was all to do with subject." He glanced up again. Gwyn's expression-briefly interrupted to acknowledge the greeting of a passerby, then stolidly reas-sumed-was one of dignified unsurprise. Richard felt all his caution disappear with a shriek. "A new world," he went on, "mapped out and reified. Not the city but the garden. Not more neurosis but fresh clarity. That took its own kind of courage," he said, still weirdly capable of meeting Gwyn's eye, "-to forge a new art of the brave."