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-They come at me. They come at me like information formed in the night. I don't make them. They're already there.
"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.
never have given you life. Rain came. Rain made the landscape heavier, and impeded it: the sopping trees, the steeped sheep. Richard looked up. A canal was unraveling parallel to the leaning, yawing train. There was a solitary barge, moored to the reeds, its chimney smoking; presumably a tramp sat within it, under this squall just made for him. It wouldn't be too bad, thought Richard. Our thick coats, our baked beans. Pleasantly drugged by the reek of paraffin .. .
It was over. It was getting nearer to being over. He looked for clues-in the daily crucifixion of the crossword. Ten years ago it used to take him ten minutes to finish the wide-grid Tiresias: he finished it on the can. Five years ago he was usually doing about half of it. Twelve months ago he was still doing about half of it; but all his answers (he would discover the next day) were wrong. They interlocked all right; but they were all wrong. Nowadays things had improved: he couldn't do any of it. This morning two clues in particular taunted and traduced him. One was:
Eggy? (16) The other was:
Going in at number eight for Zimbabwe, Gloucestershire opener joins tailender for Glamorgan (when Other unfit to play) to produce new ball with clear appeal for the philoprogenitive (3)
He pushed the thing aside and tried to sleep but just sat there with his head banging against the wall. Why trains? Why rails? Why tracks and smokestacks? Richard would go on asking himself these pointless questions for a while, presumably, as artists will. But these questions were now altogether pointless. He was leaving the reconstruction business. So he had no business asking them.
At his destination he was met, not by Demi, but by a plump youth in a bulbous washable jacket, son of gatekeeper or gamekeeper. No gate or game to keep, not anymore; so just this plump youth, at the wheel of his mobile gardener's hut, marooned for life among the lanes and hedges. Richard bounced along, up hill and down dale. The road might have been taking him back down his own central nervous system, to the past, to childhood and its green world, unfallen, where the lion lay down with the lamb and the rose grew without thorn. In the city you looked for this world, in Dogshit Park, in the Warlock AstroTurf, in the ravings of the wild boy, in the leaden pages of Amelior. The green world symbolized theThe railway station had changed since he had last had call to use it. In the meantime its soot-coated, rentboy-haunted vault of tarry girders and toilet glass had become a flowing atrium of boutiques and croissant stalls and limitless cappuccino. Trains no longer dominated it with their train culture of industrial burdens dumbly and filthily borne. Trains now crept in round the back, sorry they were so late, hoping they could still be of use to the proud, strolling, cappuccino-quaffing shoppers of the mall. There was even a brand-new Dickensian pub called the Olde Curiosity Shoppe whose set was dressed with thousands of books- written not by Dickens but by that timeless band of junkshop set-dresser nobodies … In other words, the station had gone up in the world. And Richard didn't like it. He wanted everything to stay down in the world-with him. Envy and schadenfreude and invidiousness: they arise from poor character, but also from a fear of desertion. The entrance to the platform he stood at called itself the Gateway to East Anglia. Monolithically overweight, like a prehistoric snake that had eaten not a mastodon or a mammoth but another snake of the same dimensions, the train moved toward him with its yellow eyes satedly averted. Asian and West Indian staff stood ready with their black ten-gallon rubbish bags. Richard stiffened in his soiled bow tie.