London Fields by Martin Amis Page A

diary.'
    At this point she must have made her decision. I found out why she made it, just before I left. We started with Keith's visit and talked for about forty-five minutes. She answered all my questions, even the most impudent, with considered clarity, and intense recall. I had to resist the temptation to take notes. And she threw in a tour of the apartment: through the inner passage, into the bedroom, and out again.
    'I'm going to keep my promise and slip away,' I said. 'Can I call you tomorrow? Oh – you're a Scorpio, right? When is your birthday?' This was vicious. What's the matter with me? Who do I think I am? But she didn't seem to mind. 'Isn't that Guy Fawkes' Night?'
    'Yes. Bonfire Night.'
    'You know it's also the day of the full eclipse?'
    'Yes I know. It's good, isn't it?'
    We both stood up. Then we did something that people hardly ever do in real life. We looked at each other – for twenty seconds, thirty, forty. It was especially tough for me, with my eyes and everything. In the flinch that at one point she gave I noticed that her teeth, strongly slanted, wore the faintest signs of neglect. The discoloration (vertical, resinous) was itself fatalistic. Well, why bother? Those stains gave me my first and only erotic pang of the afternoon, not the warm outlines of the breasts, nor the conviction of nakedness beneath the cotton, sweetly soiled. No one had looked at me that way for quite a time; and I was moved. When she shaped herself for a question or statement, I could see what was coming, and I knew it was fully earned.
    'You're –'
    'Don't say it!' I said (I astonished myself), and clasped my hands over my ears. 'Please. Not yet. Please don't say it.'
    And now she raised a hand, to stifle or cover a smile she knew to be wicked. 'My God,' she said. 'You really are. '
    On the way back two swearing children offered me a handful of sweets: Jimmies, or Smarties. I considered, as I listened to the squeaked, the squandered obscenities of the seven-year-olds.
    I really ought to think about what I'm doing, accepting candy from strange children.
    Before I left, Nicola gave me back her diaries and told me to throw them on a skip somewhere. I tried to look casual about it. I couldn't tell her that I'd spent half the day Xeroxing them in their entirety. Mark Asprey has a Xerox, a beautiful little thing. It seems to work like a toaster, when it works, which it doesn't, not right now. I went to the Bangladeshi stationer's in Queensway. It was a real drag and cost just enough to tip me into a money panic. I cracked at once and rang Missy Harter at Hornig Ultrason. Naturally I didn't talk to her direct, but I had words with her assistant, Janit. Not quite true. I had words with Missy Harter's assistant's assistant, Barbro: Janit's assistant. Missy Harter will apparently return my call.
    Of course it's far too early to start thinking about an advance. Or it was then, a couple of hours ago. But I don't see how I can be stopped, now I've found common cause with the murderee.
    I'm ridiculously pleased, in Chapter 4, with that bit about the Emperor Frederick and Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders. When Analiese comes up to him in the street, and he wonders whether to go with the Rick Purist ticket, or stick to Keith. I stole it from The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. Like everybody else I'm finding it harder and harder to pick up a book, but I can still manage brief engagements with Cohn, with his fascinated, his fully gripped intelligence. Also I'm nearly halfway through Hugh Brogan's one-volume history of America. Soon I'll have to rely on Mark Asprey's shelves (or Mark Asprey's writings), which don't look promising.
    These pseudo-Baldwins and pseudo-Fredericks, medieval hermits (medieval bums, often) deified by desperate populations, by the inspired hordes of the poor. They had a good run, some of them. They led uprisings; they marched on capitals and squatted in palaces. They screwed around, they partied like there was