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know what you’ve let yourself in for.’ Her tone was precise and maternal; he felt his position slipping.
    ‘Nice of you.’ Bitch, he added to himself.
    ‘Don’t mention it. And I think it’s important for Alice to see the sort of influence her father’s currently under.’ He didn’t miss that
currently
.
    ‘But how did you find out Ann was in it? She isn’t exactly on the poster.’
    ‘I have my spies, Graham.’
    ‘Come on, how did you find out?’ But all she would say was,
    ‘I have my spies.’

THREE
The Cross-Eyed Bear
    Jack Lupton answered the door with a smouldering cigarette lodged in the side of his beard. He stretched his arms out, pulled Graham in, dropped a hand on his shoulder, belted him on the bottom, and finally propelled him down the hall bellowing,
    ‘Graham, you old cunt, in you go.’
    Graham couldn’t help smiling. A lot of Jack was bullshit, he suspected, and that lot came under regular analysis among his friends; but in person he was so uncompromisingly amiable, so noisily open and so physical that you immediately forgot the precise terms of yesterday’s derision. The matiness may have been assumed, part of an act to make you like him; but if so, it worked, and as it continued without hesitation or change of key—in Graham’s case, for five or six years—you ended up not needing to worry about its sincerity.
    The cigarette trick had started as a joky short-cut to character. Jack’s beard grew wirily enough for him to park a Gauloise in it safely, at a point halfway along the jawbone. If he was chatting up a girl at a party, he’d go off to fetch some drinks and free his hands by tucking his lighted cigarette into his beard (sometimes he would light one specially to set up the effect). On his return, a chunky blur of bonhomie, he’d adopt one of three courses, depending on his appraisal of the girl. If she seemed sophisticated, or acute, or even just alert, he’d casually extract the cigarette and go onsmoking (this established him, he assured Graham, as ‘a bit of an original’). If she seemed dim or shy or charmproof, he’d leave the cigarette there for a minute or two, talk about a book—though never one of his own—and then ask for a smoke (this proved him to be ‘one of those clever, absent-minded writers with his head in the clouds’). If he couldn’t fathom her at all, or thought she was crazy, or was quite drunk himself, he’d simply leave the cigarette until it smouldered its way down to his beard, then look puzzled and ask, ‘Can you smell something burning around here?’ (this established him as ‘really a terrific character, a bit wild, probably a bit self-destructive, you know, like real artists, but
so
interesting’). When using this third ploy, he would normally accompany it with some serpentine inventions about his childhood or his ancestry. It did, however, have its dangers. He’d once inflicted a bad burn on himself in pursuit of an attractive but strangely enigmatic girl. He couldn’t imagine she hadn’t noticed the cigarette, and his rising incredulity paralleled his increasing pain; later, he discovered that while he’d been off fetching them drinks the girl had taken out her contact lenses: the smoke from his cigarette had been irritating her eyes.
    ‘Coffee?’ Jack bashed Graham on the shoulder again.
    ‘Please.’
    The ground floor of Jack’s Repton Gardens flat had been knocked through, from front bay to back kitchen; they were sitting in the crepuscular middle section, which Jack used as a living room. In the bay stood his desk, with a piano stool in front of it; his electric typewriter was barely visible beneath the contents of an upturned litter bin. Jack had once explained to Graham his theory of creative chaos. He was by nature a very tidy person, he claimed, but his art demanded mess. The words simply refused to flow, apparently, unless they sensed that there was some sexy anarchy out there on which their ordered form could