Lost for Words: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Vanessa, ‘I have no choice, because I’m talking to people who are immune to argument and have no idea how to read a book.’

  ‘I loved the chicken curry with lime and cardamom,’ said Tobias, disarming the warring Amazons with his languid charm. Underneath his overcoat, which he had discarded in a window seat, he turned out to be wearing a faded purple T-shirt, frayed jeans and a pair of battered cowboy boots.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Jo. ‘It’s important that it works at a “realistic” level, while simultaneously operating as the boldest metafictional performance of our time.’

  Malcolm, slightly irritated by Tobias’s soothing impact on the women, couldn’t help challenging him a little too sharply on which books he thought should be on the Short List. Tobias leant back, sweeping the hair from his forehead and gazing at the ceiling, and then with no more introduction than a sudden return to an upright position, and an open-handed gesture, he began to recite in a rich mellow voice.

  ‘There was scarce a lad in all of Warwickshire more comely than young Master William, with the tresses of his hair, dark as the raven’s wing, tumbling almost to his shoulders, and his cheeks like a pair of ripe English apples, and his eyes as blue as a summer’s day, only more lovely and more temperate. She might be no more than his nurse, but young Rosalind could have sworn by the Holy Body of Our Saviour that she loved William as much as ever a mother loved her own child. That morning she had bought him an orange in the market place without her mistress’s permission, and she feared lest she be chided for a wanton spendthrift, but she had only done it to show little William what a wondrous fruit it was, and to tell him how clever men in Italy had discovered that the whole world was round, just like an orange, only different in size and colour.

  Comparing one thing with another was one of William’s favourite games. Many’s the time the two of them had tarried in the damp grass, under the ever changing sky, gazing at the great clouds, like burnished galleons sailing through the bright flood of the firmament, and Master William would say, ‘How like a camel, sweet Rosalind,’ and she would say, ‘Most like a camel, Master William,’ and then he would say, ‘Methinks ’tis more like a towered citadel than a camel,’ and she would say, ‘Most like, my love,’ not wanting to contradict him in the smallest wise, but wanting to make sure that he loved and trusted the unparagoned treasure of his green imagination.’

  ‘Magical,’ said Tobias, ‘absolutely magical.’

  ‘Fancy being able to remember all that,’ said Penny.

  ‘And what about The Greasy Pole?’ said Malcolm.

  ‘Oh, it has my vote,’ said Tobias.

  ‘Good,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘And I’m blown away by wot u starin at,’ said Tobias, ‘fascinating, harrowing and fiercely original.’

  ‘It certainly isn’t original,’ said Vanessa, ‘it’s just sub-Irvine Welsh.’

  ‘It’s relevant, Vanessa. Re-le-vant,’ said Jo.

  ‘I prefer revelatory,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Why? Because it’s got more syllables?’

  Penny let out an involuntary guffaw.

  ‘Your problem, Vanessa,’ said Malcolm, ‘is that it’s not a novel about a middle-class family whose worst nightmare is that they might have to take little Bertie and Fiona out of their fee-paying schools because Daddy didn’t get his obscene Christmas bonus from the bank this year.’

  ‘Spare us the class warrior,’ said Vanessa, ‘especially when you have a car waiting outside to take you back to your Georgian house in Barton Street. The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much “relevance”. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.’

  Malcolm felt it was time to defuse the atmosphere with a cup of tea. He had feigned delight before the beginning of the meeting when Penny presented him with a gigantic caterer’s kettle he could barely imagine lifting when it was empty, let alone after it was loaded with gallons of boiling water, but now he was grateful to be able to get up from the conference table and occupy himself with making the tea. The simple change of position made him feel more like an informed eavesdropper than the chairman of the board. He could hear Vanessa’s exasperation as she gradually realized that the majority of her so-called ‘literary’ novels were not going to make it on to the Short List. She kept trying to argue that the other novels lacked the qualities that characterized a work of literature: ‘depth, beauty, structural integrity, and an ability to revive our tired imaginations with the precision of its language’. The poor woman didn’t seem to realize that what counted in the adult world was working out compromises between actual members of a committee that reflected the forces at work in the wider society, like Parliament in relation to the nation as a whole. Vanessa had taken on the role of a doomed backbencher, making speeches to an empty chamber about values that simply had no place in the modern world. Frankly, he felt rather sorry for her. However, he started to focus more keenly when they came round to The Bruce and he heard her claim that it was more or less plagiarized from an obscure Edwardian novel called The Tartan King.

  ‘All he’s done is update some of the diction, and spice up the plot with a few scenes stolen from Braveheart,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Ah, Braveheart,’ said Tobias, slipping effortlessly into a Scottish accent. ‘Aye, fight and you may die; run and you will live, at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they can take our lives, but they can never take our freedom!’ Tobias let loose a rousing cheer from an imaginary army of blue-faced warriors. ‘Terrific stuff,’ he added.

  ‘Thank you, Tobias, for reminding us of a scene which, if memory serves, is not in The Bruce,’ said Malcolm, struggling to tilt the unwieldy kettle over the edge of a teapot. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of it, Vanessa,’ he went on, ‘but all of Shakespeare’s plots are lifted wholesale from other sources, and I haven’t heard any complaints about his work recently. I admire your idealism, but I’m sorry to say, there’s nothing new under the sun.’

  ‘There’s certainly nothing new about that expression,’ said Vanessa. ‘But that’s the whole point, if a writer can’t cut through the half-truths and lazy assumptions of cliché and platitude, then he can’t make a work of art. We don’t care about Shakespeare’s derivative plots because he transforms them with the brilliant originality of his language.’

  ‘Personally,’ said Tobias, ‘I agree. If this imposter didn’t write the book, I don’t see why we should give him the prize.’

  Malcolm, who had been smiling sadly but indulgently at Vanessa’s misguided views, allowed a frown to darken his face. He lifted the brimming teapot with both hands and started to carry it, somewhat stiffly, towards the conference table.

  Jo, who had been oddly silent until that moment, suddenly saw her opportunity and spoke up.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said, in her most matter-of-fact tone, as if she had no personal investment in the outcome. ‘I’m afraid that I agree with Vanessa and Tobias on this one. We will have to rule out The Bruce. It simply isn’t fair on the candidates who’ve written their own novels to include a writer who’s copied out someone else’s.’

  ‘Unbelievable!’ muttered Malcolm, jerking his hands upwards in a reflexive gesture of protest.

  Penny later told him that she could remember every detail with dreamlike clarity: the scalding tea spilling onto Malcolm’s hands, his cry of pain, the teapot flying through the air and smashing against the fireplace, its shards scattering in every direction and the dark brew splashing onto the fake logs and soaking the beige carpet.

  The meeting, like the teapot, soon broke up and dispersed. The Short List was not yet finalized, but it was getting late, the atmosphere was strained, and everyone agreed to continue the process by email.

  One thing about choosing the best novel of the year
had become absolutely clear to Malcolm: Jo must be stopped at any cost. Her stranglehold over the Short List was truly scandalous. He reinvigorated his alliance with Penny on the phone later that evening. She felt the same way about Jo’s growing power and they agreed that after reading her choices they would compare notes over dinner and see which of her novels most deserved to be attacked.

  22

  As Alan spread the thick foam on his grey-flecked beard, he realized how much he had been missing the sanity and dullness of what Henry James had perhaps exaggerated in calling ‘the joy of the matutinal steel’. Compared to the lacerating edge of his unhappiness over the last month, his razor blade felt like the stroke of a feather as it scraped its way through the thickets of obstinate stubble covering his face.

  Why had he woken this morning, shaken and weak, but somehow determined to stop his decline – and to shave? Was it the lure of a small but uncontested area of self-determination? No employer was going to sack him for shaving; no woman was going to tell him that, although she hoped they would remain friends, she didn’t want to go on shaving with him any more. With the exhilaration of a pioneer taming the wilderness, he saw fresh tracks of skin opening across his face. He shook his blade under the running water and reapplied it expertly to his chin. This face was his face, from shining ear to shining ear, from the ridge of his upper lip to the bulge of his Adam’s apple, from the clean line of his manly jaw to the disappointing looseness of his double chin. He dried himself carefully. There were no cuts, or neglected patches of beard; every movement showed that he knew what he was doing, that he was a man who could be trusted.

  Yesterday, he had written to his old acquaintance James Miller at IPG, the talent agency, and asked for some work, any work. He wasn’t expecting to be treated like the senior editor he had been at Page and Turner. He could work for a trial period, read from the slush pile, write rejection letters, or try to lure some of his old authors over to the agency. James had replied with an email, both buoyant and cautious, accompanied by the promise of three typescripts that had ‘made it out of the slush pile but not yet been read by an editor’. Alan was tidying himself up to meet these harbingers of a return to productive life. No more sprawling around in his narrow room in acrid pyjamas, with the medicinal fumes of cheap vodka rising from his cup of morning tea. There may have been no mention of money in James’s email, but Alan was being given a chance, and that would have to do for now. Besides, the weakness of his position, as well as the gentlemanly mist that still lingered over the field of publishing, made it impossible for Alan to demand any clarification, let alone money.

  As he put on his clean white shirt, mildly puzzled that he was dressing to meet some almost certainly unpublishable typescripts, he realized that he hadn’t taken any trouble over his appearance since the day he left Katherine’s flat. He was not just dressing for work; he was defying her rejection for the first time. All he had to do was make a clean break between what Katherine thought of him and what he thought of himself. Maybe depression was always a matter of taking on a hostile point of view that, however intimate it might seem, was essentially alien. We were not put on this earth to hate ourselves, thought Alan, doing up the waistband of his trousers as if to secure this merciful claim; it’s always an unnatural state of affairs, however irresistible it seems at the time.

  He had to admit that his meeting with Sam and Didier had contributed to his recovery, even if that hadn’t been immediately obvious. Sam had first spotted him halfway through the month, staring at the last three bottles of Dostoyevsky vodka in the local corner shop. Thanks to its resemblance to a batch of bootleg paraffin, Dostoyevsky was already the cheapest vodka on the shelf, but on this particular day a fluorescent green star announced a special offer that further lowered the price by two pounds. Alan could hardly believe his luck as he grabbed the dusty bottles and rolled them clinking into his wire basket. He was dismayed to be interrupted by Sam, a man he hardly knew and in any case associated with the woman whose memory he was trying to obliterate. Sam was clearly shocked by his derelict state, but Alan soon shook him off and hurried back to the hermitage of his darkened room in the Mount Royal. He forgot about Sam long before he had absorbed enough Dostoyevsky to forget about Katherine’s limbs and lips.

  It had only been three days ago, when he couldn’t bear his loneliness any longer and caved in to Sam’s offer of lunch, that Alan learned he was not alone. In fact, he was rather put out by just how many lovers Katherine had managed to get rid of in the last month.

  ‘No need to cherchez la femme,’ said Didier, ‘she has searched for us, like a heat-seeking missile!’

  ‘Were you having an affair with her at the same time as me?’ Alan asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sam.

  ‘And at the same time as each other?’

  ‘Very much so,’ said Didier, ‘it could not have been more simultaneous!’

  ‘Good God,’ said Alan, drinking half his glass of Chianti in a single gulp, ‘this is the woman I left my wife for.’

  ‘You had a wife and a mistress,’ said Didier. ‘She had three lovers. For us the problem is that she is a woman, but in India and Tibet…’

  ‘I don’t care about Tibet,’ Alan interrupted him. ‘Anyway, I left my wife for her. There was nothing simultaneous about it; well, at least not after I’d left Marilyn.’

  ‘Typically,’ said Didier, ‘by now you will have asked her to take you back.’

  Alan knocked back the rest of his Chianti, furious at being so obvious.

  ’This is not the time to be guilty about the pursuit of pleasure,’ said Didier. ‘Permissiveness is the only ideology we are permitted. We are not just allowed to enjoy anything; we are obliged to enjoy everything. Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires; now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires: “Doctor, what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I want to tie up my boyfriend? Why can’t I get in touch with my lesbian side?” Et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘I don’t see what this has…’ Alan tried to interject.

  ‘Epicurus is bent over the handlebars of his pleasure machine, speeding along the Information Super Highway!’ Didier continued unstoppably.

  ‘I think we should narrow our focus,’ Sam began.

  ‘Finally,’ said Didier, raising a warning finger. ‘Finally, we realize that we have been quenching our thirst with seawater, and we decide to “take back the power”. We are going to jog, meditate, et cetera, et cetera – but it’s not so easy! We can’t just sit at home meditating, which would cost nothing, and therefore make us very nervous. We must look for a teacher who lives in India, or California…’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alan finally managed, ‘but what’s all of this got to do with Katherine?’

  ‘It has everything to do with all of us,’ Didier replied. ‘This is the world-historical field through which the contemporary search for the truth must take its course.’

  ‘But I loved her,’ said Alan.

  ‘Ah, love…’ Didier began, ‘when we speak of love…’

  ‘Listen,’ said Sam, placing a restraining hand on Didier’s arm, ‘I understand.’

  ‘I wish you didn’t understand, frankly,’ said Alan, pushing back his chair with a sharp scraping sound from the tiled floor, ‘since it means that you were fucking Katherine while we were living together.’ He needed another pint of Dostoyevsky fairly urgently; the Chianti was just too slow and watery.

  ‘But you were sleeping with Katherine while you were still living with your wife,’ said Didier. ‘You are trapped in the old paradigm of transgression when in reality…’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Alan. ‘I don’t know what world-historical field you were in when you planned this lunch, but it’s not a world I live in, and this lunch is history.’

  With these words, of which he was moderately proud and mildly ashamed, Alan left the restaurant.

&nbs
p; It took him another day to realize that the pressure on him had lessened. However annoyed he had been by the meeting, the logic of spreading a weight over a larger area had held. It was impossible to believe that Sam and Didier had suffered as much as him, but even the feeble support offered by their vaguely similar experiences gave him some relief. There was also a welcome splintering of his hostility, which had been almost exclusively directed against himself, with the odd burst of drunken rage towards Katherine and Yuri, but could now include Motor Mouth Didier and Philandering Sam among its targets.

  The grey phone on his bedside table rang, taking Alan by surprise. Slobodan, the former Yugoslavian receptionist whose disdainful glances Alan had grown to dread, told him that a package was waiting for him downstairs. On his way out, Alan hooked his empty rucksack over his shoulder and checked himself in the mirror; amazed to see the return of the clean-shaven and unpretentiously dressed friend he had lost sight of a month ago.

  He glided down the stairs he had so often stumbled down and as he arrived in the entrance, he took it in with a new kind of neutrality. The words ‘Mount Royal’, fixed to the fake wood casing of the reception desk, in big gold letters which used to fascinate him with their power to distort the arrival and departure of hotel guests and, in quiet moments, reflect the rippling passage of a red bus beyond the hotel’s glass front door, now simply struck him as garish.

  Slobodan acknowledged Alan’s changed appearance by briefly raising an eyebrow to show that he was not so easily fooled. He handed over two canvas bags, which Alan couldn’t resist glancing into immediately. In one was the familiar sight of two typescripts in transparent plastic folders. From the other Alan fished out a gigantic purple book covered in debossed golden domes and parapets. The Mulberry Elephant was written in rich orange calligraphic lettering across its front. On a note obscuring the name of the author, someone from IPG had written, ‘Published In India – looking for publisher here’.