Lost for Words: A Novel Page 12

  After so many failures, was she smothering the possibility of a sane intimacy? Instead of waiting for love to turn into indifference or desire into disgust, why not embrace the disgust from the beginning, in an act of proleptic despair? Or was she just taking the logic of promiscuity to its absolutely indiscriminate conclusion?

  She was back in her own bed now, without Elton, and yet her feeling of anxiety was growing stronger. John Elton was not an exotic object of desire; he was the antidote to desire. Once sex was a way to avoid affection, who better to choose? Only the catastrophe of an encounter with him could show just how vicious her resistance was. He was there to unveil the truth that she would rather fuck a man who repelled her than get close to one she really liked. Alan had been kind to her, in a rather fatherly way perhaps, but genuinely kind. Didier was an enthusiast. And Sam, well, Sam was in love with her and wanted to know her as deeply as possible, and that was why she had to get rid of him.

  She would rather not get too close to anyone who might really understand her. Besides, Sam was a novelist. There was no room in the same bed for two people in the same business. And yet, if she was going to do this thing, Sam was the one to do it with. If she was going to challenge her paranoia, she might as well challenge her egoism as well. She suffered from as much ordinary selfishness as the next person, but piled on top of that she had the special affliction of a novelist, of wanting to be the author of her own fate and take charge of a narrative whose opening chapters had been written by others with terrifying carelessness. Her need to decide what things meant came no doubt from having lived so close to the sense that they meant nothing at all. At the very least she had to inhabit a world in which things never quite meant what they appeared to mean, where the margin of invention and interpretation was broader than it was, for instance, in the final moments of asphyxiation. Could she bear to have Sam nailing down the meaning of things with his own precision and his own perspective, or bear to see her interpretations seep into his work?

  If only this latest ecstasy of shame and pointless sex would act on her with the chastening effect that an outstanding blackout sometimes has on an alcoholic. Waking in a strange place, looking back on an unqualified amnesia, with only bloodstained clothes for evidence; unsure whether the blood comes from a nosebleed or a murder (whose nosebleed? whose murder?), the drunk might think, as the corrosive dread colonizes every particle of her identity, ‘I really must stop living this way.’

  Fully awake now and knowing that sleep could not catch up with her racing mind, she got out of bed to make a cup of tea, but soon retreated from the hygienic brightness of the kitchen to the battered armchair where she often wrote, picking up a velvet cushion and pressing it to her lap. She stared out of her dark drawing room at the restless plane trees in the square, shaking sudden rushes of raindrops from their wet leaves, half shining in the lamplight and half heaving with shadow. She hadn’t responded to any of Sam’s emails since she stopped seeing him, but now she felt like getting back in touch. The simplest way, not too precipitous, and with the further benefit of disarming her competitiveness, would be to congratulate him on making the Elysian Short List.

  She picked up the laptop from the small round table beside her and scrolled down to the last forlorn email from Sam, ignored its contents, clicked on Reply and wrote,

  Congratulations

  Kx

  With a gambler’s excitement at making an instantaneous and irreversible decision, she sent the email a moment later. She then felt rather depleted and impatient, wondering how long it would be before she would get a reply. It was only just after three in the morning. He probably wouldn’t answer until lunchtime. She was about to close her glowing screen when a new item appeared in her inbox. It was from Sam.

  Thanks.

  Do you want to come to the Elysian dinner with me?

  Sx

  Without hesitating she replied.

  Love to.

  Kxx

  28

  Penny ordered another Cosmopolitan from the waiter. She was having a thoroughly enjoyable time in no less a place than the Jardin Intérieur of the Paris Ritz. None of the other members of the committee had been able to come along on the trip and all she could say was ‘more fool them’. With ten thousand euros entirely at her disposal, she had seen no reason not to take a suite at the Ritz for two nights, instead of the one night she had originally planned, go on a special guided tour of the Paris sewers, and book herself a table in the tip-top Michelin-starred restaurant conveniently situated in her own hotel. She had bought a vintage chart from her local wine merchant so as not to be bamboozled by a smooth-talking sommelier into paying through the nose for an inferior product.

  Penny took a gulp of her second (absolutely delicious) Cosmopolitan and skewered a spicy green olive with a very smart white toothpick sporting a little black ribbon at one end. This really was perfection: getting a bit tipsy in these charming surroundings. You couldn’t beat the French when it came to classical elegance. To her right was a white marble sphinx crouched on her leonine legs, with her hair up in a bun and a bow tie around her long neck. Other white marble statues of heroic male and modest female figures were dotted among the white paving stones of the garden and, at the end of the vista, high up on the far wall and seeming to preside over the whole space, was a medallion of an old man with a flowing beard; probably our friend Neptune, thought Penny, although the only water in the garden was hardly oceanic: it trickled from a fountain encased in a small white temple. Stone urns containing box, cut into perfect spheres, provided a few restrained green notes.

  She had read in one of her guidebooks that the Ritz was a favourite haunt of Marcel Proust’s. Although she sympathized with his choice of watering hole, Penny couldn’t help reflecting that he was exactly the kind of author who would not have made it onto this year’s Short List. She hadn’t actually read any Proust, but she knew perfectly well that he was a long-winded snob, with far too much private money and some very unconventional sexual tastes: just the sort of thing they had been trying to avoid.

  Apparently, Hemingway had also been a regular at the bar. She hadn’t read Hemingway since doing A Farewell to Arms for O-level, but his manly, no-nonsense style, dealing with the great themes of love and war and the eternal puzzle of human nature, had given Penny’s young imagination a strong sense of what real literature was all about. He would undoubtedly have fared better with the committee than the degenerate Proust. At least he had done something with his life other than go to parties and complain about his health. He was a man of action who had hunted big game, caught big fish and jumped on a plane the moment war broke out anywhere in the world, which of course kept him very busy during the nineteen-thirties.

  Seeing that she had twenty minutes left before her table reservation in the restaurant down the corridor, Penny couldn’t resist ordering another ‘Cosy’ as she had privately nicknamed what was rapidly becoming her favourite cocktail of all time.

  ‘O-U-T spells OUT, so out you go,’ Penny muttered under her breath, imagining the crestfallen, coughing Proust being forced to leave the magic circle of her table in the garden. It struck her as pretty historic – if that was the word – that one of the authors most celebrated for enjoying this splendid setting was being banished from the prestigious Short List by a member of the Elysian Prize committee, while she was relishing a drink in the very same spot!

  It was all very well getting rid of Proust and sparing the plainspoken Hemingway, but what her committee had utterly failed to decide was which author was actually going to win this year. ‘Win-wine / wine and dine’, Penny invented a little ditty and sang it gently to herself.

  She was just the teeniest bit tiddly and arguably should restrict herself to drinking wine by the glass over dinner. Mind you, it was rather a waste of the vintage chart to be stuck in the ‘by the glass’ section of a great wine list.

  Where was she? Ah yes, the committee. It was in gridlock, rush-hour gridlock. The dinner was in th
ree days, and nobody would budge. She and Malcolm were firmly committed to wot u starin at, with Jo and Tobias lined up against them, adamant about the virtues of the postmodern cookery novel. Vanessa was the floating voter who was driving them all mad, as she had from the word go. She was insisting that The Frozen Torrent was the only ‘work of literature’ on the List, and since there was no negotiation possible over the other two candidates, everyone should ‘compromise’ (i.e. cave in) and agree to her choice. Back in her Foreign Office days, Penny had naturally been involved in making her fair share of tough, unpopular decisions, but people had always known that she was acting from a sincere appraisal of the country’s best interests – even if the country turned out to be Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia, or General Pinochet. Vanessa, by contrast, was being selfish for entirely selfish reasons. Penny was tempted to send her one of her famous letters – known at the Foreign Office as ‘Penny’s ICBMs’ (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). Although many of them, destined for an incompetent colleague, landed up in the same building from which they were sent, the ‘Inter-Continental’ tag gave you some idea of just how terrifying Penny could be when she got the wind up her.

  ‘Arrogant bitch,’ said Penny, just as the waiter arrived with her drink.

  ‘Not you, of course,’ she reassured the waiter.

  ‘You’re welcome, madame,’ said the waiter in a perfect German accent, bowing gravely as he placed the cocktail in front of her. It was all tremendously international, even at the staff level. She could hear Russian being spoken by the entrance to the indoor bar; there were Americans by the fountain, and there was a Chinese man smoking a cigar further away, next to a marble nymph trying to hide her private parts. The French must be lurking somewhere, and with Penny representing Great Britain, they could have a Security Council meeting at the drop of a hat.

  Penny took a sip of her new drink and looked up at the side of the magnificent building next door. It was nothing less than the French Ministry of Justice. On arrival, she had been tremendously inspired to find that her hotel shared a garden wall with such an important civil service department. All she had ever really wanted the prize to achieve was justice, and now it felt like destiny to be sleeping on the eve of the final meeting in a room that overlooked the very pleasant gardens of a place that symbolized that ideal.

  Penny closed her eyes and imagined herself as the figure of Justice on top of the Old Bailey, blindfolded and holding up a pair of scales in which she weighed with absolute impartiality the endless pile of books that had been sent to the committee. She hadn’t cheated and taken a secret peek, although she had listened to some of the books. Nothing wrong with that: nobody had ever suggested that Justice should wear earplugs as well as a blindfold. At that rate, you might as well have her in a coma on a life-support machine!

  No, Penny had done her best to embody Justice, but it had been complicated and, above all, exhausting and time-consuming. When she opened her eyes again, she found that her vision was already blurred and a moment later, as she melted into a full realization of what a strain it had all been, tears started to spill from her eyes. She picked up the little folded linen napkin from the table and dabbed her wet cheeks. To her horror, the German waiter was approaching at the very moment she didn’t want to be seen by anyone.

  ‘I probably look an absolute fright with all my make up running,’ she blurted out as he arrived.

  ‘You’re most welcome, madame,’ he said agreeably. ‘Your table is ready, if you wish to proceed to the dining room. I will bring your cocktail.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Penny, draining the conical glass.

  It was time for a bit of the old cuisine gastronomique. She hoisted herself up, wandered back through the red bar and down the long blue corridor. French flag, she thought: white garden, red bar, blue corridor. She muttered encouragement to herself over the swish of her evening dress. After all, it wasn’t every day that one found oneself enjoying Versailles levels of unabashed French luxury, with the welcome addition of modern plumbing.

  In the Eurostar on the way over she had been mugging up on The City Under the City in her guidebook, and been reminded that Victor Hugo had set a very dramatic scene of Les Misérables in the Paris sewers. Without wishing to be a copycat, she thought she might do exactly the same thing and set a very dramatic scene of Roger and Out in that cloacal maze.

  To be perfectly honest the sewers had been something of a disappointment, despite the VIP treatment, which had taken her far beyond the gift shop and educational displays set up for ordinary tourists. She had been given a pair of very serious gumboots, a waterproof boiler suit and a gas mask and then been guided by top experts deep into the vaulted tunnels. She trod along narrow pavements running beside swift torrents of wastewater. She crossed metal bridges over stagnant pools full of leaves and plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and other floating objects from the gutters above. She saw the gleaming tails of rats disappearing into narrower tunnels, or washing themselves, as bold as brass, under showers of effluent. All the tunnels were named after the streets above them, with exactly the same famous blue and white street signs. At first it was rather delightful to find oneself underneath the Quai d’Orsay, the famous address which was also the nickname for the French Foreign Office. Her teeming imagination couldn’t help thinking that the sewers would be an excellent method for smuggling sensitive information out of the French F.O. without needing to be compromised by carrying it out oneself. Electronically tagged containers could be flushed down to agents waiting below (mental note: possible scene in R and O). She had passed under the Louvre with a frisson of secret pleasure, thinking of the huge queues trying to get into the museum, little suspecting that she and her guides had already gained access without the trouble of buying a ticket.

  As they worked their way back in a wide arc, under the Tuileries Gardens and to the Place Vendôme, Marcel, the chief guide, pointed out that her hotel suite was a couple of dozen metres above her head. She couldn’t help having a little pang of longing for its charming garden views, its deliciously soft sheets and, at the other end of all this plumbing, the marble bathroom with its powerful shower and the sumptuous pink dressing gown hanging from a hook on the back of the door. She pressed on, though, down the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, taking a keen interest in Marcel’s description of the boules de curage: giant wooden spheres, only slightly narrower than the tunnels they were rolled through, that forced all the grit and waste into the main drain. She daydreamed about having a very powerful hose and a good old boule de curage, with Vanessa and Jo and Tobias on the other side of it, sprinting towards a swelling flood of sewage. All they would have to shout out to make the nightmare stop was ‘wot u starin at’ and she would turn off the hose and set them free with a minimum of legal formality. Despite this enlivening fantasy, Penny started to grow a little weary of the tunnels, and when Marcel came to a halt and saluted facetiously, pointing his finger upwards and saying, ‘Ambassade Britannique,’ Penny felt a stab of nostalgia, remembering the old days when David had once taken her to lunch at our splendid Paris embassy.

  At that point, something in her rebelled and, as she struggled back to her starting point at the Pont de l’Alma, she allowed herself to reflect that on a visit to a great city whose dazzling architecture was infused with the spirit of all the art and music and literature that had been made there, and was still being made there, it was important not to set one’s sights too low and end up labouring through a labyrinth of dark tunnels, up to one’s knees in rivers of shit.

  29

  Alan put down The Mulberry Elephant with a puzzled frown. As always he had looked at the last page number before reading the first word. There were two thousand more pages of this stuff. At first, he couldn’t quite believe that he wasn’t being tricked, and that the Prince wouldn’t turn out to be framed, or undermined in some way, but after skipping forward to several random passages later in the book, he confirmed that it was written entirely from the Prince’s p
oint of view, with a wearisome emphasis on the insults dealt by modernity to the glory of the princely states, and without any hint of relief from his cloying self-regard. It was a curious object, but clearly unpublishable.

  Alan left the book behind to keep a claim on his table, and then joined the queue for tea and coffee, sliding his tray towards the cash register while he put in his order for another cappuccino. He had walked across Hampstead Heath to Kenwood House with The Mulberry Elephant pulling on the straps of his rucksack. The exercise, and the long enlivening light of midsummer, had reinforced the good mood brought on by James Miller’s early call saying that IPG had decided to offer him a job. His reports on the other two typescripts had been ‘exemplary’ and the agency would be delighted to have such a senior editor on board. To celebrate the decision, he was invited to join the IPG table at the Elysian Prize dinner. Alan put down the phone with the feeling that he was back at the centre of literary life. Wanting to get shot of The Mulberry Elephant before returning to an office routine, but unable to stand the confines of his hotel any longer, he hit on the idea of spending the day in Hampstead, walking and working. Now, in less than an hour, his work was over. He had the rest of the day to himself – not the rest of his life, as he had imagined during those drunken weeks confined to his fetid hotel room, but the rest of his day, delicious because it was limited and precise.

  He might not be living in the Mount Royal for the rest of his life either. Relations with his wife had taken on a more conciliatory tone. It was not his repentant emails nor her harsh replies that improved the atmosphere. It was the terrible innocence of his subsequent silence that won her over. He didn’t break off contact with her as a tactic but from pure incapacity. Even when she was trying to hate him, Marilyn couldn’t stop worrying about him. It was easy to reject his apologies but impossible to lose an interest in his whereabouts. Eventually the stronger species of emotion became entirely dominant, and Marilyn was worrying what state their marriage must have been in for Alan to defect, worrying about whether they could put the whole thing behind them, and worrying about Alan wasting money in hotels. Alan hoped that he would soon get an invitation back home but he knew that any pressure from him would delay its arrival.