Lost for Words: A Novel Read online

  Sonny’s head turned as if synchronized with the arrival of the elderly woman in a maroon and gold sari who now stood in the doorway.

  ‘Auntie!’ said Sonny, rising from the daybed. ‘May I present Katherine Burns, she’s a lady novelist from London.’

  ‘Oh, how delightful,’ said Auntie and then, noticing that Katherine hadn’t moved, she added, ‘Don’t get up, my dear, nobody curtsies any more these days; or only the old stick in the muds,’ her voice filled with mock-horror at the mention of this category. ‘We’re just having a cosy little lunch, nothing formal.’

  She sat on the edge of the daybed and toyed with the folds of her sari.

  ‘You’re just the person I need,’ she began, conscious of the favour she was doing Katherine. ‘I’ve written the most marvellous cookery book – full of family portraits – and, of course, recipes that have been handed down from generation to generation by the cooks at the old palace.’ She hurried over this detail as if it were hardly worth mentioning. ‘You’re in the publishing world, could you take one of the manuscripts back with you and place it with a London publisher for me? We used to know the great English writers, Somerset Maugham and dear old Paddy Leigh Fermor, but they all seem to be dead now, or out of commission. So, you see, my dear, I’m relying on you.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Katherine, trying to assemble a smile.

  4

  Over the last few weeks, Penny had been so preoccupied by becoming a member of the Elysian Prize committee that she had neglected her own writing, but she was determined to get back to work on her current thriller, Roger and Out. She clicked, a little nervously, on its icon and found herself confronted by sentences she hadn’t looked at for ages. To give herself a running jump, she re-read the beginning of the latest chapter.

  It was evening in St James’s Park and the sun, sinking in a westerly direction, had turned the clouds into pink balls of cotton wool. Meanwhile, at ground level, the puddles had already turned into dark pools of glossy chocolate.

  Sitting in her battered grey Audi A6 3.0 litre TDI with all leather seats, Jane Street was ready to call it a day. That was the surveillance game for you, waiting and watching, watching and waiting, but often ending up with nothing to show for it. Then, just as Jane’s hand came to rest on the ignition key, Grove’s voice blasted into her earpiece.

  ‘I have an eyeball. I have an eyeball.’

  The words shot through Jane’s body like an electric current. She reached instinctively into the Audi’s generous glove compartment and felt for her weapon. The IPX370 packed the punch of a Colt .38, but its magazine carried that one extra bullet that could make all the difference if things turned nasty. Six grams shy of its American counterpart, its lighter weight also made a real difference if you had to carry it round in your handbag all day.

  Jane’s hand padded around the glove compartment, but apart from the service manual and a spare packet of Handy Andies, she could feel nothing there. Where the hell was her weapon? Then it all came back with a cold sickening thud. The shooting range. That morning. Richard Lane. Lane was a classic yes-man and pen-pusher, with no more idea of the reality of life at the sharp end of things than she had of how to dance the lead role in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Probably less. She had been avoiding Lane like the plague, but he had finally tracked her down at the shooting range and delivered his usual lecture about her ‘cavalier disregard for the proper rules of procedure’, her ‘run-away expenses’ and her ‘attitude generally’. It had made her so angry that she had left her weapon behind. She had spent the whole afternoon fuming and hadn’t had a chance to discover her mistake. Now it was too late.

  Well, damn Lane, damn all the Lanes, sitting behind their desks in Thames House, watching the shafts of sunlight turn the river lapis lazuli, while their love-sick secretaries made bookings for lunch at Quo Vadis in Soho’s Dean Street. What did they know about putting your life on the line for your country?

  Penny was torn between thinking that the pages were rather good – pacey, well researched, vivid – and thinking that she was not really a writer at all. Perhaps it had been a huge mistake to retire early from the Foreign Office to pursue her lifelong ambition of becoming an author. It was true that there had been other reasons to leave. Her career had stagnated after its dazzlingly rapid rise during David Hampshire’s last years as Permanent Secretary, over twenty-five years ago. His favouritism had generated so much resentment that she remained stuck at the same level ever after, often moving sideways but never up. Her affair with David not only ruined her marriage, but arguably ruined her prospects as well. He was still her greatest friend, but the glory days were over, when he used to call her ‘my very own Anna Ford’, at a time when the nation’s favourite newscaster was considered the most desirable woman on Earth. Unlike the delicious Miss Ford, who had confidently allowed her hair to go white, Penny’s remained resolutely mahogany, matching her eyes, but increasingly at odds with the sad story told by the sags and creases of her loosening skin. Penny sighed. Nicola had never really forgiven her for the divorce – or, if it came to that, for the career – but she wasn’t going to think about that now; she must press on, if only to get away from the old feelings of hollow sacrifice that she fought against every day.

  ‘Damascus is on the bridge. Damascus is crossing the bridge,’ said Grove’s audibly tense voice. ‘Where the hell are you, Street?’

  Jane closed the glove compartment. She was about to face Ibrahim al-Shukra, one of the world’s most dangerous and ruthless men, responsible for the horrific, cowardly, tragic and completely uncalled for deaths of countless innocent members of the public, and she was unarmed.

  ‘Damascus has stopped on the bridge.’ Grove was audibly relieved. ‘Damascus is feeding the ducks.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said Jane.

  ‘Roger that,’ said Grove.

  Well, Jane reflected philosophically, she may not have the reassuring weight of the IPX370 in her hand, but she still had her handbag (it wouldn’t be the first time she’d used that as a weapon), her common sense and, above all, her professionalism.

  * * *

  The word ‘professionalism’ stung Penny with guilt about the previous night. She was meant to be baby-sitting for Nicola, but had quite simply forgotten until it was too late. Nicola had always reproached Penny for being a neglectful mother, and now she was going to have ‘neglectful grandmother’ added to the list of her crimes. Whatever her daughter might think, when push came to shove, she had a strong maternal side. Nevertheless, she was the first to admit that public service had taken the lion’s share of her attention. Nicola had become a latchkey kid, travelling on the Underground to school at an early age, letting herself in and making her own tea, putting herself to bed, booking her own holidays and going off with other families to unknown foreign destinations. It hadn’t been ideal, but at least it had helped to make the her independent.

  The night before Nicola had been planning to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a ritual she repeated on the anniversary of the occasion that Penny had promised to take her but had been forced to let her down. President Reagan had just invaded Grenada, or at least sent some Marines to invade Grenada, and Penny had felt that she simply had to stay at her desk to help draft the Foreign Office response. Even then she had been a writer, although a team of specialists handled the actual wording.

  Penny couldn’t help wincing from the memory of last night’s telephone call to Nicola.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’m on my way,’ she reassured Nicola when she suddenly remembered what she was supposed to be doing.

  ‘Don’t fucking bother,’ Nicola shouted. ‘I’m going to miss the show again anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s escaped your notice,’ said Penny, ‘but I’m part of the team that’s been put in charge of English Literature this year and, whether you like it or not, that’s a pretty big responsibility.’

  ‘Oh, piss off,’ said Nicola and hung up.

  Penny’s o
wn childhood had taken place during the Second World War. Her earliest memory was of sitting in her nursery one afternoon, playing with her favourite toy, a lovely doll’s house with a pretty red and white chequered tablecloth in its kitchen, and a little kitten sitting curled up by the fire in the living room. Suddenly, with a dreadful screeching sound, a hole appeared in the floor only a few inches from where she was sitting, and her doll’s house disappeared. A bomb had dropped straight onto her house, ripping through the roof, the nursery, her parents’ bedroom, the dining room, and finally getting lodged in the basement, unexploded.

  Nowadays that would mean instant counselling, but in wartime Britain you picked yourself up, avoiding the gaping hole in the middle of the room, and carried on. And what’s more, you remembered to count your blessings. Yes, there was an unexploded bomb in the foundations of your childhood home, undermining its rental value and putting your parents under considerable financial strain, but you never forgot that if there was one thing worse than an unexploded bomb, it was a bomb that did explode.

  All her life Penny felt that showing emotion was a sign of weakness. Emotions were what other people were allowed to have. She was there to help, and although she might not have all the answers, or even a very clear idea of what people were talking about when they talked about their feelings, she could make sure that the kettle was on, or the gin and tonic ready to hand, so that things would start to look better for those who were struggling.

  Penny scrolled down to her latest paragraph. She wanted to get at least a thousand words written before lunch. But she was also determined to shake off her dependency on some highly addictive software called Ghost and the two ambitions might be hard to reconcile.

  At the beginning of her trilogy, Penny had liked basic Ghost so much that she went on to buy Gold Ghost and Gold Ghost Plus. When you typed in a word, ‘refugee’ for instance, several useful suggestions popped up: ‘clutching a pathetic bundle’, or ‘eyes big with hunger’; for ‘assassin’ you got ‘ice water running through his veins’, and ‘his eyes were cold narrow slits’. Under ‘shoes’ you got ‘badly scuffed’, ‘highly polished’, ‘seen better days’, and ‘bought in Paris’. If you typed ‘river’ into Gold Ghost Plus, you got ‘dark flood flecked with gold’, or ‘wearing her evening gown of fiery silk’. When you looked up ‘thought’, you found ‘food for’ and ‘perish the’. She could scroll and click, scroll and click all day, with the word count going up in leaps and bounds.

  She found herself getting weekly crushes on writing tricks of one sort or another: cricket metaphors, when everyone started playing with a straight bat, or dropping an easy catch; or it was descriptions of the weather that set her imagination on fire, and clouds appeared in the sky like ‘big sponges’, or covered cities like ‘a wet blanket’. Her word of the week last week had been ‘imperceptibly’. One of her characters had ‘glanced imperceptibly’, while another had ‘imperceptibly moved her hand’. The action had generally taken on an imperceptible air, which set it apart from a run of the mill thriller.

  Roger and Out was the third volume of her trilogy. When all was said and done, the first volume, Follow That Car, had been tepidly received, but the sequel, Roger That, secured a smashing review in the Daily Express. She had the key quote, ‘Feathers knows her stuff’, blown up, framed and hanging in the guest loo of her cottage in Suffolk. She sometimes had a funny feeling when she realized that she would soon be parted from the characters she’d been living with all these months. Was it sadness? She wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, she wasn’t going to dwell on it.

  5

  Didier’s arm was looped over Katherine’s shoulder, one hand spread across her still-pounding heart, the other cupped over the hard curve of her navel ring.

  Didier wondered again if there was not something excessive, something obscene, about his enjoyment of Katherine’s body. Once its material desires had been satisfied, commodity fetishism moved on to amorous and spiritual dimensions. He was living, engulfed by a mental fog analogous to religious fervour, in a late capitalist utopia of obligatory permissiveness, with its injunction to gratify ever more perverse desires.

  ‘What does it mean when we say…’ Didier began.

  ‘Shhh,’ said Katherine. Half her motive for sex was to let her mind fall silent. Didier’s compulsion to talk, to analyse everything, to live in a perpetual semiotic frenzy, was one of the reasons their affair had been so brief. She also didn’t want Didier to think that they were having a general revival. She was just dealing with the emergency, or taking advantage of the opportunity, it was hard to know which, of Alan’s absence. They had worked hard on editing her novel when she got back from India and then he had gone to a conference in Guttenberg on the future of the book. For him that counted as work, but she was left dangerously unemployed.

  Shhh, she must stop as well. She had only just finished making love and she was already chattering. She thought of an empty train shooting through an empty station at night, an image of her mind without words. How beautifully unnecessary they seemed at that moment, but soon it would be rush hour, with hardly enough words getting off the crowded train to allow any words from the crowded platform to get on. Everything congested with words, everything spoken for; conversations, dialogues, monologues, interior monologues, all the way down, words staining the marrow, pretending that nothing existed without them. She almost wanted to make love again to get back to silence, but Sam was coming for a drink in half an hour, with the inevitable punctuality of a lovesick man. She must get ready.

  Complacencies of the peignoir, or power shower: which word cluster would get her?

  ‘Okay, I get up now,’ said Didier, taking control of his rejection, pushing aside the bedclothes and picking up his shirt from the floor.

  She gave him what he wanted, rolling over and raising herself enough to lean against his back.

  ‘That was so nice,’ she said, kissing him on his shoulder.

  ‘What does it mean that I’m your ex-lover when I have just come inside you?’ said Didier.

  ‘It means you got lucky,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Maybe I get lucky again,’ said Didier, turning towards her and lunging with his mouth.

  Katherine allowed herself to be kissed.

  ‘I have a friend coming in twenty minutes,’ she said, with regret and impatience.

  ‘The next man!’ said Didier. ‘Fais attention! One day air-traffic control goes on strike and there is a terrible accident!’

  ‘You can stay, if you like.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but voyeurism is not my taste,’ said Didier.

  ‘He’s just a friend,’ she said, getting off the bed and switching on the bathroom light. Katherine was bored by jealousy; she had been bombarded by so much of it, there hadn’t been time to find out if she had any of her own.

  ‘What does it mean, this superposition of two impossible categories: lover / ex-lover…’

  Katherine turned on the shower, missing the conclusion of Didier’s penetrating enquiry. By the time she got out, he was fully clothed and sitting in the armchair in the corner of her bedroom.

  ‘It creates the space of pure paradox, like the ephemeral emergence of a particle from the quantum vacuum – the vacuum which is not a vacuum!’

  ‘Sorry, but have you been talking while I was in the shower, or did you just start up again when I came out?’ she asked.

  ‘In the end, what difference does it make?’ said Didier.

  ‘Well, if I missed a chunk, that might explain why I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she said, letting her towel drop to the ground.

  Didier fell silent.

  ‘Putain,’ he finally managed, after she had stepped into her knickers. ‘This is what it is like to be Actaeon: you know that you will be torn apart by the hunting dogs, but you don’t care!’

  ‘I don’t think he did know,’ said Katherine, emerging from her T-shirt.

  ‘Of course he didn’t know!’ said Didier. ‘But w
e know, because we do not live in the myth, but in the knowledge of the myth. Evidently, the collective unconscious has become the collective self-conscious!’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Just in time,’ said Katherine, doing up the button on her jeans. ‘I mean I got my jeans on just in time.’

  ‘Do not worry,’ said Didier, following her into the hall. ‘My narcissism is not offended, in fact it may be gratified by the idea that this interruption was “just in time” to save you from my theories!’

  ‘Hi, Sam,’ said Katherine to the hazy image on her entryphone, pressing the buzzer to let him in.

  ‘You pay me the compliment of resistance,’ Didier continued. ‘There can be no resistance without the fear of penetration!’

  Katherine took Didier’s head in her hands and gave him a long slow kiss, knowing that even he had to stop talking while her tongue was in his mouth. She only broke away when there was a knock on the door.

  ‘And so you penetrate me instead,’ Didier concluded triumphantly.

  Sam could tell that Katherine had just been in bed with Didier. Her hair was wet from the shower and he smelt ostentatiously of sex. Sam also knew that the grey-haired Frenchman was not supposed to be her current lover. Her openness to infidelity filled him with an optimism that her choice of infidelity discouraged.

  Katherine introduced the rivalrous men and took them through to the drawing room. An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?

  ‘So you got your novel in before the deadline,’ said Sam.

  ‘Yes,’ said Katherine, wondering what it would be like to go to bed with both of them at once.