Lost for Words: A Novel Read online

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Didier. ‘The famous Elysian. In France we have the Concour. It is completely corrupt, and for that reason the rules are absolutely clear. That is the paradox of corruption: it is much more legalistic than the law! But this Elysian, c’est du pur casino.’

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Katherine, determined to go ahead now that Didier had started talking. ‘Perhaps we should have a drink first.’

  6

  Although he could see almost nothing through his dark glasses, Sonny felt that he needed their protection against the phosphorescent ocean of clicking and flashing paparazzi that might well be churning restlessly, somewhere beyond passport control, awaiting his arrival. The gutter press would only be doing its vulgar and familiar work, feeding an insatiable public with images of an Indian grandee who had stooped to conquer English Letters with his masterwork, The Mulberry Elephant. He understood their hunger and was modestly dressed for the occasion. He had just squeezed back into the slate-grey raw-silk frock coat that the pretty little air hostess fetched for him from the First Class cupboard. Underneath his frock coat, he wore a long pale-peach shirt and loose white trousers, pinched at the ankle and finished off with a pair of his signature yellow slippers. As he left his seat, he draped his shoulder, carelessly but perfectly, with a folded beige shawl of a surpassing softness that could only be achieved by weaving together the almost non-existent hairs of several hundred unborn Kashmiri mountain goats. He had one of the genuine pre-war articles, not one of these fake things they sold on every street corner in Paris and Milano.

  His shawl was not only proof against England’s loutish climate, it also spared him from contact with objects, like doorknobs and light switches, that could have been handled by almost anybody; murderers and butchers, moneylenders and lavatory attendants. It could also be called upon to wrap around materials abhorrent to his sensitive touch, like the slippery, effeminate plastic used in plastic bags.

  For the first fourteen years of his life he had never even set eyes on a plastic bag. Confined to the palace and its magnificent grounds, more varied and luxuriant than the Botanical Gardens of Kew, filled with peacocks and cockatoos and herds of antelope, he would ride around with his tutors and his equerry and the rest of his entourage, one day on an elephant, the next in a pony and trap, never seeing other children and seldom seeing his parents, but wanting for nothing among all the delightful follies and spectacles arranged for his entertainment; the orchestras that struck up as he rounded a corner, or the famous battles re-enacted for his birthday. On an island in the middle of the Home Lake, a sadhu had been persuaded to take up residence under a baobab tree. With his body covered in ash and hair down to his waist, he meditated all day with imperturbable concentration. Sonny’s tutor encouraged him to test the holy man’s resolve by emptying baskets full of harmless grass snakes over his head, or setting fire to his loin cloth, only putting it out at the very last moment. What fun they had! And yet one day, when Sonny was fourteen, as he was galloping around his private racecourse, after winning yet another race against the Household Jockeys, he was suddenly overcome by a longing to go beyond the palace gates and see the city, which sometimes betrayed its presence as a faint smudge in the air, complicating the glorious sunsets which were such a talking point among guests at the palace. His father had forbidden him to leave the grounds, and Sonny spent many weeks planning his secret expedition and accumulating what he imagined was an appropriate disguise in which to move unnoticed among his people.

  When he finally arrived at the outskirts of the city, he wrapped his borrowed garments more tightly around himself, cupping his palm over his nostrils to filter the stagnant air, clogged with the thick odours of cooking, the stench of sewage and the reek of rotting marigolds. He finally emerged from the miserable maze of leprous lanes, their mud walls plastered with drying cow dung and streaked with crimson eructations of betel juice, and found himself on open ground overlooking the river. Back at the palace the melting spring snows were artfully channelled into fountains and bathing pools, into swift streams whose murmuring music enlivened shaded pleasure grounds; here, beside the city, the sluggish flood burnt in the sun like molten glass, its unlovely banks strewn with garbage. Somewhere down by the glaring water he could hear the crackle of a funeral pyre. Slipping on the dark glasses which, mercifully, he had tucked into his shirt pocket at the last moment, Sonny watched as a blackened corpse, excruciated by the intense heat, sat up for the last time, while a pariah dog gnawed on a charred limb that had escaped the flames and lay smoking on the greasy beach. Further along the shore, an indifferent washerwoman beat clothes on a rock and chucked them into a tub nearby.

  Shaking off these memories as he moved towards the exit, Sonny nodded at the cluster of air hostesses, accepting their longing to see him again on board their airline as the inevitable consequence of the awe that he inspired. One of them, not completely ignorant of the history and traditions of her country, must have known and then told the others, in a lather of excitement, that the passenger in the front row (he had, as usual, reserved the entire front row, so as not to find himself sitting next to that famous bore, God-Knows-Who) was the six hundred and fifty-third maharaja of Badanpur. Sonny could trace his ancestry, according to the highest Brahminical authority, back to Krishna, the dark-blue god. The thought of those happy days when gods had mingled freely with humankind, and infused his own lineage with divinity, brought a radiant smile to Sonny’s face, as if he were Krishna himself, smiling at the exquisite milkmaid who was to become the first great Queen and Founding Mother of the House of Badanpur. Sonny saw the pretty little girl who had fetched his frock coat stagger for a moment, as if trying to regain her balance after an obscure shock wave that only he could fully understand had passed through the cabin. He almost reached out to support her, but checked his compassion, feeling that his touch might have the opposite effect, throwing this frail human creature to the ground and robbing her of her sanity, like a circuit incinerated by a charge that it was never designed to carry.

  As he sped through Heathrow’s long low corridors in a beeping golf cart, Sonny checked his phone to see if Katherine Burns had sent a text, shedding light on the mystery of The Mulberry Elephant having so far received no notices in the British press. He didn’t pretend to understand the workings of a newspaper editor’s mind, but he could imagine that the press would want to make a bigger splash by synchronizing all the profiles, reviews, interviews, television chat shows, and guest appearances in popular soap operas, with the explosive appearance of Mulberry on the Elysian Big List. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it was that there could be no other explanation, but he was disappointed, if not altogether surprised, that Miss Burns was so overcome with professional jealousy that she was unable to tell him herself. He had only received one communication from her, a scratchy postcard thanking him for lunch, at least a month too late, and saying that she had given Auntie’s cookbook to her publisher, but that it was a crowded market and not to raise her hopes too high.

  At the UK Border, an absurd little man asked Sonny the purpose of his visit. When Sonny said that he had come two weeks ahead of the Big List, so as to be thoroughly well rested before the hullabaloo of the publicity circus, the little man asked him what exactly this publicity would be for.

  ‘My novel, of course,’ said Sonny.

  ‘So, you’ve come to the UK to promote a novel,’ said the man.

  ‘I have come to accept congratulations for my novel,’ said Sonny impatiently. ‘I have nothing to do with trade.’

  ‘Is the novel published in the UK?’

  ‘No!’ said Sonny. ‘It is published in India – privately!’

  ‘So you are in fact trying to promote and sell goods from India in the UK,’ concluded his tormentor, ‘but on your Immigration Form you ticked the box stating that the purpose of your trip is pleasure.’

  ‘The purpose of my entire existence is pleasure,’ said Sonny angrily, ‘but I can’t say that I’m e
xperiencing any at the moment!’

  He had perhaps been unwise to lose his temper. He spent the next four hours in a depressing cubicle talking to one grim example after another of the bureaucratic breed. When he showed them his four First Class return tickets, and a phone call to Claridge’s confirmed that he’d booked the Arnold Bennett Suite for the next month, they reluctantly admitted him to the country, but spitefully limited his visit to twenty days, giving him only five days after the Big List. To think that his ancestors had already spent millennia being cooled by rose sherbets and peacock fans, while these fellows were still prancing around on frigid beaches, dressed in rotting animal skins, and jabbering away in the rudiments of a language it had fallen on him to raise to the highest level of art, brought him close to hysteria, but by the time he was reclining in the back of the Claridge’s car, massaging his temples, the calm waters of luxury and destiny started to close over the ripples of mere circumstance, and he decided that he would indeed leave the country in twenty days, at his own instigation, in order to spend an amusing night in Le Touquet, or Deauville, returning to England the next day, in the reasonable expectation that on this occasion the border would not be guarded by a complete madman.

  7

  As Vanessa looked up from her armchair and stared out at the quad, the pale-honey stone of the college chapel and the leaded diamonds of its window-panes lit up in a burst of sunlight, and then darkened again. She imagined the scudding spring clouds she couldn’t see; she noticed the invitation from the brief shift of light to transcend and then reclaim her overburdened mood. She accepted and put aside all these mental operations and felt restored, after only a few moments of lucid daydreaming, to a salutary independence of mind in which she could place her attention where she chose, with little interference from her emotions and her surroundings.

  She was doing what she was paid to do: being intelligent about writing. Rather too much writing, it was true. In just over an hour her first-year students would be coming to read their essays on ‘Evil in the Brontës’. As usual, none of them would have read Villette. She had eight essays to mark before tomorrow on the Metaphysical poets. (‘Yoked by violence together’ – was Dr Johnson right? They would all say no, of course, and quote T. S. Eliot on Donne.) The second draft of a PhD thesis on the history of the semi-colon, which Vanessa had recklessly agreed to supervise, would have to wait until Saturday. Sunday was earmarked for her own book on Edith Wharton’s Women. The trouble was that on Sunday she and Stephen had to go and see Poppy in the clinic. Poppy was back inside after her weight dropped below thirty-five kilos. The slightest hint that her mother was in a hurry to get back to work would be treated by Poppy as further evidence of betrayal and neglect, of Vanessa’s preference for ideas over human relationships, of an academic ambition whose impossibly high standards were ultimately responsible for her illness. Poppy’s eating disorder had started during the term before her GCSEs. She later explained, or made up the explanation, that she felt she was not only competing with all the students in her year, but also with her donnish parents, who took her success for granted and only paid attention to her failures. Later, when she did her A-levels, she won a scholarship to Cambridge, where both her parents taught. On the other hand, she had to be admitted to hospital for the first time that year. In support of her argument, it was true that this crisis secured her far more parental attention and professions of love than she had ever been given before.

  As Vanessa’s mind approached the black hole of her daughter’s illness, it tended to veer off into generalizations: the paradox that the inflated exam grades designed to banish low self-esteem from the national psyche made anything less than ten A*s into a source of low self-esteem; the fact that the long backward look now taken by universities encouraged an emphasis on obedience and conformity that were not necessarily the best indicators of intellectual curiosity and incisiveness. She took refuge in the platitudes of her social circle, so much easier to contemplate than her children’s individual cases. Tom had returned from the ‘birthday party’ he had been to last weekend, admitting that it had in fact been an ayahuasca ceremony that ended when one of the participants went into a coma. With only eight weeks before his A-levels, Tom had spent three days at home recovering from the weekend’s psychedelic ordeal. Now that Poppy was back in the clinic, Vanessa had lost her nerve and instead of lecturing him, carried bowls of soup to his bedroom on a tray.

  Quite apart from this multitude of obligations, she was surrounded by the Elysian Prize submissions, piled up around her armchair. These required an immediate and decisive focus, not only to reclaim some floor space by clearing out the hopeless cases (she thought involuntarily of Poppy’s bed at the clinic being liberated by her death) but also to get down, over the next two weeks, to the final twenty books out of which the Long List of twelve would then be chosen. Her first task, which she intended to dispatch before the Brontë tutorials, was to take a look at one of Malcolm’s candidates, wot u starin at. She was inclined to stay on good terms with Malcolm and to keep her polemical powder dry for the later stages of the competition. Her intention was not to read the book through, unless it became a candidate for the Long List, but to let it through, if at all possible, to the last twenty.

  She started reading the first page.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

  Death Boy’s troosers were round his ankies. The only vein in his body that hadna bin driven into hiding was in his cock.

  ‘I told yuz nivir ivir to talk to uz when Aym trackin a vein,’ snarled Death Boy.

  ‘That way I needna fucking talk ta ya at all,’ said Wanker, slumped in the corner, weirdly fascinated by the sour stench of his own vomit, rising off of his soiled Iggy Pop tee-shirt. He was fixed ta the corner, as if some cunt with a nail gun had shot him through the hands and feet and crucified the sorry bastard to Death Boy’s floor. Deep in the despair a kenning that he coudna move in any direction, he pissed himself, feeling the warm flood fill his troosers, and at the same time evacuating his tormented bowels, with a mixture a relief, and a touch a pride at the thought that heed be leavin Death Boy’s gaff in an even worse state than heed found it. No easy matter.

  ‘Shite,’ he whispered with a voice that seemed to come from a thousand miles away and belong to another creature, not necessarily human.

  ‘Awright!’ said Death Boy, his face twisted in a kinda sweet hatred. ‘Awright! Ay got it, Ay fucking got it, Ay fucking hit the vein. Awright…’ His words trailed off as the skag came on and he climbed outta the refrigerator where heed bin cramped, naked and shivering, and stepped out, inta the heat o tha midday sun, and his aching ole bones and bruised ole muscles melted like wax in a fire.

  ‘That’s fuckin awright, that is,’ he croaked.

  What was so typical of an untrained reader like Malcolm was the claim that this was a work of ‘gritty social realism’, when in fact it was a piece of surrealistic satire. Vanessa decided to sample another passage from the middle of the book.

  ‘Wot u starin at?’ sais the red-haired cunt at the bar.

  ‘Ay wasna starin at anythin,’ sais Death Boy.

  ‘Listen, mate,’ sais Wanker, who wasna in the mood for a fight, being skag-sick, and pissed at the world on account of his AIDS test comin back positive, ‘there’s nae cunt staring at nae cunt.’

  ‘Well, you can stare a this,’ sais the red-head cunt, and he brings his beer mug down on Death Boy’s heid, splitting his skull open.

  Death Boy’s goat more blood pouring outa him than a pig in an abattoir, only he’s so outa his box, he dunna ken he’s goat any cause for complaint until he’s licked up a good half pint o it.

  Wanker, seeing that a fight is unavoidable, snorts a line a speed off the bar, goes up to the red-haired cunt and head-butts him, breakin the fucker’s nose. While the cunt is still trying to get his balance, Wanker whips out his syringe and sinks it into the cunt’s neck.

  ‘Welcome to tha world a AIDS, you psycho cunt,’ sais Wanker.

>   ‘That’s enough of that,’ sais the weasel-faced barman, ‘we’re no havin any fightin in here. This is a respectable pub.’

  Yes, well, there it was, thought Vanessa: eighty or perhaps ninety thousand words of that sort of thing. An art based on impact, rather than process, structure or insight, doomed to the jack-hammer monotony of having to shock again and again. She placed it reluctantly on the stack reserved for the final twenty. She would let Malcolm have it, for what she was ashamed to admit were essentially political reasons, but she would advance her literary objections strongly when the time came – and when she had read it.

  So far the only book she wholeheartedly admired was The Frozen Torrent by Sam Black. It had what she wanted to call an experience of literature built into it, an inherent density of reflection on the medium in which it took place: the black backing that makes the mirror shine.

  There was a knock on the door. Three minutes early. How keen they were to tell her how many cruelties they had spotted in Wuthering Heights, like children bringing pebbles back from the shoreline to distract their parents when they were trying to read.

  8

  Alan Oaks had managed to catch an earlier flight than expected, and he texted Katherine from the Gatwick Express to tell her the good news. He longed to be with her again, and although he knew his back wasn’t up to it, pictured himself sweeping aside the keys and the envelopes from the hall table and having her right there, too impatient to make it as far as the bedroom. By the time he was at the front of the taxi queue, he had compromised realistically and settled on the armchair in the drawing room. With her legs hooked over its arms, she was lowering herself …

  ‘Oh, Craven Hill Gardens, please.’

  There had been opportunities in Guttenberg, but they were not temptations. With Katherine he was having that rare thing, a love affair. An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern; nevertheless, when he’d left his wife and moved in with Katherine, a couple of envious senior colleagues at Page and Turner had taken him aside to warn him against the explosive mixture of too many kinds of intimacy, and wheeled out stories of editors who had lost star writers, and novelists who had dried up or, worse, started to write mawkish and baggy prose.