Lost for Words: A Novel Read online

  She felt isolated, partly because she had turned her phone off, driven mad by constant calls from Alan, pleading to be taken back. The first day after she threw him out, he rang to say that he had sacked his assistant, and that she had left in tears.

  ‘If you were right to sack her, I was right to sack you,’ she answered coldly.

  ‘I’ll take her back if you’ll take me back,’ he said.

  ‘Rivers don’t flow upstream,’ said Katherine.

  ‘But I love you…’

  She hung up before he could finish his unpromising sentence. Every few hours her inbox silted up with emails that she deleted without reading. Katherine had become disciplined about ending an affair; it was an indispensable skill for someone who had averaged twenty lovers a year since she was sixteen. Besides, Alan suddenly seemed so irrelevant, now that Consequences was no longer in the running for the Elysian. She had felt the same way about her English tutor at Cambridge after getting a First. He had been astonished, but to her it was the most natural thing in the world: why would anybody sleep with a don after leaving university? It was nothing to do with being mercenary, but it had everything to do with being impulsive. She slept with the man of the moment. The moment might be the way a man held his glass, or it might be more practical, like a don at university, but neither kind of moment could last, and when it ended there was nothing left. She knew that she would feel frightened and empty if she ever stopped, and so there was always someone to fall back on, or move on to.

  Things were perilously close to empty right now. She had lost Sam the same day she lost Alan. The Frozen Torrent was on the Long List and she didn’t feel like being patronized in bed. Sam didn’t yet know about her decision, if decision was the right word for that snap in her psyche. As a result, in this disastrous week, only Didier was left and she was in no condition to organize anything else; she didn’t want pity, or even sympathy, she wanted infatuation.

  Katherine turned on her phone and it rang immediately.

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ she said, looking at Alan’s name on the screen. She ignored Alan and rang Didier.

  ‘Can you come round?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Straight away. It’s just you.’

  ‘A bas le triangle! Vive le couple!’ said Didier. ‘No Sam? No Alan?’

  ‘I’m down to just you,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Down is good,’ said Didier, ‘it reduces the vertigo.’

  ‘It is the vertigo,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Not once you’ve landed.’

  ‘Well, let’s land.’

  ‘Okay, I abandon this wonderful sentence I am writing: “we think we are free because we lack the language to describe our unfreedom”…’

  ‘Please,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Okay, j’arrive.’

  11

  ‘What is the purpose of art?’ Sam felt doomed as he wrote the question. What did he really think?

  ‘To arrest our attention in the midst of distraction.’

  Could he say that?

  ‘Its uselessness is its supreme value. Money only has value because it can be exchanged for something else, art only has value because it can’t.’

  Try telling that to a Rembrandt owner, who’s just exchanged a ‘useless’ self-portrait for twenty-seven million pounds, thought Sam, or for that matter to someone whose loneliness has been abolished by the perfect reflection of her mood or predicament in the sentence she has just read.

  ‘To arrest our attention in the midst of distraction’, or ‘to distract our attention in the midst of fixation’. He could imagine approaching that point from the opposite angle. The whole thing was a nightmare. If he didn’t pull himself together, he would have to come up with a Theory of Beauty.

  ‘The purpose of style,’ Sam began, ‘is to generate interest’, he concluded timidly.

  What was interest? Talk about begging the question.

  He marvelled at the speed with which elation had turned into anxiety. Ever since he had found that The Frozen Torrent was on the Long List, he had been torn between a superstitious need to avoid anticipating any further success, and a neurotic need to plan, in case further success came his way. What if he had to make a speech, the speech, in fact, of an Elysian winner? He didn’t want to think about it, in case the gods punished him for expecting things to go well, but he must think about it, so as to pacify his fear of success.

  One thing was clear; he was going to have to drop the topic of art. In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture; the word ‘elitist’ could be spat out with the same confident contempt as ‘coward’ at a court martial. It seemed as if a prejudice could not be banished without driving some other topic, once freely discussed, or even admired, into a shameful exile. Perhaps in future generations a law would be passed allowing consenting adults to practise art openly; an Intellect Relations Board might be set up to encourage tolerance towards people who, through no fault of their own, were interested in ideas. Meanwhile, it was just as well to keep quiet and play the fool.

  Whatever its contents, Sam preferred to speculate about a speech he would probably never have to make than to contemplate the agony of Katherine’s defection. When The Frozen Torrent appeared on the Long List, and Consequences did not, she had broken contact with him. Was it envy or disappointment? Was she ill, or was she dead? She ignored as many messages as he dared to send. He hoped feverishly that the equation of literary success and erotic failure was reversible, and that she would take him back if his novel didn’t make the Short List, but a quieter, saner voice told him that he would just end up with both kinds of failures at once.

  In the end he was driven to ring Didier for news.

  ‘This imbecile she used to live with,’ Didier explained, ‘sent a cookbook to the judges instead of her novel.’

  ‘What?’ said Sam, who thought he must have misheard.

  ‘No, no, it gets better,’ said Didier. ‘They put the cookbook on the Long List. This is no joke. We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting. This is the Dark Ages with light pollution: with the pollution of the Enlightenment! The pigs are wandering among the temple ruins; women are being raped on the steps of the forgotten Senate; there are only two or three monks who can still read in the whole of Europe; all of that, naturally, but this time it’s going to be on TV! This time it’s going to be famous! It’s going to give interviews: “It’s not so easy being the Dark Ages, there are many problems: I think I need some therapy, et cetera.” You get the picture? Only Lacan can do justice to this over-illuminated Dark Age, because only he has the obscurity to survive!’

  ‘Did you say, “used to live”?’ asked Sam tenaciously. ‘Do you mean Alan Oaks doesn’t live with her any more?’

  ‘Evidently, she has thrown him out,’ Didier confirmed.

  ‘So, are you still seeing her?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to see anybody,’ said Didier, ‘but we are old friends, and so she allows me to bring her some food, some wine: the bare necessities.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sam.

  ‘She knows she is living at the end of civilization,’ said Didier, ‘because I am the one who told her!’ He burst out laughing. ‘Everybody thinks they understand the joke of reality TV, but the real joke is that there is no other reality! There can be no civilization because we are living in the desert of the Real. All our experience has been mediated by a system whose tyranny is precisely that no one controls it. Its tyranny is the absence of the tyrant! We have made a catastrophic progress since Bentham’s Panoptic prison: we no longer need the supervision of The Other, we are prisoners of our own gaze! When we think we are having an original thought, we are in fact remembering an episode from the soap opera of global capitalism. Our most private fantasies have already been marketed…’

  ‘Yes, well, never mind the end of civilization,’ Sam interrupted him, ‘
what about the end of my relationship with Katherine?’

  ‘That is a personal matter,’ said Didier. ‘Ask me about the nature of the human condition, or the limits of language, but you and Katherine, this fragile human relationship, it’s too complex.’ Didier allowed himself a little giggle at the idea that there was a subject too complex for his critical capacities. ‘But what is love, really?’ he went on. ‘When we speak of the game we call “love”, what…’

  Sam said goodbye hastily, before hearing Didier’s views on this important topic. He needed to take in all this news. He was delighted that Katherine was no longer living with Alan, but annoyed that Didier was still sleeping with her. On the other hand, she couldn’t be expected to put up with his preposterous theorizing for much longer. Sam realized that he would have to keep in touch with Didier in order to choose the right time to re-submit his application to Katherine. If she went off with some entirely new lover, his access to her would become even more tenuous.

  He got up from his desk and collapsed, with a sigh, onto the sofa in the centre of his living room. In that moment of slight exaggeration, Didier’s last question returned to him reproachfully, and he couldn’t help wondering whether love could really consist of an unpleasant combination of obsession, self-pity, rivalry, lust and daydreaming. These characteristics didn’t seem to distinguish it from the rest of life, except by their intensity. He was allowing Katherine to act on him like one of Didier’s absent tyrants, rather than another suffering human being. He must pull himself together and make an effort to imagine what she was going through.

  He sat upright and rested his eyes contemplatively on the empty fireplace. She must be feeling miserable about Consequences, after five years of work. It can’t have been simple to throw Alan out, after he had left his wife for her. Sam’s empathy ground into action, and as he imagined the details of Katherine’s personality, it started to take on subtlety and depth. He gradually filtered out his private relationship with the emotions he imagined she was having. His whole state of mind became sharper and more generous. This still wasn’t love, but it was an environment in which love could prosper, unlike the self-centred misery of the last few days. If only she were with him now and could see how much love he had to give, surely she would be asking for his forgiveness, as she unbuttoned his shirt, right here on the blue sofa.

  Sam keeled over and sprawled among the cushions, groaning.

  12

  Although the hostile response to the Elysian Long List had exceeded his expectations, Malcolm still felt that a certain amount of media indignation was not only inevitable but desirable. It showed that his committee had the courage to choose fresh, original and exciting new voices and not just hand out free tickets to the darlings of the literary establishment. Vanessa Shaw was the exception, doing her best to promote the interests of the old guard. Although her three choices were now the favourites at Ladbrokes, Malcolm had no intention of being dictated to by writers, academics, publishers, readers, journalists, booksellers, literary critics or, least of all, betting shops. The Greasy Pole was languishing at 25–1, which was a gross distortion of its artistic value as well as its standing among members of the committee.

  In politics he spoke in paragraphs he had been using for decades, or deployed old arguments that could effortlessly be adapted to modern occasions, but at the announcement of the Long List, he suddenly had a feeling of being publicly exposed and vulnerable in a way he hadn’t experienced since the first time he represented Aberdeen Grammar School in a debating contest. He was supposed to be arguing in favour of Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence. He was told that by arguing for a cause he vehemently opposed, he would hone his pure debating skills. Instead, it left him feeling blank and fraudulent, just as he had at the press conference. The journalists asked questions about books he hadn’t read that were on the List, as well as about books he hadn’t read that weren’t on the List. In the end, which was not far from the beginning, he just snapped.

  ‘That’s our List – like it or not.’

  The press enjoyed pretending that the selection process took place in an atmosphere of antagonism and incompetence, whereas in fact the meetings had been perfectly friendly so far, thanks partly to Penny’s obliging nature, to some skilful deal-making between Jo and himself, and to Tobias’s total absence. Vanessa’s pedantic championing of literary tradition and her undergraduate lectures on the art of the novel did no real harm, although she was going to be in for a rude awakening when it came to carrying her three candidates forward to the next stage. He would let her keep one, preferably The Frozen Torrent, whose author was the least well established.

  Right from the start, Malcolm had laid down some ground rules with a speech he made about ‘social responsibility’.

  ‘We have eighty thousand pounds at our disposal, as well as the promise of several hundred thousand pounds which the winner can expect to earn over the next few years, and to me it’s of paramount importance that the money goes to someone who really needs it.’

  ‘It’s lucky Proust or Nabokov aren’t competing this year,’ said Vanessa, ‘or Henry James, or Tolstoy, or anyone who ever sold a novel because word got out that it was worth reading, like Dickens, or Thackeray, or…’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Jo, ‘we all know that you’ve read every book under the sun, but I think Malcolm has a very good point. If I had my way I would add, “no pseuds and no aristos”.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Vanessa, ‘in the bad old days of hatred and prejudice, you might have said, “no yids, no niggers and no women”, but thank God we live in a more enlightened age, and we’ve finally got the list right.’

  ‘And no gays,’ said Penny. ‘I mean, in the bad old days,’ she added hastily.

  ‘We want to take the marginalized, and the politically repressed voices from the periphery,’ said Malcolm, ignoring the spat between the ladies, ‘from what we might call the Outer Hebrides of the literary scene, and bring them centre stage. Now, as we know, there are a lot of vested interests that have got used to the idea that the literary scene belongs to them, and when we reclaim it for the ordinary readers of this country, let’s not pretend they’re going to thank us for it.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ said Vanessa. ‘The readers?’

  ‘The vested interests of course.’

  ‘Oh, I see. It wasn’t grammatically clear.’

  ‘I think it was perfectly clear from the context,’ said Malcolm, refusing to be provoked.

  ‘The vested interests are certainly not going to thank us,’ said Jo. ‘And all I can say is that if they want a fight, we’re ready for them.’

  ‘They think it’s some kind of scandal,’ said Malcolm, ‘if we don’t agree with their judgements, but the real scandal is that they’re trying to dictate to the duly appointed Elysian Prize committee.’

  ‘Before we all stand up and sing “The Internationale”,’ said Vanessa, ‘do you think we could take a glance at what we’ve been “duly appointed” to do?’

  And then she launched into one of her patronizing tutorials on the true nature of literature.

  The only committee member with whom Malcolm was on absolutely perfect terms was Tobias Benedict, whose stream of charming postcards, apologizing for his unavoidable absence, arrived every few days from Leeds and Sheffield, Manchester and Brighton, as he toured the country playing Estragon in a hip-hop adaptation of Waiting for Godot.

  For Malcolm, Tobias was the key to a majority vote. It was increasingly clear that Vanessa was Malcolm’s opponent and although he had formed a working coalition with Jo, she was far too fond of having her own way for their alliance to hold in the closing phases of the competition. Penny Feathers, on the other hand, was all eagerness and obedience and had a natural inclination to follow authority. As long as she stayed on side, it all depended on Tobias. Malcolm had given him the impression that he was Tobias’s only friend on the committee and that he had carefully steered All the World’s a Sta
ge onto the Long List, out of respect for his views and admiration for an ‘astonishing achievement’. Tobias had written back saying that he found wot u starin at ‘terrifyingly vivid’ and that it made ‘a welcome change from a novel about a failing marriage in Hampstead – not that I seem to have ever read one, but you know what I mean!’ Meanwhile, Malcolm was inviting Penny to dinner at the House of Commons at least once a fortnight, a brush with the corridors of power that she clearly valued. In other words, Malcolm was taking care of what really mattered: running the committee.

  13

  Nothing was quite so complicated, Sonny decided, as trying to find exactly the right costume for an assassination. One could neither delegate, nor consult, nor show off one’s sartorial authority.

  ‘Only a flunky would wear that sort of costume to a murder,’ was exactly the sort of remark he had been forced to suppress again and again, as he trailed despondently past rows of suits made from materials he could scarcely bear to look at, let alone touch.

  He had started out thinking that he would go with the timeless classicism of black: black balaclava, black polo-neck sweater, black trousers, black shoes with (alas the day) rubber soles, and some sort of short black jacket, possibly (or rather, impossibly!) with a zip. When the Harrods mirror revealed a figure who could easily have been mistaken for a bouncer on the door of a low dive in the East End, Sonny rebelled against the dreary modern uniform he had been assembling, and stormed back to his waiting car. Only the balaclava and the polo neck survived, while the rest of his repulsively slippery shopping bags were deposited by his driver into the arms of a far from grateful gypsy woman who beat on the window of the Bentley demanding cash, while her daughter, wearing an identical headscarf, pointed vigorously at her mouth, as if trying to make herself sick. It astonished Sonny to reflect that in India a beggar would be prepared to drag his trolley along half a mile of filthy ground with only the use of his chin, praising all the generations of his benefactor’s family if a small coin was tossed in his direction, whereas here, against the backdrop of this monumental department store, its rusty facade pimpled with wasteful light bulbs, a thousand pounds of untouched Italian menswear elicited only fury and resentment!