Lost for Words: A Novel Page 7

  She felt a violent desire to tear the bird feeder off its branch, and then she realized she was thinking of King Lear after Cordelia’s death. Why should a bird have life when Poppy …

  And then she found herself wondering why any book should win this fucking prize she had become involved with unless it had a chance of doing what had just happened: coming back to a person when she wanted to cry but couldn’t, or wanted to think but couldn’t think clearly, or wanted to laugh but saw no reason to.

  16

  ‘The rank sweat of an enseamed bed’, thought Katherine, sensing the dampness of the sheets as she reached for the clock on the bedside table. It had been flattened by Didier when he knocked over the lamp and sent it to the floor with a muffled clatter that echoed her own scattered climax better than the groans of ecstasy, whimpers of disbelief, and an incongruous gasp of ‘Oh, la vache!’ emanating from the orgasmic Theorist.

  It was eleven thirty-four on the morning of another formless day, without professional obligations, or medical appointments, or even social engagements, becalmed in a vast Pacific of self-employment. Didier was next door, oppressing her with his riotous creativity, tossing off another chapter on some neglected paradox, or hidden ‘scandal’ of semiotics. She could hear the pensive mumblings and triumphant yelps that accompanied his energetic style of writing and she found them, in their way, even more annoying than his cries of sexual pleasure.

  Katherine was suffering from a familiar seducer’s gloom. Just as a ‘good shot’ might kill two hundred partridges over a weekend without being expected to eat them all for dinner on Sunday night, a woman with Katherine’s genius for engendering desire and devotion couldn’t be expected to deal with all of its consequences. She lived for the moment of submission, and although it lasted a little longer than the moment when a bird jerks its head backwards and starts to plummet through the air, she sometimes wished that Yuri and Alan and Sam and Didier, and all the others, could be lined up on the ground at the end of the year and become, like Don Giovanni’s conquests, purely numerical. Mille e tre! Mille e tre! Mille e tre!

  Where was her staying power? Where was the patience that might turn her gift for sudden intimacy into lasting love? She felt a spasm of loneliness, but not of the kind that could be cured by running to Didier; the only cure was to run away from him into the shallows of a new affair. She was reminded of the beach her family used to go to in Devon when she was a child, sloping gently into the sea and then, under the swell of the milky brown water, suddenly dropping away. She used to panic when she had been swimming too long, needing each wave to take her back to the slope, where her stretched foot could feel the gritty sand against her skin.

  When she was fourteen she had watched her father die of a bee sting nobody knew he was allergic to. His face swelling and his throat swelling, while she sat with him beside the pool of their rented holiday house in Spain, his windpipe closing and letting in less and less air, while her mother, who never fully understood, because she didn’t have to watch it happening, rushed off to the local pharmacy and came back too late.

  A thousand hours of psychotherapy had done their familiar work, making an intellectually obvious truth into a deeply felt one. She knew that her anxiety about being abandoned made her compulsively abandon anyone who got close to her. Her father’s death had ensured that she would never put herself in a position to receive another blow of that sort – or get out of the position of expecting one. What the psychotherapy had to wait for life to provide was this moment of ripeness and crisis. Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront. That crisis had come, but she still had no idea what action to take.

  There was a professional (but certainly not romantic) option in the form of John Elton, the American literary agent, who had left a message inviting her to lunch.

  She had first met John Elton in his New York agency at the beginning of her career. When she was shown into his office, his black brogues were resting on the edge of his desk, while he tilted back in a swivel chair, talking on the phone. With a flick of his hand, and the slightest nod, he indicated that she should sit down in the small armchair on the other side of his desk.

  ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is the Parthenon of sado-masochistic homosexuality,’ he said down the phone.

  There was a pause. He looked over at Katherine incredulously; inviting her to marvel at the stupidity of the protests she could not hear.

  ‘I could find you ten thousand sadists this afternoon,’ he replied.

  Further scepticism must have been expressed on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Uptown or downtown?’ said John, with a peal of knowing laughter.

  While the conversation unfolded, Katherine found herself fascinated by Elton’s disastrous hair transplant. She had been told about this radical new procedure but had never witnessed its results. The skin around the last fertile follicles had been cut from the back of his neck and sewn on to the hairless dome of his head. The raw red patches of stitched skin formed little islands of dying hair in a shining ocean of baldness.

  John hung up the phone, with a contemptuous smirk.

  ‘They buy a million-dollar book and they don’t even know how to market it,’ he said.

  ‘Fools,’ said Katherine, smiling.

  ‘Do you have something for me?’

  ‘I have the first half of my second novel,’ said Katherine bashfully, taking a manila envelope from her plastic duty free bag.

  ‘I loved Hanging On Every Word,’ said John, and then bewitched her with his detailed knowledge of her first book.

  Nothing had come of that New York meeting. She had waited a fortnight for his response to her typescript, and although he had told her that it was ‘superb material’, intoxicating her for a whole day, he had not, in the end, found a publisher who would commit to it in advance. They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don’t need to promise. She knew that he was back in touch with her now because the stench of disappointment surrounding the Elysian debacle had reached his sensitive olfactory system. Her own agent, Angela, was completely blameless in the matter and Katherine had no intention of getting rid of her. In fact, Angela had written a fierce letter to the committee requesting that they take Consequences into consideration and explaining Page and Turner’s mistake, but she had received a firm refusal from David Hampshire, saying that ‘a deadline is a deadline’, and that he was not going to ‘open the floodgates to special pleading’. Given that she wasn’t going to change agents, Katherine felt a certain apathy about taking up John’s offer of lunch.

  Besides, there had already been enough bloodletting, with the sacking of Alan’s assistant and then of Alan himself. She had almost written to him, but had managed to refrain. When she first cut a lover out of her life, she liked to do it thoroughly. Nevertheless, she felt something other than pure relief when Alan stopped writing to her, especially when Sam stopped at about the same time. And then, last night, after almost three weeks of silence she had received an email, not just from Sam but also about Alan and the shocking state he had been in when Sam ran into him in a shop in Pimlico. She hadn’t answered him and she wasn’t going to, at least not yet. The priority was to get rid of Didier, not to take back Sam or Alan.

  She already knew what to expect from Didier as an ex-lover. When they had last separated he sent her emails that were little essays on the changing meaning of romantic and erotic love since the eighteenth century, indistinguishable from his published work, and indeed, after taking out the ‘dear Katherines’, he had published them.

  And there he was again next door printing out more of his effortlessly opinionated prose. Katherine realized that she must get out of the flat as soon as possible. Perhaps she should ring John Elton after all and take him up on lunch. The fact that she would be immune to any of his advances now struck her as an advantage. She noticed yet again her loyalty to Angela and to her women
friends in general, and its contrast with the ruthlessness of her behaviour towards men. In the Dodge City of romantic love, crowded with betrayal, abandonment and rejection, it was better to fire first than to take the risk of being gunned down. She felt the rapid pulse, the metallic taste, and the little razor cuts of the paranoid mentality that lay behind the apparent suavity and dominance of her love life. It suddenly horrified her that she couldn’t send a kind word to Alan, who had lived with her and left his wife for her, and who was clearly falling apart, but she couldn’t bear to linger on her remorse or her vulnerability for long, and so she threw off the bedclothes and got up briskly, determined to leave the flat as soon as possible.

  17

  Penny was on her way to Debenhams to buy an Extra Large Kettle. The Extra Large Kettle (or ELK) had been one of her main innovations at the Foreign Office. Even some members of the old guard, who had taken a sceptical, not to say frankly hostile view of her promotions during David Hampshire’s time, were forced to admit that an extra cup of tea could make all the difference to a meeting that started out looking as if it might be very sticky indeed. She had a hunch that an ELK would be just as great an asset in the literary arena as it had proved to be in the foreign policy field, with many an Elysian meeting brightened by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of piping hot builder’s tea.

  With the pressure of so many books to read, Penny had decided to buy the audio versions of the Long Listers she hadn’t got round to, and listen to them being read by an actor with a lovely famous voice. As she downloaded wot u starin at and The Greasy Pole onto her poor overburdened iPad, she was reminded of a heart-breaking photograph she had once seen advertising a charity for maltreated Spanish donkeys. The dear little thing in the photo, thin as a stick, had been carrying burdens three times her own bulk, back and forth along dusty Spanish roads, until Donkey Rescue saved her from her cruel owner, renamed her Lollipop, and allowed her to end her days in donkey heaven, on a lovely farm run by a thoroughly practical English spinster who had retired to Andalusia. Penny had been so moved that she sent in a cheque for five pounds.

  Although she didn’t like the sound of A Year in the Wild, she was doing the responsible thing and had it in the passenger seat next to her, being given a chance. Her appetite for people, like the hero of this novel, who chose to live on roots and berries, was strictly limited. Some practical part of her wanted to send him down to M&S Simply Food to get one of their excellent ready-made meals. She was always delighted to see grizzly bears salmon-fishing in one of David Attenborough’s splendid nature films, but she drew the line at grizzly bears lumbering into a novel in order to turn bankers into noble savages.

  As a responsible driver, Penny always gave her full attention to the task at hand. Consequently, it wasn’t until she came to a long queue of traffic approaching Marble Arch that she finally gave herself permission to listen to the rather hypnotic rendering of A Year in the Wild.

  As spring returned to the frozen land, the great thaw began. It bewildered Gary with its clamour and its swiftness. The grey branches outside the cabin’s southern window had hardly cast off their high narrow walls of snow, before they started to break out in bright green leaf. As soon as patches of ice melted on the lake, honking Canada geese landed on the fresh stretches of open water. The frozen stream he had crunched across in his snowshoes a few weeks before was transformed into an uproarious torrent that could only be forded by the big rock, or the Lynx Rock as he had named it in January. He had met a lynx there, completely still beside the rock, its triangular ears sharpening its attentiveness. What made it stand out against the snow was the fresh blood on the light brown fur around its mouth. He had stared at the lynx, and the lynx had stared back at him, with the calm savagery of its yellow eyes; animal to animal, predator to predator; he with a dead hare in his game bag and the lynx with a dead hare at its feet; his breath and the lynx’s breath steaming in the crystal silence of the northern woods.

  Oh, do get on with it, thought Penny. All this description was driving her potty. The author clearly had a bad case of the Doctor Dolittles, starting to talk to the animals because he had turned his back on his fellow man. If there was one thing Penny was sure of it was this: man is a social animal through and through, and nothing could be gained, except a reputation for eccentricity, by cutting yourself off from the rest of the human race. That was why she was on her way to Debenhams to buy an Extra Large Kettle, rather than chatting to a herd of caribou in the wastes of northern Canada. She fast forwarded to the next chapter, but missed the beginning because she was now being swept along by the traffic rushing around Marble Arch.

  Soon enough, there was another jam waiting for her at the beginning of Oxford Street and she was forced to listen to more of Jo’s exasperating novel.

  … the yarrow with its feathery white and pink flowers and the bright red berries of the poisonous baneberry bush …

  Oh, for heaven’s sake, thought Penny, more description. She fast-forwarded again, just to confirm her suspicions, but her mind was made up: the author had written a guidebook to the fauna and flora of the Canadian outback, without the slightest concession to a novel’s need for fast action and cliff-hanging suspense.

  He drank the cool water from the swift-running stream and then lay back refreshed in the tall scratchy grass. A peregrine falcon circled above and then came out of its gliding motion and began to hover, holding its position above the ground with the scooping beat of its wings. Gary knew it had spotted its prey moving on the shore of the lake, and he felt his own body grow tense with anticipation as he stretched out his mind and merged it with the peregrine’s perspective.

  Dear, oh dear. Penny could only hope there was an adequate cottage hospital nearby where Gary could get the help he needed before he completely lost the plot.

  ‘Excuse me; I think I’m a peregrine falcon,’ she said, staring, wild-eyed into the rear-view mirror, and allowing herself a burst of derisive laughter.

  So much for A Year in the Wild. As to Outrage, another one of Jo’s Long Listers, once she had read the synopsis, Penny decided that she wasn’t going to listen to it. It was written from the point of view of an eight-year-old boy living in a Johannesburg slum on the eve of South African independence. After his father is shot dead by a white policeman, the poor boy watches his mother being killed by the gang that has just raped her. He loses the power of speech but his ‘traumatized stream of consciousness is a powerful meditation on the politics of gender, race and African identity’. All very impressive no doubt, but frankly life was quite depressing enough without listening to a story like that, which didn’t even have the merit of being factually true.

  When Penny arrived back at her flat with her magnificent new Kettle, she couldn’t face listening to any more books, and yet the Elysian Prize still cast a shadow over the rest of her day, not just because she was off to dinner with Malcolm at the House of Commons, but also because of a recent incident that had left her somewhat shaken. A few days earlier, a diarist from a very well-known national newspaper had rung to ask what she felt about the ‘universal hostility’ to the Long List. Penny kept as cool as a cucumber and pointed out that during her days at the Foreign Office, she had got quite used to dealing with trouble spots and dissenting voices. And then, in order to counteract any impression of being stuck up, she emphasized the ordinary side of her life by adding, ‘I always had my daughter to go home to and help me keep my feet firmly on the ground.’ It frankly defied belief that the diarist had gone on to contact Nicola to get her side of the story.

  ‘She may have had me to go home to, but she was never at home when I got there,’ Nicola was quoted as saying. ‘Her feet were too firmly on the ground in her office, or at an independence ceremony in the middle of nowhere, or sucking up to the Americans at some conference. I hardly ever saw her, and even in her retirement she makes sure she’s too busy to do anything useful.’

  Penny was lost for words when she read these remarks. That your own flesh
and blood should find it necessary to be so unkind and unfair in public took her breath away. If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

  After the initial sting, Penny set about wondering how she could repair relations with Nicola, who had always been hot-headed and was only lashing out because of the babysitting incident last month. Then Penny had a brainwave. There had been such a lot in the press about the odds betting shops were putting on the various novels, why not get Nicola to place a bet, not for Penny, of course, which would have been highly unethical, but for herself? She knew that Kentish Town needed a new roof, and a hot tip would have the further advantage of proving that Penny had no hard feelings about Nicola’s unforgivable treachery. It also removed the moral pressure on Penny to dig into her savings in order to protect her nearest and dearest from the elements. At 30–1 wot u starin at was pretty irresistible for someone who knew that it was one of the chairman’s favourites, and that he was a singularly impressive man whom Penny intended to support in every way she could.

  18

  Why should Sam let Katherine ruin his love for her? Did love have to disappear with her disappearance? Did he have to hate love because it wasn’t working out the way he wanted? Since he was going to think about her all day, one way or another, why not think about her as he always had, from the first time she sat next to him by chance at a concert, wearing a pair of faded pink tennis shoes and a soft blue overcoat, her hair still beaded with rain? The concert became the soundtrack of their proximity, the slightest pressure from her sleeve made him feel that his body was interfusing with hers and that he had been waiting all his life for this union.

  It was hard not to react, not to feel humiliated by a unilateral longing, not to let pathology creep, like a mist under the door, into his reading of the situation. Despair was a worthy adversary, luring him towards contempt for Katherine, or jealousy of Didier, or pity for himself. The antidote to despair was not optimism – optimism was its staple diet, making him hope for something that was not the case and driving him back to despair. The only antidote was to embrace the despair and remain in love, to give the phrase ‘hopelessly in love’ its true meaning.