Lost for Words: A Novel Page 8

  Why dim the lights when he really needed to tear down the grid? What was the use of having a drink, or going to an afternoon film, or catching a train, or going to bed with another woman, or being proud or being angry? Instead, when he was surfeited with Katherine’s absence and would rather have set fire to the curtains than go on thinking about it, he stayed a little longer in its ruthless company. Not to shut down, not to run away: that was his job, to stay open even when love took the form of pain. It had taken him this long to be wholehearted, and whatever Katherine did he was not going to retreat from that bewilderingly private victory.

  He continued to communicate with her, without her. Just as reassuring the patient that he has no legs cannot cure the pain in a phantom limb, it was no use trying to stop Sam from speaking to Katherine just because she wasn’t in the room and couldn’t hear anything he said. He told her that his feelings for her had not become twisted or complicated, but were like a paused film that would resume exactly where she had left it, even if she took five or ten years to come back.

  He found that he had been heated beyond his melting point by romantic love and, although it had failed, it still left him inclined to rush towards other kinds of love more readily than before. When he saw the news and heard the widow of a policeman, shot in Northern Ireland by the ‘Continuity IRA’, say that her husband had been a ‘good man’ and that her life was ‘ruined’ by his death, he burst into tears, watching carefully to see if his grief was exploiting hers. Instead, to his horror, he saw that his tears were the only natural response to her suffering, and to the suffering of the men who had killed her husband, and that he had spent his life defended against compassion by a practical and robust selfishness that would soon callous his responses again, if he allowed it to. The next morning he saw a child being dragged to school a little too roughly by a harassed mother, his tumbling steps hardly able to keep up with her hurried strides, and it was all he could do not to intervene. He stopped and stared at the mother a little madly, hoping she would wake up to what she was doing and treat the child more gently. In that case, he felt that his response was much more impure than it had been with the widow, more tangled up with the desire for the woman who had power over his happiness to treat him more gently, but the underlying truth was intact: every kind of cruelty was unbearable to someone who refused, or failed, to shut down.

  For a writer as resolute as Sam, it was unimaginable that his intense misery would not be material for writing, and unimaginable that it would. Maybe in order to be material later on he had to accept that it was not material now. Maybe he had to be patient, to ‘recollect in tranquillity’ in the Wordsworthian manner, and not to take notes on every species of flower he was trampling underfoot, in the manner Wordsworth despised. Or maybe it would never be material. The rawness could not be written about without betraying its essence. He was not going to cover it with layer after nacreous layer of aesthetic distance; pain was pain, not a pearl in waiting. It was indecent to think he could make anything of it, and so he left his notebooks unopened and his lovesick journal unwritten.

  19

  John Elton was having lunch in Claridge’s.

  ‘You’re being too modest,’ he said, ‘my informants tell me that it’s a great deal more than a cookbook.’

  ‘Well,’ said Auntie, playing with the folds of her sari to cover her growing mystification at the fuss being made about her book, ‘people seem to think that it has some literary merit.’

  ‘A great deal of literary merit,’ said John, with a powerful charismatic smile. He turned to include the nephew, but Sonny remained slumped in his armchair, hidden behind a huge pair of dark glasses. ‘I can’t tell you how I know this,’ John continued, ‘but I‘ve been told by an impeccable source that your book is going to be on the Short List. Please don’t tell anyone.’

  This was pure invention, but either it would turn out to be true, enhancing his reputation for prescience, or he would not take on Auntie as a client and nobody, except for these obscure Indian grandees, would know that his prophecy had failed.

  ‘But it’s a prize for the art of fiction…’ said Auntie, faltering in the face of these further honours.

  ‘Including fiction artfully disguised as culinary fact,’ said John, beaming.

  ‘I simply sent my secretary to ask our old cook in Badanpur, who naturally can’t write, to recite the recipes that have been passed down through the generations.’

  John Elton let out a gust of confident laughter, as if he were starring in an advertisement for a new mouthwash. There was no doubt that Auntie’s supercilious manner would have to be carefully managed. Just as Magritte hid his surrealism under the uniform of the Belgian Bourgeoisie, India’s Lawrence Sterne takes a mischievous pleasure in playing the grande dame. She appears to get her secretary to ‘write’ a ‘cookbook’ in order to challenge our expectations about the nature of authorship – something like that might work.

  ‘I hope you can keep this up in the interviews,’ he said. ‘It’s superb: the illiteracy that engenders literature; the rhetoric that denies rhetoric; “I will a round unvarnished tale deliver”, as Othello says, before speaking some of the most beautiful English ever written. And the narrative frames: the secretary who interviews the cook – the man on the quayside who knows a story about the Congo; the man on the coach who could tell you a tale about the Caucasus. Superb!’

  ‘I’m not following you,’ said Auntie, irritably.

  ‘Well,’ said John, with the air of a man who is playing along with an entertaining masquerade, ‘at least you’ll admit that it’s an unusual cookbook.’

  This simplified formula gave Auntie some relief.

  ‘Of course, it’s unusual,’ she said. ‘It’s full of wonderful anecdotes, family portraits, and recipes that have been jealously guarded for centuries.’

  ‘Wonderful. Would it be possible to see a copy?’ asked John, who was more used to being burdened with manuscripts than pleading to see one.

  ‘The only copy in England was brought here by Miss Katherine Burns, a friend of my nephew’s. She’s done so much more than we expected. I keep asking Sonny to invite her to lunch, but he hasn’t been able to arrange anything yet.’

  ‘Oh, I know Katherine,’ said John, ‘we had lunch only the other day. I’d be happy to set something up.’ He tried smiling again at Sonny, but the nephew remained slouched unresponsively in his chair.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Auntie graciously. ‘I’ll get my secretary to send you a copy of the book.’

  ‘I can’t wait to read it,’ said John. ‘Playing with textuality can be dangerous, but the audacity of putting it in a “cookbook” is sheer genius.’

  ‘I suppose so…’ Auntie hesitated. She couldn’t help feeling that if she was going to have a literary agent, it would be better if she had some idea of what he was talking about.

  ‘Let’s face it, Auntie,’ said Sonny, suddenly bursting in on the conversation with undisguised bitterness, ‘you’re a big-time literary success.’

  ‘Sonny has,’ Auntie found herself wanting to say ‘also’, but resisted, ‘written a novel, but I’m afraid it’s been overlooked by the committee – most unfairly.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sonny. ‘But since there is no interest in representing my work, I will leave you to have lunch together on your own.’

  ‘On the contrary, I had no idea…’ John began, but Sonny turned away too vehemently for him to finish his sentence.

  Overhearing his aunt’s sad reflection that he’d ‘always been oversensitive, even as a little boy’, only added to Sonny’s contempt and fury as he stormed away. Auntie was taking the side of that American agent against her own nephew! Elton hadn’t once mentioned The Mulberry Elephant; in fact, he behaved as if he had never heard of it! He was too busy sucking up to Auntie, just because she was going to be on the Short List. Sonny had a good mind to get Mansur to finish him off as well, but despite these strong impulses he was too disciplined to lose sight of his primar
y target.

  He had to admit that part of his outrage over the American had been manufactured so that he could get away and at last discuss with Mansur how to dispose of Malcolm Craig, MP. To maintain his little fiction about an agonizing back pain, Sonny had been carried around a good deal by the turbaned brute over the last five days, but somehow it never seemed to be the right moment to make his special request. Now, with his pride freshly stung by that humiliating lunch, he thought he might finally be ready to cut through the awkwardness of asking a servant to step beyond the strict limits of his job description and assassinate an enemy on his master’s behalf.

  20

  Didier watched as coffee trickled from the espresso machine in Katherine’s kitchen into a tiny cup resting on the metal grille beneath. Knowing that the fourth espresso was usually the one to tip him into a frenzy of creativity, he knocked back the bitter little draft while it was still steaming, placed the cup directly in the sink, and returned with relish, and a slightly burnt mouth, to his computer. Katherine was out for the day, giving him the further impetus of solitude.

  He was soon typing rapidly, thrilled by the intelligence and authority of the words rippling onto the screen.

  Nietzsche announced the death of God; Foucault announced the death of Man; the death of Nature announces itself, with no need for an intermediary. As these three elements of our classical discourse dissolve in the acid rain of late Capitalism, we are offered the consolation of its own pale triumvirate: the producer, the consumer and the commodity. Thanks to advertising, the producer sells the commodity to the consumer; thanks to the Internet, the consumer is the commodity sold to the producer. This is the Utopia of borderless democracy: a shift of signifier in the desert of the Real. This is the playground of unlimited freedom: the opportunity to define ourselves through the gratification of an ever more perverse and hybridized fetishism. This is the celebrated openness of a technology that is at the service of perpetual supervision. It is this ‘open’ field that is the supreme disguise: in the absence of the hidden object, we cannot see what we see, because we have abandoned the need to search. As for searching, let our engines do it for us! The thought that cannot think itself is that we will die of thirst before we reach the shining city of individual gratification, which was never made of anything other than the shimmering heat waves of a collectively conditioned desire.

  In the rhetoric of bourgeois liberalism, conformity deploys the language of rebellion, precisely because there is no possibility of revolution. We are at the point in history where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism. The anxiety once expended on the mutual annihilation of warring political ideologies is now expended on universal annihilation through ecological catastrophe; preferably, of course, a catastrophe that is not going to happen, rather than the one that is happening. We would rather watch a movie about the threat of a meteor from outer space than contemplate the actual impact of the Capitalist meteor on the Earth. We may be frivolous consumers of information, who cannot stop eating popcorn until the US Air Force has saved humanity by destroying the alien meteor with nuclear weapons, or we may be serious consumers of information, who enjoy the voluptuous guilt of betraying the polar bear, or worry that our grandchildren may never know the pleasures of skiing in the Alps, or wish we had bought an apartment on a higher floor of the Manhattan sky-scraper where we live. Finally, it is of no importance, because both catastrophes, the fantastic and the actual, are deployed to distract us from the desert of the Real into which we have marched the exhausted culture of the West. In this desert, it is forbidden to think. Even if Capitalism is the crisis, Capitalism must be the solution!

  Didier paused, waiting for a second preposterous paradox to pop into his head. He was en pleine forme, no doubt about that. Would another espresso send him spiralling into a circular but inconclusive sterility, or keep him riding on the rushing and glittering wave of La Pensée? Before he could decide, the ping of an incoming email drew his attention to the lower corner of the screen. He would usually have ignored an email in the midst of writing, but this one was from Katherine and might require a quick reply. He clicked on his Mail icon and read her message.

  Didier, you’ll probably think me very cowardly to tell you this by email, but I don’t feel that I can go on being with you. I know this is the second time and that you’ll think I shouldn’t have taken you back if I wasn’t serious, but my restlessness is, as you might say, structural and not personal. I would have left whoever I was with at this point, because I need continual change to keep me ahead of the wolf pack – whatever that is.

  I am going to Italy with a (girl) friend for two weeks. I have an inkling of a new novel, and want to see if I can start it there. You’re welcome to stay in the flat until I get back.

  Please forgive me, and don’t cut me off from your wonderful company, unless you have to.

  Love, K

  Didier felt the glittering wave collapse around him and found himself tumbling and spinning, and struggling to know which way was up. How could she do that? How could she suddenly do that?

  He thought of Lacan’s opaque but strangely compelling remark: ‘Woman does not exist, which does not mean that she cannot be the object of desire’. Whatever charm this insight had once held for him, it slipped through his grasp as he groped for a sane response to Katherine’s email.

  She had ruined a day’s writing. That, at least, was a concrete starting point for his resentment. Mercifully, his focus on lost writing reminded him that he would one day infold his present suffering into a masterful analysis of Desire, or Love, or Delusion; it hardly mattered: he would perform a vivisection without anaesthetic on any abstract nouns that presumed to rule his life. He knew it would be some time before he could gather enough detachment for that task. Rome wasn’t deconstructed in a day, he thought, immediately typing the sentence on to his screen, to see if he felt the return of some measure of control. He did not.

  Didier got up from his desk and suddenly swept the coffee cup from its ledge of papers, smashing it against the wall of Katherine’s drawing room. He would have his revenge, he didn’t yet know what it would be, but he would write something about Love, or Delusion, or Desire that she would never forget. As this thought died out, Didier pictured himself sweeping the coffee cup against the wall, and suspected there was something staged about the gesture. Yes, he had been in the stupidity of his unconscious and its mechanical discharge of emotion. He wished he could have the cup back, so that he could experience the full tension between the gestural cliché and the more subtle and refreshing operations of his intellect, and then refuse the gesture. He sat down again and typed out a sentence.

  Impulsiveness always points to the absence of spontaneity.

  That was better; he could work with that.

  In the meantime, he had joined Sam and Alan in Katherine’s salon des refusés. Would he try to preserve the dignity of having lasted a few more weeks than either of his rivals, or join them in an enclave of nostalgia and bitterness? There were several emails from Sam he had not answered, because of the danger of being unavoidably (or structurally, as Katherine would want him to say, so as to enforce the tyranny of English facetiousness) patronizing. He might now be able to reply to Sam, but first he would reply to Katherine.

  Didier got up again and started pacing the room. ‘The wolf pack’ she was keeping ahead of, that was the way in. He felt the richness of its hermeneutic potential. Once he started interpreting something, the problem was how to stop. All he needed was a first sentence, and one more espresso.

  21

  Malcolm had insisted that Tobias attend the meeting to decide the Short List, and when he arrived he was an object of great curiosity, not only for his novelty but also for his annoying good looks, which had an immediate and evident impact on the three female members of the committee. His long hair, long scarf and long overcoat emphasized his tallness, and left Malcolm feeling small and portly, as well as jealous. He was determi
ned to hide these feelings behind a show of warmth and cordiality, since he wanted to be able to count on Tobias’s vote as well as Penny’s.

  After the introductions and the greetings, the meeting got off to a surprisingly acrimonious start with Vanessa immediately going on the attack with the ridiculous claim that The Palace Cookbook wasn’t a novel at all. Although Malcolm had not yet got round to reading it, he knew that the distinguished old firm of Page and Turner would not have sent in a book that wasn’t a novel, nor was Jo likely to be so confused that she couldn’t tell a novel from a cookbook. In any case, Jo turned out to have an impressive command of all the right jargon.

  ‘I’m surprised that you don’t recognize its qualities,’ she said to Vanessa. ‘You claim to be an expert on contemporary fiction and yet, faced with a ludic, postmodern, multi-media masterpiece, you naively deny that it’s a novel at all.’

  ‘It’s not a novel,’ said Vanessa, ‘it’s a cookbook. It’s called The Palace Cookbook because it’s a cookbook.’ She let out a growl of childish fury.

  ‘It tells the story of a family,’ said Jo, admirably calm under fire, ‘through cooking. What could be more universal, after all, than the language of food?’

  ‘Inuit, Catalan, Gaelic, any fucking language,’ said Vanessa, ‘because food isn’t a language, it’s something you eat.’

  ‘There’s no need to use that sort of tone,’ said Penny. She’d had just about enough of Vanessa’s effing and blinding.