Lost for Words: A Novel (10 page)

‘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.

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 primary 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!