Lost for Words: A Novel (12 page)

One thing about choosing the best novel of the year had become absolutely clear to Malcolm: Jo must be stopped at any cost. Her stranglehold over the Short List was truly scandalous. He reinvigorated his alliance with Penny on the phone later that evening. She felt the same way about Jo’s growing power and they agreed that after reading her choices they would compare notes over dinner and see which of her novels most deserved to be attacked.

22

As Alan spread the thick foam on his grey-flecked beard, he realized how much he had been missing the sanity and dullness of what Henry James had perhaps exaggerated in calling ‘the joy of the matutinal steel’. Compared to the lacerating edge of his unhappiness over the last month, his razor blade felt like the stroke of a feather as it scraped its way through the thickets of obstinate stubble covering his face.

Why had he woken this morning, shaken and weak, but somehow determined to stop his decline – and to shave? Was it the lure of a small but uncontested area of self-determination? No employer was going to sack him for shaving; no woman was going to tell him that, although she hoped they would remain friends, she didn’t want to go on shaving with him any more. With the exhilaration of a pioneer taming the wilderness, he saw fresh tracks of skin opening across his face. He shook his blade under the running water and reapplied it expertly to his chin. This face was his face, from shining ear to shining ear, from the ridge of his upper lip to the bulge of his Adam’s apple, from the clean line of his manly jaw to the disappointing looseness of his double chin. He dried himself carefully. There were no cuts, or neglected patches of beard; every movement showed that he knew what he was doing, that he was a man who could be trusted.

Yesterday, he had written to his old acquaintance James Miller at IPG, the talent agency, and asked for some work, any work. He wasn’t expecting to be treated like the senior editor he had been at Page and Turner
.
He could work for a trial period, read from the slush pile, write rejection letters, or try to lure some of his old authors over to the agency. James had replied with an email, both buoyant and cautious, accompanied by the promise of three typescripts that had ‘made it out of the slush pile but not yet been read by an editor’. Alan was tidying himself up to meet these harbingers of a return to productive life. No more sprawling around in his narrow room in acrid pyjamas, with the medicinal fumes of cheap vodka rising from his cup of morning tea. There may have been no mention of money in James’s email, but Alan was being given a chance, and that would have to do for now. Besides, the weakness of his position, as well as the gentlemanly mist that still lingered over the field of publishing, made it impossible for Alan to demand any clarification, let alone money.

As he put on his clean white shirt, mildly puzzled that he was dressing to meet some almost certainly unpublishable typescripts, he realized that he hadn’t taken any trouble over his appearance since the day he left Katherine’s flat. He was not just dressing for work; he was defying her rejection for the first time. All he had to do was make a clean break between what Katherine thought of him and what he thought of himself. Maybe depression was always a matter of taking on a hostile point of view that, however intimate it might seem, was essentially alien. We were not put on this earth to hate ourselves, thought Alan, doing up the waistband of his trousers as if to secure this merciful claim; it’s always an unnatural state of affairs, however irresistible it seems at the time.

He had to admit that his meeting with Sam and Didier had contributed to his recovery, even if that hadn’t been immediately obvious. Sam had first spotted him halfway through the month, staring at the last three bottles of Dostoyevsky vodka in the local corner shop. Thanks to its resemblance to a batch of bootleg paraffin, Dostoyevsky was already the cheapest vodka on the shelf, but on this particular day a fluorescent green star announced a special offer that further lowered the price by two pounds. Alan could hardly believe his luck as he grabbed the dusty bottles and rolled them clinking into his wire basket. He was dismayed to be interrupted by Sam, a man he hardly knew and in any case associated with the woman whose memory he was trying to obliterate. Sam was clearly shocked by his derelict state, but Alan soon shook him off and hurried back to the hermitage of his darkened room in the Mount Royal. He forgot about Sam long before he had absorbed enough Dostoyevsky to forget about Katherine’s limbs and lips.

It had only been three days ago, when he couldn’t bear his loneliness any longer and caved in to Sam’s offer of lunch, that Alan learned he was not alone. In fact, he was rather put out by just how many lovers Katherine had managed to get rid of in the last month.

‘No need to
cherchez la femme
,’ said Didier, ‘she has searched for us, like a heat-seeking missile!’

‘Were you having an affair with her at the same time as me?’ Alan asked.

‘Yes,’ said Sam.

‘And at the same time as each other?’

‘Very much so,’ said Didier, ‘it could not have been more simultaneous!’

‘Good God,’ said Alan, drinking half his glass of Chianti in a single gulp, ‘this is the woman I left my wife for.’

‘You had a wife and a mistress,’ said Didier. ‘She had three lovers. For us the problem is that she is a woman, but in India and Tibet…’

‘I don’t care about Tibet,’ Alan interrupted him. ‘Anyway, I
left
my wife for her. There was nothing simultaneous about it; well, at least not after I’d left Marilyn.’

‘Typically,’ said Didier, ‘by now you will have asked her to take you back.’

Alan knocked back the rest of his Chianti, furious at being so obvious.

’This is not the time to be guilty about the pursuit of pleasure,’ said Didier. ‘Permissiveness is the only ideology we are permitted. We are not just allowed to enjoy anything; we are obliged to enjoy everything. Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires; now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires: “Doctor, what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I want to tie up my boyfriend? Why can’t I get in touch with my lesbian side?” Et cetera, et cetera.’

‘I don’t see what this has…’ Alan tried to interject.

‘Epicurus is bent over the handlebars of his pleasure machine, speeding along the Information Super Highway!’ Didier continued unstoppably.

‘I think we should narrow our focus,’ Sam began.

‘Finally,’ said Didier, raising a warning finger. ‘Finally, we realize that we have been quenching our thirst with seawater, and we decide to “
take back the power
”. We are going to jog, meditate, et cetera, et cetera – but it’s not so easy! We can’t just sit at home meditating, which would cost nothing, and therefore make us very nervous. We must look for a teacher who lives in India, or California…’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alan finally managed, ‘but what’s all of this got to do with Katherine?’

‘It has everything to do with all of us,’ Didier replied. ‘This is the world-historical field through which the contemporary search for the truth must take its course.’

‘But I loved her,’ said Alan.

‘Ah, love…’ Didier began, ‘when we speak of love…’

‘Listen,’ said Sam, placing a restraining hand on Didier’s arm, ‘I understand.’

‘I wish you didn’t understand, frankly,’ said Alan, pushing back his chair with a sharp scraping sound from the tiled floor, ‘since it means that you were fucking Katherine while we were living together.’ He needed another pint of Dostoyevsky fairly urgently; the Chianti was just too slow and watery.

‘But you were sleeping with Katherine while you were still living with your wife,’ said Didier. ‘You are trapped in the old paradigm of transgression when in reality…’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Alan. ‘I don’t know what world-historical field you were in when you planned this lunch, but it’s not a world I live in, and this lunch is history.’

With these words, of which he was moderately proud and mildly ashamed, Alan left the restaurant.

It took him another day to realize that the pressure on him had lessened. However annoyed he had been by the meeting, the logic of spreading a weight over a larger area had held. It was impossible to believe that Sam and Didier had suffered as much as him, but even the feeble support offered by their vaguely similar experiences gave him some relief. There was also a welcome splintering of his hostility, which had been almost exclusively directed against himself, with the odd burst of drunken rage towards Katherine and Yuri, but could now include Motor Mouth Didier and Philandering Sam among its targets.

The grey phone on his bedside table rang, taking Alan by surprise. Slobodan, the former Yugoslavian receptionist whose disdainful glances Alan had grown to dread, told him that a package was waiting for him downstairs. On his way out, Alan hooked his empty rucksack over his shoulder and checked himself in the mirror; amazed to see the return of the clean-shaven and unpretentiously dressed friend he had lost sight of a month ago.

He glided down the stairs he had so often stumbled down and as he arrived in the entrance, he took it in with a new kind of neutrality. The words ‘Mount Royal’, fixed to the fake wood casing of the reception desk, in big gold letters which used to fascinate him with their power to distort the arrival and departure of hotel guests and, in quiet moments, reflect the rippling passage of a red bus beyond the hotel’s glass front door, now simply struck him as garish.

Slobodan acknowledged Alan’s changed appearance by briefly raising an eyebrow to show that he was not so easily fooled. He handed over two canvas bags, which Alan couldn’t resist glancing into immediately. In one was the familiar sight of two typescripts in transparent plastic folders. From the other Alan fished out a gigantic purple book covered in debossed golden domes and parapets.
The Mulberry Elephant
was written in rich orange calligraphic lettering across its front. On a note obscuring the name of the author, someone from IPG had written, ‘Published In India – looking for publisher here’.

Alan decided to leave the intimidating volume in his room and take the intriguing typescripts with him to a cafe. He felt the visceral excitement that had kept him going as a publisher. Maybe these would turn out to be yet more disappointing and incompetent texts, but perhaps one of them was a masterpiece, or still better, something he could help turn into a masterpiece.

23

It was ironic, in Penny’s opinion, that her slavish devotion to the cause of literature was preventing her from writing any more of her own novel. She was determined to spend the last twenty-four hours before the feeding frenzy of the Short List announcement doing some of her own work for a change.

Quite apart from their distracting quality, she was not at all pleased with the discourteous tone that had come to dominate the Elysian committee meetings. David Hampshire was taking her out to dinner that night and she was going to suggest a remedy. Last Sunday she had watched a thoroughly inspiring documentary about corporate bonding. It had followed two groups of colleagues, up a Norwegian fjord in one case, and across Dartmoor in the other, all being led by former SAS commandos. These young soldiers started out looking like strong silent types, but turned out to have thought long and hard about the value of getting back to basics and cultivating
esprit de corps
. Although there would not be time to spend a week on Dartmoor with three matches, a compass and a rabbit trap, or to go to Norway and enjoy the breath-taking natural scenery, howl at the moon, and gaze at the
aurora borealis
, she did intend to ask David to have a word with the Elysian Board and see if they would finance a trip to Paris with an overnight stay in a nice hotel.

Most people went to Paris to look at Impressionist paintings of holidaymakers lying around on a riverbank. What Penny had in mind was altogether more challenging: a good hard look at the infrastructure of the city. A limited public tour of the Paris sewers had been on offer for years, but Penny intended to use her Foreign Office contacts to get the committee taken through the entire system, led by a real expert, with a map of Paris showing them exactly what they were underneath at the time. The Louvre, the Opera House, the
Comédie Française
,
whatever it might be, they would be seeing it from a point of view that very few people indeed had ever had the chance to enjoy.

That was tonight’s task, but right now, it was time to get on with some writing.

Jane took a moment to assess her situation. It didn’t look good. In fact, it couldn’t have been much worse. She was in an isolated castle on the west coast of Sicily, without her mobile phone, hiding in an old oak cupboard with far from silent hinges, while the world’s most dangerous terrorist took a shower in his en suite bathroom next door. It defied belief, but all the evidence pointed to the fact that the Russian oligarch and owner of the Villa Concerta, Vladimir Rhazin, was bankrolling Ibrahim al-Shukra’s international terrorist network. The old Soviet cold-war game of destabilizing the West was clearly still part of Russia’s foreign-policy agenda, even if the perpetrators were now disguised as some of the world’s most avid consumers of Western decadence.

It was a distinctly odd feeling, Jane reflected grimly, to be in possession of such stunning intelligence, without knowing whether she would live long enough to pass it on to Thames House. One person she would certainly not be telling was Richard Lane. He would somehow claim all the glory for himself, while managing to reprimand her for burning the rulebook. She had to admit that hiding in the freezing luggage hold of Rhazin’s Falconer T 300, the most expensive executive jet on the market, with a price tag of forty-five million dollars, had been insanely risky, but if ever the motto ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ had any meaning at all, it was now. If only she hadn’t forgotten her BlackBerry in the glove compartment of her Audi 3.0 TDI, she could have sent a text to Peggy Fields right now, and got her to transfer it to her computer with a time code, so that Lane couldn’t get his thieving hands on her intelligence.