Lost for Words: A Novel (15 page)

‘If that’s what you want,’ said Vanessa, trying not to sound as pleased as she felt. ‘How’s Malcolm taking it?’

‘He’s very robust,’ said Penny, ‘and unapologetic. Frankly, he seems more put out by discovering that the author of
wot u starin at
is not only a well-paid lecturer in medieval love poetry at Edinburgh University, but none other than The Mc Dougal of Mc Dougal, one of the most ancient titles in Scotland. It makes Malcolm’s blood boil to think that he pretended to write a book of gritty social realism, when in fact he was leading a life of extreme privilege, dividing his time between his ancestral castle and a set of plush rooms in a prestigious university.’

‘It doesn’t really matter,’ said Vanessa.

‘Quite!’ said Penny. ‘It should be judged on its merits alone. Absolutely. Well, I’ll see you at the next meeting. Down to four: we’re really coming into the home straight.’

Vanessa switched off her phone, dropped it back in her bag and tossed
The Greasy Pole
onto the floor under the table.

She suddenly had a free afternoon. She could rush to meet her next responsibility and mark the first year’s essays on Insanity and Alienation in Tennyson. All of them would quote, ‘And my heart is a handful of dust’ from
Maud
; most of them would quote the climax of grief from
In Memoriam
,
‘And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day’; some of them would get round to Tithonus’s, ‘Me only cruel immortality / Consumes’, and point out how alienating it must have been to have his girlfriend turn him into a grasshopper; but most of all, the discussion would centre on that cautionary tale of opium addiction,
The Lotos-Eaters
,
since most undergraduates knew little about alienation and insanity except from their self-imposed drug experiences.

On the other hand, she could leave her suddenly free afternoon free: she didn’t have to cram it with new obligations, or move her schedule forward to annihilate the unexpected good fortune of a few uncluttered hours. She had read enough about Poppy’s illness over the years to know that an anorexic’s mother was typically a highly controlling perfectionist. Feeling the strain of leaving her afternoon empty, she made a concession to magical thinking and let herself believe that if she resisted imposing control on this stretch of free time she would be indirectly helping Poppy to recover.

It was a pity to ignore the thesis she was supervising, just when the semi-colon was about to reach its nineteenth-century peak of power and prestige; and difficult to neglect her own artful analysis of Undine Spragg’s mother, which took the reader around Wharton’s oeuvre, as well as fairly deep into the social history of her age: the rapidly changing attitudes to divorce, the high concentration of American fortunes in female hands, and so on and so forth; but these insights would have to wait. This afternoon, she would not let her judgemental mind characterize as mere laziness the subtle therapeutic space she was opening for her daughter. Just as an anorexic has to walk down the street rejecting the abundance of food offered on all sides, wasn’t there something punitive and self-defeating about turning down an opportunity to stop working, to relax, to play? Wasn’t there a family resemblance between the inability to take in nourishment and the inability to rest?

Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull, who catalogued anorexia and gave it the surname ‘Nervosa’, was also suspected of being Jack the Ripper. An expert on treating nervous women, he may also have been an expert on making women nervous, occupying that disturbing border between the healer and the killer, where a surgeon’s knife could be used to save a life or to end it. What good could come from a realm of mental illness claimed by such a sinister conquistador?

Even if there was some connection between Vanessa’s need to rest and Poppy’s need to eat, it was problematic for Vanessa to take the lead in doing nothing. Poppy would read Vanessa’s inspiring example as a manipulative strategy, a covert attempt to rob her of control with the cheap sacrifice of an afternoon’s work. Anorexia had been unknown in the Third World until the advent of Western television: it was supremely the disease of social comparison, of fatal competitiveness, of the final consummation of advertising, in which the image of emaciation is consumed rather than any product promoted by it.

Nevertheless, Vanessa decided that she would spend her afternoon without reading, or marking, or correcting, or writing. She would never tell Poppy, but she would just sit there thinking about her kindly, hoping it wasn’t too late to stop being too busy.

27

Katherine was woken at two in the morning by a shock of shame.

What could she have been thinking of? John Elton; the dark green sofa in his hotel room; the coffee table pushed roughly aside; property magazines slithering clumsily to the carpet; his socks still on; her yearning to run through the door she could see reflected in the mirror above the fireplace, and her horrified sense, as the cluster of clinking glasses on the tray toasted her abasement, that she had found a new level of alienation in her erotic journey, something like volunteering to be raped.

After so many failures, was she smothering the possibility of a sane intimacy? Instead of waiting for love to turn into indifference or desire into disgust, why not embrace the disgust from the beginning, in an act of proleptic despair? Or was she just taking the logic of promiscuity to its absolutely indiscriminate conclusion?

She was back in her own bed now, without Elton, and yet her feeling of anxiety was growing stronger. John Elton was not an exotic object of desire; he was the antidote to desire. Once sex was a way to avoid affection, who better to choose? Only the catastrophe of an encounter with him could show just how vicious her resistance was. He was there to unveil the truth that she would rather fuck a man who repelled her than get close to one she really liked. Alan had been kind to her, in a rather fatherly way perhaps, but genuinely kind. Didier was an enthusiast. And Sam, well, Sam was in love with her and wanted to know her as deeply as possible, and that was why she had to get rid of him.

She would rather not get too close to anyone who might really understand her. Besides, Sam was a novelist. There was no room in the same bed for two people in the same business. And yet, if she was going to do this thing, Sam was the one to do it with. If she was going to challenge her paranoia, she might as well challenge her egoism as well. She suffered from as much ordinary selfishness as the next person, but piled on top of that she had the special affliction of a novelist, of wanting to be the author of her own fate and take charge of a narrative whose opening chapters had been written by others with terrifying carelessness. Her need to decide what things meant came no doubt from having lived so close to the sense that they meant nothing at all. At the very least she had to inhabit a world in which things never quite meant what they appeared to mean, where the margin of invention and interpretation was broader than it was, for instance, in the final moments of asphyxiation. Could she bear to have Sam nailing down the meaning of things with his own precision and his own perspective, or bear to see her interpretations seep into his work?

If only this latest ecstasy of shame and pointless sex would act on her with the chastening effect that an outstanding blackout sometimes has on an alcoholic. Waking in a strange place, looking back on an unqualified amnesia, with only bloodstained clothes for evidence; unsure whether the blood comes from a nosebleed or a murder (whose nosebleed? whose murder?), the drunk might think, as the corrosive dread colonizes every particle of her identity, ‘I really must stop living this way.’

Fully awake now and knowing that sleep could not catch up with her racing mind, she got out of bed to make a cup of tea, but soon retreated from the hygienic brightness of the kitchen to the battered armchair where she often wrote, picking up a velvet cushion and pressing it to her lap. She stared out of her dark drawing room at the restless plane trees in the square, shaking sudden rushes of raindrops from their wet leaves, half shining in the lamplight and half heaving with shadow. She hadn’t responded to any of Sam’s emails since she stopped seeing him, but now she felt like getting back in touch. The simplest way, not too precipitous, and with the further benefit of disarming her competitiveness, would be to congratulate him on making the Elysian Short List.

She picked up the laptop from the small round table beside her and scrolled down to the last forlorn email from Sam, ignored its contents, clicked on
Reply
and wrote,

Congratulations

Kx

With a gambler’s excitement at making an instantaneous and irreversible decision, she sent the email a moment later. She then felt rather depleted and impatient, wondering how long it would be before she would get a reply. It was only just after three in the morning. He probably wouldn’t answer until lunchtime. She was about to close her glowing screen when a new item appeared in her inbox. It was from Sam.

Thanks.

Do you want to come to the Elysian dinner with me?

Sx

Without hesitating she replied.

Love to.

Kxx

28

Penny ordered another Cosmopolitan from the waiter. She was having a thoroughly enjoyable time in no less a place than the Jardin Intérieur
of the Paris Ritz. None of the other members of the committee had been able to come along on the trip and all she could say was ‘more fool them’. With ten thousand euros entirely at her disposal, she had seen no reason not to take a suite at the Ritz for two nights, instead of the one night she had originally planned, go on a special guided tour of the Paris sewers, and book herself a table in the tip-top Michelin-starred restaurant conveniently situated in her own hotel. She had bought a vintage chart from her local wine merchant so as not to be bamboozled by a smooth-talking
sommelier
into paying through the nose for an inferior product.

Penny took a gulp of her second (absolutely delicious) Cosmopolitan and skewered a spicy green olive with a very smart white toothpick sporting a little black ribbon at one end. This really was perfection: getting a bit tipsy in these charming surroundings. You couldn’t beat the French when it came to classical elegance. To her right was a white marble sphinx crouched on her leonine legs, with her hair up in a bun and a bow tie around her long neck. Other white marble statues of heroic male and modest female figures were dotted among the white paving stones of the garden and, at the end of the vista, high up on the far wall and seeming to preside over the whole space, was a medallion of an old man with a flowing beard; probably our friend Neptune, thought Penny, although the only water in the garden was hardly oceanic: it trickled from a fountain encased in a small white temple. Stone urns containing box, cut into perfect spheres, provided a few restrained green notes.

She had read in one of her guidebooks that the Ritz was a favourite haunt of Marcel Proust’s. Although she sympathized with his choice of watering hole, Penny couldn’t help reflecting that he was exactly the kind of author who would
not
have made it onto this year’s Short List. She hadn’t actually read any Proust, but she knew perfectly well that he was a long-winded snob, with far too much private money and some very unconventional sexual tastes: just the sort of thing they had been trying to avoid.

Apparently, Hemingway had also been a regular at the bar. She hadn’t read Hemingway since doing
A Farewell to Arms
for O-level, but his manly, no-nonsense style, dealing with the great themes of love and war and the eternal puzzle of human nature, had given Penny’s young imagination a strong sense of what real literature was all about. He would undoubtedly have fared better with the committee than the degenerate Proust. At least he had
done
something with his life other than go to parties and complain about his health. He was a man of action who had hunted big game, caught big fish and jumped on a plane the moment war broke out anywhere in the world, which of course kept him very busy during the nineteen-thirties.

Seeing that she had twenty minutes left before her table reservation in the restaurant down the corridor, Penny couldn’t resist ordering another ‘Cosy’ as she had privately nicknamed what was rapidly becoming her favourite cocktail of all time.

‘O-U-T spells OUT, so
out
you go,’ Penny muttered under her breath, imagining the crestfallen, coughing Proust being forced to leave the magic circle of her table in the garden. It struck her as pretty historic – if that was the word – that one of the authors most celebrated for enjoying this splendid setting was being banished from the prestigious Short List by a member of the Elysian Prize committee, while she was relishing a drink in the very same spot!

It was all very well getting rid of Proust and sparing the plainspoken Hemingway, but what her committee had utterly failed to decide was which author was actually going to
win
this year. ‘Win-wine / wine and dine’, Penny invented a little ditty and sang it gently to herself.

She was just the teeniest bit tiddly and arguably should restrict herself to drinking wine by the glass over dinner. Mind you, it was rather a waste of the vintage chart to be stuck in the ‘by the glass’ section of a great wine list.

Where was she? Ah yes, the committee. It was in gridlock, rush-hour gridlock. The dinner was in three days, and nobody would budge. She and Malcolm were firmly committed to
wot u starin at
, with Jo and Tobias lined up against them, adamant about the virtues of the postmodern cookery novel. Vanessa was the floating voter who was driving them all mad, as she had from the word go. She was insisting that
The Frozen Torrent
was the only ‘work of literature’ on the List, and since there was no negotiation possible over the other two candidates, everyone should ‘compromise’ (i.e. cave in) and agree to her choice. Back in her Foreign Office days, Penny had naturally been involved in making her fair share of tough, unpopular decisions, but people had always known that she was acting from a sincere appraisal of the country’s best interests – even if the country turned out to be Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia, or General Pinochet. Vanessa, by contrast, was being selfish for entirely selfish reasons. Penny was tempted to send her one of her famous letters – known at the Foreign Office as ‘Penny’s ICBMs’ (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). Although many of them, destined for an incompetent colleague, landed up in the same building from which they were sent, the ‘Inter-Continental’ tag gave you some idea of just how terrifying Penny could be when she got the wind up her.