Lost for Words: A Novel (17 page)

Alan wanted to go to one of the nearby bookshops to buy something good to read on the way home, to rinse away the poisonous, syrupy taste of
The Mulberry Elephant
and remind him what literature was before he went to the Elysian Prize dinner the next night.

30

Penny was prepared to bet that the Fishmongers’ Hall had never looked more magnificent. It had been especially re-decorated for the occasion, using black, in honour of the Elysian Group, and gold, in honour of their lucrative prize. The tablecloths were black and the candlesticks gold, the chairs were gold and the stage draped with immense black curtains, pelmets and swags. A gold podium stood in the centre with powerful television lights on either side, waiting to be switched on for the broadcast of Malcolm’s announcement. It was what she felt like calling ‘quite something’.

Downstairs, the other guests were arriving: writers, publishers, agents, journalists and so forth, but they would not be allowed into the Banqueting Room for another three-quarters of an hour. She wanted to drink it all in, knowing that she had the room to herself for the last time. The guests would mill about the State Drawing Room, drinking champagne, gawping at the royal portraits, and studying the seating plan displayed on an easel by the door.

Penny was of course on table No. 1, with the rest of the committee, nearest the stage. She wandered over to make sure that she was sitting next to her special guest, David Hampshire. On her other side was Liu Ping Wo, Chairman of Shanghai Global Assets, the new owners of the Elysian Group. How proud they must be to have taken over the prize and find themselves in one fell swoop at the very heart of British cultural life. Mrs Wo was on David’s other side, and would no doubt be amazed by his detailed knowledge of the Chinese scene. David being David, he would probably keep his perfect Mandarin for dessert. She longed to see Mrs Wo’s face when she realized that she was sitting next to a man who had translated some of Gladstone’s famously long and complicated Budget speeches into Chinese as a pure intellectual exercise.

Penny looked through the tall windows at the swift flood of the Thames, racing under the arches of London Bridge while the city’s myriad lights sketched a thousand white and orange doodles on its liquid surface. Then she looked back at the podium where the announcement of the winner was due to be made in three hours’ time. What nobody outside the committee could have guessed was that its ‘final’ meeting had been far from conclusive. While London’s literati were speculating wildly about this year’s winner in the State Drawing Room, the committee was doing exactly the same in the Library. At this very moment Malcolm and Jo were engaged in desperate last-minute negotiations with Vanessa, fighting to secure her pivotal vote. Tobias had gone downstairs to ‘check out the canapés’, and Penny, unable to stand the tension, had chosen a moment of quiet reflection in the Banqueting Room.

*   *   *

When Auntie was invited to the Elysian dinner, she had replied saying that she would be bringing Monsieur Didier Leroux as her guest, and that she would also like to bring her publisher and her literary agent. These were the titles she was assigning to Sonny and Mansur in order to smuggle them into the Fishmongers’ Hall. Auntie forgave herself this little white lie, knowing that every other Short-Listed author would take for granted the sort of entourage she had conjured up by these dishonest means. Mansur had been thrown into crisis by the prospect of sitting down to dinner with his semi-divine employers, but Sonny, who was usually rather a stickler in matters of rank, surprised Auntie by insisting that Mansur come along.

‘Don’t be such an old stick in the mud,’ said Sonny, as their car drew up outside. ‘Mansur is really one of the family.’

Auntie’s nightwatchman, gratified to the point of panic, sat motionless in the passenger seat next to the driver.

Auntie disguised her annoyance with Sonny by opening her evening bag and checking for the tenth time that it contained the acceptance speech Didier had written for her. She hardly expected to win, but the very obliging Monsieur Leroux had written something for her, just in case.

*   *   *

Sam lay in Katherine’s bed, in a pool of half-formed dreams, not quite asleep, nor quite awake, his arm wrapped loosely around her waist. For their reunion, Katherine had taken him to a Japanese restaurant for lunch. They drank a bottle of sake to celebrate his Short Listing. It had made him think of spring rain and forests of swaying bamboo. When he leant against Katherine he felt their bloodstreams merging into a single flow. Back at her flat, they fell into bed and made love. He noticed that it was about four o’clock when she fished a small joint out of the drawer of her bedside table.

‘I don’t think I should,’ he said

‘Don’t worry, it’s not skunk, just some very friendly home-grown.’

When they made love again, everything was slower, as if the sensual freight had grown so heavy that time couldn’t be expected to rush along as it used to. Afterwards, they fell into a kind of buzzing stillness, their breaths synchronized and their bodies moulded together.

‘Christ! It’s six-thirty,’ said Katherine.

‘Fuck,’ said Sam, ‘I’ve got to have a shower.’

‘Together,’ said Katherine, kissing him, calming him down and making him wonder if he wanted to leave at all.

*   *   *

John Elton arrived at the Fishmongers’ Hall accompanied by Amanda, his irresistible assistant. He did something much more thrilling than sleep with Amanda: he made people think he was sleeping with her. When they were out together, the only restriction he put on her conversation was any mention of her boyfriend, or any explicit denial that she was having an affair with her boss. She generally said, ‘John and I are very close,’ or, ‘That’s for you to wonder,’ or, ‘Mind your own business,’ depending on how late it was and how many times she had been asked. She was paid a bonus for her evening work and, as she explained to her friends, ‘It’s like being an escort without the sex – pretty ideal really.’

John was the agent for
All the World’s a Stage
. The author, Hermione Fade, had refused to fly in from Christchurch, New Zealand, unless she was told that she going to win. John pleaded with the Elysian Group for a little advanced notice, but received a very stony reply from David Hampshire, saying that it was ‘out of the question to give any hints of any sort whatever about the outcome of the prize’. John was authorized to deliver a speech on Hermione’s behalf if
All the World’s a Stage
won. He had it tucked in his inside pocket; it was a theatrically confident manifesto for historical fiction perfectly crafted for the confident theatrical historical novel it celebrated.

The sight of Auntie and Sonny, standing under a larger than life portrait of the portly, blue-sashed George IV in a bright red coat and white wig, spoilt John’s proprietary sweep into the State Drawing Room. Despite his contempt for
The Palace Cookbook
, he couldn’t help reproaching himself for a lack of cynicism: to have two books on the Short List, especially one that was so ludicrously unworthy, would have done his reputation for shrewdness and prescience no harm. ‘Sometimes you have to read the judges rather than the books,’ he could imagine himself saying in the long
Vanity Fair
profile that would one day inevitably be written about him.

*   *   *

By the time Alan arrived, the party had really kicked off: photographers were taking photographs of people they had photographed before, the quails’ eggs had run out and one or two people were already quite drunk. Alan couldn’t immediately see James Miller but was in no particular hurry to find him.

He had been over to Marilyn’s to collect his dinner jacket and had ended up dressing in his old bedroom, finding his shaving foam and razor at the back of the cupboard under his basin, and his cuff-links in the little box in the drawer of his bedside table. After nearly a year of exile, he was taken over by a deeply familiar feeling of being at home, preparing to go out for the evening. Marilyn suggested that he move in over the weekend ‘as an experiment’. He left Belsize Park with a sense of gratitude and security only slightly shadowed by loss and defeat.

In the taxi, he toyed with the wistful thought that he might have been going to the Elysian dinner with Katherine, that she might turn out to have won the prize and that they might return to her flat for a night of passionate celebration. As he approached his destination, he tried to chastise himself, but like a man who slaps the mosquito on his arm and then sees, as he withdraws his hand, that the crushed insect has already drawn blood, Alan realized that his intellect had arrived too late to stop his imagination from getting lost in an alternative reality that contained no reality at all.

As if to point out, from another angle, the futility of his attempted discipline, the first person to greet him was Yuri, his old employer at Page and Turner.

‘Ah, Alan,’ he said, with the brutal directness that he usually farmed out to his wife but was capable of reclaiming for special occasions, ‘I suppose Katherine would have been here if it wasn’t for your ineptitude.’

Alan was too startled to think of a reply.

‘I hear she has also given you the sack,’ Yuri went on. ‘Everywhere I go I start a fashion!’

He gave Alan a blast of genial laughter, and then turned away and started to stroll around the room, dispensing charm.

Alan wandered over to the bar to give himself time to recover. He dithered over what to drink, torn between a cautious elderflower cordial and a consoling glass of Jack Daniel’s. Before he could make a decision, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘
Salut
, Alain!’

‘Didier! What are you doing here?’

‘So, this is the epicentre of English Literature,’ said Didier, smiling at Alan, ‘located in the home of a very successful fishmonger, under the gaze of dead monarchs, in the narrow space between the hostility of a philistine commerce and the indifference of a philistine ruling class! Bravo for the artist who survives in this environment! In France, it is the opposite: everything is culture. It is a kind of nightmare. You walk down a street named after Voltaire, your steak has apparently been cooked for Rossini, and Chagal has designed the label on your bottle of wine. You rush to the country to escape the cultural density of the city, but the little waves lapping on the lakeshore belong to Rousseau and the birds that appear to be singing in the woods are in fact singing in a poem by Chateaubriand. Even a field of wheat is a cultural object, oppressed by its semiotic potential to become the world’s most iconic loaf: the baguette!’

‘Yes, but what are you doing here?’ Alan persisted.

‘I am the speech writer for one of the Small-Listed authors,’ said Didier, hardly able to contain his mirth. ‘My friend Sonny Badanpur has asked me to help his aunt…’

‘Badanpur…’ said Alan, ‘has he written a very long novel?’

‘Absolutely:
The Mulberry Elephant.
You have read it?’

‘Yes, well, not all of it – it’s twice the size of
War and Peace.
Which one is he? I must make sure I don’t meet him; I just wrote rather a harsh report on his book.’

‘By the fireplace with the yellow slippers,’ said Didier. ‘Ah,’ he went on, looking over Alan’s shoulder and suddenly growing animated, ‘here is someone I’m sure you will want to see.’

Alan turned round, already knowing from Didier’s tone what to expect. Framed in the doorway, her hair still tangled, and her mouth swollen by round after round of kissing and biting, stood Katherine, dishevelled enough to remind him that her beauty did not depend on what she was wearing. Next to her was Sam, looking sleepy and electrified at the same time; with his bowtie tilted, like an old-fashioned plane propeller that needed to be pulled down to get it started.

Before Alan could fully appreciate the rush of nausea and jealousy that passed through him, a tall man with white hair and a red tail coat, who might have stepped out of one of the mediocre portraits that encumbered the walls of the State Drawing Room, appeared at Katherine’s side and started shouting slowly at the top of his voice.

‘Your Excellencies, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen! Dinner is served! Will you please proceed to the Banqueting Room.’

*   *   *

Here comes the human stampede, thought Penny, as she returned along the upper gallery, somewhat anxiously, after a fruitless search for the rest of the committee. They must have gone downstairs for a drink without bothering to let her know. Frankly, it defied belief, even if relations had become somewhat strained. Nevertheless, she must keep calm, park herself at table No. 1 and wait for the committee to come to her. Malcolm was sitting the other side of Mrs Wo from David, and so he was bound to turn up soon. The thought of David stopped Penny in her tracks. He could hardly be expected to make it up the stairs on his own. Why did she have to think of everything? The smart young women in black evening dresses, checking the guest list by the front door, would have simply ticked his name off the list and left him to fend for himself.

As the first guests arrived at the top of the stairs, Penny went in the opposite direction along the upper gallery to the small lift in the far corner of the building.

After confirming that he had arrived, she found David sitting in a gilt chair next to the Drawing Room doors, looking somewhat forlorn, with two walking sticks resting against the wall beside him.

‘David!’

‘Ah, Penelope, thank goodness you’re here, I’m not sure I can manage these stairs.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ve thought of that,’ said Penny, ‘we have a lift specially prepared for you.’

David followed her painfully across the hall, with Penny saying, ‘Take your time,’ every five seconds.

‘I am taking my time,’ said David. ‘I’m sorry it’s so fucking slow, if that’s what you’re driving at.’

‘No, I…’ Penny was lost for words. There had always been a prickly side to David, but at this stage of their relationship, she really didn’t appreciate having her head bitten off.