Lost for Words: A Novel (19 page)

‘I am a little concerned,’ he said cheerfully, ‘our panna cotta with mixed woodland berries
is about to arrive and there is still no sign of the chairman.’

‘I’m more than happy to take over,’ said Jo.

‘No need,’ said Mr Wo, ‘Tobias has already offered to “step up to the plate” – a baseball metaphor, I believe, which even your prime minister has started to favour over the “wicket”, such is the British enthusiasm for the Special Relationship.’

Jo stared incredulously at Tobias, who was leaning towards Penny, listening carefully to what she was saying.

‘Excuse me,’ said a timid voice behind Jo.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Robin Wentworth, the author of
The Enigma Conundrum.
I just wanted to take the opportunity of thanking you personally for putting me on the Short List.’

‘No need to thank me,’ said Jo, ‘your advocate was Penny Feathers. Why don’t you go and interrupt her. She looks to me as if she’s conspiring to pervert the course of justice.’

‘Congratulations on your Short Listing,’ said Mr Wo, shaking hands with Robin Wentworth. ‘As you can see, tempers run high among the judges. You could do us all a great favour by finding Malcolm Craig and Sir David Hampshire; we seem to have lost them.’

‘I have an idea,’ said Robin eagerly, ‘I saw them downstairs.’

‘Proper little boy scout,’ said Jo, as he set off.

‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Wo, ‘I must have a word with my wife.’

‘But you do realize,’ said Jo, ‘that we haven’t made a final decision yet.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Wo, ‘Penny explained everything. Maybe I will ask Vanessa if she could compromise a little.’

*   *   *

‘Hello!’ said Malcolm, spreading his arms to encompass the table. ‘I’m so sorry, we’ve been trapped in the lift. I do apologize, Mr Wo, Mrs Wo, all of you. It was a bit of a nightmare, especially for poor David. Just as we were about to despair, and David was on his satellite phone to a friend in the SAS, we were saved by one of the Short Listees. Naturally, we’d been pushing all the buttons we could lay our hands on, but for some reason he was able to call the lift from the first floor. It’s the strongest argument I’ve heard for including a thriller writer on the Short List. You wouldn’t find the author of
The Frozen Torrent
showing that sort of initiative.’

Malcolm glanced over to see the effect of his barb on Vanessa, but she was absorbed in listening to Mr Wo.

‘Sorry, but Tobias won’t budge,’ said Penny, leaning over to Malcolm. ‘He’s in a bate because when we couldn’t find you, Mr Wo asked him to stand in, and he’s spent the whole of dinner composing an “utterly brilliant” speech.’

‘Christ!’ said Malcolm. ‘He’s only ever attended one meeting! I suppose I’ll have to announce joint winners.’

‘Please sit down,’ said Mrs Wo to David, ‘you must be exhausted. What did your army friend say when you rang from the lift?’

‘He told me,’ said David, pausing to take a gulp of water, ‘to bugger off and call an engineer.’

‘Oh, dear, how unfortunate,’ said Mrs Wo, with a perfectly judged laugh that contained no mockery, only relief and sympathy.

‘I must get something inside me before my speech,’ said Malcolm.

‘No hurry,’ said Mrs Wo, ‘you have eighteen minutes. Perhaps some dessert and a small glass of wine.’

‘Quickest way to raise the old blood sugar,’ said Malcolm, knocking back a glass of wine and working his way swiftly through a little tub of panna cotta and woodland berries.

The prospect of being on national television, and having three or four minutes of it exclusively to himself – longer than a prime minister on the news during a major crisis – which in some ways, or more precisely, in every way, had been Malcolm’s motivation for accepting the job as chairman of the Elysian Prize, was now turning into a persecution and a potential source of humiliation. He had written a speech with two possible endings, one printed in green for the victory of
wot u starin at
and one written in red for the victory of
The
Palace Cookbook
. Now he would have to improvise a merger of these two endings and present the resulting train wreck as some kind of cultural triumph. He quickly devoured a second panna cotta, abandoned by Penny during her negotiations with Tobias.

Mr Wo was about to ask Malcolm for a quiet word, when a woman with a belt full of brushes approached and said it was time to do his make-up.

‘Just a moment,’ said Malcolm, hoping Wo had some good news.

‘We can’t discuss this – for obvious reasons,’ said Mr Wo, smiling and tilting his head discreetly towards the television camera aimed at them across the table. ‘Apparently, the broadcaster employs lip-readers in case someone indiscreetly names the winner in public.’

‘I understand,’ said Malcolm, smiling back at him while accepting an envelope.

‘I finally persuaded Vanessa to commit.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Malcolm.

He couldn’t look inside until he was out of range of the cameras, and the moment he left the Banqueting Room, the make-up artist immediately sat Malcolm down in the corridor and started to pat his face with a sponge and then dust it with a soft brush. He instinctively closed his eyes, holding the envelope tightly in his lap.

‘I’m sure that’ll be fine,’ he said impatiently.

‘Almost finished,’ said the make-up artist, but as soon as she had stepped back to admire her work, a young woman with a walkie-talkie came over and said, ‘Three minutes.’

‘I really must have some time to myself,’ said Malcolm, ‘to…’ he hesitated to say ‘find out who’s won’ and so he settled on ‘gather my resources’.

‘I completely understand,’ said the young woman. ‘Don’t forget to breathe slowly.’

‘Why?’

‘It helps you to relax.’

‘I don’t need to relax! I just need a moment
alone
,’ said Malcolm.

‘I totally understand, I’ll leave you now and come back in about two minutes.’

*   *   *

Vanessa suddenly couldn’t bear it any longer. She knew that she had voted out of spite and anger and she felt ashamed of herself.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to David Hampshire, who was about to repeat the crushing remark he had made to the Spanish ambassador after he claimed that Britain was nothing but ‘a small island clinging to small islands’.

Vanessa hurried towards the door she had seen Malcolm go through. Out in the corridor she spotted him sitting on a chair, next to a temporary control centre, with a console of dials and knobs being checked by two men in headphones. As Vanessa approached, a young woman with a walkie-talkie blocked her path.

‘I’m sorry but this area is restricted during the broadcast,’ she said.

‘But I have to speak to Malcolm Craig,’ said Vanessa.

‘He’s specifically asked to be alone. I’m afraid you’ll have to talk to him after the announcement.’

‘But I’m on the committee,’ said Vanessa. ‘He’s about to make the wrong announcement.’

‘I very much doubt that,’ said the young woman, ‘he’s the chair of the judges and whoever you are, I’m quite sure he knows more about what’s going on than you do. Now, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, please.’

Vanessa did not move, but a man with ginger hair and a black T-shirt came over and said, ‘One minute,’ to the woman with the walkie-talkie.

‘Okay, I’m going to take him in. Could you accompany this lady back to the Banqueting Room?’

‘Malcolm!’ Vanessa cried out in despair, but when he glanced in her direction, Malcolm looked straight through her and continued towards the door that led to the far end of the Banqueting Room.

*   *   *

Watching Malcolm labour up the steps to the stage, Penny was assailed by guilt and anxiety. Why had she ever encouraged Nicola to place a bet? Vanessa had disappeared before Penny had time to find out her final decision, and Mr Wo refused to ‘spoil the surprise’ by telling her the result. Fingers crossed all would be well, but if things didn’t go her way, Penny’s moral dilemma was whether to refund Nicola’s original bet, or refund the sum Nicola would have won if Penny had provided her with an accurate tip. Perhaps she could get away with not refunding her at all. A gamble was a gamble, after all.

*   *   *

As Malcolm arrived on the stage, he paused a moment to allow the toastmaster to do his job.

‘‘Your Excellencies, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, pray silence for the Right Honourable Malcolm Craig, MP, Chair of the 2013 Elysian Prize.’

Malcolm spread his speech on the lectern, and put on his reading glasses with an air of unhurried self-assurance, smiling at the room he assumed was still there, although it was lost in the glare of the television lights. He had already been feeling a strange disquiet as he climbed to the stage, something much more menacing than the familiar strain of public speaking; now that he had to begin his speech, there was a surge in the strength of his anxiety. He could hear a high-pitched humming in his ears, and his body was throbbing, as if it had become a kettledrum for his pounding heart. What was going on? An electric tingling washed over his skin and he wondered if he was about to faint. With self-fulfilling dread he realized that he was experiencing stage fright for the first time. He had spent his professional life queuing up for a presidential slice of airtime, but now that he had what he thought he wanted, it felt like a primal threat to his existence.

‘I used to think,’ he began, knowing these were the opening words of his speech, but when he looked down at the page he felt utterly disconnected from the text in front of him.

The hall remained silent, apart from a few coughs and some ill-mannered conversation from people who weren’t even pretending to listen.

‘With a product as varied and flexible and, eh, slippery as the novel,’ Malcolm improvised, ‘there’s nothing to grab hold of.’ He clutched the podium, feeling that everyone knew that he was really talking about his vertigo and expected him to fall over at any moment.

‘You can talk about relevance,’ he said, grateful to Jo for the first time since he’d met her, ‘or, um, the human condition, or … eh, style, yes, writing style; but in the end it’s all a matter of personal taste.’

Malcolm could hear himself stumbling from one platitude to another, but there was nothing he could do beyond hoping to survive. What was it in his nature that destroyed these moments of potential triumph? Why had he made his fatal speech about Scottish independence when he appeared to be rising inexorably toward a cabinet post? Why had he proposed to two women on the same day and in the ensuing muddle lost both of them, although they had both accepted? Why had he not declared his interest in
The Greasy Pole
when the committee was considering it? He couldn’t think about it now, that flaw that made him throw away the game at the last moment. The one thing he knew was that he must stop talking about writing. Anything he said might be taken down and used by the press when they exposed the
Greasy Pole
scandal. He glanced up and thought he could make out figures twitching over their phones. The story was probably breaking as he spoke, appearing on people’s screens around the room, and being discussed by the pundits back in the studio.

‘What we have offered the public is the opinions of five judges who were all asking themselves the same basic question: “Which one of these books could be enjoyed by the largest number of ordinary people up and down this country?”’

How many times had he used that phrase in his political career? He was close to tears at the thought, but powerless to say anything meaningful.

‘When a journalist asked me what qualifications I had for this job…’

Why had he said that? He was like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime.

‘What I told him was that I’d taken my lessons from the best teachers of all: the British people.’

Flatter the audience, always works.

‘Now, if you would prefer to trust the opinion of one journalist who sets himself up as judge and jury and executioner for the entire prize, without having read all two hundred books we ploughed our way through, then be my guest.’

Oh, God, the good old combative approach.

‘Before I make the final announcement, I want to thank my fellow judges for their … for their passionate dedication to the cause of literature. I’m quite sure that we shall remain friends, reminiscing fondly about the ups and downs of the selection process in the years to come.

‘I would also like to thank Sir David Hampshire, in the year of his retirement. David has been the power behind the prize, always close to hand, ready to smooth ruffled feathers, and offer the wisdom he draws from his vast wealth of experience.’

Malcolm paused in vain for a round of applause.

‘And so, without further ado,’ he resumed, impulsively deciding that the public could do without any praise of the Short-Listed books or explanation of the committee’s final choice, ‘the winner of the 2013 Elysian Prize is
The Palace Cookbook
by Lakshmi Badanpur.’

*   *   *

John Elton snapped the stem of his wine glass.

Jo smiled triumphantly at Vanessa’s empty seat.

Alan stared down the well shaft of his empty panna-cotta ramekin.

Penny decided that ultimately it was not her responsibility if Nicola chose to gamble with her savings, but that she would chip in something towards a new roof.

Auntie let out a cry of unfeigned consternation. Camera lights were soon shining in her eyes and everyone at her table pressing forward to offer their congratulations. Yuri expressed his joy while reminding Auntie that she was under contract to Page and Turner.

‘Of course,’ she murmured, ‘my memoir … Oh, Sonny, I’m not sure I can manage.’

‘Of course you can. Remember who you are!’

‘I do remember who I am, but I don’t remember being a writer. Ah, Mansur, there you are. Please help me up, I’m feeling a little dizzy. Where have you been?’

‘I was near the stage, ready to do my duty; then I heard that your Highness had won and…’

‘Never mind all that,’ said Sonny.

‘Do his duty – what an earth does he mean?’

‘Auntie, you’re needed at the front!’