Lost for Words: A Novel (20 page)
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Authors: Edward St. Aubyn
To Sonny’s relief, a young woman with a walkie-talkie came up to Auntie.
‘Could you please come to the podium as quickly as possible, Lakshmi? We’ve cut to our panel of critics in the studio, but we’ve got the news coming up in twenty minutes, and obviously everyone is very keen to hear your speech.’
‘I only wish I were very keen to make it,’ said Auntie, ‘but to tell you the truth, I’m dreading it. Where is Didier? Oh, Didier, it was so kind of you to write that speech for me, but I’m not sure I completely understand it.’
‘Excellent!’ said Didier. ‘If you understood it, no doubt you would disagree, but this way you can deliver it with perfect sincerity!’
Not entirely reassured, Auntie was led past dozens of tables where the words ‘absurd’ and ‘ridiculous’ seemed to be playing an unusually large part in the conversation. By the time she reached the lectern, she was so anxious that she wondered if she would be able to speak at all.
‘What is literature?’ she began, feeling that her voice was not her own. ‘What is this privilege we grant to certain verbal combinations, although they employ the very same words we use to buy our bread and count our money? Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches and arches into aqueducts.
‘
The Palace Cookbook
forces the recognition of this truth through the play of irony and absence: the only authentic relationship modernity can have with the classical ideals of equilibrium and lucidity. By appearing to use language for the most banal purpose, for the maintenance of our material existence through eating, we are thrown into a crisis of meaning. Is this all there is to life? And yet slowly, through the hypnotic reiteration of quantities and ingredients: rice, water, flour, oil, ounces, pounds, cups and teaspoons, the author invokes, through their absence, the impossible ambitions of the highest art. Right from the beginning, in the title itself and in the Introduction, we are in the presence of this paradox. The Palace, we are told, is ruined, abandoned, lost, and yet it stands behind the Cookbook, just as the matrix of syntax stands behind the banality of the semantic corpus, ready to transform it into the scandal of excess and transgression of utility that is art!
‘When Foucault tells us, in
The Order of Things
…’
Auntie couldn’t go on. She had no idea what Didier was driving at and felt that, whatever the consequences, she must tell the truth.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she resumed, ‘I want to thank Monsieur Didier Leroux for writing me such a clever speech and trying to make me a worthy recipient of this famous literary prize, but I have to say that I am a simple woman and that what I set out to do when I wrote
The Palace Cookbook
was to record as many recipes as possible before they were irrevocably lost. These recipes have been passed down from head cook to head cook over the centuries, but never written down, being treated as a kind of secret family knowledge. Fortunately we were able to interview the last cook, Babu Singh, a few months before he died. Despite being very old and completely blind, Babu had a perfect recall of the recipes and was able to recite them like verses, day after day for a week. The way of life that accompanied those dishes has gone for ever – the tiger hunts, the elephant fights, the stables with a hundred matching polo ponies, the six hundred household staff, and the very special relationship between a maharaja and his people, who looked to him as children look to their father: for kindness and advice. The palaces have fallen into disrepair, or been turned into hotels – but I hoped that perhaps I could bring the culinary art perfected over many generations to a more varied world, and preserve some of the splendour of that tradition by sharing it more widely.
‘Mr Malcolm Craig has told us that the novel is such a “varied” and “flexible” form, and yet no one could be more amazed than I am to discover that I have transformed my cookery book into a work of literature, simply by including one or two stories about some of our more colourful ancestors.
‘I want to thank the distinguished panel of judges for giving me this prize, and to say that I shall donate the money to the Badanpur Orphanage, of which I have the honour to be the Patron.’
Auntie bowed to her audience and crossed the stage with quiet dignity, holding her sari a little raised as she walked cautiously down the steps, amidst a scattering of applause, tentative in places and fanatically enthusiastic in others.
* * *
‘Fucking hell,’ said Katherine, staring at the television from her bed, while Sam stared at her glowing skin from the pillow beside her, ‘that’s the book that Alan sent to the judges instead of
Consequences
.’
‘The world’s gone mad,’ said Sam, leaning over to kiss her on the neck.
‘Listen to
this
,’ said Katherine. ‘It’s an interview with one of the judges’ daughters.’
Sam turned to the screen and saw an angrylooking, middle-aged woman standing in front of a terraced house, with her arms folded across a thick sweater.
‘Yes, I’m saying that my mother told me to place a bet on
wot u starin at
.
She gave me inside information and encouraged me to commit what would in effect have been fraud.’
‘But it wasn’t fraud, was it, because that book didn’t win?’
‘That doesn’t mean she didn’t try to cheat,’ said Nicola stubbornly, ‘it’s just another thing she isn’t any good at.’
‘Great,’ said Sam, relighting the joint. ‘Maybe there’ll be a retrial and we can both get Short-Listed and one of us can win. I don’t mind which one of us, that’s how madly in love I am.’
‘If you were madly in love, you’d want me to win,’ said Katherine.
‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Sam. ‘I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacrifice is only enabling someone else’s egoism. Altruists always end up riddled with resentment, or if they make that last superhuman effort, with spiritual pride.’
‘Oh,’ said Katherine, ‘you mean you’re not going to enable my egoism.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Sam ‘you’re right – love is doing everything you want all the time.’
‘Only because you want it too,’ said Katherine.
‘Hmm, the ever-popular merged volition,’ said Sam, ‘that can work, for about three weeks.’
‘Oh, look,’ said Katherine, lying down sideways, with her head in her hand, ‘it’s the mother of that woman.’
Sam looked at Katherine, her fine shoulder blades, the line of her waist, the ridge of her hipbone, and her legs tapering into the sheets.
‘Amazing,’ he said.
‘She’s been told about her daughter,’ said Katherine.
Sam looked back up at the television. Penny was still in the Banqueting Room, with the empty stage behind her.
‘I have no idea why she would say something like that. Nicola has always been fond of a practical joke, but I really think this is going a bit too far. Besides, it makes no sense, since the book I’m
supposed
to have recommended didn’t win!’
‘She says that’s just incompetence,’ said the interviewer. ‘Were you planning to share the money?’
‘Now, look here,’ said Penny, genuinely indignant, ‘our committee has been working extremely hard all year, in order to bring the very best works of literature to the public’s attention, and those discussions have always been
strictly confidential
. To suggest otherwise is not only an insult to me but also to my colleagues and friends.’
‘Some of us have been following Jo Cross’s Twitter wars with critics of the Long List for several weeks now,’ said the interviewer.
‘I’m not prepared to discuss these matters any further,’ said Penny, ‘for the very reason that they are, as I’ve said, strictly confidential.’
‘Are you saying that Twitter is confidential?’
Penny turned her back on the camera and walked out of shot.
‘Oh dear, well, I seem to have lost Penny Feathers,’ said the interviewer. ‘I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about this year’s highly controversial Elysian Prize, but that’s all we’ve got time for tonight and so…’
Katherine switched off the television and tossed the remote control onto the floor under her bedside table.
‘I’m sick of prizes,’ she said.
‘Comparison, competition, envy and anxiety,’ said Sam.
‘Let’s just make love and be happy.’
‘
Vaste Programme
,’
said Sam,
‘
as De Gaulle said to the heckler who shouted, “Death to the idiots”.’
‘That
is
too ambitious,’ said Katherine, ‘but my programme is completely realistic, especially the first half.’
‘Ah, the first half,’ said Sam, sliding down the sheets.
‘Which will lead naturally to the second half,’ said Katherine.
They smiled at each other and all the irony seemed to have rushed from the world, restoring it to a place where things happened naturally and incomparably.
ALSO BY EDWARD ST. AUBYN
Never Mind
Bad News
Some Hope
Mother’s Milk
At Last
On the Edge
A Clue to the Exit
A Note About the Author
Edward St. Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He is the author of a series of highly acclaimed novels about the Melrose family, including
At Last
and
Mother’s Milk
, which was short-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, as well as the novels
A Clue to the Exit
and
On the Edge
.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Edward St. Aubyn
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2014 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2014
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
St. Aubyn, Edward, 1960–
Lost for words: a novel / Edward St. Aubyn. — First American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-28029-1 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71148-1 (ebook)
1. Novelists—Fiction. 2. Literary prizes—Fiction. 3. Satire. I. Title.
PR6069.T134 L68 2014
823'.914—dc23
2013048089