Lost for Words: A Novel (6 page)

As well as
wot u starin at
, Malcolm had chosen
The Bruce
, an action-packed novel that really brought Scottish history alive, and
The Greasy Pole
, the story of a working-class lad from the Highlands who goes into politics and, without giving the plot away, ends up becoming Prime Minister of Britain, which was a remarkable achievement.

The only member of the committee Penny really found it hard to take was Vanessa Shaw. She was so frightfully intellectual, but not in fact, in Penny’s opinion, really that clever. She was mad about a novel called
The Frozen Torrent
, which Penny had been unable to make any headway with. The whole thing was, according to Vanessa, ‘built and unbuilt’ on systematic self-contradiction, just as life was built on the contradiction of death (ugh!). Not only did the text (as if it had just popped up on her mobile phone!) show a deep reading of Beckett, Blanchot, and Bataille (whoever the last two were), but also brought to this ‘self-corroding sensibility’ (good God!), the richness of a profound and original psychological novel.

In other words, the author had stolen all his ideas and didn’t just contradict himself by mistake (which, let’s face it, happens to all of us, now and again) but actually
set out
to contradict himself! It made her blood boil to think that this charlatan, with his second-hand ideas and phrases, and his absurd habit of self-contradiction, was going to get his wretched novel on to the Long List.

Penny glanced at her watch. She’d better get a move on. It was no use dawdling at home daydreaming about past meetings when she was due at the most important meeting yet: the one that would finalize the Long List and take the prize into a whole new phase.

10

Now that it was his turn to sit hunched in her armchair, his collarless shirt bulging and contracting with the grief that shuddered through his body, Katherine realized how little she knew Sonny. When she let him in to her flat he had barely greeted her before casting himself down and beginning to sob.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Sonny. ‘I’ve been robbed of this year’s Elysian Prize.’

‘I didn’t even know that you’d written a novel,’ said Katherine.

‘I’ve written an enduring work of art,’ said Sonny, ‘and they haven’t even put me on their Long List!’

‘
Consequences
isn’t on the Long List either, thanks to my idiotic publisher,’ said Katherine. ‘He gave my novel to his assistant to send round on the day of the deadline and she sent your aunt’s cookbook instead. Any other committee would have realized that there’d been a fuck-up and sent the cookbook back.’

‘I’m sure you deserved to be on the Long List,’ said Sonny. ‘But I deserved to win!’

‘Well, in that case,’ said Katherine, ‘I can’t wait to read this masterpiece of yours.’

‘There’s a signed copy at Heywood Hill,’ said Sonny. ‘Don’t tell the book fellow you’re a friend of mine.’

‘That’ll be easy enough,’ said Katherine. ‘The only question is whether to camp overnight on the pavement outside.’

‘I hope you’re not being sarcastic with me,’ said Sonny, brought upright by pique. ‘My nerves really can’t take it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Katherine, ‘but I’m disappointed as well.’

‘That’s why we should form an alliance,’ said Sonny.

‘What for? Being disappointed?’

‘For revenge, of course,’ said Sonny. ‘In a more enlightened age, the judges would have been dragged into a public square and horsewhipped.’ His body relaxed for a moment under the softening influence of nostalgia. ‘The furious multitude,’ he went on, his hands spreading artistically as he imagined the scene, ‘would have torn them limb from limb to punish them for insulting their betters! But in these degenerate times, I suppose we’ll have to make do with a hired assassin. Do you know such a person? I tried to get a man sent over from Delhi, but they wouldn’t give him a visa. Red tape!’

‘You can’t be serious,’ said Katherine.

‘Very well,’ said Sonny, getting up with restored vigour and stepping back into his slippers. ‘I see that you have no pride in yourself, but I am not, nor shall I ever be, in that pitiful condition! We shall see which one of us is truly serious about literature!’

Katherine waited tensely until she heard the front door close. She could imagine a time when she would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of Sonny’s conversation and the relief of his departure, but she had been too angry in the last few days to laugh at anything.

She felt isolated, partly because she had turned her phone off, driven mad by constant calls from Alan, pleading to be taken back. The first day after she threw him out, he rang to say that he had sacked his assistant, and that she had left in tears.

‘If you were right to sack her, I was right to sack you,’ she answered coldly.

‘I’ll take her back if you’ll take me back,’ he said.

‘Rivers don’t flow upstream,’ said Katherine.

‘But I love you…’

She hung up before he could finish his unpromising sentence. Every few hours her inbox silted up with emails that she deleted without reading. Katherine had become disciplined about ending an affair; it was an indispensable skill for someone who had averaged twenty lovers a year since she was sixteen. Besides, Alan suddenly seemed so irrelevant, now that
Consequences
was no longer in the running for the Elysian. She had felt the same way about her English tutor at Cambridge after getting a First. He had been astonished, but to her it was the most natural thing in the world: why would anybody sleep with a don after leaving university? It was nothing to do with being mercenary, but it had everything to do with being impulsive. She slept with the man of the moment. The moment might be the way a man held his glass, or it might be more practical, like a don at university, but neither kind of moment could last, and when it ended there was nothing left. She knew that she would feel frightened and empty if she ever stopped, and so there was always someone to fall back on, or move on to.

Things were perilously close to empty right now. She had lost Sam the same day she lost Alan.
The Frozen Torrent
was on the Long List and she didn’t feel like being patronized in bed. Sam didn’t yet know about her decision, if decision was the right word for that snap in her psyche. As a result, in this disastrous week, only Didier was left and she was in no condition to organize anything else; she didn’t want pity, or even sympathy, she wanted infatuation.

Katherine turned on her phone and it rang immediately.

‘Oh, fuck off,’ she said, looking at Alan’s name on the screen. She ignored Alan and rang Didier.

‘Can you come round?’

‘When?’

‘Straight away. It’s just you.’

‘
A bas le triangle! Vive le couple!
’ said Didier. ‘No Sam? No Alan?’

‘I’m down to just you,’ said Katherine.

‘Down is good,’ said Didier, ‘it reduces the vertigo.’

‘It is the vertigo,’ said Katherine.

‘Not once you’ve landed.’

‘Well, let’s land.’

‘Okay, I abandon this wonderful sentence I am writing: “we think we are free because we lack the language to describe our unfreedom”…’

‘Please,’ said Katherine.

‘Okay,
j’arrive
.’

11

‘What is the purpose of art?’ Sam felt doomed as he wrote the question. What did he really think?

‘To arrest our attention in the midst of distraction.’

Could he say that?

‘Its uselessness is its supreme value. Money only has value because it can be exchanged for something else, art only has value because it can’t.’

Try telling that to a Rembrandt owner, who’s just exchanged a ‘useless’ self-portrait for twenty-seven million pounds, thought Sam, or for that matter to someone whose loneliness has been abolished by the perfect reflection of her mood or predicament in the sentence she has just read.

‘To arrest our attention in the midst of distraction’, or ‘to distract our attention in the midst of fixation’. He could imagine approaching that point from the opposite angle. The whole thing was a nightmare. If he didn’t pull himself together, he would have to come up with a Theory of Beauty.

‘The purpose of style,’ Sam began, ‘is to generate interest’, he concluded timidly.

What was interest? Talk about begging the question.

He marvelled at the speed with which elation had turned into anxiety. Ever since he had found that
The Frozen Torrent
was on the Long List, he had been torn between a superstitious need to avoid anticipating any further success, and a neurotic need to plan, in case further success came his way. What if he had to make a speech, the speech, in fact, of an Elysian winner? He didn’t want to think about it, in case the gods punished him for expecting things to go well, but he must think about it, so as to pacify his fear of success.

One thing was clear; he was going to have to drop the topic of art. In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture; the word ‘elitist’ could be spat out with the same confident contempt as ‘coward’ at a court martial. It seemed as if a prejudice could not be banished without driving some other topic, once freely discussed, or even admired, into a shameful exile. Perhaps in future generations a law would be passed allowing consenting adults to practise art openly; an Intellect Relations Board might be set up to encourage tolerance towards people who, through no fault of their own, were interested in ideas. Meanwhile, it was just as well to keep quiet and play the fool.

Whatever its contents, Sam preferred to speculate about a speech he would probably never have to make than to contemplate the agony of Katherine’s defection. When
The Frozen Torrent
appeared on the Long List, and
Consequences
did not, she had broken contact with him. Was it envy or disappointment? Was she ill, or was she dead? She ignored as many messages as he dared to send. He hoped feverishly that the equation of literary success and erotic failure was reversible, and that she would take him back if his novel didn’t make the Short List, but a quieter, saner voice told him that he would just end up with both kinds of failures at once.

In the end he was driven to ring Didier for news.

‘This imbecile she used to live with,’ Didier explained, ‘sent a cookbook to the judges instead of her novel.’

‘What?’ said Sam, who thought he must have misheard.

‘No, no, it gets better,’ said Didier. ‘They put the cookbook on the Long List. This is no joke. We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting. This is the Dark Ages with light pollution: with the pollution of the Enlightenment! The pigs are wandering among the temple ruins; women are being raped on the steps of the forgotten Senate; there are only two or three monks who can still read in the whole of Europe; all of that, naturally, but this time it’s going to be on TV! This time it’s going to be famous! It’s going to give interviews: “It’s not so easy being the Dark Ages, there are many problems: I think I need some therapy, et cetera.” You get the picture? Only Lacan can do justice to this over-illuminated Dark Age, because only he has the obscurity to survive!’

‘Did you say, “used to live”?’ asked Sam tenaciously. ‘Do you mean Alan Oaks doesn’t live with her any more?’

‘Evidently, she has thrown him out,’ Didier confirmed.

‘So, are you still seeing her?’

‘She doesn’t want to see anybody,’ said Didier, ‘but we are old friends, and so she allows me to bring her some food, some wine: the bare necessities.’

‘I see,’ said Sam.

‘She knows she is living at the end of civilization,’ said Didier, ‘because I am the one who told her!’ He burst out laughing. ‘Everybody thinks they understand the joke of reality TV, but the real joke is that there is no other reality! There can be no civilization because we are living in the desert of the Real. All our experience has been mediated by a system whose tyranny is precisely that no one controls it. Its tyranny is the absence of the tyrant! We have made a catastrophic progress since Bentham’s Panoptic prison: we no longer need the supervision of The Other, we are prisoners of our own gaze! When we think we are having an original thought, we are in fact remembering an episode from the soap opera of global capitalism. Our most private fantasies have already been marketed…’

‘Yes, well, never mind the end of civilization,’ Sam interrupted him, ‘what about the end of my relationship with Katherine?’

‘That is a personal matter,’ said Didier. ‘Ask me about the nature of the human condition, or the limits of language, but you and Katherine, this fragile human relationship, it’s too complex.’ Didier allowed himself a little giggle at the idea that there was a subject too complex for his critical capacities. ‘But what is love, really?’ he went on. ‘When we speak of the game we call “love”, what…’

Sam said goodbye hastily, before hearing Didier’s views on this important topic. He needed to take in all this news. He was delighted that Katherine was no longer living with Alan, but annoyed that Didier was still sleeping with her. On the other hand, she couldn’t be expected to put up with his preposterous theorizing for much longer. Sam realized that he would have to keep in touch with Didier in order to choose the right time to re-submit his application to Katherine. If she went off with some entirely new lover, his access to her would become even more tenuous.

He got up from his desk and collapsed, with a sigh, onto the sofa in the centre of his living room. In that moment of slight exaggeration, Didier’s last question returned to him reproachfully, and he couldn’t help wondering whether love could really consist of an unpleasant combination of obsession, self-pity, rivalry, lust and daydreaming. These characteristics didn’t seem to distinguish it from the rest of life, except by their intensity. He was allowing Katherine to act on him like one of Didier’s absent tyrants, rather than another suffering human being. He must pull himself together and make an effort to imagine what she was going through.