Lost for Words: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘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.

  Before Penny could decide what to make of David’s rudeness, she heard her name being called.

  ‘Ah, Penny, there you are!’ said Malcolm. ‘David, good to see you! I’m afraid we’ve got rather a situation on our hands. Vanessa can’t be persuaded to choose either of the finalists. She simply won’t budge. The only other way is for one of us to change our minds. I wonder if you could track down Tobias and see if he’s prepared to save the day by voting for wot u starin at.’

  ‘I was going to take David up in the lift,’ said Penny, who couldn’t help marvelling at the way Malcolm had bounced back after the Greasy Pole incident.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Malcolm, ‘I need to have a word with him about precedents. Could the prize be awarded jointly if we can’t break this gridlock?’

  ‘There is a precedent for that: 1978,’ said David immediately, ‘but it won’t be popular with the Elysian board. They like a clear victor.’

  ‘Well, I’d better hunt down Tobias and appeal to his team spirit,’ said Penny. ‘See you upstairs.’

  Malcolm eventually managed to get inside the small panelled lift with David, and push the button for the first floor.

  ‘You’ll be sitting next to Mrs Wo,’ he said. ‘She’s the wife of the man whose corporation has taken over the Elysian Group.’

  ‘Bloody Chinks – they’re taking over everything,’ said David.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you won’t be putting it quite like that,’ Malcolm hesitated as the lift jerked to a halt without the doors opening.

  ‘Oh, you can’t stop me now,’ said David. ‘It’s the privilege of old age: I can speak my mind at last, after a lifetime of diplomatic toadying.’

  Malcolm pressed the first-floor button several times to no effect. Although the news that David was renouncing his legendary charm and was planning to make a xenophobic attack on the evening’s most important guests would normally have alarmed him, it hardly had any impact thanks to the spasm of anxiety he felt at the prospect of being trapped in a broken lift. He pressed the ground-floor button, and the second-floor button without getting any response.

  ‘Are we stuck?’ asked David.

  ‘I’m afraid it looks that way.’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ shouted David, swinging one of his walking sticks against the thudding metal doors with surprising violence. ‘I have to tell you that I suffer quite badly from claustrophobia.’

  ‘Please calm down,’ said Malcolm firmly. ‘We have an emergency telephone, and we’ll soon have everything under control.’

  ‘Don’t panic!’ shouted David a second time, poking his other stick at the ceiling and smashing one of the light bulbs.

  * * *

  Sam and Katherine arrived early at their table and quickly changed the place cards so as to be together. They stroked each other’s thighs under the table, sometimes dreamily, sometimes fervently, unconcerned with the world around them, or so they thought, until a very agitated woman came and sat down next to Sam.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you,’ she said, ‘but I feel that there’s something I must tell you.’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said Sam. ‘You are?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m Vanessa Shaw. I’m one of this year’s judges, and I really wanted to apologize to you personally.’

  ‘What? You voted against The Frozen Torrent?’

  ‘No, no, I voted for it.’

  ‘I forgive you,’ said Sam. ‘We forgive her, don’t we?’ he said to Katherine.

  ‘Yeah, you’re forgiven,’ said Katherine, smiling, while her nails grazed the hollow behind Sam’s knee.

  ‘No, you don’t seem to understand,’ said Vanessa. ‘I wasn’t able to get your book through. It was by far the best piece of writing; in fact it was the only book of any literary merit at all. I’m really sorry – you should have won.’

  Vanessa’s voice faded; a film of tears formed over her dark blue eyes.

  ‘You probably shouldn’t be telling me this, should you?’ said Sam.

  ‘I’m sorry, of course you’re right,’ said Vanessa. ‘I was afraid I would miss you after the announcement, and I wanted you to know how passionately I feel about your book and what a terrible injustice it is. The only consolation I can offer is that The Frozen Torrent will last; it’ll be read long after all the other books on this list have been forgotten.’

  ‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Sam. ‘Time grinds everything to dust, but one or two things are hard enough to dent the millstones and fall through intact – on the first round.’

  Sam picked up the menu of that evening’s dinner, as if to distract himself from this astral perspective of human affairs. He ran his eyes over the delights in store.

  ‘By the way, do you know Katherine Burns?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ said Vanessa, ‘pleased to meet you. I’m a great admirer of your work. Do you have a novel coming out soon?’

  ‘Next week,’ said Katherine.

  ‘But why wasn’t it submitted to us?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Katherine, wondering how much detail to go into, and finally opting for opaque simplicity, ‘they fucked up.’

  ‘I can’t exactly thank you for what you’ve told me,’ said Sam, ‘but it may save us the trouble of working our way through the goat’s cheese, beetroot and salmon mousse.’

  He turned to Katherine, pressing his palm gently but emphatically against her lower back. ‘Shall we go, or shall we stay?’ he asked.

  * * *

  Tobias gave an ingratiating smile to Mr and Mrs Wo, who were looking with what he took to be solemn displeasure at the empty chairs which should have been occupied, according to their stiff little place cards, by The Right Honourable Malcolm Craig, MP, Sir David Hampshire and Miss Penny Feathers.

  ‘I’m afraid we will have to start without the Chairman,’ said Mr Wo. ‘We’re on a tight schedule with the television broadcast.’

  Tobias sat down uneasily next to Mrs Wo, wondering where on earth the committee had fled to. He imagined himself having to improvise a speech about the importance of literature, the encouragement of new talent, the generosity of Shanghai Global Assets and, last but not least, the insufferable drabness of his fellow judges. Instead of a dinner jacket – the world’s dreariest uniform, which he would only consent to wear if he were asked to star in a West End production of a play about an eloquent head waiter – Tobias was wearing a black velvet frock coat, a double-breasted dark grey waistcoat, and a dark purple silk tie with a pearl pin. There was no doubt he looked good tonight. Not only that, but he had once memorized Shelley’s Defense of Poetry to impress his English teacher in a talent competition at school, so as to get the lead part in that summer’s production of Hamlet. The key bits about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world had stayed with him and would make an impressive introduction to the section on the importance of literature. There was also a striking phrase of Shelley’s, which had been a particular favourite of his English teacher’s, about ‘imagining that which we know’. He must try to work it in somewhere. As to the radical originality of this year’s winner, it would help to know which book he would be attributing that quality to.

  ‘Red or white?’ asked the waiter, rousing Tobias from his private thoughts.

  ‘Do you think you could lay your hands on a bottle of whisky?’ Tobias asked. ‘I’m allergi
c to wine, you see.’ He generally found a fake allergy was taken more seriously than a simple request.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, sir.’

  ‘You could just bring us the bottle. I’m sure Mr Wo would like a drop.’

  ‘My husband is a teetotaller,’ said Mrs Wo, putting her phone back into her evening bag.

  ‘Oh, well, I’ll have to dispatch it all on my own,’ said Tobias, with an amusingly martyred sigh. ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.’ Seeing that Mrs Wo was not especially amused by his allusion to the Scottish play, he switched smoothly to a tone of great seriousness.

  ‘So, are you a keen reader yourself, Mrs Wo? Forgive me, I really ought to know, but is it pronounced “wo” or “woo”?’

  “Wo – as in “woe is me”, something I can truly say,’ laughed Mrs Wo. ‘But to answer your question, Mr Benedict, I am reading Virginia Woolf’s notebooks at the moment; so fresh, with all the visual brilliance of the novels, but much more relaxed and natural. You agree?’

  ‘I worship the notebooks,’ said Tobias. ‘I was once asked to play Leonard Woolf in a film that never got made, but I devoured the notebooks for weeks.’

  ‘In China we put great emphasis on this naturalness, which of course can only come from the mastery of artifice.’

  ‘I can see you’ve been into these questions very deeply,’ said Tobias, twisting around to see if his whisky was on its way yet. He had snorted a couple of lines of coke in the loo and really needed to take the edge off. What he saw instead of the waiter was Sam Black, whom he recognized from the photograph on the dust jacket of The Frozen Torrent, weaving his way towards the door, with an extremely attractive woman close behind him. There was something definitive about their way of leaving.

  ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek,’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Mrs Wo.

  ‘Oh, I was just struggling to remember a quotation – about naturalness and so forth.’

  ‘Ah, there are so many!’ said Mrs Wo. ‘Picasso saying he could draw like Raphael when he was a child but it took him his whole life to learn how to draw like a child; or La Rochefoucauld…’

  ‘Ah, La Rochefoucauld,’ said Tobias, delighted at the discovery of a mutual friend.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Wo unexpectedly, inviting Tobias to turn around.

  Standing behind them was a muscular young man in a black suit, holding a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label.

  ‘When I heard you asking for whisky I texted my driver; we always keep a bottle in the car, in case one of our friends would like a “wee dram”,’ said Mrs Wo, giggling at her imitation of a Scottish accent.

  ‘That’s more than generous of you,’ said Tobias, in a Scottish accent of his own. ‘I must say, Mrs Wo, you’re a woman full of surprises! Let’s drink a toast to naturalness: art’s greatest achievement!’

  ‘With pleasure,’ said Mrs Wo.

  * * *

  Sonny was thoroughly disconcerted by Malcolm’s absence and quite unable to concentrate on his food, or even find time to cultivate his indignation at the insultingly remote table assigned to him at the very back of the room. The time had really come to tell Mansur where his duty lay. Sonny regretted that his chances of evading capture would be somewhat reduced by committing murder on live television, but the poetic justice of a public execution easily outweighed the almost certain loss of a faithful retainer.

  With great foresight Auntie had made Mansur bring a small picnic hamper in case the Elysian food turned out to be unsuitable. The main course of Beef Wellington could hardly have been more unsuitable for the Hindu party, and Mansur gradually distributed the contents of the creaking wicker hamper that nestled discreetly on the floor next to a fire extinguisher and a bright red bucket of sand.

  ‘Sonny!’ said Auntie, clasping his forearm, as if her chair alone couldn’t be expected to provide enough support under these conditions. ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened.’

  ‘I give up,’ said Sonny, still scanning the entrance in the hope of seeing Craig arrive.

  ‘The Russian gentleman to my right, who is the owner of the famous Page and Turner, has commissioned a memoir from me, all about the old days in Badanpur, before Independence and Partition: the glamour, the Durbars, the purdah, and the disastrous advent of modern India, Mrs Gandhi’s betrayal of the Constitutional guarantees offered to the princely states … are you all right?’

  Sonny, who had inhaled a pickled walnut on first hearing the news of Yuri’s commission, was bent double with a napkin pressed to his mouth, trying to muffle the coughing fit that shook his prodigious frame and flushed his face with blood.

  * * *

  ‘Now, look here,’ said Malcolm into the emergency phone, ‘I don’t want to be told to press the ground-floor button again, we’ve been through all that. I want you to send us a lift engineer immediately.’

  Malcolm listened for a while to the reply.

  ‘Where exactly are you?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘In Bhopal? Well, what earthly use are you to someone stuck in a lift in London?’

  David took another swing at the doors with his walking stick.

  ‘Please stop that,’ snapped Malcolm. ‘No, not you. I have someone in the lift with me who suffers from acute claustrophobia. Hello? Hello?’

  Malcolm hung up the emergency phone with an exasperated sigh, and took his own phone out of his breast pocket.

  ‘Oh, Christ, I haven’t got a signal.’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ said David, ‘I have one of these satellite phones – they’re frightfully expensive, but they work pretty well anywhere. The colonel of the SAS is a friend of mine and I happen to know that he’s dining in London tonight.’

  ‘Isn’t that going a bit far?’ said Malcolm. ‘What we really need is a lift engineer.’

  ‘In an emergency always go straight to the top,’ said David firmly. ‘There’s no point in cutting corners.’

  * * *

  ‘What direction do you see yourself taking the prize in?’ Jo asked Mr Wo, in a combative tone that suggested she was ready to fight any answer he gave, so it was no use trying to guess what she wanted to hear.

  ‘It’s a prize for literature,’ said Mr Wo. ‘I hope it will go in the direction of literature. My wife takes a great interest in these things. Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared, but my wife thinks that “least mediocre of the mediocre” is a discouraging title for a prize,’ Mr Wo couldn’t help laughing.

  Jo didn’t know where to begin. She disagreed with everything that Mr Wo had said, as well as with the assumptions behind everything he had said, but she was temporarily paralysed by the abundance of potential targets. Her hesitation gave Mr Wo the chance to speak again.

  ‘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 he
r. 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?’