Lost for Words: A Novel (11 page)

Didier paused, waiting for a second preposterous paradox to pop into his head. He was
en pleine forme,
no doubt about that. Would another espresso send him spiralling into a circular but inconclusive sterility, or keep him riding on the rushing and glittering wave of
La Pensée
? Before he could decide, the ping of an incoming email drew his attention to the lower corner of the screen. He would usually have ignored an email in the midst of writing, but this one was from Katherine and might require a quick reply. He clicked on his Mail icon and read her message.

Didier, you’ll probably think me very cowardly to tell you this by email, but I don’t feel that I can go on being with you. I know this is the second time and that you’ll think I shouldn’t have taken you back if I wasn’t serious, but my restlessness is, as you might say, structural and not personal. I would have left whoever I was with at this point, because I need continual change to keep me ahead of the wolf pack – whatever that is.

I am going to Italy with a (girl) friend for two weeks. I have an inkling of a new novel, and want to see if I can start it there. You’re welcome to stay in the flat until I get back.

Please forgive me, and don’t cut me off from your wonderful company, unless you have to.

Love, K

Didier felt the glittering wave collapse around him and found himself tumbling and spinning, and struggling to know which way was up. How could she do that? How could she suddenly do that?

He thought of Lacan’s opaque but strangely compelling remark: ‘Woman does not exist, which does not mean that she cannot be the object of desire’. Whatever charm this insight had once held for him, it slipped through his grasp as he groped for a sane response to Katherine’s email.

She had ruined a day’s writing. That, at least, was a concrete starting point for his resentment. Mercifully, his focus on lost writing reminded him that he would one day infold his present suffering into a masterful analysis of Desire, or Love, or Delusion; it hardly mattered: he would perform a vivisection without anaesthetic on any abstract nouns that presumed to rule his life. He knew it would be some time before he could gather enough detachment for that task. Rome wasn’t deconstructed in
a
day, he thought, immediately typing the sentence on to his screen, to see if he felt the return of some measure of control. He did not.

Didier got up from his desk and suddenly swept the coffee cup from its ledge of papers, smashing it against the wall of Katherine’s drawing room. He would have his revenge, he didn’t yet know what it would be, but he would write something about Love, or Delusion, or Desire that she would never forget. As this thought died out, Didier pictured himself sweeping the coffee cup against the wall, and suspected there was something staged about the gesture. Yes, he had been in the stupidity of his unconscious and its mechanical discharge of emotion. He wished he could have the cup back, so that he could experience the full tension between the gestural cliché and the more subtle and refreshing operations of his intellect, and then refuse the gesture. He sat down again and typed out a sentence.

Impulsiveness always points to the absence of spontaneity.

That was better; he could work with that.

In the meantime, he had joined Sam and Alan in Katherine’s
salon des refusés
.
Would he try to preserve the dignity of having lasted a few more weeks than either of his rivals, or join them in an enclave of nostalgia and bitterness? There were several emails from Sam he had not answered, because of the danger of being unavoidably (or structurally, as Katherine would want him to say, so as to enforce the tyranny of English facetiousness) patronizing. He might now be able to reply to Sam, but first he would reply to Katherine.

Didier got up again and started pacing the room. ‘The wolf pack’ she was keeping ahead of, that was the way in. He felt the richness of its hermeneutic potential. Once he started interpreting something, the problem was how to stop. All he needed was a first sentence, and one more espresso.

21

Malcolm had insisted that Tobias attend the meeting to decide the Short List, and when he arrived he was an object of great curiosity, not only for his novelty but also for his annoying good looks, which had an immediate and evident impact on the three female members of the committee. His long hair, long scarf and long overcoat emphasized his tallness, and left Malcolm feeling small and portly, as well as jealous. He was determined to hide these feelings behind a show of warmth and cordiality, since he wanted to be able to count on Tobias’s vote as well as Penny’s.

After the introductions and the greetings, the meeting got off to a surprisingly acrimonious start with Vanessa immediately going on the attack with the ridiculous claim that
The Palace Cookbook
wasn’t a novel at all. Although Malcolm had not yet got round to reading it, he knew that the distinguished old firm of Page and Turner would not have sent in a book that wasn’t a novel, nor was Jo likely to be so confused that she couldn’t tell a novel from a cookbook. In any case, Jo turned out to have an impressive command of all the right jargon.

‘I’m surprised that you don’t recognize its qualities,’ she said to Vanessa. ‘You claim to be an expert on contemporary fiction and yet, faced with a ludic, postmodern, multi-media masterpiece, you naively deny that it’s a novel at all.’

‘It’s not a novel,’ said Vanessa, ‘it’s a cookbook. It’s called
The Palace Cookbook
because it’s a cookbook.’ She let out a growl of childish fury.

‘It tells the story of a family,’ said Jo, admirably calm under fire, ‘through cooking. What could be more universal, after all, than the language of food?’

‘Inuit, Catalan, Gaelic,
any
fucking language,’ said Vanessa, ‘because food isn’t a language, it’s something you eat.’

‘There’s no need to use that sort of tone,’ said Penny. She’d had just about enough of Vanessa’s effing and blinding.

‘On the contrary,’ said Vanessa, ‘I have no choice, because I’m talking to people who are immune to argument and have no idea how to read a book.’

‘I
loved
the chicken curry with lime and cardamom,’ said Tobias, disarming the warring Amazons with his languid charm. Underneath his overcoat, which he had discarded in a window seat, he turned out to be wearing a faded purple T-shirt, frayed jeans and a pair of battered cowboy boots.

‘Well, there you are,’ said Jo. ‘It’s important that it works at a “realistic” level, while simultaneously operating as the boldest metafictional performance of our time.’

Malcolm, slightly irritated by Tobias’s soothing impact on the women, couldn’t help challenging him a little too sharply on which books he thought should be on the Short List. Tobias leant back, sweeping the hair from his forehead and gazing at the ceiling, and then with no more introduction than a sudden return to an upright position, and an open-handed gesture, he began to recite in a rich mellow voice.

‘
There was scarce a lad in all of Warwickshire more comely than young Master William, with the tresses of his hair, dark as the raven’s wing, tumbling almost to his shoulders, and his cheeks like a pair of ripe English apples, and his eyes as blue as a summer’s day, only more lovely and more temperate. She might be no more than his nurse, but young Rosalind could have sworn by the Holy Body of Our Saviour that she loved William as much as ever a mother loved her own child. That morning she had bought him an orange in the market place without her mistress’s permission, and she feared lest she be chided for a wanton spendthrift, but she had only done it to show little William what a wondrous fruit it was, and to tell him how clever men in Italy had discovered that the whole world was round, just like an orange, only different in size and colour.

Comparing one thing with another was one of William’s favourite games. Many’s the time the two of them had tarried in the damp grass, under the ever changing sky, gazing at the great clouds, like burnished galleons sailing through the bright flood of the firmament, and Master William would say, ‘How like a camel, sweet Rosalind,’ and she would say, ‘Most like a camel, Master William,’ and then he would say, ‘Methinks ’tis more like a towered citadel than a camel,’ and she would say, ‘Most like, my love,’ not wanting to contradict him in the smallest wise, but wanting to make sure that he loved and trusted the unparagoned treasure of his green imagination.’

‘Magical,’ said Tobias, ‘absolutely magical.’

‘Fancy being able to remember all that,’ said Penny.

‘And what about
The Greasy Pole
?’ said Malcolm.

‘Oh, it has my vote,’ said Tobias.

‘Good,’ said Malcolm.

‘And I’m blown away by
wot u starin at
,’ said Tobias, ‘fascinating, harrowing and fiercely original.’

‘It certainly isn’t original,’ said Vanessa, ‘it’s just sub-Irvine Welsh.’

‘It’s relevant, Vanessa. Re-le-vant,’
said Jo.

‘I prefer revelatory,’ said Vanessa.

‘Why? Because it’s got more syllables?’

Penny let out an involuntary guffaw.

‘Your problem, Vanessa,’ said Malcolm, ‘is that it’s not a novel about a middle-class family whose worst nightmare is that they might have to take little Bertie and Fiona out of their fee-paying schools because Daddy didn’t get his obscene Christmas bonus from the bank this year.’

‘Spare us the class warrior,’ said Vanessa, ‘especially when you have a car waiting outside to take you back to your Georgian house in Barton Street. The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much “relevance”. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.’

Malcolm felt it was time to defuse the atmosphere with a cup of tea. He had feigned delight before the beginning of the meeting when Penny presented him with a gigantic caterer’s kettle he could barely imagine lifting when it was empty, let alone after it was loaded with gallons of boiling water, but now he was grateful to be able to get up from the conference table and occupy himself with making the tea. The simple change of position made him feel more like an informed eavesdropper than the chairman of the board. He could hear Vanessa’s exasperation as she gradually realized that the majority of her so-called ‘literary’ novels were not going to make it on to the Short List. She kept trying to argue that the other novels lacked the qualities that characterized a work of literature: ‘depth, beauty, structural integrity, and an ability to revive our tired imaginations with the precision of its language’. The poor woman didn’t seem to realize that what counted in the adult world was working out compromises between actual members of a committee that reflected the forces at work in the wider society, like Parliament in relation to the nation as a whole. Vanessa had taken on the role of a doomed backbencher, making speeches to an empty chamber about values that simply had no place in the modern world. Frankly, he felt rather sorry for her. However, he started to focus more keenly when they came round to
The Bruce
and he heard her claim that it was more or less plagiarized from an obscure Edwardian novel called
The Tartan King
.

‘All he’s done is update some of the diction, and spice up the plot with a few scenes stolen from
Braveheart
,’ said Vanessa.

‘Ah,
Braveheart
,’ said Tobias, slipping effortlessly into a Scottish accent. ‘
Aye, fight and you may die; run and you will live, at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they can take our lives, but they can never take our freedom!
’ Tobias let loose a rousing cheer from an imaginary army of blue-faced warriors. ‘Terrific stuff,’ he added.

‘Thank you, Tobias, for reminding us of a scene which, if memory serves, is not in
The Bruce
,’ said Malcolm, struggling to tilt the unwieldy kettle over the edge of a teapot. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of it, Vanessa,’ he went on, ‘but all of Shakespeare’s plots are lifted wholesale from other sources, and I haven’t heard any complaints about
his
work recently. I admire your idealism, but I’m sorry to say, there’s nothing new under the sun.’

‘There’s certainly nothing new about that expression,’ said Vanessa. ‘But that’s the whole point, if a writer can’t cut through the half-truths and lazy assumptions of cliché and platitude, then he can’t make a work of art. We don’t care about Shakespeare’s derivative plots because he transforms them with the brilliant originality of his language.’

‘Personally,’ said Tobias, ‘I agree. If this imposter didn’t write the book, I don’t see why we should give him the prize.’

Malcolm, who had been smiling sadly but indulgently at Vanessa’s misguided views, allowed a frown to darken his face. He lifted the brimming teapot with both hands and started to carry it, somewhat stiffly, towards the conference table.

Jo, who had been oddly silent until that moment, suddenly saw her opportunity and spoke up.

‘Absolutely,’ she said, in her most matter-of-fact tone, as if she had no personal investment in the outcome. ‘I’m afraid that I agree with Vanessa and Tobias on this one. We will have to rule out
The Bruce
. It simply isn’t fair on the candidates who’ve written their own novels to include a writer who’s copied out someone else’s.’

‘Unbelievable!’ muttered Malcolm, jerking his hands upwards in a reflexive gesture of protest.

Penny later told him that she could remember every detail with dreamlike clarity: the scalding tea spilling onto Malcolm’s hands, his cry of pain, the teapot flying through the air and smashing against the fireplace, its shards scattering in every direction and the dark brew splashing onto the fake logs and soaking the beige carpet.

The meeting, like the teapot, soon broke up and dispersed. The Short List was not yet finalized, but it was getting late, the atmosphere was strained, and everyone agreed to continue the process by email.