Lost for Words: A Novel (3 page)

‘Don’t worry, darling, I’m on my way,’ she reassured Nicola when she suddenly remembered what she was supposed to be doing.

‘Don’t fucking bother,’ Nicola shouted. ‘I’m going to miss the show again anyway.’

‘I don’t know if it’s escaped your notice,’ said Penny, ‘but I’m part of the team that’s been put in charge of English Literature this year and, whether you like it or not, that’s a pretty big responsibility.’

‘Oh, piss off,’ said Nicola and hung up.

Penny’s own childhood had taken place during the Second World War. Her earliest memory was of sitting in her nursery one afternoon, playing with her favourite toy, a lovely doll’s house with a pretty red and white chequered tablecloth in its kitchen, and a little kitten sitting curled up by the fire in the living room. Suddenly, with a dreadful screeching sound, a hole appeared in the floor only a few inches from where she was sitting, and her doll’s house disappeared. A bomb had dropped straight onto her house, ripping through the roof, the nursery, her parents’ bedroom, the dining room, and finally getting lodged in the basement, unexploded.

Nowadays that would mean instant counselling, but in wartime Britain you picked yourself up, avoiding the gaping hole in the middle of the room, and carried on. And what’s more, you remembered to count your blessings. Yes, there was an unexploded bomb in the foundations of your childhood home, undermining its rental value and putting your parents under considerable financial strain, but you never forgot that if there was one thing worse than an unexploded bomb, it was a bomb that
did
explode.

All her life Penny felt that showing emotion was a sign of weakness. Emotions were what other people were allowed to have. She was there to help, and although she might not have all the answers, or even a very clear idea of what people were talking about when they talked about their feelings, she could make sure that the kettle was on, or the gin and tonic ready to hand, so that things would start to look better for those who were struggling.

Penny scrolled down to her latest paragraph. She wanted to get at least a thousand words written before lunch. But she was also determined to shake off her dependency on some highly addictive software called Ghost and the two ambitions might be hard to reconcile.

At the beginning of her trilogy, Penny had liked basic
Ghost so much that she went on to buy Gold Ghost and Gold Ghost Plus. When you typed in a word, ‘refugee’ for instance, several useful suggestions popped up: ‘clutching a pathetic bundle’, or ‘eyes big with hunger’; for ‘assassin’ you got ‘ice water running through his veins’, and ‘his eyes were cold narrow slits’. Under ‘shoes’ you got ‘badly scuffed’, ‘highly polished’, ‘seen better days’, and ‘bought in Paris’. If you typed ‘river’ into Gold Ghost Plus, you got ‘dark flood flecked with gold’, or ‘wearing her evening gown of fiery silk’. When you looked up ‘thought’, you found ‘food for’ and ‘perish the’. She could scroll and click, scroll and click all day, with the word count going up in leaps and bounds.

She found herself getting weekly crushes on writing tricks of one sort or another: cricket metaphors, when everyone started playing with a straight bat, or dropping an easy catch; or it was descriptions of the weather that set her imagination on fire, and clouds appeared in the sky like ‘big sponges’, or covered cities like ‘a wet blanket’. Her word of the week last week had been ‘imperceptibly’. One of her characters had ‘glanced imperceptibly’, while another had ‘imperceptibly moved her hand’. The action had generally taken on an imperceptible air, which set it apart from a run of the mill thriller.

Roger and Out
was the third volume of her trilogy. When all was said and done, the first volume,
Follow That Car
, had been tepidly received, but the sequel,
Roger That
,
secured a smashing review in the
Daily Express
. She had the key quote, ‘
Feathers knows her stuff
’, blown up, framed and hanging in the guest loo of her cottage in Suffolk. She sometimes had a funny feeling when she realized that she would soon be parted from the characters she’d been living with all these months. Was it sadness? She wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, she wasn’t going to dwell on it.

5

Didier’s arm was looped over Katherine’s shoulder, one hand spread across her still-pounding heart, the other cupped over the hard curve of her navel ring.

Didier wondered again if there was not something excessive, something obscene, about his enjoyment of Katherine’s body. Once its material desires had been satisfied, commodity fetishism moved on to amorous and spiritual dimensions. He was living, engulfed by a mental fog analogous to religious fervour, in a late capitalist utopia of obligatory permissiveness, with its injunction to gratify ever more perverse desires.

‘What does it mean when we say…’ Didier began.

‘Shhh,’ said Katherine. Half her motive for sex was to let her mind fall silent. Didier’s compulsion to talk, to analyse everything, to live in a perpetual semiotic frenzy, was one of the reasons their affair had been so brief. She also didn’t want Didier to think that they were having a general revival. She was just dealing with the emergency, or taking advantage of the opportunity, it was hard to know which, of Alan’s absence. They had worked hard on editing her novel when she got back from India and then he had gone to a conference in Guttenberg on the future of the book
.
For him that counted as work, but she was left dangerously unemployed.

Shhh, she must stop as well. She had only just finished making love and she was already chattering. She thought of an empty train shooting through an empty station at night, an image of her mind without words. How beautifully unnecessary they seemed at that moment, but soon it would be rush hour, with hardly enough words getting off the crowded train to allow any words from the crowded platform to get on. Everything congested with words, everything spoken for; conversations, dialogues, monologues, interior monologues, all the way down, words staining the marrow, pretending that nothing existed without them. She almost wanted to make love again to get back to silence, but Sam was coming for a drink in half an hour, with the inevitable punctuality of a lovesick man. She must get ready.

Complacencies of the peignoir, or power shower: which word cluster would get her?

‘Okay, I get up now,’ said Didier, taking control of his rejection, pushing aside the bedclothes and picking up his shirt from the floor.

She gave him what he wanted, rolling over and raising herself enough to lean against his back.

‘That was so nice,’ she said, kissing him on his shoulder.

‘What does it mean that I’m your ex-lover when I have just come inside you?’ said Didier.

‘It means you got lucky,’ said Katherine.

‘Maybe I get lucky again,’ said Didier, turning towards her and lunging with his mouth.

Katherine allowed herself to be kissed.

‘I have a friend coming in twenty minutes,’ she said, with regret and impatience.

‘The next man!’ said Didier. ‘
Fais
attention!
One day air-traffic control goes on strike and there is a terrible accident!’

‘You can stay, if you like.’

‘I’m sorry, but voyeurism is not my taste,’ said Didier.

‘He’s just a friend,’ she said, getting off the bed and switching on the bathroom light. Katherine was bored by jealousy; she had been bombarded by so much of it, there hadn’t been time to find out if she had any of her own.

‘What does it mean, this superposition of two impossible categories: lover / ex-lover…’

Katherine turned on the shower, missing the conclusion of Didier’s penetrating enquiry. By the time she got out, he was fully clothed and sitting in the armchair in the corner of her bedroom.

‘It creates the space of pure paradox, like the ephemeral emergence of a particle from the quantum vacuum – the vacuum which is
not
a vacuum!’

‘Sorry, but have you been talking while I was in the shower, or did you just start up again when I came out?’ she asked.

‘In the end, what difference does it make?’ said Didier.

‘Well, if I missed a chunk, that might explain why I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she said, letting her towel drop to the ground.

Didier fell silent.

‘
Putain
,’ he finally managed, after she had stepped into her knickers. ‘This is what it is like to be Actaeon: you know that you will be torn apart by the hunting dogs, but you don’t care!’

‘I don’t think he did know,’ said Katherine, emerging from her T-shirt.

‘Of course he didn’t know!’ said Didier. ‘But
we
know, because we do not live in the myth, but in the
knowledge
of the myth. Evidently, the collective unconscious has become the collective self-conscious!’

The doorbell rang.

‘Just in time,’ said Katherine, doing up the button on her jeans. ‘I mean I got my jeans on just in time.’

‘Do not worry,’ said Didier, following her into the hall. ‘My narcissism is not offended, in fact it may be gratified by the idea that this interruption was “just in time” to save you from my theories!’

‘Hi, Sam,’ said Katherine to the hazy image on her entryphone, pressing the buzzer to let him in.

‘You pay me the compliment of resistance,’ Didier continued. ‘There can be no resistance without the fear of penetration!’

Katherine took Didier’s head in her hands and gave him a long slow kiss, knowing that even he had to stop talking while her tongue was in his mouth. She only broke away when there was a knock on the door.

‘And so you penetrate me instead,’ Didier concluded triumphantly.

Sam could tell that Katherine had just been in bed with Didier. Her hair was wet from the shower and he smelt ostentatiously of sex. Sam also knew that the grey-haired Frenchman was not supposed to be her current lover. Her openness to infidelity filled him with an optimism that her choice of infidelity discouraged.

Katherine introduced the rivalrous men and took them through to the drawing room. An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?

‘So you got your novel in before the deadline,’ said Sam.

‘Yes,’ said Katherine, wondering what it would be like to go to bed with both of them at once.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Didier. ‘The famous Elysian. In France we have the Concour. It is
completely
corrupt, and for that reason the rules are absolutely clear. That is the paradox of corruption: it is much more legalistic than the law! But this Elysian,
c’est du
pur casino
.’

‘I have an idea,’ said Katherine, determined to go ahead now that Didier had started talking. ‘Perhaps we should have a drink first.’

6

Although he could see almost nothing through his dark glasses, Sonny felt that he needed their protection against the phosphorescent ocean of clicking and flashing
paparazzi
that might well be churning restlessly, somewhere beyond passport control, awaiting his arrival. The gutter press would only be doing its vulgar and familiar work, feeding an insatiable public with images of an Indian grandee who had stooped to conquer English Letters with his masterwork,
The Mulberry Elephant
. He understood their hunger and was modestly dressed for the occasion. He had just squeezed back into the slate-grey raw-silk frock coat that the pretty little air hostess fetched for him from the First Class cupboard. Underneath his frock coat, he wore a long pale-peach shirt and loose white trousers, pinched at the ankle and finished off with a pair of his signature yellow slippers. As he left his seat, he draped his shoulder, carelessly but perfectly, with a folded beige shawl of a surpassing softness that could only be achieved by weaving together the almost non-existent hairs of several hundred unborn Kashmiri mountain goats. He had one of the genuine pre-war articles, not one of these fake things they sold on every street corner in Paris and Milano.

His shawl was not only proof against England’s loutish climate, it also spared him from contact with objects, like doorknobs and light switches, that could have been handled by almost anybody; murderers and butchers, moneylenders and lavatory attendants. It could also be called upon to wrap around materials abhorrent to his sensitive touch, like the slippery, effeminate plastic used in plastic bags.

For the first fourteen years of his life he had never even set eyes on a plastic bag. Confined to the palace and its magnificent grounds, more varied and luxuriant than the Botanical Gardens of Kew, filled with peacocks and cockatoos and herds of antelope, he would ride around with his tutors and his equerry and the rest of his entourage, one day on an elephant, the next in a pony and trap, never seeing other children and seldom seeing his parents, but wanting for nothing among all the delightful follies and spectacles arranged for his entertainment; the orchestras that struck up as he rounded a corner, or the famous battles re-enacted for his birthday. On an island in the middle of the Home Lake, a sadhu had been persuaded to take up residence under a baobab tree. With his body covered in ash and hair down to his waist, he meditated all day with imperturbable concentration. Sonny’s tutor encouraged him to test the holy man’s resolve by emptying baskets full of harmless grass snakes over his head, or setting fire to his loin cloth, only putting it out at the very last moment. What fun they had! And yet one day, when Sonny was fourteen, as he was galloping around his private racecourse, after winning yet another race against the Household Jockeys, he was suddenly overcome by a longing to go beyond the palace gates and see the city, which sometimes betrayed its presence as a faint smudge in the air, complicating the glorious sunsets which were such a talking point among guests at the palace. His father had forbidden him to leave the grounds, and Sonny spent many weeks planning his secret expedition and accumulating what he imagined was an appropriate disguise in which to move unnoticed among his people.