Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

‘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 .’

‘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.