Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

‘Of course, sir,’ said the tailor, turning Sonny gently towards the mirror and running his hands appreciatively down the sides of the dinner jacket. ‘Just as I thought, sir, it might have been made for you.’

Sonny was so elated by his new purchase that he decided to walk the length of Savile Row, telling the driver to wait for him on the far corner. He strolled down the street, glancing into the broad windows of renowned tailors, each with its trio of headless mannequins, displaying a variety of such alluring costumes that by the time he reached Burlington Gardens, Sonny found his imagination was already drifting towards an alternative costume. Why not take a week’s deer stalking in Scotland? On the day ordained for his revenge, he would have a plane waiting to take him to Inverness. Under the circumstances it would be eminently plausible for him to be wearing a pale green tweed such as he’d seen a few windows down, with a faint sky blue over-check, a cream silk shirt with a simple dark green or golden brown knitted tie. If the police questioned him about wearing these emphatically country clothes in the middle of Mayfair, he need only mention the shooting lodge he had taken in the Highlands and show them evidence of his imminent plane flight, and their suspicions would dissolve. They wouldn’t bother to open the boot of his car, and if they did, what could be more natural than to find a deer-stalking rifle lying innocently in its case?

A gun! Of course, he needed a gun! Sonny pressed a steadying hand on the roof of his car. He felt like a traveller who arrives at the check-in desk, only to realize that he has left his passport on the dressing table at home. How could he have forgotten? Back in Badanpur he had a splendid hunting rifle: the very weapon with which his grandfather had shot over two hundred tigers. One couldn’t shoot two hundred tigers nowadays without buying them first from several city zoos. There wouldn’t be much sport in releasing a bewildered urban tiger into the wild and magnificent, if somewhat shrunken, forests of Badanpur. The wretched tiger would probably be mobbed by gazelles, like an eligible schoolboy surrounded by insatiable women at his first big dance!

The red tape involved in trying to get his grandfather’s rifle sent over from India would no doubt outweigh the atavistic pleasure and lyrical beauty of using it to destroy his detractors. Sonny got into his car and ordered the driver to return him to the hotel.

He was soon beached on a pink sofa in the Arnold Bennett suite, among the wreckage of a Full English tea. Suddenly feeling the melancholy of those empty plates, he pinched the last few strands of watercress and placed them listlessly in his mouth. Planning a murder was such a lonely business and such a strain on the nerves.

The phone rang, lifting him out of his torpor. For a moment he wondered if he could face answering it, but the prospect of alleviating his loneliness got the better of him.

‘Auntie!’

‘Sonny, my dear, how are you?’ said Auntie, without pausing for an answer. ‘I’m planning a little trip to London. There’s been such a hullabaloo about Palace , I thought I should come over in person. Apparently, I’ve written a great novel, which I suppose is true, but really I set out to write a cookery book. It’s too amusing, when I think of all the people who are struggling to write a great novel, that I’ve done it without even noticing.’

‘Quite,’ said Sonny drily. ‘Will you be bringing Mansur with you?’ he asked, trying not to sound as inspired as he felt.

‘Why would I want that brute to come to London with me?

‘Well,’ said Sonny, improvising wildly, ‘my back has completely gone , I mean completely , and I need someone to carry me around.’

‘Can’t Claridge’s help?’ said Auntie irritably.

‘Well, you know how it is in the West,’ said Sonny, ‘everyone is so spoilt; they’ve lost any idea of service or gratitude. Only this morning a beggar I’d been showering with gifts chased me down the street! Instead of thanking me, she completely lost her temper! I need someone who will sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed, without complaining. I’ll take care of his fare, of course.’

‘Very well,’ said Auntie with a click of her tongue.

When the conversation was over, Sonny clapped his hands with delight. He had always coveted Mansur, Auntie’s ferocious nightwatchman. He sometimes thought that Mansur took more pride in the Badanpur clan than Sonny himself, if such a thing were possible. The man was a human mountain. There would be no need to provide him with a fire-arm; he could tear apart the impudent judges with his bare hands.

Sonny felt himself irradiated by a divine presence. He saw now that all the trials of the day had been Krishna’s way of protecting him from the strain of personally dispatching Malcolm Craig, MP. His ancestor Krishna had sent him Mansur. Truly, the gods were on his side.

The only luxury left to Alan was that brief passage before he was fully awake, before the hazy disorientation that surrounded his drugged sleep was replaced by the solid horror of his circumstances. The woman he loved, the woman he had left his wife for, had thrown him out. His pleas to be taken back by Katherine had been utterly ignored, and his humiliating but pragmatic request to be taken back by Marilyn had been angrily rejected.

He moved into a hotel near his office in Pimlico. It was cheap in every respect, except for the cost of spending a night there. When he returned from work each evening, he pressed the trembling orange light switch in his corridor, buying a few fluorescent seconds to fit the key into his bedroom door. A man at the peak of his training might have opened the door in time, but for the forlorn and drunken Alan it was out of the question. After feeling around the keyhole in the dark, stabbing his finger a couple of times, and finally unlocking the door, he stumbled into a room that made him long to go out again. The dingy net curtains were disturbed by a draught from the ill-fitting window; the mustard yellow bedspread was made of a synthetic fabric that must have originally been designed for experiments in static electricity; and on a small stained tray, next to sachets of instant coffee that had withstood generations of indifference, there were three little plastic pots of milk whose claims to long life made his own seem all the more tenuous.

The hotel’s proximity to his office lost its charm once the Russian proprietor of Page and Turner sacked Alan for his failure to submit Consequences to the Elysian committee, and for Katherine’s subsequent threats of defection. It had long been rumoured that Yuri (as everyone chose to call him, preferring not to embark on the polysyllabic slalom course of his surname) had been drawn to the august and bankrupt firm of Page and Turner by his fascination with Katherine Burns rather than his passion for English letters. Either way, he had acquired it, and its debts, for one pound. The world was evenly and quite heatedly divided over the question of whether Yuri and Katherine had slept together. Alan had the misfortune of knowing the truth. Katherine had granted Yuri a few nights and then manufactured a stricken conscience over going to bed with a married man. Mrs Yuri was known to be the merciless partner, who took care of the brutalities of her husband’s business, freeing him to be relatively gallant and agreeable. During the breakup of their brief affair, Katherine had known that Yuri would not make any reckless gestures, or even mendacious claims about leaving his wife. Instead, he softened Katherine with a persistent rain of opera tickets and orchids, as well as a gigantic advance they both knew she would never earn out.