Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

When Penny arrived back at her flat with her magnificent new Kettle, she couldn’t face listening to any more books, and yet the Elysian Prize still cast a shadow over the rest of her day, not just because she was off to dinner with Malcolm at the House of Commons, but also because of a recent incident that had left her somewhat shaken. A few days earlier, a diarist from a very well-known national newspaper had rung to ask what she felt about the ‘universal hostility’ to the Long List. Penny kept as cool as a cucumber and pointed out that during her days at the Foreign Office, she had got quite used to dealing with trouble spots and dissenting voices. And then, in order to counteract any impression of being stuck up, she emphasized the ordinary side of her life by adding, ‘I always had my daughter to go home to and help me keep my feet firmly on the ground.’ It frankly defied belief that the diarist had gone on to contact Nicola to get her side of the story.

‘She may have had me to go home to, but she was never at home when I got there,’ Nicola was quoted as saying. ‘Her feet were too firmly on the ground in her office, or at an independence ceremony in the middle of nowhere, or sucking up to the Americans at some conference. I hardly ever saw her, and even in her retirement she makes sure she’s too busy to do anything useful.’

Penny was lost for words when she read these remarks. That your own flesh and blood should find it necessary to be so unkind and unfair in public took her breath away. If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

After the initial sting, Penny set about wondering how she could repair relations with Nicola, who had always been hot-headed and was only lashing out because of the babysitting incident last month. Then Penny had a brainwave. There had been such a lot in the press about the odds betting shops were putting on the various novels, why not get Nicola to place a bet, not for Penny, of course, which would have been highly unethical, but for herself? She knew that Kentish Town needed a new roof, and a hot tip would have the further advantage of proving that Penny had no hard feelings about Nicola’s unforgivable treachery. It also removed the moral pressure on Penny to dig into her savings in order to protect her nearest and dearest from the elements. At 30–1 wot u starin at was pretty irresistible for someone who knew that it was one of the chairman’s favourites, and that he was a singularly impressive man whom Penny intended to support in every way she could.

Why should Sam let Katherine ruin his love for her? Did love have to disappear with her disappearance? Did he have to hate love because it wasn’t working out the way he wanted? Since he was going to think about her all day, one way or another, why not think about her as he always had, from the first time she sat next to him by chance at a concert, wearing a pair of faded pink tennis shoes and a soft blue overcoat, her hair still beaded with rain? The concert became the soundtrack of their proximity, the slightest pressure from her sleeve made him feel that his body was interfusing with hers and that he had been waiting all his life for this union.

It was hard not to react, not to feel humiliated by a unilateral longing, not to let pathology creep, like a mist under the door, into his reading of the situation. Despair was a worthy adversary, luring him towards contempt for Katherine, or jealousy of Didier, or pity for himself. The antidote to despair was not optimism — optimism was its staple diet, making him hope for something that was not the case and driving him back to despair. The only antidote was to embrace the despair and remain in love, to give the phrase ‘hopelessly in love’ its true meaning.

Why dim the lights when he really needed to tear down the grid? What was the use of having a drink, or going to an afternoon film, or catching a train, or going to bed with another woman, or being proud or being angry? Instead, when he was surfeited with Katherine’s absence and would rather have set fire to the curtains than go on thinking about it, he stayed a little longer in its ruthless company. Not to shut down, not to run away: that was his job, to stay open even when love took the form of pain. It had taken him this long to be wholehearted, and whatever Katherine did he was not going to retreat from that bewilderingly private victory.

He continued to communicate with her, without her. Just as reassuring the patient that he has no legs cannot cure the pain in a phantom limb, it was no use trying to stop Sam from speaking to Katherine just because she wasn’t in the room and couldn’t hear anything he said. He told her that his feelings for her had not become twisted or complicated, but were like a paused film that would resume exactly where she had left it, even if she took five or ten years to come back.

He found that he had been heated beyond his melting point by romantic love and, although it had failed, it still left him inclined to rush towards other kinds of love more readily than before. When he saw the news and heard the widow of a policeman, shot in Northern Ireland by the ‘Continuity IRA’, say that her husband had been a ‘good man’ and that her life was ‘ruined’ by his death, he burst into tears, watching carefully to see if his grief was exploiting hers. Instead, to his horror, he saw that his tears were the only natural response to her suffering, and to the suffering of the men who had killed her husband, and that he had spent his life defended against compassion by a practical and robust selfishness that would soon callous his responses again, if he allowed it to. The next morning he saw a child being dragged to school a little too roughly by a harassed mother, his tumbling steps hardly able to keep up with her hurried strides, and it was all he could do not to intervene. He stopped and stared at the mother a little madly, hoping she would wake up to what she was doing and treat the child more gently. In that case, he felt that his response was much more impure than it had been with the widow, more tangled up with the desire for the woman who had power over his happiness to treat him more gently, but the underlying truth was intact: every kind of cruelty was unbearable to someone who refused, or failed, to shut down.

For a writer as resolute as Sam, it was unimaginable that his intense misery would not be material for writing, and unimaginable that it would. Maybe in order to be material later on he had to accept that it was not material now. Maybe he had to be patient, to ‘recollect in tranquillity’ in the Wordsworthian manner, and not to take notes on every species of flower he was trampling underfoot, in the manner Wordsworth despised. Or maybe it would never be material. The rawness could not be written about without betraying its essence. He was not going to cover it with layer after nacreous layer of aesthetic distance; pain was pain, not a pearl in waiting. It was indecent to think he could make anything of it, and so he left his notebooks unopened and his lovesick journal unwritten.

John Elton was having lunch in Claridge’s.

‘You’re being too modest,’ he said, ‘my informants tell me that it’s a great deal more than a cookbook.’

‘Well,’ said Auntie, playing with the folds of her sari to cover her growing mystification at the fuss being made about her book, ‘people seem to think that it has some literary merit.’

‘A great deal of literary merit,’ said John, with a powerful charismatic smile. He turned to include the nephew, but Sonny remained slumped in his armchair, hidden behind a huge pair of dark glasses. ‘I can’t tell you how I know this,’ John continued, ‘but I‘ve been told by an impeccable source that your book is going to be on the Short List. Please don’t tell anyone.’