Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

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.

One thing about choosing the best novel of the year had become absolutely clear to Malcolm: Jo must be stopped at any cost. Her stranglehold over the Short List was truly scandalous. He reinvigorated his alliance with Penny on the phone later that evening. She felt the same way about Jo’s growing power and they agreed that after reading her choices they would compare notes over dinner and see which of her novels most deserved to be attacked.

As Alan spread the thick foam on his grey-flecked beard, he realized how much he had been missing the sanity and dullness of what Henry James had perhaps exaggerated in calling ‘the joy of the matutinal steel’. Compared to the lacerating edge of his unhappiness over the last month, his razor blade felt like the stroke of a feather as it scraped its way through the thickets of obstinate stubble covering his face.

Why had he woken this morning, shaken and weak, but somehow determined to stop his decline — and to shave? Was it the lure of a small but uncontested area of self-determination? No employer was going to sack him for shaving; no woman was going to tell him that, although she hoped they would remain friends, she didn’t want to go on shaving with him any more. With the exhilaration of a pioneer taming the wilderness, he saw fresh tracks of skin opening across his face. He shook his blade under the running water and reapplied it expertly to his chin. This face was his face, from shining ear to shining ear, from the ridge of his upper lip to the bulge of his Adam’s apple, from the clean line of his manly jaw to the disappointing looseness of his double chin. He dried himself carefully. There were no cuts, or neglected patches of beard; every movement showed that he knew what he was doing, that he was a man who could be trusted.