Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

‘No.’

‘Fasten your seat belt,’ said Penny. ‘It turns out that Malcolm’s old boss at the Scottish Office is the author of The Greasy Pole. Alistair Mackintosh is just a pseudonym. Can you beat it? Malcolm has been quite subtly, not to say cunningly, pushing that novel in the hope of currying favour with a senior colleague.’

‘What a coincidence, I was just about to read it,’ said Vanessa, disguising the intensity of her disgust. ‘It was the only one I hadn’t got round to yet.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re all behind with our homework,’ said Penny. ‘In his defence, I don’t think Malcolm meant any harm. It was just a prank that went rather too far. And, as he says, there’s nothing on record to show that he promoted the book himself.’

‘Except in all our memories,’ said Vanessa.

‘Well, quite,’ said Penny. ‘He did persuade Tobias, and I’m afraid me, to vote it onto the Short List. Neither of us had the chance to have a proper look at it, but I suppose we just trusted him as Chairman.’

‘So we’re down to five books,’ said Vanessa. And we should be down to four judges, she thought. She wanted Malcolm to resign, she wanted him to be publicly reprimanded, but as she imagined the scandal unfolding, a certain world-weariness came over her. There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it; besides, if Malcolm lost his authority, it might improve the chances for The Frozen Torrent .

‘Yes’ said Penny, ‘one book each, which is fair. Mind you, I’m not fanatical about my choice. I’m prepared to concede gracefully if nobody else likes Conundrum .’

‘Well, I’m sure we all think it’s a ripping yarn,’ said Vanessa, ‘but perhaps it’s not quite right for this prize.’

‘That’s probably true,’ said Penny, ‘in fact, we might as well say that we’re down to four.’

Vanessa was struck by Penny’s acquiescence, not to say her eagerness to get rid of her candidate, but she was too relieved to question it.

‘I’ll tell the others,’ said Penny, ‘to count Conundrum out.’

‘If that’s what you want,’ said Vanessa, trying not to sound as pleased as she felt. ‘How’s Malcolm taking it?’

‘He’s very robust,’ said Penny, ‘and unapologetic. Frankly, he seems more put out by discovering that the author of wot u starin at is not only a well-paid lecturer in medieval love poetry at Edinburgh University, but none other than The Mc Dougal of Mc Dougal, one of the most ancient titles in Scotland. It makes Malcolm’s blood boil to think that he pretended to write a book of gritty social realism, when in fact he was leading a life of extreme privilege, dividing his time between his ancestral castle and a set of plush rooms in a prestigious university.’

‘It doesn’t really matter,’ said Vanessa.

‘Quite!’ said Penny. ‘It should be judged on its merits alone. Absolutely. Well, I’ll see you at the next meeting. Down to four: we’re really coming into the home straight.’

Vanessa switched off her phone, dropped it back in her bag and tossed The Greasy Pole onto the floor under the table.

She suddenly had a free afternoon. She could rush to meet her next responsibility and mark the first year’s essays on Insanity and Alienation in Tennyson. All of them would quote, ‘And my heart is a handful of dust’ from Maud ; most of them would quote the climax of grief from In Memoriam , ‘And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day’; some of them would get round to Tithonus’s, ‘Me only cruel immortality / Consumes’, and point out how alienating it must have been to have his girlfriend turn him into a grasshopper; but most of all, the discussion would centre on that cautionary tale of opium addiction, The Lotos-Eaters , since most undergraduates knew little about alienation and insanity except from their self-imposed drug experiences.

On the other hand, she could leave her suddenly free afternoon free: she didn’t have to cram it with new obligations, or move her schedule forward to annihilate the unexpected good fortune of a few uncluttered hours. She had read enough about Poppy’s illness over the years to know that an anorexic’s mother was typically a highly controlling perfectionist. Feeling the strain of leaving her afternoon empty, she made a concession to magical thinking and let herself believe that if she resisted imposing control on this stretch of free time she would be indirectly helping Poppy to recover.

It was a pity to ignore the thesis she was supervising, just when the semi-colon was about to reach its nineteenth-century peak of power and prestige; and difficult to neglect her own artful analysis of Undine Spragg’s mother, which took the reader around Wharton’s oeuvre, as well as fairly deep into the social history of her age: the rapidly changing attitudes to divorce, the high concentration of American fortunes in female hands, and so on and so forth; but these insights would have to wait. This afternoon, she would not let her judgemental mind characterize as mere laziness the subtle therapeutic space she was opening for her daughter. Just as an anorexic has to walk down the street rejecting the abundance of food offered on all sides, wasn’t there something punitive and self-defeating about turning down an opportunity to stop working, to relax, to play? Wasn’t there a family resemblance between the inability to take in nourishment and the inability to rest?

Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull, who catalogued anorexia and gave it the surname ‘Nervosa’, was also suspected of being Jack the Ripper. An expert on treating nervous women, he may also have been an expert on making women nervous, occupying that disturbing border between the healer and the killer, where a surgeon’s knife could be used to save a life or to end it. What good could come from a realm of mental illness claimed by such a sinister conquistador?

Even if there was some connection between Vanessa’s need to rest and Poppy’s need to eat, it was problematic for Vanessa to take the lead in doing nothing. Poppy would read Vanessa’s inspiring example as a manipulative strategy, a covert attempt to rob her of control with the cheap sacrifice of an afternoon’s work. Anorexia had been unknown in the Third World until the advent of Western television: it was supremely the disease of social comparison, of fatal competitiveness, of the final consummation of advertising, in which the image of emaciation is consumed rather than any product promoted by it.

Nevertheless, Vanessa decided that she would spend her afternoon without reading, or marking, or correcting, or writing. She would never tell Poppy, but she would just sit there thinking about her kindly, hoping it wasn’t too late to stop being too busy.

Katherine was woken at two in the morning by a shock of shame.

What could she have been thinking of? John Elton; the dark green sofa in his hotel room; the coffee table pushed roughly aside; property magazines slithering clumsily to the carpet; his socks still on; her yearning to run through the door she could see reflected in the mirror above the fireplace, and her horrified sense, as the cluster of clinking glasses on the tray toasted her abasement, that she had found a new level of alienation in her erotic journey, something like volunteering to be raped.

After so many failures, was she smothering the possibility of a sane intimacy? Instead of waiting for love to turn into indifference or desire into disgust, why not embrace the disgust from the beginning, in an act of proleptic despair? Or was she just taking the logic of promiscuity to its absolutely indiscriminate conclusion?