Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

She was back in her own bed now, without Elton, and yet her feeling of anxiety was growing stronger. John Elton was not an exotic object of desire; he was the antidote to desire. Once sex was a way to avoid affection, who better to choose? Only the catastrophe of an encounter with him could show just how vicious her resistance was. He was there to unveil the truth that she would rather fuck a man who repelled her than get close to one she really liked. Alan had been kind to her, in a rather fatherly way perhaps, but genuinely kind. Didier was an enthusiast. And Sam, well, Sam was in love with her and wanted to know her as deeply as possible, and that was why she had to get rid of him.

She would rather not get too close to anyone who might really understand her. Besides, Sam was a novelist. There was no room in the same bed for two people in the same business. And yet, if she was going to do this thing, Sam was the one to do it with. If she was going to challenge her paranoia, she might as well challenge her egoism as well. She suffered from as much ordinary selfishness as the next person, but piled on top of that she had the special affliction of a novelist, of wanting to be the author of her own fate and take charge of a narrative whose opening chapters had been written by others with terrifying carelessness. Her need to decide what things meant came no doubt from having lived so close to the sense that they meant nothing at all. At the very least she had to inhabit a world in which things never quite meant what they appeared to mean, where the margin of invention and interpretation was broader than it was, for instance, in the final moments of asphyxiation. Could she bear to have Sam nailing down the meaning of things with his own precision and his own perspective, or bear to see her interpretations seep into his work?

If only this latest ecstasy of shame and pointless sex would act on her with the chastening effect that an outstanding blackout sometimes has on an alcoholic. Waking in a strange place, looking back on an unqualified amnesia, with only bloodstained clothes for evidence; unsure whether the blood comes from a nosebleed or a murder (whose nosebleed? whose murder?), the drunk might think, as the corrosive dread colonizes every particle of her identity, ‘I really must stop living this way.’

Fully awake now and knowing that sleep could not catch up with her racing mind, she got out of bed to make a cup of tea, but soon retreated from the hygienic brightness of the kitchen to the battered armchair where she often wrote, picking up a velvet cushion and pressing it to her lap. She stared out of her dark drawing room at the restless plane trees in the square, shaking sudden rushes of raindrops from their wet leaves, half shining in the lamplight and half heaving with shadow. She hadn’t responded to any of Sam’s emails since she stopped seeing him, but now she felt like getting back in touch. The simplest way, not too precipitous, and with the further benefit of disarming her competitiveness, would be to congratulate him on making the Elysian Short List.

She picked up the laptop from the small round table beside her and scrolled down to the last forlorn email from Sam, ignored its contents, clicked on Reply and wrote,

Congratulations

Kx

With a gambler’s excitement at making an instantaneous and irreversible decision, she sent the email a moment later. She then felt rather depleted and impatient, wondering how long it would be before she would get a reply. It was only just after three in the morning. He probably wouldn’t answer until lunchtime. She was about to close her glowing screen when a new item appeared in her inbox. It was from Sam.

Thanks.

Do you want to come to the Elysian dinner with me?

Sx

Without hesitating she replied.

Love to.

Kxx

Penny ordered another Cosmopolitan from the waiter. She was having a thoroughly enjoyable time in no less a place than the Jardin Intérieur of the Paris Ritz. None of the other members of the committee had been able to come along on the trip and all she could say was ‘more fool them’. With ten thousand euros entirely at her disposal, she had seen no reason not to take a suite at the Ritz for two nights, instead of the one night she had originally planned, go on a special guided tour of the Paris sewers, and book herself a table in the tip-top Michelin-starred restaurant conveniently situated in her own hotel. She had bought a vintage chart from her local wine merchant so as not to be bamboozled by a smooth-talking sommelier into paying through the nose for an inferior product.

Penny took a gulp of her second (absolutely delicious) Cosmopolitan and skewered a spicy green olive with a very smart white toothpick sporting a little black ribbon at one end. This really was perfection: getting a bit tipsy in these charming surroundings. You couldn’t beat the French when it came to classical elegance. To her right was a white marble sphinx crouched on her leonine legs, with her hair up in a bun and a bow tie around her long neck. Other white marble statues of heroic male and modest female figures were dotted among the white paving stones of the garden and, at the end of the vista, high up on the far wall and seeming to preside over the whole space, was a medallion of an old man with a flowing beard; probably our friend Neptune, thought Penny, although the only water in the garden was hardly oceanic: it trickled from a fountain encased in a small white temple. Stone urns containing box, cut into perfect spheres, provided a few restrained green notes.

She had read in one of her guidebooks that the Ritz was a favourite haunt of Marcel Proust’s. Although she sympathized with his choice of watering hole, Penny couldn’t help reflecting that he was exactly the kind of author who would not have made it onto this year’s Short List. She hadn’t actually read any Proust, but she knew perfectly well that he was a long-winded snob, with far too much private money and some very unconventional sexual tastes: just the sort of thing they had been trying to avoid.

Apparently, Hemingway had also been a regular at the bar. She hadn’t read Hemingway since doing A Farewell to Arms for O-level, but his manly, no-nonsense style, dealing with the great themes of love and war and the eternal puzzle of human nature, had given Penny’s young imagination a strong sense of what real literature was all about. He would undoubtedly have fared better with the committee than the degenerate Proust. At least he had done something with his life other than go to parties and complain about his health. He was a man of action who had hunted big game, caught big fish and jumped on a plane the moment war broke out anywhere in the world, which of course kept him very busy during the nineteen-thirties.

Seeing that she had twenty minutes left before her table reservation in the restaurant down the corridor, Penny couldn’t resist ordering another ‘Cosy’ as she had privately nicknamed what was rapidly becoming her favourite cocktail of all time.

‘O-U-T spells OUT, so out you go,’ Penny muttered under her breath, imagining the crestfallen, coughing Proust being forced to leave the magic circle of her table in the garden. It struck her as pretty historic — if that was the word — that one of the authors most celebrated for enjoying this splendid setting was being banished from the prestigious Short List by a member of the Elysian Prize committee, while she was relishing a drink in the very same spot!

It was all very well getting rid of Proust and sparing the plainspoken Hemingway, but what her committee had utterly failed to decide was which author was actually going to win this year. ‘Win-wine / wine and dine’, Penny invented a little ditty and sang it gently to herself.