Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

She was just the teeniest bit tiddly and arguably should restrict herself to drinking wine by the glass over dinner. Mind you, it was rather a waste of the vintage chart to be stuck in the ‘by the glass’ section of a great wine list.

Where was she? Ah yes, the committee. It was in gridlock, rush-hour gridlock. The dinner was in three days, and nobody would budge. She and Malcolm were firmly committed to wot u starin at , with Jo and Tobias lined up against them, adamant about the virtues of the postmodern cookery novel. Vanessa was the floating voter who was driving them all mad, as she had from the word go. She was insisting that The Frozen Torrent was the only ‘work of literature’ on the List, and since there was no negotiation possible over the other two candidates, everyone should ‘compromise’ (i.e. cave in) and agree to her choice. Back in her Foreign Office days, Penny had naturally been involved in making her fair share of tough, unpopular decisions, but people had always known that she was acting from a sincere appraisal of the country’s best interests — even if the country turned out to be Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia, or General Pinochet. Vanessa, by contrast, was being selfish for entirely selfish reasons. Penny was tempted to send her one of her famous letters — known at the Foreign Office as ‘Penny’s ICBMs’ (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). Although many of them, destined for an incompetent colleague, landed up in the same building from which they were sent, the ‘Inter-Continental’ tag gave you some idea of just how terrifying Penny could be when she got the wind up her.

‘Arrogant bitch,’ said Penny, just as the waiter arrived with her drink.

‘Not you, of course,’ she reassured the waiter.

‘You’re welcome, madame,’ said the waiter in a perfect German accent, bowing gravely as he placed the cocktail in front of her. It was all tremendously international, even at the staff level. She could hear Russian being spoken by the entrance to the indoor bar; there were Americans by the fountain, and there was a Chinese man smoking a cigar further away, next to a marble nymph trying to hide her private parts. The French must be lurking somewhere, and with Penny representing Great Britain, they could have a Security Council meeting at the drop of a hat.

Penny took a sip of her new drink and looked up at the side of the magnificent building next door. It was nothing less than the French Ministry of Justice. On arrival, she had been tremendously inspired to find that her hotel shared a garden wall with such an important civil service department. All she had ever really wanted the prize to achieve was justice, and now it felt like destiny to be sleeping on the eve of the final meeting in a room that overlooked the very pleasant gardens of a place that symbolized that ideal.

Penny closed her eyes and imagined herself as the figure of Justice on top of the Old Bailey, blindfolded and holding up a pair of scales in which she weighed with absolute impartiality the endless pile of books that had been sent to the committee. She hadn’t cheated and taken a secret peek, although she had listened to some of the books. Nothing wrong with that: nobody had ever suggested that Justice should wear earplugs as well as a blindfold. At that rate, you might as well have her in a coma on a life-support machine!

No, Penny had done her best to embody Justice, but it had been complicated and, above all, exhausting and time-consuming. When she opened her eyes again, she found that her vision was already blurred and a moment later, as she melted into a full realization of what a strain it had all been, tears started to spill from her eyes. She picked up the little folded linen napkin from the table and dabbed her wet cheeks. To her horror, the German waiter was approaching at the very moment she didn’t want to be seen by anyone.

‘I probably look an absolute fright with all my make up running,’ she blurted out as he arrived.

‘You’re most welcome, madame,’ he said agreeably. ‘Your table is ready, if you wish to proceed to the dining room. I will bring your cocktail.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Penny, draining the conical glass.

It was time for a bit of the old cuisine gastronomique . She hoisted herself up, wandered back through the red bar and down the long blue corridor. French flag, she thought: white garden, red bar, blue corridor. She muttered encouragement to herself over the swish of her evening dress. After all, it wasn’t every day that one found oneself enjoying Versailles levels of unabashed French luxury, with the welcome addition of modern plumbing.

In the Eurostar on the way over she had been mugging up on The City Under the City in her guidebook, and been reminded that Victor Hugo had set a very dramatic scene of Les Misérables in the Paris sewers. Without wishing to be a copycat, she thought she might do exactly the same thing and set a very dramatic scene of Roger and Out in that cloacal maze.

To be perfectly honest the sewers had been something of a disappointment, despite the VIP treatment, which had taken her far beyond the gift shop and educational displays set up for ordinary tourists. She had been given a pair of very serious gumboots, a waterproof boiler suit and a gas mask and then been guided by top experts deep into the vaulted tunnels. She trod along narrow pavements running beside swift torrents of wastewater. She crossed metal bridges over stagnant pools full of leaves and plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and other floating objects from the gutters above. She saw the gleaming tails of rats disappearing into narrower tunnels, or washing themselves, as bold as brass, under showers of effluent. All the tunnels were named after the streets above them, with exactly the same famous blue and white street signs. At first it was rather delightful to find oneself underneath the Quai d’Orsay, the famous address which was also the nickname for the French Foreign Office. Her teeming imagination couldn’t help thinking that the sewers would be an excellent method for smuggling sensitive information out of the French F.O. without needing to be compromised by carrying it out oneself. Electronically tagged containers could be flushed down to agents waiting below (mental note: possible scene in R and O ). She had passed under the Louvre with a frisson of secret pleasure, thinking of the huge queues trying to get into the museum, little suspecting that she and her guides had already gained access without the trouble of buying a ticket.

As they worked their way back in a wide arc, under the Tuileries Gardens and to the Place Vendôme, Marcel, the chief guide, pointed out that her hotel suite was a couple of dozen metres above her head. She couldn’t help having a little pang of longing for its charming garden views, its deliciously soft sheets and, at the other end of all this plumbing, the marble bathroom with its powerful shower and the sumptuous pink dressing gown hanging from a hook on the back of the door. She pressed on, though, down the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, taking a keen interest in Marcel’s description of the boules de curage : giant wooden spheres, only slightly narrower than the tunnels they were rolled through, that forced all the grit and waste into the main drain. She daydreamed about having a very powerful hose and a good old boule de curage , with Vanessa and Jo and Tobias on the other side of it, sprinting towards a swelling flood of sewage. All they would have to shout out to make the nightmare stop was ‘ wot u starin at ’ and she would turn off the hose and set them free with a minimum of legal formality. Despite this enlivening fantasy, Penny started to grow a little weary of the tunnels, and when Marcel came to a halt and saluted facetiously, pointing his finger upwards and saying, ‘Ambassade Britannique,’ Penny felt a stab of nostalgia, remembering the old days when David had once taken her to lunch at our splendid Paris embassy.