Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

‘You’ll be sitting next to Mrs Wo,’ he said. ‘She’s the wife of the man whose corporation has taken over the Elysian Group.’

‘Bloody Chinks — they’re taking over everything,’ said David.

‘Well, I’m sure you won’t be putting it quite like that,’ Malcolm hesitated as the lift jerked to a halt without the doors opening.

‘Oh, you can’t stop me now,’ said David. ‘It’s the privilege of old age: I can speak my mind at last, after a lifetime of diplomatic toadying.’

Malcolm pressed the first-floor button several times to no effect. Although the news that David was renouncing his legendary charm and was planning to make a xenophobic attack on the evening’s most important guests would normally have alarmed him, it hardly had any impact thanks to the spasm of anxiety he felt at the prospect of being trapped in a broken lift. He pressed the ground-floor button, and the second-floor button without getting any response.

‘Are we stuck?’ asked David.

‘I’m afraid it looks that way.’

‘Don’t panic,’ shouted David, swinging one of his walking sticks against the thudding metal doors with surprising violence. ‘I have to tell you that I suffer quite badly from claustrophobia.’

‘Please calm down,’ said Malcolm firmly. ‘We have an emergency telephone, and we’ll soon have everything under control.’

‘Don’t panic!’ shouted David a second time, poking his other stick at the ceiling and smashing one of the light bulbs.

* * *

Sam and Katherine arrived early at their table and quickly changed the place cards so as to be together. They stroked each other’s thighs under the table, sometimes dreamily, sometimes fervently, unconcerned with the world around them, or so they thought, until a very agitated woman came and sat down next to Sam.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt you,’ she said, ‘but I feel that there’s something I must tell you.’

‘Oh, hi,’ said Sam. ‘You are?’

‘Sorry, I’m Vanessa Shaw. I’m one of this year’s judges, and I really wanted to apologize to you personally.’

‘What? You voted against The Frozen Torrent ?’

‘No, no, I voted for it.’

‘I forgive you,’ said Sam. ‘We forgive her, don’t we?’ he said to Katherine.

‘Yeah, you’re forgiven,’ said Katherine, smiling, while her nails grazed the hollow behind Sam’s knee.

‘No, you don’t seem to understand,’ said Vanessa. ‘I wasn’t able to get your book through. It was by far the best piece of writing; in fact it was the only book of any literary merit at all. I’m really sorry — you should have won.’

Vanessa’s voice faded; a film of tears formed over her dark blue eyes.

‘You probably shouldn’t be telling me this, should you?’ said Sam.

‘I’m sorry, of course you’re right,’ said Vanessa. ‘I was afraid I would miss you after the announcement, and I wanted you to know how passionately I feel about your book and what a terrible injustice it is. The only consolation I can offer is that The Frozen Torrent will last; it’ll be read long after all the other books on this list have been forgotten.’

‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Sam. ‘Time grinds everything to dust, but one or two things are hard enough to dent the millstones and fall through intact — on the first round.’

Sam picked up the menu of that evening’s dinner, as if to distract himself from this astral perspective of human affairs. He ran his eyes over the delights in store.

‘By the way, do you know Katherine Burns?’ he asked.

‘Oh, hello,’ said Vanessa, ‘pleased to meet you. I’m a great admirer of your work. Do you have a novel coming out soon?’

‘Next week,’ said Katherine.

‘But why wasn’t it submitted to us?’

‘Oh,’ said Katherine, wondering how much detail to go into, and finally opting for opaque simplicity, ‘they fucked up.’

‘I can’t exactly thank you for what you’ve told me,’ said Sam, ‘but it may save us the trouble of working our way through the goat’s cheese, beetroot and salmon mousse.’

He turned to Katherine, pressing his palm gently but emphatically against her lower back. ‘Shall we go, or shall we stay?’ he asked.

* * *

Tobias gave an ingratiating smile to Mr and Mrs Wo, who were looking with what he took to be solemn displeasure at the empty chairs which should have been occupied, according to their stiff little place cards, by The Right Honourable Malcolm Craig, MP, Sir David Hampshire and Miss Penny Feathers.

‘I’m afraid we will have to start without the Chairman,’ said Mr Wo. ‘We’re on a tight schedule with the television broadcast.’

Tobias sat down uneasily next to Mrs Wo, wondering where on earth the committee had fled to. He imagined himself having to improvise a speech about the importance of literature, the encouragement of new talent, the generosity of Shanghai Global Assets and, last but not least, the insufferable drabness of his fellow judges. Instead of a dinner jacket — the world’s dreariest uniform, which he would only consent to wear if he were asked to star in a West End production of a play about an eloquent head waiter — Tobias was wearing a black velvet frock coat, a double-breasted dark grey waistcoat, and a dark purple silk tie with a pearl pin. There was no doubt he looked good tonight. Not only that, but he had once memorized Shelley’s Defense of Poetry to impress his English teacher in a talent competition at school, so as to get the lead part in that summer’s production of Hamlet . The key bits about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world had stayed with him and would make an impressive introduction to the section on the importance of literature. There was also a striking phrase of Shelley’s, which had been a particular favourite of his English teacher’s, about ‘imagining that which we know’. He must try to work it in somewhere. As to the radical originality of this year’s winner, it would help to know which book he would be attributing that quality to.

‘Red or white?’ asked the waiter, rousing Tobias from his private thoughts.

‘Do you think you could lay your hands on a bottle of whisky?’ Tobias asked. ‘I’m allergic to wine, you see.’ He generally found a fake allergy was taken more seriously than a simple request.

‘I’ll see what I can do, sir.’

‘You could just bring us the bottle. I’m sure Mr Wo would like a drop.’

‘My husband is a teetotaller,’ said Mrs Wo, putting her phone back into her evening bag.

‘Oh, well, I’ll have to dispatch it all on my own,’ said Tobias, with an amusingly martyred sigh. ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.’ Seeing that Mrs Wo was not especially amused by his allusion to the Scottish play, he switched smoothly to a tone of great seriousness.

‘So, are you a keen reader yourself, Mrs Wo? Forgive me, I really ought to know, but is it pronounced “wo” or “woo”?’

“Wo — as in “woe is me”, something I can truly say,’ laughed Mrs Wo. ‘But to answer your question, Mr Benedict, I am reading Virginia Woolf’s notebooks at the moment; so fresh, with all the visual brilliance of the novels, but much more relaxed and natural. You agree?’

‘I worship the notebooks,’ said Tobias. ‘I was once asked to play Leonard Woolf in a film that never got made, but I devoured the notebooks for weeks.’

‘In China we put great emphasis on this naturalness, which of course can only come from the mastery of artifice.’

‘I can see you’ve been into these questions very deeply,’ said Tobias, twisting around to see if his whisky was on its way yet. He had snorted a couple of lines of coke in the loo and really needed to take the edge off. What he saw instead of the waiter was Sam Black, whom he recognized from the photograph on the dust jacket of The Frozen Torrent , weaving his way towards the door, with an extremely attractive woman close behind him. There was something definitive about their way of leaving.