Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn

glass, or it might be more practical, like a don at university, but neither kind of moment could last, and when it ended there was nothing left. She knew that she would feel frightened and empty if she ever stopped, and so there was always someone to fall back on, or move on to.
    Things were perilously close to empty right now. She had lost Sam the same day she lost Alan. The Frozen Torrent was on the Long List and she didn’t feel like being patronized in bed. Sam didn’t yet know about her decision, if decision was the right word for that snap in her psyche. As a result, in this disastrous week, only Didier was left and she was in no condition to organize anything else; she didn’t want pity, or even sympathy, she wanted infatuation.
    Katherine turned on her phone and it rang immediately.
    ‘Oh, fuck off,’ she said, looking at Alan’s name on the screen. She ignored Alan and rang Didier.
    ‘Can you come round?’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Straight away. It’s just you.’
    ‘ A bas le triangle! Vive le couple! ’ said Didier. ‘No Sam? No Alan?’
    ‘I’m down to just you,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Down is good,’ said Didier, ‘it reduces the vertigo.’
    ‘It is the vertigo,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Not once you’ve landed.’
    ‘Well, let’s land.’
    ‘Okay, I abandon this wonderful sentence I am writing: “we think we are free because we lack the language to describe our unfreedom”…’
    ‘Please,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Okay, j’arrive .’

 
    11
    ‘What is the purpose of art?’ Sam felt doomed as he wrote the question. What did he really think?
    ‘To arrest our attention in the midst of distraction.’
    Could he say that?
    ‘Its uselessness is its supreme value. Money only has value because it can be exchanged for something else, art only has value because it can’t.’
    Try telling that to a Rembrandt owner, who’s just exchanged a ‘useless’ self-portrait for twenty-seven million pounds, thought Sam, or for that matter to someone whose loneliness has been abolished by the perfect reflection of her mood or predicament in the sentence she has just read.
    ‘To arrest our attention in the midst of distraction’, or ‘to distract our attention in the midst of fixation’. He could imagine approaching that point from the opposite angle. The whole thing was a nightmare. If he didn’t pull himself together, he would have to come up with a Theory of Beauty.
    ‘The purpose of style,’ Sam began, ‘is to generate interest’, he concluded timidly.
    What was interest? Talk about begging the question.
    He marvelled at the speed with which elation had turned into anxiety. Ever since he had found that The Frozen Torrent was on the Long List, he had been torn between a superstitious need to avoid anticipating any further success, and a neurotic need to plan, in case further success came his way. What if he had to make a speech, the speech, in fact, of an Elysian winner? He didn’t want to think about it, in case the gods punished him for expecting things to go well, but he must think about it, so as to pacify his fear of success.
    One thing was clear; he was going to have to drop the topic of art. In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture; the word ‘elitist’ could be spat out with the same confident contempt as ‘coward’ at a court martial. It seemed as if a prejudice could not be banished without driving some other topic, once freely discussed, or even admired, into a shameful exile. Perhaps in future generations a law would be passed allowing consenting adults to practise art openly; an Intellect Relations Board might be set up to encourage tolerance towards people who, through no fault of their own, were interested in ideas. Meanwhile, it was just as well to keep quiet and play the fool.
    Whatever its contents, Sam preferred to speculate about a speech he would probably never have to make than to contemplate the agony