Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn Read Free Book Online Page B

When she let him in to her flat he had barely greeted her before casting himself down and beginning to sob.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ said Sonny. ‘I’ve been robbed of this year’s Elysian Prize.’
    ‘I didn’t even know that you’d written a novel,’ said Katherine.
    ‘I’ve written an enduring work of art,’ said Sonny, ‘and they haven’t even put me on their Long List!’
    ‘ Consequences isn’t on the Long List either, thanks to my idiotic publisher,’ said Katherine. ‘He gave my novel to his assistant to send round on the day of the deadline and she sent your aunt’s cookbook instead. Any other committee would have realized that there’d been a fuck-up and sent the cookbook back.’
    ‘I’m sure you deserved to be on the Long List,’ said Sonny. ‘But I deserved to win!’
    ‘Well, in that case,’ said Katherine, ‘I can’t wait to read this masterpiece of yours.’
    ‘There’s a signed copy at Heywood Hill,’ said Sonny. ‘Don’t tell the book fellow you’re a friend of mine.’
    ‘That’ll be easy enough,’ said Katherine. ‘The only question is whether to camp overnight on the pavement outside.’
    ‘I hope you’re not being sarcastic with me,’ said Sonny, brought upright by pique. ‘My nerves really can’t take it.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Katherine, ‘but I’m disappointed as well.’
    ‘That’s why we should form an alliance,’ said Sonny.
    ‘What for? Being disappointed?’
    ‘For revenge, of course,’ said Sonny. ‘In a more enlightened age, the judges would have been dragged into a public square and horsewhipped.’ His body relaxed for a moment under the softening influence of nostalgia. ‘The furious multitude,’ he went on, his hands spreading artistically as he imagined the scene, ‘would have torn them limb from limb to punish them for insulting their betters! But in these degenerate times, I suppose we’ll have to make do with a hired assassin. Do you know such a person? I tried to get a man sent over from Delhi, but they wouldn’t give him a visa. Red tape!’
    ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Very well,’ said Sonny, getting up with restored vigour and stepping back into his slippers. ‘I see that you have no pride in yourself, but I am not, nor shall I ever be, in that pitiful condition! We shall see which one of us is truly serious about literature!’
    Katherine waited tensely until she heard the front door close. She could imagine a time when she would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of Sonny’s conversation and the relief of his departure, but she had been too angry in the last few days to laugh at anything.
    She felt isolated, partly because she had turned her phone off, driven mad by constant calls from Alan, pleading to be taken back. The first day after she threw him out, he rang to say that he had sacked his assistant, and that she had left in tears.
    ‘If you were right to sack her, I was right to sack you,’ she answered coldly.
    ‘I’ll take her back if you’ll take me back,’ he said.
    ‘Rivers don’t flow upstream,’ said Katherine.
    ‘But I love you…’
    She hung up before he could finish his unpromising sentence. Every few hours her inbox silted up with emails that she deleted without reading. Katherine had become disciplined about ending an affair; it was an indispensable skill for someone who had averaged twenty lovers a year since she was sixteen. Besides, Alan suddenly seemed so irrelevant, now that Consequences was no longer in the running for the Elysian. She had felt the same way about her English tutor at Cambridge after getting a First. He had been astonished, but to her it was the most natural thing in the world: why would anybody sleep with a don after leaving university? It was nothing to do with being mercenary, but it had everything to do with being impulsive. She slept with the man of the moment. The moment might be the way a man held his