Lost for Words: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

with professional jealousy that she was unable to tell him herself. He had only received one communication from her, a scratchy postcard thanking him for lunch, at least a month too late, and saying that she had given Auntie’s cookbook to her publisher, but that it was a crowded market and not to raise her hopes too high.
    At the UK Border, an absurd little man asked Sonny the purpose of his visit. When Sonny said that he had come two weeks ahead of the Big List, so as to be thoroughly well rested before the hullabaloo of the publicity circus, the little man asked him what exactly this publicity would be for.
    ‘My novel, of course,’ said Sonny.
    ‘So, you’ve come to the UK to promote a novel,’ said the man.
    ‘I have come to accept congratulations for my novel,’ said Sonny impatiently. ‘I have nothing to do with trade.’
    ‘Is the novel published in the UK?’
    ‘No!’ said Sonny. ‘It is published in India – privately!’
    ‘So you are in fact trying to promote and sell goods from India in the UK,’ concluded his tormentor, ‘but on your Immigration Form you ticked the box stating that the purpose of your trip is pleasure.’
    ‘The purpose of my entire existence is pleasure,’ said Sonny angrily, ‘but I can’t say that I’m experiencing any at the moment!’
    He had perhaps been unwise to lose his temper. He spent the next four hours in a depressing cubicle talking to one grim example after another of the bureaucratic breed. When he showed them his four First Class return tickets, and a phone call to Claridge’s confirmed that he’d booked the Arnold Bennett Suite for the next month, they reluctantly admitted him to the country, but spitefully limited his visit to twenty days, giving him only five days after the Big List. To think that his ancestors had already spent millennia being cooled by rose sherbets and peacock fans, while these fellows were still prancing around on frigid beaches, dressed in rotting animal skins, and jabbering away in the rudiments of a language it had fallen on him to raise to the highest level of art, brought him close to hysteria, but by the time he was reclining in the back of the Claridge’s car, massaging his temples, the calm waters of luxury and destiny started to close over the ripples of mere circumstance, and he decided that he would indeed leave the country in twenty days, at his own instigation, in order to spend an amusing night in Le Touquet, or Deauville, returning to England the next day, in the reasonable expectation that on this occasion the border would not be guarded by a complete madman .

 
    7
    As Vanessa looked up from her armchair and stared out at the quad, the pale-honey stone of the college chapel and the leaded diamonds of its window-panes lit up in a burst of sunlight, and then darkened again. She imagined the scudding spring clouds she couldn’t see; she noticed the invitation from the brief shift of light to transcend and then reclaim her overburdened mood. She accepted and put aside all these mental operations and felt restored, after only a few moments of lucid daydreaming, to a salutary independence of mind in which she could place her attention where she chose, with little interference from her emotions and her surroundings.
    She was doing what she was paid to do: being intelligent about writing. Rather too much writing, it was true. In just over an hour her first-year students would be coming to read their essays on ‘Evil in the Brontës’. As usual, none of them would have read Villette . She had eight essays to mark before tomorrow on the Metaphysical poets. (‘Yoked by violence together’ – was Dr Johnson right? They would all say no, of course, and quote T. S. Eliot on Donne.) The second draft of a PhD thesis on the history of the semi-colon, which Vanessa had recklessly agreed to supervise, would have to wait until Saturday. Sunday was earmarked for her own book on Edith Wharton’s Women. The trouble was that on