Free Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn

noticing.’
    ‘Quite,’ said Sonny drily. ‘Will you be bringing Mansur with you?’ he asked, trying not to sound as inspired as he felt.
    ‘Why would I want that brute to come to London with me?
    ‘Well,’ said Sonny, improvising wildly, ‘my back has completely gone , I mean completely , and I need someone to carry me around.’
    ‘Can’t Claridge’s help?’ said Auntie irritably.
    ‘Well, you know how it is in the West,’ said Sonny, ‘everyone is so spoilt; they’ve lost any idea of service or gratitude. Only this morning a beggar I’d been showering with gifts chased me down the street! Instead of thanking me, she completely lost her temper! I need someone who will sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed, without complaining. I’ll take care of his fare, of course.’
    ‘Very well,’ said Auntie with a click of her tongue.
    When the conversation was over, Sonny clapped his hands with delight. He had always coveted Mansur, Auntie’s ferocious nightwatchman. He sometimes thought that Mansur took more pride in the Badanpur clan than Sonny himself, if such a thing were possible. The man was a human mountain. There would be no need to provide him with a fire-arm; he could tear apart the impudent judges with his bare hands.
    Sonny felt himself irradiated by a divine presence. He saw now that all the trials of the day had been Krishna’s way of protecting him from the strain of personally dispatching Malcolm Craig, MP. His ancestor Krishna had sent him Mansur. Truly, the gods were on his side.

 
    14
    The only luxury left to Alan was that brief passage before he was fully awake, before the hazy disorientation that surrounded his drugged sleep was replaced by the solid horror of his circumstances. The woman he loved, the woman he had left his wife for, had thrown him out. His pleas to be taken back by Katherine had been utterly ignored, and his humiliating but pragmatic request to be taken back by Marilyn had been angrily rejected.
    He moved into a hotel near his office in Pimlico. It was cheap in every respect, except for the cost of spending a night there. When he returned from work each evening, he pressed the trembling orange light switch in his corridor, buying a few fluorescent seconds to fit the key into his bedroom door. A man at the peak of his training might have opened the door in time, but for the forlorn and drunken Alan it was out of the question. After feeling around the keyhole in the dark, stabbing his finger a couple of times, and finally unlocking the door, he stumbled into a room that made him long to go out again. The dingy net curtains were disturbed by a draught from the ill-fitting window; the mustard yellow bedspread was made of a synthetic fabric that must have originally been designed for experiments in static electricity; and on a small stained tray, next to sachets of instant coffee that had withstood generations of indifference, there were three little plastic pots of milk whose claims to long life made his own seem all the more tenuous.
    The hotel’s proximity to his office lost its charm once the Russian proprietor of Page and Turnersacked Alan for his failure to submit Consequences to the Elysian committee, and for Katherine’s subsequent threats of defection. It had long been rumoured that Yuri (as everyone chose to call him, preferring not to embark on the polysyllabic slalom course of his surname) had been drawn to the august and bankrupt firm of Page and Turner by his fascination with Katherine Burns rather than his passion for English letters. Either way, he had acquired it, and its debts, for one pound. The world was evenly and quite heatedly divided over the question of whether Yuri and Katherine had slept together. Alan had the misfortune of knowing the truth. Katherine had granted Yuri a few nights and then manufactured a stricken conscience over going to bed with a married man. Mrs Yuri was known to be the merciless partner, who took care of the brutalities of