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

her husband’s business, freeing him to be relatively gallant and agreeable. During the breakup of their brief affair, Katherine had known that Yuri would not make any reckless gestures, or even mendacious claims about leaving his wife. Instead, he softened Katherine with a persistent rain of opera tickets and orchids, as well as a gigantic advance they both knew she would never earn out.
    Alan realized that he had really been fired for making Yuri jealous. To be punished for his intimacy with Katherine just as she ceased to acknowledge his existence deepened his sense of injustice. Not only had the incompetence over the typescript not been his, the competitiveness with Yuri had not been his, and now the intimacy with Katherine was not his either. Yuri, on the other hand, could count on Katherine’s meticulous thank-you notes and prompt replies, and the fact that she would eventually be persuaded to stay at Page and Turner by another preposterous advance for a still more distant book.
    Without his salary, Alan could no longer afford his room in the Mount Royal Hotel. He had guiltily handed over his savings to his abandoned wife, but he still had enough money in his current account and a good enough credit record, he hoped, to rent a room somewhere in outer London. He told the hotel that he was leaving, but to his surprise, on the morning of his departure he was suddenly overcome with lethargy. He wanted to be practical, to search for a room to rent, but somehow everything was too much, and he sprawled on the bed all morning, dressed but unable to leave. He tried to rationalize the feeling as a need for the hotel’s central location, the convenience of a single bill compared with a plethora of household bills, broken boilers and toasted toasters in a rented room, but the truth was that he felt terribly tired. Why not stay a few more days? He had three credit cards, after all, with a combined overdraft capacity of fifteen thousand pounds. Perhaps, in the end, the best thing to do was to stare at the ceiling of his bedroom and sleep as much as possible. If only he could get to sleep, he would sleep for a thousand years.
    At first Alan resisted the cliché of an unshaven depressive, but then, reflecting bitterly that he was no longer being paid to uproot cliché, he abandoned shaving with a certain vicious pleasure. The initial energy of his self-neglect depended on a barely acknowledged theatricality: he expected someone to notice, to be shocked, to offer to wash his clothes or run him a bath, but after a week or two his expanding sense of loneliness vaporized these imaginary friends. His actions were no longer gestures, and without the incentive to communicate, they were engulfed by his all-consuming fatigue. As he lay on his bed, the basin seemed so far away that the idea of brushing his teeth made him think of Livingstone’s search for the source of the Nile. He imagined the terrible mountain ranges of his yellow bedspread; native bearers falling off the cliff of his mattress with piercing cries; the delirium of a tropical fever; his excruciating boots slippery with blood; the forbidding overhang of smooth white porcelain in the final ascent. He was so small that he might disappear at any moment, so little able to move that the inertia might spread to his heart and stop it beating.
    There was a sheer fall, not at the end of things where it belonged, at the end of thought, or language, or at both ends of the visible spectrum, like horizons to our cognitive capacities, elegant, expected, almost reassuring; there was a sheer fall in between the things he used to take for granted, between instinct and desire, between desire and will, between will and action, between this and that, between one thing and another; gaps, crevasses, open wounds, broken circuits. How could he not have noticed before? What had he been doing all his life? Zipping along as if the ground were not groundless. He was like a toddler who has just been