Consider the Lilies
"I felt a profound sense of ennui towards it all. That is to say: I was bored, but in a way which is only strictly possible when one is on the continent."
Editor’s Note
TODAY’S guest story comes courtesy of Florid Tuppence, a talented young author whose debut novel From Biarritz to Beatrice has received almost universal critical praise, and has become an early contender for this year’s Somerset Maugham award.
Blending autofiction, religious memoir, and elements of the picaresque, From Biarritz to Beatrice traces the narrator’s journey from a luxury spa in southwest France to another luxury spa in Silva, Portugal, the birthplace of the eponymous Saint Beatrice. Through the figure of the 21st century woman increasingly reliant on alcohol, non-prescribed psychoactive medicine, and other people’s money, Tuppence deftly mirrors the Portuguese Saint’s escape from Royal imprisonment to her eventual founding of a new religious order.
Tuppence was born to a modest family. As a child she was no stranger to the quiet humility of the food bank queue, her mother, Arid Tuppence (OBE), being Treasurer of the West Almondsbury Vagrancy Cleanup Group and having frequent dealings there. Her father, Rigid, was a simple man of little distinction, never rising to be anything more than a backbench Tory MP. Despite their humble background, Tuppence’s parents prioritised the education of their daughter, with her father going as far to change his primary residency to the family’s second home, which fell outside of his constituency, in order to gain her a place at the local Saint Theresa’s Bogstandard Comprehensive for Girls.
Here Florid excelled academically in all areas, particularly in Rhetoric and Philosophy, and soon became the recipient of a scholarship to study Theology at Bournemouth University. Though her family is Anglican and largely secular, Florid specialised in Catholic Female Martyrdom and, under the tutelage of Doctor Lyndon Shobley, converted to Catholicism in her final year of undergraduate study.
Her first book of short stories and poetry, Like the Lemon Juice to the Oyster, was published one week after her graduation by Indie Square Books (A London subsidiary of Hachette) She now makes regular contributions to the Telegraph as a literary critic, and occasionally stands in for the paper’s economic analyst, her uncle Fetid, when he is off on one of his “long holidays” in South East Asia.
The following preview is an excerpt from Consider the Lilies, her second novel which is set to be published by Simon and Schuster on 8th August of this year.
Consider the Lilies by Florid Tuppence
11th March, 2004
Whatever you might have said about Randeep, he was certainly good for money.
It was the third week of Lent and I was lounging in a third floor hotel room in Seville. Randeep was out at a business meeting with a client or an associate or something. Or perhaps it was in Venice or Athens. I had travelled so often and so widely, had seen so many luxury hotels and spas, that every historic European city had at this point converged into a single, homogeneous blob of Western Civilisation. The hotel room, which shared the same, uniform Mediterranean appeal as the rest of them, afforded me no hint of where I might be. I only knew that outside it was sunny, as light was pouring through the slats of the Venetian shutters, cutting slanted figures on the walnut floor.
My balcony looked onto, I assumed, a busy plaza, as I could hear the chattering of the locals outside going about their day-to-day tasks. I imagined them haggling over fruit while their children played hopscotch on a crudely-drawn chalk outline on the cracked pavement. They were experiencing the sort of abundant joy that is only afforded to those who are fortunate enough to be both poor and poorly-educated. I was unable to determine which language they were speaking. Spanish and Greek, despite being from very distinct families, have a remarkably similar cadence, and Italian is not that different, either. I have found that if one lisps a mixture of all three, gesticulating generously and peppering one’s words with English, one can get served a Negroni pretty much anywhere. I had one in my hand at that moment, as it happened. It had been brought up to me by a swarthy but not unattractive busboy who gave no further hint, neither by his accent nor his features, as to which country I was in. He could have been born and reared anywhere in the world. I settled in my mind that he was Romani and took another gulp.
I felt a profound sense of ennui towards it all. That is to say: I was bored, but in a way which is only strictly possible when one is on the continent. When an ordinary English or American person gets bored they likely just feel frustrated and wring their little fists like a monkey. My reaction was somewhat more subdued: I felt absolutely nothing. In part this was due to my Alexithymia, a condition which I had developed this as a child when I learnt to be hyper-vigilant of my mother’s fluctuating emotional state while ignoring my own. It also had something to do with the enormous amount of psychoactive medication which I had ingested that morning.
I had started the day as ever with a 5mg dose of Valium. That was my base, and I would administer it every morning with an almost religious regularity, always at the same time, and always while facing myself in the bathroom mirror. After that I would give myself carte blanche for the day. Over breakfast with Randeep, when neither of us could think of anything to say, I took a small dose of Adderall to perk myself up. Later I took a handful of Clonazepam to calm myself down. When I thought about how, when we went walking together, Randeep would always walk several feet in front of me for some reason, I felt odd and quashed the feeling with a dose of Focalin. This gave me tremendous energy and I began to read Cioran’s Précis de décomposition, a work which, I am told, is particularly popular with the deeply sad, and the deeply intelligent. I read up until the following line:
Vivre dans l‘attente, dans ce qui n’est pas encore, c’est accepter le déséquilibre stimulant que suppose l’idée d’avenir.
To live in expectation, in that which does not yet exist, is to accept the stimulating imbalance that the future supposes.
Here I closed the book, feeling terribly dizzy all of a sudden. It wasn’t until I’d swallowed some more Valium, a bit of Zaleplon, a little Gabapentin, a sizeable portion of Vyvanse and a generous spooning of Lorazepam that I began to approach something approximating a normal state of mind again. Wishing to celebrate this mental equilibrium, I sent up for a Negroni.
When Saint Theresa of Ávila was a little girl, she dreamt of martyrdom. She and her older brother Rodrigo spent their days talking of Paradise and their nights meditating on the transience of earthly life. They would stay up late repeating the words: “Para siempre, siempre, siempre,” or “For ever, ever, ever”. At just seven years old Theresa and her brother escaped from Ávila with the intention of reaching the land of the Moors. Their deepest wish was to be decapitated in the name of their Catholic faith. They took some provisions, intending to beg for alms when they ran out, and fled from the town.
Randeep was supposed to be my Moor. Europe and Europeans had become dull to me. I was bored of the cerulean blue and white tiles, the boozy brunches, the crumbling infrastructure mistaken for tradition. I was tired of men in tweed suits with Oxbridge credentials who cited Pound at the dinner table and who would always say dull things like “Friendship is the most dangerous of all types of love” when all I wanted to do was enjoy the braised ox cheek in front of me. Randeep, at least on paper, promised an escape from the stuffy pedantry of that world. Just his name elicited the smell of jasmine, pomegranate and blood. I would either civilise him or be slaughtered by him.
But Randeep was a practical man. He had studied Business at King’s College and worked as a Tech Consultant. His single-minded nature, the sort cultivated in middle-class Indian families, meant that he was neither disposed to conversion nor violence. His family, though technically Hindu, was non-practising, and his father had embraced British culture (or a parody of it) with the sort of enthusiasm which seems to be reserved for ex-subjects of former British colonies. He was particularly proud, to give an example, of his son having participated in the Duke of Edinburgh award. Metaphysics were alien to them, and the strange gods of their culture, window dressing.
Chief among Randeep’s inherited British characteristics was his lack of conversation. This, at least, was something which I could appreciate. Like the rest of the men I’d known he worked internationally and with him I was able to pass beneath a series of hotel roofs without having to work myself. But he was averse to intellectualising, to speaking in general, and that made all the difference. because it was if he wasn’t even there. I felt for the first time in my life that I was standing on my own two feet.
Randeep’s presence was so minimal that I didn’t even notice when he didn’t come back to the hotel for the next three days. I only realised when I was told by the bus boy that I was supposed to have checked out that morning.
“Has Randeep called?” I asked.
“No,” he said, with abstract foreignness.
I looked through Randeep’s things but found no money, nor bank cards, nor anything that could get me home or to another hotel. With nowhere to go I went to a telephone booth to call Randeep’s family. It was his mother who picked up. She sounded weary. When I asked if she had heard from Randeep, she said:
“Don’t you know? Weren’t you with him? How could you not have known?”
She told me that a series of bombs had gone off in the Madrid Cercanías train line the morning Randeep had left, and that he had been on board. The funeral was in two days.
Madrid. That was it. I was in Madrid.
Saint Theresa and her brother never got any further than a few miles from their home. They were found by their uncle Francisco, at a religious monument named Los Cuatro Postes. When he dragged them back they got a horrid spanking from their parents.
Terrible writing