A Clue to the Exit

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘Fuck me,’ she said angrily.

  My symptoms melted away as I unzipped my trousers. Clasping her buttocks, I hoisted her off the ground and entered her standing up. She groaned as her back grated against the trunk; I wept with gratitude to be back inside her.

  Soon my arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets.

  ‘My arms,’ I moaned.

  ‘My back, you’re tearing the skin off my back,’ she replied.

  We fell over slowly, trying not to disconnect. I lay on my back in a bed of pine needles and Angelique, her skirt hoisted up and pinned back by her elbows, and her fingers pushing aside the complications of her underwear, looked down at me with that febrile pensiveness which absorbs every inflection of physical pleasure. She drew the heat up through the centre of her body, like hot mercury in a thermometer, bursting the glass, streams of quicksilver running down her sides and bathing us in brilliant danger. It felt like the first time and the last time, the double ecstasy of a fatal renewal.

  ‘Oh, no, that bitch has followed us,’ said Angelique, looking through the trees at the lawn.

  ‘We’d better stop,’ I said with a sigh.

  ‘No, I refuse to let her stop us. You’re my prisoner,’ she said, pinning my arms down and making small but telling movements with her hips, rolling them one way and then another, clenching and unclenching her muscles.

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ I gasped. ‘We can’t be caught like this.’

  I could hear their voices now, without being able to make out what they were saying. How could I explain our predicament? To which scene in the Maestro’s repertoire were we alluding?

  Angelique leant forward slowly, arching her spine inwards as she pushed back, our foreheads touching and our eyes intercrossed. Our bellies and our chests joined, our noses brushed, our lips met and our tongues slithered confidently over each other. She sprang back and fixed me in the eye. It was almost too strong. My mind floated like the Bullet Train above its tracks, meeting no obstruction; everything clear.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Marie-Louise, without any particular emphasis. ‘My father used to call this the “Lovers’ Grove”. I’m happy to see that the tradition is being kept alive.’

  I strained back and managed to say, ‘It’s the garden scene from The Roads of Venice.’

  ‘Ah, bravissimo,’ said Alessandro.

  ‘Je trouve que c’est très réussi,’ said Jean-Marc. ‘A great suque-cess.’

  ‘Now I can see why they didn’t want any coffee,’ said Pamela, in the tone of someone who knows she is being witty.

  ‘We all pay homage to the Maestro in our own way,’ I said, hoping to bring the interview to an end.

  Angelique let out a cry of joy. ‘I’M COME-ING!’ she shouted. ‘OH, GOD, IT’S SO GOOD, IT’S SO GOOD!’

  ‘Shall we go and see the pagoda?’ said Marie-Louise, leaving us in no doubt that orgasms, properly speaking, should be silent.

  We didn’t bother to go back to the house, but walked down to the main road, kissing and laughing and brushing debris from each other’s clothes and hair. We hitched our way back to Monte Carlo and were in the casino by half-past four.

  The fever is back. Our love is stronger than ever. We have only five days of gambling money left. Time is running out, screaming. I can see Angelique drifting among the tables, scattering treasure as she goes. Her glances light gunpowder trails between us, and as she turns back to the wheel the feel of her erupts inside me.

  At last I can get back to writing.

  ‘Sometimes,’ drawled Patrick, as he marvelled at the pearly bruise of fog splintering the station lights, ‘I suffer from a fit of misguided simplicity. I think that the brain and the mind are aspects of the same thing, that there is no mind–body problem, any more than there’s a car wheel problem. The problem is our passion for making convenient distinctions which we then treat as if they had an independent reality.

  ‘What if everything is as it appears to be? What if consciousness is an aspect of the mind, the mind a redescription of the brain and the brain a part of the body, and they are all interdependent, with no epiphenomenon, no duality, no discarnate minds?

  ‘Anyhow, I have these fits,’ Patrick concluded, drawing a spiral in the condensation of the window, ‘but I soon recover, and if I don’t I cancel everything and get myself to the nearest consciousness conference. After that, it’s only a matter of minutes before this pathetic vision of integrity shatters into a thousand “problems”.’

  ‘You had me convinced there for a moment,’ said Crystal. ‘I’m a sucker for that down-home, plain man’s wisdom.’

  They smiled at each other and Patrick felt a wave of happiness. He wanted to play with Crystal, to talk with her about the most abstract and the most intimate things, to visit places with her, to make love to her, to make love to her right now. He could kneel on the floor and bury his head in her lap, and forget that he was dying. He could kiss her bruised body with unspeakable tenderness, concentrating all the love which he had somehow never found it convenient to donate to a starving world. He was ready to give it now. He radiated this feeling in Crystal’s direction while continuing to admire the damp iridescence of the station lamps.

  Crystal felt the warm blast of his attention, which was like stepping out of a plane into a tropical country. After all the Tantric sex courses she had attended with Peter she was nothing if not open-minded, but, caught between an unconscious husband and a revived ex-boyfriend, she felt unable to take on this newcomer with his heavy charge of troubled desire. And yet there was something touching about him – that combination of defiance and vulnerability, not trapped in the restless shuffle of adolescence, but held in a kind of oppressed balance, like two caryatids shouldering a slab of stone. And beneath that – the ground they stood on – she could feel an inconsolable sadness.

  ‘Do you think anybody lives in Didcot,’ said Patrick, ‘or is it just for getting stuck in?’

  ‘If you get stuck long enough, the distinction wears thin,’ said Crystal.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Patrick. ‘There are probably thousands of residents who just happen to live on trains.’

  Jean-Paul had dropped out of the conversation, like a swimmer who breathes out and allows himself to sink to the bottom of a pool, resting a while in the peaceful interval between landing and needing to breathe again. Patrick’s muddled physicalist apology and his banter with Crystal reached him like the muffled sounds and distorted shapes of poolside action. And yet he knew exactly what was going on above the surface. He was not engaging with what was being said, but he was not ignoring it either. He was just resting. Not all the theories in the world could stop him from resting.

  The slow metallic drumbeat of the tracks and the screech of braking wheels announced the arrival of another train. The fog swirled and scattered, and reassembled as the dark-blue carriages drew to a halt at the neighbouring platform.

  ‘Ah,’ said Patrick, ‘so that’s why we’ve been made to wait. It’s the royal train. Who knows which member of that legendary family is jumping the queue?’

  ‘But if we’ve stopped for them,’ said Crystal, ‘why have they stopped as well?’

  ‘This is a parliamentary democracy,’ said Patrick. ‘Even the royal family have to acknowledge the paralysing influence of Didcot Junction.’ And then, feeling the encroachment of another fit of simplicity, he started to argue again.

  ‘Why are we so astonished by consciousness? When my hand feels my leg, I’m not amazed that it feels itself at the same time. Why be amazed that the mind, while receiving sense data, also receives data about itself?’

  ‘The Buddhists treat the heart–mind as a sixth sense,’ said Crystal, ‘abolishing that little problem as well as a number of others.’

  ‘How sensible,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Exactly. Consciousness is in the senses – all six of them. Awareness is just the measure of how unobstructed a relationship we have with making sense.’

 
‘That is not the problem,’ Jean-Paul sighed, unable to go on enjoying his rest.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Crystal, ‘the professor has woken. Being aware is not the problem?’

  ‘Of course, of course, you know you have made me into a Being freak. But in order to define consciousness, we need to pause before we arrive at the enticing word “awareness”, this mermaid who appears to have human form until we embrace her and she takes us down into the luminous depths in which you are so beautifully at home.’

  ‘Well, gee,’ said Crystal.

  ‘For you the problem is how to keep your consciousness expanded – what facilitates and frustrates that task. What we must do, however much we sympathize with your mermaid’s progress towards awareness of awareness or the presence of absence, is to look at a very banal act of consciousness, the apprehension of sense data.’

  ‘Oh, let’s not look at a banal act,’ said Crystal.

  ‘Anyway, how banal is it?’ said Patrick. ‘We bring the whole history of our formation to what we see. If we’re lucky, after years of meticulous analysis we may be able to prise open a little gap and interrupt the glibness of the projection, but we’ll still be struggling with the fact that what we see is a selection made by how we feel.’

  ‘Stop!’ said Jean-Paul. ‘Let’s not stray down that route either. Let us leave aside the psychoanalytic, the Buddhistic, the question of scientific method, the paranormal, the linguistic…’ Jean-Paul started to smile at Crystal’s indignant face.

  ‘So what aren’t we setting aside?’

  ‘The fact that we have no idea how a single event could have physiological and phenomenal properties at the same time, no idea how consciousness results from irritated tissue or firing neurons. This mind–body problem is not trivial. A correlation is not a cause. Cerebral activity and consciousness may occur at the same time, but until we know how they interact they will lead parallel lives. I just ask you to appreciate their philosophical isolation.’

  ‘Of course we appreciate it,’ said Crystal sympathetically, as if she was talking to a child who had cut his finger.

  Jean-Paul noticed the ‘we’ more keenly than he would have liked.

  ‘Oh, look, they’re off,’ said Patrick.

  The dark-blue carriages of the royal train slipped into the fog, but still their own train remained immobile in the empty station.

  15

  I managed to write those last few pages since our lunch at Jean-Marc’s, but now I’ve been taken over by my circumstances and can’t carry on.

  Yesterday was my last day with Angelique. I suggested we go to the Grand Large, where we first met, and although she agreed she could barely disguise her impatience with my sentimentality. The casino is only ten yards east of the Hôtel de Paris, where we usually have lunch, and it clearly irked her to be driven dozens of miles in the wrong direction by someone whose credit was about to run out. I was mortified that we were reduced to commenting listlessly on our food, like a couple of alienated pensioners in whom enthusiasm, even for mutual torment, has been entirely replaced by the congealing powers of resignation and habit. In other words, like the rest of the clientele. By the time my myrtilles Metternich arrived I was furious.

  ‘What makes you think that I’m going to give you my last million francs when all you can do is sit there sulking?’

  ‘We have a contract,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but it’s based on passion. Without passion it’s shit.’

  ‘I know you’re under pressure with your health and everything,’ she said politely, ‘and it’s difficult for both of us that we’re separating tomorrow morning,’ she soldiered on, ‘but I think it’s unfair of you to start threatening me just because you feel bad. You know I have to gamble, so if you’re not going to give me the money I’m going to go to the bank right now before it closes. I’ll leave your bags with the hall porter.’

  ‘You “have to gamble”. You think you’re so wild and haunted, don’t you? But your life is as routine as a bank clerk’s, except that your mission is to throw away as much money as you can, which isn’t, in some cases, the aim of bank employees.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she growled. ‘You have no idea what it means to take risks.’

  ‘Bullshit! You’re the one who’s playing safe. For you, danger is removed to a world of tokens and substitutes. Why gamble with chips and cards when you can play with your life and sanity? The answer is that you don’t dare.’

  ‘I know you’re unhappy because you’re going to die soon, but you don’t have to take it out on me,’ said Angelique. She picked her bag off the floor and slid her chair back from the table.

  I suddenly felt the chasm of her departure. ‘Don’t go,’ I said, clasping her forearm. I took out my last two 500,000-franc tokens and put them on the table. ‘I’m upset, that’s all. I can’t bear the idea of our parting. It’s…’ I stopped, knowing that we couldn’t have that conversation again. ‘Listen, I’m going to go for a walk now. I’ll see you back home or in the Salle Privée.’

  ‘OK, darling,’ she said, kissing my hand, and struggling to load her handbag with the huge rectangles of shining plastic. ‘It’s so silly to argue on our last precious day together.’

  I left the hotel and set off round the coastal path of St Jean-Cap-Ferrat, feeling overwhelming anguish at the prospect of being separated from Angelique. I had to keep up a hot pace so as to turn the feeling of being overwhelmed into one of being pursued; if I was pursued perhaps I could escape. But I couldn’t escape. The fear was in my marrow.

  What was the fear in the marrow? The loss of Angelique and, behind that, the loss of the illusion that she cared for me.

  And behind the illusion that she cared for me, the knowledge that my mother had not cared for me, that she had never overcome the feeling that a baby was in bad taste. She spent the first years of my life at a careful distance, her eyes closed and a scented handkerchief pressed to her nostrils. Later on she tried to instruct me in the good taste which enabled her to find me repulsive in the first place. No wonder I had noticed Marie-Louise. Everything was falling into place.

  I cursed the compulsion which had driven me to spend my time soliciting the love of a woman who has no love to give. The reason Angelique had fooled me was that she never attempted to: she had left the deception to me. Had she pretended, I would have seen through her, but what I could not see through was my own deepest longings. How does that happen? How can we choose not to know what we cannot help knowing? How could I write about consciousness without writing about the fear in the marrow, the fear of loveless desolation which was laying waste the last months of my life?

  I couldn’t walk fast enough to keep ahead of the vicious panic which filled every cell in my body, and every possible world I could imagine, chasing me round the Cap like one of the chiens méchants advertised on every gatepost. I was on the edge, no longer playing with metaphors or describing states of mind, but stumbling along a twisting coastal path, the sea sirening me to slip, or more candidly, to dive, on to the rocks. I imagined my blood mingling with the sea; wondered how little time it would take for the salt and the sun to bleach my corpse. Would the crabs feasting on my brain find themselves, as they sucked the morsels of Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area from their busy claws, troubled by the problem of consciousness, or burdened by the need to finish On the Train? It seemed no more likely than my wanting to fulfil the aspirations of the langoustines I had for lunch. But perhaps I was fulfilling their aspirations. Perhaps that’s what made me want to dive off the cliff back into the sea. Mad thoughts. Sparks from the wheel.

  I slowed down and tried to return to the thing which these thoughts were scattering from: the fear in the marrow. Is there any negotiation with the feelings stitched into our growing bones, the things we knew before our first set of teeth?

  I suddenly saw with a strange clarity, a clarity which took me deeper into confusion, a glass knot, saw that I could only make any difference to the terror of loveless desolation by
penetrating its chaotic heart. If I could consciously live what I could not bear I might be able to reshape it. I glimpsed a molten core to consciousness, a protean heat where everything could be reshaped. Yes, a molten core, like the core of the earth, deeper than the deposits of civilization, beyond the complacencies of archaeology. I grabbed the air, closing my fist on this elusive vision.

  I remembered that at the beginning of my gambling phase I had only wanted to throw away half my capital. I still had 1.2 million francs in the bank. If I gave another million to Angelique I could buy one more day in her fantastic company. I could annihilate the simulacrum of our intimacy, and return to the truly harrowing intimacy of solitude. First it was Prozac I had to give up; now it was Angelique. I might appear to be acting from panic, like a rabbit dashing under the wheels of the car it dreads, or merely expressing my fear of separation by buying another day, but I would in fact be purifying myself of a fear which distorted everything. I would give away my last million in order to savour the pathology of my motives, second by second; volunteering for the Chinese water torture of an unbearable knowledge.

  Indifferent to the jogger who panted his way towards me on the coastal path, I let out a scream of fury. I was swaying with vertigo and blazing with conviction at the same time, knowing that I was taking a mad gamble, but knowing that if I didn’t I would lose everything.

  16

  Things haven’t worked out quite as I envisaged on Cap Ferrat. What on earth did I think I was doing? Not content with a month of sick love, I have pushed myself to the brink of destitution by insisting on another day. Not only did I give away my last whole million, but instead of the two hundred thousand francs I expected to have left, I found one hundred and eight. I forgot to cancel the direct debits on my household expenses and that scumbag Dai Varey has been on the phone to Australia ever since, with all the lights on and the hot water running. If my doctor turns out to be wrong, things could get very nasty. As it is, I only have just enough for four months. I must stop asking for a quarter bottle of Evian with my coffee. That’ll be a saving. I can’t help being scandalized by an indiscriminate tax like VAT which hits rich and poor alike.