And then the wind died and the stars were at their steeliest. Morbidly swaddled in my sleeping bag, an electric shock of panic kept me from unconsciousness; I was like a sentry who stabs himself awake to avoid the capital crime of sleeping on his watch.
27
The next day I lay dozing in the tent all morning in a pool of sweat. I woke up fuddled and airless and dehydrated. After drinking a pint of warm water with a taste of baked plastic, I climbed a small dune and tried to clear my mind.
What struck me was the spontaneous transparency of consciousness. Consciousness and experience are synonymous. When I feel the sun warming my face I know it for what it is, nothing needs to be added. I don’t have to tell myself a story: ‘The sun is warming my face.’ It is not a linguistic act. I don’t have to observe myself to know the content of my consciousness, that is precisely what I know already. I may not understand my experience because I am confused, but then the experience I am having is confusion. Understanding may require analysis, knowledge requires facts, but this knowing is given. In its essence consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental.
Having no argument with my experience, there was no such thing as a non sequitur. I was just watching the pattern unfold, like a child playing cat’s cradle with a piece of string. I was driven by local emotions into a freewheeling lateral association, or downwards in a potentially endless search for the anchor at the end of some chain of thought, or upwards into more and more denuded categories of categories.
And then, because this search can only find arbitrary resting places, it was the whole process, accepted with complete permissiveness, which became fundamental; its endlessness was its resting place: thoughts seemed to radiate from and collapse into the same source, as if the whole history of a star could be compressed into a single unimaginable image, a black hole as bright as the sun. This image disappeared into itself (because it was a thought within the process) and reappeared (because it was the image of the process in which it disappears) and there was no succession any more (because of its self-effacing appearance) and I was outside time (because there is no succession) and inside time (because I am a dying animal who has no reason to believe that he could have this experience without a living body).
And yet when I really accepted that I couldn’t be outside time if I wasn’t inside time, my whole being, and not just my identification with a particular aspect of my thoughts, was this speechless eloquence of still moving alpha omega part whole black light and I felt that I was participating in reality for once and not just hoping and moping, and all the oxymorons turned into paradoxes, all the watersheds into figures of eight, and I was as helpless as sand dancing on a beaten drum, but I was helpless from the strangeness of reality, not from some suburban despair induced by the insult of circumstance, and this helplessness was the greatest freedom I could know.
28
Six weeks have passed since I left the desert. My visionary moment curdled into loneliness and terror. I found myself cracking up, persecuted by all the little voices that were silenced by what I’d seen. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the wave which flings itself highest up the beach should make the noisiest retreat. But what had I seen? Without the feeling of insight there was nothing left, nothing portable. I couldn’t stay where I was, let alone go any further. All I wanted was to warm myself by the fake fire of reassurance. I didn’t care if it was fake. I didn’t want to think any more. I wanted to die in England. I wanted to see the crocuses in Hyde Park. I wanted to see my daughter one more time and hold her hand in mine.
Soon after arriving in London, I made an appointment with Dr Turner. I was hoping to get some painkillers that would catapult me into the only paradise for which there are any reliable witnesses. Instead, he greeted me with the disturbing announcement of an experimental treatment for my condition. If I volunteered for a trial at the King’s Liver Unit I could start using it straight away. Nobody knows the long-term effects, but the initial signs are promising. I felt my perfect despair prised open by this oyster knife of good news. I had been so set on the certainty of death that I couldn’t separate my tentative relief from some less obvious emotions. The luxury of knowing when I was going to die, unknown to the athlete and the health-store freak, was surprisingly hard to give up.
After leaving Turner’s surgery I stood on the corner of Pont Street, holding my breath so as not to absorb more than half the cloud of diesel pumped into my face by an accelerating taxi, opposite the hotel where Oscar Wilde was arrested, and a few hundred yards from the prep school which first taught me to hate education, searching for the secret glamour which is only vouchsafed to the reprieved, but I did not find it in the stony face of the jogger who hopped beside me at the zebra crossing, a mouse squeak of rock music leaking from the headphones clamped to his skull, or in the shimmering pelt which tottered across the road with the wrong animal inside it, the quick and the wild replaced by the contemptuous pallor of a powdered stick insect; and I began to suspect that it was not gratitude for extra time, but the incisiveness of approaching death which could cut through to the heart of the matter, and I felt the bathos of survival, the loss of dramatic tension, the disappointment of watching the pristine violence of a mountain torrent thicken into a bloated yellow serpent glittering its way slowly through the crowded plain.
Now I would have to start again, writing silly screenplays, negotiating a mortgage, fighting with my ex-wife, struggling to secure a place in the world. I dragged myself across Cadogan Square, under the nervous buds of the plane trees, feeling the nausea of spring. No wonder Henry James, falling down after a stroke, thought he heard a voice saying, ‘So, here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing.’ He was expecting to be released from the triumphant mediocrity of life, its vulgar insistence on the inessential.
Today I finally called Heidi, my nerves sliding over sandpaper as I dialled her number. She took the news pretty well and after some hesitation suggested I pick up Ton Len from school this afternoon. We agreed on the details and signed off more tenderly than we have for years. After our conversation I felt such a tangle of excitement and weariness that it was impossible to do anything practical, and so I wandered into the street, killing time until Ton Len’s school day ended. It was – is – one of those staccato spring days, sunburst and cloudshadow speeding overhead and underfoot, and in perfect harmony, simmering beatitude interlaced with the horror of watching the future wreathe itself around my attention.
I saw an advertisement for the Monet exhibition on the side of a bus and, with an impulsiveness I knew I would soon have to renounce, leapt on board and rode along Piccadilly to the Royal Academy. I hadn’t realized that Monet had become as popular as a Cup Final, and I had to buy a triple-face-value ticket from an art-lover loitering by the gates.
I could hardly see the early canvases through the thrusting crowd, but when I reached the final room the scale of the Grandes Decorations acted as a forcefield, holding the viewers at bay. I shuffled to the front and scanned the unframed lilac expanse of clouds hanging in water and waterlilies hanging in the sky. It drew me to its light-flooded centre only to diffuse me into the lilac pool, the pulse of ambiguity dilating into stillness. The water was a natural mirror for the mirror of art: once that dialogue of reflecting surfaces was set up, everything else – depth and surface, abstraction and representation, paint and painted – could enter into it, and when these compacted reflections reached their highest concentration there was a burst of freedom, the flashing moment when the eye perceives itself.
Monet said he wanted to paint the air, a task not unlike writing about consciousness, the medium for seeing which can’t itself be seen. I have failed to paint the air or to write about consciousness, but it’s enough to know that there are states of mind and works of art which deliver this paradox: that the thing which is closest to us is the most mysterious. Something I’d glimpsed in the desert was now in front of me, already made. The pleasure of recognition shimmered through my bloodstream. O
bsessive reflection, which had sent my own mind falling and flailing over the last few months, stood before me like a serene piece of nature, and I felt like a walker on a cliff path who is met by a perfect gale and can lean effortlessly into the slope with outstretched arms.
I hurried out of the gallery, trying to protect this decaying impression. My attention was locked on to my imagination and I was almost run over as I crossed the street. Passing the window of Hatchard’s bookshop, I saw the latest cluster of books to emerge from the great consciousness debate: Emotional Intelligence, The Feeling Brain, The Heart’s Reasons. I felt the giddy relief of knowing that I wasn’t going to read any of them. The fact that science has decided to include emotion in its majestic worldview seems about as astute as an astronomer discovering the moon.
In five minutes I must go and fetch my daughter from her school. How will I tell her where I’ve been? My novel, thank goodness, is abandoned, and the sequel to Aliens with a Human Heart is unlikely to deliver any aesthetic charge, other than the stunned incredulity which sometimes sells fifty-three million tickets. Life is coming to get me, like the latest model of the sea monster in Phèdre, no longer the agent of divine cruelty but of pointless information, squelching down the beach, dragging its tail in the sea; it will soon crush me, downloading its scaly mass of triviality into my frail mind, but I am going to go down fighting, fighting for the flash of freedom at the heart of things.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDWARD ST. AUBYN lives in London with his two children. He is the author of The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mothers Milk, and At Last). Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. His novel On the Edge was published in the United States for the first time by Picador in 2014. His latest novel is Lost for Words. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY EDWARD ST. AUBYN
Lost for Words
On the Edge
THE COMPLETE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS
Never Mind
Bad News
Some Hope
Mother’s Milk
At Last
PRAISE FOR THE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS
“A remarkable cycle of novels … The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation, and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Stunning, sparkling fiction … Unforgettable.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“One of the great comic writers of our time … [A] sprightly, caustic, and harrowing novel sequence.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Gorgeous, golden prose … St. Aubyn is utterly fearless when faced with the task of unpacking and anatomizing the inner lives of characters. No emotion is so subtle and fleeting he can’t convey it, or so terrifying or shameful that he can’t face it.”
—Lev Grossman, Time
“One of the most amazing reading experiences I’ve had in a decade.”
—Michael Chabon, Los Angeles Times
“Parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidity, suicide, alcoholism … nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St. Aubyn’s world—or more surprising—its philosophical density.”
—Zadie Smith, Harper’s Magazine
“One of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.”
—The Boston Globe
“Powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose … On every page of St. Aubyn’s work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
“Extraordinary … Acidic humor, stiletto-sharp.”
—Francine Prose
“The best books I’ve read all year.… They’re riotously funny. St. Aubyn writes sentences that are so beautiful it almost hurts to read them. And his dialogue is the best I’ve ever come across. I can’t recommend these books enough.”
—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“St. Aubyn writes like an angel. As far as I’m concerned, his books are better than Evelyn Waugh’s.”
—David Ives, New York Post
“Brilliant … These are addictive and enormously enjoyable novels, full of juicy dialogue, narrative acrobatics, and expert characterization.… A tremendously moving depiction of recovery and survival, without a drop of sentimentality to sully or dilute the experience.”
—Details
“The most brilliant English novelist of his generation.”
—Alan Hollinghurst
“The Melrose novels are among the smartest and most beautiful fictional achievements of the past twenty years.”
—New York Observer
“I read the five Patrick Melrose novels in five days. When I finished, I read them again.”
—Ann Patchett, The Guardian (London)
“Take P. G. Wodehouse’s lighthearted country-house tales of the British aristocracy, then dip them in an acid bath of irony, drug abuse, and general decay, and you have Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels.… St. Aubyn’s novels fall into that rare category of books that have been highly praised yet are still somehow underrated.”
—Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic (The Best Book I Read This Year)
“Highly entertaining and often devastatingly dark … The Melrose novels are modern masterworks of social comedy.”
—Bookforum
“Edward St. Aubyn is probably neck-and-neck with Alan Hollinghurst for the title of ‘purest living English prose stylist.’”
—Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of the Year)
“Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St. Aubyn?”
—Bret Easton Ellis
“The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England.”
—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
“Hilarious and insightful, with a sinister tint and pitch-perfect dialogue … St. Aubyn’s sentences were the best I read this year.… I’m addicted to St. Aubyn.”
—Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them
“These [novels], covering more than forty years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war.”
—The London Review of Books
“Heartbreaking and delicious.”
—Anthony Bourdain
“Telling someone how much you loved Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels has become something of a cliché, and lately achieves one of two responses: either the remark, ‘Oh, people keep recommending them to me,’ or, more frequently, ‘Yes, aren’t they wonderful?’ which then begins a long, satisfying, somewhat fetishistic conversation about which one of the novels is your favorite, and why.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings
“Dialogue as amusing as Waugh’s and narrative even more deft than Graham Greene’s.”
—Edmund White
“The bravura quality of St. Aubyn’s performance is irresistible. Brilliant.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
“A master of dark comedy and difficult truths, St. Aubyn is one of contemporary literature’s finest novelists.”
—Bob Edwards
“St. Aubyn is a staggeringly good prose stylist and evidently has a big and open heart.”
—The Times (London)
“These books are hilarious and terrifying, shot through with pain and wisdom and written in the most extraordinary cold, pure style: rockets of wit exploding like flares to highlight the bleakness of the terrain.”
—Independent on Su
nday (London)
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
About the Author
Also by Edward St. Aubyn
Praise for the Patrick Melrose Novels
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CLUE TO THE EXIT. Copyright © 2000 by Edward St. Aubyn. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
A Clue to the Exit Page 13
