A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (6 page)

Giving in to a childish ambition to get rid of one million francs in under five minutes, I asked one of the croupiers to place half a million on 14 – the date of my birthday – and then walked over to the neighbouring table to place my second half million on red. An individual number seemed absurdly unlikely to come up and I’d already had some luck losing on red. Returning to the first table, I heard an ominous murmur of astonishment and was appalled to find thirty-six half-million franc counters stacked up for me like building blocks in a children’s game. Needless to say I was the centre of attention as I tried to stuff the unfortunate winnings into my pockets. I really needed a shopping bag, but I was too shy to ask. At the neighbouring table I found that red, at least, had not let me down, but the loss of one counter hardly made up for the burden of gaining so many more.

I was too shaken by my failure to carry on gambling. Instead of unloading all my money, I was now fifteen times richer than when I came in. With the money I still had in the bank, my total wealth had risen to nearly twenty million francs. One million francs a week for the rest of my life! Unless I gave up writing in order to bounce around in speedboats feeding caviar to the fish, I was never going to get rid of the wretched stuff.

I drifted into the bar, thoroughly depressed. At the same time I detected the return of that hollow acceleration, that dry-mouthed excitement, that I had noticed earlier in the evening. I wished I could just give the whole lot away, but a tramp is far harder to find in Monte Carlo than a roulette wheel. My situation was truly hopeless. Perhaps if I gambled again … no, that’s what all the desperadoes think.

Unable to drink alcohol, which now leaves me feeling sick for days, I celebrated my defeat with Vichy water. My gloomy financial reverie was interrupted by a half-familiar voice. Turning round I saw the woman I had ravaged on the afternoon of the countess’s death. The loose spirals of her golden-brown hair entangled me in nostalgia. No longer naked, we went through the introductions which our furious appetites had vaulted over. Her name, it turns out, is Angelique.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she said.

‘Well, it’s funny you should ask,’ I replied, emptying my trouser pockets, and stacking the counters up on the bar.

At least I could now move my legs freely. Only my top half felt as if I was wearing a flak jacket.

‘You’re having good luck tonight,’ she said admiringly.

I struggled to explain how badly things were going from my point of view, but although she seemed to grasp the principle of what I was saying there was a stubborn incomprehension in her eyes each time they came to rest on the five million francs stacked up in front of us.

‘I don’t think you get free until you die,’ she said, half-heartedly trying to participate in my preoccupations.

‘If only it were that easy.’ I smiled.

She had lost all her money earlier in the evening and, drawn by the inverted symmetry of our disappointments, I slid the counters along the mahogany and offered them to her.

‘Lose them for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably just win more.’

‘You’re not serious,’ said Angelique.

‘Absolutely serious.’

She leant over and kissed me on the mouth. ‘Do you want to watch me play?’ she asked, looking at me intently.

‘Sure.’

Her elegant evening bag was too compact to accommodate her new fortune and, after looking around discreetly, she slipped some of the counters into her underwear, a turmoil of lace and silk, straps and buttons.

‘You’re
so
great,’ I said, biting her earlobe. ‘You drive me crazy.’

Now that I’d learned her name and was watching her play with the desires we had merely caved into on our first meeting, I felt my passion tinged with gold, like raw liquor matured in oak. The potential for true feeling bared its teeth.

‘I could fall in love with you,’ I said anxiously.

‘This is just the beginning,’ she replied, running her nails over my unencumbered pockets.

‘If I became your slave, would you set me free?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to be free.’

Walking back to the gambling tables, our interlocked fingers eagerly grinding each other’s knuckles, I felt the charge from her warm palm throbbing through my whole body. My imagination usurped the visual field: shotguns exploding in a paint factory, wrinkled rainbows thick as cream rippling across the floor, starbursts of wet colour climbing the walls.

‘Can you feel it?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes.’

She kissed me a second time. The crowd churned around us, animated by a duller force.

And then she unlocked her fingers and turned to concentrate on the wheel. I was left transfixed by the shattering of my loneliness. I stood in a rushing stillness, which was like the smooth curve of a once turbulent soon turbulent waterfall. There could be no more violent and perfect contradiction than the agony of my relief, like the sting of blood returning to a frostbitten limb it is already too late to save.

As I write this I am in Angelique’s apartment on the Avenue Princesse Grace. She is asleep in the bedroom, while I’m sitting out on the balcony, naked under my overcoat, washed in winter sunlight. She inherited my luck last night and there are about twenty-five million francs in gambling chips scattered around the drawing room.

The fire of our love, which was like a blowtorch the first time we met, is now a burning forest, leaping rivers and consuming landscapes. She knows that I’m always thinking about death and I know that she’s always longing to gamble. We reprieved each other, with every touch. With momentary impersonations, we flicked through the index cards of all our identities, and then burnt the file. There was nobody left for us to be except exactly who we are, doubly naked on an unprecedented dawn.

We didn’t forget to be practical either. I am beginning a new chapter in my life. Today I am too elated to sleep, but normally we will get up in time for a late lunch at the Hôtel de Paris, and then go to the casino when it opens at four o’clock. She will take one million francs each day and gamble; I will sit in the blissfully sealed bars and restaurants of the casino, writing. Even if she loses every day, we have twenty-five delirious days together. She will make sure that I write and I will make sure that she doesn’t spend more than a million francs a day. At midnight we will return and burn away our sickness in the incinerator of her bed. What more could we ask for? I feel almost religious.

12

I checked out of the Grand Large today. They told me that the hotel was dead at the moment but should revive around Easter. I’ll be checking out for good by then, slipping away before
un monde fou
bears down on this strip of coast which is still beautiful enough to explain why it has been destroyed.

Even an hour’s separation from Angelique dragged me into melancholy, but now that I’m back in the bar of the Salle Privée I’m in a holiday humour. I can see her through the doorway, stalking one wheel after another with a touchingly fanatical expression on her face. I am determined to continue
On the Train
, despite the fact that I feel fulfilled simply watching her move around, cocooned in the sweet oblivion of her single-mindedness, alluring in a way that only someone unconscious of being watched can be. I realize now the headlong rush into intimacy of last night’s offer to let me watch her play. Gambling is what’s really private for her, and she might with comparative casualness have offered to let me watch her masturbate.

At first I thought it was death, then consciousness; now I’m not sure it isn’t time that really fascinates me. (I read somewhere that the deep etymology of ‘fascination’ is the Hittite – always useful when there’s a gap in the archaeological record – word for vagina.) In any case they all seem tantalizingly related to one another. Identity is in there too, disappearing. There’s something that keeps changing shape but remains the same. Ways of putting it dance before me in a nervous congregation, like a cloud of gnats at sunset, made visible by the dying light, the reddening sky.

Who wants to hear a writer complain about his impossible, his hopeless, his indissoluble, his medieval, his shotgun marriage to words? Words distance us from the world, except of course when they don’t. Dreams are wordless, except when they aren’t. We can have a vision of the structure of the Benzene ring, or a vision of Kubla Khan. Intuition circumvents words, unless it lands on them. One moment we’re complaining that our very means of thought are linguistically determined, the next that there’s no language for what we’ve just thought.

Oh, for God’s sake, let’s stop being so cerebral; let’s daub our bodies in mud and stomp around on the ground, inviting Gaia to join in our revels; let’s knock back a pint of ayahuasca with some authentic tribal persons, hurtle down the tunnel of psychedelic consciousness to the dawn of time, and drown our egos in the white waters of the unavoidable truth. Then what? Chant? Pray? Interpret our shamanic journeys? Write a book pissing on Descartes? For myself, I’m grateful that thousands of years of trouble have gone into making sense of language, especially when I’m writing.

This casino coffee certainly makes one opinionated. I’d better get on with the story.

Quite apart from an unreasonable possessiveness towards Crystal, Patrick felt some alarm at the prospect of Jean-Paul’s conversation. His performance at the conference, simply entitled ‘Being’, took the audaciously tentative form of an ‘exploration’. Jean-Paul’s claim that he would ‘attempt to speak
from
, and not merely
about
, the place I wish to explore’ had produced long pauses in which his rapidly nodding head suggested an impressively spontaneous review of his alternatives, but also contained a hint of insanity, of the rocking chair in the back ward of the asylum. He had played with this open form by saying, after a long pause, ‘So, what’s next?’ And then, after another pause, ‘What
is
“next”?’

At this point some people had walked out, tactfully or indignantly, but others had stayed, feeling the desert plains of the future dropping away, and the bracing mental sensation of standing upright on the edge of a perpetual cliff.

Patrick realized that the latter effect could not have occurred without Jean-Paul holding himself at the point where he invited his listeners to join him. On the other hand, he sympathized with those who had come to learn something other than the impossibility of speaking accurately about what really mattered. He wondered if he could ask Crystal whether Jean-Paul was always ‘like that’, but she still seemed preoccupied and he hesitated for too long.

Crystal ached to be beside Peter again, or, rather, beside his body, the one place she could be sure not to find him at the moment. She couldn’t have gone to Oxford if she didn’t believe that her connection with him was infinitely extendable and, as the Quantum fans at the conference liked to say, ‘non-local’. Two particles which had once been joined continued to influence each other after they were separated. Few people understood the physics of non-locality, but many were thrilled by its metaphoric potential.

Non-local or not, she continued to hope that consciousness would return to Peter’s body, preferably while Tracy dropped a tray in the doorway, like a Victorian maid who has seen a ghost, or a bare ankle. Perhaps she could cry ‘Lawksamercy’ at the same time. Crystal was reluctant to deprive herself of any Pinewood effects for this moment of beneficent revenge. She quite wanted to ask Jean-Paul about non-locality, and not just for educational purposes. She didn’t exactly regret going to bed with him last night – for what it was worth with her body in its current state – but she didn’t want to go to bed with him tonight, and so she favoured a general conversation, possibly including this unhappy but quite intelligent man opposite.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I’m Crystal.’

‘Patrick.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Crystal. ‘That was Jean-Paul at the window.’

‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘I went to his challenging lecture. Is he always like that?’

‘No. Usually he’s pretentious without the long pauses,’ said Crystal. ‘I’m sort of joking. He’s an old boyfriend of mine.’

She knew she was being unfair to Jean-Paul. He had been so sweet to her last night, selflessly stroking her broken body, his fingertips drifting back and forth gently, like an abandoned trapeze, or tracing tortuous rivers among her cuts and bruises. He cradled the back of her head, gazing kindly into her eyes and saying, to her amazement, nothing. She hardly recognized the argumentative intellectual she had driven to psychedelic insanity in the Utah desert five years ago, the man who declared the ‘scandal’ of pure Being, and ‘announced the death of Nature’.

‘He’s become much kinder,’ she added, more for herself than Patrick; ‘that’s the main thing.’

Something horrible has just happened. I looked up from my notebook and instead of seeing Angelique in her usual rapt communion with the wheel I saw her chatting to a party of sixty-year-olds. As if this wasn’t bad enough, they started to bear down in my direction.

There was an olive-brown Spaniard in an olive-green suit, who followed the inefficient policy of chuckling continuously just in case somebody made a joke. He needn’t have worried. The party was led by an Italian whose rheumatic courtesies were like getting stuck behind a vintage-car rally in a narrow country lane.

A white-haired Englishwoman sighed theatrically. ‘John was
so
silly not to come,’ she said. ‘He kept saying, “What will I do all day in La Réserve?” and I said, “What you always do: read your book and lose your cufflinks.”’