A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (9 page)

There was a babble of approval.

‘I’ll be dead by May,’ I said quietly.

‘Oh, no, not you as well,’ said Pamela. ‘What a morbid lunch.’

‘But surely you wouldn’t want to miss it,’ said Jean-Marc, placing his hand lightly on my back as he guided me into the hall. ‘Alessandro tells me you’re in the cinema yourself.’

‘We’re all in the cinema,’ I said, influenced, perhaps, by Pamela’s mention of ‘pretentious twaddle’.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Jean-Marc.

‘What does it mean, “we’re all in the cinema”?’ said the chic Frenchwoman indignantly. ‘I never go to the cinema. For me it is absolute-lay a nightmare to be locked in the dark with all the ordinary people.’

‘Of course I don’t want to miss it…’ I went on.

‘Well, then, it’s decided,’ said Jean-Marc, resuming control after a crisis of defection: ‘we can count on you to come.’

Two greyhounds with red leather collars sat beneath their own portrait in a hall that smelt of wood smoke and lilies.

‘My cook is furious with me,’ Jean-Marc confessed, ‘because, as a homage to the Maestro, I asked her to prepare a lunch based on the famous scene in
Pompeii
where they feast on oysters and suckling pig. The shellfish were not a problem, but she had to hunt high and low to find the suckling pig.’

Everyone agreed that only Jean-Marc would have gone to such trouble.

In the drawing room Jean-Marc’s wife, dressed in cream linen edged with black velvet, stood beside the fireplace like a funeral invitation. Her eyelids drooped almost to closure and her long pale body did its best to resemble the lilies which overflowed from every vase. She greeted us with unaffected indifference. The house had belonged to Marie-Louise’s father, Jean-François de Hauteville, as she was inclined to remind her husband and other visitors. Everything that Marie-Louise touched or refused to touch was in the very best taste. She looked over my shoulder as if admiring a landscape which had just been painted for her by Poussin and in which I was not included. Even the burglars who had robbed the chateau earlier that year had been ‘real professionals’ with ‘very good taste’. Had they been ordinary thugs, without degrees in art history, they could never have been admitted to Marie-Louise’s circle.

The Maestro’s death was not likely to impress her when a member of her own family had died only last week. It had been her ‘disagreeable duty’ to go to the family vaults in Cannes and remove the remains of the old Admiral de Hauteville in order to make room for the new arrival. When the Admiral’s tomb was opened, there was nothing inside. The remains had not remained.
Vanité
des vanités, tout est vanité
. Only Bossuet could have done justice to the depths of the loss, but Bossuet, it went without saying, was dead. Saying that things went without saying and saying them anyway was, in Marie-Louise’s opinion, sophisticated. When she strayed from this policy it was in order to say things which were plainly absurd.

‘I don’t know a painter or a writer who hasn’t known what they want to do by the age of two,’ she explained, when we were discussing the Maestro’s mythologizing of his cinematic destiny.

‘The world will never be the same again without the Maestro,’ Alessandro concluded.

‘My dear Alessandro, the world never is the same again,’ said Marie-Louise, ‘with or without the Maestro.’

While we chomped our oysters and suckling pig, I noticed that a strange mood had overtaken Angelique, a mood of such vehement boredom that, had we been in a Buñuel movie, she would have turned out to be a terrorist and the lunch party would have ended explosively. I asked her as soon as possible if everything was all right.

‘I can’t stand that stuck-up bitch,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for a walk in the garden.’

We went outside while the others drank coffee, and plunged deep into the grounds. When we were well hidden from the house, Angelique leant against the rough bark of an old umbrella pine and let out a growl of fury and contempt.

‘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?’