A Clue to the Exit Read online

  Yes, Angelique is definitely right. Besides, she might win, and then our extraordinary happiness will hold.

  I try to challenge that happiness to see if it is false. Am I wedding myself to Fortune because it is the unreliable sidekick of a reliably nasty Fate? Parting from Angelique is almost as terrifying as death, and yet I expect to survive it. Am I using her as a training ground for extinction, manfully putting the pistol to my temple and firing a blank?

  No, on the contrary, the two endings enhance each other: leaving her body and leaving my own body have become as beautifully entwined as entering her body with my body.

  Walking here from her apartment, I saw aqueducts of rainbows arching down the polluted avenues. I was ready to die because I was entirely fulfilled, and I was ready to live because I was entirely ready to die. I had never felt less indifferent to life or more indifferent to death. This moment could not have occurred at any other moment, nor could it occur again at any other moment. We walked in silence until we had almost arrived, and then Angelique turned to me and said, ‘What a feeling,’ and we kissed on the steps of the casino.

  Time may pass quickly when you’re having fun, but when you’re happy it almost stops. Heavily freighted as Cleopatra’s barge, it can’t be expected to flit along. All ideas and all impressions are accepted by a mind with no motive to shut down. The more conscious I am, the slower time moves. The toll is that I have to stay conscious of death, but if I insisted on ‘having fun’ instead, I would hurtle down a wall of ice towards the very thing I was trying to forget. Standing on the steps of the casino, I thought of saying to Angelique that if we want to slow down the approach of death we must entertain it ceaselessly, but she knows that already; it’s only thanks to her that I’m realizing it at all.

  As I begin to experience more freedom, the definition of what it is changes. Freedom is always what I don’t have, because it refuses to be possessed. It may have a ‘field’, though, in which I can learn to spend more time, and for that I can never thank Angelique enough.

  I suppose I’ll have to burden my characters with more ruminations on this subject. I need to place my own feverishly textured sense of time in some scientific framework other than hallucination. Fiction, of course, textures time in its own way and superimposes further layers of elasticity and roughness. One character can assess the meaning of her entire life, while another, apparently caught in a world of molasses, just manages to light a cigarette during the same period. Dialogue gives us a bracing sense of honesty because it appears to take place over the same duration as the rest of life. The characters would take as long to speak what they say outside a book as they do within it. On the other hand, we are reading and not listening and, with any luck, what they have to say is less diffuse than most conversation, and therefore artificially compressed.

  So, what am I going to do with these characters of mine? It might not be implausible for their train to break down at Didcot. If it speeds its way to London uninterrupted, they only have fifty-five minutes to solve the riddle of consciousness, an unfair pressure to put on any conversation.

  I’ve just seen my darling Angelique collect a stack of 100,000-franc counters. That means that I have a while before we go back to her apartment. It’s tempting to eliminate dialogue from the next section of On the Train, to ruffle the smooth surface of equal duration, to plunge into a speculating or remembering mind while the rest of the world achieves almost nothing.

  ‘We can’t already be in Didcot,’ said Patrick.

  ‘We may not have time to crack the code before we arrive at Paddington,’ said Crystal.

  ‘We could be going to Vladivostok and still get nowhere if we refuse to look into the heart of the matter,’ said Jean-Paul.

  ‘And what’s that, monsieur le professeur?’ said Crystal.

  ‘Dualism!’ said Jean-Paul.

  ‘That old chestnut.’

  ‘Two old chestnuts,’ Jean-Paul corrected her.

  ‘If we’re going to have two, we might as well have three – a soul as well as a mind and body.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘two chestnuts is more than enough, I assure you. My terrible confession is that I am convinced by certain philosophical arguments which dissolve in the light of my own experience, but which I would nevertheless like to resolve in their own terms.’

  ‘But if the terminology of the arguments is inadequate for your experience, why not chuck it out?’ said Patrick impatiently.

  ‘Ultimately I do,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘but penultimately I would like to convince some of those who occupy my abandoned positions that they should abandon them as well.’

  ‘You’re a missionary,’ said Crystal.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ said Jean-Paul, opening his hands in a plea for clemency.

  ‘I knew a philosopher called Victor Eisen,’ said Patrick, ‘who worked on the problem of identity. Nobody knew better who he could properly be said to be if half his body happened to be replaced by Greta Garbo’s, which it wasn’t, by the way; or his partially damaged brain was transplanted into a robot’s body after three hundred years in a cryogenic vat. His autobiography, on the other hand, is dry and shallow, because he forgot to pay attention to the experience of being alive.’

  ‘That is not a problem confined to philosophers,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘The question is what attention do we pay to the experience of being alive. Is it necessarily dualistic?’

  ‘Or troilistic.’ Crystal smiled. ‘You know my woefully simple position on this question, namely, that our perceptions and sensations are indeed dualistic, but that they needn’t be. We can experience non-duality.’

  ‘Yes, I do know your position,’ said Jean-Paul, bowing to her in the Indian style.

  ‘I would go further,’ she went on, ‘and say that we should make those peaks of non-dual experience into the ground of our being.’

  ‘You call that a simple position!’ said Jean-Paul, looking genuinely shocked.

  ‘And my simple position,’ said Patrick, ‘is that we can make our experience as fragmented as we like, but that it isn’t a flaw in reality, just a fault in the transceiver.’

  ‘And yet that advances nothing, because we then have to know whether the fault is inherent to the transceiver,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘Is it a dualistic transceiver?’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ an announcement came over the system. ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control…’

  ‘Fucking Didcot,’ muttered Patrick. ‘Why does one always get stuck in Didcot? And in the fog.’

  14

  I haven’t been able to write for several days. Not only did Angelique continue to lose money, but she managed to get rid of several million in one evening. She found the place where I used to hide the gambling counters and took a few more million after I had given her the evening’s supply. She was very brazen about it the next day. I almost felt that she wanted to get rid of me, the way one sometimes tries to hasten the unbearable. I argued that I was owed the days that she overspent, and she counter-argued that my job was to stop her gambling all the money at once and that the terms of our contract couldn’t be altered just because I had failed. We started bickering. She became imperious and remote, while I dropped defencelessly into depression.

  Although the liver is nerveless, I had been warned to expect some ‘discomfort’ from pressure on the intestines as well as ‘referred liver pain’ under the right shoulder blade. Among the endless medical complications I might expect, the most exotic was the cirrhotic liver’s failure to eliminate the small amount of oestrogen naturally produced by a man, causing my breasts to swell painfully. The prospect of drifting towards a biochemical womanhood was not altogether displeasing, but I couldn’t adjust to the fact that I would only be able to sleep on my back. There would also be ‘magnified mood swings’, ‘blackness’, and ‘impaired memory’ to contend with.

  And yet, over the last two months I’d been miraculously, almost disturbingly, free of symptoms. In fact I was growing more v
ital every day. Until we started arguing, love and work seemed to enable me to transcend my physical limitations, but then all the symptoms pounced at once, like wild animals when the camp fires die out in the middle of the night.

  I had to retire to bed. I had a spear in my side and a trowel digging under my shoulder blade; hatpins of brief agony shot through my body unpredictably. My vision blurred and my jaundiced eyeballs and coated tongue spoke of imminent catastrophe. I started to forget the names of my characters and lost any sense of their respective personalities. Angelique, moving around in the neighbouring rooms, trampled on my aching body. Breathing in, reputedly an instinct, became a negotiated settlement.

  And still I handed the haughty and faintly disgusted Angelique her daily gambling money, the high price of my suicide-inducing bed and breakfast. Each time she came in and held out her impatient hand, close enough to reach the counters but too far for me to catch her wrist and pull her over to my side, I thought of le père Goriot, bedridden in his filthy garret but only wishing he could be further exploited by his marble-hearted daughters.

  Yesterday Angelique came into the bedroom holding my thin manuscript. She moved towards the open window and I surged up from the pillows shouting, ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to throw it out of the window – that would be doing you a favour.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘It’s wooden and dry and boring. I can’t believe this is what you want to do with your last days. Why don’t you write about how wonderful the figs taste when you know you may never taste one again?’

  ‘Because they don’t,’ I said, ‘they taste like ash.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell us how we must live every moment to the full because life is so precious?’

  ‘Because if it’s dying that makes you realize that, you’re already too anxious to do anything about it. I wanted to do something serious…’

  ‘You are doing something serious: you’re dying,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Something impersonal.’

  ‘But that’s exactly the problem: you must make it more personal, more human, more dramatic. You should write from your own experience, write about us.’ She put the manuscript on the table by the window. ‘I’m only trying to help,’ she said. ‘I think the real problem is that you don’t know how to make abstract ideas exciting. You should read Alain. We used to read him in the Lycée. He’s wonderful. After a page of Alain, you see Spinoza everywhere.’

  ‘I’ll check him out,’ I said feebly.

  She left the room and, paralysed by failure and confusion, I watched the breeze scatter the pages across the floor.

  On my third day in bed Angelique let me know, with some reluctance, that we’d been invited to lunch by a friend of Alessandro’s who had a fabulous house in the hills above Cap d’Ail. Where was that largesse I’d felt at Jimmy’s? Gone. I loathed the idea of the lunch party, but I couldn’t bear Angelique to drift further from me, to make the reanimation of our perfect love yet more impossible, and so I excavated myself from the bed and, assembling the fragments of a social identity, set off with her in the back of one of Alessandro’s cars, obsessively fingering my aching new breasts, like a thirteen-year-old girl.

  Our convoy of limousines glided down the long drive, past deeply shaded lawns, and arrived at a seventeenth-century chateau the colour of lavender honey, with pale-grey shutters. We parked beside a gurgling trout pond, its reflected light trembling steadily on the jasmine-crowded walls of an old tower. Angelique, for whom the house represented rather less than a month’s gambling in an inconveniently solid form, was less impressed than I was. I found it the perfect setting for the war between dignity and self-pity which was raging inside me. Heaving myself out of the car, I imagined the soundtrack that might accompany the long shots of a dying man walking along those gravel paths. A close-up of an intelligent and passionate face. The scream of a peacock counterpointing its own visual charm and piercing through the aesthetic consolations of the place. Yes, a peacock, the symbol of immortality, turned into the messenger of death. I thought of the Maestro and the balance he would have kept between the wit of the treatment and the savagery of the subject.

  And then one of those extraordinary things happened. Our host came out of the house and before he even greeted us he cried out, ‘The Maestro is dead. It’s a tragedy for the cinema.’

  ‘But I was just thinking about him,’ I stammered stupidly.

  Pamela, the white-haired Englishwoman, leant over to me confidentially and said, ‘John can’t stand his films; says they’re “pretentious twaddle”.’

  I looked at her with hatred, but she was too pleased with her quotation to notice.

  ‘He died behind the camera,’ said Jean-Marc, pausing on the steps of his house.

  ‘Ah, bravissimo!’ said Alessandro.

  ‘I’m sure it’s how he would have wanted to go,’ said Pamela. ‘Captain going down with his ship and all that.’

  ‘He was working on a film called Flat,’ said Jean-Marc.

  ‘Only the Maestro…’ murmured Alessandro admiringly.

  ‘Alas, it was incomplete when he died, but there will be a screening in Cannes this May. I happen to be on the festival committee,’ Jean-Marc hurried past the glamour of his connections, ‘and I thought we should form a party.’

  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.