A Clue to the Exit Page 8

  Mind you, inspiration can’t fail to strike under these miserable conditions. I’ve achieved poverty and isolation, the world-famous formula for artistic success, among other things.

  I’m in a pension in the red-light district of Toulon. The wallpaper must have been brought here from Oscar Wilde’s death chamber. In this case, however, it’s not clear which one of us will go first. The building next door is being demolished and a ball and chain could easily slip through the emaciated walls at any moment. In the meantime, and what a mean time it is, brown and purple flowers with the texture of warts press in from every side of my tiny room. At the slightest movement my bed twangs like an unstrung guitar.

  Outside, the French genius for covering pavements in dog shit achieves its most perfect expression, leaving almost no room for the beggars to display their cardboard autobiographies. As darkness rushes tactfully onto the streets, hideous women, sometimes overweight, sometimes dangerously thin, offer parts of their bodies for rent at understandably modest prices.

  I wish I could stay but I’ve heard of a beautiful island nearby where the off-season rates are even more reasonable than they are here. I’ve found a room through an advertisement in the Var Matin, looking after the summer house of a Toulon family. I went for an interview and they seemed to think that it was pleasingly romantic to have an écrivain anglais caretaking for them. I’ll be living on the wild side of Porquerolles, a carless, unbuilt miracle of preservation, so they tell me. I can walk to the village to buy my supplies and then go home to write On the Train. I am hoping my life will be perfectly uneventful, so that I can concentrate exclusively on my novel. My last day in Monte Carlo, by contrast, was far from uneventful and I’ll have to describe it as briefly as possible so my mind is clear enough to carry on with the work.

  I returned from my cliffside vision convinced that I had glimpsed a state in which I could become free through the intensity of my self-consciousness, and through being the neutral witness of my pathology. It turned out not to be so easy to pack decades of psychotherapy into one day of deliberate unhappiness. I did my best.

  The first thing that threw me when I went back to Angelique’s apartment was the letter waiting for me in the hall from my implacably literary friend Lola.

  My dear Charles,

  Imagine how delighted I was to hear that you’ve been spotted, pen in hand, in the Monte Carlo casino. They’ll have to put up a plaque! I happen to be on Jean-Marc Olivier’s committee for the screening of Flat, the Maestro’s unfinished masterpiece (which, by the way, is absolutely marvellous and in some mysterious way better, and truer to itself, for being unfinished. One could almost think he died for aesthetic reasons, Maestro to the last). Anyhow, our mutual friend says that you’ve been creating quite a stir by beavering away in the Salle Privée while your engaging-sounding Muse loses huge sums of money at the tables. Please reassure me that you’re not just adding up her losses!

  Oh, Charles, how wonderful if you’re finally getting down to the serious work I know you have inside you. One can’t help thinking of Dr Johnson’s famous remark!

  If there’s anything I can do to help, you know I’m only too willing. I’ll be staying at Jean-Marc’s all week. Do ring me if you have a moment when you’re quite certain you can’t write another word.

  Lots of love and tons of admiration for your courage,

  Lola

  I was writhing with irritation. How could I be expected to concentrate on the root fear under these circumstances? I wrote a short sarcastic note inviting Lola to be my literary executor and assuring her that if I died before my novel was finished it would not be for aesthetic reasons.

  I had scarcely finished when the phone rang. I answered it, in case it was Angelique.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi, baby, it’s Heidi!’

  ‘Heidi, how did you find me?’

  ‘Lola told me your number.’

  ‘What would I do without that woman?’ I muttered.

  ‘Don’t be grumpy, you silly billy,’ said Heidi. ‘I’m ringing with good news.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘I want you to see Ton Len.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I didn’t realize you were really ill,’ she said.

  ‘Did you think I was lying?’

  ‘I thought it was some kind of English joke,’ she said, laughing as merrily as one of the mountain streams that crowd her native land. ‘You know the way I never got your sense of humour.’

  ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘I think it’s important for Ton Len to have some photos of herself with her daddy, and when she’s older we can look at them together and I’ll tell her what a wonderful man you were.’

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ I said, wondering if things could get any worse.

  We made some practical arrangements, and Heidi drew the conversation gracefully to a close. ‘I’ve got a Tibetan monk doing a ritual for you, so you can die more consciously.’

  ‘Don’t use that word. I never want to hear it again.’

  ‘You can go into the Bardo state fully aware of what’s happening,’ chirped Heidi, like a mystic wind-up doll. ‘It’s incredible. You can have a proactive relationship with your next birth.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I also want you to know that I’ve worked through my issues around us and I totally forgive you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Everything,’ she said, blowing me a kiss down the line.

  I could hardly find room to accommodate what was going on. See my daughter? See her now? Was it too late? Never too late for a photo shoot.

  In the bedroom there was a letter for me on the pillow, this time from Angelique.

  My darling,

  I’m sorry we had such a horrible lunch. It’s all my fault. I find myself faltering as we approach the moment when we must separate. I cannot bear to lose you. I have never known a passion like ours. I have never given myself so completely. It’s very hard for me, I’ve always been so frightened of getting close to anyone. I’ve never told you this before, but both my parents were killed in a car accident when I was three. I was always told what a ‘terrible misfortune’ it was, and ever since I have been fascinated by bad luck. I gamble in order to get close to Maman and Papa. Only by losing can I enter the mysterious absence which constitutes their love.

  Don’t you see that I cannot let you stay, I cannot fall more in love with you when you will soon be dead. It’s not the money, my darling, it’s just that I’ve found a system for coping with my unhealable wound and I cannot allow you to destroy that system when you will not be here to hold me among the ruins.

  Let’s come back early tonight and make love as never before. Now you know my terrible secret, make love to it, go to the heart of it, make love to my wound with your own desperate desire to live and then let’s part before the dawn, like the two vampires we really are, belonging more to death than life; let’s not wait for the beams of the reproachful sun to discover us together, staining our love-soaked sheets with tears.

  Come to me soon, my darling. I long to be with you.

  Angelique

  Of course I didn’t believe a word of it. Still, I felt an involuntary stiffening in my trousers. I was sure that if I hunted around the flat I would find the prototype of this letter, customized for each bankrupt lover. It was too smoothly written not to be rehearsed. I couldn’t help admiring the way she proposed to get rid of me before breakfast.

  I paced around the room indignantly rereading the letter. Then the terrifying possibility that she was telling the truth stabbed through my contempt, like a dagger through an arras. Even if the letter was carefully written, that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Authenticity doesn’t have to be inarticulate. What if my own root fear (which I was now over-fearlessly confronting) made me want to believe she was a cold, selfish bitch, when in fact she was someone who couldn’t afford to love me
any more than she did? I started to spiral as I attempted to catch sight of the distorting effect of my proudly unveiled terror. How could I see through my fear without looking through it at the same time? I was already lost and I hadn’t even proposed an extra day to Angelique.

  Needless to say, as Marie-Louise would say, things didn’t improve when I arrived at the casino. Angelique came running over and kissed me on the mouth.

  ‘Did you get my letter?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  She threw her arms around my neck. ‘Hold me,’ she whispered. ‘I feel so vulnerable after telling you those things.’

  I held her in my arms and I could tell from the trembling in her body that she was telling the truth. I opened to her completely. We pulsed with love, our bodies flowering effortlessly, and at the same time a terrible apprehension rushing over me.

  ‘What have we done?’ I said. ‘Falling in love is so dangerous.’

  ‘That’s why I got angry when you said that I only gambled with tokens and substitutes. First, because it used to be true and secondly because it isn’t true any longer.’ She looked at me with a shattering combination of trust and suspicion.

  ‘This is so confusing,’ she said. ‘I opened up for the first time with you, even though I knew you were dying. It makes me feel mad, like I chose you because of that. Sometimes I wish we’d never met. It’s a miracle to be able to feel again, but it’s so raw. I have no detachment left, none at all. It’s like a drug, it’s so real. But I know I have to let go of you. If I stay with you it’ll destroy me. If you leave now maybe I can thank you for bringing me back to life.’

  I was transfixed by her emotions. I have never felt so close to another person.

  ‘I can’t stand you going,’ she said, ‘either now or ever, but I know I probably couldn’t love you if you weren’t. Christ, Charlie, it’s so horrible. Can’t you stop it from hurting?’

  ‘Stay a little,’ I mumbled, ‘stay.’

  Angelique brushed my cheeks with the back of her fingernails, her eyes brimming with tears.

  ‘We need another day,’ I said more forcefully. ‘I’m not asking for any favours. I fetched the last of my money.’

  ‘You have more money?’

  ‘Yes, my last million francs. We can carry on just as before, but we’ll have tomorrow to live consciously.’

  ‘You expect so much from that word,’ she said.

  ‘Imagine the intensity,’ I went on, ‘now that we know everything. You see, I’ve reached a kind of barrier too. I was convinced that you were cold and manipulative. I was reproaching myself for choosing someone who was bound to reject me. We’ve both been caught up in our histories, but tomorrow, for one day, we could set aside all the things that stop us from loving each other completely. And then we could part knowing at last what it means to be intimate with another person.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘maximum intensity.’

  I was moved when Angelique, who hadn’t yet lost all the money I gave her at lunch, suggested we go home. We went straight to bed but, instead of the hectic passion we expected, found ourselves clinging to each other doubtfully. It wasn’t that passion had been replaced by protectiveness; we were simply appalled by what was happening.

  It was too late to hide and too late to reveal ourselves as well. We clung to each other, wishing we had never met; we rolled apart, wishing we could interfuse. Gradually the unease grew: the marrow fear, the worm on the hook, the tears in the womb, the screaming tedium of death’s row, the unbearable thought of the unbearable thought. Angelique had told the truth. How brave, how distinguished, how futile. No shortage of ashes, not a phoenix in sight.

  Neither of us slept all night.

  ‘I can’t stand this,’ I said in the morning.

  ‘You wanted another day,’ she reminded me.

  ‘Another forty years would suit me better,’ I said.

  ‘Another day like this,’ she said, bent over her folded arms, as if she had been stabbed in the guts.

  ‘I don’t think I realized how frightened I am of dying until now,’ I said. ‘It’s really desperate.’

  ‘You’re the one who wants to live consciously.’ She spat out the word like a bad oyster.

  ‘I think I thought it would be more rewarding.’

  ‘There’s nobody giving out prizes—’

  ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I interrupted. ‘I just … when it comes down to it, I don’t know where I got hold of the idea that it would be better to be in a more direct relationship with what’s going on.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘Nudist colonies are famously unsexy.’

  ‘I almost forgot,’ I said, walking over to the cupboard, fetching my small carrier bag and dropping it at her feet. I unzipped it and parted the flaps with my toe. She glanced down at the sheafs of fluorescent green banknotes. A desultory gleam, like a rat’s tail, slithered across her expression and disappeared. I realized I had destroyed her way of life and I was offering her nothing to put in its place. She loves games because they have rules, their catastrophes are organized. By abandoning her gambling she set herself loose on a sea of unbounded emotion. ‘The truth’ wasn’t just abstract and unconsoling, it had become positively malign, like being thrown an anchor after falling overboard.

  The day hobbled on with unrelenting horror. By the time we got home again we were too tired to make love and too upset to sleep. We stared out of the window, admiring the suave transition from hideous day to hideous night.

  Our parting was silent. There was nothing to say. Tears belonged to a luxurious world we had left far behind.

  I went to the station and, contemplating the departures board, chose Toulon, the nearest place with no reputation for merriment.

  17

  I think continually of Angelique, the sharp crease of her thigh tendons, the soft hollow behind her knees, the throb of her jugular. I think of her on all fours, slippery with sweat, that last time when she turned her head and smiled, confident that I would enjoy myself, anxious that I would know she couldn’t.

  I want to lift her in my mouth like a lion cub and carry her to safety. I want to push my thumbs up her spine, vertebra by vertebra, until the pleasure floods her brain. I want to hook my arms around her shoulders and draw her closer. I imagine us foundering onto the bed, my chest against her back. We sink into a humming realm, a bell jar of bees, flesh buzzing. We are not absorbed in ourselves, or lost in each other, but both feeling the sting of the same rain, as if the rain was intelligence.

  She begged me not to ring her after I left. It was easy enough to agree at the time, but the restorative influence of this terrifying loneliness has made me forget the agony of our parting and the seriousness of my promise. Perhaps she regrets her request and is longing for me to ring. I would do the kind thing if I had any idea what it was.

  Impatience, when it intensifies beyond the banal agitation of the ticket queue, and the anguish of a pacing lover, changes its nature and nails one to the floor. Instead of a single stimulating obsession, a universe of cattle prods prevents the slightest movement. Today everything had the impossible urgency of already being too late. I spent the morning breathless on my hotel bed. If there was an Oscar for Best Corpse, I would currently be making the longest acceptance speech in the history of that sincere ceremony. Who could I not thank, what could I not thank, for bringing me to this perfect paralysis? A thousand lines of tumbling dominoes crash in on every moment, bringing their descent to the character of each situation. Of course the dominoes don’t stop tumbling just because I call something a situation. The situation is itself a tumbling domino.

  It is already too late to spend a significant amount of time with my daughter. Would it help her to be grasped by a dying stranger with the troubling title of ‘Daddy’? I would do the kind thing if I had any idea what it was.

  It is already too late to master the field of consciousness studies, a field which in any case trumpets the insoluble nature of its enquiry. You name it
, it’s already too late. I lay there, my thoughts anticipating themselves hopelessly and collapsing at their inception.

  What finally got me off the bed was the wallpaper. I couldn’t stand that fucking wallpaper.

  Why can’t I just crawl under a bush and die quietly? Why am I sitting here in the Brise Marine, waiting for the ferry to take me over to the island, worrying about how to put it, how to describe what happened to me this morning? The answer is simple. The moment I stop writing, a fungus invades my mind and, instead of the marble on which I was carving my epitaph, I am surrounded by the soft garbage of circumstance, my own death amounting to nothing more than a further mess.

  Putting aside my reservations, I rang Heidi to arrange a time when I could see Ton Len. They were away for the weekend.

  18

  What an island! The straggling branches and peeling bark of the eucalyptuses in the dusty village square belong far further south than a short ferry ride. Outside the village, unmetalled roads turn into rocky paths. Shillings of light fall through the branches onto the wings of golden-tailed pheasants as they strut among the crunching leaves. Gulls lift from the sea spray and slice the salty sky. And the black sea, turned milky turquoise by the coast, heaves itself slowly onto the rocks and rushes down, pure white, in fleeting streams and cataracts. This is the southern coast, the wild side, looking out towards invisible land: Corsica, Sardinia, Africa.

  Spring is too articulate to let winter ramble on. Vine shoots burst from its impatient mouth. Valleys that have never seen a bulldozer, thick with different greens – pine green, sage green, olive green, laurel green – are all tilted by the same wind and dazzled by the same sun.

  I must bring my daughter here. However frightened I am of our love blossoming too late, I picture the two of us standing in this sickle bay, watching the clear ripples sift the black and gold sand at our feet. If we meet here, perhaps love will count for more than loss; perhaps she will always remember that I love her and hold the confidence in her heart.