J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'The toy poodle becomes a wolf again?'

'But only when it wants to. Remember your childhood – like all of us you stole from the local supermarket. It was deeply exciting, and enlarged your moral sense of yourself. But you were sensible, and kept it down to one or two afternoons a week. The same rules apply to society at large. I'm not advocating an insane free-for-all. A voluntary and sensible psychopathy is the only way we can impose a shared moral order.'

'And if we do nothing?'

'Danger will rush up to us and put a knife to our throat. Look at the century that lies ahead – an upholstered desert, but a wasteland all the same. An absence of faith, except for a vague belief in an unknown deity, like the sponsor of a public-service broadcast. Wherever there's a vacuum, the wrong kind of politics creep in. Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatreds that could liberate them, and they found an Austrian misfit only too happy to do the job. Here at Eden-Olympia we're setting out the blueprint for an infinitely more enlightened community. A controlled psychopathy is a way of resocializing people and tribalizing them into mutually supportive groups.'

'Like divisions of the Waffen-SS? At the Cardin Foundation there was real violence. People might have been killed.'

'It was more choreographed than you think. Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us "buying"? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world. Your passing infatuation with that child in the Rue Valentin might spark off some vital new development in aviation…'

Penrose stood up, kicked the fur stole out of his way and began to stroll around the room, almost dismissing me with a flourish.

Scenting the sunlight, he opened a window and filled his lungs.

He had been saving little Natasha to the last, warning me from any rush to judgement. After inspecting himself in the mirror, he turned to stare down at me. The warring elements in his face, the ready smile and steely eyes, gave me the sense that several personalities were jostling for space in his large skull.

'Paul, you can tell me – are you going to the police?'

'Probably. I need to think about it.'

'I've been completely frank. I've held back nothing.'

'The Cannes police wouldn't understand a word. If they did, they'd probably agree with you.'

Penrose chuckled over this. 'Still… the Cardin Foundation robbery. Are you going to report it?'

'Not for a day or two. I'll tell you when I do.'

'Good. I need to know. There are large issues here.'

'Involving a great many powerful people. Don't worry, it would be easy to arrange a ratissage for an Englishman who's overstayed his welcome. An old Jaguar with fading brakes, the high corniche road, an empty bottle of cognac in the wreckage… at least I'd have cured some chief executive's migraine.'

'Paul…' Penrose seemed disappointed in me. 'This isn't a regime of gangsters.'

'Gangsters and psychopaths? Surely that's the prospectus you've been setting out? What I still can't grasp is where David Greenwood fits into all this.'

I waited for Penrose to reply, but he stood with his back to the sun, arms limply at his sides, his large chest deflating. As I watched his uneasy grimaces, the heavy knuckles that cuffed his nose, I realized that he was hoping for my approval. He needed me to understand him, and the brave gamble he had taken for the sake of Eden-Olympia. In some way he had failed David Greenwood, and he was now doing his best to avoid failing me.

Then he noticed me standing by the coffee table and rallied himself. Smiling affably, he strolled up to me and held my shoulders. He steered me towards the Alice mirror, as if we were about to step together into its glassy deeps. He swerved away at the last moment and pushed me to the door, laughing soundlessly to himself.

'Paul, sit by the pool and give it some thought.' Before propelling me into the avenue, he whispered fiercely: 'Think, Paul. Think like a psychopath…'

After leaving Penrose, I needed breakfast, and the strongest coffee I could make. Dust lay over the swimming pool, an overnight veil disturbed by the feeble movements of a waterlogged fruit fly, struggling against the meniscus that gripped its wings in a mirror harder than glass. Sympathizing with the creature, whose predicament matched my own, I searched for the damp footprints that usually marked Jane's race back to the house and a long bath, earphones over her soapy head as the Walkman played Debussy. But the tiled verge was dry in the late November sun.

I walked to the terrace and stepped into the hall, where I bruised my shins against two of my leather suitcases. I gripped the handles, and guessed from their weight that they held my entire wardrobe.

Upstairs, drawers slammed as Jane roamed the cupboards. The punitive jolts of Carmina Burana sounded from the bedroom, a call to marital strife. Without thinking, I knew that Jane was throwing me out, and felt a deep regret that we would never drive the RN7 back to Paris together. Our marriage had ended, like those of my friends, in a mess of trivial infidelities and questions with no conceivable answers.

I had reached the villa at midnight, after an evening in Antibes with Frances Baring. From the clinic Jane had earlier called me to say she would be late, and suggested that I see a film in Cannes. But as I tiptoed past the darkened lounge the faint moonlight revealed that she had recruited other company to amuse her. The carpet was marked by almost lunar ridges, left by heel marks that belonged to neither Jane nor myself.

Aware of Frances 's scent on my hands, I moved to the children's room, and slept soundly among Tenniel's amiable menagerie. I woke at seven and telephoned Wilder Penrose from the bathroom, determined to confront him with the criminal reality of Eden-Olympia.

Jane was still asleep when I left to see Penrose. She lay facedown, an infected puncture point on the inside of her thigh oozing a faint lymph. I eased back the drawer of the dressing table and counted the used syrettes, hoping that my arithmetic was at fault.

Jane breathed quietly, an ageing Alice in an expurgated chapter of her own book. Careful not to wake her, I kissed her open lower lip, still marked by the paste of another woman's lipstick.

I met her on the landing, dragging a suitcase from the bedroom. As always, she had recovered quickly from the dose of diamorphine.

She wore jeans and white vest, a garb she had abandoned soon after arriving at Eden-Olympia. But her skin was pale and putty-coloured, and her face seemed toneless. She had cut her left hand on one of the suitcase locks, but had yet to notice the blood.

She saw me watching from the door, reached into a wardrobe and pulled out a heavy rucksack.

'Paul? You can help me. Stick that on the bed.'

'Sure. Tell me what's happening.'

'Nothing to worry about. You're leaving half an hour from now.'

'I'm leaving? Why?'

'We're both leaving. We're saying goodbye to Eden. I've told personnel to post an angel with a flaming sword by the gate.'

'Jane…' I stepped through the clutter of unpaired shoes that she was rooting from the cupboard, placed my hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet, surprised by how much weight she had lost. 'Calm down. Now when exactly are we leaving?'