Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

‘OK, darling,’ she said, kissing my hand, and struggling to load her handbag with the huge rectangles of shining plastic. ‘It’s so silly to argue on our last precious day together.’

I left the hotel and set off round the coastal path of St Jean-Cap-Ferrat, feeling overwhelming anguish at the prospect of being separated from Angelique. I had to keep up a hot pace so as to turn the feeling of being overwhelmed into one of being pursued; if I was pursued perhaps I could escape. But I couldn’t escape. The fear was in my marrow.

What was the fear in the marrow? The loss of Angelique and, behind that, the loss of the illusion that she cared for me.

And behind the illusion that she cared for me, the knowledge that my mother had not cared for me, that she had never overcome the feeling that a baby was in bad taste. She spent the first years of my life at a careful distance, her eyes closed and a scented handkerchief pressed to her nostrils. Later on she tried to instruct me in the good taste which enabled her to find me repulsive in the first place. No wonder I had noticed Marie-Louise. Everything was falling into place.

I cursed the compulsion which had driven me to spend my time soliciting the love of a woman who has no love to give. The reason Angelique had fooled me was that she never attempted to: she had left the deception to me. Had she pretended, I would have seen through her, but what I could not see through was my own deepest longings. How does that happen? How can we choose not to know what we cannot help knowing? How could I write about consciousness without writing about the fear in the marrow, the fear of loveless desolation which was laying waste the last months of my life?

I couldn’t walk fast enough to keep ahead of the vicious panic which filled every cell in my body, and every possible world I could imagine, chasing me round the Cap like one of the chiens méchants advertised on every gatepost. I was on the edge, no longer playing with metaphors or describing states of mind, but stumbling along a twisting coastal path, the sea sirening me to slip, or more candidly, to dive, on to the rocks. I imagined my blood mingling with the sea; wondered how little time it would take for the salt and the sun to bleach my corpse. Would the crabs feasting on my brain find themselves, as they sucked the morsels of Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area from their busy claws, troubled by the problem of consciousness, or burdened by the need to finish On the Train ? It seemed no more likely than my wanting to fulfil the aspirations of the langoustines I had for lunch. But perhaps I was fulfilling their aspirations. Perhaps that’s what made me want to dive off the cliff back into the sea. Mad thoughts. Sparks from the wheel.

I slowed down and tried to return to the thing which these thoughts were scattering from: the fear in the marrow. Is there any negotiation with the feelings stitched into our growing bones, the things we knew before our first set of teeth?

I suddenly saw with a strange clarity, a clarity which took me deeper into confusion, a glass knot, saw that I could only make any difference to the terror of loveless desolation by penetrating its chaotic heart. If I could consciously live what I could not bear I might be able to reshape it. I glimpsed a molten core to consciousness, a protean heat where everything could be reshaped. Yes, a molten core, like the core of the earth, deeper than the deposits of civilization, beyond the complacencies of archaeology. I grabbed the air, closing my fist on this elusive vision.

I remembered that at the beginning of my gambling phase I had only wanted to throw away half my capital. I still had 1.2 million francs in the bank. If I gave another million to Angelique I could buy one more day in her fantastic company. I could annihilate the simulacrum of our intimacy, and return to the truly harrowing intimacy of solitude. First it was Prozac I had to give up; now it was Angelique. I might appear to be acting from panic, like a rabbit dashing under the wheels of the car it dreads, or merely expressing my fear of separation by buying another day, but I would in fact be purifying myself of a fear which distorted everything. I would give away my last million in order to savour the pathology of my motives, second by second; volunteering for the Chinese water torture of an unbearable knowledge.

Indifferent to the jogger who panted his way towards me on the coastal path, I let out a scream of fury. I was swaying with vertigo and blazing with conviction at the same time, knowing that I was taking a mad gamble, but knowing that if I didn’t I would lose everything.

Things haven’t worked out quite as I envisaged on Cap Ferrat. What on earth did I think I was doing? Not content with a month of sick love, I have pushed myself to the brink of destitution by insisting on another day. Not only did I give away my last whole million, but instead of the two hundred thousand francs I expected to have left, I found one hundred and eight. I forgot to cancel the direct debits on my household expenses and that scumbag Dai Varey has been on the phone to Australia ever since, with all the lights on and the hot water running. If my doctor turns out to be wrong, things could get very nasty. As it is, I only have just enough for four months. I must stop asking for a quarter bottle of Evian with my coffee. That’ll be a saving. I can’t help being scandalized by an indiscriminate tax like VAT which hits rich and poor alike.

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.