Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

‘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 It wasn’t that passion had been replaced by protectiveness; we were simply appalled by what was happening.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.

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.

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.