Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

In the delirium of my longing to reassure Ton Len, I started to think of the insects which were now eating my neck and hands and face as the appetites of all the furious generations before us, the troupe of hungry ghosts who had prepared the way for this meticulous tangle of suffering. With every bite I imagined I was offering them my blood, like a coin in a cup. Finally, when my whole body was contorted with the desire to crush them, I saw that my need for Ton Len to know that I loved her was itself a hungry ghost. At that moment the ravenous troupe subsided, appeased by blood and recognition. The emotions which had seemed to be inextricably entangled with my love for Ton Len — frustration, despair, longing, resentment, the desire to be a good person — took on their own separate natures, leaving an unalloyed love radiating from my body through the rest of space.

I was jolted into a new clarity by this strange fantasy. I started to flick away the flies and scratch my bitten skin. I’m not interested in martyrdom, just in having as many lucid episodes as possible before the curtain drops.

The wind had died down and the glassy atmosphere it left behind was turning a lighter grey behind the high hill to the east of the creek. I sat very still for a moment as if I was made of glass as well. The icy moon had sunk out of view. I felt drained and light. I couldn’t think any more, any more than I could have stopped thinking at the beginning of the night. My legs were half dead as I clambered to my feet. I tottered home like a dizzy pensioner.

I was welcomed back to the house by a pair of air-force fighters cracking the sky above my head, the sharp lines of their vapour trails turning to smears of lipstick against the lurid dawn. I can never sleep in daylight or, for that matter, in darkness, but at least at night I’m in with a chance. I knew I would have to bully my way through another day on the volatile fuel of coffee and desperation. After a bath, I dragged myself to the village and had breakfast at L’Escale. I’ve given Heidi the number of the cafe, in case she changes her mind. I can’t help entertaining the superstition that my little breakthrough of the previous night, however buried it now is by exhaustion, will be rewarded by some transformation in her attitude. Just as I was mocking myself for this magical thinking, Jean-Baptiste, the barman, came over to tell me that a woman had telephoned last night and would call again in the afternoon. It must be Heidi. She is the only person who knows I’m here. I settled down for the day and, after my sixth double espresso, started to write as if there were no tomorrow.

After his period of silence and withdrawal, Jean-Paul felt lucid and calm and, if he was going to be impeccably honest, rather superior, among all these Anglo-Saxons who brought the atmosphere of Sherlock Holmes to intellectual life, observant only in its case-by-case myopia, and lacking that power of impertinent generalization to which it was so invigorating to return in a text such as Le Mythe du sens .

‘Ladies and gentlemen, may we have your attention, please—’

The announcement broke off immediately.

Ah, no, thought Jean-Paul, not my attention, that is asking too much. Won’t it be more than enough to leave part of my mind, as I inevitably do, receptive to the information of my senses, to let your dead words drift down and land on the ground of my awareness? You really can’t expect me to leap up and catch those withered trophies.

Crystal didn’t speculate: a man had been talking; now he wasn’t.

What has secured our attention, thought Patrick, is the interruption of the message. More is said in the pauses, blah, blah, blah.

The announcement resumed. ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control this train will be terminating at Didcot Junction. Coaches have been provided for passengers to continue their journey to London’s Victoria coach station. The coaches are located outside the main entrance to the station. We apologize for any inconvenience.’

A collective, stoically English groan passed through the compartment.

‘Circumstances beyond our control’ is an excellent phrase, thought Patrick. There’s hardly a statement that wouldn’t be improved by mentioning them. ‘Due to circumstances beyond my control it’s my birthday today … Due to circumstances beyond our control we still don’t know how consciousness works.’

By the time they arrived at the coach, there were too few seats for Jean-Paul, Crystal and Patrick to sit together. Crystal smiled forlornly at the others and sat down in the first free seat. Patrick walked down the aisle, hoping to find someone who would not awaken the monster of his intolerance. When he got to the back of the coach he settled there anyway.

Jean-Paul installed himself as near to Crystal as possible, a knight’s move away as he saw it, two rows back, on the other side of the aisle. He knew that the man next to him was Derek Wood, the evolutionary psychologist, and he had no intention of talking to him. Jean-Paul took an aloof view of ‘Evo-babble’, as Crystal liked to call it. For him, what characterized the twentieth century, if one could put aside its dazzling achievements in the competing spheres of overpopulation and mass murder, was the way in which thoughts, behaviour and communication had been set adrift from the intentions of the person making them, first by psychoanalysis, leaving us helpless in the hidden face of the unconscious, and then by all the disciplines that could loosely be called structural. Evo-babble was the latest attempt to demonstrate the vast weight of prejudicial habit. It was, in Jean-Paul’s estimation, a natural consequence of the famous death of God that his depressing omniscience should be redistributed among genetic, linguistic and cultural structures. Evo-babble trumpeted the maturity of facing up to the blindness of natural selection, without that blindness leading to any more freedom than the most rigid predestination.

‘My wife’s waiting for me at Paddington,’ sighed Derek, ignoring Jean-Paul’s hasty immersion in his book.

‘You have been hunting in Oxford, and your wife is gathering you in Paddington,’ said Jean-Paul drily.

‘Oh dear,’ said Derek, laughing too hard, ‘I hope you’re not making fun of evolutionary psychology. It’s very easy to mock, very easy indeed.’

‘There is no need to mock it,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It is too banal to require mockery. If someone tells me that we spend more time standing on our feet than on our heads, mockery is an exaggerated response. We are clearly embedded in our bodies, in our ecologies, and in the history of our species. There is no doubt that the mind is modular and that its various modalities have evolved.’

‘We see eye to eye, then,’ said Derek.

‘But if I am reading a page of Proust, let us say a scene from the final reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes in Le Temps Retrouvé , how will my appreciation of the complexity of this experience be enhanced by the knowledge that fifty thousand generations earlier the Prousts were wandering the plains of Africa, peeping greedily and apprehensively over the tall grass, without yet having attended even the most rudimentary cocktail party?’

‘Oh, I think they would have attended a rudimentary cocktail party,’ said Derek. ‘You only have to watch a group of chimpanzees to know that. Language evolved from the pressures of social cooperation. Anyway, nobody could say that Proust was indifferent to the pecking order in his society, and it might be argued that he gave birth to so many books because he was unwilling to disseminate copies of his genes by the traditional method.’