Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

I left the cafe and hurried out of the village like a hunted animal. Arnie had stolen my solitude and I had to shed the self he had conjured up before I could think again. The island was becoming too crowded and vulnerable. Calls could burst in from New York and flood me with strange preoccupations. ‘Never give up hope.’ That was Arnie’s vision of my situation: an argument between hope and despair, probably resting on a still sillier struggle between optimism and pessimism. At least hope and despair were feelings; optimism and pessimism were emotional ideologies, or deals with fate. In the universal chiaroscuro, the Manichaean crevasses of daily life, it made no sense to latch on to one thing rather than another. There was no point in striving for anything but intimacy with mental reality.

I started to reinvoke the power of intimacy, but the feeling of insight which had accompanied the whispering of its name on the previous night was gone. What pressed in on me instead, as I walked along the dusty track to the Plage du Langoustier, was the impossibility of saying anything that was true, anything that didn’t require qualification, anything that wasn’t local and uncertain. I was obsessed by the trap that if knowledge is uncertain and causation inexorable, our sense of freedom rests on our ignorance. This thought is always available (I think Patrick had it at some point, or was it me?), but sometimes it insists on itself with a kind of leaden authority. The world again resolved itself into rippling lines of dominoes, falling through me, over me, past me, crashing down with every action I took and every thought I had.

I came to the top of the hill and looked down on the tapering south-western tip of the island, its bevel of beach, its wind-stooped bushes, and further out to sea, in a final rush of seclusion, a ruined tower crumbling on a rock of its own. I was suddenly gripped by the desire to swim out to the tower, to a place where Arnie couldn’t telephone me, an ultra-island to which this island would be ‘ le continent ’. I walked down to the spit of land I had seen from the hill, intending to set out from the long, pale Plage du Langoustier, but seeing the sickle bay of Port Fay on the other side, and remembering that I had imagined taking Ton Len there and watching the clear ripples sift the black and gold sand at our feet, I decided instead to set out from there and swim to the tower round the end of the island. It was a much longer swim, but I’d stopped reflecting and was acting from impulses which were so rapid and imperious that they seemed to belong to a single trance.

The water was cold. By the time I reached the mouth of the bay I was shivering uncontrollably, but my mind was in a state of despairing calm, my gaze fixed on the grey crease of the horizon where the sea and sky seemed to meet, without in fact doing so. They just went rolling on in their parallel curvature, only brought together by storms, like the mind and the body forever separated by the ‘explanatory gap’ but brought together by the storm of life. The horizon was the home of delusion, pretending to reconcile the parallel curvature of the world. I must swim out there and denounce its lies. I was beyond the narcissistic impertinence of the lonely tower — ‘ Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie ’, the winding stair to the crumbling battlements — beyond all that. I was cold and tired, but I was furious as well, furious with all illusions of reconciliation. And what of intimacy? Was I going to let the vague potency of that word save my life? Was intimacy going to make me turn back and get dressed and stop this silliness and have a hot meal and get a good night’s sleep? No. Intimacy was another blurred horizon, pretending to dissolve the observer and the observed, only to resurrect them the moment that the dissolution was recognized. I swam on with savage weariness.

As I finally broke free of the bay, I was confronted by a cream-coloured yacht. Ostentatiously old-fashioned, the inside of its funnels painted red, and several forests felled and varnished for its masts and saloons, it bore down on me with easy indifference.

Other people, I thought, other people were always ruining everything. Then again, what did it matter? I could just swim on. I would be out of sight by the time they could give me any unhelpful help. The yacht continued to bear down on me.

‘Oy!’ I shouted. ‘Watch where you’re going.’

It made no correction to its course. Its sharp bow was set to split the hemispheres of my convoluted brain. With a burst of speed I swam to the right. I had no intention of being exhibited at a consciousness conference as an unplanned example of one of Gazzaniga’s split-brain patients. I needn’t have bothered to move. The engines roared into reverse, and after the slithering indented clatter of the anchor chain the boat came to a halt, cut its engines and undulated serenely a few yards away.

The sudden expenditure of energy left my stately and thoughtful suicide in jeopardy. I also had to deal with the uncomfortable fact that I’d tried to save my life. Was I the mere plaything of animal instincts, the ‘fuck, food, fight and flight’ of evolutionary psychology? Or was I only prepared to kill myself on my own terms? Far from submitting to fate I was trying to exercise stylistic control over it; I was still playing a role.

‘Coo-eeh!’ someone called from the boat. I looked up, galvanized by an involuntary social habit. ‘ Excusez-moi, j’espère que vous nous , I mean, nous vous … Charlie? Is that you? It’s Pamela, Pamela Goodchild. What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Drowning — until you came along.’

‘Well, hop on board quickly! I’m sure Jean-Marc’ll be delighted. It’s his boat; isn’t it lovely? Jean-Marc!’ she called, looking over her shoulder. ‘Guess who’s off the starboard bow, if it is the starboard bow — I never know which is which.’

Jean-Marc appeared at the guard rail. ‘Charlie! Your timing couldn’t be more perfect. Marie-Louise was just complaining that we needed an extra man for lunch. Really, she has a genius for arranging these things.’

‘John dropped out at the last moment,’ said Pamela. ‘I was furious . Whenever we have something really lovely planned, he wants to stay at home and doze off over some absolutely dire political memoirs.’

Silent with horror, I mounted the ladder as if it were a scaffold. The usual suspects littered the deck.

‘What a small world,’ said Pamela. ‘It really is, isn’t it?’

‘In Spanish,’ said Xavier, laughing like a hyena, ‘we say “the world is a small handkerchief”. Maravilloso! A small handkerchief.’

While these fools wittered on around me and a crew member rushed forward with a cream-coloured bathrobe, my eyes were drawn across the vast scrubbed deck to an unknown figure in a charcoal suit who stood with his back to us massaging a pair of shoulders in the chair below him. I knew with nauseating certainty that they belonged to Angelique.

‘So, what were you doing on this charming island?’ asked Jean-Marc.

‘Taking the long swim,’ I said.

He looked at me discerningly. ‘Not, I hope, the “long swim” which Richard Burton threatens to take in Night of the Iguana ?’

‘Colder,’ I said.

‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘you must take a hot shower straight away.’

Angelique and her masseur remained perfectly self-absorbed in their corner of the deck. I followed Jean-Marc through the saloon and down some stairs into a rainforest mausoleum of mahogany and rosewood panels.

‘I’ll send one of the crew to fetch your clothes on shore,’ he said, leading me through the double doors of the master cabin. ‘Or, if you prefer, you’re welcome to borrow something…’