Free A Clue to the Exit: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn Page A

dying,’ she said, laughing.
    ‘Something impersonal.’
    ‘But that’s exactly the problem: you must make it more personal, more human, more dramatic. You should write from your own experience, write about us .’ She put the manuscript on the table by the window. ‘I’m only trying to help,’ she said. ‘I think the real problem is that you don’t know how to make abstract ideas exciting. You should read Alain. We used to read him in the Lycée. He’s wonderful. After a page of Alain, you see Spinoza everywhere.’
    ‘I’ll check him out,’ I said feebly.
    She left the room and, paralysed by failure and confusion, I watched the breeze scatter the pages across the floor.
    On my third day in bed Angelique let me know, with some reluctance, that we’d been invited to lunch by a friend of Alessandro’s who had a fabulous house in the hills above Cap d’Ail. Where was that largesse I’d felt at Jimmy’s? Gone. I loathed the idea of the lunch party, but I couldn’t bear Angelique to drift further from me, to make the reanimation of our perfect love yet more impossible, and so I excavated myself from the bed and, assembling the fragments of a social identity, set off with her in the back of one of Alessandro’s cars, obsessively fingering my aching new breasts, like a thirteen-year-old girl.
    Our convoy of limousines glided down the long drive, past deeply shaded lawns, and arrived at a seventeenth-century chateau the colour of lavender honey, with pale-grey shutters. We parked beside a gurgling trout pond, its reflected light trembling steadily on the jasmine-crowded walls of an old tower. Angelique, for whom the house represented rather less than a month’s gambling in an inconveniently solid form, was less impressed than I was. I found it the perfect setting for the war between dignity and self-pity which was raging inside me. Heaving myself out of the car, I imagined the soundtrack that might accompany the long shots of a dying man walking along those gravel paths. A close-up of an intelligent and passionate face. The scream of a peacock counterpointing its own visual charm and piercing through the aesthetic consolations of the place. Yes, a peacock, the symbol of immortality, turned into the messenger of death. I thought of the Maestro and the balance he would have kept between the wit of the treatment and the savagery of the subject.
    And then one of those extraordinary things happened. Our host came out of the house and before he even greeted us he cried out, ‘The Maestro is dead. It’s a tragedy for the cinema.’
    ‘But I was just thinking about him,’ I stammered stupidly.
    Pamela, the white-haired Englishwoman, leant over to me confidentially and said, ‘John can’t stand his films; says they’re “pretentious twaddle”.’
    I looked at her with hatred, but she was too pleased with her quotation to notice.
    ‘He died behind the camera,’ said Jean-Marc, pausing on the steps of his house.
    ‘Ah, bravissimo !’ said Alessandro.
    ‘I’m sure it’s how he would have wanted to go,’ said Pamela. ‘Captain going down with his ship and all that.’
    ‘He was working on a film called Flat ,’ said Jean-Marc.
    ‘Only the Maestro…’ murmured Alessandro admiringly.
    ‘Alas, it was incomplete when he died, but there will be a screening in Cannes this May. I happen to be on the festival committee,’ Jean-Marc hurried past the glamour of his connections, ‘and I thought we should form a party.’
    There was a babble of approval.
    ‘I’ll be dead by May,’ I said quietly.
    ‘Oh, no, not you as well,’ said Pamela. ‘What a morbid lunch.’
    ‘But surely you wouldn’t want to miss it,’ said Jean-Marc, placing his hand lightly on my back as he guided me into the hall. ‘Alessandro tells me you’re in the cinema yourself.’
    ‘We’re all in the cinema,’ I said, influenced, perhaps, by Pamela’s mention of ‘pretentious twaddle’.
    ‘Ah, yes,’ said Jean-Marc.
    ‘What