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

does it mean, “we’re all in the cinema”?’ said the chic Frenchwoman indignantly. ‘I never go to the cinema. For me it is absolute-lay a nightmare to be locked in the dark with all the ordinary people.’
    ‘Of course I don’t want to miss it…’ I went on.
    ‘Well, then, it’s decided,’ said Jean-Marc, resuming control after a crisis of defection: ‘we can count on you to come.’
    Two greyhounds with red leather collars sat beneath their own portrait in a hall that smelt of wood smoke and lilies.
    ‘My cook is furious with me,’ Jean-Marc confessed, ‘because, as a homage to the Maestro, I asked her to prepare a lunch based on the famous scene in Pompeii where they feast on oysters and suckling pig. The shellfish were not a problem, but she had to hunt high and low to find the suckling pig.’
    Everyone agreed that only Jean-Marc would have gone to such trouble.
    In the drawing room Jean-Marc’s wife, dressed in cream linen edged with black velvet, stood beside the fireplace like a funeral invitation. Her eyelids drooped almost to closure and her long pale body did its best to resemble the lilies which overflowed from every vase. She greeted us with unaffected indifference. The house had belonged to Marie-Louise’s father, Jean-François de Hauteville, as she was inclined to remind her husband and other visitors. Everything that Marie-Louise touched or refused to touch was in the very best taste. She looked over my shoulder as if admiring a landscape which had just been painted for her by Poussin and in which I was not included. Even the burglars who had robbed the chateau earlier that year had been ‘real professionals’ with ‘very good taste’. Had they been ordinary thugs, without degrees in art history, they could never have been admitted to Marie-Louise’s circle.
    The Maestro’s death was not likely to impress her when a member of her own family had died only last week. It had been her ‘disagreeable duty’ to go to the family vaults in Cannes and remove the remains of the old Admiral de Hauteville in order to make room for the new arrival. When the Admiral’s tomb was opened, there was nothing inside. The remains had not remained. Vanité des vanités, tout est vanité . Only Bossuet could have done justice to the depths of the loss, but Bossuet, it went without saying, was dead. Saying that things went without saying and saying them anyway was, in Marie-Louise’s opinion, sophisticated. When she strayed from this policy it was in order to say things which were plainly absurd.
    ‘I don’t know a painter or a writer who hasn’t known what they want to do by the age of two,’ she explained, when we were discussing the Maestro’s mythologizing of his cinematic destiny.
    ‘The world will never be the same again without the Maestro,’ Alessandro concluded.
    ‘My dear Alessandro, the world never is the same again,’ said Marie-Louise, ‘with or without the Maestro.’
    While we chomped our oysters and suckling pig, I noticed that a strange mood had overtaken Angelique, a mood of such vehement boredom that, had we been in a Buñuel movie, she would have turned out to be a terrorist and the lunch party would have ended explosively. I asked her as soon as possible if everything was all right.
    ‘I can’t stand that stuck-up bitch,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for a walk in the garden.’
    We went outside while the others drank coffee, and plunged deep into the grounds. When we were well hidden from the house, Angelique leant against the rough bark of an old umbrella pine and let out a growl of fury and contempt.
    ‘Fuck me,’ she said angrily.
    My symptoms melted away as I unzipped my trousers. Clasping her buttocks, I hoisted her off the ground and entered her standing up. She groaned as her back grated against the trunk; I wept with gratitude to be back inside her.
    Soon my arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets.
    ‘My arms,’ I moaned.
    ‘My back, you’re