‘Patrick.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Crystal. ‘That was Jean-Paul at the window.’
‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘I went to his challenging lecture. Is he always like that?’
‘No. Usually he’s pretentious without the long pauses,’ said Crystal. ‘I’m sort of joking. He’s an old boyfriend of mine.’
She knew she was being unfair to Jean-Paul. He had been so sweet to her last night, selflessly stroking her broken body, his fingertips drifting back and forth gently, like an abandoned trapeze, or tracing tortuous rivers among her cuts and bruises. He cradled the back of her head, gazing kindly into her eyes and saying, to her amazement, nothing. She hardly recognized the argumentative intellectual she had driven to psychedelic insanity in the Utah desert five years ago, the man who declared the ‘scandal’ of pure Being, and ‘announced the death of Nature’.
‘He’s become much kinder,’ she added, more for herself than Patrick; ‘that’s the main thing.’
Something horrible has just happened. I looked up from my notebook and instead of seeing Angelique in her usual rapt communion with the wheel I saw her chatting to a party of sixty-year-olds. As if this wasn’t bad enough, they started to bear down in my direction.
There was an olive-brown Spaniard in an olive-green suit, who followed the inefficient policy of chuckling continuously just in case somebody made a joke. He needn’t have worried. The party was led by an Italian whose rheumatic courtesies were like getting stuck behind a vintage-car rally in a narrow country lane.
A white-haired Englishwoman sighed theatrically. ‘John was so silly not to come,’ she said. ‘He kept saying, “What will I do all day in La Réserve?” and I said, “What you always do: read your book and lose your cufflinks.”’
‘“Lose your cufflinks”,’ said the Spaniard. ‘Maravilloso! Maravilloso!’
‘But you must remember,’ said the Italian, ‘for the English gentleman the cufflinks are objects of religious veneration.’
‘“Religious veneration”,’ said the Spaniard (chuckle, chuckle).
‘It is very sad that John has not been able to come on this occasion,’ said the gallant Italian. ‘Next time we will not let him get away so easily,’ he added, duelling the air with his index finger.
A depressingly chic Frenchwoman turned to me and said, as if she were quoting Pascal, ‘Je trouve qu’il fait affreusement froid ce soir. Absolute-lay throwzen.’
‘Who the fuck are these people?’ I asked Angelique, dragging her aside. ‘How could you let them stop you from gambling, and stop me from writing about death?’
‘They’re friends of mine,’ she said.
‘Friends?’
‘Sometimes I blow all my money on the first of the month. Then I go to their dinner parties. They feed me and keep me going until the next payment arrives. Alessandro is very sweet to me.’
‘Couldn’t you keep some fish fingers in the deep freeze to see you through the hard times?’ I sputtered.
‘Fish fingers?’ said Angelique, who, like so many foreigners, hadn’t heard of that wonderful food. She clearly preferred Alessandro’s steamed asparagus and grilled sea bass.
‘Alessandro understands my little weakness. Sometimes he gives me jetons. I find them in my handbag after I leave. It’s sweet, no?’
‘It’s…’ I almost used the word prostitution, but, given that I was paying one million francs a day for her company, thought better of it. But it was not the same in my case, I was mad about her … maybe Alessandro was too.
Angelique said that Alessandro’s party had invited us to join them in a nightclub after they had celebrated Xavier’s birthday. The chuckling Spaniard is sixty today. What the hell do I care? I felt utter disgust but knew that I couldn’t bear to be separated from Angelique for even a few hours.
I collapsed on a chair, knotted with jealousy.
Why is life so unsatisfactory, so disappointing? Angelique suddenly seemed ordinary and compromised, but as my general admiration for her failed, my sexual longing grew more stubborn. Jealousy was the child of this divorce: I had to possess what I was about to lose, the secret of forgetfulness, the illusion of purification.
The great thing about writing is that these troublesome emotions can just go straight onto the page. The atmosphere of imminent death is like a time-lapse movie, a slow-motion speed, pullulating with blossoms. Everything is too much. Death and writing go so well together because the unbearable everything — the chalk squealing on the blackboard, the Albinoni at full volume, the Othello-felling jealousy — can all be vaporized on the hotplate of wild indiscretion. And, at the same time, nothing changes: the chalk squeals on, the violins scrape our heartstrings, Othello dies in a pool of green blood, worrying about his reputation.
I’d better get on with the story before I’m hauled off to a nightclub.
Patrick could see Jean-Paul working his way towards them down the corridor, a wrinkled black bag on a shoulder strap, a yellow anorak with a corduroy collar, a big murky, speckled, purplish sweater, black jeans and bulbous caramel-coloured shoes. He had a hawkish face which he clearly hadn’t shaved since his lecture. Just too busy having pensées, eh? What did Crystal want with an old boyfriend when she could have a new one? Patrick had always prided himself on not being jealous. Now he could see that he would have to throw the pride overboard and haul in the jealousy. The last thing he needed was a Lear-like eruption of self-knowledge, a busy traffic of deadly sins just as he might have expected to sink back onto the pillow in a legitimate stupor.
‘Ah, just in time,’ said Jean-Paul, as the train shuddered into motion. He hoisted his bag into the overhead rack and sat down next to Crystal. She introduced him to Patrick, and the two men greeted each other cautiously.
‘I enjoyed your “exploration” on Saturday,’ said Patrick.
Jean-Paul bowed his head. ‘It was really nothing,’ he said. ‘At least, I hope so!’
Patrick smiled politely.
‘I tried to keep it, as the English say, “short and sweet”.’
‘I’ve never understood,’ Patrick drawled, ‘how “short and sweet” has become a cliché when short and bitter has so much more reason to be popular.’
‘But it’s the shortness of the sweetness that’s bitter,’ said Crystal. ‘So, why not stay at the source?’
‘Well, thanks for clarifying that point for me, Crystal,’ said Patrick, feeling the excitement and the presumption of using her name for the first time.
‘I was saving you from the in-depth perspective,’ said Crystal. ‘You should never begin a sentence with the words “I’ve never understood” when you’re with Jean-Paul. He’s a natural-born teacher. Which reminds me,’ she said, looking at Jean-Paul teasingly, ‘I’ve never really understood non-locality.’
‘Ah, non-locality,’ said Jean-Paul, as if he’d been presented with a favourite dish. ‘I’m no expert, but I know a little about the territory. The traditional argument against non-locality playing any part in consciousness is that the brain is too hot and too wet for coherent quantum events to occur there. There are two ways out of this dismissal of our interesting friend. One, advanced by Penrose and Hameroff — a mathematician and an anaesthetist — is that “microtubules”, the component structures of the synapses, are quantum environments sealed off from the rest of our tropical brains. These microtubules are constructed in a Fibonacci series — for a Platonist this mathematical elegance is the signature of Ideal Form. For such a temperament, it becomes irresistible to imagine a nested hierarchy linking the smallest to the greatest through the most fundamental. You can understand the temptation: the reconciliation of mysticism and science through the impersonal perfection of mathematics.