‘You had me convinced there for a moment,’ said Crystal. ‘I’m a sucker for that down-home, plain man’s wisdom.’
They smiled at each other and Patrick felt a wave of happiness. He wanted to play with Crystal, to talk with her about the most abstract and the most intimate things, to visit places with her, to make love to her, to make love to her right now. He could kneel on the floor and bury his head in her lap, and forget that he was dying. He could kiss her bruised body with unspeakable tenderness, concentrating all the love which he had somehow never found it convenient to donate to a starving world. He was ready to give it now. He radiated this feeling in Crystal’s direction while continuing to admire the damp iridescence of the station lamps.
Crystal felt the warm blast of his attention, which was like stepping out of a plane into a tropical country. After all the Tantric sex courses she had attended with Peter she was nothing if not open-minded, but, caught between an unconscious husband and a revived ex-boyfriend, she felt unable to take on this newcomer with his heavy charge of troubled desire. And yet there was something touching about him — that combination of defiance and vulnerability, not trapped in the restless shuffle of adolescence, but held in a kind of oppressed balance, like two caryatids shouldering a slab of stone. And beneath that — the ground they stood on — she could feel an inconsolable sadness.
‘Do you think anybody lives in Didcot,’ said Patrick, ‘or is it just for getting stuck in?’
‘If you get stuck long enough, the distinction wears thin,’ said Crystal.
‘Exactly,’ said Patrick. ‘There are probably thousands of residents who just happen to live on trains.’
Jean-Paul had dropped out of the conversation, like a swimmer who breathes out and allows himself to sink to the bottom of a pool, resting a while in the peaceful interval between landing and needing to breathe again. Patrick’s muddled physicalist apology and his banter with Crystal reached him like the muffled sounds and distorted shapes of poolside action. And yet he knew exactly what was going on above the surface. He was not engaging with what was being said, but he was not ignoring it either. He was just resting. Not all the theories in the world could stop him from resting.
The slow metallic drumbeat of the tracks and the screech of braking wheels announced the arrival of another train. The fog swirled and scattered, and reassembled as the dark-blue carriages drew to a halt at the neighbouring platform.
‘Ah,’ said Patrick, ‘so that’s why we’ve been made to wait. It’s the royal train. Who knows which member of that legendary family is jumping the queue?’
‘But if we’ve stopped for them,’ said Crystal, ‘why have they stopped as well?’
‘This is a parliamentary democracy,’ said Patrick. ‘Even the royal family have to acknowledge the paralysing influence of Didcot Junction.’ And then, feeling the encroachment of another fit of simplicity, he started to argue again.
‘Why are we so astonished by consciousness? When my hand feels my leg, I’m not amazed that it feels itself at the same time. Why be amazed that the mind, while receiving sense data, also receives data about itself?’
‘The Buddhists treat the heart — mind as a sixth sense,’ said Crystal, ‘abolishing that little problem as well as a number of others.’
‘How sensible,’ said Patrick.
‘Exactly. Consciousness is in the senses — all six of them. Awareness is just the measure of how unobstructed a relationship we have with making sense.’
‘That is not the problem,’ Jean-Paul sighed, unable to go on enjoying his rest.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Crystal, ‘the professor has woken. Being aware is not the problem?’
‘Of course, of course, you know you have made me into a Being freak. But in order to define consciousness, we need to pause before we arrive at the enticing word “awareness”, this mermaid who appears to have human form until we embrace her and she takes us down into the luminous depths in which you are so beautifully at home.’
‘Well, gee,’ said Crystal.
‘For you the problem is how to keep your consciousness expanded — what facilitates and frustrates that task. What we must do, however much we sympathize with your mermaid’s progress towards awareness of awareness or the presence of absence, is to look at a very banal act of consciousness, the apprehension of sense data.’
‘Oh, let’s not look at a banal act,’ said Crystal.
‘Anyway, how banal is it?’ said Patrick. ‘We bring the whole history of our formation to what we see. If we’re lucky, after years of meticulous analysis we may be able to prise open a little gap and interrupt the glibness of the projection, but we’ll still be struggling with the fact that what we see is a selection made by how we feel.’
‘Stop!’ said Jean-Paul. ‘Let’s not stray down that route either. Let us leave aside the psychoanalytic, the Buddhistic, the question of scientific method, the paranormal, the linguistic…’ Jean-Paul started to smile at Crystal’s indignant face.
‘So what aren’t we setting aside?’
‘The fact that we have no idea how a single event could have physiological and phenomenal properties at the same time, no idea how consciousness results from irritated tissue or firing neurons. This mind — body problem is not trivial. A correlation is not a cause. Cerebral activity and consciousness may occur at the same time, but until we know how they interact they will lead parallel lives. I just ask you to appreciate their philosophical isolation.’
‘Of course we appreciate it,’ said Crystal sympathetically, as if she was talking to a child who had cut his finger.
Jean-Paul noticed the ‘we’ more keenly than he would have liked.
‘Oh, look, they’re off,’ said Patrick.
The dark-blue carriages of the royal train slipped into the fog, but still their own train remained immobile in the empty station.
15
I managed to write those last few pages since our lunch at Jean-Marc’s, but now I’ve been taken over by my circumstances and can’t carry on.
Yesterday was my last day with Angelique. I suggested we go to the Grand Large, where we first met, and although she agreed she could barely disguise her impatience with my sentimentality. The casino is only ten yards east of the Hôtel de Paris, where we usually have lunch, and it clearly irked her to be driven dozens of miles in the wrong direction by someone whose credit was about to run out. I was mortified that we were reduced to commenting listlessly on our food, like a couple of alienated pensioners in whom enthusiasm, even for mutual torment, has been entirely replaced by the congealing powers of resignation and habit. In other words, like the rest of the clientele. By the time my myrtilles Metternich arrived I was furious.
‘What makes you think that I’m going to give you my last million francs when all you can do is sit there sulking?’