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

recover, and if I don’t I cancel everything and get myself to the nearest consciousness conference. After that, it’s only a matter of minutes before this pathetic vision of integrity shatters into a thousand “problems”.’
    ‘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,