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

‘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?’
    ‘We have a contract,’ she said.
    ‘Yes, but it’s based on passion. Without passion it’s shit.’
    ‘I know you’re under pressure with your health and everything,’ she said politely, ‘and it’s difficult for both of us that we’re separating tomorrow morning,’ she soldiered on, ‘but I think it’s unfair of you to start threatening me just because you feel bad. You know I have to gamble, so if you’re not going to give me the money I’m going to go to the bank right now before it closes. I’ll leave your bags with the hall porter.’
    ‘You “have to gamble”. You think you’re so wild and haunted, don’t you? But your life is as