A Clue to the Exit: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

blue-rinse hair and wrinkles as fine as anything in a Holbein portrait. When she found out that I was a writer, she asked me if I used a pen or one of these new computers she had read so much about.
    I told her that I cut open my wrist and collected the blood in my cupped hand and, using a six-inch nail, scratched out my sanguine words on the hides of snow leopards.
    That shut her up.

 
    8
    This morning a funeral hearse arrived at the back of the hotel.
    ‘ Madame la comtesse est morte ,’ explained the concierge, drawing the side of his hand slowly across his throat and letting his tongue hang out, in case I didn’t understand French.
    I was overwhelmed with guilt. Why had I been so unfriendly to that vivacious old blue-rinse? Now she was dead and it was no use offering her a Kir royale before lunch. It’s not enough to live each day as if it’s your last, unless you remember that it’s everybody else’s last day as well. The grief a loving son would feel, and of which I had no inkling when my own mother was lowered into her flinty grave, tornadoed through me at the news of the countess’s death.
    ‘All one can do is set an example,’ my mother used to say.
    ‘Or make an example of someone else,’ my father would add.
    And it was all they could do.
    Sometimes wild ideas were in the air. ‘People did things with tremendous style in those days,’ my mother occasionally remarked, but it turned out that these stylish people simply travelled with an unusual amount of luggage, or had allowed themselves to take a favourite terrier on a military campaign, and that, in any case, ‘those days’ were hopelessly remote from life in our Tudor farmhouse in Staffordshire.
    I once dared to complain that I had been brought close to breakdown by my parents’ exemplary deadness.
    ‘You seem to have turned out perfectly all right,’ said my mother tranquilly.
    ‘Perfectly all right,’ said my father, in a tone which suggested that ‘all right’ was all wrong.
    As I wept in the garden of the hotel, I realized that I was not crying for the countess or for my mother, but with frustration at not having had a mother who deserved my tears. I dread the prospect of the pressure of death roaming through my psyche like a wildcat prospector and producing these eruptions of unwelcome insight. I wish my mother had been right when she accused me of not wanting to ‘make a contribution’. It would be so lovely to be good at doing nothing, but nothing is the one thing I cannot do.
    Later, I saw the Maestro leave for Rome in a black Lamborghini. I couldn’t help noticing that his chauffeur was dressed as one of the charioteers in Ben Hur . There’s nobody quite like the Maestro. My helplessness prevented me from saying goodbye, but his departure added to the determination of my melancholy.
    Feeling too upset to write, I made the brave decision to write about feeling too upset. At that precise moment when I was majestically uncapping my pen, a strikingly beautiful woman walked into the bar, where, despite my liver condition, I had just finished my seventh espresso.
    Her hazel eyes threw out sparks of green fire from behind the loose spirals of her golden-brown hair. We looked at each other with unassailable hunger, knowing that sex would only usher us into an Ethiopia of desire where we would taste even more keenly the tragic knowledge that true intimacy cannot be shared.
    Who ever allowed a little thing like that to interfere with a fuck?
    On the contrary, our tragic lucidity and, of course, the frantically life-affirming atmosphere of a recent death stimulated us to a savage interrogation of each other’s bodies. She drew blood with her nails and sucked the wounds like the flavour from a water ice. I rolled my forehead against hers, trying to break through the fortress of our lonely skulls and meld our yearning minds. We thrashed like marlin caught on the hooks of each other’s unforgiving genitals.
    ‘It’s incredible how I can