Perhaps he should abandon the letter, or just leave the hotel to trace it out in the coarse moonlit sand the full length of the Biarritz Grande Plage, and then sit back on a wrought iron bench, and watch the waves swarm in to lick over it like flies on a wound, blurring the lines and finally lifting it away into the Atlantic.
“That’s the trouble with pity. You can give it out, but you can’t take it yourself,” says a voice, amused rather than adversarial. He knows that the voice is his, that it must be, one way or another; he is alone in the room. He supposes that it is the voice of his dementia, his swansong into senility, his chirping cricket of a conscience. It is a voice that comes from somewhere deeper than his conscious mind. From his hollow chips of bone. From his smears of stubbornly clinging marrow. From his doubtful soul. He hears it so often, these days, that it has started to irritate the hell out of him. He has had enough of posing as the subject of a muted watercolour. He flicks the switch, and drowns the cell-like solemnity of the room in a flood of harsh electric light, the furniture suddenly orange and lurid green, as bright and sinister as a clown at a children’s party.