disharmony: sing for a living2
Returning from the Centre exhausted: adulthood in doubt: wife re-married, children gone: after the day’s distraction, nemesis avoided, drying the pots in the sink in the kitchen at the back of the house, glad, at least, of a further distraction, waiting for Simone to ring: due home from Vienna (one conference too many), her voice with its light (infectious) interrogative tone: one of nature’s enquirers: why and how and when – the where excluded – a further perspective suddenly revealed, the ghost of his successor, prospectively, always on his mind: somewhere, anywhere, everywhere: to be announced when least expected, the model (that day) a catalyst, he thought, in that respect, less object than subject for reflection, recently matured, her body, no signs of pregnancy visible upon it; evidence, rather, of bounty, richness – ‘essence’, which Genius and the t’ai chi Neil so much went on about; that strange divergence from their own physique, mysterious, elusive, a resonance which transfigured, rounded, contained – plausible: different from that attachment between his legs, speaking of loss, dismemberment, being wrenched apart, anxious for reconnection, no wholeness associated with it. Old enough to be her father, his thankfulness for what she serenely expressed: a seraphic expression, guilelessness not that of an equivalent man, or her husband.
Conscious of pieces of paper lying around the house, on table, chairs, cupboards, shelves, the floor, on which inscribed
unconsciousness disharmony: sing for a living
ask Simone the meaning of intent
are anxiety attacks due to missing letters in the DNA; if so, where learnt experience?
are the accretions (epigenetics) recently discovered on genes the beginning of a causal theory of behaviour?
is space matter; if so, to whom?
still in the foothills: make everything plain
transitoriness a permanence of its own
which was why he looked at her more than at his drawing, to the delight of Neil, the jeaned instructor (slow motion: quick awareness) who conceived the perfect drawing: eight hours of concentration with nothing at the end to show for it, beholder and beholden one
brutum fulmen
her Balkan mind crossing a frontier few had known was there, extant in ways no amount of drawing, even less, photography or filming, could record, a rapture commemorated by her body, its disregard for what they, on sheets of paper, were actively pursuing
carbonating her
standing at the kitchen table (a narrow projection, the kitchen, from the back of the house), adding ‘a resonance which is shared by the stillness of your husband and your child, waiting for this mundanity to come to an end,’ his house, he had to face it, almost a wreck, subsidence evident in its outer as well as inner walls, an alarming or, in any other circumstances, would-be-alarming tilt to the windows, the building held together by those on either side. ‘Good job it’s in the middle of the terrace and not,’ he had told Simone, ‘at the end, otherwise,’ he’d gone on, ‘it would have fallen off,’ the ‘falling off’ a condition he recognised as his own – away, from, down – propped up by circumstance, chance – the ‘charge’ (the ‘chance’) Simone had mentioned, the residue of a life which, but for her, he had abandoned (left intriguingly at the side of the road to be picked up by anyone who happened to be passing: she as it turned out)
beyond his reach, these speculations, other than as something embodied in Alexis’s untroubled gaze, the trance she went into before their eyes, a spiritual residuum.
A sidestreet, in his own case, off the Chalk Farm Road: terraces one hundred and fifty years old, once strawberry fields approached, from the east, by a footpath crossing the River Fleet at Kentish Town, subsequently encroached upon, the river covered, by Victorian dwellings, associations unknown to him until recently, which absorbed him more and more, not least the tube line which ran through the London Clay directly beneath his feet.
Above the narrow rear extension, the bathroom, the main body of the house comprised of a single through-room on the ground floor, opening directly on to the kitchen, and two bedrooms on the floor above, a double one at the front, a single one at the rear, the furniture sparse, a post-marital requirement minimally expressed: drawers, a wardrobe, in the upper rooms and, in the loft, entered through a trap-door on the landing, the bric-à-brac he had stored there in a number of cardboard boxes.
Somewhere, in one of the boxes, were the photographs of his children, three infants (mainly) whom in most instances he was no longer able to differentiate, one from the other: the maternally expressive mother, the paternally apprehensive father, a source of fascination, the former, to her (second) husband Gerry, a peripatetic entrepreneur moving from company to company as executive bagman: good old G! (Brady: publicist and mesmeric raconteur).
A photograph of his children in their maturity he had by the bed: three men of strangely variable build, Charlie, like his mother, tall and slim, the eldest; Steven, the youngest, slightly built, neither like Charlotte nor himself, and Joseph, a broad, expansive figure who represented something of Maddox in nature and build, a formalised aloofness characterising their expressions, misleadingly, in this one photograph, creatures of Maddox’s own inventory: he had taken the picture, the occasion the announcement of his and Charlotte’s separation, paternity, however, despite their parents’ negative example, common to them all, offspring, he’d been delighted to see, eschewing complexity and self-division, beholden to their mother for composure, fair-mindedness, familial restraint (bearers of grace).
Charlotte, with some misgivings, had left him: he was getting old; so was she, it adding to her attractions. His expectations of anything better had been judiciously withdrawn, hers focused on excitation (companionability, curiosity, warmth), he, as it turned out, travelling in the opposite direction, a reductive if not, on reflection, annihilating process, she a volitional creature, he, he’d concluded – they’d both concluded – not: Ariadne winding up her string, leaving him deeper in than ever
a sinner: his disgrace
grateful, nevertheless, to Gerry, the avuncular MD, for providing her – providing all of them – with a life which otherwise they couldn’t afford.
The white walls (of his residence) were now a uniform grey, embellished with darker patches: the marks of his grandchildren’s hands on the stairs, a reminder, the infrequency of the visits, he was reluctant to remove: less house than alcove, quartered into use – distracted, at that moment, by voices, the crashing of a door, the sliding up and down of a window, audible through the party-wall: Berenice, known familiarly as Berry to her numerous callers, a voice as penetrative as a rock-drill, its harshness interspersed at intervals with the interrogative, ‘Right?’, a punctuative exhalation as potent as a shell expelled from the barrel of a gun – his neighbours on the other side, the Connollys, he a minister at the local Presbyterian church, relatively silent (hymn-singing, occasionally – with which, through the party-wall, he often joined in – on Mrs Connolly’s Wednesday evenings), Sundays a popular day for addicts at Berenice’s front door, marshalled in and out by Isaiah, her definitively non-Christian Afro-Caribbean minder, the poker-work wood panel beside the front door, below a snarling Dobermann head, inscribed ‘I can get to the gate in five seconds. Can you?’ putting no one off, as far as he was aware: the nightly recital of benefit and credit card fraud, fencing, the itinerary of Berenice’s more sporadic (now she was ageing) intimate engagements often accompanying Maddox’s reflections as he fell asleep.
He was missing Simone, night closing in: slim, high-bosomed, past her prime (in reality, coming into it): the high forehead, the dark hair, the fangs of grey on either side drawn back from carefully – erotically, magnetically – mascaraed and pencilled-in brown eyes (great care in preparing and laying on her make-up): an inquisitive, searching nature – given over, in maturity, to declamation: no children, despite three marriages. Having gone to her as a ‘client’ – recommended, ironically, by Charlotte, on the recommendation, in turn, of Gerry, several of whose employees had allegedly benefited from her ‘work’ – he’d come away, after several months, as something else entirely, she announcing an involvement at ‘something other than a clinical level’, a curious innocence, amounting to naïvety, having, in his view, characterised their encounters, one which, he imagined, rendered her immune to the potential depravity, despair, cynicism not only of him but of all her clients: something he’d belatedly, perhaps confusingly, recognised as ‘faith’, though in what, and to what purpose, even now, he had no idea, associating this with the ‘grace’ he thought he’d recognised that day in the Kosovan model.
Re-tracking his career in the dark: the prodigal essayist, one year out of the Courtauld (there as postgraduate, via Wadham), a junior curator at twenty-six (at a highly competitive time), a senior one at thirty, the Raybourne Professor of Art History at the Drayburgh School of Fine Art, succeeding Viklund who’d moved over to a similar but more remunerative post at the Royal College, inertia (and hack-work, ironically) at this point, coming in: lassitude, or indifference, or a liking for the atmosphere of the Drayburgh (its activities confined exclusively to fine, as opposed to applied art), together with the character of Pemberton, the unprecedentedly long-term, avuncular Principal, the college off the Euston Road, in any case, more accessible to his north London address than, should he have followed Viklund on the older man’s retirement, as many had imagined he would, South Kensington and the Cromwell Road? Tendentiousness, speciousness: a vocabulary he was inclined to favour retrospectively in assessing his career, having focused his attention, at that time, on his sons, the ‘familial triptych’ he’d assembled with Charlotte: their beauty, their grace (again): their divinity, even, drawn on, once more, to what he thought he’d recognised that day in the Kosovan model.
Night, on the single bed in the back room, where he slept when not in the front room with Simone: away from the sound of Berenice’s activities through the party-wall, the window open to the tiny backyard below, alive with birdsong, the evening light still strong. Aircraft lumbered up from Heathrow. Hers would have landed, he assumed, he disinclined to go and meet her amidst her colleagues, convinced, for one thing, his successor was amongst them, his insecurities in this area so entrenched that, exhausted by a day of speculation (observation: self-expression) he couldn’t rest. She would ring him once home: even, on one occasion, had rung him on arrival, anxious to reassure him that ‘nothing had changed’, her interest, at such moments of return, directed normally to her faxes, her e-mail, her answering machine, her collected calls on her mobile (no similar machinery, he reflected, at his end of the line): the slim, upright, recalcitrant figure, addicted to clothes, high heels, the paraphernalia, it invariably seemed to him, of an earlier existence: a charmed and constantly changing nature, commandeering his weaknesses, his strengths – his hopes (his remaining aspirations). Why so enamoured? he plaintively enquired: the fervour of his – and her – ‘conversion’, as she described it, he, one moment, sitting in her consulting-room on the ground floor of her house, the next, scarcely three months later, ascending the stairs to her living-quarters overhead: a further ascent to her roof garden: the plants, the air, the insects, the flowers (winter turning into spring), the view over the surrounding roofs to the West End, the smear, like a trail of smoke, of the North Downs in the distance: in the opposite direction, above the intervening roofs, the sky above the St Albans hills. It had – the word came spontaneously to mind – felt like home: the intimacy of the wood-panelled sitting-room below and, not long after that, the greater intimacy of her wood-panelled bedroom, occupied almost exclusively by the double bed: the fragrance of the sheets, the covers, the pillows.
Amidst her machines – her telephone rarely stopped ringing – her cellular containment amongst the skylights, gardens and chimneys, he identified a solitariness to match his own, he disengaged from her as a client, an echo (a facsimile) of those figures who came up the eroded stone steps to her door, attracted less to a favoured-by-nature mentalist than explicitly to a healer, he, from such speculation, evoking an image of someone alarmingly beyond his reach.
What, conversely, in him, appealed to her: to the extent of diverting her, uniquely, from a lifetime’s practice? An emeritus professor, to boot, with, currently, a singularly discredited background. Previously, the discursiveness as well as the dynamic of his life had been focused on a process which turned animal, vegetable and mineral matter into something, at the least, elusive, at the best, transcendent. He had, to this degree, set his signature on the past, a challenge to be superseded, if not by his own interpretations, by those of others. Atrophied by the process, he had reached the point where, in arresting history, he had arrested himself: writing in the notebook beside his bed, his head bowed, his body arced to the light still coming from the window …
‘What is her attraction?’ Charlotte had enquired – on the phone, having heard of the outcome of their encounters (engineered by her, he had begun to suspect, a prank, conceivably, on both their parts, he tossed helplessly between them). On the whole it had been too early, too unexpected, too sudden, too unlikely, to warrant hers or Gerry’s (or their sons’) intrusion: he and Simone had behaved like children, a regression to hitherto undiscovered, certainly unconsidered parts of their previous lives, a regression of which they were instantly aware, fear, of an inexplicable nature, having, ironically, in him, in the first instance, brought them together. ‘Like all men,’ he might have said by way of explanation of his attraction to a woman whose attractiveness, to him, was both alarming and profound. ‘My only regret,’ he’d told all of them, ‘is it’s too late for us to have children.’
The darkening sky outside, the lights appearing in the windows: rarely did anyone draw a curtain, the intimacy of the yards proscribing it. On the floor, by the bed, was one of the drawings he’d been preoccupied with throughout the day, the fragmentary outcome of several hours of observation: whatever had been achieved had been absorbed, the model an embodiment of something he had unknowingly been preoccupied by throughout his life
death around the corner: an aversion to signalling left or right
the language of an earlier discipline had found a muse
long after he might have expected it …
The phone rang, the window still open, the room dark. He must have fallen asleep, lighted transparencies, the other windows along the backs.
Obliged to get out of bed, the phone in the other room where, on her rare visits, they slept, he picked it up.
‘How are you?’
He was well.
‘We didn’t say much on our previous call.’
‘Nevertheless, I’m relieved you’re back. I take it the weekend and your paper went well,’ imitating, he noticed, her interrogative tone.
‘I was thinking much of you.’
‘I of you,’ he said. ‘When you’re away, a tabula rasa on each occasion,’ a baby crying from across the street, Berenice mercifully silent through the party-wall.
A light went on behind a curtain: the crying stopped.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ arranging the time. She might have suggested his coming-up now, or her coming-down, her e-mail read, faxes examined, messages listened to, he concurring, however, tonight was too late, unease at her absence brought to an end.
‘Much love!’ the sound of her voice.
‘Much,’ he confirmed.
The sound of her laughter.
‘Much,’ he repeated (a bottomless well).
How far, reflecting, back in bed, having curtained his window, the top ajar, should speculation go? Two miles away – less than that, a mile-and-a-half – two tube station stops beyond Chalk Farm, the pilgrim route to St Albans, over the crest of Holly Bush Hill, she, he imagined, would be pottering around her flat, the lamplight on the panelling, the cretonned furniture she went in for, rugs with extravagant Iberian designs (‘murillos’, she called them), intimacy in her domestic life as in her work, something of a whore in this situation, too, a lending not of her body but of her mind, her acuity, her spirit, a reinforcing of a persona not her own.
Dreams, when they came, had involved, over recent nights, a house he had left forty-seven or more years before, reinhabiting its rooms – deserted, in some dreams, in others cluttered with the furniture which, unseen for all that time, was more familiar than his own: a fireguard he’d forgotten, bought when his younger brother was born; a cot, a Victorian creation, with embellishments, carved animals in relief at either end, its woodwork glowing in the light from the nursery fire: their biblical names, Matthew, Paul, Sarah, his elder sister, his imagination fired, finally, into wakefulness by Simone’s call: his brother’s jobs, his high-pitched, almost hysterical apprehension, as a child, peculiar in the context into which he was born, youthful, in appearance, even at sixty, ‘engaged and engaging’ in his description of Paul to Simone who, he had discovered belatedly, had a liking for sensitive, high-minded men (something of the same which, if extinguished, she’d located in him): had ‘gone into the Church’ in his early twenties, a process phrased at the time as if into a building (St Albans Cathedral and Abbey remains at the end of the road), ‘coming out’ at the age of thirty-one, God ‘a misplaced endeavour, sought but not found (knocked, but not opened)’ his (credible) reasons, rather than excuses, relief, Maddox recalled, to both of them, at this confession (‘I gave it a try’), apprehension, so conspicuously evident in his youth, disappearing, never to return, Paul passing, as if by means of a natural process, an evolutionary procedure (‘the ethic’s much the same’) into ‘banking’: discretion, sobriety, fidelity to a system, much play made at the time with the parable of the talents: ‘praise by employment’, a ‘secularised religion’, ‘work as prayer’, water into wine displaced by rock dust, clay and ore into concrete, brick and steel: the pointed, inquisitive, curiously trusting Maddox face tuned to application, tuned, too, specifically, to belief – in what, in Maddox’s own case, however, he no longer had any idea, vocation, initially, in his brother’s case, as also in his …
his thoughts, at that instant, turning to their sister Sarah, vocational solely in maternity (heavy on her now), a biblical source of their names in common – but something else, he, a man as well as a brother, incensed on her behalf, she forging ahead throughout her life, a forager on her own as well as their behalf: strength, fortitude, dispassion, he privy to her nature, all things seen by him, in his youth, as if by her. How could Bully have walked away from her? the nickname, given affectionately, initially, by her, licensed by his surname Bulford, christened Charles.
Three Charleses in the family, as Sarah had pointed out, if Charlotte’s equally affectionately ascribed ‘Charley’ counted.
Was this – she the most religious of the Maddox family – the triumvirate she was always seeking (Father, Son and Holy Ghost), Paul’s apostasy, at the time, decried (bitterly) by her, while ‘lost to the Church’ their father’s ambivalent cry had greeted both Paul’s ordination as well as his subsequent recantation – his ‘reconversion to mundanity’ as Sarah had described it: ‘Wasn’t there room for another saint in St Albans?’ ‘Paul’ possessing, Maddox had assumed, at least for his sister, a canonical ring.
Plus: why was she so much stouter – taller, broader – than Paul and himself? femininity, giving her grace as a child, now endowing her with bulk, mass, scale: the inscrutability with which she looked over her children’s lives displaced by a familiar Maddox moral fervour, sensitive not so much to the proverbial ‘catch’ in life as its explicit moral resolution, as if, pro Maddox, their ends were not relative or personal but universal: ‘materialising death’, as she had once described it, distinguishing artfully between body and soul: a prescient sister, predicating Bully’s departure long before he had even thought of it, a passion for renewal, a reinvigoration, post-children, post-grandchildren, living subsequently, contentedly, enliveningly, engagingly, on her own.
Placed by their father in the seats of his cars, lined in an intoxicatingly scented row behind his showroom windows, the light reflecting off their bonnets – mudguards, roofs – the ‘massage’, as he called the paintwork, the odour of metal, oil, leather, polish sensationally, entrancingly, erotically combined, the garage and showroom fronting the old Roman road leading in from the south, ‘straight as an arrow’ his father’s claim on his own behalf printed in lower-case gold letters across his principal showroom window: an allusion to probity, speed, openness (honesty, reliability, directness, common sense), proven Maddoxian traits. From this, Paul had, Maddox had always assumed, acquired his early religious and later secular conviction.
From this, too, had Maddox acquired his appetite for art: the nebulae of his early Albanian life.
And school: sent away, with Paul, by his parents because of the bombs, Sarah alone remaining, a familial retainer, it had seemed, at the time: the ancient brick building enclosed by others of a more recent, formal design, facing eastwards, on a hill in Yorkshire, the coat-of-arms and inscription on the gates those of the manor’s original owner
nosce teipsum
taken over, the injunction, by the nineteenth-century ‘proprietary school for boys’, set, the inscription, on a scroll beneath the design of a lion rampant either side of an open book, ‘Fierce in Faith’ the title of the school anthem:
… and strong in duty,
keenly tuned to nature’s beauty:
trust in justice, truth and learning,
faith for which our hearts are yearning,
moving on, his thoughts, from those of his sister – vocational, too, in later life, in teaching – his sons, his former wife: generational, too, the dissolution of disbelief, prompting Charlotte, a post-marital gift, to send him to Simone, a woman who, in treating several of Gerry’s colleagues, after he had finished with them, had ‘impressed’ her – the ‘mystic woman’ on Holly Bush Hill, singularly not prone, he’d discovered for himself, to disbelief, or doubt, or hesitation.
Far from him to complain: altruism’s roots not to be examined: the image of the labyrinth with something terrible happening at either end.
As usual, in the early hours of the morning, he woke, got up, sat in the kitchen, then, drinking tea, walked through to the other room, Berenice active through the wall. On many (most) evenings he fell asleep to the sound of her voice – waking, finally, scarcely rested, to find her still talking: from the moment she woke until the (dubious) occasions she fell asleep, the staccatic, bass-based, pneumatic crescendo, heightened by coke, amphetamines, what else, the suffix ‘Right?’ finalising each sentence, self-exculpation the dominant tone:
non utile dulce
how did he say rock-drill in Latin?
Charley had visited him once, to reassure herself about the house: scented, radiant – ‘effulgent’ the word that came to his mind, bringing a message of reassurance from their sons, she sitting where he was sitting now, facing the non-functional fireplace and, at the sudden incursion of Berenice’s voice, had risen, spontaneously, as if hoisted by invisible hands, gazing incredulously to the door and then the window.
‘Berenice has the ability to shift you,’ he had said, ‘when not even in the room,’ anxious to reassure her about the virtues of his living in an otherwise characterless house.
Now he listened without complaint, the content of her speech muffled by the wall, the gravel-crunching, visceral, gravitational bass transposed to something of an abstract sound, ‘fuck’, in its various declensions, resonating through the brickwork, and the final, interrogative, affirmative, ‘Right?’
Reverie at three a.m. gave way, an habitual visitation, to preparing himself for execution, waiting, numbered, the beckoning call.
Clinging mentally, meanwhile, to Simone.
Tomorrow was his ‘group’.
With this recollection he went back to bed. Was it in a dream or had he in reality gone recently to Berenice’s door and, despite the canine five-second warning, rung the bell, Isaiah putting his head out of the upstairs window to announce, behind his back, that someone, below, was ringing the bell, to hear Berenice enquire from the rear of the building, ‘Is it that cunt from next door?’ he merely requesting, on this occasion, that she lower the volume of her radio?
preferring the sound of her voice
living, increasingly, a synthetic exercise, mandatory, on the one hand, volitional, on the other
the past reduced to a tunnel, the future an ever-widening plain
recalling, as he did each night – each day, each morning – the incident on the Camden Town tube station platform, waiting, with others, for a northbound train, when, as the train drew in, he had been seized by what he could only describe – had insistently described – as a giant hand, one finger of which was the width of his chest, and flung at the line, striking the corner of the driver’s cab to be thrown back across the platform. Screams, he recalled, from someone watching. Cries of a more personal nature from himself
nolens volens
sectioning: confusion and distress of an unprecedented nature
followed, months later, by Charley’s suggestion (insistence) he visit ‘a woman in Hampstead’ recommended by Gerry (‘naturally he’s concerned’): people he had employed had gone to her with ‘beneficial’ results (more amenable, in reality, to Gerry’s cost-cutting knife). ‘It won’t jeopardise your National Health treatment,’ his wife had advised, the woman’s address, he’d noticed, on the pilgrim route to St Albans, its one establishing credential: the abbey-turned-cathedral which, even as a child, he had likened to an upturned boat, he, Paul and Sarah, their mother and father, trapped inside, a reductive, alarming, sinking sensation he associated with a sense of extinction, a degalvanising experience scarcely – its impersonality, its vastness – to be identified with something as directly appealing as the notion – a notion – of a personal God, creativity, in that instant, replaced, obscurely, by an appetite for comment.
And now, equally obscurely, a lightening of the heart at the association with something he had always mentally avoided.
She, at the first meeting, he had, initially, scarcely noticed: she had, he observed, a liking for prints: Durer: a harsh, unsensuous, graphic presence: the hare (victim), the praying hands (supplication), the unyielding, anachronistically sensually-lipped self-portrait (her?) – and melancholia: a dreamlike, abstracted, oppressive gaze, the latter positioned immediately behind her head: a condition, he assumed, she identified with most if not all of her patients (clients, analysands) – and noticed, too – could scarcely fail to – the wood-panelling which gave the room a feeling of confinement, the room itself adjacent to the front door of the house, a sensuous woman in an ambivalent setting, they sitting not knee to knee as, at one time, he might have imagined, but facing each other beside, not on either side of a desk.
There was a table for writing – a Victorian cabinet and desk adjacent to the window – and a fireplace, conceivably the original one, black, cast-iron, an odd, idiosyncratic, domestic touch; and, more startingly, a cat, he only aware of its presence as it stirred, rising from an upholstered chair, itself covered by a travelling rug, its eyes, almost luminescent, turned in his direction before, having risen, it turned once more and settled.
The light on him, he had faced the window, a skein of muslin shading the view to the narrow street outside – scarcely more than an alley, cobbled, with a long flight of stone steps leading up to it from Heath Street below. Directly opposite was visible the lower half of a large, through-floor window, evidently of a studio, with smaller, street-level windows either side of a metal-studded door.
Here he was, confronted, unexpectedly, by ‘art’, talking of things he had never considered, or even been drawn to before: an imperative – coming out of where? as a result of what? – to fling himself, almost abstractly (directed by forces which, seemingly, at the time, had nothing to do with him) in front of a train, forces – a force – which, at her request, he described as ‘elemental’, then, persuaded into allegory by the Dürer prints, he suggested, colourfully, he could more graphically describe as ‘synonymous with the Demon King himself’.
‘What Demon King?’ she had enquired, scepticism in her repetition of the phrase.
‘The one I assume tempted Christ to leap from the mountain,’ the analogy coming to him as he spoke. How odd, the promptness of his response, he’d reflected, in the silence that followed, avoiding her look, his attention, once more, drawn to the studio window opposite: the inside of the single, massive pane was cluttered with plants.
Finally, glancing back at her, he had noticed her make-up, the dark colouring above the even darker eyes: a penetrative, yet almost disingenuous gaze, abstracted (melancholic?) self-contained. And had noticed, too, the lace frill of her blouse which, high-necked, showed within the opening of her formal, sharply cut dark jacket.
On greeting him – shown in by a receptionist occupying a room across the hall – his attention had been drawn to the length of her skirt, cut halfway across her calf, and the square-heeled shoes which extended the slimness of her ankles: so much was contained, so much was revealed, a composed, self-possessed, self-referential figure, her appearance a signal that ‘psychology’, or even ‘science’, had an unavoidable personal edge. Like God, he reflected, as he (as we, he mentally amended) were taught: something he associated with sacrament, if not with sainthood: a few yards down the hill, immediately below the house, shielded from it by equally ancient domestic buildings, was the original lane which led northwards to the St Albans hills: a choirboy collar, dark skirt: a spiritual rather than psychic mentor, he a supplicant (the praying hands), a potential devotee, turning, reluctantly, towards an awareness of ‘higher things’ (the piercing, astringent directness of the Dürer portrait). The phrase came to him as unexpectedly as his earlier reference to the Demon King, turning his look once more in her direction, taking in another feature of her appearance: a ring on the third finger of her left hand, on her right hand another ring (a bracelet, gold, thin, on her delicate left wrist).
A second swift glance to confirm the first: her mouth, thin-lipped, tinted with a near-natural colour: broad, receptive, braced, seemingly, to an appetite not yet acknowledged, let alone fulfilled.
Perhaps, he’d reflected, they had something in common, she, too, a supplicant; all these years prescribing to others: refinement, repetition, exclusivity (associated with the house and its location); art for God’s sake, at one time, in his case, obeisance to nature, conceivably, in hers: the slender, rather suffered hands, held lightly, one within the other. So much of what he said she had, he assumed, in one form or another, heard before: the externalising of an energy (the Demon King) which came exclusively from within – he aware of her examining stare, the supposedly ‘objective’ look which took him in, he scrutinised, disconcertingly, in the direct light from the window, her own face and figure silhouetted against it. Only as he rose to leave did the face, once more, present itself as something companionable, informal, reassuring, the inquisitive, or seemingly inquisitive nose, the nostrils small, dilated, the indentations on either side, like thumb prints, suggesting playfulness, a remnant of childhood which the clarity of her other features assertively disowned, a suggestion, in effect, of ‘another nature’, lightly contained, elusive, self-amused.
Intrigued, he had set his scepticism aside; he couldn’t afford – in a sense, didn’t even ‘believe’ in the visits, yet decided he should: he could borrow the money from Gerry, or one of his sons; from Paul, or Sarah – dismissing the idea, surprised, however, by the urgency – the recklessness, almost: he had never borrowed from any of them, or even thought of it (half his pension still going to Charlotte, even though, he suspected, she didn’t need it): a further encounter the following week, a third a few days later, several on alternate days, finally, absurdly, daily visits: a fish, he reproached himself, being deftly wound in.
‘You are in control,’ she told him. ‘You are in charge. You can always change it. It’s up to you how frequently we meet. I can only suggest it. I’m not inclined,’ she’d concluded, strangely, ‘to make conditions.’
It was the familiar interrogative tone that had warned him – warned her, too, he suspected – that they were crossing or had already crossed a line. Perhaps, too, he reflected, it had been the cat at that first visit, not merely its presence but its unconscious regard; she, he thought, like him, unaware of the animal until it stirred, turning, instinctively, to remove it, he discouraging her. ‘It’s no bother,’ he’d told her. ‘I rather like it there,’ reassured by its presence, the animal, a dark, ochreish creature, circling once more in the chair before settling down.
‘It’s normally upstairs,’ she’d said, ‘or out in the street. Mrs Beaumont,’ she’d added, naming the receptionist who had shown him in, ‘should keep an eye on it.’
‘It’s really all right,’ he’d insisted.
‘It comes in when I’m not looking.’ The sudden informality had lightened her mood.
Perhaps the high collar of the blouse, with its chorister’s lace frill, hid the evidence of ageing, the sharply cut jacket, similarly, with its unwinged collar, curtailing speculation. The crossing of her legs, beneath the skirt, both attracted and bemused him, a form of defiance, he’d reflected, but in the face of what?
‘Is she a tease?’ he had asked Charley on the phone, having first had to give a résumé of his encounter to Gerry, the overseer of the event, whose seemingly guileless nature had so much attracted his wife to him in the first place. ‘Sounds a good lay. How about it, Matt?’ he’d concluded, to be reproached by Charlotte when she immediately took over: ‘The instincts and intellect and morality of a mouse,’ she’d affectionately complained. ‘Like all women in these situations, she has to draw a line between selflessness and presence.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Gerry enquired in the background.
‘Matthew,’ Charley said, ‘will know what I mean.’
‘I’m not sure I do,’ he said, anxious, as he had always been since the break-up of their marriage, to discover what, in his wife’s reasoning, might have led to their divorce: why so free with Gerry and never similarly with him? Children, he’d concluded, the inhibiting factor. ‘Find, I suppose,’ he said, ‘a middle line.’
‘Precisely.’
An exhalation (self-justification) came familiarly from the other end.
‘Identity,’ she’d added.
‘Oh, identity!’ he heard Gerry calling. ‘Obtained at any broker. Cheap at any price.’
‘Simone’s no magician,’ Charley had gone on, a door closing, the sound of Gerry’s commentary suddenly cut off. ‘The change, if it is to come, has to come from you,’ she’d concluded.
‘I’m not expecting magic,’ Maddox said. ‘Though there was a cat in the room.’
‘Are you suggesting she’s a witch?’
His wife’s – his former wife’s beleaguered cry rang out in a familiar warning.
‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ he said. ‘It’s purely,’ how should he describe it? ‘empirical at present.’
The odd thing was, though married for over thirty years, whenever he spoke to, or even thought of Charlotte, no image of her, familiar or otherwise, came to him: the vivacious, blooming, expansive – and, let’s face it, extravagant creature he had first picked up at the Courtauld and subsequently seen maturing, step by visible step, over the following decades, had disappeared from his memory as well as his imagination, replaced by a cipher, a voice familiar only at the end of a telephone. They rarely met (the last occasion she had come was to confirm his referral to the psychiatric department of the North London Royal, his sectioning, at that time, at an end: ‘we can’t have you living on your own without knowing how you are,’ a mixture of guilt and attachment with which he had become increasingly familiar). Should he encounter her in the street he was convinced he would pass her by without any sign of recognition, she increasing in size in her post-menopausal years, her innate good humour subdued, he had assumed, by her stewardship over their sons – to be subsequently re-ignited by Gerry’s tasteless, animalistic presence. After all, it was in her interests – and Gerry’s – he should come to no harm as a result of her defection (‘we don’t want that,’ she’d told him, ‘hanging over our heads’).
‘Simone knows what she’s doing,’ she’d finally told him. ‘The woman is no fool.’
Foolishness, however, was what he was presently absorbed by. To support, in the past, a wife and three children on what, at the best, might have been described as a vocational disposition, was foolishness enough (how many times had he thought of giving it up?). Greater foolishness was to see his wife depart for what, at the time, she had described as ‘a livelier camp’: the jolly, peripatetic (vocational in his way, too) MD, in Maddox’s view, epitomised juvenility itself.
In their last meeting in her consulting-room, Simone had merely said, as if to confirm the room’s domestic atmosphere, ‘I shall have to bring these appointments to an end,’ he unsure, for a moment, what she meant. Had he said something to offend her? Was he too recalcitrant a client (patient, analysand)? Was what he had revealed too boring? Was he ‘cured’?
Most of the time, despite her prompting, he had talked little about his past, convinced he had little, if anything, to complain about: his younger brother, his older sister, his automobile-focused father, his mother – a secretary when her three children had left home, not in his father’s showrooms – too familiar and domestic – but in a local school. He had, on the other hand, felt obliged to talk about cars, the Wolseley in particular: its name had, like the thought of his younger brother’s potential sainthood, a canonical ring.
Its odour, too, he had been significantly attracted to, an intoxicating smell, the appeal of which had only increased with time – as had the potency of his recollection of watching the movement of its bonnet, and specifically its radiator cap, against the contour of the road ahead: an aesthetic sensation, visceral and overwhelming, which had scarcely lost its power. What else? Away to school in the north because of the bombing, with his younger brother Paul: an unnecessary precaution he’d thought at the time (not many bombs on St Albans) but, since everyone with ‘sense’ had done it, he’d felt obliged to go along with it. It hadn’t ‘transformed’ him in any way; he had even felt an odd reluctance, at the end of each term, to remove himself from what, later, he had been inclined, portentously, to describe as the ‘provenance’ of the place – its unique situation at the brow of a hill overlooking the enigmatic municipal buildings of the nearby town, identifying himself unobtrusively and, for the most part, undemonstratively with what, in his maturer letters home, he had referred to as the ‘industrial conflagration’ in the valley below: the mill and factory chimneys, the triangulated slag heaps and the headgears of the collieries, several of which were visible on or around the surrounding hills, the polluted streams, the dams serving the mills, the even more polluted river: a dour and unavoidable presence which, in an indiscernible way, had thrilled him, the evidence of a dynamism which he rarely, if ever, associated with the south, least of all with St Albans.
Yet, when she had said, ‘I shall have to bring these appointments to an end’ (not ‘terminate’ them, he had noticed), the formality of the declaration had been sufficient, first, to alarm him and then, triggered by his alarm, to lead him to suspect a challenge, he blurting out, ‘You mean we’re getting nowhere?’ about to add, ‘I’m too defensive?’ as startled by this enquiry as he had been by the attempt of ‘another’ presence to hurl him in front of a train, continuing, however, ‘I know what you mean,’ she waiting in a by now familiar manner for anything further he might add, he finally announcing, ‘I see you less as a therapist than as a woman. It’s been the problem all along, as if I’m here to entertain, distract, rather than examine or explain,’ waiting as if – a curious sensation – he’d been suspended from the ceiling, or thrust up from the floor, his gaze fixed not on her face but on her hands – hands which, he realised, he’d long felt a desire to hold.
‘It happens occasionally,’ she’d said, adding, ‘but not previously with me,’ her hand, her left hand, the one with the ring and the bracelet, waved helplessly in the air.
‘I shouldn’t see you again?’ he’d suggested.
‘Under different conditions,’ she said, ‘I suppose you could.’
‘What conditions?’
It was as if these conditions, these precise conditions, had been anticipated, rehearsed.
‘Not today. Another day.’ Again, the wave of the hand. ‘At a café, perhaps. Away from here.’
‘Somewhere neutral.’
‘Yes.’
A decision already taken: no longer suggestion, fact.
‘Okay.’ Equally crude and direct.
She’d moved in her chair: the same long skirt, the same jacket, a similar high-necked blouse: formal, anonymous, contained.
‘You think I ought to continue.’ He gestured round as if to suggest a venue different to this. ‘With someone else.’
‘That’s up to you. There are people I could suggest. I wouldn’t wish to dissuade you. There are clearly things waiting to be discovered.’
‘But not with you.’
‘Not in this context.’ She waved her hand again. A moment later, she added, ‘It’s a significant event to feel an urge to kill yourself, particularly,’ she went on, ‘if you identify it with a force coming from somewhere else.’
His gaze, as it frequently did, returned to the window, specifically – he hadn’t realised it until now – to the view of the artist’s studio, with its vast through-floor window – unused, he’d assumed, because of the density of plants strewn on the inside of the pane: that was its significance, he reflected: it had reminded him of something.
‘I don’t feel it’s likely to happen again,’ he said.
‘That you may have felt before the first occasion.’ She was looking at him directly, as if, having got so far, predictably, she no longer knew which way to go.
Already he was standing. ‘Maybe we should just shake hands,’ he said. ‘See how we feel after we’ve had time to think.’
‘Fine.’ Expectation and disappointment encapsulated in a single sound.
Having risen herself, she extended her hand.
For the first time he took it in something other than a formal manner, delaying releasing it until he felt hers withdraw.
They were stepping back, she into the room, he into the hall.
‘Shall I call you?’ he said. ‘Or you call me?’
‘Either,’ she said.
‘Fine.’
No Mrs Beaumont: she only came in two days a week, Simone herself opening the door on other occasions. Conceivably, she’d chosen a day when her receptionist wouldn’t be there: nor the cat, fastened in, presumably, upstairs.
‘Until we hear from one another.’ He smiled, suddenly alert: it was like the conclusion to a quarrel. Having opened the front door himself, he paused on the steps outside. ‘It’s been coming for some time,’ he added, continuing with a smile, ‘It won’t mean you’re unfrocked, or whatever they do on these occasions?’
‘I doubt it. Unless,’ she paused, ‘you’ve a cause for complaint.’
‘None at all,’ he said. Having followed him to the door she’d stepped back inside, he turning, descending the steps, glancing back moments later, not having heard the door close, to see her emerge, he waving, she waving too before, stepping back once more, closing the door behind her.
Walking to the tube that morning: the bizarre fibreglass shop fronts: an aeroplane – a Dakota – in vertical descent, a gigantic pair of ill-shaped boots, a simulated pine-wood rocking-chair sufficient to accommodate a giant, gargantuan android human figures, dissimilitude, seemingly, the theme – changing his mind, turning back on his tracks and setting off, past Chalk Farm, up Haverstock Hill, the dome of St Paul’s, at one point, visible behind, emerging, from the steepest ascent, into cleaner air, as if from a lake of pollution: the demarcation line, he always felt, between his place and hers. Up Rosslyn Hill into Hampstead High Street: boutiques, cafeterias. Up the final steps to the summit of Holly Bush Hill, the prospect below, briefly visible, extending to the Thames and the familiar smear of hill-land at Crystal Palace, the view still fresh, brilliant, sparkling (his state of mind), Mrs Beaumont just arrived, in the hall, as he let himself in (a key of his own): ‘How are you, Matt?’ a conspiratorial smile (a medical as well as social enquiry), the door to her room already open, the phone ringing, the constrained voice of a caller, male, on the answering machine, the message, continuing, indecipherable, following him up the stairs – Simone already up (the cat he’d seen in the street, sitting on an adjacent window-ledge, stretching itself, as it recognised him, yawning, turning away), she dressed, coming through from the sitting-room to the kitchen, post in her hand, the interior’s narrow window looking out to the backs of the encroaching houses: the formalised embrace as she prepared herself for the day: some clients, he knew, she had seen already, her earliest, one day a week, scheduled at five-thirty: dark-suited, long-skirted, he an envious glance – her activity, her absorption – turning on the kettle, putting a tea-bag in a mug (already prepared: showing she had thought of him), she sitting companionably at the kitchen table, examining her correspondence (voluminous), laying it aside, aware of his gaze, if not his inspection, she somewhere to go, something to do, he, he reflected, nothing
ex nihilo nihil fit
little (he) to communicate this time of day, nevertheless, she sitting there, braced, he, sitting, too, the tea once made, full of admiration.
Amare!
‘I’ll walk with you,’ she said. ‘I’ve delayed my next appointment,’ adding (when he protested – ‘I’ll be all right’) – ‘I need to get out before I start again. I ought to do it every morning,’ so that, not much later, his tea drunk, she fetching a coffee through from the sitting-room, they were descending the south-westerly slope of the hill to the clinic off Fitzjohn’s Avenue, above the Finchley Road, a recently constructed building of red brick and matching tile, domestic in its proportions of walls to windows to roof to door, pausing on the brick wall fronting the forecourt, where they sat, knee to knee, he holding her hand, at her prompting, before, seeing others entering – signalling or averted looks – he decided it was time to go in; on this occasion, unlike previous ones, they having scarcely spoken: observations on the weather (mild), and the buildings, domestic, they had passed – Edwardian, villa-like constructions – something, he conjectured, on her mind, the conference in Vienna – Vienna itself – her lecture scarcely mentioned: the journey back, a colleague sick in the aircraft: ‘Some of us are getting too old for these outings.’ ‘Not so,’ he told her, alarmed: should she go again? an imponderable presented as if to conceal another.
‘I’m glad you’re back,’ he finally declared. Perhaps, he reflected, she’d been waiting for this, he waiting for – and receiving – something in return: her offer to accompany him to the clinic – imagining, then, her walking back up the hill (halfway down the slope to the Tavistock Clinic, her one-time home), wondering why their conversation had lagged, both the previous night and this morning, as if, solemn, silent, each had identified an interlocutor in the other that neither of them could recognise.
‘We seem two different people since you went away,’ he suggested, the brightness of her face of earlier that morning fading (she had spent much time on her make-up); even her coat, a casual affair, she’d slipped on without her usual enquiry as to her appearance.
‘I’m not much company today. I rarely sleep well after a trip,’ she said, adding, ‘which is why I didn’t ask you to stay last night.’
Such freedom, he reflected, yet it was as if a principle, undefined, unmentioned, had suddenly divided them, she waiting for him to go before she turned away, calling, ‘You’ll come up afterwards?’ waving.
He waved too, nodding, the sliding doors opening before he reached them, focusing, as best he could, on the ordeal before him, his one-day-a-week submission, as he saw it, to the self-defined day clinic ‘for the older person’, a self-inflicted form of retribution which, at present, he saw no way of bringing to an end.
Such tact! Beth already there, and Alex, his thoughts, at that instant, turned, curiously, to Rachel, the benevolently featured life-drawing widow, her sensibility, her sensitivity, her perplexity – her suffering: what else? – evident in her harried features as well as her drawing, qualities which he identified, prospectively, as his own: a vitality, too, he identified exclusively with women, the pain of separation on him now, as if, at any moment, he might rush back up the hill, overtake her, move ahead of her, be at the house when she returned: that tentative first meeting in a High Street café, sitting in ‘civvies’, as she’d described it, though not much different, in appearance, from before, their previous clinical encounters disassembled, two respondents to a formal invitation: stillness as opposed to agitation: a post-engagé misalliance
noli me tangere
yet he had, taking her hand between his own, talking of the past, she knowing much more of his: three marriages, in her case, each, in her view, less a failure than a ‘moving-on’, ‘stages’ to where she was at present, brought out, her husbands, as credentials: a catalogue of virtues, a modicum of vices, this woman Charley (and Gerry) had landed him with, more than he could handle, an unnatural division, he suspected, between thought and feeling – and action – between the formality of their previous encounters and the formalised informality of this.
Beth the first person he saw as he entered the reception room: the wary ‘good-morning’ as they milled around the table by the window – looking out to a garden at the back – its surface set out with cups and saucers, a tin of biscuits, the apparatus for making tea and coffee. In the centre of the room a circle of half-upholstered chairs with wooden arms, his thoughts engaged still with Simone: the glimpse of her departing figure, wrapped in thought (her inelegant coat), head bowed, shoulders stooped, age – their relationship, too – maturing into reflectiveness: his impression as she walked away from him.
Beth had taken her seat across the room: the one she sat in every week: tall, thin, dark, bowed by an unspoken physical affliction, legs sheathed in a track-suit bottom, a cardigan, her arms not in the sleeves, around her shoulders, beneath, a jersey the same dark colour as the trousers, inclined to move with difficulty whether standing or sitting, the Guardian one of two newspapers available on the coffee table before her, opened on her lap, a cup of tea in one hand, its saucer on the arm of her chair, Maddox noticing the way the daylight came into the room, lighting up the circle of chairs, not unlike the life-class without the model, a totemic, druidic, congregatory event, five women, he and Alex – a sixth woman entering the room, poling herself along with a stick, easing with a sigh, a stiff articulation, into a chair, accepting an offer of tea from across the room, Richard, the charge nurse, a tall, cadaverous figure, holding up a cup in greeting, celebrants, each, of a new, unspoken, unclaimable religion – a new, unspoken, unclaimable routine, sobriety, excision; its characteristics, death – its environs – its provenance
ist dies etwa der Tod?
Two had died since his joining the group, Alex, seemingly, about to join them – a gaunt, lean, angular figure, with a sharply featured, fleshless face, dilated cheeks, brow furrowed laterally and vertically above pale, almost colourless eyes, a soldier, traumatised by Dunkirk: preponderance of women, two statutory men, the day beginning with a solicitous, enquiring, cautious conversation, prompted and sustained by Richard: sandals on his feet, a sporting, genial, enterprising man, hair sprouting in confusion above and below his head, features quizzical, suspended, furrowed: ‘How are you this morning, Anna?’ a slight, crepuscular, apprehensive figure, bulbous eyes protruding from a tiny face, her posture in her chair erect: evacuated, as a child, from Breslau, her origins finally a cipher: ‘Judith?’
‘Very well, Richard,’ beneath her breath, a slim, white-haired, full-breasted woman, in her youth (a photograph previously passed around) a celebrated beauty: a sensuous, appealing, enquiring face: had shot, in her youth, a British soldier, had never left Jerusalem until her marriage (resentment that the camps not part of her legacy: pain – distress – of a diurnal nature), she, like the majority of the others, like Maddox, living alone.
‘Sally?’ a sprightly, bird-like presence, inquisitive, close-set eyes, companionable, contentious: ‘Not too good. I had a bad night.’
‘Bad nights are normal,’ Beth, twisting in her chair. ‘Don’t you take pills?’
‘Too many.’
‘I get up and read.’
‘I listen to the radio,’ insomnia a common thread, Maddox dismayed to be included, his geriatric group pre-dating his first visit to Simone: a thoughtful collation, abandoned if not by relatives, friends, their own cohesiveness.
‘How are you, Matthew?’
‘Pretty good.’ Never inclined to say less, courtship, in his case, unlike with the others, starting anew.
Déraciné: off the shelf, back in use.
When the tea, the coffee and exchanges had been completed they filed, separately and with difficulty, for the most part, into an adjoining room: a narrow, light-filled interior with windows looking onto a central lawn surrounded by and interspersed with beds of flowers. Tables, chairs, cupboards and easels were formally arranged in a classroom fashion; paints, already mixed in cake tins, stood on the tables, brushes, pastels, pencils, charcoal and crayons set out, too. The previous week’s exercises had been pinned to the door, a half-circle of chairs confronting them. Melissa, a stout, broadly featured, middle-aged woman, vivaciously dressed in a patchwork skirt and a maroon blouse, was seated on the central chair, indicating to each of them as they came in that they might care to take their places beside her.
Maddox, far gone in thought, took in the images before him: a bird, its beak bigger than its body, a boat, appearing about to sink, a horse with, seemingly, five legs, a baby, lying in a crib, the edges of which were engulfed by flames, several figures being fired upon by others, a garden comprised entirely of flowers: last week’s instruction (differentiated strictly, by Melissa, from suggestion) had been to draw the first thing that had entered their heads.
‘What do you think was in your mind when you painted your animal, Ida?’
‘I’ve always liked animals,’ a swarthy, muscular, working-class woman, pre-empted from an overdose by the unexpected arrival of a son-in-law: paint, fortitude, resourcefulness: pills, heights: the apartment, in Beth’s case, in Vienna, the jackboots on the stairs, the humiliation of her father, her mother, her sisters, none of whom she saw again (grief interminable at their departure): Anna, he reflected, scarcely alive, three attempts at suicide; pale, thin – skeletal – holding a brush, when she painted, in a tremoring hand, transferring colours from cake tin to paper, watery washes indicating a flower-bed (an unvarying image), the proportions of a grave.
Nor could he accustom himself to Alex’s soldierly horrors, resuming in old age (he was eighty-seven): his picture of a figure sheltering in a cave, its features, like its limbs, distorted, a figure, in a previous week’s drawing, falling down a cliff, another crushed beneath a rock, a face, its eyes bolting from its head, graphically, linearly, weekly depicted.
Criticisms by others, a criticism of himself.
Meanwhile, at the top of the hill, Simone analysing her analysands – her engagés, her therapees – a line of exclusivity marked by the space between their two confronting chairs, while he, fulfilling his National Health role ‘for the older patient’, submitted himself to a routine which he admired – to the point of idealisation – but the efficacy of which, he suspected, he hadn’t entirely grasped. At intervals – invariably at lunchtimes – he would be called in to see Kavanagh, the presiding consultant, a genial, companionable, youthful figure, in shirtsleeves and jeans – not unlike, in his informality, the charge-nurse Richard: discussion of his medication – dothiepin, thioridazine – he unsure if his behaviour were merely consistent with that of the world around, an irresistible urge to destroy himself a not unreasonable proposition, his curiosity, in this respect, vividly ignited: what was it like? was that – is this – the limit of endurance, he, otherwise, a chemical aberration?
His days, as he’d known for some time, were numbered.
He was, on the other hand, discovering his past, reminded by Plutarch of the significance of depression in the lives of Socrates, Plato, Heracles and Lysander: anxiety, terror (Carlyle, Tolstoy, Michelangelo), an integral part of any excelling view of human nature, dismay – despair – as an equitable rejoinder to the perversity of nature cyclically destroying itself, as healthy a sign, he concluded, as any.
Without dread, nothing is real
without psychosis, sanity unconvincing
absit invidia
absento reo
Of what, after all, was reality comprised? an awareness, subliminally as well as otherwise, of what was going on at present, as well as what had preceded it, and the invisible and unknowable extension of the same that not only went on for ever but, a moral proposition, went on for good. Pain, otherwise, of a, so far, exclusively mental sort, had produced little if any further illumination. How could he absorb himself in a reclamatory process which eluded his understanding? How, in short, could he believe in something that possibly didn’t exist?
All his relationships, he could safely assume, were based on a perception of himself which provided little if any insight into anything other than what had been arranged: that system of beliefs (paternity, loyalty, dedication) which had sustained him to the point where, consistency alone the dominant feature, he had cracked – in a fashion: his fashion (come to that, in Ida’s and Anna’s fashion, too). He was, he had been, overcome by a sense of fear – alarm, dread – which emanated, or appeared to do so, from all inanimate as well as animate matter, a fear that broached the bounds not only of all he had previously known (a lot) but all that previously he might have imagined.
He was, on the other hand, intact; as a consequence, his awareness of the past amounted to little more than a sense of separation: there it lay, here he was, between the two a gulf which no amount of speculation would allow him to cross, pain an intermediary between one thought and the next, one feeling and another. He was, as he’d come to regard it, not only within but the instrument of a process which had, in its exclusivity, little to do with what previously he had considered – he might have considered, however tentatively – to be himself.
Or, as he was coming to propound it, his self: there ‘it’ lay (all he had been, and was – unwittingly, for the most part); here he was, divorced from ‘it’ completely.
Somewhere there was an image, not necessarily of himself, but of a gnarled and suffering creature which, having ventured outwards all its life, in its final days had returned to its past: a forgotten, an unconsidered, at least unconsidered until now to be relevant past, one which came back to it in ‘snatches’ – bouts, spasms – paroxysmal, unsolicited, uncalled-for, a reassertion of something which, in his own particular experience, had attempted to hurl him in front of a train (to ‘execute’ him, he had no doubt), the equivalent, he had imagined, of that force which had tempted Christ to hurl himself from the peak of a mountain (no suggestion of salvation in his own case whatsoever).
He was, he recalled, into reverie, persuasion, reflection, opposed to dispersal, dissemblance, obtuseness, doubt: singularity, in his case, governed all, his achievements – struggles, confrontations (failures, even: he might have learnt from those) – had come to nothing. Thoughts of ending it – since his tube train encounter – had absorbed him completely, interspersed as they were with a longing – a sceptical, rear-guarded, almost posthumous longing – for Simone – all the while composing requests, reports, pronouncements, the ‘what-if?’ at the beginning of every line. He was, he’d discovered, in the process of making amends: a life unlived, or, in his more recent speculations, lives unlived. Where was he now? where had he been? a reasonable expression, his enquiries, of his variegated gifts: no peaceful expiration in a bed, more the albatross brought down at the apogee of its flight, or, in his case, in the midst of its final, fluttering descent.
This was how it happened – an event with a name but without a prescription – he had been a success, art a synonym for life: known as as known by: where he had been others were inclined – were persuaded, were cajoled, were encouraged – were challenged (were finally obliged) – to follow.
There was, after all, a code he’d always lived by (he had always unwittingly subscribed to): it had something to do with a forgotten time: not consciously forgotten, merely set aside, initially, he suspected, for examination, analysis, reflection – relevances, records, evidence of some sort, an elusive configuration (it had the potential to acquire a shape), elements within as well as without, he the agent if not the organ of destruction – recalling, at that instant, crouching with his mother in a cupboard beneath the stairs: a sense of upheaval, finally of terror, expectation, the oscillating moan of aircraft overhead. And then, out of this excitation, the screeching, he assumed, of an object, increasingly louder, in its invisible descent: the vibration of the ground: the same vibration inside his head: something indisposed to his isolation, specific, spectacular, all-powerful, conclusive – his mother, in his recollection, wearing a nightdress underneath a coat, her ankles bare above the wool lining of her slippers: the whiteness of the skin, the blueness of the veins: her silent face, her silent stare, an abstracted, brooding, melancholic look which, years later, he recognised as something of his own, flesh, blood and bone, in his imagination, spattering their enclosure: whereat, whereas, wherefore, where born? what circumstance? what formative agenda? body tuned to a new awareness, he prospecting a way ahead, disarmingly engaged by the one behind, shaped not by events but speculation.
Alex had drawn a figure astride a bomb, descending at an angle; similarly, Beth had drawn a child being stoned on its way to school, the stoners anonymous, stick-like figures, the child, female, vividly in colour. Anna had drawn a garden, as ever: muted, pallid, pastel, mild. He who had recently lectured on della Francesca, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Uccello, Signorelli (Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Cimabue), who had stood for hours – days, in his youth – in front of the San Francesca, Arezzo frescoes, currently obliged to comment on his own affliction, was reminded that art, aesthetics (he had produced another abstract) were not required: references to Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby by Melissa, Alex’s misfortune, on the other hand, not hard to guess, nor Beth’s Semitic exercise, Anna a wraith, the frailest of creatures, likening her three flower-beds, when invited by Melissa, to a tapestry or curtain, then, prompted more vigorously (‘realistically’) by the therapist – ‘You have attempted to kill yourself three times, Anna’ – responding, kindly, gently, discreetly, ‘I don’t see that at all.’
Dothiepin, in his case, plus thioridazine for otherwise unmanageable moments, fear purporting to be terror acquiring the upper hand. Meanwhile, in St Albans, the first Anglicised Roman martyr, he, eighteen or so centuries later, sent away with Paul, by mother, father – Uncle Joseph alone demurring (‘they’ll both be safe enough with us’): rugby, cricket, athletics: idiosyncratic buildings which, five decades later, still littered his dreams: collieries with their triangulated heaps, the concertinaed roofs of factories, the rectangular silhouette of mills, the single stems of industrial chimneys, the effulgence of smoke, steam, the lowering clouds swept by and away by the prevailing westerly winds, the gentler, eastern incline of the Pennine escarpment: nosce teipsum: the inference of self-division, ‘thy’ in one place, ‘self’ in another – leading to an impulse to bring the two together, a process, in this instant, conducted by Melissa: ‘we are not here to hide’ (what we know is there), an interval of painting followed by another of analysis, Alex, on this occasion, summoned to account (‘What are you drawing there, Alex?’), ‘A feeling of falling without stop,’ his Scottish accent still lyrically engaged. ‘Plus the certainty of extinction.’
‘Is there no escape?’
‘None.’
Not Melissa but the rest dumbfounded: no exit, implied, the other end? the unspoken, communal enquiry, Alex’s pictorial suicide note pinned, oppressively, before them to the inside of the door.
‘I’ve had enough of suffering. I want to rest,’ Anna’s gentle eyes turned courteously in their direction.
‘We are here for support through awareness,’ Melissa said.
‘You could say Alex’s only recourse is to blow his brains out,’ Beth responded.
‘Or, his having expressed it, to feel free of it,’ Melissa said.
‘I’ve had enough of suffering,’ Anna’s continued rejoinder.
While he, Maddox, as on previous occasions, with no specific image in mind, had painted, in bright colours – pink, red, blue, juxtaposed against grey – another abstract.
‘I see lumps of meat, hanging in a butcher’s shop,’ Melissa said, Maddox not inclined to disagree.
‘Having identified a subject it becomes something you can deal with,’ Melissa insisted. ‘Assessing its relevance, or otherwise, puts you in control,’ her attention reverting to the figure astride the descending bomb. ‘Is that your final statement, Alex?’ the tortured eyes, the tortured smile, the tortured nose and ears and brow, the tortured, supplicating, bereft expression which, refracted through an overlying look of deprecation, characterised them all
malum in se
all these women, two statutory men, Simone’s endorsement of the same, her sole reservation ‘cerebral awareness not your line’, a lifetime, however, of the same, ‘visceral engagement’ (presumably with her) ‘your only way out’, something he, for his part, endorsed in her
reductio ad absurdum
glancing at her watch, Melissa standing. ‘We’ll return to these next week. Judith’s contribution,’ a dormitory of figures lying comatose: dead? asleep? ‘I’m particularly keen to get to,’ adding, ‘Put out the lights, the last one to leave,’ neon strips supplementing the light from the windows, her audience, eyes turning from the paintings on the back of the door to the gap left by the therapist’s departure, their feelings, reactions, thoughts, reflections – aspirations, even – terminally suspended, they returning, a bedraggled line, to the reception room, the room itself prepared for lunch.
Standing in a queue: the assiduity of the staff, the assiduity of the patients. After eating, they retired to the chairs – newspapers, magazines – and, as the clock on the wall struck two, rose, with varying degrees of alacrity, and returned along the corridor, past the art room, to a smaller room at the opposite end, the charge-nurse, Richard, already there, alert, straight-backed (formalised, his posture, despite the informality of his appearance), his hands cupped upwards – a meditative gesture – in his lap, Stephanie, middle-aged, grey hair cropped short, dark eyes inclined enquiringly towards each entering figure: dark skirt, a high-necked jersey, a fleshless, harrowed, haunted face enlivened only by the light reflected from her glasses, she facing Richard across a by now familiar circle of, in this instance, metal-framed chairs. ‘The silent hour,’ Beth had said, having, on previous occasions, declined to speak, ‘specifically to this character here,’ indicating Stephanie, beside whom, nevertheless, she always sat, their elbows almost touching. ‘Who is using,’ she’d expand each week, ‘everything we say for her PhD.’
‘A bit late for her PhD,’ Maddox (invariably) responded, gallantly inclined, pace Simone, towards the austere, dispassionate presence of the psychotherapist, her benignity warily concealed beneath the remoteness of her gaze.
‘She’s not having my insights for nothing,’ Beth said.
‘In which case, what’s the point in coming?’ Alex enquired.
‘I don’t want to talk about personal matters,’ Anna said, a distraught expression, subdued over lunch, reignited.
‘What are personal matters?’ Ida, the working-class virago, enquired.
‘Family matters,’ Anna said, her walking-stick beside her, seated uncomfortably in the metal-framed chair.
‘We all have family matters,’ Judith said. ‘We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t,’ she went on. ‘So what’s the problem?’
‘I’m not talking,’ Anna said, smiling, a courteous expression of withdrawal, bowing her head.
‘So what’s the point in coming?’ Alex enquired again, face furrowed, starkly, his hairline descending towards his brows: doubt, perturbation, confusion: the nakedness they each unwittingly revealed.
‘The rest of us can talk, in that case,’ Maddox said, Richard and Stephanie significantly silent.
Formality and intimacy inextricably combined. Had he earned, was he earning, the right to ignore what anyone else might think? enough time gone to make concealment irrelevant, he concluded, the ‘I’ he was engaged with here at last, the responsibility – examining the other faces – devolved to him, this, in reality, the end of the line, not a way forward or back, merely – specifically – a circle of chairs, he examining his reflection alongside Stephanie’s in the window: the severity of the therapist’s expression, the bulbous projection of her nose, a bracing of her lips suggesting an underlying tension: the vista of the garden beyond, he, bowed on his chair, white-haired, framing his reflection against the flower-beds outside, his final glance at Anna, cowed, since her admission, rather than sitting: everything relevant, revealing, connected, as Melissa, earlier, had been keen to point out, once-lived-a-life accounts seeking a refuge, an explanation, requesting a purpose – he returning his stare across the room, Judith, finally, driven into speech, a slow reddening, conspicuous, of brow and cheek – accentuated by the whiteness of her hair: belligerence stored up from her past, her having missed out on Beth’s, Ida’s, Anna’s Holocaustian accreditation, familial insults from half a century before, less than casually intended, obsessively recalled, venomously expanded, the intolerable isolation incurred by subsequent widowhood, the distance of her children: the horror of everything, ‘everything!’, coming to an end.
The fissures in Alex’s face, the shadows beneath Beth’s eyes, the declivities in Anna’s cheeks, the ascending scale of self-deprecation, animadversion, the oppressiveness of houses, streets (sky: stars: the immutability of nature, the variety of custom no longer a distraction), an account, a summation, he concluded, not drawing them together, driving them, rather, further and further apart.
From his earliest days a sense of exclusion: something suggested by his father’s cars, their elegant bonnets, mudguards, wheels – pain, in this context, a prerequisite of pleasure: what he had been searching for all his life, his occupation recognised from the start as ‘observer’: the scent of cars, the intoxicating, quaintly animal, certainly exclusive odour of woodwork and leather, metal and oil, petrol and rubber, the infiltrating smell of the engine exhaust: his earliest memory of sitting beside his uncle Joseph, his father’s exotic, macaronic brother, to be driven along an unpaved lane at the back of the house – circling his father’s premises, the dipping and turning of the bonnet against the rutted surface: a sensation of fluidity, motion, lucidity, light, the constant realignment of shape against shape, a frame – the windscreen – transposed, in the end, to art, to line and colour, to Cimabue’s iconographic glow.
As with Melissa, once the hour was up, Richard and Stephanie rose, the group – startlingly – abandoned, they, left to their own devices, finding their way back to the reception room: tea, biscuits, a desultory conversation – anomalous after the comparative silence, the resistance, the waywardness of the previous hour. Obtuseness: a sea-change in those for whom the ocean never rolled.
Taxi-cabs for the infirm, the drivers’ bulky figures silhouetted against the outer door.