3

It was his habit, on these occasions, returning up the hill to Simone’s, to buy supper in the village, preparing it for when, exhilarated or exhausted, she came up from her room: a pause on the way to check the e-mail, the faxes, the answering machine. Sometimes, however, if she were ‘charged’ (a successful encounter with her final client, customer, patient, analysand) she’d come up directly and embrace him: the fragrance of her hair – even after hours in the room below (smoking in the building not allowed).

Today he could hear her talking in the hall, evidently to Mrs Beaumont, who hadn’t been in her room when he’d arrived – to realise, in fact, she was speaking on the phone, her voice peremptory, focused, sharp.

‘Who was that?’ he enquired when she finally appeared, flushed, offering him her mouth, a brief cessation, or so it seemed, of breathing. ‘An assessment I’ve been waiting for,’ she already in the other room, picking up the phone, having recognised the voice on the answering machine.

Finally, free, they sat at the table he’d prepared in the sitting-room, by one of the two windows, looking onto the alley-like street, the upper part of the window of the artist’s studio directly opposite. Occasionally, when the weather was fine, they ate on the roof, enclosed by plants and overlooked by attic windows, ‘What sort of day?’ a mutual enquiry, she disinclined to talk about her clients unless and until persuaded, a reluctance which, in recent weeks, had been decreasing, provoked invariably, over this interval, by questions recalling their past: Dennis, a theatre director (‘schizoid, like many of his profession’), Ruebeck (Claire), an actress only ‘fulfilled’ in front of a camera and, more fragmentally, on stage (‘what do I do with the rest of my time?’) ‘entertaining reality’, for her, diminishing all the while. And Maddox: what did he come up with? familiar, his account of Semitic grief, Celtic nightmare (‘Alex reducing himself to the obscurity of a Scotch mist’). In this instance, however, face to face, he was aware of her fatigue: the ringing of the phone below, the varying voices on the answering machine: male, female, predominantly male, she finally turning the volume down. Popularity, accessibility, put her under stress as well as, paradoxically, reassuring her, her relative silence on this occasion indicating a subject she was disinclined to talk about.

Much in both their lives was hypothetical, his principal thesis which, like she with much of her work, in regard to him, he kept from her, focused on his self-named, long-standing and much abused ‘New Philistinism’ agenda – he suspended in a curious position for an academic, as a polemicist, a hack (an agitator, at extremes) when, in reality, at this stage, all he had wanted was a quiet life: articles for the Critical Review, the Atlantic Quarterly (he not admired in the United States), the arts pages of the broadsheets, the arts pages of the weekly magazines: propositions, aversions, a preternatural disinclination to take anything for granted, an inability not to provoke, qualities of character, of native disposition extended in correspondence columns over several weeks, art subsumed by mechanical procedures his unvarying line – ‘The Mercantile Aesthetic’ another of his themes – that which had dominated the visual arts in the second half of the century, specifically, in the Anglo-Saxon ‘mind’.

He was provocative, contentious, challenging: he was also, by any as well as recent reckoning, nuts: if only his enemies could see him – life-class, on the one hand, psychiatric day clinic, on the other: art and lunacy ineffably combined.

He’d credited himself, as he’d grown older, with a sensibility enhanced by common sense; almost, conceivably, by a common touch, a quality he’d associated with his experience – his earliest experience – of cars: a particular car: its shape, its colour, its sheen, an aphrodisiacal, or so it had seemed, aroma – a cultural aroma, he’d finally decided, of a highly exclusive kind.

Machines, however, were one thing, aesthetics another, he having crossed the gap between (‘Product and Sensibility’, another of his projects), an elderly creature, his skin, like his hair, his bones, his muscle – his sexuality – in terminal decline (impotence, the threat of, waiting in the wings). And then, of course, his mind: something elusive there, a presence urging him on, at one time, to good things – now, the same, to something significantly not: on the one hand, suspicion, on the other, humiliation, his weapon against complacency, subdued by as well as subject to something even worse, women in extremis his numerically superior companions, a few male eccentrics, not unlike himself, thrown in, each alternately galvanised and denatured by a need, an appetite, a hunger, a stimulus they could scarcely understand: he no longer called the shots (made legitimate demands), an image memorably re-occurring in many of his dreams that of a ship, unaware of its destination but convinced it had one, slowly going down.

They transferred from their chairs at the table to the couch facing the television, his arm around her shoulder: war, starvation, ruin, the retrieval, from a sewer, of an endearingly stranded dog: obsolescence, inferred, of everything, not excluding themselves, movement requiring continuity, continuity requiring engagement, engagement presupposing if not synonymous with death (make sure you’re not caught out).

‘More cells than stars in the universe,’ he said, for no reason he could think of referring to the brain.

‘All stars in the universe, by definition, haven’t been and never will be accounted for,’ she said.

The set turned off, she stretched out on the couch, her feet propped across his thighs, evening light, at the windows, shadowing the woodwork, the grid-like configuration of the fireplace, its flames, amongst the simulated coal, fed, he reflected, from a subterranean duct beneath the North Sea.

Hypothetical: her interest in himself, someone whom she knew little if anything about, he, she’d nevertheless insisted, an indispensable presence, one from within which he was gazing (rapturously) at her now, at the fireplace, at the cat which, roused from the hearthrug, was now settling in her lap. His estimation (in her view, his imagining) of himself – this objectively realised presence – was practically nil, below a certain perceivable level a token effort to remain afloat alone attracting his attention. That, he concluded, he could see and recognise (the view of himself measured exclusively by displacement): recognition, too, amongst his peers, something, also, to take into account – dominant amongst them, of course, Simone: arbiter, agent, co-respondent – responding to what, for the most part, he offered as himself, someone going if not already crazy, ‘him’ and ‘self’ divided in a way which, clearly, ‘her’ and ‘self’ were not, his estimation (of how much he could see and recognise of all this) all he had to go on: ‘Stigma and Aesthetics’, a seminal essay (Art Monthly), ‘Post-Victorianism in Anglo-Saxon Art’ a more laboured repetition.

Into this confabulation he had introduced Simone: a conflagration (up a sidestreet) she knew little if anything about, he having decided long ago man not manner seductively her style, ‘Form as Content’ another of his less mind- than career-bending contributions, ‘Plasticity as Style: Lundquist to Auerbach’ another.

How much, or, conversely, what did he know of her (she peripheral to his vision at this point)? Did he imagine, had he imagined, was he about to imagine there was another dimension to her waiting to be exposed – unravelled, examined: yielded to, absorbed? ‘Style as Content’, plus, ‘The Demon of Novelty in the Arts’, updating Wyndham Lewis, the upper half of the first page taken up with tabloidesque pronouncements: ‘The Gratuitous Imperative: Twentieth-Century American Painting’ another of his ‘stingers’ as Devonshire, the broadsheet’s arts editor he worked most closely with, invariably described them: ‘Philistinism and Commodity: the present seen’.

He was coming, had come, to the point of making amends, a will to set things right – if only to discover what the right, in his case – his unique and much troubled case – might be: the vivacity which, even now, with Simone, showed through after a day in the room below: not words, in her case, but people, insights, perceptions, suspicions, speculations, entrancingly described. Once her reluctance had been overcome he cherished listening to her accounts of lives endured, confiscated, submitted to at a point where, not unlike his own, facility and meaning, expression and accountability had come to an end: the chimera that, in his case, sensation had become: her face, her brushed-back hair, the luminosity of her eyes as she re-lived in her descriptions these inward encounters: the inquisitive and acquisitive nose, the childlike candour.

‘Redeemed’: the word came to him – at an angle, he half turned to gaze at the fire, she a child of grace (of light), he listening to her voice, its interrogative tone, elevating – liberating – statement into query: her self-possession, autonomy, belief. Where should she begin but with the news they had been watching? so many of her therapees rocking to a momentum begun before their time: out-of-the-world encounters, end-of-the-world decline – he glancing sideways: the receding light, the silhouette of her face against the window, the corners of her mouth turned down, still visible, in a gentle, wry, self-deprecating smile: the presence within of an otherwise invisible observer, dispassionate, suspended, deftly owned, he liking, above all, her self-sufficiency, even as it alarmed him. What he was clinging to might, at any moment, move away, yet here she was, her ankles in his lap, her feet twisting and turning as she described her day’s encounters, tied in, as he was, to the dexterity, the clarity, the alacrity, finally the elusiveness (the transcendence) of her thoughts.

Everything in a moment might be removed; her authority undermined his own, he on his knees, if not prostrated, praying for compliance, acceptance, recognition, something other than defeat, requesting understanding by and of something other than himself – identifying, listening to her voice, a collateral built up from other people’s lives, a collateral extending, validating her own (he, crouched beneath the table, grateful for the crumbs).

Credo of his time

the subtleties of his situation allowed him to complain.

Later, in the cabin-like room beneath the roof, they went to bed: intimacy, containment (security, style), the window, its sill level with the bed, looking onto the roofs of the houses lower down the slope. Invariably, enclosed like this, he slept deeply, contentedly, the cat between them, in contrast to the broken sleep when he slept on his own, even her snores a reassurance, the cat, at an early hour, vacating the bed, leaving a space into which either of them might roll: the sound of her breathing, her sighs, her groans, the helplessness, the candour, the intimacy of a life attached to his own, his dreams on these occasions invariably occurring in the room in which they were lying, he struggling, as he was, to find a line, something he might cling to (Ariadne, inevitably, came to mind), he wondering if she didn’t pity him, something less than oddity in his appeal; or whether she had glimpsed, identified, even, something unlike anything she had glimpsed before: three husbands an immediate line, he’d imagined, to disenchantment – sudden, unequivocal (remorseless, he suspected, too), she subject to sudden urges, like the cessation of their appointments, pursuing a divergent course to his own, one which took her, had taken her, amicably, for the most part, from one husband to another, each male sensibility absorbed by its successor, an ascending scale of enhancement reaching, conclusively – or so he hoped – himself: art as polemic, involvement, even prank, she having stayed clear, previously, in her own work of practitioners, those clients with paint-stained fingers, cluttered rooms, messy quarters, studios dirtier than a factory floor, preferring, as in his case, combatants of another sort, belligerents more akin in appearance, manners, thought and purpose, to herself: she was ‘for’ observation, taking apart, examination, then reassembly.

He, him, it, he was blind to: could no longer see the shape, the outline – the content, even – she had made for (and had taken into bed), he, for his part, prepared at a moment’s notice to bring what couldn’t be recorded to an end: the trauma of the tube train driver, the not dissimilar of the watching crowd, seconds only, as far as he was aware, between sentencing and execution: intuition, instinct, something equally spontaneous and as seemingly unknown, had drawn him back – thrown him back: that intervening second of hesitation precipitating him too late at the edge of the track: could such intervention, for instance, be relied on, the Demon King a subliminal, ever-watchful, seditious, equally spontaneous presence?

On the other hand, only by touch could he sense the delicacy of Simone’s approach, what she was encountering foreign to himself, a liability, for one thing, not to be relied on, a composition of effects, defects – presences of varying and often contradictory natures, evidenced by his expression, specifically his eyes, the only part of his ‘self’ that reached the surface, he in the hands of a creator he had, at one time, mistakenly, assumed to be precisely that same self. No such authority existed: he clung to images of his mother, his father, his uncle, his brother, his sister; to recollections of the past – and not always of his own – to memories of his school, the games he’d played, the texts he’d learnt – more vivid than anything between – and, most potently, and strangely, weirdly, even, to the image of a car, a vehicle invariably in motion, the movement of the road ahead, object and subject ineluctably one: ‘this is my construct in which I am well pleased’, a direct line, or so it had seemed, to his creator, an emanation from outside as well as, more profoundly, from within himself, machinery and art aesthetically combined.

In the morning he left, she dealing with her post, her figure bowed over the desk in the room used by Mrs Beaumont, reading, as she did all her messages, from a standing position, her first appointment mounting the stone steps to her street – a figure – tall, cadaverous, a briefcase in one hand, a portable telephone in the other – he’d nicknamed ‘Doctor Death’. ‘Aids?’ he’d enquired, coldly, on a previous occasion, she responding, equally coldly, ‘Far from it,’ refusing to further explain, despite his curiosity (masking his dislike: a subliminal suspicion of all her male patients, if, more conspicuously, of this one). Now, habitually, whenever he encountered this figure in the street, he acknowledged it with a querying nod, the same response, more minimally expressed, effortlessly returned, the figure moving on.

Earlier – no appointments to interrupt her breakfast – he had asked her again, ‘Is anything the matter? Is anything troubling you you’d like me to know?’ she responding, ‘Not a thing,’ an immediacy of reply which, rather than dissipating, confirmed his suspicion, a shadow of some sort, almost visible, passing between them. Was it him? he reflected as he walked away, or her? braced by the morning traffic descending the hill at little more than walking pace, an unusual feeling absorbing him that things, despite his previous unease, were moving his way – disappointed only when, beyond Chalk Farm, approaching Camden Town, he reached his home and was suddenly reminded he was returning to confinement (isolation, if not worse), no life-class or peer group to distract him, the process of renewal, of revival, if such it was, to be continued on his own.

Maybe it was too late to change more than his appearance (Simone’s occasional, if regular insistence he smarten up), his principal energies, like his principal interests, now curtailed. The introductory, formal examination (a professional exercise) – Simone’s – had been abandoned in favour of something more intrinsic; replaced, in that sense, by something more dramatic – reprehensible, professionally, he assumed – Simone herself, however, sharing no similar unease, if anything approving his ‘egalitarian’ line: the democracy of the National Health Service: no more private sessions with anyone; the one-day-a-week clinic, supervised by Kavanagh. It was as if she had recognised (and responded to, against her current practice) the virtues of a system, the perversities, anomalies, inconsistencies and incompetence of which, characterising her earlier career (her first husband had been a GP), she had derided when they’d first ‘got together’.

She had seen and acknowledged, that is, the virtues of ‘nature’ taking its course, the facilities available to him for guidance (recovery, illumination) and supervision no different from those available to anyone else. Here he was slotted into what, she concurring, he had described as a ‘universal’ system (over-burdened, under-funded) while the optimal agent of recovery was, some nights – she liked ‘slumming’ in Chalk Farm – in his home: she, her it. Initially, he’d thought himself sufficiently advanced – adept, proficient, self-aware, intelligent, perceptive – to examine and explore what was, after all, a not uncommon medical condition, focusing, in the process, on what, presumably, had eluded him in the past – largely, he suspected, because of the pace of his earlier life: too busy, too constant, too inclined, desirably so, it had seemed at the time, to look forward rather than in.

Even now, what was there to recognise and examine in him that hadn’t been recognised in so many before – Judith, Beth, Alex, Anna, to name but a few? a realisation that, in any final summation, life was scarcely worth the living (Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello notwithstanding), the preponderance of pain – in this instance a mental phenomenon, hard to describe as well as to grasp – over what might have been described as the benignity, even the grace and resourcefulness of human nature, too (painfully) apparent. The unpremeditated leap at the line: the sum, otherwise, scarcely added up: he was there, here was it, the answer still in his head, a head over which he’d had little control, an inconclusive, mutatory device focused primarily on pleasure, hunger once appeased, pleasure an impulse as exhaustible as any other. Apart from that he was – had been – obliged to subscribe to a reality in which he no longer believed (he an indissoluble element of it: no meaning, as no end), fortuity, he’d concluded – even with Simone – governing all, ‘significance’ as gratuitous as everything else.

What did Simone mean by abandoning him to a regime she had previously, if not despised, dismissed as hostile, at best complementary to much of what she did herself? Abandoning him, in effect, to a course of treatment which would set them even further apart. Retirement (redundancy) had played a part in, if not been the start of his decline; previous to that his life, by any normal measure, had been both sustainable and pleasant. Succeeding Viklund at the Drayburgh had provided a base from which his censuring of the art of the last half of the previous century had been, in his view, a legitimate and inevitable advance, a Ruskinesque brief he’d been delighted to take up – and (if no longer a judge in the matter) vigorously to extend.

He visited Viklund from time to time, invariably at the great man’s invitation, a summons he rarely if ever declined, and which, occasionally, he even prompted with a card or a letter: a familiar and, to Maddox, reassuring figure, small, slight, with a disproportionately prominent head, blue eyes gazing out – at least, in his direction – with an invariably benevolent expression, the hair, silvery, dense, thrust backwards and upwards to create – reassuringly to Maddox – the impression of someone moving at speed, the shoulders supporting this unusually dominant head alarmingly thin, the arms similarly fragile and ending, disappointingly, Maddox always thought, in curiously blunt, short-fingered hands, reminiscent of a child’s, a perverse denial, or so he felt, of the eminently practical nature not only of Viklund’s commentaries on the manner and content of trecento and quattrocento Florentine art but – inevitably linked with the same – life: Viklund’s legendary post-war achievements from which Maddox had had great difficulty in disinterring – disentangling – his own pronouncements.

A post-war regenerator of pre- and early Renaissance art – a written-out period at the time – Viklund’s texts, originating, many of them, from his earlier life in Rome, had blocked the way, initially, to Maddox’s own advancement. Only recently had many of them been set aside (abused, disregarded) to be replaced by his own – a continuing process as his successors, in turn, set about his, empiricism (‘social expressiveness’) replacing aestheticism, grandeur, style.

Brought up in Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, Rome and Paris, his father a Swedish diplomat (and humorously alleged ‘spy’) at the ‘heart of darkness’ throughout the Second World War, Viklund’s own accounts of this period in Rome and later in Paris, which had witnessed the beginning of his ‘Renaissance’ career, were uncharacteristically fragmentary, perversely obscure. Unlike Berenson, he had acquired little wealth from his scholarship, largely, Maddox concluded, because he hadn’t needed to, his grandparents Swedish industrialists whose legacy, even now, stretched across Western Europe and the United States, Viklund, as far as Maddox understood, a significant, if reluctant beneficiary. An indifference to personal wealth was characterised by an indifference to carrying cash, something which, in the past, had cost Maddox dear: ‘a scholar millionaire, if of an unusual kind’, he invariably described him to anyone requiring a synoptic description of his friend, someone whose character, like his reputation, he had long ago abandoned more thoroughly explaining. His house, overlooking Regent’s Park, was exclusively his wife’s creation. ‘A lease, not a freehold,’ he would explain, dismissing the building with a wave of his hand, its size, its scale, its (seemingly) superfluous rooms (‘I was brought up in anonymous interiors and don’t really know anything better: certainly don’t feel at ease with anything else’), on one occasion only, in Maddox’s experience, revealing any concern about his situation, looking onto the eastern flank of the park, and, referring to the recent removal of several diseased elms, remarking disconsolately, ‘It looks more like Clapham Common, don’t you think?’ turning Maddox aside to show him a recently purchased Matthew Smith (‘Ilse likes it: I had no choice,’ referring to his wife. ‘I couldn’t afford a Matisse, of course. We have to make do with this’), a curious insensitivity to pre- and post-Second World War art (‘I leave it up to you’) conspicuous in his, or Ilse’s – Maddox was never sure which – choice of pictures to hang around the house, a choice, if it were exclusively Ilse’s, he was too proud and too protective, other than on this one occasion, to own up to. Of several William Nicholsons, no hint of the son Ben’s, he would remark, ‘A touch of Velázquez, don’t you think, certainly Ribero, or would you say Murillo?’ quickly passing him by the landscapes with the same mischievous expression – Norfolk, the South Downs, the south coast – the still-lifes and occasional portraits (‘fortunately, no one we know’), Nicholson numerically the most prominent of the artists scattered about the house, his not infrequent remark whenever he opened the door to Maddox, ‘Welcome to the home of a very poor collector,’ his stress on the word ‘poor’ never satisfactorily defined.

Now, returning from Simone’s, he examined his mail (bills only) and, reminded by a note he’d left purposely lying on the floor in the hall, set off again, in the same southerly direction.

Turning west, to his right, at Camden Town, at the top of Parkway he turned south again along the eastern façade of Nash houses overlooking the park, approaching the door of one which, with another, stood isolated from the terrace. The ringing of the bell aroused the barking of Ilse’s dog, the animal evidently ushered into a room, a door closing, before the outer door was pulled back by Viklund himself.

Dressed, as usual, in a formal grey suit, white shirt and diagonally striped tie – his only affectation, his membership of a club – a formality from which he rarely departed (‘life, in every sense, is a business, don’t you think?’), he opened the door wider as if to facilitate the entry of not one but several figures, calling, seemingly, into the road behind, ‘Come in, my dear friend!’ his accent, part Nordic, part Mediterranean, melodious, half lilting, pitched between enquiry and exposition. ‘How are you today? Looking better. Much. Much improved since the last time,’ gazing directly into his face before, disarmingly, turning aside to indicate the way down the hall, the door closing behind Maddox’s back. Passing between several Nicholsons – Sussex Downs, the south coast: Lulworth Cove – he entered the principal room at the front of the house, its three tall windows looking not onto the park but onto the approach road which gave access to the terrace.

Somewhere in the house a female voice was singing and moments later a young woman in a white overall entered, carrying a tray of coffee and biscuits. ‘Loreen, meet Matthew,’ informally, from Viklund, ‘our latest acquisition from Hong Kong,’ the girl laughing, and adding, ‘Tel Aviv!’

‘And how many young women in Tel Aviv are called Loreen, I wonder?’ Viklund enquired.

‘My grandmother is called Loreen,’ the young woman responded, her laughter, after she’d closed the door, coming from the hall outside.

‘And how are you, in fact?’ Viklund asked, offering Maddox the coffee, the biscuits – waiting for him to sit down, taking his own seat by the marble-fasciaed fireplace with a sigh.

‘I’m well,’ Maddox said, seated, formally, some distance across the room, its furniture spaciously divided. ‘I’m relying exclusively on pills, psychotherapy abandoned.’

‘Oh, pills,’ Viklund said. He held up his hand, the curiously gnarled stump, or so it seemed, protruding from the sleeve of his jacket. ‘I’ve any amount of those,’ the vividly, companionably animated face turned in his direction. ‘Swap you some, if you like. Mine are red and green. How about yours?’ adding, ‘Most of them, otherwise I’ll throw them away. Don’t tell Ilse,’ shading his eyes to examine Maddox once again, amused by the formality of the furniture that obliged them to sit so far apart. ‘You’re right,’ he concluded, ‘you’re looking much better. Suicide no longer, I assume, in mind.’

‘It never was,’ he said.

‘Exactly!’ the telephone ringing in another room. ‘Not long to go, in any case. Nevertheless,’ he raised his hand again, ‘the trip’s been worth it. We can talk candidly? No need for circumlocution?’ Lowering his hand, he went on, ‘I can leave the rest, of course, to you. Something of which we never wished to take advantage, namely,’ smiling, ‘how to deconstruct my past and – how should I describe it? – bring it into the present.’

‘Biography,’ Maddox said, ‘is not my line,’ a suggestion of Viklund’s made on several occasions, the older man anxious that Maddox, a favoured pupil and his successor, might take up the challenge of, as the older man invariably put it, ‘renegotiating my work’.

‘I get so many requests for autobiography and reassessment, even after so many years refusing. You, on the other hand, have your ear closer to the ground. Not, for instance, like living here,’ gesturing round, ‘where I hear nothing of relevance, close to the Drayburgh though we be. Halfway to paradise, I call it. Not a good place to write from. The other half, I trust, of course, to be travelled rather faster. It’s ages, Matt, since I wrote anything at all. What say?’ urgency, for the first time, in his manner. ‘You write so well. My subjects, which I’ve always been glad, relieved, to be precise, to leave to you. Francesca, Masaccio, I almost see as my children. I do see as my children, if in the hands of others. Yours, I hardly need to say, the safest of all. Not much space, perhaps, to manoeuvre. Here, however,’ he stretched out his arms, ‘all the space you require. Viklund in remiss, Viklund as error.’

It was, unmistakably, Maddox thought, a mark of senility – of self-preoccupation, a reversal, in many respects, of his previous nature – he was witnessing in his old friend now, a process not dissimilar to that which recently he recognised as proceeding, if at an earlier stage, and at a slower pace, within himself.

‘Historicism, after all, is fiction, and what could be more fictional,’ Viklund went on, ‘than living like this?’ a quizzical, blue-eyed expression, courteously presented, the lips framing to a smile, anticipating Maddox’s response. ‘If I wasn’t so badgered,’ he added, ‘I wouldn’t ask,’ raising his hand to indicate a revision of that thought. ‘I wouldn’t suggest,’ he amended. ‘Others, I’m only too aware, are anxious to get their hands on it. My work. The moment I have gone.’

‘Attendance at a psychiatric day-hospital, for the older person – older than whom, or what? I fruitlessly enquire – is hardly a recommendation, even for fiction, if it is to be that,’ Maddox said.

Having, earlier, taken a seat which favoured Viklund’s left ear, he virtually deaf on the other side, he was sitting not only some distance from his friend – a ‘psychological’ explanation for that, too, he reflected – but diagonally facing him. Friendship between them, however, had never been closer, even if it still required, as in the past, discretion – a wilful suspension of obscurer desires – on both their parts: they were – always had been, after all – sparring for the same position – one from which Viklund, it appeared, was now formally withdrawing: a new stage in their relationship

‘To me it’s common sense,’ his friend responded. ‘It’s the ones who aren’t attending, like myself, I’m most worried about. You’ve stolen a march on all of us. As usual, Matt. Even your psychoanalytical friend recognised that. She responded to the man not the patient. A degree of common sense in her as well. I envy her, someone who didn’t know you, coming so swiftly to that conclusion.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Let’s face it, Matt, between the two of us there’s a great deal of interpretation still at stake. We say a great deal about ourselves and, hopefully, our times, messages we assume we’ve fathomed, one way or another, and which neither of us, retrospectively, would like to see disowned, abused or, even worse, ignored. All this,’ he gestured round, ‘passes so quickly. Here today and much, if not all of it, gone tomorrow. What say either of us will have another chance? Posterity, as far as I can see it, is the only thing that counts. At this stage. I’d even say for both of us.’

Maddox was examining the frail figure of his friend as he turned away, too grieved, or perplexed, or perhaps simply confused to carry on. Viklund’s alertness was unusual for this time of the day, he notoriously a ‘night person’, known often to go to bed at dawn and sleep all day, embroiled on these occasions in his earliest and never abandoned passions, a dedication which Maddox had, in the past, imitated to his cost, resorting, finally, to a daytime routine which, to this degree, measured the difference in commitment, concentration, penetration between the two of them.

A tenacious, at times predatory nature, Viklund’s, the eyes curiously lightless on these occasions of obsessive preoccupation – or, as now, unusual self-preoccupation – indicating the intensity, almost dreamlike, of his inward reflection. It was as if, in these bouts of concentration, Viklund took his subjects into a cave – re-emerging, blinking in the light, to disseminate his conclusions as to their nature to an invariably receptive and, in this instance, certainly appreciative guest.

‘The exchange now, of course,’ his friend went on, ‘is more relevant. More sexual, for one thing. Between you and your therapist. It is, to that extent, I’d say, a step forward. One both she and you, I assume, felt obliged to make. To do what? Move forward in the only way you recognised.’ Smiling, he added, ‘A situation as intimate as that could, in any case, scarcely be expressed otherwise. Isn’t the nature of it sexual to start with? No new theories, I take it, on the evolution of the motor-car?’ a calculated provocation, preceded by flattery, intended, Maddox reflected, to soften him up. They were back, he concluded, on common ground.

At one time he’d been considered not merely Viklund’s successor at the Drayburgh but his supplanter, his victor, Viklund’s reputation, at the time of Maddox taking up the vacated post, then at its height, The Roots of the Renaissance (a title disclaiming exclusivity), a nevertheless far-reaching search through Greek as well as Italian art, an unprecedented post-war success, paralleled, as it was – a subsequently realised necessary ingredient – by a serialised television commentary, a medium for which, until then, Viklund had had outspoken contempt. ‘Sup with the devil at least once in your life, don’t you think?’ exposition and enquiry blended, as usual, into one, adding, slyly, ‘Though not the first time,’ Maddox concluding, on this occasion, his friend had sensed his eventual, if not imminent decline – responding, as a result, in the only way he’d thought available: popularisation (before it’s too late), encapsulation (just in time). ‘Life, after all, is a business, wouldn’t you say?’

Maddox’s own position at the Drayburgh had been one of little strategic significance, other than – though not to be despised – as a platform from which to extend his influence, less as interpreter than critic. ‘Ease of access to the next generation not something to be sneezed at,’ Viklund had told him on his own departure. ‘It’s amazing how quickly juvenilia comes to the fore, first to be recognised and then accepted. Increasingly quickly,’ he’d gone on, ‘to the point where, if you don’t keep abreast, it becomes too late to turn round.’

Much of Viklund’s time, after moving to the Royal College, he had spent abroad, a prerequisite he’d negotiated before his appointment: visiting professorships in the United States, lecture tours in the Far East (‘Ilse’s very fond of Japan,’ wryly. ‘Have I mentioned her buddhist inclination? – Much enthusiasm in places where you’d least expect it, though I’m not entirely convinced the Japanese are focusing their interests elsewhere’).

In the years previous to his appointment to the Royal College, he had been generously licensed by Pemberton to pursue his interests overseas. ‘After all, the first two or three decades of my life were spent in a diplomatic corral: not only in the blood, I’d say, but the central nervous system. It advertises the Drayburgh as much as our Professor. Or, rather, it advertises our Professor as much as the Drayburgh: not much to choose between the two, as far as Felix is concerned. I’m convinced he believes the college will disappear into the ground the moment he retires,’ Pemberton offering Maddox, on his succession, a not dissimilar facility: ‘The terms are barely eight weeks long: half the year to pursue your own enthusiasms, as long as our name comes to the fore,’ Pemberton dismayed by the parochialism, at that time, of British art, anxious for ‘influences’ from overseas (many foreign students on the register), particularly American (an alarming progressive in this respect). ‘France, Italy, Spain, Germany, where you might reasonably have looked for a guide, I despair of. The war, in that respect, too, has a great deal to answer for,’ directing Maddox’s attention to appropriate figures at the British as well as the Arts Council. ‘Get in with the government. They never know what to do until you tell them. And often, of course, not even then. Can’t do any harm. Look at Daniel. He milks them by the hour. He’s milked them white for years. He has – he won’t mind me mentioning this – more connections than a fireman’s hose. His father was allegedly an agent for the CIA,’ Maddox’s own reflections, at this point, returning to Viklund’s sepulchral figure seated before him, focused on his friend’s curious Christian name, recalling that recently his attention had been drawn to the presence of the Danish Church – Den Danske Kirke, announced outside – along the road which, he’d been startled to discover, Viklund and Ilse attended each Sunday: ‘a devotional couple’, Donaldson, his co-critic on his Sunday broadsheet, had facetiously described them.

‘You haven’t, I take it, got yourself a computer?’ Viklund enquired.

He shook his head. ‘I haven’t.’

‘I have one in the study.’ He pointed overhead, a room, devoted to his interests, at the top of the house. ‘You can have that, if you like. I can’t get it to work. When it did, as the result of a visit from a technician from the College, I managed to disable it in a matter of seconds. Without it, I’m afraid, you – we – haven’t a chance. Pen and ink are less than Third World stratagems now,’ smiling at Maddox, small, irregular, yellowish teeth suggesting, within the narrow configuration of his lips, a degree of impishness which the eyes themselves denied: a ‘divided’ face, Maddox had always thought, mischievousness, in Viklund, carelessly obscured, charm, of an equally casual nature, to the fore in appearance as well as expression.

What was it that Viklund had identified in those pre- and early Renaissance figures which had rarely been remarked upon before? A graphic distinction (a graphic vitality) as if, in Viklund’s phrase, they had ‘gone behind the back of God’, reality displacing iconography, a mutatory phenomenon (yet another) identified and singularly promoted: an event – as spontaneous and as seemingly miraculous as the summary arrival of a saviour – around which Maddox had focused much of his own endeavours, ‘liberating consciousness from nature’, his own ambivalent phrase, ‘like fruit from trees’, technology another of his wonders: ‘the propagation of the species by other means’: a ‘false fruit’, in his estimation, requiring ‘separation, distinction, alienation, the sublimation of the ends by the means’, a process to be ‘arrested’ and, as a result of his own (momentous) intrusion, reversed.

‘Writing letters, I’m afraid, is all I’m fit for. And those I dictate,’ Viklund went on. ‘Ideally they should be sent by e-mail. Occasionally I do it. Not from here. The College. They still look with favour on a poor old man. Resources minimal. Message delivered, but I’m not deceived. Which is where you come in, do you think?’

‘Perhaps there’s much to be said for redirecting communication away from machinery, even if it is to a bottle of ink and a pen,’ Maddox said, wondering, as he spoke, what might be the purpose of his visit, other than to receive the by now familiar invitation to ‘renegotiate’ what Viklund was inclined to call his ‘misspent’ life: to readdress (to ‘revisit’) it in terms that a present generation, ‘far removed from mine’, might understand. ‘I can no longer make any sense of it, or them.’

Something of the grandeur of the room was affecting his senses, a not uncommon experience when visiting the house: a feeling of being airily suspended, some distance from the floor, taken up into a space immediately below the cavernous ceiling with its stuccoed surrounds depicting birds, animals, foliage – exclusivity (again) involved, something which his own accommodation, and thereby his life, he assumed, could neither suggest nor, if suggest, sustain: a sensation indistinguishable from the aura of Viklund himself, so much an element of the place, inseparable from it (he had lived here for over thirty years), as if, confusingly, he had produced it, or it had produced him.

‘Maybe the incident at the tube station, Matt – a place, incidentally, I’ve avoided since your experience there: I’m quite prepared to believe, I must tell you, in “other” forces – was less a prospective than a retrospective event. Drawing a line beneath, literally and metaphorically, before moving on. In a sense, in that respect, an artistic decision. “If I do this what will it mean?” Or don’t you agree? Am I being presumptuous?’

‘A fresh start promoted,’ Maddox said, ‘by a threatened end.’

The incident, after all, had been a defeat, a grievous defeat – almost a lifetime’s defeat and submission – for both of them, so embedded was Viklund’s life in his, and his in his friend’s.

‘The spontaneity with which you drew back shows you had no intention of completing the exercise. The one, in other words, could not be had without the other. Debit here, credit there. Sum added up, in an instant, in favour of the latter. I take it,’ he waved his hand again, ‘we can talk about these things. It’s not off limits?’

He waited while Maddox shook his head.

‘I’m much interested in the subject, as you’re aware,’ he went on. ‘Not in your death, of course, nor mine, but in death as a cessation of sensory perception, of a totality of experience as we’ve come to know it. The knowing, too, part of the same. In front of a tube train, for instance, an almost popular form of execution, though a selfish one since it vicariously involves other people. Disregarding the effect on the driver.’

He was forcing these sentences home, Maddox observed, watching, though not waiting for his reaction.

‘But conducted, let’s say, in the privacy of one’s room. In bed, for instance, if medication is involved, or in the bathroom if something messier. The latter, too, of course, involves someone else. Nevertheless, the cessation of sensation is what I’m constantly drawn to. The peculiar counter-imperative which nature insists on, glorifying the senses, on the one hand, on the other, discarding them completely. What, I wonder, does that reversal mean? What, for instance, does your therapist mean by abandoning her discipline, and thereby, presumably, though offering an alternative, in the form of a colleague, returning you to the situation from which you were hoping to progress?’

‘She’s conducting what, I presume, is her therapy by other means. Something more tangible,’ he said, ‘more certain, conceivably,’ he added, facetiously, ‘more productive.’

‘So we’re still in a therapeutic situation?’ Viklund said, turning in his chair to regard him directly.

‘To that degree, I assume I am,’ he said. ‘But, then, no more than you and I are, sitting here,’ he went on, ‘discussing this.’

‘She can see in it something for her, but how do you perceive it. Is everything a therapeutic exercise?’ He placed his hands – his strange, stubby, impractical hands – beneath his chin, lowering his mouth towards them. ‘Do you want to go on living?’

‘I do,’ Maddox said, wondering if this was the purpose of his visit: to decide, once and for all. ‘By doing nothing,’ he went on, ‘we simply hang around. The only choice we have is to preempt what, at our age, is increasingly apparent, or simply to let matters take their course. Having confronted the former, I’ve settled for the latter, with, in this instance, a witness in tow. Whether she’d like to be described in those terms I’m not sure,’ he concluded.

‘I suspect she wouldn’t.’ He smiled: the small, neat, mischievous teeth again. ‘She, of all people, must be aware of the degree of perversity in everything, self-interest not excluded. After all,’ releasing his hands to spread them out on either side, ‘what are we here for if not to be stimulated by something? We have art, of a certain kind, she, presumably, has people. And you. Her latest, how should we put it, post-doctorial exercise?’ He laughed, looking to Maddox to join in. ‘Another biscuit? More coffee?’

Maddox got up and crossed to the table beside Viklund’s chair: a convivial, mercurial, confrontational nature, ironic – derisive – self-amused: he wondered how much of his own was reflected in the other man, or – not for the first time – whether it was the absence of any similarities which drew them together. After all, Viklund had the habit – had always had the habit – of expressing aloud what he, Maddox, at any moment might be thinking, an engaging and at times startling facility which, while warming him to the man, had also had the effect of thrusting them apart.

He poured more coffee into their respective cups, took another biscuit, and returned across the room.

A formalised informality (again): one which had characterised their relationship from the start when, after the interview with Pemberton, Viklund and the Registrar of the Drayburgh, together with several anonymous figures who rarely spoke, Viklund had rung to tell him, ‘unofficially’, he’d been appointed to his own soon-to-be-vacated chair, something, he’d said, which he’d like to ‘nail down: the post not the object’ (laughing at the reference), the Registrar, he’d confided, not altogether sure. ‘He was for someone older, and less contentious, but Felix, of course, was on our side. Registrars are obliged to be nothing else but prudent. The only ones at the Drayburgh who are,’ laughing again, a light, derisory sound. ‘If they don’t confirm it in the next few days let me know,’ less, at that time, a spiritual than a paternal presence, one which subsequently he was quick to outgrow, the preoccupation with death a recent speculation. To someone so attached to sensibility, to the formulation and re-formulation of what he invariably described as ‘primary vision’ – that prospective expedition behind what he had imagined to be the ‘nature’ of God – it was of final importance to understand the experience of all that ending. ‘Call me Daniel, this is Felix,’ Viklund had said, familiarly, since they all knew one another, at the beginning of the interview, adding, ‘And this is Johnny,’ indicating the small, bespectacled figure of the Registrar, ‘whom you also know,’ regarding him with the impish smile which accompanied most, if not all, of his more contentious statements. ‘Trouble-makers I like,’ he’d said on another occasion. ‘Which is why we hired you. This man, I thought, will be nothing but that. So here you are, toeing the line, living up to expectations.’

When describing – ‘confessing’ – to Viklund his experience on the tube station platform, his friend had responded, ‘That is a behind your God experience, wouldn’t you say? seeing how far you might push it. And seeing how far,’ he’d added, ‘you might be pushed back. A terminologist’s gamble, wouldn’t you say? “Means without ends” your castigation of your times, if not of mine. What a field-day the mechanics you despise would have had if your Demon King, as you call him, or it, had succeeded. I hope you’ll go to church on the strength of that and say something, however mild, “Where do we go from here?” for example.’

‘Apart from what you describe as your peer support, and the orthodoxy of taking pills, you’re on your own, I take it?’ Viklund went on.

His personal injury: his personal grief: he had no such injury to show: everything was perfect, commendable – yet here he was, disabled by something he knew nothing about: his father, his mother, his uncle, his brother, his sister – himself: innocent. All of them.

‘There’s Simone, my principal collateral where well-being, or even survival, is concerned,’ he said.

He waited for Viklund to respond: perhaps he’d brought this problem specifically to his friend to resolve, not merely to articulate what he suspected might be in his, Maddox’s, mind, but to persuade him – to convince him of the need, the inevitability, even, of moving ahead, of moving behind him, ‘to see what I can’t see,’ he reflected, ‘even while I speak.’

‘No doubt she thought you’d had enough of exposition. After all, half a lifetime is quite enough. I take it you did have a life before you came across Cimabue?’

Another reference to one of Maddox’s celebrated tracts: art as containment, the stricture of the medium, the tyranny of form: whereas all the while, he, it, they were responsive – should have been responsive – to content, form dictated by style, style by convention, convention by dictat: dictat determined by apprehension, fear of God preceding love of man.

Viklund, while he waited for an answer, glanced away, his head turning in the direction of the nude suspended over the large, caryatid-decorated marble fireplace (the latter ‘an idea of the previous lease-holder, I’m afraid,’ Viklund had explained its presence): a diagonal of cream-coloured paint crossed a green and alizarin background: his compromised Matthew Smith. ‘Mediterranean eye, or would you say a calciferous Nordic one?’ Viklund had enquired at the time: the strange antinomies in Viklund’s nature: somewhere upstairs a Clausen, in addition to further Nicholsons, a Tissot (loaned for exhibitions: ‘another Franconian source’), paintings which, even if his wife’s taste, suggested something obscure, self-contradictory, if not consistently perverse in Viklund’s nature.

His friend and former colleague had had no children, professing earlier in life he had had no time for them: ‘And then, of course, it got too late,’ a succession of dogs, some of bizarre appearance, taking what might otherwise have been their place, largely, Maddox assumed, as with the paintings, at the suggestion of his wife. The same indifference, regarding children, he’d shown to Maddox’s excursions into reviewing, the revisionist ‘The Demon of Novelty in the Arts’ attracting the enquiry, ‘Can indifference increase in intensity, do you think, or am I merely confirming my worst suspicions?’ adding, on another occasion, ‘I have no eye for contemporary detail. It is detail, I take it?’ expanding into, with regard to this particular publication, ‘Anglo-Saxon art without an Anglo or a Saxon in sight. The best painters in Britain appear to be foreign. What would you Anglicans produce if you were to try?’ division of taste and absence of children not alone in separating them. Viklund’s wartime activities, occasionally hinted at but never revealed, a separate source of obfuscation: the peculiar trips from Rome to Stockholm during the Second World War, from Stockholm to Berlin, then back to Rome, mentioned in the context of matters other than war (‘family business: we had so much of it’ a familiar line); further trips from Rome to Lisbon, to London, and back again, Viklund’s parents’ house in the via Campagna a meeting-place for Axis, neutral and Vatican ‘celebrities’ (‘even the Pope’), ‘les ingénus’ who had ‘nowhere else to go’, the ‘civilising arena we managed to sustain’ where paintings and drawings and sculptures were allegedly exchanged (‘in the interests of preservation – including self-preservation: everything, and everyone, was black market in those days. What else might you expect?’), the ‘market’ Viklund père controlled (‘someone had to do it: who better?’).

Matthew Smith, Nicholson, Tissot, Clausen, Sargent (a late addition in the bedroom), plus several looming, patrician Chinese screens, Matisse-like configurations in black, red and gold, he was openly possessive of (‘a touch of Simone – not your Simone – Martini, do you think?’) attested to a peculiar parochialism which he was content to live with, a disguise, a testimony to his devotion to Ilse, or to a ‘blankness’, as he had once described it, ‘in the centre of the eye: I see so much, and more strongly, at the edges. That’s why the history as opposed to the practice. I see a long way sideways, but never very much, I’m afraid, ahead,’ a testimony to a taste that had been Anglicised: rumoured purchases, earlier, of Matisses and Picassos, Legers and Vuillards, quickly sold on. Once, briefly, a Braque had appeared on his wall – in his dining-room – but had quickly disappeared: ‘I was hanging it for a friend. He brought his client here and sold it. An appropriate setting, the baroque? I refused his offer of commission,’ a taste which, Maddox suspected, was intended to mislead, as if, in a corner of his life, not least his domestic one, he had wished to escape from the grandeur, the austerity, the mathematics, even – the monumentality – of his trecento and quattrocento idols – escape, that is, into something inconsequential, consciously evasive, taking on ‘native cover’. ‘A philistine at heart,’ he had protested when Maddox first enquired about the paintings which, at regular intervals, began to appear on his walls, he not sure he had heard the aspirate preceding the final word. ‘Art, after all, is commerce first, and commerce last – who owns what – and commerce, as we know, is invariably unfair in that value is vagariously determined. That’s where you and I come in, the two of us, wouldn’t you say, ingenious fellows?’ a remark, or aside – presumably the latter – intended, Maddox suspected, to put him and others off the scent.

‘Daniel is a very secretive fellow, for all his charm,’ he had said when first describing him to Charlotte. ‘No wonder the suggestion he and his father were dealers and agents during and immediately after the Second World War. There’s much there to be written up,’ providing room, this process of dissimulation, for Viklund to manoeuvre, deploy and despatch his more radical ideas – his early discrediting of the authenticity of the Giotto St Francis Assisi frescoes, the turbulence from which had never subsided throughout his professional (‘I wouldn’t call it vocational’) life, Rome not Florence the source, if not co-agent of naturalism’s demystifying drive.

Attempts to pin down his friend to his wartime past, a source of fascination to Maddox, invariably prompted the same discursive reaction: how old had he been at the time of the German occupation of Paris, similarly of Rome, he professing to have known Eluard, Sartre, Queneau, Camus, and both the underground and the collaborationist press, carrying messages (for whom?) on several occasions: texts of declarations as well as warnings (to whom?). He had had a friend (‘a fellow enthusiast’) and acquaintances in the SS; as a neutral he had relative freedom to travel: he was watched (by whom?): ‘Whereas you, old fellow, were an evacuee of an entirely different sort. Where was this industrial town of yours? And wasn’t your brother too young to be leaving home?’

He saw, too, in Viklund, reflections not only of his father – the subscription to an (obscure) ideal, to a ‘notion’ of ‘experience’ (a phenomenological event) – but of his uncle Joseph, a man who, in Maddox’s youth, had dominated his life more than his father (or mother): a ‘macaroni’ – a name he lived up to, an habitual performer, given to Homburgs, in a town of bowlers and trilbys and flat caps – cigars, silk cravats, suits made by ‘a tailor in town’: flared trousers, unusually so, waistcoats of variegated colours (almost luminous in the dark), an uncle who sold cars, cigar in hand, while his father merely serviced and admired. ‘Your dad’s the craftsman, I the connoisseur,’ his uncle had announced on the memorable first occasion he had driven Maddox into town and taken him to the theatre, introducing him – ‘My genius nephew, Matthew. Watch his progress’: a world of bars, lights, declamatory people, a curious parody, he discovered later, of something substantial – subtler, intenser – which Viklund had been the first to bring to his notice, a celebratory flourish which deepened into a final, agonised, silent gaze: man in nature as well as isolated from it, ‘consciousness’ a gift which both elevated and maimed, illumined and injured: Donatello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, and particularly Giotto, despite the Assisi reservation, the ‘move behind God’, expulsion into reality, the irreversible decline, the irrepressible defeat: the flinging (of something) at the tube station line frozen – suspended – in a permanent image – ‘Mad Ox’ trailing in his mentor’s wake, the man who, he’d lately discovered, weekly attended with his wife the nearby Danish Church, Maddox responding to something undeclared in all his pronouncements: something Viklund had witnessed and clarified exclusively himself.

‘Psychology, I take it, in that case, is out?’ Viklund had said, returning his attention to the room. ‘Has she, I wonder, any interest in art?’ He gestured to the nude above the mantelpiece: art as parody, the gesture said: ‘A bit like opening a Woolworths in Buckingham Palace,’ he’d observed, once, to several guests admiring it, subterfuge, disguise, very much to his taste.

‘Not even that.’ Maddox gestured back.

‘What on earth do you talk about?’

‘Everything,’ he said, ‘other than that.’

‘Probably,’ Viklund said, ‘a good sign. It’s time you turned a new corner.’ Pausing, he added, ‘Younger or older?’

‘Younger.’

‘By how much?’

‘Eight years.’

‘A lot at my age, but scarcely anything at yours. You are, after all,’ with a smile, the mischievous teeth on display, ‘still a handsome fellow. I imagine the women at your art class scramble to get their easels – or is it their donkeys? – next to yours.’

‘Three times married,’ Maddox said, anxious to provoke him.

‘There you have me. Once, as you are aware, was always, and, I assume, will continue to be enough for me. Unless Ilse has other ideas. As it is,’ he waved his arm again, ‘both of us are out of fashion. Everyone, these days, gets in on the act: intellectuals, students, social workers, policemen, “art-like” the sole criterion now. Appearance, not substance, facetiousness in lieu of wit, “Anyone can do it”. Donaldson, your colleague, in place of you.’ Turning in his chair, once more, to face him, he added, ‘I’m still looking to you to reverse the decline. When you’re better, not now,’ continuing, as if this were part of the process, ‘Bring her along. I’d like to meet her. She can explain her science. I’ve always thought it adjacent to ours. If either is a science. It might also illuminate what she sees in you. I don’t want her to place you on a lower level of appreciation than, let’s say, the one, long ago, I placed you on myself. Would you say,’ he smiled, ‘there’s something paternalistic in her choice of men?’

‘As far as I’m aware they were all, roughly, the same age as herself.’

‘Did she leave them? Or they her?’

‘She them. She’ll leave me, too, I assume, when the appropriate moment comes.’

‘On the other hand,’ Viklund said, turning to look at the foliage outside the window, a lack of animation showing for the first time, ‘she may have found what was lacking in the others,’ glancing back at Maddox to add, ‘Bring her,’ Maddox’s attention distracted by the barking of the dog, the scampering of its claws on a wooden floor followed by the closing of a door.

A doorbell rang: voices came from the hall, then, as a further door was closed, faded. ‘I won’t be able to make much of her, of course. Not sight, so much as judgement failing. I find myself, as no doubt you’ve observed, coming out with things I would never have considered mentioning before. She, on the other hand, might make something of me. It might help you,’ he went on, smiling, ‘in your research.’ His look wavered in Maddox’s direction. ‘It’s all,’ he continued, ‘a question of procedure. Something we’ve omitted to consider until now,’ his look shifting to the window, abstracted.

More guardian than parent, Maddox reflected, seeing his former mentor in terms of a past which obscured more than it revealed, a past, in effect, he could scarcely imagine, invoking the presence of someone who had moved through so many stages of development that what was, or might have been, there at the beginning was no longer apparent: transcendence rather than transformation, someone continuously travelling beyond – obscurity prefacing obscurity, a process he’d long thought of as being involved in himself: an enigma, a mountebank, conceivably, even a criminal: those wartime packages associated with a process Viklund had described as ‘saving art’, objects rather than pronouncements.

No wonder he had counted on trecento and quattrocento speculations, and what he had uncovered there, to ‘save’ him from the ‘mercantile aspirations of my background’: a salvationary process achieving its fulfilment, legitimately, it must now have seemed, in his weekly attendance at the church along the road. ‘A time of truth, a time of renewal,’ his one-time observation on his immediate, post-war career – ‘an apostle of an even higher truth than that’ had been, at the time, Maddox’s own reaction: a servant to higher things placed fortuitously in a position to which no one else could respond: an exclusivity of means to achieve an equally exclusive end: he ‘who went before to prepare a way’ leading, as it had happened, from the camps, from aerial bombing, from nuclear fusion to a world removed from all these things when ‘time’ – the time prefacing these disasters – began.

What, on the other hand, Maddox reflected, lay behind his own exterior? the face that ran up from the pugnacious chin: the muscular throat, the rudimentary, naïve, expectant eyes – eyes which, whenever he caught a glimpse of them, ‘betrayed everything’ (Simone’s phrase), he not at all sure what, in this context, she was suggesting, a preoccupation, he’d concluded, with extremes, flaws, a perception of things no longer sound, no longer reliable, dominating his life.

The privilege, he reflected, of sitting here, the identification with, the empathy he felt for this elusive, older man, something he had felt from the beginning, someone with whom he had little if anything, materially, in common, both of them seeing one another, engagingly, as opposites, by temperament, by nature, yet focused, reassuringly, on a similar if not identical goal.

Or, perhaps, it was that Viklund was feeling his isolation more intensely: saw it vividly confirmed in his friend and former colleague, seizing on Maddox as someone whom he might ‘charge’, or change, servant to his servant, if, at first, deferential, a justifier of his ways.

Less isolated, in some respects, the older man, than facing a situation in which art, and everything associated with it, could play little if any part, at least, in which the ‘ethic’ identified with it – impersonal, extreme, inclusive – took him beyond what, in the past, he would have described as his ‘reckoning’, life as art becoming merely life as something (anything) else, two contrary distinctions which, though divided, represented a single faith: a fidelity to ‘space’, instinct and reason mellifluously combined, an effulgence of the spirit cohesively aroused.

What Maddox – what Viklund, he imagined – had considered as most relevant to their relationship were those companionable silences which had characterised their first meetings – initially in the corridors of the Drayburgh but subsequently more often in Pemberton’s office, Pemberton absent, they alone, he and Viklund, theoreticians in a place of practitioners, and set, as a result, conspiratorially apart.

It was, notoriously, from Pemberton’s own disciplines as a painter – observation of the object, rigorously adhered to – that Viklund had extrapolated much in his study of della Francesca (Mathematics and Muse). Over the previous few months, on his walks to and from Simone’s house, he had, on several occasions, met the retired Principal of the Drayburgh, Pemberton, singularly unaged, using a studio in a friend’s house off the High Street and living in a flat around the corner: a tall, avuncular, bearded figure, cast more in a Romany role than an academician’s, the genial source of many seemingly irreconcilable pronouncements (following Viklund’s amply misunderstood example): ‘measurement as feeling’, ‘mathematics as intuition’, a cornucopia of contradictions which sought and occasionally achieved their resolution in his meticulously constructed figures, landscapes and still-lifes, a man who, with his devotion to Courbet and his dislike of Cézanne (‘the source of all our problems’), represented to Maddox a past which, for all but Pemberton and, to some extent, Viklund, had ceased to exist: a retrospective sentiment which, despite his vulnerability to it (certainty, of a sort), despite being, at this moment, seated in Viklund’s house, he was hoping to discard (intending to disown).

It was the hands, he thought, which gave Viklund away: impractical, small, he often allowing them to retreat into the sleeves of his jacket, a habit which, on standing, gave him a misleading air of helplessness (how many, in the past, had fallen for that) and which the frailty of his body inevitably confirmed: something, too, which turned him away from life to its representation, as if translation were the only thing to count. ‘The gap in the fence’ was how, previously, he had referred to this late illumination in his life, ‘an appetite for faith’, another designation, occasionally accompanied by, ‘which may possibly be replaced’.

And where – and what – was Maddox in relation to all this? ‘Maddy’, to his friends, ‘Mad Ox’ at school, ‘Maddox Major’, alternately ‘Maddox Primus’ to his teachers, ‘Oxey’, at the Courtauld, he something of an enthusiast in all things, an ‘idealism’ he thought he had acquired from his father, an entrepreneurial zeal (quickly discomfited), recklessness associated with it, responding to Viklund’s art as something other than chance with something of a zealot’s passion. Only later had ‘philosophy’ taken over, a rancour which, belatedly, he’d come to recognise, had been creeping up on him throughout his life: a premonition, at first, then something not unlike a seizure, a Demon-designated lurch, a vividly resisted near disaster, an ‘exercise in execution’, so described to Simone in one of their first exchanges, she, curiously, never querying, ‘Why?’

Perhaps – he’d long suspected it to be the case – he was neither sufficiently mature nor advanced to reflect on what might have happened; or even, he concluded, on what might be happening now, exclusion rather than inclusion his principal, late-life passion, a fevered process of subtraction, effect attended to, rather than cause, something he could associate with ‘time’ (what little left of it, ‘space’ another factor) and which precluded something as abstruse, or as precise, as ‘recognition’ (of himself, to start with) – anxious, however, in this instance, to define something in the presence of the other man: a cathartic thrust towards the line, a soundless interjection, self-violation of one sort or another, an unexamined life, in this sense, not worth living, an examined one leading him, however, to the same conclusion.

On the other hand (again), what did he know of Viklund, a man he cherished and admired, and involuntarily looked up to? a slight, cadaverous figure (he in, he estimated, his eighty-seventh year), a residue of something once substantial, the curiously insensitive ‘normal’ hands, the inquisitive features (not unlike Simone’s), the protruding cheekbones, the galvanic eyes, self-amused – corrosive, too – as if, beyond his achievements, he had glimpsed something which reduced his best endeavours – his resourcefulness, his playfulness (his insights, his pronouncements – his suggestion, at one time outrageous, that Cavallini (‘the unknown’) was the author of the Assisi St Francis frescoes) – to ‘inadvertencies’ (his description).

‘A certain pleasure in disowning what others see as your achievements.’ He suddenly intruded into Maddox’s thoughts, a not infrequent feature of their conversations, as if their minds, in these exchanges, were mesmerically one. ‘Arrogance to do so, yet …’ a hand held in the air. ‘Bent, as we are, on a similar, if not identical venture. What does it matter if we leave nothing behind? As if faith in something unimaginable has replaced a faith in something we thought we had perceived,’ glancing across at Maddox to add, smiling, ‘Bent on a mission which doesn’t amount to what your American adversaries – mine, too, at one time: I should never have mentioned Cavallini, and Santa Cecilia, Trastevere, left Giotto and Assisi quite alone – would have called, in reference to your own reflections on postwar American painting, a hill of beans.’

Himself, set, in silhouette, he imagined, against the profile of the other man: appearances, he concluded, no longer mattered, that evocation of himself – the boldness of the head not quite outmatching that of Viklund’s – the whiteness of the thinning hair, the sombre sense of introspection, the eyes, capable (still) of lightening in the presence of Simone, his sons. Who else? His brother, his sister – Viklund: his friend’s less a rake’s or a pilgrim’s than a mere itinerant’s progress: not to perdition, but something more elusive, as if Viklund were prompting him to a recognition of something intrinsic in his nature which he himself had yet to identify, let alone respond to.

Raising his head, Viklund looked up at the stuccoed ceiling, the plasterwork birds, leaves, flowers, animals, the whirls and volutes, a forested menagerie suspended in friezes, reliefs, and the ornate central ‘rose’ surrounding a chandelier. ‘The unspoken question of earlier conviction brought into the open. All we – I – can do is stare, unable to describe, analyse, decipher. What does it all add up to?’

Maddox, too, was gazing up, his attention distracted: the corpse he was carrying – which Viklund, for all his graciousness, his mischievousness, his charm, was carrying too, if not had almost become: the vehicle, the harness in place, which would carry him on to where the event would finally occur, this material burden his sole credential (his spiritual signature hopefully in place: to be evaluated by whom? Evaluated by Maddox, if he could find the time, the inclination, the reason).

Pemberton, too, on those aimless encounters in Rosslyn Hill, in the High Street, in Heath Street, the avuncularity of the taller, bearded man, away from the Drayburgh, his lifetime’s domain (the longest-serving incumbent of the professorial post), seemingly an affectation: the rumour of breakdown following his deferred retirement (echo of his own predicament): the first occasion in the former Principal’s life when he had had the opportunity to paint without disturbance, to catch up with Courbet, overtake Degas, the weighty tonality of his carefully constructed, relatively colourless pictures: Pemberton, too, had felt the lurch towards the line, a resolution, involuntarily extracted, viciously expressed – inexcusable, unwarranted, undesired – the signature on yet another failed attempt, an irretrievable commitment to something other than himself.

Love!

His heart, or something approximating to it, vibrating in his chest: echoes, he reflected, of wartime bombing: the accelerating screech of a metal object descending a metal chute: a fear-ridden allegiance to something other than himself, a systematic reappraisal, Simone, in this sudden recollection, convener and subject in one: a marker to where he was at present.

Love!

Viklund’s voice across the room was suggesting he sit closer. Removing his teacup from the arm of the chair, Maddox drew forward, the pile of the carpet resisting. ‘I have difficulty hearing, even on my good side. So much have I missed. Not that it’s any matter. We know each other too well,’ adding, ‘Don’t you think?’ Regent’s Park, the Nash terraces, Hampstead, Maddox’s modest refuge in the declivity between. Beneath him, too, at home, the rumble of the tube.

There was his purpose, too, in ringing up Viklund several days before to make the appointment to see him, Viklund out at the time, Maddox speaking to Ilse, the dainty, bird-like creature Viklund had married over fifty years before (‘another souvenir from Stockholm’), attempting to decipher from her still Nordic-inflected accent how enthusiastically or otherwise he might be welcomed, surprised by the warmth (she, since his ‘incident’, apprehensive of his influence on Viklund), by the vivacity, the flirtatiousness on this occasion: ‘Dan will be so disappointed to have missed you. He sees you as someone of increasing significance in his life,’ adding, ‘Well, we both do,’ with something of a laugh. ‘You see what it’s like, my dear, to be not merely old but very.’

‘Scarcely,’ he’d told her, thrilled, nevertheless, by the flighty voice, the frail, delicately featured, elfin figure who had remained, seemingly contented, certainly unobtrusive, in the background of Viklund’s extravagant, at times turbulent if not mysterious life.

Now she came to the door, knocking, Maddox standing to embrace her, to kiss her cheek, first one side then the other, then the first side once again – a formality he invariably resisted – to feel his hand taken between hers, squeezed, retained, while she exclaimed, ‘It’s so good to see you, Matt!’ he adding, mentally, in parenthesis, ‘alive’. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you. Any more coffee? Cakes, perhaps, instead of biscuits. I never realised Loreen had brought up those. And you’ve scarcely eaten any,’ turning to indicate the girl who had followed her in.

‘One each, or was it two, Matt?’ Viklund said, standing, meticulously attentive to domestic detail whenever his wife was present. ‘The coffee’s cold, otherwise I believe we’re both all right,’ the girl collecting the cups and saucers, stacking them on the tray, returning with it to the door, Ilse turning, too. ‘Don’t let him leave, Dan, without saying goodbye. So rarely do we see you, Matt,’ she added before the door was closed – Maddox, by this remark alone, recalling those occasions when he had almost haunted their home, at that time off the Cromwell Road, having been offered a room there, Viklund, on that occasion unwell, exhausted, listless, inert, seemingly about to expire, ‘Hiatus Drayburghia,’ he’d suggested to Maddox, whom he’d called in to help. ‘Mind you don’t catch it. I’m fed up with the place. But for Felix. So many regressive students. All they’re interested in are introductions to Cork Street.’

Re-seating himself, he said, as if prompted by his wife’s appearance, ‘What of Taylor? Any more news of him?’

‘I’ve received a visitor’s pass,’ Maddox said.

‘Good Lord.’ Viklund put his hands together, a prayerful gesture, the fingers pointing up, the thumbs, indicating, misleadingly, someone of a practical nature, curled back: the knuckles he pressed against his lips, tapping them slightly as he breathed out.

Maddox looked up at the plasterwork again: the frieze of animals, birds, vegetation: even there, in the fortuitous circumstances of a leased house, something of Viklund’s nature was oppressively defined.

‘Tomorrow,’ Maddox said.

‘In prison?’

‘They’d hardly allow him out.’

‘I’m not familiar with the procedures.’ Viklund glanced away. ‘In wartime, of course, it was different. I visited a number of prisons then,’ a sudden leniency apparent in his manner, as if a digression, if not canvassed for, were a necessity at present. ‘I was once invited to visit an acquaintance – no stronger than that – in Paris, after his arrest, convinced, once there, I’d be arrested myself. Only,’ he released one hand from its prayerful gesture and waved it in the air, ‘he’d agreed to co-operate, his captors wondering what the effect would be on his former colleagues if he were suddenly to reappear. I couldn’t tell them. Nor could I tell them if the news of his arrest had got around. It was done discreetly at his girlfriend’s, who was also taken in.’

‘What happened next?’ Maddox asked: it was unusual of Viklund to talk of his past in such detail.

‘I had the impression his arrest had been what, in peacetime, would have been described as an administrative error, one department not knowing what another was doing. That he’d been turned, as the saying went, already. As it was, having been reassured by me it would be best if he were released, they shot him. I assumed, at the time, they were fingering me, wondering how far my influence went. Not a few of the resistance at that time were informers, their only means of staying alive. The Germans, with their familiar thoroughness, affected, even in that peculiar world of loyalties and self-interest, to keep a system of checks and balances: so much coming from one side, so much going to another. As the son of a neutral diplomat, it was the closest I came to being arrested myself. As it was …’ He paused, abstracted, almost to the point, Maddox reflected, of confessing he was a collaborator: so many drawings, so many paintings, so many sculptures, to stay alive. ‘Close shaves,’ he added, ‘were something of a norm, rather than, as with Taylor, being the exception.’ Looking across, his head at an angle, he smiled: something of a more intimidating nature crossed his mind, crossed and re-crossed, as if he were struggling to restrain it.

‘How well do you remember Taylor?’ Maddox asked.

‘An inanimate character. Droll. Recessive. Or have I confused him with someone else?’

‘Distant. Recessive. Bright. But very,’ Maddox said.

Viklund looked up once more at the painting above the fireplace.

‘Something visceral,’ he added, following Viklund’s gaze.

Something visceral, too, he reflected, in Viklund’s response to the garish, lavishly painted nude.

‘His essays were outstanding. More cinquecento than quattro-,’ he added, as if building on something Viklund already knew. ‘Also,’ he paused, Viklund’s gaze returning to his, ‘his religious identification was very strong. Wrote as a believer, one instant, as a sceptic the next. His paintings were not dissimilar. More application than intuition. He followed Felix in that. But without the talent.’

‘Norfolk?’

‘That’s right.’

Viklund’s enquiry had been direct, his eyes fixed fiercely on him: blue, intense, suddenly, characteristically, viciously alert. ‘For how long are you allowed to see him?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Strange his inviting you.’

‘I was his tutor. Perhaps no one else is inclined to go.’

‘No relatives.’

‘I assume there were.’

‘Not inclined, I imagine, to get involved.’ He paused. ‘According to the papers and the televison at the time, his neighbours found him pleasant. His family, too. In which case …’ He paused again, inviting Maddox to continue. ‘Have you any experience of murder?’

‘The only person I’ve been close to killing,’ Maddox said, ‘is myself.’

‘Of course.’ Viklund’s look was turned away. ‘How does your psychologist friend explain it? His case, I mean,’ he added.

‘She doesn’t.’

‘Have you discussed it?’

‘A little.’

‘Depression, whatever that means, was suggested at the time.’

Maddox didn’t respond.

‘Though, since most of us get depressed without, apparently, killing anyone …’ Again he waited. ‘Particularly one’s wife.’

‘Yes.’

‘And children.’

‘Three.’

‘Two.’

Maddox paused. He’d been reluctant to ask Simone for an explanation, afraid, he suspected, she might provide one; afraid, too, of coming to a conclusion about something which eluded analysis as well as definition: it wasn’t ‘explanations’, he concluded, he was looking for, or anticipated, either.

‘And himself,’ Viklund said. ‘He failing, in that respect, like you.’

‘I think he was more intent,’ he said. ‘He’s attempted to do the same in prison, and is evidently under close supervision.’

‘I hope he appreciates you going. After all, in one sense,’ Viklund said, ‘some might see it as an endorsement of what he’s done, if not a gratuitous involvement in something in which they have little to lose, if anything at all. I, on the other hand,’ he smiled, testing Maddox’s reaction in a by now familiar manner, ‘know neither is the case.’ His smile fading, his tiny teeth concealed. ‘Does he know you were prompted to do something not dissimilar?’

‘I don’t see how he could. In reality,’ he added, ‘there’s no comparison.’

‘Of course.’

‘None at all.’

‘His first name, I believe, was Derek.’

‘Eric.’

‘Not very grand.’

‘No.’

‘Domestic, rather than archetypal.’

‘Yes.’

‘Though an interesting subject. If one is capable of looking at these things. Suicide, or, as I would call it, self-election.’

‘Non-election,’ Maddox said.

‘Precisely.’ His look had intensified, his eyes shadowed, the receding hair-line drawn down to his brows, a deep, vertical declivity between.

‘When it first appeared in the news I couldn’t remember his name. His first name,’ Maddox said. ‘I thought that very odd. He was my student for almost four years. Apart from his first name,’ he went on, ‘I remembered him so clearly.’

Reality was imposed upon something, he reflected, but what? the configurations of his own life, for instance, reaching beyond feeling, beyond thought: merely a blankness: nothing – the nothing that something was imposed upon but which was included in reality itself: his examining, for instance, via Taylor, his own capacity for self-destruction, if not the destruction of others – the war, everything, by inference, as well as direct experience, he had envisaged.

Examining, too, the furthest reaches of compassion, his motive, if only one of them, in going to see Taylor at all: this rage, in his own case, though not in Taylor’s, to stay alive – a rage which had subsided, again, in his case, to quiet perturbation, finally to a compulsive gesture of dissent; subsequently, that failing, a return to the ‘flow’, the submission, biological in origin and expression, which took him casually, haphazardly, along with everything else: this room, their two figures, those trees outside the window (decades of growth and pruning) – everything directed towards the light – awareness creeping into hands and feet, limbs, head, body, events, a slow, inexorable dissolution; awareness arrested by distraction.

It was as if, he concluded, the event involving Taylor paralleled, or echoed, something not only in his own but in Viklund’s life.

‘Are you in a fit state to get involved?’ Viklund said. ‘Won’t this add unduly to what troubles you at present?’

‘It might distract it,’ Maddox said.

‘Distraction won’t last long.’ The response came quickly, Viklund leaning forward.

‘It might clear something up for both of us,’ he said.

‘Wasn’t his wife a student as well?’

It was this Viklund had been intending to ask all along.

Maddox looked away, avoiding his friend’s expression.

The previous evening he and Simone, watching the news, had witnessed an interview with the distraught parents of a seven-year-old child who was missing: a girl – the tear-streaked faces, the mask-like confrontation with something beyond the imagination, an involvement with prurience indistinguishable from the prurience of the daughter’s possible fate, an involvement with something which only gratuitously involved themselves, murder, the possibility of, a specious form of entertainment.

‘She was.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘Yes.’

His response came out without any stress.

‘Were you her tutor?’

‘No.’

‘She was in the years you lectured to?’

‘That’s right.’ Glancing back at Viklund, he added, ‘Rebecca.’

‘One never knows where these strands from earlier in one’s life might lead. The significance of attachments which you thought you’d long ago abandoned. Suddenly, out of nowhere …’ he waved his hand.

The girl had knocked at the door and re-entered with the tray, setting it down once more beside Viklund. ‘Shall I pour?’ she said.

‘Matthew will do it,’ Viklund said.

It was as if a dividing line had been drawn and, recognised, lightly stepped across.

‘What was she like?’ Viklund said as, with an acknowledging gesture to Maddox, the girl went out.

‘Attractive.’

‘Talented?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were she and Taylor connected at the time?’

‘Shortly after.’

‘Of course, relationships between students and staff were prohibited,’ Viklund said as Maddox got up. Crossing to Viklund’s chair he poured the coffee, the tray set on a low table beside him. ‘It was included in the contract at the Drayburgh when I first arrived. So delicately phrased I asked Saunders, the then Registrar, what it meant. “You may not fuck the students,” he replied, adding, thoughtfully, “Either sex applies.”’ He paused. ‘Deleted, of course, in your time.’

‘Yes.’

‘Though left implicit.’

‘It was.’

‘And at the Courtauld.’

‘The Courtauld, too.’

‘In my time it was written in.’

‘Not in mine.’

‘But left implicit.’

‘Of course. Charlotte, for my part, never complained.’

Viklund smiled: a tendentiousness, familiar to Maddox, lightly played.

‘What was Rebecca’s background?’

‘East End.’ He waited. ‘Her father was a tailor. Ironical, her surname, when she married. Robust. Good-humoured. An oddly contrasted couple. He with very little humour. She, I thought, a lot.’

He paused again: so much of this had come out without preparation, a summary, he concluded, he’d been assembling, if only for himself, for some time. Having filled one cup and placed it beside Viklund, he filled a second, added milk, and returned to his chair. Despite having moved it closer, something of the formality of their encounter still remained: a discourse, rather than a conversation, he suspected, had been intended, Viklund inclined to tell him something to which, he had already decided, there would be no adequate response.

‘And all we have by way of explanation was that Taylor was depressed?’

‘As far as I’m aware.’

‘So have you been, recently,’ he said. ‘At least, diagnosed as such,’ he added.

‘Yes.’

‘No similar inclination, I take it?’

‘No.’

‘Taylor, of course, is younger.’

‘In the midst of life.’

‘Almost.’

Something dream-like about the proportions of the room, as if, a not uncommon occurrence, he was suddenly aware of this conversation having happened before, in precisely the same location, and in precisely the same form, absorbed Maddox completely; as if, in effect, his life had been lived not once but several times, if not, conceivably, simultaneously, touching at certain points where the congruity between the several versions had suddenly, without warning, overlapped.

‘Look here!’ Viklund was getting up, alertly, as if having contemplated the action for some time. ‘Let’s take a stroll. The air is stifling. I’ll fall asleep if I sit any longer. Nothing to do with you, of course. Far from it. I realise the importance of staying awake. I ought to walk, though rarely have anyone to walk with, other than Ilse, and she’s quite bored with me after all this time. The chauffeur, sometimes. And the girl. No, really,’ he went on, ‘I need someone fit and young, like yourself,’ laughing as he turned to the door.

In the hall Ilse reappeared, the dog, sensing a change in the atmosphere, scampering behind her, a small, tousle-haired animal which, at its impetuous approach, Viklund pushed away with his foot. ‘I’ll take him,’ he said. ‘I’ll take him,’ in response to a silent enquiry from his wife. ‘Give me the lead. No need for him to mope in here,’ a coat lifted from the rack by the door into which, with Ilse’s and the girl’s assistance, he thrust his arms, a hat, a trilby, set at a rakish angle on his head. ‘Just the job for Matthew and me. No telling how long we’ll be. Don’t wait up!’ laughing once again.

Moments later they were crossing the road at the front of the house to a gate set in the park hedge the other side. ‘As you can see, they’ve made up for the elms. Like missing teeth in a familiar mouth, but finally I’ve got used to them,’ indicating a footpath leading to a further gate which, in turn, via a road, gave access to the centre of the park.

‘Something we were saying back there in the house,’ he added, releasing the dog, ‘reminded me I saw a man shot dead in the street, in Paris, at the end of the war. There one minute, gone the next.’ He waved his arm, as if anticipating a similar event taking place on the path before them. ‘A collaborator, I was told. What I’m getting at,’ he waved his arm again, a man much given, Maddox recalled, to involuntary physical movement, before leaving the house refusing a walking-stick held out to him by Ilse – presumably, like releasing the dog, to leave himself free of impediments, ‘is the barrier between something like myself and that,’ stabbing at the air before him. ‘A restlessness I could never trust, or even accept, and which, as a result, I filled with pictures. Well, principally pictures,’ with a laugh. ‘Anything, in other words, which proved, if in one sense only, to be static. A religious convocation, don’t you think? Looking for steadfastness, certainty, and so on. Pictures, of course,’ he went on, ‘invariably of a reflective nature. None of your Nicholsons. Ilse’s idea. The Tissot I like. More painter than illustrator, the damned English disease. As for the rest,’ waving his arm before him. ‘A space between being here and being there,’ adjusting his trilby to a more rakish angle, a sudden alacrity evident in his movements ever since he had risen from his chair in the house, ‘which, a religious aspiration, you’ll think, I’ll be glad to be rid of. The same goes, I assume, for you. Weren’t you foreclosing on that space when you leapt at the line? Or, rather, in your text, the leap was provided for you. In the thrust at the line. As it turned out, a premature expectation. This allegiance, Matt, to a space that doesn’t exist. That indifference I’ll be glad to be rid of. A nightmare, don’t you think? You, of course,’ he glanced across, ‘have your wonderful children. And their children. I’ve only got the dog,’ calling, ‘Jefferson! Jefferson!’ bringing it to heel, the animal, for a moment, followed by a bigger dog, trotting behind. ‘Your journalism, too. We mustn’t forget that. A determination, in your case, to tear the space apart and fill it with something, anything, irrespective of the cost.’

He held up his arm to arrest anything Maddox might have said in response.

‘The quality of your selection I have rarely been disappointed by. I, on the other hand, have had the curse of the diplomat to contend with. Bred into me, from the earliest age, and impossible, at least, until now, to relinquish. Formalised activity requiring you, at all times, to leave the space intact. Into it may enter anything the diplomat is obliged to consider. Obliged to receive,’ he went on, ‘and courteously acknowledge. Alienation, on the one hand, exclusivity, of a sort, on the other, “the man who is nowhere”, my father once called it, referring to his job. A rarefied combination, the two. Distance from everything at the same time as identification with the same. No such reserve, however, with me any longer.’ Calling the dog once more, ‘Jefferson! Jefferson!’ he concluded, characteristically, ‘What do you think?’

‘That kind of exclusivity,’ Maddox said, ‘I never had,’ adding, ‘not exclusively,’ waiting for Viklund to laugh: a sound, ‘Hah!’ came out briefly, his own thoughts, evidently, moving on.

‘There aren’t such barriers or spaces any longer,’ Viklund said. ‘If nothing else, technology has removed them. Messages,’ he went on, ‘expel themselves, no longer simply arrive, the pertinence of what’s transmitted no longer of account. Transmission,’ he paused, ‘has entered everything. We’re assailed, not, as only in the recent past, informed.’

Maddox’s own thoughts, too, had moved on: something formalised in his response to Taylor which had scarcely if ever been there before, a reversion to their earlier relationship as tutor and student: a proximity to evil, of a clearly definable sort, left him bemused – suspended, atrophied, even – disinclined to consider it – what it was comprised of, what it entailed: something abstract, at this distance, overwhelming, which took – had taken – a specific physical form. The definitive nature of what he was confronting had never been more apparent, driving him back, mentally, to resources he suspected he’d never had: the shadow Taylor represented was the corollary of light – his light: forgiveness, toleration, the overriding of that which, uniquely, in his case, could scarcely be imagined, recalling the news feature the previous evening: entertainment, the fanfared introduction. Cynicism, regarding his motives, was, he reflected, creeping in on every side: a vicarious indulgence in feelings he could otherwise disown. Was it for this reason he’d visited Viklund? Was it for this reason he was walking with him now, anxious for a ‘line’ which might complement if not, more hopefully, displace his own?

The park was where, recently, he’d been much inclined to walk himself, approaching it along the canal footpath from Camden Lock, a colourful route following the curve of the waterway, passing beneath low road and rail bridges and alongside a variety of converted barges, the smoke from their coke stoves reminding him of similar walks in the north of England, away at school, a recollection of industry and commerce, mixed inextricably with domesticity.

The inner park, which they’d crossed into, Viklund finally resetting the dog on its lead, with its rose garden, artificial waterfall and lake, was where he was inclined to sit and reflect – invariably in a corner shaded by climbing roses strung along overhead rope structures, the formalised flower-beds, richly variant in colour, contrasting vividly with the asymmetrical contour of the lake, its surface laden with water fowl, fluttering and splashing, ducking and diving, the elegance of the swans, both black and white, vivifying the restlessness of the smaller birds.

His thoughts were moving in the same contrasted fashion, perturbation of one sort in conflict with the staidness of the rest; that is, a feeling that the whole of his formalised existence was about to be overwhelmed, if not discarded – to the point where everything he had previously recognised, however tenuously, as ‘himself’ was to be dispensed with, as clinically, as involuntarily, as decisively as that plunge towards the line – impelled, this event, he reminded himself, by forces, or a force, not only beyond his control but foreign to his nature, something possessed of its own dynamic, indifferent to who or what or why or where or how he was.

A final evaluation had been set determinedly in place.

It was that final matter towards which his thoughts were now directed: something cool and hard, unplaceable, unapproachable: a figure, in one sense, emerging from a mist, in another, shrouded by a curtain, to be contained before unleashed, a creature, as yet, only to be imagined, there to be confronted, the precursor of worse, much worse, to come.

His suggestion to Viklund they might sit was rejected by the older man, the dog straining backwards, leashed, dragging behind: a curt, ‘Jefferson!’ and it ran ahead, tugging rather than dragging. ‘Let’s walk. Keep moving. Imprudent thoughts, in that way, are inclined to go away. I often walk in this place,’ gesturing to the more open spaces confronting them, the path leading, to their right, towards the open-air theatre, a barricade of trees and shrubs concealing it from view. ‘You were saying you knew his wife as a student. I recall her. An anachronism at the Drayburgh, a healthy-looking figure. Felix had hopes for her as a painter. That I do recall. Much better, in that respect, than Taylor, I believe you said.’

‘That’s why she fascinated him, and why Taylor, bound up in theory, fascinated her.’

‘And still the conundrum. Why did he kill her? And their children.’ Glancing aside, he added, ‘And the nature of your involvement. Evidently with both of them, at separate times. On the other hand,’ his steps faltering as he decided, from several paths, which one they’d follow, ‘there was an extraordinary range of students, year on year, Felix’s theory being, with an annual intake of eighty, he could only reasonably expect six or seven to have any talent, selecting the rest on the basis of diversity, age, sex and background. “The in-filling”, he once described them. How many would that be? Seventy-three or – four. Always likeable, always fascinating, at least, at first sight. Army officers, graduates from other disciplines, misfits of almost every description. Out and out delinquents. Do you remember the Irish peer with his open-top Bentley? Artisans, clerks, schoolchildren. A unique collection, quite unlike any other institution. Rebecca, did you say? fitted in like a fist in a glove. Taylor, too. Very many said, later, it was the best period of their lives.’

They were moving towards the exit from the inner park which, across a secluded road, led to a gate giving access to the larger lake and the vaster spaces beyond.

To their right, from the distance, came the trumpeting of elephants at the zoo: late morning, midweek, there were few people about, Viklund releasing the dog from its leash once they’d crossed the road.

Listening to the older man Maddox’s reflections had refocused: images of Taylor and Rebecca came to mind, walking, arms around each other’s waist, out of the Drayburgh, across the yard opening onto Gower Street; or, conversely, walking in, separately, on a morning, the taciturn expression of the Norfolk youth, a sturdy, square-shouldered figure, the open-faced expression of the girl, receptive, vulnerable, expectant, lips parted, she invariably wearing a smock or – the garment he remembered most clearly, endearingly, even – a large, loose-fitting, ex-army greatcoat.

He was reminded, too, recalling his own solitary walks in the park, that he was finding it increasingly difficult to retain, for any significant length of time, his thoughts or feelings. Here he was, accompanied by someone he knew, respected, had long looked up to, someone whose deliberate obtuseness, arrogance, even, brought out reciprocal qualities in himself – his introducing, for instance, the nature – the content – of his relationship with Taylor, and particularly with his former student’s dead wife. The prospect of something immovable, impersonal – terrifying in its indifference – preoccupied him intensely, this the subject of many of his solitary walks along the path they were following – something to which he and Viklund were, in varying ways, irretrievably connected, something, he reflected, devoid of intimacy, tenderness, anything likeable, let alone lovable – anything, in short, that might be adhered to – something, in his own case, caught up with, defying, even, the illness for which the nightly dose of dothiepin was intended to be a palliative, if not a partial cure.

‘What do you think?’ He gestured aimlessly at the scene below: the curve of the path to their left, bordered on one side by recently planted flower-beds and, on the other, by an expanse of smoothly mown grass running down, past the bandstand, to the lake. A solitary rowing-boat left a jagged wake between the edge of the lake and the heron-nested island opposite.

The vagueness of his enquiry had caused Viklund to smile: for the first time since entering the park he glanced at him directly.

‘I was thinking,’ he said, still smiling, ‘of how Masaccio said goodbye to God. Let’s keep, he might have said, to something that we know. Listen!’ He held up his hand to the sound of the elephants trumpeting in the distance. ‘No more metaphysics!’

‘Speculation doesn’t die,’ Maddox said.

‘Arrogance in promoting it gives way to irrelevance.’ Viklund waved his hand at the view. ‘We have too much to contend with. Let’s be satisfied with that.’

‘Consciousness, nevertheless, relates even to this.’ Maddox gestured at the bridge crossing the easterly extension of the lake, they turning towards it.

‘Ignore it.’

‘I can’t.’

‘No point in doing otherwise, old fellow.’

‘It doesn’t ignore us,’ Maddox said. ‘Something overwhelming. Something, for instance, overwhelming me. Overwhelming Taylor. Overwhelming his wife. His children.’

Viklund quickened his pace, as if the boat landing-stage at the far end of the lake was now his destination. His attention to the dog had faded and, as if sensing this, the animal desisted from roaming on either side and trotted at their heels.

Unaccountably, Maddox was reminded of how Simone, after reducing the intervals between their appointments to a daily pattern, had suddenly extended them before finally declaring they were at an end, he suddenly aware, for the first time, that, unlike his supposition at the time that he was either on the mend or boring her, she was struggling against his attraction, a thought which, rather than amusing or pleasing him, disturbed him, a curious reaction, and a curious reflection in relation to the trees beneath which they were walking – a place where he had never walked with her, only alone – plane and chestnut for the most part. In the distance, beyond the lake, was the relatively treeless space stretching to the concrete structures of the bear enclosure at the zoo.

How his ‘engagements’, as she called them, darted around, one moment caught up with Taylor, the next with her – the next with the ruffled surface of the lake, the movement of birds across it: the recollection of Rebecca crouched on a stool, drawing, in the mixed life-room at the Drayburgh, looking up, her gaze abstracted, as he signalled her from the door.

A sense of sadness transposed to a feeling of dread, as if the ground were about to disappear beneath their feet: a naïve presentiment, yet something other than a naïve response, a transposition of an otherwise incommunicable activity within himself, a draining away, a removal, of every mental and physical resource, a degenerative force which he couldn’t otherwise describe, as if, in walking at a brisker pace, the older, slighter, almost childlike figure were walking him through, conducting him through, a mandatory exercise the inevitable consequences of which he knew in advance: adverse, painful, destructive.

‘I knew Rebecca well,’ he said, startled by the suddenness of his confession. ‘We were together for a while. Some months, in fact. Before she took up with Taylor. I’d visit her in her student hostel and, when she moved out, the visits becoming too conspicuous, in a room we rented.’

Viklund said nothing, the dog still at his heels, concentrating, or so it seemed, on the goal ahead.

‘I withdrew, in the end, because of Charlotte. Because of Rebecca, too, of course. In addition to which, I was putting my job at risk. She had an abortion. Though I wasn’t altogether sure it was mine. We went to some trouble not to conceive.’

‘Did Felix know?’

‘I imagined he did. Though it could well be he didn’t. Other students must have known.’

‘How did you feel when it ended?’

‘Saddened. Grieved. Quite ill. She, too. It was shortly after that she took up with Taylor.’

‘On the rebound.’ An odd term, Maddox reflected, coming from him, sophistry, semantics more his style.

‘Possibly.’

‘Did he know about you?’

‘I imagined he did. But then, I was inclined to imagine everybody did. A form of endorsement. “If everyone knows and is doing nothing, what on earth am I worrying about?” Inevitably, of course, I felt like a shit. I still do. Even worse, now, of course. It may be why Taylor asked to see me. I was always surprised – astonished, even – it never came out at the trial. That he had a grudge against her.’

‘Other things, I assume, were more pressing.’

‘Yes.’

They walked in silence for a while, the western façade of the Nash terraces to their left, the bridge crossing the head of the lake taking them past the boat landing-stage, in the direction of Viklund’s house on the eastern fringe of the park. ‘She was, at the time, new to the place, my own life bogged down in domesticity. I felt renewed. Spurious, of course. Mad, even, if it were known.’

‘And have felt guilty ever since.’

‘Oh, yes.’ He was glad to admit it, but surprised by how much. ‘You never disengage from these things, however unrelated to real events they might have been. And still are. Because they’re dismissed they become more real. On top of which,’ he paused, ‘she was a virgin.’

‘So Taylor must have known. Something, I mean.’

‘I always knew he did but resisted acknowledging it. After their relationship began I was still his tutor. He didn’t ask to change, which he could have done, and I didn’t suggest it because I didn’t wish to acknowledge what had happened. The inevitable consequence, of course, was, although I was the tutor, I always took the lead from him. Deferred to him,’ he concluded.

‘It should be quite a meeting,’ Viklund said. ‘I can well imagine neither of you actually saying anything.’

Maddox paused, Viklund’s pace decreasing: it was as if – he couldn’t dispel the feeling – he were being manoeuvred through the conversation. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘she got something of significance out of it. Not least a dramatic introduction to the Drayburgh. She quite relished the hold she had over me, and even threatened to go to Charlotte and complain.’

‘But didn’t.’

‘No.’ His own pace slowed further. ‘As for Taylor, he showed exceptional interest in art history. Something unusual for a non-academic, particularly at the Drayburgh where it took second place to everything. I’d even say he was exceptional. We spent sometimes an hour discussing his essays, once or twice a whole afternoon. That’s after he took up with Rebecca. No sign of resentment or lack of interest. He was totally absorbed, too much so, I thought, at times. It was me,’ he suddenly went on, ‘who recommended he apply to the Courtauld. Unfortunately, in his case, he thought theory took second place to painting. If he’d gone to Reading, or the Courtauld, things might well have turned out quite differently.’

The path ahead ran straight for a considerable distance, the flat, open space of mown grass stretching away on either side, to their right to the tree-enclosed eastern extension of the lake, to their left to the zoo on the park’s furthest northern limit, the dog, sensing the homeward stretch, hanging back, running to and fro, as if anxious to delay their progress.

‘In which case we mustn’t expect too much from your connection with his wife.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘We hope not!’ Viklund laughed, the short, sharp, ‘Hah!’, more exclamation than evidence of amusement. ‘If all the women we had affairs with were subsequently killed by their husbands there wouldn’t be many of the sex around. The place,’ he waved his arm, ‘would be littered with corpses.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Maddox said, but added nothing further.

‘Liaisons with students,’ Viklund said suddenly, ‘were almost part of the job.’

‘Did you take part?’ Maddox said, surprised again by Viklund’s coarseness.

‘I could see the temptation.’ He laughed again, the sound not unlike an attenuated cough, glancing back at the dog, not calling it, however, turning to the path again as if he, too, were reluctant to return to the house. ‘With a younger man, of course, all the greater. Plus the Drayburgh, where exercising your temperament was mandatory, wouldn’t you say?’

Glancing at Maddox, who had fallen silent, he added, ‘What distinguished his essays?’

‘Their subjectivity.’ He paused. ‘Their air of objectivity. Their enterprise. Sensibility. Enthusiasm. Vasari, as it were, all over again, including the misstatements. Yet, engagingly, writing, or seemingly so, about people he knew, almost, even, about pictures he had painted. Giotto he was extraordinary about. As if he had known him all his life, the artist illuminating the paintings, not, as in our case, the other way around. Fascinating stuff for someone from the Courtauld.’ He pointed at his chest. ‘Not history, of course. But absorbing. It felt a privilege at the time to have him as a student. He lit up for me much that had previously been obscure. Another window, illumination coming from a previously unconsidered source. In addition to which,’ he paused again, wondering how he might express it, ‘it was as if who he was writing about was more relevant than anything else in his life. In a way, of course, had he known it, his painting was theoretical, his theory unconscionably real. To that extent he’d already sacrificed himself to his art, when his salvation, had he known it, lay elsewhere.’

‘Poor fellow.’ Viklund shrugged, glancing away.

‘Naturally, later, I set all this aside for fear of Charlotte getting to hear of it. Finally, however, I told her. It, and much else, much later, part of the reason for our break-up. Her break-up. I think I’d have gone on with the marriage if it had been left to me. A pretty damn silly thing to say. What I mean,’ he faltered again, ‘it was she who left though it was I who left the house.’

‘She’s happily remarried, however,’ Viklund said, dismissingly, this subject, for several years, having rarely come up. At the time, to Viklund, he had reported the divorce as little more than a formality.

‘She feels she’s done the right thing. Is that happiness? I wonder. As for Taylor, he was a very involving student. I recognised some of my own aspirations, not in him, but in his facility. To some degree I rather envied him, yet, at the same time, out of guilt as much as admiration, wished the best for him. I certainly did my best by him. He talked of painting, particularly Florentine painting, as if he were engaged in it himself, not reporting or interpreting it. Yet, despite that, perhaps even because of it, he lacked any kind of distinction in his own work. Rather like Pemberton, but without the flair. Looking back, rather than forward. Unlike his wife. Her touch of originality unmistakable. Only a touch, however. Nothing substantial.’

‘Even then,’ Viklund said, ‘enough to turn him against her.’

‘Evidently she gave up because of him. Seeing how her work undermined him. That, of course,’ he went on, ‘and the children. Most of the talented Drayburgh women gave up once they had children.’

‘Probably applies no longer,’ Viklund said, his tone still dismissive. ‘Though it must have made it all the worse, in their case, a husband endeavouring unsuccessfully to do what his wife did with ease. And which, the worst rub of all, she abandons in his favour.’

They’d left the principal path and, aimlessly, it seemed, crossed the area of grass to the left, following the dog, which had run off in that direction. Walking on, they came to the top of the embankment looking on to the zoo, pausing to gaze over at the concrete terraces of the bear enclosure and, directly in front of them, the more recent structure of the elephant house. Two of the animals were being sprayed by an attendant with a hose, the view partly obscured by trees. Viklund, abstracted, seemingly distant, had paused to watch, the dog running to and fro at the foot of the embankment, searching the base of the zoo’s railing.

‘What Taylor was doing instinctively,’ Maddox said, inclined, after some hesitation, to pursue the subject, ‘I was doing by application, a curious image, if inverted, of his future relationship with his wife. Even then, at that stage, it warned me off. I’d rather modelled myself on your detachment. How did you describe it? Hauteur. All the while I was looking for signals that he knew me in ways more intimate than I knew him. That she’d told him, negatively, a great deal about me. She certainly knew a great deal about me. At different moments I must have told her everything. And then my final humiliation, of course, in running off. I think, even at that stage, she’d had visions of setting up as a professor’s wife.’

‘You’re quite preoccupied by it,’ Viklund said, again dismissively. He had taken Maddox’s arm and turned him away from the zoo and once more along the top of the embankment in the direction of his house. ‘Whereas I,’ he suddenly added, ‘am pointed a different way entirely.’ He laughed, his arm more firmly in Maddox’s. ‘Get rid of the past. I’ve no inclination to recall it. I have no wish to remember. Only,’ he went on, stressing the phrase, ‘to get rid. Nothing,’ he waved his free arm, ‘that can be remembered can be retained. Yet, at the same time, the notion of cessation is unacceptable. I’d like to be remembered even if I have a wish not to remember. The same, I suspect, is true for you. The decline, amounting to the disappearance, of what we know as sensibility. The capacity to reflect, assimilate, conclude. A childish perception, for sure, but one which gives me no rest. I resent the cessation of awareness. Put it as simply as that. As if we’ve been put in a packet which, after a certain amount of time, has to be disposed of, contents and all. Why the contents? Surely they could, and should be preserved. Otherwise we’re reduced to assuming that everything we’ve judged estimable in life has little or no validity at all. Childish, as I say, to wish to retain, but compulsive. If we are meant to die it’s gratuitous to be sustained by a desire to live!’

So Viklund, Maddox reflected, had achieved neither resignation nor acceptance: his identification with the finest elements in his own life had rendered him incapable of letting them go. It was as if his friend and former mentor envied him the involuntary nature of his experience on the tube station platform – an event which, outside the family, had been reported (to Devonshire, Donaldson and others) as an ‘accident’, a misrepresentation he wasn’t sure he’d got away with. Surely everyone, by now, knew precisely what had happened, suspicion emboldened into fact. Reminded of the incident – principally by the direction of Viklund’s thoughts – he recalled, vividly, how compulsion to do one thing had been met by an equally, if not more powerful inhibiting force: caught between two such conflicting elements, it was as if he were frozen – had been frozen – in mid-flight, flung forward and back at precisely the same moment, self-restraint, self-resistance, a death-in-life posture insecurely secured.

‘All this, I assume, is old-fashioned.’ Viklund was indicating the zoo – the chatter, the cries and screeches of animals and birds in the hidden enclosures – they passing its outer limits on their left. ‘Fastening up animals a reflection, I assume, of what we do with ourselves, playing safe with something that shouldn’t be confined. This appetite to contain and define amounts, does it not? to a recognition, unacknowledged, for the most part, that everything comes to an end, as plain an observation as remarking it must therefore have a beginning. From what, however? To what effect?’

It was the zoo, Maddox reflected, which absorbed both of them, the cries and screeches, the occasional movement of figures between the enclosures, even the smell, coming to them on the southerly breeze. Was it this spot to which Viklund had intended to proceed since their entering the park? Even the dog, he noticed, was subdued, its scurrying to and fro at an end, and was walking beside Viklund, its tail lowered, occasionally glancing up as if questioning, silently, the direction in which they were going. Was it this Viklund was intending to point out, the confinement of both their lives, his, Maddox’s especially, in something of a self-constructed prison, the ‘envelope’ of the body one thing, the ‘cage’ of the mind another, the construct of circumstance a third? ‘Beware where you go after your near death,’ he might have been saying. ‘Beware, too, where you go with Taylor. If art is to be – has been – abandoned take care what you put in its place: promiscuity, distraction, self-enquiry. None of these will be enough.’ In which case, he reflected, what was Viklund suggesting? The animal and bird cries, which had appeared to bemuse his friend, were beginning to alarm Maddox himself. He was glad to respond to Viklund’s suggestion they move on: the paroxysmal screeches paralleled, in a curious way, the wave-like consistency of his anxiety attacks (a recent feature of his illness). Here they were, reneging, to some extent, on Viklund’s work, and, by inference, on his own – as casually, as rakishly, even, as his friend had set his trilby on his head, as if to defy his age and, even, his appeal to women: a dandy, a macaroon, not all that different from his uncle Joseph.

‘Things we appreciate are, by definition, there to be discarded,’ Viklund said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘Discounting everything seemingly an irresistible urge at this age, not necessarily, of course, at yours. Getting rid of it all,’ he swung his free arm again, his hand clutching the dog’s leash, ‘has a positive attraction, not least because everything that has gone before has deceived us as to its significance. There’s something intractable in nature, it appears at first, only for us to discover there isn’t. Extinction alone guaranteed. Everything in the process of dissolution. Quite right we don’t acknowledge it at the time. Recognition at such a moment would require a response and, inevitably, should recognition have occurred, it would not be positive.’

‘Or provoke us,’ Maddox said, ‘to appreciate the moment more.’

‘Persuading us to cling on tightly!’ Viklund laughed – a barking sound – the dog looking up, startled, as if it had suddenly been called. ‘Take our house on Crown lease. I’ve assigned that to Ilse. Yesterday I realised my last will and testament was thirty years old, and the one before that I made at the end of the war. On my father’s advice, he not, at the time, having long to live and I, I assumed, as one should at that age, destined to live for ever. Well, that episode, as you can see, is at an end. Which brings me back to yesterday. In a wholly nominal way, I’m broke, having handed over everything to her. If she wishes she could push me into the street. All I’d have left is Jefferson. And I can’t be sure of him. He responds to me more than he does to her, though she’s the original owner. It was her idea to get him,’ glancing down at the dog, still reluctant, it seemed, to go in the direction they were proceeding, trotting by his side as if waiting a contrary instruction. ‘I’ve had no corresponding desire to yours, to bring my life to an end, but, inevitably, at this stage, I foresee the possibility of doing so. Is inertia sufficient to hold one back? Should we exercise our option to pre-empt? Are we little, if nothing more than a neurological function, triggered and controlled by chemicals which, fortuitously or otherwise, may or may not be there? Are we merely a mutation which, by repetition, has acquired a “spetial” authenticity? An authenticity which, because of its novelty, we go on so much about? A difficult thing to let go. You’ll know from your earlier interest in cars,’ the barking sound a vibration passing now into Maddox’s arm. ‘It’s the preemption I’m inclined to go on about. Its voluntary or involuntary nature. Is freewill another neurological function, aimless, artless, misleading, imprecise? These questions! You see why I had to get out of the house. To sit in there and think at all is becoming, for me, impossible. The room, particularly that room, and those paintings, with their inference – arrogance, even, in light of their quality – they’ll live on even if, or when, we don’t, are an imposition. After a certain age. My age, for instance. I’ve been, I’ve concluded, in that respect, imposed upon too long. Either they go or I do! Do you get that feeling? At a certain stage you start to say goodbye. No sooner introduced to life than we endeavour to secure it. No sooner secure than we’re obliged to let go. It lives us. After that point I’m not at all sure what we are supposed to do.’

‘A welcome challenge, in that case,’ Maddox said, angling his arm to facilitate Viklund retaining his grip on it. ‘After all, everything we do now we can be pretty damn sure is something we won’t do again. I’m glad I came to see you. It’s loosened everything up. Perhaps we have more in common than we thought.’

Perhaps, he reflected, Viklund was knowingly ‘loosening’ him up (characteristically, if obscurely, another favour). Alternately, too, came the thought that his friend might have wanted him, Maddox, to do his dying for him: to stand between him and death as art had stood in before – an art which no longer provided a defence, that short cut to life which, ironically, meant more than life itself: an ignominious entity known as ‘Maddox’, a representative – an active and (presently) ongoing representative of a process known as ‘dying’, life, the absence of, in motion: someone known to him, if not affectionately attached: someone he could count on, someone he could trust (someone who had had a foretaste of the very thing) – no longer, death, an advance into ‘nothing’, but into ‘something’ (associated profoundly with his friend): would Maddox do the trick, perform the exercise, before he, Viklund, was obliged to do it himself, life, with all its accoutrements (children included, in Maddox’s case) voluntarily thrown aside?

All he was confronted with, so far, however, was a figure pitched irresolutely towards a tube train line, waiting – involuntarily or otherwise – to be saved, salvation as procurable, at that instant, as freedom would be for the animals and the birds should the walls of their enclosures fall down. He, Maddox, had stepped out (had been hurled) from his enclosure – into what? A misalliance with someone whose nature, whose motives, even, were growing increasingly elusive: the longer he observed them the more perplexing they became: life was there to be lived as opposed to a life that was there to be lost.

‘Let’s sit down.’ They had come to a fountain marking the convergence of several footpaths, the paths themselves laid out, at their conjunction, in a curvilinear pattern, benches arranged asymmetrically on either side. The sun was out, the air, despite the southerly breeze, warm, if not warmer than when they had set out.

Viklund undid the buttons of his overcoat, freeing his figure, freeing his legs, the dog, reassured by the sudden lack of movement, taking its place beneath the bench. Some distance away, beyond the irregularly sited trees, the spires of the Danish Church were visible: conceivably, because of their proximity and visibility, Viklund had chosen this place to sit, a feeling, in the ease with which he reclined, that he had sat here on not innumerable occasions before. He had closed his eyes, his head, the remarkable boulder-like protrusion above the now loosened collar of his overcoat, thrown back, an aspiration, a specific desire, Maddox suspected, passing through his companion’s mind: the furrowing of the brows, the tightening of his mouth.

Conversely, he might have been in pain, their walking, previously, a distraction from it. Reluctant to disturb him, Maddox merely moved his position on the bench.

‘I like it here,’ Viklund added suddenly and, reverting to their previous conversation, went on, ‘Like being requested, on pain of death, to solve a problem when the significant integers have been deliberately, we can only assume, withheld. Commissioned, on the one hand, prevented, on the other. The problem in a nut shell.’ Opening his eyes, examining the scene before them down the length of his nose, he suddenly announced, ‘To come to the point, after all this prevarication, I have two pills.’ He paused. ‘Of an anonymous colour. In a box where they have been for a very long time. If, for instance, my medical condition were to become irreversible, I could, within three or four minutes, taking either one, be gone from the scene. Similarly, Ilse, who doesn’t presently know of their existence, if we took one each. I used, occasionally, when younger and their use appeared hypothetical, to take them out of the box and examine them. They even came with a putty-like substance, with which, in order to secrete them, you could attach them to the inside of the mouth. I got them during the war. From a fellow who had several. I assume they haven’t lost their potency. The trouble is, I could only find out by using them. Not a good idea if they didn’t work. On the other hand, assuming they do, they provide what, paradoxically, might be called a life-line. A lift from this life into something which, by inference, might be better. The older one gets, curiously, the less reason I feel I have had to use them. A comfort knowing they are there. But also a threat, even a challenge. Such tiny little things, and yet such power. A world of mystery, both what they do and how they do it. The proximity to something definitive and small, a convenience almost, promotes a peculiar feeling. Abstract, in one sense. And yet not quite.’

Having lowered his head, he glanced at Maddox who, half angled towards him while he spoke, had been examining his expression. ‘Less messy than your method. At least, I assume so. The fellow who gave them to me said he had witnessed their use – he was in the Resistance – and they had been, without exception, effective. I recall him saying that, curiously, those who were most reluctant to use them were the ones who kept them on their person. Spontaneity, not knowing, less than seconds before, what will happen. Something similar, I discovered, in my case. Now, of course …’ He glanced towards the church. ‘Odd thing to talk about. Taylor, I suppose. Would you have imagined, as little as ten years ago, for instance, we’d be sitting here, discussing this? Decline for men, I’m told, as opposed to women, comes with a rush. Fair, one moment, something else the next. What do you think? Do you find all this intrusive?’

‘Helpful,’ Maddox said, yet didn’t know why. Viklund, for some reason, was laying himself open to being examined, probed, a feeling that he no longer had anything to lose dominating his manner. On the other hand, he was also conscious of his friend looking to him to provide a suitable response to a question neither of them, as yet, had raised, as if each of them were circling the unmentioned subject, casting glances at it, at one another, but referring exclusively to other things, death, as a subject, a mere distraction.

‘Art, taste, determined by a neural condition, the differences between us,’ Viklund went on, ‘so slight that, increasingly, as our resilience runs out, they become indistinguishable. The dilution of the species by repetition, to the point of irrelevance, if not excrescence.’ He smiled. ‘Is that,’ he concluded, ‘authoritarian?’

He was, however, no longer looking at Maddox: it was as if a fresh dimension to his life had been revealed, something concealed, previously, by erudition, by sophistry – by insight, even, one perception distracting another; as if, greedily, he were holding on to something which much in his nature, to his surprise, disinclined him to release, he, Maddox, something of a challenge, one which, at this point, at least, he was anxious to acknowledge. ‘Even this, even this,’ he appeared to be saying, art an exercise synonymous with confinement, reduction, removal; synonymous, that is, with displacement, even the highest, even the best: the superlative, the exemplary, the revelatory: all this, he appeared to be saying, had misled him (to its true intent), an entropic misadventure, an entropic exercise, decay – disintegration – displaced by something worse.

Maddox was tempted to shout: to get to his feet, to cup his hands to his mouth, to scream, as if a spirit of immeasurable proportions, having seized him, was about to be released. Yet, sitting there, all he was governed by, exclusively, was fear; an exclamatory impulse to ask for reassurance – wondering, in that instant, if he were indeed regressing; that, rather than moving on – the sensation of release – his medication, his treatment as a whole, even Simone, were progressing his decline.

Wondering, too, if Viklund’s presence, his responses, weren’t doing the same, a curious, vascular sensation, located in the upper half of his body yet governed by his brain, his sense, his sensibility, as if, once again, he were feeling the vibration of the descending then exploding bomb, the indifference of its flight, the indifference of its damage, reducing his sense of exclusivity to nothing, at the centre of everything (in the region of his heart) an otherwise indiscernible and inexpressible fear of which the waves of anxiety he was feeling were merely the slightest reflection.

And yet, he didn’t wish to leave: he no longer knew what he wanted from Viklund, nor what Viklund, any longer, wanted from him, other than attendance (in itself, no mean demand), each exposing a wound to the other, a vulnerability neither knew, even at this late stage, how to cope with, either within themselves or in relation to each other.

Maybe, vis-à-vis the Danish Church, Viklund was moving back to an evaluation of himself (a continuing reference) which might well have come to him first in the Capella Scrovegni in Padua, the levering open of a door to something so serene, so implacable, so delicate, so robust and complete, that no other feeling, spiritual or otherwise, not even love for his wife, had ever surpassed it. It was, after all, the ‘anoetic indifference’ of death, as he had once described it, in reference to Giotto, that preoccupied him now – preoccupied him now to the exclusion of everything else, a soullessness which neither love nor constancy, nor faith, nor belief, could arrest or distract: nothing to note but disappearance, excision, darkness. Blank.

‘Shall we walk?’ After sitting for some time in silence, Viklund rose. As if waiting precisely for this signal, its own thought processes having arrived at the same conclusion, the dog rose, too, and Viklund, stooping, reminded of its presence, stroked its head, the first gesture of affection he had shown the animal since setting out.

‘Back to the ranch,’ he added, thrusting his arm in Maddox’s again: whatever he had hoped to achieve by their walk had either been realised or abandoned.

‘Indifference a difficult thing to grasp when difference, seemingly, is what it’s all about. How to discard everything we might have saved. All we certainly treasured. Not greedily. Dispassionately. Lovingly. Much of which has been thrust on us. Urged on us, even, as a gesture of faith, constantly on the lookout for what has justified that faith in the first place,’ Maddox, as Viklund spoke in this curious manner, awkwardly matching his stride to that of the other man, so that they walked at a pace scarcely brisker than a shuffle. ‘Taking on board the injunction to live then obliged to pitch it back again. What do you think? A post-mortem on your case would suggest you had everything to live for. “No excision necessary”, the verdict of the court.’

He thrust his arm deeper into the crook of Maddox’s, squeezing his lower arm against his side, Maddox reminded again how thin and frail he was. It wasn’t, he reflected, sympathy or understanding he wanted from Viklund but clarity of mind – from someone, he realised, whose own condition gave him cause for alarm: Viklund was grappling with something he, Maddox, had only glimpsed, a fear not so much of dying as of a closing-down of sensibility, of consciousness itself.

‘Since everything is appropriate to its circumstances, if not, it ceases to exist, what is this appropriate to, I wonder?’ Viklund added, his gaze moving along the façade of the Nash terraces towards his house, its presence, at the moment, obscured by trees. ‘Misery, confusion – confusion, certainly – terror, in your case, appear to be the appropriate reactions. To what? Everything round here? Is there something we’ve missed which drives us to these conclusions? If not, where does the incongruity lie? In Taylor? In the circumstances in which we live? Are both of you, to that extent, neural aberrations? Am I?’

Was this, then, what Viklund was requesting? Was he, at this stage, ‘consistent with his circumstances’? Or was something significant missing? Maybe it was Taylor he had wished to talk about, pre-empting any reaction in Maddox which might have resulted from their meeting. Had they both, he and Viklund, gone beyond the ‘appropriate’: were they now on a descending scale – into the inappropriate – having previously convinced themselves – been assured by others, even – they were safely on a scale ascending? Were they being, in one of Simone’s phrases, describing, his current state of mind, ‘plucked down’ (the corollary, presumably, of being fucked up)? ‘Nothing lasts for ever,’ another of her paradigms, ‘eternity, in that case,’ she had concluded, ‘out of the question.’ Nothing, similarly, went on for good, ‘Time,’ in that case, too,’ she’d further concluded, ‘a moral attribute,’ life appropriate to circumstance an ambivalence: the impulse to leap at the line united him with what was everlasting. Was he, in short, living his own conversion?

‘Facing up to death amounts to facing down life, don’t you think?’ Viklund went on. ‘Eradication of life, wouldn’t you say, was our overall business? Only at this point does it become apparent,’ gesturing at the park ahead, as if, oddly, to indicate himself. ‘Consistency, now the veil is down, with what in reality is all around. Quite a conclusion. How are we to separate, now we’ve established this link between us, this supernormal connection?’

Was this the last he was to see of Viklund, his mentor, friend and colleague? Was this the preamble to his taking out his box and testing the efficacy of one of the pills (conceivably offering the other, to be taken then or later, to Ilse)? Or, like his absurd lunge at the line, would he only discover he was back in the circumstances, if not worse, in which he had started? Were the circumstances appropriate to his action, his action to its circumstances? Was affluence, of the sort Viklund enjoyed, not the antithesis but the progenitor of morbidity – poverty, ill-health, insecurity, like art, merely distractions (death visiting, in short, less destructively)? Was Viklund, like himself, locked into a logic which, once introduced, sustained its own momentum, one initiated, in their case, by their introduction to art – anterior time anteriorly extended: a momentum governed by a dynamic which, they were alarmed to discover, having been persuaded otherwise, came, in this instance, exclusively from themselves?

Detaching his arm from Maddox’s as they reached the gate leading, across the road, to his house, Viklund called the dog and re-attached the leash to its collar, the animal seemingly reconciled to their return. It, too, Maddox reflected, might have been thinking: its bright eyes, its wagging tail, its demonstrations of affection, loyalty, gratitude, Viklund, too, suddenly energised, in a not dissimilar manner, his face flushed, looking up at the windows of the house with a startled, enquiring, engaged expression, as if seeing it for the first time: the tall windows at the side, fronting a strip of garden, the windows higher up – coming finally to those of his study, overlooking the park, on the top floor, a look of surprise which faded to one of disaffection: this I have acquired, this I dispose of.

Replacing his arm in Maddox’s, as if whatever had passed between them was now permanently secured, the dog’s leash in the other, they crossed the road.

‘We must do this more often, weather permitting,’ he said. ‘Now we are both free. A companionable experience, much passing between us, even if, particularly when, we say nothing at all!’ the barking, ‘Hah!’ then ‘Hah!’ again. ‘I don’t recall our having that before. I appreciate it. Immensely. Expediency on top of us, so to speak, decline, if not extinction, inextricably bound up, let us hope, with renewal. In decline, shall we say, we renew? Nature’s law!’

He was smiling, the dog, associating a return to the house perhaps with food, now tugging at the leash. ‘A really jolly walk,’ he said to Ilse who met them in the hall. ‘Jefferson would have preferred it to have been more active. But then, we can’t all have what we want, and even he is getting old. Another day, another walk,’ he added, indicating the girl who had appeared from the kitchen below. ‘Loreen can take him on the next one.’

‘I should be getting back,’ Maddox said to Ilse’s invitation to stay to lunch. ‘I’ve enjoyed the morning as much as Jefferson,’ he added, with a laugh.

‘But you must stay to lunch,’ she said. ‘Dan will be so disappointed at you leaving.’

‘Don’t pester him,’ Viklund said. ‘He’ll come another day, I haven’t a doubt,’ returning with Maddox to the door where, shaking his hand, he added, ‘Come any time. I’m almost invariably in. Give me a ring before you leave. Make sure I’m still alive,’ winking, Ilse, her hands clenched together, smiling behind.

As he walked back along the front of the Nash terraces he endured the curious sensation that Viklund was walking beside him, even to the extent of feeling the pressure of his arm inside his own, the next moment talking aloud, ‘Nothing is arrested, nothing is still, another of Simone’s aphorisms,’ adding, formally, a figure ahead turning at the sound of his voice, ‘I await my execution with equanimity,’ recalling Simone’s enquiry when hearing this phrase, facetiously presented, ‘Why do you call it execution?’, he describing the image of a crowded room, inclined to recur not infrequently in his dreams, at the door of which, at irregular intervals, a figure appeared, beckoned, and led one of the occupants out, the numbers declining, one by one, until, finally, having been distracted by the antics around him, as, indeed, had everyone else, there was only himself, the empty door, the imminently expected figure, a feeling of helplessness conjoined with apprehension, heightening the terror which he associated with the imagined physical sensation of being consumed by fire.

This was the illness which brought him awake each morning, an anxiety, the source of which he identified in everything around – he, however, he reminded himself, descending Parkway at the time, the vehicles in the road going in the same direction, the houses converted on the ground floor into shops, their contents a scarcely acknowledged distraction, as if the accessibility of so much – restaurants, cafés, travel and house agents: sportswear, toys, pets, paintings, books – were a reminder of all he had to lose: an implacable extension of that repertoire of fear which appeared, misleadingly, to emanate from everything which passed across his field of vision.

A reminder, too, of all from which he was now detached, as if everything, even himself, all he had considered, tortuously, to be himself, were no longer his to dispose of; as if everything were being presented in order to be removed, the scale and intensity of this removal, an ever-quickening enterprise, the sole purpose of his senses to record, animate, quantify, respond to: recognise. ‘Everything moves,’ he reported once again, noting the sunlight now as a filtering beam flecked with dust flung up by the traffic, the deadening, indissoluble conjunction of scent and sound, ‘a part and yet apart’, he further noted, ‘a singular subtraction’, as if, having passed from the vicinity of the stuccoed royal terrace, he were once more back with that fragment of himself to which the ‘him’, divergent from the ‘self’, insensibly belonged.