4

The telephone woke him: a rattle, first, inside his head, the sound bursting outwards, enveloping the room, the bed, the detritus of books and papers, the files and folders, even the dust, he noticed, floating upwards in the light from the window, he crossing to the landing and into the other room, the phone by the double bed. He must have simply got back from Viklund’s, lain down and, peculiarly exhausted, fallen asleep.

‘I wondered if our morning’s conversation had disconcerted you,’ Viklund said after his initial introduction.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It clarified any number of things.’

‘Good.’

‘Has it,’ Maddox enquired, ‘disconcerted you?’

‘Not at all.’ A cheery note at the repetition of the phrase, ‘I felt heartened by it, as a matter of fact. Heartened,’ he repeated. ‘I was hoping that you might have had a similar reaction.’

‘I have.’

‘Good luck, of course, tomorrow. We might have spoken more of that,’ Maddox confused, scarcely awake, before recalling Taylor.

‘I’ll let you know,’ he said.

‘I’ll look forward to hearing, Matt. Ilse sends her love. She omitted to mention it on your leaving, she was so concerned you stayed to lunch.’

‘Next time,’ Maddox said.

Replacing the phone, he was about to leave the room, rising from the double bed on the edge of which he had been sitting, when it rang again. Assuming it to be Viklund he lifted it directly and enquired, ‘Was that too abrupt? What did we forget?’

‘Nothing,’ Simone said. ‘What a curious thing to ask.’

Confused for a second time, he said, ‘I’ve been talking to Dan. I thought he was calling back. He’s concerned, talking of death, his, he might have had what he’d describe as a negative effect.’

‘Has he?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I, too, was ringing to see how you are.’

‘I’m well,’ he said, remaining standing. ‘How did your day go?’

‘My day is still going,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been talking to a client who has no one in the world, she says, to love. My immediate response might have been to say, “How about yourself? As good a place to start as any.” Instead, my dear, I thought of you. I have someone to love so why do I suggest she take a grip on herself? Continually,’ she added, ‘I’m overstepping the mark. Ever since,’ pausing for a response and getting none, ‘I’ve taken up with you. I was hoping I’d find you at home. Merely to hear your voice. And here I am, making protestations which are singularly ill-received.’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You can ring me any time you like.’

‘I shall.’

‘I shall be waiting.’ He sat down, once more, on the edge of the bed.

‘How is your friend Viklund?’

‘Braced,’ he said. ‘Preoccupied with dying. He was looking to me, I thought, for reassurance. Not that I provided any. He usually comes up with Lucretius, who allegedly committed suicide, when he talks of nature and dying. Today not a word. Nor of Plato’s admonition against such speculation. Nor of Aurelius, who spent the whole of his life thinking of little else. Nor of Seneca, another of his favourites, who also killed himself.’

Why was he telling her this: was this his reaction to Viklund, buried beneath the rest?

‘Why waste one’s life prospecting its end?’ he added, ‘is usually his bottom line. Plato invariably his chosen text. Socrates’ death …’

He waited, puzzled by his conversation.

‘It sounds as if it’s cheered you,’ she said.

‘On reflection,’ he said, ‘it has.’

‘It’s odd when, for no conceivable reason, I find I’m missing you. We were only together a few hours ago.’

‘I’m in my recovery phase,’ he said. ‘Things, on the whole,’ he went on, ‘are looking up,’ yet all he could think of at that moment was her. She was looking up. He was looking up to her, carried along by what he, too, was beginning to call her ‘charge’: that force which carried her – carried him, whenever he was with her – from one bountiful moment to the next: he was, he concluded, relying on it entirely.

‘Doctor Death, as you call him, is my next client. I wonder if he’ll turn up. Last week he didn’t, but rang Mrs Beaumont to apologise and make an appointment for today. He’s in a manic state. At least,’ she paused. ‘I think he is.’

Uncertainty was, he reflected, something new in her, specifically where her work was concerned: perhaps, he further reflected, it was why she was ringing.

‘I always think I should be in the house whenever he’s there,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m perfectly safe,’ she said. ‘He’s harmless. I haven’t a doubt. That’s been his problem. Though I shouldn’t talk about it. At least, not now.’

‘Why aren’t you sure he’s manic?’ he said, his unease increasing.

‘I have the curious feeling he’s rehearsing his symptoms. Nothing unusual, of course, in that. On the other hand,’ she paused, ‘he’s very convincing. It could be real. Yet at times I feel he’s playing a game. I usually have Mrs Beaumont in when he’s here. Today she wasn’t available.’

‘I’d better come up,’ he said.

‘Not at all.’ She was instantly dismissive. ‘I can handle these situations, Matt. After all, my dear, I’ve been doing it for years. I’d feel defeated if you should even think of it.’

‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I think I shall.’

‘Not at all,’ she said again, fiercely. ‘I’m quite capable of dealing with it on my own. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You know the prohibition I put on talking about my clients. Not always kept to, I know. But on this occasion I have to insist. You must allow me to make my own judgement.’

‘Okay.’ The bed creaked as he shifted his weight.

‘Was it all death and dying with Viklund?’ she said.

‘We talked about Taylor. I haven’t seen him for fifteen years, possibly more, and suddenly, out of the blue, I see him tomorrow. It was useful talking to Viklund. He used to come in and give lectures after his retirement, whenever I invited him, and Taylor made himself conspicuous by asking the most pertinent questions. And invariably querying the answers. Viklund was much taken up with him at the time. Whenever I invited him in, he’d say, “Will genius be there, who knows all the answers?” He became quite focused on him, and on the student who subsequently became Taylor’s wife. He gave her a prize on one occasion when he came in to judge a Sketch Club. He was quite taken by her flair.’

‘What’s his view of Taylor now?’ she said.

‘Like mine,’ he said, ‘but more faded. I knew them both much better, of course.’

‘Do you want to come up this evening?’ she said.

‘I’d like to,’ he said. ‘I’m feeling pretty alone down here. At least you have clients and/or patients coming in.’

‘We can talk about that, too,’ she said. ‘I’ll be finished by seven. There’s something in the fridge. If I’m not up already I shouldn’t be long.’

Returning to the rear room he sat in the chair beside the bed and contemplated the houses opposite: still half asleep, he reflected on the morning’s conversations, glancing at the diminutive clock on the desk to discover, surprisingly, it was mid-afternoon: he must have been asleep longer than he’d thought.

He was, he recalled, constructing an agenda – a structure of some sort – conceivably to his life, one comprising elements which had, other than his possession of them, and the use to which they had been put, little, if anything, in common – recollecting, too, at that instant, a bench in the overgrown, bush-shrouded garden at St Albans, a bench his father had constructed towards the end of his life, assembled from miscellaneous pieces of wood which, aimlessly, or so it had seemed, he’d been collecting for some time. ‘Something,’ his father declared, ‘I’d like to sit on. Something,’ he’d gone on, mysteriously, ‘I’ve always wanted to do.’

‘But you can buy one,’ his mother had protested. ‘Buy two, or even three, if you want.’

‘I’d like to make it,’ his father insisted, until then having shown no interest in woodwork. ‘Living tissue,’ he’d remarked to Maddox on the one occasion he’d watched him at work, his shirtsleeves rolled, his jacket off (itself an unusual sight), hammering and sawing, Maddox’s sole contribution being the suggestion his father use screws rather than nails. ‘Otherwise,’ he told him, ‘at some point it will come apart.’

‘This will do well enough,’ his father had responded, complacently almost, despite his application, hammering, if anything, even harder.

In the end an asymmetrical, lop-sided structure stood against a sunny section of the wall at the rear of the house, a bench which, having sat on it once, he rarely, if ever, sat on again. After his death, a few months later, it stood against the wall in a half-collapsed condition, a testimony of some sort – to transience, Maddox suspected – a singularly transient gesture – which was finally broken up by a refuse collector, on his mother’s insistence, and taken away.

Much of what he was endeavouring to assemble from elements of his own life, he concluded, was of the same disparate nature, obscure, confusing, resistant to identification. He was, furthermore, acquiring the characteristics of a hermit, reluctant to go out unless he was obliged to and, once out, immediately aware of his anxiety to return. A life, he reflected, without dynamic, other than the one provided by Simone, she, even then, a partial element – one, however, without which he wondered if he’d survive. Without the promise of her house, her flat, her work, her, on the whole, imperturbable nature, he doubted there was sufficient left of his own resources to sustain him until, during, and after what, even now, he conceived as the next, inevitable attack.

By what? A presence, he knew from previous experience, could seize him without warning and precipitate an event over which he assumed he would have little or no control; a presence which had separated itself from, or been expelled by, a power he associated with a detached, disassociative creative force – less a term, or a description, than a sensation, a fluctuating awareness of which came and went similarly without warning; one he could scarcely conjure up or sustain by mental application, a welcome diversion, nevertheless, from the malignant and oppressive one he associated with the ‘other’ – or, alternatively (demystifying its source), with ‘himself’, in this evaluation a self-divided entity where observer and observed were inseparably combined – each confounded by the other, each clamouring for release (each clamouring for expression), each immobilised by a desire, or so it seemed, for a separate existence.

He had long ago abandoned ‘organisation’: that system of beliefs, assumptions (conclusions, even) which afforded grace and peace and understanding – in his view, of a specious nature (something his brother Paul was, or had been, addicted to, having, in his late teens, ‘gone into’ the Church), a metaphysical attribution to what, in Maddox’s own case, he was convinced was a pathological condition, a neurological exclamation, a conflagration – an abomination, as he’d finally come to know it, the preliminary ingredient of a final stage of terror and the sudden, irrepressible impulse to bring it, and everything with it, to an end: a diurnal arrangement intended to preserve a mental equilibrium balanced between terror on waking and what he recognised as ‘normality’ (peace of some sort) before he went to sleep each night.

There was, on the one hand, feeling, on the other the thing that felt: the thing that felt was at the mercy, or so it seemed, of the feeling it sensated, if not engendered, a tortured mutuality which functioned without intrusion from ‘himself’, the ‘nature’, the ‘presence’ of this experience the embodiment of something which extended itself, helplessly, into everything around.

He was, he reflected, in an indeterminate state – life, of one sort, was coming to an end, another, more obscure, more indefinable, more unpredictable, about to begin – he thinking, in the first instance, of his marriage, his children, the end of his ‘career’, in the second of what he had started and was seeking to sustain with Simone. The chimera, if it had been one, of art had been superseded by something he recognised as ‘nature’, urgency, not reflection, in this interim period, preoccupying him more and more. Otherwise, a cumbersome, unauthenticating process in which thoughts succeeded one another without any conclusions being drawn, or decisions being arrived at. He was taking on board a cargo without designation, he and Viklund, he had assumed, earlier that day, fingering each other’s load with a view, conceivably, to lightening it or lightening their own. ‘Salvation’ had never been further from his mind: the liberation celebrated and expounded by others had extended itself so far it had disappeared: a sense of longing, of attachment, had only been appeased by the appearance of Simone. How much might he rely on that; how long would it last? With it came the remembrance of an attachment even more profound, the severance of which had been the precursor to so much he was feeling now, ‘limbo’, he reflected, a portent of worse to come.

Simone, to this extent, was a recapitulation of his past; at least, in those first encounters when he was scarcely aware of her as a person, merely as an agent, a facilitator, something, even, of a voyeur, looking on, gratuitously, at what, misleadingly, he was encouraged to expose – she an attraction, after this introduction, promising fulfilment of a familiar kind, an extension of much of what had gone on before – the ‘melting-pot’, he had told her, in which the viscosity produced by the process provided the material, the foundation, even, of what he was to become, a suitable opponent of what he had determined was, and had described as, the Demon King, the metamorphosis of something, presumably, hidden in his nature.

So Simone represented something to sustain, to encourage, there to reinforce, there to endorse his otherwise recalcitrant and despairing nature, Viklund’s presence still uppermost in his thoughts, the evocation of a more sensitised, creative, revelatory figure in conflict with or transcending what he had hitherto considered to be his own, behind it all and, to some degree, formulated from it, an indifference which, on the tube station platform, had almost overwhelmed him.

All that, he reflected, despite the security of a house, together with a pension and someone to clarify what lay ahead – and what might have lain behind – he as unsure of her, however, as he was of himself, she an arbiter and dispenser of common sense, he of something peculiar only to himself: he dismayed by the vulnerability of a woman who meticulously ‘made up’ her face each morning, who chose and assessed her dress each night for the following day – asking his view of her final decision but rarely, if ever, changing it: a woman who attended to her hair, her skin, her clothes as conscientiously as she did to her appointments, lectures and meetings with friends.

And the time, too, she spent on her e-mail and faxes, more of the former than the latter, her messages on her answering machine, the formal way she stood to receive these communications, distanced from the screen in the first instance as she might be from a stranger encountered at the door, examining her faxes with the same detachment, listening to her phone messages with her gaze abstracted, distant, remote, as if summoning a voice from the end of a passage, her eyes downcast, the pencil, moments later, busy in her hand as she listed the calls in order of importance.

And he himself: where did he fit in, a silent attendant, insight suspended, bemused, by her inclusion of himself in something whose complexity, at first sight, precluded his participation? Detached, fragmented, on one side, cohesive and articulate, on the other: her detachment, his fragmentation; her cohesiveness, their joint articulation, the endless flow of her imagination into areas represented by other people, not paintings, artefacts, but flesh and blood – Doctor Death prominent amongst them.

His mind flowed back to the skeletal figure and the wisdom of being there or not: the consanguinity of her engagements realised by a coherent – in his experience, novel – perception of where she stood, an experience, mesmerically, in his case, shared with others.

All this, he reflected, and therapy, too, ‘we are our relationships’ a dictum she considered to be almost true, the dividing line between this absorption in lives other than her own – something, in this sense, of a self-reflecting mirror – and what, in isolation, alone at night, for instance, she experienced (she ‘almost’ experienced) as herself – a division neither she nor he could clearly distinguish, perception and cognition bewilderingly apart. A societal compulsion, on the one hand, an inclination – on his part, for instance – towards self-enclosure, on the other, he almost seeing it as a confrontation, compulsion-v-absorption, with the suspicion they might, in reality, be the same thing, nature consistent with circumstance.

So, he concluded, he was of her as she was of him, a conjunction of dissimilar natures, ironically, drawing them together – divergent yet complementary elements, if only they could see it, of the same thing.

It was his ‘knowing’ of his perception that drew him on, almost, in effect, a consistency with much if not all that had gone on before set aside, the sum and the cogito vividly apart. Division was, he conceded, inseparable from his nature, an ironic coloration of who or what he was; or, he further reflected, an attribute of what otherwise could only be described as an aberration, a chemo-neurological function inside his skull which appeared, in many respects, to have little if anything to do with ‘him’ at all: everyone experienced ‘themselves’ in a similar way: what, paradoxically, couldn’t be considered as peculiar to himself sublimated by an awareness of others (her).

He was ‘into’ a suspended part of himself, something which, he suspected, he had held in abeyance throughout his life, function determining everything, an aimless submission to whatever came to hand, not least within himself – to the extent that he perceived an interior necessarily different from the exterior which contained it.

The telephone, at this point, rang again and, no more composed than when he had lifted the receiver to hear Viklund’s enquiring voice, he lifted it once more to hear Devonshire say, ‘I’m worried,’ the sound echoing inside his head: no mention of a name identifying the caller, the presumption that Maddox would be preoccupied by no one else.

‘I rather liked it,’ Maddox said, assuming assumption his best defence.

‘I’m not sure like, or dislike, come into it,’ Devonshire said: a blond, close-cropped creature, he recalled, with a predilection for wearing round-lensed, wire-framed glasses tucked in behind comically recessive, almost absent ears: a moon-like face which, without the glasses, suggested the persona of a twelve-year-old child: a kindergartenic effect which the glasses, presumably, were meant to disguise: shirtsleeves, no tie, open-necked: a convivial, domestic personality, the new demos in action.

Maddox cleared his throat; having returned from the back bedroom to pick up the phone, wondering, not for the first time, why he didn’t have an additional extension by the bed, he was breathless (a lack of strenuous exercise): anxiety thickened his voice, and intensified further at the presumptuous nature of the sound in his ear, someone young enough, he reflected – almost – to be his grandson: Devonshire, less than half his age, hadn’t been born when he, Maddox, had been at what, euphemistically, he might have referred to – retrospectively – as the height of his career.

‘“Let’s face it, it’s not painting, it’s illustration.” The collegiate chumminess apart, Freud happens to be recognised as one of the most outstanding representational painters of our time.’

An expansion at the end of the line of Devonshire’s lungs: he daily cycled to work and played football, or was it cricket? with a journalists’ eleven. ‘His Christian name is spelt with an “a” not an “e”.’

‘Surely you mean given name,’ Maddox said, flinging out the bait.

‘Another thing,’ Devonshire said. ‘Everything, or almost everything, comes in as an e-mail, if not a fax, if not,’ he went on, ‘directly to setting. A typewritten sheet sent by post is a method of communication we have, apart from writs and injunctions, largely abandoned. I don’t understand why you have to be different. There’s surely a fax machine in Camden High Street, or Chalk Farm, or you could even get on a bus, or a bicycle, or the tube, and bring it down without undue inconvenience to yourself. You have, I take it, heard of the internet?’

A helicopter – he assumed a police helicopter – was circling overhead, the oscillation of its blades vibrating the glass in the windows. The sound drifted away and returned, several times, while Devonshire was speaking, Maddox sensing this was the prelude to a more pertinent enquiry, if not a declaration, and not inclined, as a consequence, to ask him to repeat what he’d missed.

‘“The paintings might well be likened to strips of wallpaper expensively framed and gratuitously isolated against a white wall in order to insinuate their relevance.” Hodgkin happens to be one of, if not the most highly considered of our lyrical abstractionists. If I’m not mistaken he has, or is about to be given, a knighthood.’

‘There you are,’ Maddox said. ‘The whole system is corrupt.’

‘“A scene-painter given to portentous effects. The closer you observe them, the more they fall apart.” Thank God he’s dead. Normally, Bacon is considered the greatest British, if not European, if not global post-war artist, as close to, if not the equal of Moore, as makes no difference. He also you have a word for. “Fibreglass monstrosities, as close to form without content as anyone might reasonably manage.” I’m only relieved you’ve been kind to the maquettes.’

‘And carvings.’

‘And carvings.’

‘And bronzes.’

‘And bronzes.’ Devonshire inhaled, lustily, the other end. ‘You do realise this “Millennial Exhibition of British Art” would be the envy of any major gallery in the civilised world? I stress “civilised” for obvious reasons. The Metropolitan would give its eye-teeth for the loan of it, as would the Musée d’Art Moderne.’

‘Or the Louvre.’

‘Not the Louvre.’

He inhaled again; perhaps, recently, he’d had a cold – conceivably, still had it: his voice gurgled, as if asphyxiated, the throat obstructed. ‘“Wall-coverings”. Do you know how grateful the Tate were to receive those paintings? “Vacuity eclipsed”. Rothko could have given them to any gallery in the world. Do you realise how pissed off, for instance, were the Metropolitan when he chose the Tate, at virtually no cost to themselves? They’ll form a central, if not the central part of the Bank Tate’s collection.’ Checking the copy before him, he paused, his voice a lowered murmur.

The police helicopter chuntered once more overhead.

‘Your dismissal of the whole of post-war American painting, as, indeed, the whole of American painting as “literary” and, what is it?’ he murmured again before adding, ‘“sentimental”, “sound without content”. I choose the phrases at random. “Noise without form”. So it goes on. “Sloppy”, God help us. You realise our proprietor has a unique and much-admired collection of post-war American art and if he doesn’t take this as an attempt to lower its value and villify his taste I’ve no idea what conclusion he, and a lot of other people, will come to.’

He paused.

‘And another thing.’

He paused again.

‘“Much of his painting is dreary. Uniform tones, uniform brush strokes, repetitive colours. The product,” you describe it, “of stigmatic vision, a medical not an aesthetic imperative. The whole of twentieth-century art reduced to an aberrant eye condition.” This is Cézanne you’re talking about.’

He liked Devonshire: he was an enthusiast (something which, as with Taylor, earlier, he’d always relished), enthusiasm, in Devonshire’s case, indistinguishable from ambition, ambition, similarly, from opportunism, opportunism from predictability. He liked him, he reflected, because he didn’t trust him; if he didn’t trust someone he knew precisely where he was – in a ‘real’ world as opposed to one of his imagining. With people he could trust, like Simone, like Viklund, each in their separate ways, like his former wife, whom, despite her loyalty, he’d betrayed on several occasions, like his sons, whom he loved and didn’t understand, he invariably felt at ease, unable to decide, because of their veracity, what precisely they were up to. He wondered – had wondered – to what degree this reflected adversely on himself, or whether it was a sense of reality – his sense of reality, a valuable if elusive property – which was so finely, so astutely tuned that it gave him an inadvertent advantage over everyone else.

‘“Conceptual art,” to which you say the British cognoscenti are inevitably addicted, “is an oxymoron, ‘moron’ the operative word.” Apparently, if it’s conceptual it can’t be art, if it’s art it can’t be conceptual. As for heading the article, which may well be my job, “Neo-Philistinism in British Fin de Siècle Art”, likening it to the facile illustrative traits in Victorian painting, “the end of a century seems to bring out the worst in us”, it gives the feature a wholly negative ring. What standards are you referring to? Sienese? Florentine? Quattrocento? Cinquecento? The overall tone is regressive. Singularly so. Overwhelmingly so. I wondered if you’d like to amend it? It will have to be faxed in by the end of the day.’

‘I’ll leave it as it is,’ he said.

‘You think so?’

The helicopter chuntered once again, an exhausted and exhausting sound. Something Devonshire said was drowned by the roar of the engine and the percussion of the rotor blades: the glass in the window vibrated more severely.

‘I’ll have to ask Donaldson to review “British Art”,’ Devonshire said. ‘At least he’ll give a more balanced picture.’

‘Balanced with what?’ he enquired, his own voice lost, he assumed, in the overhead sound, for next he heard Devonshire remarking, ‘I’m inclined, in his case, to think he can.’

‘He likes to screw women artists, of course, and to get pissed with the male ones. Or is it the other way around? He’ll write whatever they tell him.’

‘At least he writes well. By well,’ he said, ‘I mean convincingly. Your postscript, for instance, on the desultory nature of British public sculpture doesn’t resonate well, either. “An ossified honeycomb”. Montgomery, in Whitehall. Viscount Slim caricatured as “an incorrigible wanker”. “Field Marshal His Royal Highness, George, Duke of Cambridge mounted less on a horse than something extruding from his bowels”. Then music, God help us. This in a piece on art. I have someone to write on music, who certainly wouldn’t agree with your gratuitous aside. Mahler “unique in twentieth-century music, every note a false one, unless borrowed from someone else”. I think a rest from your fortnightly pieces would do us both some good.’

‘You’re not inclined to print it?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Am I fired?’

He waited for Devonshire to make up his mind, or, having made it up, to decide how he might care to express himself.

‘We’re not a public school notice-board. I like to think,’ he went on, ‘that our arts pages carry more weight than those of any paper. In fact, I’m pretty damn well sure they do. I’m not inclined to allow them, even out of loyalty, to be fucked up.’ He paused. The helicopter, meanwhile, had retreated, like an insect, he reflected, having had its fill. ‘Let’s give it a break. Until Donaldson’s away in the summer. You could well have recovered your resilience by then.’

‘Resilience is not a requirement at this stage,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it’s ageing,’ Devonshire said, safe in the limitations of his youth and apparent good health.

Replacing the receiver, he lay on the double bed: here he and Simone slept whenever she stayed over, both of them, however, if sleeping together, inclined to spend the time at her place, ‘civilisation’ of a sort involved, ‘civility’ suggested, not least by the age of the building (eighteenth-century) and its immediate environment close to the summit of the Hampstead hill. There he could be ‘different’: there was history to commemorate, associations of a definitive nature to take into account, a past resonating with the present: Johnson, Southey, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickens: Marx, Freud – Moore, Hepworth, Mondrian: the list went on, concluding, finally, close to the crest of the hill, with Simone Leiter (her maiden name), an inheritor of a legacy which he, Matthew Maddox, marooned in the detritus at the foot of the hill, could only partake of as a visitor.

But she: he was confused (seduced) by her completely – she who had known Bowlby, Winnicott, Ivan Illych (briefly), Laing, Esterson, Cooper, whose current friendships (he had met quite a few of those involved, immobilising himself in the process: why had she chosen him, not them?) included luminaries from the Tavistock, where she’d trained, the Analytical Forum, the prestigious Cenacle Foundation for Psychoanalysis, where she did most of her lecturing; whose entrée into equivalent American, Swiss, Austrian and Italian centres of analytical propaganda had been commented on in the press; she who, from amongst her clients, acquaintances (relatives, even), colleagues and friends, had chosen a burnt-out case, a luminary (at one time) whose luminosity had expired a little while before – not only burnt out, he reflected, but teetering (once more) on the edge – whose powers of recovery were very much in question, whose regression (to what?) was, if not imminent, certain.

She, on the other hand, someone whose approach to him, over a series of appointments, he had seriously misjudged; who had herself been the initiating party; who had had three husbands – what faith in marriage! the remnant of a passing age – having learnt ‘a great deal from each’. What, in the process, was she learning from him; what, disregarding a tutorial role, had he in his possession, by way of appearance, intellect or reputation – by way of destiny, even, or potential, at his age, of any sort – which would draw her in his direction, someone as enigmatically self-possessed, self-sufficient as Simone?

Each occasion he approached her house, even though he had a key, something she’d handed to him, he his to her, at the beginning of their relationship, it was with the expectation, entering the wood-panelled hall (Mrs Beaumont in the room on one side – a judge’s former wife, someone not needing the income, merely the twice- or occasionally thrice-weekly distraction – Simone in the room on the other), that he could, quite easily, peremptorily, without warning, his usefulness expired, be dismissed – a challenging note to this effect left on the table in the hall or even with Mrs Beaumont, suggesting she had, as expected, changed her mind, with an afterthought, only, he might leave his key, a saucer or a small receptacle provided (she much given, he recalled, to collecting miniature, artfully constructed, ingeniously decorated wooden boxes (along with her prints), a relevance here though of what, as with everything else, he couldn’t be sure).

This was his regressive state, referred to, bluntly, by Devonshire, the one, along with other manifestations of arrested development, that he brought with him whenever he mounted the indented stone steps from Heath Street to his beloved’s abode (loft, refuge, sanctuary). Women, as a species, eluded him – increasingly so whenever he reflected on what had happened to his wife, she a woman alone, at the time, as she’d frequently pointed out, in a house of men, not hesitating, once three of them had gone, to start thinking of and for herself, coming to the conclusion that, other than their children, there was, bearing Maddox’s infidelities, if invariably of a trivial nature, in mind, little if anything any longer to bind them together: a menopausal conclusion which had finally taken her, by tortuous routes, into the arms of the peripatetic Gerry, who had borne her along, had carried her along, as lightly as a breeze. ‘Why not?’ had been her response, salvation, of a sort, for her, if of an incredulous nature, something of the reverse for Maddox, the Mad Ox epithet restored as, bereft suddenly of wife and children, and a shared home, he spun around not quite knowing where or who or why he was, nor what it was he intended, or had intended to do.

She, Charlotte, had, in the process, grown opaque, having previously been nothing but transparent – transparency, in his mind, associated with domesticity, their mutual absorption in it. Had their lives really been reduced to a preoccupation with food, clothing, accommodation, holidays, finance? had they really not noticed one another on either side of the marital bed, meeting in the middle in occasional, mannered, repetitive embraces, getting up each morning like a pair of mechanics totally aborbed in the outrageous demands of the machine they managed? A sense of wonderment at her advancement – a postgraduate degree in her middle fifties – coincided with the unmistakable signs of his own decline, an abyss of obscurity opening before him, one into which, if he wasn’t mistaken, he had now descended (been hurled – lowered, certainly, without his permission) – so dark, so deep, so sudden its first appearance, associated with fears, the intensity and scale of which he could only liken to his childhood experience of sitting under an audibly descending bomb (which could descend no further, seemingly, other than into him), imagining, as he did so, the totality of extinction; a feeling, then, that he was lost for ever, that everything was lost for ever, that there was, no longer, anywhere to go – a feeling which, less than sixty years later, diverted, in the interval, by art – belief, fidelity, something – had returned and, in returning, dramatically, sensationally increased.

While he was descending into his self-designated pit, Charlotte was climbing – higher and higher: effortlessly, with, so it seemed, invisible wings: a female precocity, a female facility, a female felicity: a return to academe (a study of Sanskrit, yet another seminal source), and then, further released, ascending higher, energised by her elevation, her abandonment of him in favour of the twice-married Gerry (‘three times for luck, Matt, what d’you think?’ he at the announcement of their intention as he genially took over), who had, on his own confession, ‘never read a book’ since taking his engineering degree – though secretly addicted, Maddox had subsequently discovered, to children’s stories: Richmal Crompton, W. E. Johns, Romany, several volumes of which Charlotte had found beneath his bed (before their marriage), confiding the discovery to Maddox as a source, but one of many, of his endearing, irresistible charm.

In no time at all, after their marriage, she was working in his office; shortly after that she had a department of her own, ‘handling people’, according to Gerry, her principal if hitherto unrecognised talent, ‘although,’ he’d gone on, ‘she handled you and the kids in a commendable fashion: if we’d looked more closely we might have known,’ sharing Gerry’s peripatetic course, no sooner installed in one IT company than headhunted for another, his unstressed, juvenile appeal the source, seemingly, of his entrepreneurial skill, ‘first a curiosity, then a need’ his self-proclaimed approach to exploiting what he referred to, phonetically, as ‘ticknology’.

Plus: a dulled, postdated attempt to acknowledge Maddox’s presence in his current wife’s former life (‘most men my age pick a bird twenty years younger: I picked an eagle, Matt, in full flight’) by mentioning, at intervals, whenever they met, the art gallery he’d visited in Tel Aviv, Houston or Hong Kong, ‘good old Charley!’ his invariable identification of the source of what he called his ‘late development’: ‘she’s taught me a lot of new habits, and not only in bed. Know what’s the first place I ask for when I hit a new town? The picture gallery. Hell, I’ve even bought one or two. You must come round, Matt, and tell me, tell us, what you think,’ Maddox, so far, no subsequent invitation having arrived, spared this final, horrific humiliation. ‘We’ve got to take care of the mentally ill. No stigma to me, I can tell you, at all. Hell, I’ve seen executives go down like ninepins in this shit-arsed world we live in. Know what I do? Take care of the fucking creeps. No one else gives a fuck. We only live once. Let’s keep us alive!’

Wifeless, childless, careerless, ‘good old Matt’ listened to ‘good old Gerry’ extolling ‘good old Charley’s’ progress through the ranks of the ‘born again’, wondering when, or if, his second birth might be forthcoming, something close to dementia, so far, the only sign of change – other, that is, than the arrival of Simone, the ultimately, to him, unknowable presence who dominated his life to the exclusion, virtually, of everything else. His wife – his former wife – luxuriated, meanwhile, in the provisions of her new existence: severely ‘pruned’ by the previous exigencies of domestic life, she was blossoming in her maturity: in his maturity: hadn’t he, after all, done some of the pruning: wasn’t he, over and beyond Gerry’s acknowledgement, responsible for some of the late fruition? Plus, of course, the impression she and Gerry created of a couple who had been endearingly, successfully, unmorbidly married to one another throughout their adult lives, apophthegms, ‘what’s life for if not to be lived?’ thrust magnanimously in Maddox’s direction – in much the same fashion, he recalled, that Simone had been suggested as a ‘suitable helper’.

He, Maddox, Mad Ox, Oxey, whatever appellation he went under, was ‘finished’ – ‘completed’, had come to the end of the track. It didn’t need Devonshire, juvenility again, to remind him, nor Charley, to suggest, to the contrary, he was going through a ‘potentially positive’ phase. The finished article was before him now: his morning (flinching) gaze into the mirror revealed, after almost seventy years, the features of a stranger: the eyes that looked out were, from within, the eyes of his youth, the eyes that gazed back were those of a wizened creature: whose the terror, who the witness to an otherwise unnameable horror? whose the look of confusion, disbelief, incredulity: doubt? As Charley acquired increasing faith in her destiny, her former husband was, deservedly, it seemed, losing sight of his: behind everything, he concluded, a reservoir of fear, restrained by what he could only describe as a wall of distraction (art as serviceable in this respect as any). The wall, or part of it, in his case, had collapsed: all who failed to recognise ‘life’ as a distraction were forever on the point of being engulfed. He could feel the ‘force’ building up behind his back (towering above him, about to descend), resistant to examination, resistant to scrutiny, except at its own discretion: resistant, even, in his case, until recently, to acknowledgement. How could Simone, at that point, step away and, instead of consultation, exploration, explanation, suggest an involvement which abandoned, if not precluded analysis in favour of demonstration? In the presence of a force he couldn’t pretend to understand, except as a denial of life as he knew it, another reality was about to impose itself, greater if not infinitely greater than that perceived by the senses, a reality inclined to erupt – predisposed to erupt – out of ‘nowhere’, a mystical empire invoked tokenly by some, the majority of whom, as far as he was aware, were either insane or dead.

He was intrigued by small things (willingly distracted: a learner, in this field, anxious to begin): in the house, without his jacket, he invariably wore a track-suit top, a present from one of his sons, a reference to a sporting past, if only at school, and the inference he might take exercise. Occasionally he would find himself with one sleeve pulled up, the other down, always, he noticed, the left sleeve up, as if about to undertake a physical if not a menial task; yet, he reminded himself, he was right-handed: his left hand, he recalled, was the one more frequently in use in his love-making with Simone. Was this what, vocationally – unconsciously, empirically, even – he was now about: structuring his life to an activity which had preoccupied him in his youth, and which, if only with difficulty, absorbed him at present? Was this one further absurdity of old age, on the threshold of which he stood (lingering, understandably hesitant, reluctant to go in)?

He was still ‘young’: Simone frequently reminded him – encouraged him – not indisposed to discovering evidence of ‘youthfulness’ in herself. What, otherwise, was the purpose of her make-up, her choice of clothes, the ‘difficult’ problem she had, professionally, of ‘what to do with her legs’: short skirts, medium skirts, long skirts, or trousers? The drawn-up sleeve, as a consequence, troubled him, as did his recent habit of talking aloud, invariably, he assumed, to consolidate a thought, or feeling, reassuring himself that ‘it’ and ‘he’ were there, identifying his behaviour, however, as a further measure of decline: ‘Thus, and no further: I must put a stop to this,’ only to discover his self-admonition had been spoken aloud.

He thought he might ring Simone, less to speak to her directly (she’d be busy) but merely, if Mrs Beaumont weren’t in for the day, to hear the sound of her recorded voice: its authority, its formality, its composure, its self-possession, a quality which, even now, rarely failed to ignite him. He could tell her he’d been fired, by a juvenile. Other than Devonshire and Donaldson knowing, he felt obliged to tell someone, dismissal, to this degree, brought under his own control: ignominy, defeat. On the other hand, no more contentious reviews, the contentiousness of which invariably continued in subsequent weeks’ correspondence columns, Maddox’s latest offering echoing down the pages, connecting him less with a world he understood than with something he was now consciously fleeing from. Why be ‘real’? Hadn’t he done enough to be something else entirely? Let it slip away. Let everything slip away. He was speaking aloud. ‘I’ve moved on to, I am moving on to, other (higher) things – otherwise, uppermost in your (and Devonshire’s) mind today the lining of a budgerigar’s cage tomorrow.’

Yet what were these ‘higher things’? Something responded to, presumably, through the senses, they themselves, however, comprising an increasingly moribund system, yet sufficiently alert to register its own decline: nature’s analgesic, a step-by-step submission to extinction, relief achieved, ironically, by an awareness of the deterioration it was increasingly less able to observe. Here he was, not unlike an athlete turning up, in old age, for a race he might have run in his twenties (did run in his twenties, thirties, ever onwards), primed to expectancy, to achievement, confident of the outcome despite his rivals’ youth: Devonshire, Donaldson, the latter someone he had taught, for God’s sake (almost everything he knew), at the Drayburgh, ambitious (like Taylor) but (unlike Taylor) garrulous to the point of inanity, accommodating his lack of talent by transferring his garrulity to the printed page, he, Maddox, ironically, the first, if not the only one, to point him in this direction. Images of supersession in both an ascending and descending scale had dominated his mind since Devonshire’s call. If he were to be tortured in this way had he acquired, or re-acquired, sufficient resilience to absorb the perversities involved?

A Roman sense of abnegation, devoid of religiosity, he couldn’t subscribe to (it would have to come upon him, like everything else at present, unawares). Understanding which came from knowledge and, conversely, knowledge which came from understanding, had, presumably, passed him by. Ever since the incident on the tube station platform he had reverted to a view of reality governed by two diametrically opposing forces, one that presumably went on for ever, and that could be perceived as such in a transcendental form – first glimpsed in services experienced as a child and a youth, following his parents’ instruction, in St Albans Cathedral and the Quinians school chapel, but most potently – overwhelmingly – in the Arena Chapel murals (‘like witnessing a birth’) a sensual, galvanic, protean force – and a corresponding protean presence implicit in the impulse, hitherto unregarded, to take his own life, its scenario writ large in a universe where species devoured species, galaxies galaxies, in an aimless appetite to survive.

Rhetoric had always been his strongest suit: a desire to dispel absurdity, invariably by abuse. He was, to this extent, making progress, if the field for opportunity had been suddenly reduced. Divesting himself of previous assumptions – assumptions which, on the whole, had stood him in good stead over the previous sixty-odd years – he was clearing the ground for further progress – presumably on the lines less proposed than insisted on by Simone. New formulations, if they were formulations, were falling into place on either side, a sense of purpose, chiefly, pointing in the one direction (up the hills – Haverstock, Rosslyn, Holly Bush) to her house. The indignity (the humiliation) of the geriatric support group, arguing each other into a less negative frame of mind, had, in itself, inclined him to assume that little by little he was ridding himself of earlier pretensions, earlier perceptions. Having fallen so far, in his own eyes, there was little if any scope to fall further: disencumbered of wife, family and job, he could set about – set in motion – his own revival. He could, to this extent, re-formulate his life, disencumber himself of structures – or have them disencumbered for him – which had supported him until now but which, post-tube train experience, could support him no longer. Bereft of his past there was no knowing what he might achieve.

With reviewing, he’d been on the point of pulling down the temple, the one place which was still, if tenuously, offering him shelter: first his near contemporaries, then those preceding, Cézanne’s demise to be followed, presumably, by others: the parodic Picasso’s, the decorative Braque’s (Matisse and Chagall in a category he had, cautiously, set aside), anticipating, prognosticating that which would last, that which would not, in the same fashion as he was identifying the same within his own nature: what was Maddox now was not what Maddox had been a few weeks ago.

The exclusivity of declining powers, the inclusivity of those ascending: he had a picture devoid of illusions, something pristine, if not prestigious, a resolution to take little of anything for granted: a corresponding willingness to abandon everything – in favour of what?

He had to make clear: he had to define, even if, as yet, he couldn’t identify, except for one thing, what he was moving towards: an absence of awareness was one thing, an awareness of the increasing absence of awareness another. Absolutes were beyond him, yet absolutes were what he had previously lived by: love, marriage, paternity, fidelity (not much progress with that), vocation – perceived, all of them, as ideals, anxiously subscribed to.

The anxiety remained, growing stronger, more insistent, that anxiety regressing into terror, terror, in turn, informing his determination (a fresh anxiety) to stay alive. The premium he had put – was putting – on his decline as a necessary precedent to his survival was growing clearer all the while; conversely, his pretensions to a personal life were growing increasingly obscure, his insistence on something outside, and beyond it, all the more marked. The vehicle which, recently, had carried him so far, via the day-hospital, the life-class, was, he concluded, in the process of being dismantled, if not abandoned, broken up, he determined to construct an alternative of his own.

Almost idly, he picked up from the floor the review of the British Millennium Exhibition which Devonshire had rejected and, retrieving a pen, a ball-point, from several scattered on the floor, began to amend the text: Freud’s predilection for rendering human flesh as butcher’s meat a necessary re-assertion of a Berliner tradition (Bosch, Grünewald, Dürer, Grosz, Auerbach), a redressing of an otherwise British aversion to rendering flesh as anything other than an agreeable transposition of the reflexive angle of the picture plane, Bacon’s a not disconnected insistence, Celticly acquired, on the perversity of flesh being flesh at all. The knighted Hodgkin’s infectious appetite for colour as much as form – transference of sunlight into a chromatic purity – a Sufistic transposition, sensually extended, resonant of the tiled domes and arches of Isfahan.

As for Moore’s Carrara marbles, what more could he say about the nature of stone and its mesmeric identification with the human spirit, a resonance echoing back, as far as he could tell, to the beginning of life itself? Plus, Cézanne’s visionary elevation of paint in his final, unfinished pictures to the plasticity not to be rediscovered until half a century later in the textural evocations of American expressionism.

Not convincing, but there it was: thinking, to this degree, had come to a halt, something almost consciously brought about, as if, unbeknown to him, he had been slipping free of everything, nothing left amongst his mental acquisitions but Simone; as if the very act of leaving go had ensured his taking hold of her – a tug, as it were, to tow him back to the ocean. Once free, he surmised, he would float on his own, drawn, once again, into reflecting on the significance of this perplexing woman who, in her own way, if not as comprehensively as himself, was leaving go of something: professional propriety, perhaps – something, he concluded, as simple and, presumably, as damaging as that – moments later lying back on the bed, the amended sheet falling to the floor, the pen still in his hand, the police helicopter, once more, returning, chuntering overhead, conscious only of the approach of that which he had, he concluded, desired the most, next to the embrace of Simone: oblivion.