5

It was as if, in sleep, particularly during the day, he was subjecting everything to clarification, subsequently recalling the contents of his dreams in the hope that something so subjectively arrived at would point him more decisively in the direction he was going (death alone on the skyline). Certainly, on waking, he looked for amendments, if not radical changes to everything which he had been disagreeably aware of, afflicted by, before he had fallen asleep. No such clarity, however, had emerged. More firmly in place than ever, his uncertainties and doubts engaged one another in an increasingly familiar manner. Yet somewhere, somehow, resolution (revelation, even) would arrive, he waking, on this occasion, from his afternoon sleep – no lunch having been taken, a Marks & Spencer prepared food item in his microwave oven (another ‘gift’ from Charlotte and Gerry, intended, as the others, to do him an unspecified ‘good’) – aware that the change, or the ‘charge’, he’d been warned to look out for was still some distance off. Temperament inclined him to expect its arrival at any moment, its speed of approach, unfortunately, as unpredictable as the change or ‘charge’ itself – this curious conjunction of imminence and discomposure, of expectancy and inertia, sufficient, finally, to get him out of the house.

He resumed his walk of barely a few hours before, turning northwards, however, instead of south and, proceeding, past Chalk Farm, up Haverstock Hill, emerging, as if from a polluted lake, into the fresher air before the less steep ascent to Belsize Park, the restaurant tables partially occupied on the forecourts either side, the level interval beyond leading to the climb of Rosslyn Hill.

A reminder now, in his heart, his lungs, in his knees, his hips, he was getting older, entering the area of boutiques, cafés and restaurants of the High Street until, beyond the tube station, stooped, bent almost double, he set off up the worn stone steps which, rising fifty or sixty feet above his head, took him finally to Simone’s door.

Her voice was audible as he entered the hall and, assuming from her tone, its evenness and persistence, she was dictating a letter for Mrs Beaumont, he went upstairs to the kitchen.

Aware of his approach, the cat was already waiting, stretching its hind legs, extending its claws, crossing to the fridge, in front of the door of which it sulkily paraded.

Removing an already opened tin, Maddox measured a spoonful into the bowl by the sink, dropped in several pellets from a container kept beneath the sink, and re-examined the interior of the fridge for what he and Simone might eat.

At moments like this he was aware again of how much he welcomed distractions, however slight, his attention drawn to anything of a familiar nature, preferably undemanding: walking to the house, for instance, the evening rush-hour underway on the tube underneath, the road convoyed with northbound traffic, feeding the cat, examining the possibility of preparing a meal from the contents of the fridge – which, on this occasion, he hadn’t supplemented or refurbished – even hoping, in this instant, that Simone would be further delayed (voices on the answering machine, heard every few minutes) so that he could enjoy the indulgence of being in her house alone. Here he was released from those preoccupations which came spontaneously to mind when he was at home, reflecting, on this occasion, in hers, on the propriety of writing (e-mailing or faxing, using Simone’s machines) to Donaldson as his former tutor and more recent colleague: ‘someone has to throw discretion to the wind. With little left to lose it might as well be me …

‘… as a child brought up during the Second World War my elucidation of what, at the time, was referred to as post-war art is probably more tendentious (more generous, more open-minded) than yours. This drift into trivialisation …’

had dominated his consciousness for a considerable number of years, no Third World War having occurred to distract it

‘… to the point that trivialisation has acquired a dynamic of its own. This transposition of everything into accessibility. Devonshire, by the way, has put me out to grass. I got my head knocked off, as you were probably aware, a year ago – shortly before my recent illness – by suggesting that women, as a whole, had trivialised art and literature throughout the century, this in itself part of an overall process …

‘… a doomsday text which adequately ensured I’d never work – at least, in the field of commentary – again.’

He paused, reminded he’d intended writing to Devonshire to amend (reverse) his previous assessment (flexibility, resilience, adaptability, subservience to the fore), not to his loquacious, prematurely balding former pupil: eyes like marbles, glistening – a peculiar phenomenon – in the dark, due, allegedly, to a congenital eye condition, if not, in Donaldson’s own account, a visionary conceit.

Skin like marble, luminescent, too, in certain lights, flecked with acne, a languid, languorous, skeletal figure, suited in blue corduroy as a student, affecting a cravat and a loosely displayed top pocket handkerchief, a conspicuous oddity in a world characterised exclusively at that time by denim, perpetually on the move from one student bar to another, his inimitable nasal drawl now frequently heard on radio and late-night television (occasionally, recently, on news items), someone convinced of his destiny, of one sort or another, from the age of eighteen, his first appearance at the Drayburgh, his paintings – ‘expressionist’ – suggesting a sensibility, modishly perceived, struggling into existence – to deteriorate, finally, with indecision, into the chaos from which they had presumably emerged, his immoderate commentary on his efforts transposed effortlessly, vocationally, almost, certainly with relief, to the work of others, entertainment (‘enchantment’) taking over, ‘the singing stamen’, Pemberton had once described him (his last retrospective having been neglected in Donaldson’s column).

No wonder Devonshire, who hadn’t witnessed this transformation of slug to butterfly, of weed to orchid, had signed him up at once, an ‘intermediary’ (as he saw himself) of the same generation, ‘conceptualism’ (intellect, reason, accessibility) in common, an antagonist of Maddox’s New Philistine Agenda, its progenitor ploughing an increasingly solitary furrow (Taylor, a rural heritage behind him, might, in his own time, have been a suitable recruit).

‘On the other hand, although we differ on the cyclical nature of creativity, art one moment moving precociously ahead of public perception, the next judiciously behind, the latter phase currently in operation, the regressive element involved is, in my view, full of potential. Namely, in deciphering in the downward surge those elements which may well comprise the next inevitable upward drive. “Progress” has a perverse, self-generating momentum (its only credential), something, as you once gratuitously suggested, “springing from the heart” – in this case, of course, of Judas, worn conspicuously on the sleeve, along with everything else (so many badges! so many designations!). More sobering times, however, I am predicting ahead, not annihilation, exactly, but something appropriate, let’s say, to the fate of Ozymandias, the decay of an empire endowed with everything destined, at one time, seemingly, to last for ever. In my view …’

In his view?

But then, he hadn’t a view: who, in any case, was listening? He was running out of steam. Devonshire’s intrusive telephone call had, once again (unwelcome, this time), distracted him. Here was a mind full of Ruths, Annas, Ailsas, Judiths – Alexes and others: the debris of a ‘cultural exercise’, the like of which had never previously been recorded, bringing him to the daily reality of a life bereft of common sense – and here was art, in its most meretricious and, he now realised, resented form, once again imposing itself. He had, he’d concluded, taken on ‘humility’ in order to redress a situation in which something like the opposite had operated for the previous sixty-odd years. He had looked to the exalted companionship of the saints in the past, those quattro- and cinquecento giants, Giotto, Donatello, Masaccio, della Francesca, together with their heirs: now, however, he was looking to the companionship of his crazed and largely suicidal fellow sufferers. ‘Something’s eating out my brain,’ he had confessed to Charlotte at the onset of his illness, she, post-illness, offering him Simone to mark, as she described it, his ‘recuperative phase’. Continuity, of a sort, he reflected – one which, with hindsight, might develop into something more significant than that, but, he’d confided to Charlotte, this ‘eating out’ was as tangible as a caterpillar eating a cabbage, its daily consumption removing the possibility of any further source of sustenance (‘my brain’s disappearing’), day by day, more glaringly, night by night, removing the certainty which came, he’d always assumed, with experience …

‘… judgement increaseth as talent decays an axiom – not Simone’s – that scarcely needs confirming …’

yet here he was, day by day, almost hour by hour, proposing, if not confirming, something significantly different.

Wasn’t this why he resented Devonshire’s intrusion? Didn’t Donaldson signal an ascendancy he no longer recognised or cared about, the vestigial spasms of a hack still in his system but, like everything else, being gradually, through exhaustion, sifted out?

And there was Simone, a woman he scarcely knew or recognised, coming into the kitchen where, absently, distracted, he’d laid out the cartons to be processed in due order in the microwave (what other devices, he wondered, had she hidden about the house?), he looking up at her lovely face, fatigue lending it sensual charm, taking her face between his hands as if, without this reassurance, it might disappear, securing his lips on hers, aware that she, at some point – conceivably on her way up – had refreshed her make-up, the brown-irised eyes framed beneath the dark-lashed lids, the lids lowered as, out of focus, their faces blended into one another, as if, he reflected, she and he were one.

There was something here he would have to construct: the enigma of his death-in-life predicament, the unforeseen attempt to kill himself: wipe the page or the canvas clean, the opportunity here, at least, to start again, to create, compose – to bring her, for instance, steelily alive, page after page, picture after picture, as if she, after her corresponding number of years, was only now becoming recognisable, something mercurial (he’d recognised before: her varied moods, inquisitor, one day, enthraller, the next), something transitional, confining itself to one form, only to precede its re-formation as something else.

His own powers, he further reflected, were consistent with this, recalling sitting beside her in the dark, ensconced in the armchair comfort of a cinema in Belsize Park, turning to gaze at her (the mesmerised look of everyone around, focused on the screen), awareness fluctuating in response to a beam of light, emerging later into the machine-driven street: the fumes, the traffic, an oppressive awareness of too many people, proliferating, or so it seemed, before their eyes, a ‘spetial’ enterprise, a genetic conundrum, an outrageous extrapolation of ‘a reason to live’, the highest form, he concluded, of animal life canvassing extinction by means of a machine of its own device.

‘It’s ready when you are.’ He indicated the row of boxes, adding, ‘Expediency,’ the telephone ringing, she depositing a file on the kitchen table, declaring, ‘Give me a minute. I must take a call,’ disengaging from his hold, his hands having drifted down to enclose her back, her waist, her hips, her voice, moments later, coming from the sitting-room. He feeding in the boxes, one by one, the pinging of the machine as each one was finished: his laying-out the food and taking it to the table by the window which, with foresight, earlier in the day, she’d prepared: plates, glasses, cutlery, napkins. A glass vase containing flowers, taken that morning from her roof, occupied the centre of the table: beyond that, the window looked out to the studio window opposite, invariably dark, its inner surface strewn with climbing plants.

And she: poised on one foot, one knee resting on a chair: the shape of her calf, her hips, her waist, her breasts delineated within the folds of an almost formal, anonymous black dress which she occasionally wore for clients of ‘distinction’. Who today?

Her voice animated, she laughing, evidently female the other end: an arrangement to meet in town one evening.

One less for him, he ungenerously reflected.

A bird (Gerry came censoriously to mind): as elegant as a heron: one leg, a body devoid of post-menopausal flesh, a demonstration of something which her early life – photographs she’d shown him of an urchin-like creature with a more than androgynous look – had scarcely suggested, if not actively denied. Out of that uncertain, unfocused, if not neutered child – dark-haired, dark-eyed, soulful – had emerged this elegant, assertive, straight-backed, celebratory figure, with its unconsciously requesting if not solicitous look – which suggested (insisted) you should tell it all: everything! everything! a receptor, a provider, a provisioner of goodwill, a wholly charitable intention contained in that unchangeable, delicately proportioned head.

In regarding her as he set out the food he was aware of what an incredible choice both of them had made.

On more than one occasion she had remarked that she worked from ‘instinct’ not ‘theory, or even common sense’: something, for reasons of which he wasn’t totally aware, that had not characterised her previous choice of husbands, men who, in their separate photographs, looked curiously alike, balding, each one, at the front of the head (one wearing a moustache, which, she confessed, she hadn’t ‘liked, though it played no part in our separation’): knowledgeable if not vulnerable eyes (perhaps, he reflected, they had that in common), assertive, determined, thin-lipped mouths, a suggestion they saw her as only one stage in their own advancement: prominent (dominant) noses (‘men of the world, not apart from it,’ she’d observed, he wondering if, in this respect, she were making him an exception). Not brothers, exactly, he’d remarked to himself, but an affinity of a sort, identifying their natural habitat as that of the schoolroom, conceivably a church: priests of an uncommon denomination, she either the object or the subject of their faith.

Markers, she saw them, for her part, of the progress of her emancipation, she affectionately viewing the three of them, in retrospect, as instructors, appropriate, each of them, to each stage of her development, the first persuading her in the direction of medicine, finally analysis (a further need implied of enlightenment of a disingenuous, if not seductive nature, esoteric, mythic, unnervingly secure).

Her study, overhead, adjacent to her bedroom, was lined with books which, other than her, at one time, omnivorous appetite for reading, had no recognisable theme in common. ‘I intended to be a biologist,’ she’d once explained, ‘but gave it up for people, mind more interesting, in that respect, than matter,’ going on to announce, ’I always felt I was born for a life different to the one I lived and could only approach it in stages. Hence the marriages, I guess,’ concluding, ‘Even now, when I’m convinced I’ve arrived at where I intended to be, I have a strong feeling I should be somewhere else,’ looking at him intently, he, at the ferocity of the look, glancing reflectively away.

Now he merely admired the curve of her leg, the sturdiness of its support belying the slimness of the ankle, the tantalising line where the calf disappeared beneath the hem of the dress, the sway of her body as she responded to something reported at the other end, the half-twist of her waist as, still speaking, she turned to smile at him, indicating she would soon be finished, the dying finality of her voice, chilling in its severity, as she disengaged from her caller.

Moments later she was sitting at the table, the image of expectancy as, childlike, she waited to be served.

Having told her of his sacking (dismissal or suspension) by Devonshire – largely to pre-empt what, on other occasions, he welcomed and encouraged, her edited account of her day in the consulting-room below – she immediately responded, ‘It’ll leave you free,’ a curious reaction: he felt free, if not too free, already, ‘to do what you want. Look at the way you sweated over your article the last few times,’ to the point, she might have said, where syntactical errors crept glaringly in, he blind to most of them until, showing her the copy (a rare occurrence: he seldom took her to the galleries either, anxious to preserve the singularity of his view), she blithely, at times incredulously, pointed them out: a sure sign, she’d concluded, of the artificiality of his position (one he’d used as an indicator of his returning health). ‘Isn’t it prostitution to have a historian resorting to these tricks?’

‘Tricks?’

‘Conceits. A requirement to write something which, if informative, is there to entertain. Not normally something you’d go in for.’

He’d waited, surprised, if not distressed by her response.

‘After all, you were taken on by his predecessor, who’d been there long before you, who was as old as you and who shared many of your sentiments.’

‘They’re not sentiments,’ he responded.

‘Weren’t you driven into opposition by a need to come up with something?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not, after all,’ she went on, ‘his generation. He had to get rid of you sometime.’

He watched her arrange her food in separate piles: an unconscious exercise, signalling what?

‘However much you dislike it,’ she said, having waited for his further response, ‘Devonshire was bound to fire you in the end. The reviews had got so negative. Okay for you. You thought what you were reviewing was negative, too. More than negative, cynical, gratuitous. Fine. But not for him. He won’t change his perceptions any more than he can change his age. However ephemeral, without something positive he can’t, presumably, sell his paper. That, we can assume, is supposed to be his job.’

‘It’s not his paper. Even if he likes to think so,’ he said.

Again she reassembled her food: the delicate fingers, the delicate hands, the knife and fork manoeuvred like surgeons’ instruments, probing, exploring: opening up.

‘Who cares if culture goes one way and you go another? Your integrity is intact without having to advertise it every other week.’

‘Like Donaldson.’

‘A performer. An entertainer,’ she said. ‘You’re not.’

It – life, everything: she – could go on without him; that, after all, was what filled him with despair, pain not so much at inertia, or even profusion, but irrelevance. True for everyone, he reflected, so why should he be different? Irrelevance had its own agenda, fortuity a doctrine much exercised in his youth (the world an oyster: seize your chance). Alternately, he didn’t wish to diminish what had, at the time, appeared as a miracle, watching Charlie emerge from between Charlotte’s legs, an experience he’d never subsequently come to terms with, a mystery which neither time nor later births had in any way reduced.

‘You’re right,’ he said, dismissing it. ‘That and Viklund in one day. I’m not altogether sure what he was after, either. Everyone I know appears keen I abandon everything. Or, at least, are anxious to discourage me.’

‘That’s not true, either,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t take one setback as final,’ she added.

Resourcefulness, he reflected, was her principal tool: she wasn’t a fool: the presumption inferred must be he was. ‘Wife, children, job,’ he said. ‘All I’ve got left is you.’

‘That’s not true, either,’ she said again.

The food reassembled on her plate: the delicate disposition, he assumed, of her thoughts and feelings: voiced and unvoiced thoughts blended seamlessly, he unsure, in his own case, which was which. Had he told her about Donaldson or not?

‘You can still write. Devonshire’s proscription, or, indeed, anyone else’s, needn’t stop you. You could put it, for instance, into a book.’

Her food having been sorted to her satisfaction, she began to eat, thoughtfully, her mind, he concluded, on other things.

There was, he reflected, something tenuous in their relationship, not least the hold he’d imagined he’d had on it. Confident of his own reactions, he was, nevertheless, persuaded by her views not to deny so much as to amend them, something, with Charlotte, he’d rarely done. The inference was that she knew more and better, something, in his present state, he was inclined to go along with (the superstition surrounding psychoanalytical theory giving her an indisputable edge), he persuaded, if not seduced by her accounts not only of others’ feelings but, more seductively still, of her own: her need for a constant commentary on what was, or was not – the two mellifluously divided for examination – going on. ‘I like your smile,’ she’d told him on one occasion. ‘I’ve never seen anyone smile so thoughtfully. There’s a great deal behind it, not merely melancholy, that intrigues me. As if you’re inviting me into a space you’re anxious, for my sake, I might fill. I feel I’m being hauled in,’ she’d expanded, ‘at the end of a line. I know it’s going on, but, as you see, I’m not inclined to call a halt,’ smiling to confuse him.

He felt, in any case, disinclined to talk: he wanted time to think (an inclination to withdraw, not necessarily of a pathological origin), such conclusions he might come to, not to be separated – impossible to separate – from his being with her. With her beside him – more nearly, with her holding his hand, or holding him elsewhere, he felt free to think, or do, anything, a childlike imperative he was more than reluctant to oppose: hedonism, if of a depleted nature, dominated every aspiration.

‘Now you have an opportunity,’ she suddenly intruded, ‘to clear the ground, move on, see what might come up when everything you’ve previously been familiar with has been discounted.’

‘Therapy,’ he said, ‘in another form. Down here,’ he added, indicating the table, ‘and up there,’ indicating the ceiling, its inference of her bedroom.

‘Where therapy ends is clearly defined,’ she said, briskly. ‘On the other hand, you could say we’re constantly renegotiating where the boundaries might be …’

He heard her continue, or thought he did, his own reflections distracted, as they had been increasingly over the previous weeks by the studio window opposite. It represented, he concluded, something of his own condition, the function of the window to admit indirect light – for clarification, examination, expression – encumbered on the inside, its purpose thwarted, by vegetation, specifically climbing plants, placed there, deliberately, he assumed, along its lower edge.

The relevance he was attaching to the window echoed a state of mind he associated with himself: the problems he was confronting were ones which, by definition, warranted no solution: relevance, as opposed to indifference, was one, the evidence of the soul, as distinct from the spirit, another; the purpose of his suffering, a third; the requirement (logical, feasible, extremely practical) to do away with himself an immediate and compelling fourth. He had instinctively (without thought) given himself another chance, stymied, by his failure to recognise what ‘him’ and ‘self’, combined, might, in the best of all possible worlds, add up to (the inference of self-division), otherwise disassociated partners contentiously opposed within a single frame. He was, he realised, looking to her to identify, if not what he was, what he was becoming, an ongoing process, he assumed, which had no end. All he came up with, however, was her charismatic, impenetrable, mysterious gaze, like the light reflected from a pool, obscuring rather than revealing.

Absit omen.

Was this the source of her fascination, not her appearance nor her manner, though they were seductive enough, but the fact that he had invested in her the means of deciphering what he could no longer decipher for himself? asking her, in effect, to gaze in through the window, ignore, if not remove the encumbrance – the self-propagating accumulation of a lifetime of neglect – and describe to him (God help him) what she saw.

Such an analysis, if true, was unacceptable: he had his own resources (DV): it was up to him, the allegorical significance of the window opposite a distraction. No good looking to someone else to reverse a process, much of which, spontaneously or otherwise, he’d conjured up himself, not even her: addle-brained Maddox, aka Mad Ox, who had endeavoured to re-shape the sensibility of his time, disfiguring his own in the process – he now venturing to discover where the source of such an authority, if not within himself, might be, its voice, its imperative, still echoing in his brain: ‘all you have done, all you represent, all you think you are, is fit only to be discarded.’

A sensibility founded on his earliest experience of a motorcar, isolating its beauty from its function (an instinctive exercise), returning the machine, therein, to its rightful owners, his father, his uncle, in whose recalled appearance, the latter, he recognised a foreshadowing, curiously, of both Donaldson and Viklund.

They were sitting by the fire, the meal finished, watching the news, his arm around her, he focused not on the screen but the sheen of her stocking where it protruded from the hem of her skirt, such aesthetico-sexual sensations, associated with their relationship, something, too, he had failed to analyse, an excitation which never failed to distract him: the curve of her breast beneath the buttoned front of her dress, the shape of her hand as it enclosed his own, the two resting on his trousered knee: a conjunction of desire and reflectiveness which he had come to identify as the dominant feature of their relationship. Meanwhile, spectacularly before them, aircraft bombed, buildings (people, too, presumably) disappeared, explosions illuminated the night sky above a silhouetted city: skeletal figures passed silently before them. Finally, a dog was rescued from a hole (a reckless pursuit of a rabbit).

Transitory events foreshadowing a transitory future.

Later, in bed, he watched the moon through the muslin drape on her window, a three-quarter shape illuminating a patchwork of cloud passing across its surface, a lamp, a light, a governance of some sort, he listening to her breathing, nasal, then oral, then nasal again. Soon she would be snoring (so would he), a struggled, snarling, self-possessive sound (how remote they were from one another) which he scarcely associated with her at all, turning on his side to watch her strange, anonymous, unknown face, illuminated by the filtered light from the window, that of another creature drawn into the bed beside him, transposed by sleep into something oblivious, distant, disowning.

It had been his relationship with his mother she had focused on – been focused on – in the last appointments before her declaration, the date of which they commemorated each month, anxious for the monthly count to add up to a year. Yet his mother was a non-participatory figure, as far as he recalled, in his background, no significant emotions associated with her at all (‘perhaps that was the problem’). Overall, he had liked her, her most intimate relationship in the family inevitably with her daughter, his sister Sarah, she precociously, something of a ‘mother’ herself, solicitous of her younger brothers (‘practising’, they’d described it, for when she was older; ‘I shan’t have children,’ had been her reply, ‘you two have worn me out entirely’). He’d admired his mother: her self-possession, her composure, her ability to get things done (a prefiguring of Simone, he suspected, in this respect): the tweed suits and pork pie hat she invariably wore in public, the briskness, the compactness, the absence of extremes either in her apperànce or her manner, her accounts of school life, viewed from her position as secretary, attracted him, in retrospect, immensely, not least his memories of mealtimes, particularly the ritualistic evening affair, whenever they were home together (a Mrs Tyndal coming in to clean and cook, before, during and after the war), for him, again, in retrospect, the highlight of the day, his father’s account of the day’s adventures in the showroom and garage alternating engagingly with her own, he, on these occasions (frequent, questioned interruptions, eager, flush-faced, from his brother Paul, more measured enquiries from Sarah), drawn to the conclusion he was essentially a listener, an observer: a recorder, too, keeping a diary for much of the time, considered, by the others, an affectation, if not subversive.

In which case, with this pacific background to draw on, wherefrom his appetite for art, and a particular art, at that, something so remote from his place and time he could give no adequate account of it? Similarly, from where had he extracted, from where had arisen, a hitherto unsignalled – undiagnosed, unformalised and unsuspected – appetite not to live? in the half-light of Simone’s bedroom, holding up his hand to examine it, configurated, in that light, as if a stranger’s – not he, he reflected, lying beside Simone, or she lying beside him, but two enigmas (two problems waiting to be ‘solved’) laid unknowingly side by side.

She stirred, her head turning towards him on the pillow, the eyes still closed, the lips parted: a position of trust, each sleeping, unnerved, beside someone they scarcely knew, someone who, in his case, had conceivably ‘lost touch’ (with everything, looking to Taylor, he presumed, absurdly, to set him ‘right’: the privilege, the authoritative task of evil). So much for sleep, and anticipation, his nerves – his hand was shaking – on edge; so much for relaxation; so much for what had taken place only moments after getting into bed, a prolonged, sustained encounter where sensuality rather than sensibility, or reflection, had played its exclusive part.

What he hadn’t faced up to was his sectioning (something definitive, overly definitive, in his life at last), something of which he was sensationally ashamed and inclined, at first instant, to deny. Nor had he faced up to his mother’s death, an event precipitating the first, though, at the time, he’d considered it to have little, if anything, to do with it. Preceding that, of course, had been the measured decline of his previous powers – measured, that is, in the ascendancy of Charlotte, of his sons, of almost everyone he knew.

He’d been standing on the northbound platform of Camden Town tube station, intending to walk on Hampstead Heath, when, as the train came in, he’d been seized by what, afterwards, he had described, vividly, as a giant hand. Flung towards the line, he had caught the edge of the driver’s cab and been hurled backwards across the platform. Moments later a face was gazing down, joined by others: he was raised towards the curved surface of the ceiling, the motion continuing, the ceiling, however, drawing no nearer. He resented, and was alarmed by, terrifyingly, the intrusion of others, his mind, curiously, occupied by the one speculation: has this been enough?

Moments – days, hours – previous to that, it seemed, he had been with his mother. She was, in this recollection, lying in a bed, her face unrecognisable from the one he knew, the cheeks drawn in, the mouth, devoid of teeth, wide open.

She was sucking at the air, the suction of her lungs producing a gurgling sound inside her throat.

A cylinder had been positioned by her neck, a tube, running from it, disappearing inside the collar of her nightdress.

A shrivelled, cadaverous creature whom he was willing to die.

Paul, his brother, and Sarah had been and gone, they work and other responsibilities to respond to, he sitting there until he could bear the waiting no longer, getting up, crossing the ward from the alcove where she was lying, and descending the stairs to the hospital entrance.

Passing a stall beside the reception desk, he saw a pile of writing pads and a box of pencils. Buying one of the pads and two of the pencils, along with a pencil sharpener, he returned upstairs to the ward.

Earlier, he had distracted himself by making words from the name of the nurse written on a board in the alcove, opposite the bed: Liebermann, regretting he hadn’t a pen or a pencil to write them down, recollecting the list as best he could in order to distract himself from the labouring of the figure beside him: the stentorian breathing which, at intervals, faltered, he assuming, at one point, she might be dying, at another, when the breath was suspended for several seconds, amounting, he guessed, to more than a minute, concluding she had died, feeling the relief that the struggle was over, only, with a staggered intake, a resistant gurgle, for the breathing to be resumed.

At intervals the nurse had come in, felt his mother’s pulse and, with a nod, departed. Now, however, sitting beside her, he began, laboriously, to draw her face, sketchily at first, page after page until, his confidence growing, despite his lack of skill, the figures, the faces of The Deposition in the Capella Scrovegni vividly in mind, he was drawing not only her face but her head, the caverned eyes, the protuberant nose with its flaring nostrils, sucking at the air, the chasm of her mouth, gasping, grasping, almost biting at the air, the gurgling in her throat, her snores increasing.

The disarray of her hair against the pillow, prongs of it projected across her brow, white, brittle, dishevelled, like strands of wire.

At one point her eyes had opened: a bleared examination of the room before her, the drowsy shifting of the pupils in his direction and, having registered his presence in the chair, the eyelids lowered, mechanically, stiffly, tiny apertures remaining, filling at intervals with liquid which, with his handkerchief, leaning forward, he wiped away.

Then, his drawing finished – completed, satiated – feeling he could draw no more, he had left, driving home, St Albans to London, the telephone ringing as he arrived, he lifting it to hear his sister’s voice announce that the hospital had rung to tell her that, not long after his departure, their mother had died. ‘I’m constantly going, not arriving, when the moment comes,’ he said, unable at that instant, at his sister’s enquiry, to understand what he had meant.

After the incident on the tube station platform he had come to in an observation room: a bed and a chair were screwed to the floor. A window, high in the wall, its sill level with his chin, was, he discovered, similarly secured.

In the centre of the door was a glass panel: it offered a view of the corridor outside and of the upper two-thirds of any watching or passing figure. He had wept; he had wept a great deal, having little if anything else to do. Several times a day and occasionally, if he were awake, at night someone had unlocked the door and asked him how he was. He had no clothes: one side of his body, his chest and – or so it felt like – his back, were severely bruised. No bones, he’d been assured, were broken.

Much of the time he stared at his legs, at his feet, at his arms, at his abdomen. He was, he’d told himself, complete, an indivisible hole, his hands held before him to measure how far they might reach; nothing was extraneous; his flesh occupied a space he could legitimately call his own: his limbs reached to what was neither him nor his. Otherwise, he’d concluded, the whole of space eluded him.

At intervals he’d been given a bath: he’d noticed from time to time how his smell (he presumed it was his smell) dominated the room: someone stood over him, invariably foreign, male (circumspect, aloof): jeans and trainers; a vaguely athletic figure. He’d been an athlete once himself, hence his awareness of his body, of its potential and excesses: a decent, enquiring (‘Are you all right?’), empirically minded sort of chap (much like himself), the kind who, quite reasonably, he might have encountered on the moon, coming out of a crater to shake his hand as, confused and apprehensive, he descended from his rocket, he the representative of another time, another space, one he could legitimately call his own, not the one he had left for – disowning the one he had left behind.

He’d asked for a transplant, a suggestion made to him by a fellow patient. Acceding to his wishes, they’d put him to sleep, he waking to enquire if the process were complete: everything, he’d concluded, was down to him, someone whose face was growing increasingly familiar appearing at the door, glancing in – entering, on occasion, casualness (familiarity) characterising his manner, enquiring, ‘How are you, old fellow?’ as he might of a child or a dog.

‘Have I been transplanted?’ he’d asked, adding, ‘Is the machinery in place?’ convinced, if they had, they would never tell. ‘The same old, reliable matter,’ they said, touching his arm, his shoulder, his head. ‘I prefer absolution,’ he told them. ‘A question of habit, of custom,’ holding on to that which existed at the conjunction of his legs. ‘Without a past, the very next instant is with us now,’ he’d said.

He’d been moved (invited) to ‘Death’s Head Valley’, so inscribed on a door by an institutionalised hand, most of the day and all of the night subdued by a drug whose name he knew but could never pronounce (endeavouring to do so to Charlotte, several times, and once to Gerry – smiling, cheerful, full of bounce – and, more often, to his sons, to Paul, to Sarah). ‘The hole of what I am,’ he said, each time, explaining, days passing.

From ‘Sleepers Only’ he’d been moved (no invitation) to ‘Sometimes Awake’, the night-time grimaces, the groans, the sighs. ‘When I recover (when I recover) I shall be restrained. The drugs are speaking,’ he often announced, the recollection of his relatively recent past coming to him – lying in Simone’s bed, at this point – with unexpected force, wave after wave of excitation, spasm after spasm erupting in the darkness, he on the point of waking her up, the vibration of his body something he couldn’t control.

Helplessness, a recurring feature of his recent illness, appeared, paradoxically, to take charge of his system: a chemical outrage (amongst the structures inside his skull), his recollection of Kavanagh’s ‘No one knows the causes, though many, unfortunately, profess to do so,’ something Simone (and others) had taken exception to, her objections, however, never defined, increasing the sensation this was ‘something’ that had little, if anything, to do with ‘him’, an internalised storm which otherwise, quite easily, might have been experienced – probably had been – by someone else: spectated, that is, not suffered ‘here’.

Instead, convulsions focused around his abdomen, emanating, seemingly, from his stomach, a visceral evacuation which brought him upright in bed, assured that a previous, curled position, foetal in shape, could not subdue or contain it.

He was standing on the roof, looking across and between the moonlit chimneys, the distant phalanx of lights which indicated London a reflected, ochreish glow on the underside of the clouds. The coldness of the air revived him, as did the flagstones against his bare feet, his arms wrapped, vibratingly, around his chest. Inside, convulsions had given way to tremoring, stillness finally returning, a sense of isolation – a solitariness heightened when he raised his head and, looking elsewhere than at the now faded light, recognised the star shapes to the north and west: the Great Bear, the North Star, the navigational incubus of his early life, looking out from the dormitory windows, ‘into the past’, forgetful of how far back in time he was.

Then, like a ghost, she drifted out of the door leading onto the roof, bare-footed, too, wraith-like, her face re-formulated, yet again, by shadow, extending her arms, taking him to her, he aware of the warmth of her body, and of how cold, in his nightclothes, he was.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Sure.’

‘I felt you get up.’

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you,’ he said, adding, ‘Shakey,’ as she took his hand, held it to the light, watched it vibrating, her fingers gripping his wrist: the release of his hand, the tightening of her embrace, drawing him once more against her.

And fear, a residual dread which, despite his distractions, despite her, rarely left him: a trajectory of himself, out into the stars: yet here, flushed, the insinuating benevolence of her voice, its intention to reassure him: despite the darkness, despite something intolerable going on for ever, she, he, it, they were here, there, somewhere, he absorbed at that instant by the fragrance of her skin.