7

He’d visited the prison on several occasions, a peculiar situation when he’d been written to by a former Quinians schoolfriend: the Bastillian severity of its walls looming over the streets in north-east London, the gate within a gate designed, perversely, it seemed, to oblige the visitor to lower their head: the crossing from the gatehouse to a taller building, within which, along with the other visitors, he was shown to a room divided by what looked like cattle stalls, his friend coming in from one side, he shown to a seat in a cubicle on the other.

The introductory declaration by his friend he hadn’t forgotten, his rage on discovering Maddox had brought no cigarettes, the sole purpose, it was explained, of his visit, he at the time preoccupied by thoughts of loyalty, allegiance, confederacy: the past.

Disengaged, he had listened to his friend’s account of being ‘fitted up’, this unbelievable appeal followed by a request that Maddox find a psychiatrist who would plead on his friend’s behalf. ‘Another month in here and I’ll be completely off my head,’ the baleful and wholly credible glare through the grille in the wooden panel: someone, this, whom he had liked at school, one of four brothers varyingly described as Major, Major-Minor, Minor, Mini-Minor (Minor-Minimus for a fifth brother due later) to the amusement of their peers, he, Major-Minor, an enthusiast at sport, something dislodged, however – evidently still dislodgeable – in his nature, inclined aimlessly to ignore convention, rules, enclosure or discipline of any kind, a burly, precociously muscled youth for whom Mad Ox had seemed a suitable partner. Failing to reappear at the end of school holidays – accounts of a voyage as a deckhand on a tanker bound for the Persian Gulf – he had finally been removed by his parents and sent to a naval college, their parting, for Maddox, at least, a memorable event, he bound for orthodoxy, his friend for something, imaginably, more rumbustious (a mark of failure, on his own behalf, in Maddox’s mind at the time).

Then, later, came the letter, followed, when he responded, by a warrant licensing one visit, their peculiar confrontation in something not unlike a cattle stall, his friend’s familiar features coarsened, as if, internally, the mind behind them had been torn apart, a leering, savage, reproachful stare, that of an animal pinioned in a cage, replacing the helpless, hapless, engaging fecklessness of the former Quinians youth, the cigarettes, the absence of, a seemingly considered provocation. Everyone, evidently, was a criminal, living, one way or another, off others, he, his friend, more honest than most: ‘You haven’t painted the fucking pictures, you just make money from writing about the fuckers who have,’ Major-Minor minor no longer, having written to him via the newspaper in which his first reviews had appeared, he, Maddox, surprised that such a publication should have been available in prison. ‘I steal from the insurers, not individuals,’ Maddox’s incredulous, ‘But who do the insurers charge for the thefts? Me and the rest of the community,’ adding, ‘You cunt,’ to reinforce his declaration.

He’d felt sorry for, finally pained by, his friend’s delinquency, unable, he decided, to challenge it further on a subsequent visit (‘No one else wants to come. My wife’s sold our flat and all my possessions and pissed off to Spain’), he handing over a permissible carton of cigarettes, listening, grieved, to further justifications of his friend’s decline (‘more honest than most’), his friend’s anger reignited when Maddox announced the name of the psychiatrist he had, after a great deal of enquiry, discovered: ‘He’s bent, for fuck’s sake. Every court in the fucking country knows him. He’ll get me years on not off,’ adding, to reciprocate Maddox’s previous reproach, ‘you cunt.’

By request, he had met his friend at the prison gates on the day, years later, of his release, a considerably reduced figure dressed in a dishevelled suit on a winter morning. Rain was falling. He’d bought him a meal and, on request, had given him money, finally a cheque: ‘I could change this easily to make it a hundred.’ ‘Why don’t you?’ he’d responded, ‘there’s less than fifty in the account.’ He had had two further, summary encounters with his former chum before he had once again disappeared, only the memory, of something uncompleted, unresolved, removed, remaining, a legacy which, subliminally, he suspected, he carried over into his meeting with Taylor.

Perhaps because of the severity of the sentence, and the conditions under which Taylor was now held, he was shown, after a great deal of scrutiny – electronic and otherwise – into a featureless room furnished with two canvas-seated chairs on either side of a plastic table, a uniformed figure remaining inside the door. Taylor, whom he didn’t recognise, had entered in his shirtsleeves, his collar open, a pale, curiously bloated figure with prematurely greying hair, taking his seat on one side of the table without glancing at Maddox at all.

It was as if he were waiting to be assessed, a vestige here of the Taylor he’d known, but so recessive that he, too, sat in silence, his defences, his prospective defences, disarmed.

His former student had been of a stocky, broad, almost round-shouldered build, exuding a sense of physical strength (stoicism, even), an archetypal, to Maddox’s then tutorial mind, farm-labourer (he gave evidence of having worked as such), a rural mechanic of some sort: a figure resonant of an assured, two-footed emplacement on the earth (conspicuous amongst the aesthetes who dominated the Drayburgh at that time, Donaldson later to be included), stolid, truculent, fresh-faced, his cheeks shiny, his full lips red, the eyes filled with a stark, unquestioning fervour: something provincial, if not parochial, evoking the sense of an enclosed community, belligerently indisposed, if for good reason, to the world outside, unmannered, reluctant to be approached directly, brusque, suspicious, recalcitrant – other than in a response to painting, an elemental, if not devotional exercise (the one window opening, Maddox had reflected at the time, on an otherwise dark enclosure): passionate, injured, curiously modest, warm.

Maddox, distracted by the morose figure by whom he was confronted, glanced up at the uniformed figure inside the door, he, too, without a jacket, his shirted arms folded across his chest, a protuberant gut – and was conscious of the similarity to Taylor’s own appearance, dark trousers, white shirt, as if one were a parody of the other, each involved in an overt if conspiratorial alliance. His immediate response, if unexpressed, had been to suggest he’d been brought the wrong prisoner, Taylor, a relatively common name: how many were there in the prison: how long would it take to sift the right one out?

The silence, which he wasn’t disinclined to let continue, was broken by a door clanging in the corridor outside, followed by the sound of voices. ‘That one’s occupied’: the retreating sound of footsteps on a stone-flagged floor.

‘I didn’t know if you smoked,’ Maddox said, reminded of his previous experience of a first-time visit. ‘I brought some cigarettes which I’ve been asked to leave outside.’

Taylor raised his head, his eyes, dark-rimmed, flickering in Maddox’s direction, taking him in, swiftly, then glancing away.

‘Are we allowed to shake hands?’

Taylor didn’t answer: neither did the warder respond, his gaze, abstracted yet nevertheless alert, fixed on the cream-painted brick wall behind Maddox’s back.

Drawing up his chair, Maddox placed his arms companionably on the table, Taylor, for his part, sitting with his chair pushed back. His hair, previously dark and thick, was now thinning, with flashes of white at the temples. The sensitised, almost parochial look had vanished, something pained, hesitant, unreflective taking its place. The previously sturdy, ingenuous features, too, had gone, the nose alone, curiously, retaining the sensitivity of the student of fifteen years before: the experience of wife, children, job – disillusionment and terror, too, Maddox assumed – had produced a thickening of the brow, the cheeks, the chin, a dark, vertical line, like an incision, dividing the shifty, hesitant, averted eyes. It was as if Taylor were signalling he wished he hadn’t come. As it was, he’d been prepared not only for a more confrontational encounter but a more explicit one, something of a more spirited nature, a vestige of what had passed contentiously between them as student and tutor. Rather than diminished by what had happened, Taylor appeared to be enlarged, if not enhanced, almost, Maddox reflected, complacently so, as though the recent past had returned him to the way things were, or ought to have been, he back with the people, and in the place, where he truly belonged, and from which the Drayburgh had unfortunately divided him. A childlike submissiveness pinned him to the chair, his hands, fisted, thrust in his armpits, an image of resistance and self-enclosure. At any moment Maddox expected him to enquire of his wife and children, specifically of Rebecca, as though she and he, Maddox, were the cause of his current discomfort, Maddox increasingly aware of his own actions, splaying his fingers, unaccountably, on the table before him, as if to indicate to Taylor he had nothing to hide. What curious behaviour for both of us, he thought, concluding at the same time it was up to him to break the pattern (a residual tutor’s role). The enormity of what had happened, placing Taylor beyond humanity, or so it seemed, stood between them like an invisible wall. What am I feeling? he asked himself. What sensation do I associate with this unusual encounter? Is it me he wished to see or someone else? conscious of the warranty that had brought him here: his own attempt to kill himself. In no time at all, he reflected, the meeting would be over and nothing would have been said.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he said, recalling a similar (disastrous) offer made to his Quinians friend.

Taylor shook his head, the first direct acknowledgement he’d given, the gesture not unlike that of someone flicking hair or water out of their eyes, a degree of containment, exasperation, irritation. Feelings of a more dynamic nature were being entertained behind that dark, recessive gaze, inflaming, discomforting, vengeful.

‘Have you kept any other contact with the Drayburgh?’ he enquired, prompting Taylor, reminding him that the invitation for the visit had come from him. They’d sat in a not dissimilar room – smaller but almost equally spartan – on many occasions in the past: the tutor room next to the sculpture studios in the basement of the Drayburgh – discussing, he recalled, Taylor’s essays on his then favoured theme, the return to naturalism – ‘poetic naturalism’ – from the iconographic formalities of the earlier half of the century, likening it to the emergence of the same in Florentine trecento painting: something of a precocious analogy but curiously – dismayingly – dated now. Yet something echoed, if in reverse, in Taylor’s own emergence from provincial life into the vitality of London. Life was first lived, and then endured, had been implicit in much of Taylor’s attitude at that time, allied to a voracious appetite to survive. So much of his past, if revoked (‘I don’t want it’), was only to be introduced at his discretion: marriage, children – the Drayburgh: his enquiry was met by the same dismissive flick of the head.

‘Would you like me to stay?’ Maddox concluding he’d leave the cigarettes and go, a relief to both of them, he imagined.

The warder’s eyes came down to scrutinise, with interest, the back of Taylor’s head, and then, momentarily, examined Maddox’s enquiring expression.

‘Is there anything I can get you?’ he asked again. ‘A book. Paints. Pencils. Paper. Ink,’ and then, more forcefully, ‘Is there anything you’d like to talk about?’ the Florentine revolution compromised by recent Roman discoveries passing briefly through his mind.

‘Rebecca talked about you,’ Taylor said, turning his head to meet Maddox’s gaze as if he, Maddox, were the prisoner – a peculiar, penetrative insight – and he the visitor.

‘They were formative times for us all,’ Maddox said.

Removing his hands from his armpits, Taylor lowered them to the table: cupped, they lay there like offerings, or potential containers, a curious sense of displacement, of removal, almost of disowning (there they are, here I am: they have nothing to do with me), Maddox recalling, with a shock, they were the instruments of something which might no longer be mentioned. The nails, he observed, were black, as if he had been digging, scraping, excavating earth: a subterranean sensation caused the hair at the back of his neck to stiffen.

‘It’s true. You had a great influence on all of us,’ Taylor said, lightly, derisively, disowning the claim as swiftly as he presented it.

‘And you on me,’ Maddox said, unwilling to let the challenge pass.

‘How was that?’ The recessed, dark-rimmed eyes were starkly alert. He should be pleased I’m even speaking to him, Maddox thought, withdrawing the speculation the instant he was aware of it.

‘Invariably you learn as much, if not more, from your students as they do, ideally,’ he said, ‘from you. No doubt you found that, too, as a teacher.’

‘To take advantage of it, though, is reprehensible,’ Taylor swiftly responded.

‘So it is.’

It was as if he were seeing Taylor from a distance; or, as if the once familiar but now foreign figure were retreating across the room, beyond the wall, beyond the prison, to a place he, Maddox, didn’t know, a curious displacement of the present occurring, as if neither of them were confined by or in the room at all.

Yet there it was: a presence of colossal, almost superhuman proportions, Maddox aware of the likeness of this sensation to that which he associated with the tube station platform: fear, of a similar nature, gripped the centre of his body, as if once again he were enclosed by the fingers of a gigantic hand, aware of a surge of anger, even triumph – ascendancy of some sort – in Taylor’s eyes as he examined him more keenly, threateningly, across the table.

‘If there’s something you’d specifically like to say I’d prefer you to come out with it,’ Maddox said, sinking under the look, returning, bleakly, he assumed, to his role of tutor – adviser, outside agent, a representative of an authority that exceeded himself, holding Taylor’s gaze, his own hands, he noticed, spread-eagled more firmly across the surface of the table, bracing himself for an assault, of a physical nature, from the other side.

‘I’m in the medical wing,’ Taylor said, inconsequentially, withdrawing. ‘Somewhat better than a cell. Particularly if you have to share.’

‘Is there anything you need?’ he asked again. ‘Anything,’ he went on, ‘you’d like to tell me?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Taylor said, capitulation, of some sort, taking place. ‘I could swap them. Screws allowing.’ Turning his head, half smiling, he indicated the figure at the door: if anything, its attention had grown more acute. Conceivably, Maddox reflected, Taylor was feinting before he struck again: a not unexpected sense of desolation appeared to grip them both. ‘Probably,’ he suddenly went on, ‘it was not a good idea asking you to come.’

‘You must have had something in mind,’ he said.

‘Persona non grata, I should think, wondering if the persona and the grata were still in place.’

‘Evidently so,’ Maddox said, relieved at the invitation.

‘I gave up painting years ago.’ Taylor paused. ‘I followed your writing. Rebecca didn’t. Follow it.

‘Why not?’

‘She didn’t like you.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said.

He waited, too.

‘Could have cost you your job.’

‘It could.’

‘Screwing students.’ Taylor smiled, eerily: his teeth, conspicuously white at one time, were discoloured. The whites of the eyes, too, were reddened: no doubt against his wishes he’d been sedated. His smile, moments later, turned into a grimace. ‘You old enough to be her father.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Nowadays of no account.’

‘That’s true also,’ he responded.

‘You went on, of course, all right.’

‘I did.’ He was about to add, ‘and so did she,’ but swiftly amended, ‘She was capable of making her own decision.’

It was, he realised, a bold intrusion: looking up at the warder he recognised someone vividly, antagonistically alert: someone, he assumed, indisposed to both of them. He regretted Taylor, his back to him, couldn’t see the reaction.

‘Capable, but not necessarily in a position to do so,’ Taylor said, calm suddenly, articulate.

‘And,’ Maddox went on, recklessly, ‘you didn’t have to marry her.’

Taylor considered this: ‘marry’ and ‘murder’, phonetically, were not that far apart: at any moment, alarmed by his stillness, the sudden evenness of expression, Maddox imagined him leaning across the table, dislodging it, grasping his throat: no reason to hold back. I am not responsible for this situation, he reflected.

‘She married me. I didn’t marry her,’ Taylor finally responded, the evenness of tone remaining.

‘She asked you to?’ he said, the heat at the back of his neck increasing. Was Taylor implying she was pregnant? That the first of her children was his? The absurdity of this caused him to tighten his pressure on the table, endeavouring, or so it felt, to force its surface down.

The dates of the child, he recalled, didn’t match.

‘It was her decision,’ Taylor said. ‘I went along with it. We didn’t have to, but she thought we should. As you probably remember, she was determined if not impetuous by nature.’

‘Yes.’ He waited, Taylor still examining him, aloofly, across the table.

‘In reality,’ Taylor went on, ‘I’m not really here.’

Maddox waited again.

‘What you see here I call P.G.’

‘P.G.?’

‘Putative Ghost.’ A coarsened expression crossed Taylor’s face, calculated, Maddox reflected, consciously presented. ‘I’m watched continuously.’ He indicated, without turning, the warder behind his back.

For his part, the warder stirred, shifting the weight on his feet: the whiteness of his shirt, the darkness of the tie, the neat line of the sleeve above the elbow: a young, dispassionate, bony face, the forehead and the cheeks prominent, the eyes alert, the previously abstract look displaced by one of enquiry, the mouth, thin-lipped, arrested in a grimace.

‘Giotto I pray to each night. God. Something along those lines. Two G’s. A freakshow here, otherwise. One I have to attend to. Inattention not allowed. There’s a lot I’d like to ask.’

The request came suddenly and, rather than responding, Maddox waited. He was reflecting much himself, not on Taylor, his current or his previous relationship with him, but on the peculiar way he himself had abandoned his life, or endeavoured to do so, here as good a place as any to discover how far, to this extent, he had succeeded, not so much Taylor as the place itself a marker. A feeling of disillusionment, pronounced on his arrival, had strengthened: it only needed a signal from the warder for his own confinement to be confirmed: so much had he done to deserve it, so much was he doing to add to that conviction. No longer could he see any reason why he shouldn’t be locked up as well.

‘She focused much of her life on you. A prescient signal, I told her.’ Taylor’s calmness of voice remained: he was invoking something of the mood, the tone, of their tutorials and might well have been reading notes he’d already made. ‘He has his wife, his sons. He has his acclaim. I did much, at that time, to defend you. There was much of value, I told her, to preserve. He has done much for me as well, I said. Those eyes. Have you ever seen such eyes? The eyes of Saint Peter betraying Jesus.’

The warder was examining the back of Taylor’s head: raising his arm, he glanced at his watch: some, if not much of this, his manner suggested, he had heard before.

‘The living dead,’ Taylor went on. ‘Which is where we are at present.’ His cupped hands now he held together, the grimy nails conspicuous. ‘For which offence, you might say, to make redress, he was crucified upside down. One up on Christ! If his crucifixion was one to write home about, what about poor Pete? See how far we’ve come! One up, too, you might say, on Jehovah.’

Maddox, recalling his own past, was contrasting the youth he had known with the figure he was confronting now: the bright provincial with his unlikely passion for something that had happened in Florence, in Padua, in Assisi six hundred or more years before: the sagacity, the weight, the density – the probity, the anguish – the intensity of those muralled figures, gazing out, their horizontally configurated, shadowed eyes, as if, Taylor had suggested at the time, from Plato’s cave.

Reality at last! they cried.

‘Executing murals for a living comes very close,’ Taylor intruded on his thoughts, ‘to executing something, or even someone else. What do you think, Herr Professor?’

It was, he concluded, as if indeed they were back in the tutor room: the same confinement, the same bleakness (functional at the Drayburgh, something other here), the same scuffling feet outside the door. Only different was the emanation summoned by the place and the two of them together, Taylor unaware, presumably, of the nature of the effect he was having, Maddox considering whether he might tell him of his recent difficulties, not least of the event precipitating his sectioning, and the nature of the experience associated with that.

‘I’m inclined to see us as equals, rather than as tutor and student,’ he said, aimlessly, unable to penetrate or decipher Taylor’s increasingly hostile expression. Even that, he reflected, was aimless, as if, having prepared one text for their encounter, Taylor was substituting another: retribution, of a sort, had been displaced by a memory of something else: an allegiance, even a confederacy, surviving over all these years, as if both were embarked on a common cause.

‘I intended, at some point, to take up painting again,’ Taylor said, leaning back, the chair creaking beneath his weight, his hands, still clasped, falling into his lap. ‘It’s been suggested. An atmosphere not unlike the Drayburgh, wouldn’t you say? Apart from the dances, the dinners, the parties. The Drayburgh hostel. Self-portraits, I thought, might be my line. Not who you paint, or how, but what. Necessary, of course, to have an agent. On the outside. I thought of you. Do a favour. Remember the advice you gave me, from time to time? “Don’t make your essays too personal.” Struck me hard. Viklund as well. Those lectures. Questions he avoided, I thought, at the time. In reality, questions to which there aren’t any answers. Absurd, when we’re born with the facility to enquire, to be met, at the end of the day, by nothing but silence. A dysfunction built into the system, I’d say. “This is not autobiography”, another of your remarks. Personality all the go, now, of course. Before my time.’

The skin had lightened on Taylor’s forehead, the furrow deepening between his eyes, expectation and resignation flickering, alternately, in his expression, a shadowed, angered, beaten look, Maddox’s feelings of remorse, and identification, increasing. Helplessness of a new sort at Taylor’s helplessness intensified. Gratuitous involvement, he reminded himself, not required: keep the horror of what’s happened in mind.

A dominant and domineering expression, as a result, appeared to take possession of Taylor’s features, he leaning further back from the table, surveying Maddox down the length of his nose: a guarded look, withdrawn, circumspect, less inviting judgement than providing it.

‘Though I recall, too, you discouraging me from painting, suggesting I apply for the Courtauld. Encouraging me,’ he went on, ‘to follow your example. Even invoked Pemberton, on your behalf, the two of you together. Methuselah, for Christ’s sake. On the other hand, you’ll not know what it’s like, painting yourself to death. An exercise I’ve resisted all these years. The monumentality, for instance, of all those figures …’

The whiteness of Taylor’s forehead gave way to a redness which extended upwards from his collar, across his neck, his cheeks, reaching the fringes of his thinning, brushed-back hair: Maddox was confronting not the grown man but a sullen, swollen replica of the student, the virginal, agrarian look, distorted and malformed.

‘There was a surgical element involved I didn’t appreciate at the time,’ Taylor went on. ‘Di Bardone had a problem, wouldn’t you say, in the way he incised those ocular expressions? When I pointed it out you said you rather liked it. The reference, I mean. Weren’t you called Mad Ox at school? That, too, I recall. A tutorial confidence, a tutorial confession. Confession and confidence being much to the fore. In both of us.’ He paused, before adding, ‘Mr Tutor,’ paused again, and went on, watching Maddox intensely, ‘Those cars, for instance. How you drew a distinction between aesthetics and function. I thought that aesthetical, too. Preciously so. “Art has no purpose”, one of your maxims. Though it might reasonably be described, I would have thought, as useful. Impressed me, however, at the time, no end. What else has no purpose? I mentally enquired. Almost everything, I concluded. Mythology, on my part. Evidently not on yours. The New Philistine Agenda. Quite a thing. Read up on it, of course, every week you wrote. The whole of the second half of the century given over to the very thing! Art up its own arsehole, so to speak. Wonderful! Somebody who can sum it up. The omnipotent eye. God praise to that fellow from – where was it? – St Albans! You and Viklund, who, the latter, wanted no part of it. Confined himself to history. Wily old man! How is he? Still around?’ not waiting for Maddox to respond before concluding, ‘Maddox, I thought, at least the real thing!’

Maddox leant back, exchanging glances once more with the warder; perhaps he too stood in awe of Taylor’s situation: Taylor who, once his antagonism had been expressed, was inclined to talk of, if not transpose it to other things. Something Maddox could recognise in the light of his recent experience: a suspension of grace, of forgiveness, looking to Taylor to inform him of how things were on the other side (is hell as bad as they make out? he could guarantee that, of course, himself). Yet, the other side of what? Lunacy, he reflected, unlike his own, of a permanent nature, beyond hope, beyond forgiveness, beyond atonement, Taylor a correspondent from a kingdom that parodied his own. Or was it, he reflected, the other way around? a state of mind, certainly, into which, helplessly, despite advice and medication, despite even love (‘love is not enough’) he felt he was being drawn, Taylor an emissary, too, beyond – far beyond (his ultimate horror) the reach of anyone.

No difference, in that case, between them, he examining yet again the changes in his former pupil’s face, a Faustian regression summoned up, he concluded, from his fevered imagination.

‘Who else has been to see you?’ he asked, the collateral of the past, he was suggesting, available to both of them, the most significant event of all, the greatest divide between them, the crime itself.

Taylor had shaken his head: intrusion of this sort, at least, he could no longer complain about.

‘Is this your only visit?’

‘Naturally.’ He waved his hand. ‘My parents, fortunately, are dead. My brother and my sister have both been once. Even an uncle. Other than that, no one. You were the last I could think of. Pemberton wouldn’t want to include me in his c.v. I thought you, on the other hand, might feel an obligation. Knowing both of us,’ he added. ‘Intimately, in one case.’ A moment later, he added, ‘I’ve been told I’ll be killed by the other cons. Murdering peers okay. Murdering minors, not.’ He shrugged, bringing his body back to the table.

‘I thought I’d make an experiment. As relevant, pace experiments, as any other. An experimental age, you could say. A unique, artistic enterprise involving not mineral and vegetational elements, but human flesh and blood. How to live the unliveable, surely of interest, at the very least, to succeeding generations, as the race as a whole plunges off, vocationally, into, if not the unknown, extinction. An enterprise on a scale unprecedented in our time. A paradigm, I thought, outparadigming every other. Something unique, at least, in that. Something you alone might appreciate. Record it in a book. How you like. A series in your paper. Television. Film. Any manner of forms, though the content, as with all art, remains the same. In this instance, you could say, the subject is the human condition, but expressed in an unprecedented manner. At least, something rarely, if ever, done. Certainly not with this degree of deliberation. Such consciousness involved. Someone trained, by masters, you might say, in observation and expression. An art consistent with the times. Surely, with this degree of awareness, never considered, let alone done before.’

The warder, once more, had glanced at his watch: shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and back again, he examined, stolidly, frankly, blankly, Maddox’s reaction: curiosity, finally, as much as anything, as if to enquire, ‘What do you make of that?’

‘I gave up painting some time ago. A belated acknowledgement of your suggestion. Teaching scarcely left me any time for it. The headmaster wrote to me the other day asking if there was anything I wanted. What he would describe as a humanitarian gesture. One of the teachers, an art teacher, a woman, might come. A colleague, and humanist, too. Sent me messages before and after the trial. I never replied to them. In no mind to. Out of it, at the time, and afterwards …’ He waved one arm, in a gesture reminiscent of Viklund. ‘With you I thought there’d be an incentive. In at the beginning, since you knew us both. As if, having been your student, I’m looking to you for an explanation. Something as imbecilic as that. Otherwise, as I say, a twenty-first-century version of a hitherto unconceived twenty-first-century art. Vasari’s Vasari, ahead of your time.’

He smiled, to expose once again his seemingly neglected teeth: a sudden warmth went out to him from Maddox, unpremeditated, unexpected, unconsidered, as much to do with grief as guilt, a warmth for someone beyond the reach of consolation, beyond the reach of anything that might possibly be imagined: ‘the end of everything’: the phrase came to mind, something coincidental with the feelings he associated with his recent past – relevant now to someone he’d known, someone he’d admired, someone who had promised much (someone he’d taught), someone he’d been partly instrumental in destroying, in putting where he was.

‘I don’t think this adds up to much. To you, I mean,’ Taylor said, watching him intensely.

‘It adds up to a great deal,’ he said. ‘Though I couldn’t put a word, or words, to it.’

‘All that count are facts. Isn’t that what you used to say?’ A moment later, as Maddox shook his head, he added, ‘At least, it’s someone to speak to. Here I can’t describe it.’

‘I’ll come again,’ he said, ‘if you like.’

‘Let me think about it,’ Taylor said. ‘It may do more harm than good. Raising expectation,’ he added. ‘Though of what I’ve no idea.’

It was, Maddox felt, as if he were divesting himself of a child, one without protection of any kind, both the expression and victim of an otherwise inexpressible force, a feeling which bled into his own experience of the previous months, particularly that experience which medication was endeavouring to appease.

Taylor got up from the table, the warder, startled, stepping forward.

His wrists, curiously, held together, Taylor turned to the door; perhaps, for an instant, he had thought of adding something else but, without glancing back, he waited for the door to be opened, then preceded the warder out.

Some moments later a second uniformed figure appeared, glancing in enquiringly at Maddox who, having risen, was still standing by the table. Getting no response from him, the warder enquired, ‘Shall I show you out?’ indicating the corridor, waiting for Maddox to step before him.

Outside the main gate he paused: the traffic flowed by beyond a parapet: an aircraft lumbered overhead. Rain was falling: it hissed on the cobbled precinct leading to the gate. He pulled his raincoat on, recalled the inquisitive faces of the warders stationed inside and glanced back at the walls. Something implacable, conveyed by the height and texture of the stone, echoed something similarly featured within himself, something uncherished, unlovable, merciless, antipathetic to everything he might otherwise, before his visit, have cared about. Fear, which had preceded his arrival, and which had been revived during his visit, was vividly reignited.

Thrusting his hands in his pockets he walked away, his head bowed, enduring the curious sensation not that he was leaving the building behind but that he was taking a vital part of it with him, reluctant to look behind him to dissuade himself, breaking, finally, into a run, deciding not to travel back on the tube but to take a bus, anything to avoid going, once more, beneath the ground, anything to avoid reliving what had been, and, he presumed, still was, an ungovernable desire to do away with himself.

The rain had lightened as he reached the house, his fatigue, however, increasing. He no longer knew what to make of Taylor. He recollected how he himself had splayed his fingers on the surface of the plastic table, wondering at the gesture, as if signalling he might leave at any moment, the preliminary movement to departure, or, conversely, a sign he was growing increasingly attached to being where he was.

What he couldn’t recall was at what point he had removed his hands, for towards the end he had been sitting, obliviously at the time and only now remembered, with them in his lap. It was as if the unimaginable in their lives had gone by default, life, as he’d experienced it at that moment, a process of extinction, in his case by his own hand – in the case of Taylor, also by his own hand; signalling, however, at the end of the interview, as Maddox had understood it, that what he had done he’d done on behalf of others, an inexorable and unavoidable exercise.

‘Mad.’ He’d spoken aloud, shrugged, and endeavoured to dismiss the thought. ‘Not knowing what I think,’ he’d gone on, still aloud, ‘until I hear it, or write it down,’ sitting in the kitchen, desperate for the company, the presence, the comment of Simone, picking up a pen from the table, extracting an already written-on sheet of paper from one of several piles scattered on the table top, and writing, ‘Taylor’, crossing it out, substituting ‘Eric’, pausing before continuing, ‘are you invoking amnesia? A desire to eradicate what can’t be faced is, I have to tell you, common to us both, if, in my case, at a singularly lesser level …’

He’d put the pen down: they were both attempting, if disinclined, to talk about something which could scarcely be spoken about: no language, no image: not simply a handing-back of life, but of death, an improbable if irrepressible enterprise: an unalterable good expunged not by an unalterable evil but by the same unalterable good:. ‘I did this,’ he spoke aloud, ‘in order to start again.’

He wrote quickly, obscurely, scarcely aware of what he was writing and, having written it, tore it up. So much for that: inverting goodness into vice, vice into virtue. He wondered if he hadn’t expected too much of Taylor, his precocious and at one time respected student; whether, should he send his message, as Taylor’s elected amanuensis, it might confuse, if not provoke, him further, confound the suicide watch of the warders, subvert their best, more likely ambivalent intentions – he who had expunged his family, they disinclined to expunge themselves. Was not Taylor, in short, commandeering him as a witness, the archivist of his perverse adventure, to exhume what he’d done, to define it retrospectively, the one who, in certain circumstances, knew him better than most, who had witnessed him in formation, the incubus before the revelation? Was Taylor giving him as good a reason to live as any, turning dross into something which, however perversely, offered illumination, presenting his own survival, after initial doubt, as a revelatory gesture? Observe and closely mark (this may not, need not happen again: the human involvement in a seemingly inhuman exercise, the nature, the unique nature of the individual involved), hauling Giotto, as he did so, into the picture.

He was hesitating, curiously, from writing anything further, the pen, however, still in his hand. The conclusion he had come to was that Taylor had, after all, proved to be his ultimate pupil, the Baptismal precursor to his revelatory scheme: the conventional oil or gouache paintings, the pencil, ink and conté drawings he’d done at the Drayburgh the afterglow of a tradition that had been expunged by art-as-action, not as contemplation, refinement, encapsulation – transposition – but simply, and gratuitously, nakedly art-as-life: no longer synthesis by paint and brush, hammer and chisel, clay and spatula, but by kitchen knife, a rudimentary, practical, domestic tool, as close to life, in this case – in this definitive case – as death, Giotto’s giant step, in the process, remeasured – to be found longer, broader (more encompassing) than first pronounced. Taylor had come good – unasked: all he had learnt, all he had been taught at the Drayburgh, not in the life-room, the sculpture-room, the antique-room, but in his tutorial encounters with Maddox put to explicit, demonstrable, definitive use: he had gone over the edge in the process – the process of validating Maddox, the process of proving him right. Mad Ox had given him his line: his wife, his progeny, his origins subsumed by a desire to be ‘real’, conceptualism taken to a demonstrably absurd and comprehensively destructive end – as effortlessly as Mad Ox had opened the world of Florentine trecento art, the principle, the premise, the solution the same: out of the blandness of Norfolk had emerged the shape, had he known it, of things to come.

His immediate reaction was to return to his earlier impulse, to write to Devonshire, not so much a revision or amendment as a re-visioning, in the boldest terms, of his review of the British Millennial Exhibition, his original contribution a preamble to what would now be a comprehensive clearing – atomisation – of the ground: Lucretius – Lucretius! all over again! All those parodists painting pictures, plus conceptualism posing as an avant-garde – while Taylor, effortlessly, perversely, in its final context, blew away the dust, drew the record straight, offered the sum total in tendering the final account. ‘Over the edge’, ‘beyond providence’: he wrote the phrases down: the provisional titles came to mind, conceptual art turned on its head, the Christian ethic, after two thousand years, definitively endorsed, if not transcended, divinity and inhumanity indivisibly one: Taylor’s event presented as Maddox’s final statement, Ruskin out Ruskined – by perversity – at last.

Conversely, he reflected, the pen still in his hand, he could ask Simone to e-mail it (give Devonshire a shock), standing by her shoulder as the sensational message came up on the screen, pre-empting Donaldson, he hadn’t a doubt, Donaldson the self-extolled and self-extolling, the self-realised self-promoter, the precursor precursed by Maddox at last.