8

He could hear her talking as he entered. Having waited, vainly, for a taxi (the first time he’d thought of taking one to her house), he’d finally come up on the tube, descending the escalator to where he had had his ‘Demon’ experience, with scarcely a second thought, the feeling that something not negligible had taken place: a perversity, he reflected, behind which he felt peculiarly secure.

He paused before ascending the stairs, not sure whether she was on the telephone or speaking to an unusually silent client, Mrs Beaumont not in her office. Nor was the cat visible, it invariably scampering down to be let out when it heard the front door, or, if it were out, waiting on a nearby window sill to be let in.

She, however, must have heard the door, for a moment later she appeared from her consulting-room, the door of which, unusually when she was in session, had been ajar.

They both spoke at once, mutually confused, she agitated, he alarmed at the strangeness of her expression, she coming forward to be embraced, more impetuously, he realised, than he had moved towards her. ‘Have you seen Taylor?’

‘I’ve just got back.’

‘I’ve cancelled my appointments for the rest of the day,’ she drawing away, suddenly composed. ‘Come upstairs.’

He followed her up, noticing the creases in her skirt, her jacket, the fact that she was wearing flat-heeled shoes, and concluding she’d been in the house alone for some time – failing to take in the scent which, he following her, would familiarly have been flowing in his direction.

Before reaching the sitting-room she turned to the bathroom, called, ‘Make yourself some tea. I’ve had some,’ and was gone, he stepping into the kitchen, putting on the kettle, his anxiety, obviated on his journey up, vividly returning. Wave after wave rose, paroxysmally, from the region of his stomach: had she, he reflected, found, or was she prospecting finding someone else (younger, more attractive, more stirringly engaged)?

A need for air, for somewhere less confining than the minimal proportions of the kitchen, took him to the roof, stepping out, breathing deeply, slowly, retaining his breath, exhaling: the view to the south, the distant smear across the horizon, examining the intervening distance for familiar buildings, then, his agitation scarcely reduced, examining the plants, the burgeoning flowers, the declining ones, sitting down, finally, on one of the two garden chairs drawn up at the outside table.

Moments later, restless, wondering on the desirability of returning downstairs, he got up again, the adjoining roofs and chimneys, the overlooking windows, the sky itself, suddenly oppressive: from alarm to something little short of terror, as if everything he were looking at evoked an unmistakable feeling of aggression, antipathy, dislike, rage. Fear absorbed everything around him, a paroxysmal interlude once again, sourced from outside but endured in the region of his stomach, a visceral exclamation. His heart pounded. Sweat came into his eyes.

Then, still flushed, high-coloured, she came through the door, her voice calling, ‘Matt?’ a sound which calmed him. ‘Are you all right?’ holding him, he aware of her scent, the softness of her face, her voice, a look of alarm, however, reflecting his own.

‘I came up to rewrite the article,’ he said, adding, ‘Devonshire’s. I thought we might e-mail it, if you have the time,’ she drawing back, looking at his face, his arms trembling as he held her.

‘I thought you’d given it up.’

‘I had.’ He waited. ‘I thought I might refocus it. On Taylor. A perception of his perception of what he thinks he’s done. He practically requested it. I feel I have no choice. I feel,’ he paused, ‘I owe him it. That, without being aware, discrediting his painting, I left him little choice. The Courtauld, for instance, something which, with hindsight, I should have seen he could only reject. He was, above all, an activist, not a pen or a brush he must have to hand but a tool. Specifically a weapon.’

He was aware, speaking too quickly, of something monstrous in his voice and manner, a look of incredulity replacing the one of confusion on Simone’s face. ‘Focus,’ he went on, more slowly, carefully, ‘the operative word. I get the feeling he’s moved into another world, not parallel or adjacent to but divergent from our own. One he’s anxious, desperate, even vocationally inclined to report on before he disappears for good, murder the last thing left for art to do.’

He was sweating profusely, pausing, first, to wipe his eyes, then to breathe in deeply.

Released, she was sitting down, watching his expression. ‘What did he say?’ she said, indicating – he having stood up to embrace her – he sit at the table too.

‘He suggested I played a significant part in disillusioning him. That, of course, I have to take on board. It was only when I got back, however, that I realised why he’d invited me. He wanted what he had done to be understood. Something seen and expressed from an otherwise unacceptable position. Extreme taken to extreme. Who better than me? Someone who, unknowingly, had pointed him in that direction. Who’s better placed to do it? I even knew his wife.’

She waited, examining him intently, her own high colour undiminished.

‘He sees his actions, and their implications, as consistent with the circumstances in which he found himself. A moral consideration, a moral awareness. To that degree, consistent with the way things have gone and are going. He’s broken through what he sees as a definitively destructive culture into something unprecedented on the other side. My role, as a sceptic, is to report it as it happened, authenticity, on my part, assured by my scepticism, and finally, because he sees his actions as the deployment of a truth – truth to circumstance – transcending it, murder, in his case, a definitive form of self-expression, in my eyes the definitive form of malignancy.’

He was sweating profusely, leaning on the table as if manually to extend his words across it, presenting this to her in an almost physical form. He was what he was saying.

‘He wishes a great evil to be put to the service of identifying a universal good. Before it is too late. The execution of everything which we, in our day-to-day conjugations with and in the literal world, patently overlook if not deny.’

He’d been speaking, he thought, for some time, articulating something not on his own but someone else’s behalf, articulating what could, to himself as well as others, only give offence. ‘He wants his experience to become available. An artistic, not a pathological event which he is deriding as he does it. Judas’s prerogative, without which nothing can be real.’

‘All you have in common is that you attempted to kill yourself and so did he.’ Her voice was calm, her look increasingly composed. ‘You haven’t killed anyone. Nor are you likely to. Apart from the fact he was your student, you have no obligation to do anything. Certainly nothing as absurd as authenticating his dementia, a specious form of artistic licence, to say the least.’

‘Don’t you think his actions had any connection with the circumstances in which he lived, and is living now?’

‘Why not take any madman, in that case, and say he’s doing the same?’

‘Because he isn’t Taylor. With his sensibility, his intelligence, his background. He’s been through the schools. He’s studied the process. Presumably he’s even taught it. Look at your clients. Aren’t they telling you the same? Life is unliveable, yet they’re obliged to go on. Isn’t Taylor giving us the message, an unliveable existence, for the benefit, or so it now seems, of us all? Isn’t it legitimate to record it? Isn’t it real? Didn’t it happen?’

The argument, he realised, was already fading: his own agenda, so crudely expressed, was to recognise Taylor as an examplar, a self-presented one, of all that had gone wrong in the art of his time: all that had gone wrong, in short, in his time, the gratuitous displacing feeling, intellect displacing sense. She wanted him free of such morbidity, equating it, no doubt, with his illness. But then, wasn’t that ‘true’ as well?

She’d crossed her legs, her hands clasped, resting on her knee, the light in her eyes – of concern, even distress – suffused by something more elusive: a darkness, extruding, it seemed, from far inside, a malignancy almost, as if someone he didn’t recognise and who only wished him harm were gazing out from within a much loved face.

‘Why have you cancelled your appointments?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been reported to the NMC.’

‘For what?’

‘This.’ She gestured round, then, more specifically, at the two of them. ‘I’m a doctor as well as an analyst. Someone has complained.’

‘Who?’

‘The client you called Doctor Death. His real name is Norman. I’ve made, he complains, indecent proposals. To him. Allegedly, to you. Also, allegedly, to someone else. Oddly, I thought, with him, I’d been making progress. In some respects, I suppose I had. He’s acting on his own behalf, showing initiative. His chief complaint in the past has been that his life has been dominated by other people.’

‘What credence will they give it?’

‘Some time ago, a little time ago, it would have been ignored. Complaints from cranks are ten a penny. With accountability, and litigation, increasing as they are, rightly or wrongly, they’ll feel obliged to look into it.’

‘Every time I passed him he gave the same averted look. I’m surprised,’ he said, ‘you went on with him. He clearly took exception to me, and now, evidently, to both of us.’ He waited. ‘It doesn’t stop you practising.’

‘If the complaint is upheld I’d be deregistered as a doctor and my accreditation with the British Psychoanalytical Association would come to an end. I could still practise as a therapist.’ She shrugged.

‘When were you notified?’

‘I was told of a complaint some time ago. No name was given. I even saw him several times afterwards, not knowing it was him. Peculiar, in the circumstances, why he went on coming. I suppose, like a pyromaniac, he wanted to watch the blaze.’

She gazed at him for a while without speaking.

‘Tricky stuff. He not knowing if I knew. Me not knowing it was him. This morning, however, I received a letter. Registered. No e-mail or fax, you’ll be pleased to note. If they go ahead, after getting my response, I have to appear in front of the Preliminary Proceedings Committee. I’ve been talking to a lawyer recommended by a colleague. He was impressed both by them and the allegation. More business, I presume. A growing market. The Medical Council is a subdivision of the Privy Council, and not to be taken lightly. Ambition, on his part, may not be entirely to my advantage. The ultimate threat to remove me from the Register I have to take seriously as well. As for what credit they give to this complaint, I guess as much as you give, or want to give, to Taylor.’

Something jarred – ricocheted, even – inside his skull, a curious physical sensation. ‘Taylor’s separate,’ he immediately responded.

‘I wonder if he is.’ She was still watching him. ‘If you want to champion him as an artist who kills his family as a definitive form of self-expression, I’ve a feeling you’ll be leaving me, if not a lot of others, a long, long way behind.’

‘Let’s not argue about it,’ he said.

He paused, no longer sure what ‘it’ might be: a vulgar involvement in a delusional world which, he couldn’t help feeling, bordered on his own. He had known the man: he had known one of his victims: what he had done was unimaginable. Yet somehow, somewhere – its sole legacy, other than Taylor’s own death, something he was now assuming to be a formality – it had to be explained. Or, in the current fashion, he recalled (cf. Donaldson), ‘decoded’. Was this the connection Simone had made with his own involvement, a disturbance which might, quite easily, reactivate his own?

‘What happens once you’ve seen this committee?’

‘If they conclude there is a case they’ll hand it to someone called the Preliminary Screener. He or she examines it and if there is a case to be answered the Registrar invites me to an examination conducted, as the lawyer felicitously described it, by my peers. Alternatively, at this or a later stage, I could offer to resign, without a hearing, and I’d have the opportunity to reapply at an unspecified time in the future. Meanwhile I could function as, what you might term, a quack. With, presumably, a declining list of clients. The Preliminary Screener could, however, refer me back to the Preliminary Proceedings Committee and they, in turn, could refer me back to the Licensing Committee. As you can see, plenty of leeway to shuffle the pack and, for the lawyers, the wonderful opportunity for endless proceedings. I don’t, necessarily, have to have a lawyer, of course. But in the present climate anything could happen. I might, for instance, get off with a warning. I might even be commended for taking on an idiot beyond the call of duty. On the other hand, Norman could be a plausible liar. Looking back, I’m inclined to believe he is. On top of which there’s the other client, identity unknown.’ She paused, measuring his reaction. ‘It’s not uncommon, particularly in psychiatry, to get a patient, or several, complaining about the way they’ve been treated. Like art, I assume, at one level, everything goes.’

She had uncrossed her legs and, leaning forward, stretching across the table, she took one of his hands.

‘They also, of course, have you. An undoubted corroboration of my lack of judgement, of unprofessional practice, of abuse of my position.’

‘Do you want to pack it in?’ The thought came to him in the instant he expressed it, he enclosing her hand in both of his. ‘Us,’ he added, ‘not your job.’

‘I don’t.’ She shook her head. ‘What would that look like? Confirmation!’ She laughed, glancing up, an aircraft whining overhead on its ascent from Heathrow, the vibration of its engines passing through the house. ‘I’m worried about you and Taylor,’ she added. ‘Another phenomenological exercise. Art as life. It’s time you moved on. Particularly,’ she concluded, ‘from that.’

‘Art’s always close to delinquency,’ he said. ‘Also to voyeurism. There’s not much changed in that. And I can’t deny there’s a subjective element involved, because I know him, and also knew his wife. Nevertheless, he invited me, even if he does or doesn’t succeed in killing himself. Or one of the prisoners does it for him. In addition to which,’ he paused. ‘I was even more involved with his wife.’

‘How?’

‘Like we are.’ He added, ‘She was a first-year student, I was a lecturer. I knew her before she knew Taylor. He took her on the rebound.’

About to respond, she paused, then shook her head. ‘Scarcely like us,’ she said. ‘I would have thought.’

‘I’d have to go back and talk to him, in any case. There’s no guarantee,’ he said, ‘he’ll see me. The whole thing,’ he raised one hand, releasing hers, ‘could go on for ever. Even now, on reflection, he won’t know precisely why he asked me.’

He was, he realised, in the face of her problem, withdrawing. ‘Should there be a hearing is the lawyer you spoke to able to represent you?’

‘He’s drafting a letter asking for clarification. More details of Norman’s allegations. Who the second person is. Expressing my willingness to cooperate.’

‘I’ll come with you if you have to go.’

‘I’ll have to ask him whether that’s a good idea or not. They might see it as a provocation. But,’ she smiled, ‘I very much appreciate the offer. As for Taylor,’ her smile had faded, ‘I’d let it settle before you get in touch with him or Devonshire. Perhaps I should come and see him, too.’

‘That,’ he said, ‘would make it something else. It’s far too personal,’ he added, ‘at present.’

‘That’s the trouble.’ Still she retained his hand in hers. ‘Are you aware of your reaction being unusual?’

‘It’s an unusual situation,’ he said.

‘Maybe writing about it is a way of exonerating yourself,’ she said. ‘Getting rid of his accusation of your involvement in what he did.’

They sat in silence, their hands still held across the table, caught in a process, he thought, which could sweep either or both of them away.

‘You feel challenged by your situation, I feel challenged by mine,’ he finally responded. ‘I’ll support you in whatever way you like. If the worst comes to the worst we could sell our houses and move separately or jointly into something more modest. We can both of us, in one way or another, go on working. Separately or together, we can both survive.’ He waited for her response and, getting none, went on, ‘How serious is it with the Medical Council? I can hardly see our arrangement, on its own, jeopardising your career. Otherwise, all they have is the accusations of two presumably nutty clients.’

‘I’ll have to rely,’ she said, ‘on their discretion and on how well I put my case. There’ll be an inclination, in the present climate, to give the accusations a run. On the other hand, I’m confident I could give a robust response. With us, I stopped the therapy the moment there was an involvement. If every doctor was deregistered because of a relationship with a former patient or client there wouldn’t, I assume, be many of us around. After all,’ she smiled, ‘it’s a sure way of meeting a lot of interesting people. You could say that’s why some of us take it up. Not, of course, in my case. I already felt socially fulfilled. Otherwise, however, there’s an absolute discretion involved, an absolute commitment. Like you with Taylor. What he has done. The nature, the cause and the purpose of your involvement. We’ve both, in one sense, breached, if at different times, a professional ethic. On the other hand, if evil is the seat of goodness, as you suggest, what price goodness? What price evil? What price anything? Who says?’

He thought for a moment she might go on speaking, but, turning to look at him directly, she smiled again, nodding.

‘Taylor,’ he said, ‘was responding, or thought he was – still thinks he’s responding – to something inclusive, not exclusive, as you suggest. All he’s asking is for what he did to be seen in the widest possible context, something he thinks I can do for him.’

‘Have you told him you’ve been ill?’

‘No.’

‘Does he know?’

‘I doubt it. I was absent from reviewing for a while, but he wouldn’t know the reason. Devonshire only took me back because of it. Didn’t wish to be seen regressive, and has regretted it ever since. His present resolve is to treat me as normal in order to show going nuts for him is no different from having measles, or flu, or a broken leg.’

‘In a sense, he’s right.’

‘I wonder.’

‘In your case, I mean.’

‘I doubt it.’

She was looking at him strangely – not unlike the expression he associated with their first encounters, an aloofness of a clinical nature, mentally stepping back in order, paradoxically, to examine something more closely.

‘Insanity,’ she said, ‘is exclusive. To assume otherwise is to misunderstand it completely. I think something perverse, on your side, is creeping in. I’m frightened for you.’ She added, ‘I think, as with Norman, Taylor can still do a lot of damage. The enlightenment that you and your friend Viklund go on about is not, in my view, enlightenment at all. More nearly it’s the arrest of a particular kind of perception which galvanises, or appears to, because it’s arrested. I feel, I felt, I was freeing you from all that.’

‘Immaturity,’ he suggested.

‘Innocence. Viklund, despite his appearances, and manner, is guilelessness writ large.’

He watched an insect, a bumble-bee, move from flower to flower: at each it paused, probed, flew on. Overhead, another aircraft whined up from Heathrow, a frill of condensation flickering from its tailplane and wings. Distracted by the sound, she glanced up, too, the horizontal lines at the base of her neck accentuating her look of concern, bordering, he felt, on disaffection.

‘That was your philosophy, which, at the time, you were keen for me to know about.’ Having lowered her head, she smiled. ‘We are here to destroy and to be destroyed. A dispassionate view of history confirms it. Wars, pogroms, disease, personal as well as communal disasters. The annihilating experience of marriage, motherhood, paternity. It’s because the pain of destructiveness is too much that we come to understandings. If I don’t hurt you you won’t hurt me. Self-interest moves on to an interest in others. Pain, in its mental and physical forms, persuades us, finally, to compromise. Interest in others turns to affection, affection to love, a species of self-love externally confirmed. We love ourselves for loving others. Finally we reach the stage of, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me”, which, of its nature, evolves into “I’ll love you even if you don’t love me”, our exegesis, as you remarked, of the tyranny of nature, of, you concluded, our unrequested end.’

He smiled, listening to her encapsulation of what he had – tendentiously, for the most part, certainly defensively – explained: his own ‘governance’, he’d described it, pleased – rejoicing – that she recalled it, and, having recalled it, was now discounting.

He was reminded, once again, of his instinctual response to Taylor: someone so far outside his experience – their experience (they were in this together) – must count as something – he realising, too, in that instant, how much he loved her, how completely she over-reached his life, securing him to something he couldn’t live without: loving her, in effect, at that moment, for her attempt to dress herself in his (metaphysical) clothes in order to show how absurd he looked.

‘What did you think when you heard it?’

‘I thought it,’ she said, ‘an unusual defence.’

‘Against what?’

‘I never found out. I wondered, nevertheless, if I could bring you back to earth.’

She was smiling once again.

‘And now?’

Colour, once more, had risen to her cheeks.

‘Self-interest is an indeterminate term,’ she said. ‘I’m always inclined to oppose it. Cynicism,’ she added, ‘given a plausible face, “we are our relationships” a partial truth, like,’ she went on, ‘so much else you put my way. The volition towards pleasure is as much a natural volition as a desire to destroy. You mustn’t, to that degree, take Taylor as confirmation of your thesis.’

Birds swooped across the roof: swifts, their high-pitched squeaking echoing between the houses. Higher up, house-martins traced more jagged loops, fluttering and falling, diving and climbing, pursuing, he assumed, an invisible, from this distance, cloud of midges.

‘What other conclusions did you come to?’

‘Not a lot.’ She re-crossed her legs, composure of some sort returning: they had long ago released one another’s hands. ‘I was more interested in you describing art as something useless which, the moment it has a use, becomes something else, utility combined with aesthetics a craft, aesthetics combined with nothing, art. Plus, your evocation of an environment in which the machine had passed the point of service, we obliged to service it. And how, generally, what couldn’t be pronounced until the moment it was expressed, creating precedent in the process, was fastened in with what you described as “mechanics”. That we are mechanics, without choice, art currently, as a result, a mechanism too. The impression, for instance, you create, that you and Viklund, and now Taylor, are the last of the cultural Mohicans.’

She was laughing, leaning back, he following her gaze to the nearby roofs: the attic windows, the variegatedly angled chimney-pots, her own neat enclosure of plants and flowers – more than ever, he reflected, a refuge.

Below, at intervals, the telephone rang: the swift cutting-off as it recorded a message: the inaudible muttering of a voice.

‘Your view of art as history, of anything as history, come to that. Your admiration for a tradition, a humanist tradition, which is now extinct and which, helplessly, it seems, you feel obliged to revive. I suspect the perversity of Taylor’s return to your life is the seal on the verdict you’ve been looking for. Comes, as it were, at an opportune time, philistinism ending not in suicide but murder, then suicide. An explanation of your impulse to self-destruction. He killing others as himself, the two, to him, unlike you, indistinguishable. “We are our relationships”, his final message.’

He didn’t wish Taylor to be ‘wrong’; that, too, she could see: his requirement that murder (of ‘himself’) should be seen as the inevitable outcome of the way things were, the absolution he was seeking without hope of achieving.

‘Maybe we should lie down,’ she said. ‘Recover from all this. I’ll bolt the front door. Mrs Beaumont isn’t due today, and I’ve fed the cat.’

Things were more real than they seemed, he reflected, following her down, the slimness of her figure, the texture of her hair, her vulnerability and her determination suddenly apparent, conformity, compliance with everything, or most things, perversely or otherwise, not on her agenda: an ability, he further reflected, to cast herself off, independent, self-reliant (to an extraordinary degree) – a self-reliance which she was inviting him to share, changing its nature, its form, its purpose.

And later, in bed – abandonment of a sort, since it was mid-afternoon – he endured the curious sensation they’d been cast off together, invisibly suspended, surveying the angle of the tiles outside, the sagging line of the older houses, the confirmatory lines of those that had been restored, his feeling, increasingly engendered on each of his visits, once in her bedroom, that they were indeed afloat: the wood-panelling, the reflective figure beside him, her eyes, too, turned to the window – until, finally, lulled by a rhythm which came from them both, she placing her arm around him, he turned on his side, the shape of her body impressed against his back.

His old terror had been that he might survive, his new one that he wouldn’t, he, recently, noticing the vagaries of his mind much more, wondering if they were vagaries at all and not the evidence of a parallel existence. Particularly clear were his experiences of ‘another place’, full of warmth and familiarity (a feeling induced by being in her bed). The moment these sensations were recognised, however, they vanished, as if consciousness alone had dispelled them.

An involitional drama, an involutional exercise: not to be alone, not to be suspended (not to be out of a job) and then, quite simply, not to be afflicted, ‘nuts’ the condition that looked over the edge, saw what was there, helped solely by familiarity to claw its way back: a neural conflagration with no physical manifestation other than a knitting of the brows, the rocking forward and backward over the axis of the arms, the second-by-second confrontation with what he assumed were the principal questions of existence: why? who? how? where? a mutatory device engaged, seemingly, on its own destruction.

All his decisions, he’d concluded, at the onset of his illness, had been wrong: wrong in space, in time, in sequence: not the right action for the wrong reason, nor the right reason for the wrong action: instead, an accumulation of defects, a litany of excuses (excesses, confessions) – less regret, remorse, contrition, than statement of fact.

One of those mornings, early in their relationship, for instance, he had found himself walking up the hill from his backstreet dwelling by Camden Lock to that welcome enclosure of Georgian, pre-Georgian, Queen Anne dwellings where Simone had her consulting-room as well as her domestic quarters and, for the first time, as he approached her door, saw emerging from it the skeletal, dark-haired, pale-featured, black-suited individual, a briefcase in one hand, a portable telephone in the other, whom he had immediately personified, to Simone’s displeasure, moments later, meeting her in the hall, as Doctor Death. ‘Aids?’ he’d enquired (searing eyes gazing portentously from a skull-like head), to which she’d responded, ‘Far from it,’ disinclined, at that point, to discuss it. She: her dark hair, on that occasion, lustred to perfection: the delicacy, in the morning light, of her porcelain features, the refinement of nose and brow, dark eyes, thick-lashed, extended laterally with eye-shadow, a hint of blue across the lids, each eye opaque but for its reflection – of the one he was disinclined to see, at that stage: himself – nothing visible of what lay beneath: cheeks subtended to a percipient chin, incised above a percipient mouth, the whole of her face – its asperity, its bird-like gaze – pointing to enquiry: why? her figure, in its fifties, drawn forward to all-consuming, engaging breasts, moving before her, sensual, sensuous, informing: grand. And legs, high-heeled, even in her domestic quarters, the persuasive endorsers of a quisitive nature, the preternatural ‘what is it all about?’ implicit in the frankness of her look: the framing cheeks, the framing brow: creator, expeller, adviser, judge, her house an arbour on the pilgrim route to St Albans, the Romano-British Christian martyr, he, Maddox, approaching his seventieth year …

No wonder Doctor Death had responded in the way he had, much scope, in Simone’s appearance, to be misconstrued, not least by someone persuaded (determined) it could be. Perhaps, he concluded, she should dress for work in a less celebratory fashion, her clothes, he recalled, mannered to Paris rather than Rome, less line involved than substance (lascivious, for instance, his own response, illicit, warm): the agate ring she twisted on the third finger of her left hand, the stone she gazed into as if into herself: what stars! what moon! what future – he waking some time later to find her still compressed against his back, he turning over to embrace her, his still to hold, he still hers to do likewise.

He had taken to writing when all else had failed, he, sleepily inspired, reclining in bed, she, restless, having got up, preparing their supper: the sound of crockery and cutlery and cooking utensils coming up the stairs from the kitchen. Earlier, she had been pottering with her plants on the roof above his head: she was ‘into’ everything, he reflected, he checking her past, his own, for errors, mind subsumed by drugs: dothiepin, thioridazine, the side-effects, previously, of seroxat too extreme, in his case, to bear: irregular heartbeat, sensational headaches, convulsive jaw movements, nausea, anxiety increased, not so much wrestling, as Aurelius might have had it, as dancing (to death), wheeling and gliding – pots crashing more vigorously in the kitchen, determination and concentration two of Simone’s more obvious traits, even sleeping a convulsionary sound.

He was reading Lucretius (again: a Viklund recommendation): a copy of De Rerum Natura by his bed, another by Simone’s. Waiting for supper, he’d just put it down: everything was chance, he not so much a god’s, or the gods’ or even ‘the Father’s’ invention as an asymmetrical, unprogrammed, irrelevant aside, a disencumbrance disencumbered. And Plutarch, Epicurus, Seneca, Cicero, Pliny, practitioners whose practitioning embraced a curious disposition: what was inexplicable abandoned to the divine, an ineradicable omission – life, his life, his and Simone’s life, an omission – crime, brutality, passion, efficaciously slotted into position, an irrefragable part of an indissoluble whole. ‘You deal with the best in human nature, I the worst,’ Simone had written in one of her cryptic notes, posted whenever she was away, with protestations of ‘I love you’, arriving invariably after she was back (‘that’s all right: it’s what I felt’), ‘What’s the diff, Professor?’ A sophist (she!), he not so much a philosopher (or professor) in response, as a pillager, as Major-Minor, his former schoolfriend, had once remarked, irreality his saviour, what was redeemable, in Simone’s life, an ethic, a passion – a vocation, even (pace Taylor), passed to him. What was owed, in his case, exceeded what was given, duty seceding to rights.

Building a dossier on himself, he reflected, as others might be building one on her: turning over in the bed to see the photograph of himself she kept beside it, a tiny original of him seated on her roof, wondering, as he did so, on her preparations in the kitchen. Wondering on her.

‘Let’s face it,’ he spoke aloud, savouring the words, finally the meaning, ‘I’ve failed’: marriage, paternity, posterity, vocation, job: the imprimatur he’d franked on Simone’s life, even if it were a joint decision. Plus, the curious sensation that immobilised him each morning, that he was about to be taken into the street and shot: that he had informed on his neighbours (the worst of his dreams), dealers in crack, plus prostitution, extortion, theft, fencing: Berenice’s minder who spent his days in bed, the nights marshalling her punters: black, close-cropped, bulbous, a buttress, he, of the narcotics trade, Maddox, by comparison, a ‘clerc’, an observer, reporter, redundanteur, spectator: Plato’s cavern, he standing at the mouth, avoiding the shadows, identifying the objects stranded outside.

He’d been drawn to Laycock’s theories of supra-indifferentiation (and supra-disregard) in his youth: unfashionable in the forties when they’d first appeared (the effect of war on the ‘cerebral imagination’), the individual a synthesis of external ‘charges’, pressures reflecting subliminal as well as overt forces – theories Simone had favoured herself but which he, carelessly at first, then vigorously, had abandoned, genes and epigenetics his current principal ‘charges’, specifically the influence of methyl groups of chemicals on gene formation, the methylation as much, if not more, an influence than the determinology of the genes themselves: new species formed (misbehaving chromosomes misbehaving on the part of something else: aneuploidy) seeing himself, seeing Taylor, as the precursors of an otherwise unpredictable event – the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ of mutatory research – he determined to e-mail or fax, or simply post to Devonshire his revised exegesis on post-twentieth-century art, phenomenology taken, in the instance of Taylor, to its logical, amoral, definitive end.

Already she was on the stairs, he with the Lucretius (affinity with nature: affinity with circumstance) still in his hand, she calling, ‘Supper’s ready,’ passing by the bedroom door with a wave, on the way to the roof to collect herbs, a pair of scissors in her hand: the sound of her feet on the flagstones: the creaking of the ceiling, the telephone ringing, the sound of a voice recording a message: everything normal (the atmosphere so unlike that of his own house, where the telephone scarcely rang at all).

‘The despair,’ he said to her over supper, ‘that humanity is succeeding,’ they eating at the table beside the familiar window, she, anxious for distraction, perpetually on the move, ‘whereas, with you, it’s the horrible feeling that it might easily lose. What a combination. The ball, however, in your court. Your turn,’ he told her, ‘to knock it back.’

She remained distracted (had been since waking), glancing about her, not least towards the window as if, from there, she expected otherwise unseen support.

‘Maybe I should go ahead with Taylor, without involving you,’ he continued. ‘I can get the copy faxed in the High Street. That alone should startle Devonshire. Even then,’ he paused, ‘I ought to see Taylor again. The idea of handing something in before Donaldson, of course, is out of the question. I must have been ranting when I first came in,’ pausing again before enquiring, ‘Is this mania, do you think?’

‘That’s for you,’ she said, ‘to decide,’ turning her gaze to him, a moon-like expression, calm, abstracted, reproaching him, it seemed – or removing him, or about to, from her life. ‘Maybe you should pursue it, to see where it leads.’

‘Shall I stay the night?’ he asked.

‘I need time to myself. You, too,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ moving her food about her plate, examining it, as if undecided whether to eat it or not. ‘I’d like to see you tomorrow,’ she added.

‘Should I see your letter?’ he said. ‘The one from the Council.’

‘Later,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with it now,’ dismissing the suggestion with a wave of her hand. ‘Let’s keep the two things separate. You with Taylor, I with this,’ her gaze returning to the window, the steps of someone passing below them, in the street. ‘It’s odd, but since we’ve talked about it, I have the feeling we’re being watched. That the place is being watched. Obsessional behaviour, of course, is infectious, provoking a similar response in the victim.’

Maddox, too, looked out to the street, little more than a cul-de-sac, centrally approached by the flight of stone steps leading up from Heath Street: whoever had been passing had gone.

‘I feel quite capable of handling it,’ she added.

‘All I need is for you to tell me the best way I can help,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I shall,’ turning to her food, finally, and beginning to eat.

Later, when he left, she said, ‘I don’t like you going home alone. You hear of so much trouble nowadays, particularly around your place,’ he, embracing her, responding, ‘It’s only as dangerous as it always was. Neither of us should get uneasy,’ wondering, however, as he descended the steps to Heath Street, whether he was being watched, glancing at the figures descending with him from the neighbouring public house, as well as those coming up from below, dismissing the thought once he’d reached the tube station entrance and, the evening being fine, deciding to walk.

The reality was, if Taylor were ‘consistent’, à la Laycock, with his circumstances, then so was he: an imperative of self-destruction in both their cases, unless the anomalies thrown up by science – those lately discovered chemical accretions which had as much effect on function as the genes themselves – were nevertheless consistent with their environment in which a universal mutatory process was underway, of which few – or even any, other than Taylor and himself – were aware.

The cafés and restaurants were full in the High Street, chairs and tables spilling out on the pavements; similarly, in Belsize Park. Further down the hill, however, the streets were comparatively empty. Where the road dipped down to Chalk Farm he glimpsed the floodlit dome of St Paul’s in the distance: it could all, conversely, this scenario, be part of his dilemma: he and Taylor were nuts, his illness no different from that characterising several, if not all, of those members of his ‘support’ group: poor Beth, and Judith, Ida, Anna, Alex, Sally, geriatricity in action, age alone engulfing what rational qualities he had left, nervous exhaustion inseparable from physical decline.

Once he was in the house he rang her to say he was back: the darkness of the streets, the last walk along a level stretch of pavement, past the lit windows of cafés and pubs, his mind, he realised, no longer calm, if anything, in something of a fever, reactions (in his case) identified with causes, causes misinterpreted as effects, a paradoxically ordered sense of disorder, he inclined to ring her back, to talk over again what might be happening, what had happened, what might well happen (his imagination on the loose again), Laycock’s theories of indifferentiation – separating effects, in effect, from causes (the ‘Viennese Syndrome’ wherein effects were diagnosed as causes) – notwithstanding, a subliminal absorption by (invisible) adjacent forces mirrored in – paralleled by – a mutatory activity in the brain, Taylor and Laycock, in this context, a concatenation of thought and feeling – a conclusion which took him, confusedly, to bed, he missing her, he now realised, acutely (could she trust him, at this moment, not to regress?), the events of the day, he further reflected, coming to a head: the darkening room, the view of the houses opposite, the windows alight beyond his own uncurtained one – absorbed by a sensation corresponding to that which had gripped him earlier that day in the presence of Taylor, a negative element projected by each of them, indistinguishable from the physical sensation experienced on the tube station platform (not three hundred yards from where he was lying), a hand, its individual fingers configurated around his body, projecting him, without warning, towards the line.