10

It was Viklund who woke him, ringing in the middle of the afternoon (that morning his monthly appointment with Kavanagh), he roused by the telephone and, for a moment, not sure where he was – initially assuming he was at Simone’s, reminded of her threatened situation, conceivably the end of her professional life, the instrument of destruction, in this instance, no one but himself.

Picking up the receiver from beside the bed – he’d been sleeping on his back, fully clothed, as he invariably did in the afternoons, on the double bed in the front room – he listened to Viklund’s courteous, nevertheless insinuatory voice as if it were an element of a dream itself: the surge of confusion which increased rather than dissipated itself on waking, he recoiling from answering so that, after Viklund’s, ‘How did you get on with Taylor?’ he remained silent, ‘Did your visit go ahead?’

‘It went very well,’ his opinion going out without reflection. ‘He’d rationalised, or was attempting to, the experience along the lines of an artistic event convened less by him, he merely being its instrument, than others.’

‘Who?’

‘Me. You. All of us,’ gesturing around the otherwise empty room. ‘Laycock’s “reductive imperative”, if you’ve ever heard of it. We subsume what we don’t like as a matter of form. Truth to his materials, another way of putting it, his materials, in this particular demonstration, being his family and himself, A Family Group, as it were, the title of his composition, a long-established, indeed, honourable theme.’

Was that right; or was he transposing Taylor’s experience into something constructed facetiously by himself?

‘Expressing what is there without his necessarily being aware of it,’ he added.

‘Deranged.’ The dog was barking in the background: concurrence or disagreement, hard to tell. On odd occasions, more in rebuke than with affection, Viklund would remark, ‘That dog knows everything,’ examining it with apprehensive eyes. ‘Not a term, I realise, you’d prefer to use,’ he added, sketching his distance not from him but Taylor.

‘I’d thought of writing about him along those lines,’ Maddox said, ‘he practically inviting me. Certainly it would get up Devonshire’s nose. Being an opportunist, he’d feel obliged to use it.’

‘Pulling down the temple as long as you aren’t in it,’ Viklund said. ‘Wouldn’t opportunism,’ he went on, ‘be levelled at you? Not to mention trivialisation,’ he concluded, ‘if done in haste.’

So Daniel thought he was mad as well, shovelling him out of his life along with Taylor.

‘It has an authenticity of its own,’ he said. ‘Both the event and Taylor’s perception of it,’ he dancing, he was convinced, at the end of a rope – in the same way he had danced when he was a student and Viklund a professor: so much was known by the older man, so much was revealed, and so much held in reserve, either as a challenge, genially extended, to be discovered, or, more obscurely, to be divulged at a strategically chosen moment.

Processes – convolutions of thought and feeling – pursued in eradicating his illness, a biochemical digression, fomented by ageing, from the norm, preoccupied him exclusively at that moment: a strategy of defence, a disintegration of his personality accompanied by, until that moment, a subliminal appetite not to live, formed and re-formed itself, graphically, strenuously, in Maddox’s brain – the thought coming to him at that moment that Taylor must have concluded, been actively recalling at the time of their meeting, that he, Taylor, might well have followed Maddox into the Raybourne Professorship of Art History at the Drayburgh in much the same way as Maddox had followed Viklund into the same post. A luminary he might have been at the Courtauld, a junior curator at the Tate, early papers followed by the equivalent of Viklund’s early and pre-Renaissance series on television (the charm of youth challenging Viklund’s persona of wartime engagé) and his subsequently celebrated books: a life of attainment, his precocious, fevered, inventive mind springing up all over the place: a glorious reputation, no wife and children dead at all.

Instead, obscurity in a comprehensive school, somewhere in the north-east of London, a light extinguished beneath a bushel, a misconceived determination to be the ‘real thing’.

He had, he recalled, written Taylor a testimonial, to whom it may concern, on his leaving the Drayburgh, and a second, specific one, several years later, at Taylor’s request (coming out of the blue) when he’d applied for a post in the Department of Fine Art at Reading University (‘an hour from London,’ Taylor had written in his requesting letter, ‘just the right distance from where I live now, I’m sure I’ll be all right’), presumably a last attempt by Taylor to retrieve himself.

Had he, in that second reference, voiced his misgivings: someone intent on one course when they’d have been better off, years before, pursuing another: someone addicted, mesmerically, to giving subjective reactions a convincing air of objectivity?

Weren’t they all, on the other hand, doing that all the while?

He’d assumed his application had been rejected: he’d heard no more about it, neither thanks for the receipt of, nor a report of what had happened. Had he – even – been called for an interview? His wife, too, had been ‘invalidated’ by not dissimilar circumstances, ‘visited’ not by Gabriel but Maddox before he, Taylor, had met her. Even she, even the prospect of a post that would have elevated him above the rank of schoolteacher, even that which had been most precious, had gone the wrong way. And now his (Laycockian) brush with the nature of time, of ‘civilisation’: with several wild blows, with a multitude of wild blows, he’d got rid of the lot.

All that remained was an analysis of what had happened.

‘Was he vengeful?’

The voice casual, deferential.

‘Not more than I’d expected.’

‘Did he respond to your interpretation?’

‘He offered it himself. Or, rather,’ he paused, ‘much of what I’d concluded came after I’d left.’ After pausing again, he suddenly went on, ‘It reminded me of reviewing the galleries on a regular basis, not knowing on the day I went round what I’d write. Invariably, at night, I’d go to sleep my mind a blank. The following morning I’d get up and write a review without a second thought. I became subject to a process, and a product, I could neither understand nor control. Odd, don’t you think?’ his final enquiry a Viklundian rejoinder.

‘Familiar.’ Viklund’s voice faded, as if he’d turned his head to confront someone coming into the room.

‘Morbidity, finally, of course, got hold. That and exhaustion. It’s just as well I gave it up. Now I just have the Devonshire pieces, though I’m afraid I’ve been fired from that. He was always uneasy after my sectioning. Not surprising. I felt uneasy after the same. He finds the pieces too abusive. Morbidity, too, of course. Possibly exhaustion. If not lunacy. Am I still recovering, with something new to offer, or am I going mad? Am I, do you think, regressing?’

‘I get the feeling,’ Viklund said, ‘you’ve been revivified by Taylor. I imagine you see that as morbidity as well.’

‘Not really.’ Mischief, of a familiar nature, was being passed along the line. He wondered if, bored by his current situation, and by a so far unmentioned source of ill-health, Viklund wasn’t looking for something more than entertainment. ‘I’ve a feeling,’ he went on, playing along with his friend, ‘particularly after visiting Taylor, that this is primarily an age of deceit, the self, as we describe it, on the one hand, asking to be saved, on the other, suppressing to the point of denial the realisation that there’s little if anything worth saving. That all those disasters which become the meat of our reported lives estrange us. A suggestion that the worst goes on over there, and that the over there is always over there, not least,’ he hurried on, ‘when it’s over here and we don’t wish to acknowledge it. Except, of course, when it’s over there. Isn’t that what Taylor’s suggesting?’

Without waiting for Viklund’s response, he added, ‘Displacing everything, obsolescence the principal obsession.’

A heavier breathing at the end of the line, alternating with no breathing at all, Viklund conceivably turning his head to engage, visually, someone else in the room, suggested to Maddox that his friend and he had arrived at a significant point of disagreement: a perception, he suspected, had been arrived at, of his (Maddox’s) own situation, which was too disagreeable to be acknowledged, let alone condoned.

Or was this his illness speaking?

Was there something significantly different still to be revealed?

Was this what Simone had stepped back from, or decided to approach from an alternative direction: more intimate, more sensual, more loving: more complete – a healing gesture, intrinsic to her nature, perhaps, not to Viklund’s?

Or was she, like Viklund, resisting an abhorrent view of him, her commitment only partial – demonstrably so? Was he focusing on something irredeemable in his nature which, inexorably, was coming to the surface, beyond hope, beyond meaning, beyond any reasonable explanation? Was Taylor, whatever he represented, claiming him at last, a revenge he’d always anticipated (it had been lurking out there somewhere) but had hoped had gone away?

‘I recall your reaction to Taylor’s use of the phrase – I believe it was his,’ Viklund said, his voice still restrained, ‘in describing the excesses of Giotto’s fateful expressions – “mascaraed excesses” – which you referred to as the bewilderment of their emergent roles, the antecedents of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, the same resonance, if more weathered, you traced to Rembrandt’s self-portraits and which you thought had been diversified into the body, or the embodiment, of the paint in Picasso and Matisse. A bewilderment, you suggested, amounting to terror, which we – presumably you – had not yet come to grips with. Had “subsumed”, the word you used, to the point where distraction would finally consume us all. And I recall his stare as you answered. Intense. Obsessive. Other-worldly. And I wondered, what do these two get up to together? But after all, or so you tell me, it was a woman you had in common. What do you think?’

The final enquiry came abruptly – a sudden alacrity and alertness – contrasting vividly with the tone which had preceded it, a harshness returning to his voice.

Viklund wasn’t, he concluded, glancing away to address someone else in the room, but was speaking with a lowered head, consulting something lying on his desk – his elongated, lectern-like desk – in his study, he seated on the bench before it.

He had often sat there himself, the room, at the top of the house, with its two square windows looking directly onto the park. Facing the windows, and immediately below them, was the desk, itself of sufficient length, with its sloping surface, to accommodate any number of books laid side by side, the bench before it, not unlike a pew, similarly sufficient to accommodate several people sitting side by side.

The two of them, frequently, had sat there together, examining texts and reproductions, or simply gazing out of the windows, they facing, in the evening, the setting sun, as well as the trees which had replaced the diseased elms in the park. The ecclesiastical, almost monastic atmosphere of the room, with its white-painted walls, unlike any other room in the house, otherwise rich with wallpaper, possessed – he imagining his friend at the end of the line – an atmosphere not unlike that of the Danish Church a few hundred yards along the road, which he had only recently discovered Viklund and Ilse attended each week, occasionally several times, Ilse not reluctant to go on her own but invariably capable, evidently, of persuading Viklund to go with her.

Devotional, his nature, he reflected, all this while, and all this while, absorbed in aesthetics, he had never noticed, Viklund leaving this inference to speak for itself: an ecclesiastical saboteur, licensing faith in an age of disassociation, God an aetiological exercise, the significance of which he’d left each artist guilelessly to dissemble: not ‘humanity’ emerging for the first time, a phenomenological exercise, in Maddox’s interpretation, but God, discarding the prospect of no return, opening his arms to redemption: not the disassociative catastrophe Maddox himself had been entertaining (going on about) all these years under the illusion he and Viklund were engaged on the same thing.

All these years, his mentor, friend and colleague had been drawn to him as a protagonist: saw his illness, no doubt, as the inevitable conclusion not so much of his lack as loss of faith – a faith which, unknown to him, Viklund had been preserving, witnessing Maddox’s illness, as well as his humiliation (sectioning: peer-group support: what peers!), above all, perhaps, his identification, guilt-ridden, with Taylor (Taylor committing what Maddox had commissioned) – witnessing all this as a definitive form of retribution, forgiveness for which lay, exclusively, now, in Viklund’s prayerful hands (and not in those, framed, in Simone’s consulting-room).

He was, he concluded, revisualising his founder (imagining him in that upper room), confident of what would finally happen, if he, Viklund, had anything to do with it: the action of a friend, on the one hand, of a Salvationist, on the other. Here, too, was a reference to his past which Viklund, presumably, was playing on, a suggestion that retrieval lay not in the direction of the Danish Church but in his own formative experience involving his home town’s cathedral, St Albans, the interior – too large, too remote: too grand – he had absorbed and finally fled from as a child: Viklund the diplomat, consistent with the training and manners absorbed in his youth before art – or as art, the interpretation of (another diplomatic exercise) – took over.

‘I merely wanted to be sure you hadn’t been bowled over by Taylor.’

He might, he thought, have said ‘evil’.

‘Hardly,’ Maddox said.

‘You are, as you yourself have observed, in a highly impressionable state.’

‘The conclusion I came away with,’ he said, ‘was to do with prodigality. Too many people doing too little and much the same thing. Prodigality the source, paradoxically, of the species’ destruction. Taylor’s vision of the same. Of he, him, himself, overwhelming everything.’

Not necessarily true, if only abstracted from the confusing impression of his visit: a point to start from, something to play back into Viklund’s court.

And, inevitably, an indication he wished Viklund to keep talking (challenging, prompting): that he still cherished this sensitive, elegant provocateur, his demeanour, now he considered it, less that of a diplomat than a sage, inference his method rather than statement, implication if followed through, rather than fact. Taste, sensitivity, fidelity: art politicised in favour of belief: an ideological interpretation, after all (the thought no sooner realised than he wondered if it were true).

He was moving onto treacherous ground: his own treachery, his own ground (occupied now by Taylor): the delusion of ‘explanation’ was not only his but shared with someone he admired, even deferred to, excusing Viklund as the representative of an older, if largely defunct generation, an observer of war, of exclusion, betrayal, extermination, explaining, again, as an observer, the effect of a disaster greater than anything imagined when the century had begun: the age of means subduing ends, everything, it must have seemed to Viklund, as with Taylor, as with himself, coming to an end.

And yet what was Viklund, in his discreet, self-effacing yet nevertheless – because of that – authoritative role intending to defend – hoping, even at the last moment, the nightmare of his aberrated behaviour concluded, to be handing on to Maddox? a tradition of doubt, of rejection, of repulsion countered by one of acceptance, forgiveness, atonement, a suggestion not that everything was coming to an end but, renewed, was once more beginning (faith as art moving to its summation in the Sistine Chapel roof), he, Viklund, preparing the way which Maddox would more thoroughly establish.

No wonder, he reflected, Viklund had stayed clear of the High Renaissance – God becoming man – the beginning of the slope (man becoming ‘other’: Laycock), down which the species was descending at an ever-increasing rate, drawn on, mesmerically, by the prospect, the vanity, of its own destruction.

This man was both for and against him, art as graven image, as spiritual exposition: the salvationary imperative (Laycock again: the ‘individual’ a romantic conception, ‘Christ revealed’ its template): the moral nature of ‘progress’, progress confused with expansion, man made ‘real’, the ‘individual’ made real, by his figurative advances.

Here was Maddox, on the other hand, with his notion of self-preservation – substituting for a previous notion of self-assertion – taking himself off to a weekly life-class as he took himself off to the geriatric clinic, a fallen angel in Viklund’s imperium, imperium in imperio, falling, Viklund was hoping (inferring, suggesting), no more.

‘I don’t want you to be swept away,’ his friend was saying, as he might to a child, adding, more firmly, ‘by Taylor’s anomic disposition. Or would you refer to it as anoetic, consciousness without awareness?’

‘Awareness devoid of consciousness,’ Maddox responded. ‘Displacement no longer a correlative of art.’ He paused. ‘Maybe I should come round. Or you come here. Better than talking over the phone. This thing, to me, has become important.’

‘I don’t mind coming,’ Viklund said, eagerness evident in his voice, an unexpected development. ‘It’s time I saw where you live. I’ve been anxious,’ he went on, ‘about you living on your own. I don’t believe Charlotte and her new husband like it either.’

‘How do you know that?’

He waited.

‘She’s rung me on several occasions to ask how you are.’

Concern: love – magnanimity in his wife, so lacking in himself, he was always anxious to discern.

‘She could easily have rung Simone.’

‘She has.’

‘Odd she never told me.’

‘It’s good to be surrounded,’ he paused, ‘by people who care.’

Back to that: Taylor, presumably, had cared: ‘Love,’ he had evidently written in a note read out in court at the time, ‘is not enough.’

‘I’ll see you soon,’ Viklund said, putting the receiver down at the other end.

Scarcely a quarter of an hour later his friend, supported by a walking-stick, appeared at the door, stooping as he came in, as if to indicate the diminutive proportions of the building, pausing, once inside, before the door was closed, to gaze at the houses opposite, the symmetry of doors and windows in the low, one-storeyed façades. ‘As both of us have remarked in the past, my place, really Ilse’s place, is far too grand,’ stepping from the narrow hall into the ground-floor through-room as if he were climbing a ladder, allowing Maddox to take his coat, to lay it over a chair, accepting not the offer of a drink but tea, Maddox talking to him from the kitchen, coming through, finally, and sitting down opposite the spot where the fireplace might have been, in its place, the cavity sealed off, a television set.

‘Time we talked,’ his visitor said, the mug of tea untouched on the low table Maddox had placed beside him. ‘Quite soon,’ he added, ‘it’ll be too late.’

There was, after all, a confederacy between them: the legacy of pictures, sculptures.

‘Back to iconography, for instance,’ Viklund said. ‘I felt drawn at the beginning not to life but art, and was immediately impressed when you drew my attention to motor-cars. Flesh into metal, and back again,’ facetiousness in his tone as well as glance.

His friend was dressed in the familiar dark grey suit, a filament of a lighter, vertical line passing through it: light-coloured socks, the slim, sharply pointed, thin-leathered, handmade shoes, the handkerchief pointing up from the lip of the breast pocket, a lighter-coloured waistcoat visible between the lapels of the jacket, the white shirt and diagonally patterned tie, pink and grey: a uniformity of appearance which Viklund had affected since the moment Maddox had first known him. As far as he could recall he’d been dressed in a similar, if not an identical manner at the first lecture Maddox had attended at the Courtauld, and consistently so, later, at the Drayburgh: a uniform, saddening, almost childish, Viklund had thought congruous with his calling as a gentleman, if more pertinently, a diplomat: serenity, composure, exactness: something entrancingly ‘away’ from life, Pemberton, too, he recalled, inclined to suits, dark and, minus patterning, even more anonymous.

‘We’ve both been pulling on the same rope, but,’ Viklund said, ‘in divergent directions, not maximising our effort, only convinced of the one thing, the nature of the opposition at the other end, identified by both of us as aggressive, redundant, obscene.’

A moral disposition in both of them, he wondering if the familiarity of his own home, and Viklund’s agreement to be in it, licensed a renewed examination of his life-long friend (and, he was beginning to recognise, rival).

He took in the particularities of the face, the sharpness, now the flesh had left it, of the projecting forehead, the darkening cavities, as if moulded by a finger, from within which the eyes gazed out – a look characterised by an unusual candour, one he associated with Viklund’s early years: an unblinking, unwittingly oppressive stare (the misleading impression of boyish expectation).

And the mouth, thin-lipped, flexed between bracketed incisions, a self-deprecating grimace creeping in with age, braced to pain, or the prospect of, above it the assertive, autocratic, avian nose: all this, and sensibility, too, from an amalgam, Maddox reflected, of reptilian, apean, human resources, a million million years from spark igniting gas to God’s aesthete – bent, or so it appeared, on a final evangelical mission.

Through the walls, as ever, came Berenice’s frenetic, expostulating, self-exonerating voice: the intimacy of her domestic regime: ‘I’ve just tidied the fucking room and you’re fucking it up already,’ followed by the inevitable, ‘Right?’

Or, rather, ‘Roight?’

‘You cunt!’

Viklund’s head went up to acknowledge the sound, pausing before enquiring, ‘Would you say we’re divergent, or on the same line?’

‘The same line. Though we might dispose of the rope,’ he added.

The tiny, yellowing teeth appeared: something circumspect in his manner evident at once, a probity which came from values, from a predilection not necessarily his own. He, too, he might have been saying, had had a father – an uncle, even – who had played a determining role in his earliest life, putting in place a refinement he might otherwise never have had: fortuity, on the one hand, predestiny, on the other. ‘What’s the diff, Professor?’ he was mentally enquiring, recalling Simone’s observation on the contrary nature of their careers.

And she, what was her place in Viklund’s imperium? Would news of her predicament confirm what Viklund had suspected all long – a professional misjudgement on her part?

On both their parts.

It’s odd,’ he said, ‘when we’ve been so close, that what was there in you, so significantly, was never recognised by me until now,’ the strangeness of Viklund sitting in a place where he had never sat before striking him at that moment with renewed force. This is a reductive experience, he warned himself, he’s here on a missionary expedition. ‘Faith on one side,’ he added, ‘something considerably less on mine.’

‘Not less,’ Viklund said, ‘different,’ the tone light, inconsequential, the suggestion thrown away.

‘What I’ve been, and am going through, might be seen as a consequence of what I rejected, consciously, in you,’ he said.

‘Not, as you supposed, that I’m seeking a deathbed conversion.’

Maddox shook his head. ‘I assume you held such beliefs all along and chose, rightly, not to impose them on me. At this point of our lives, however, they’re scarcely important. Certainly Lucretius wouldn’t approve. Nil igitur mors est ad nos, extinction or life continuing in another, or even similar form, irrelevant.’

‘I’m not here to convert,’ Viklund said, still smiling. ‘I’m not asking you to share anything at all. The antidote to despair isn’t further rejection. There’s a great deal of resistance to art being about anything at all. That, I scarcely need to add, is still very strong.’

‘The best of both worlds,’ Maddox said.

‘Aestheticism, as an end in itself, however, has never been my line. I merely suggest, it doesn’t have to be yours. I believe you’ve discovered that for yourself.’ He lifted his head: once more through the party-wall came Berenice’s cry: ‘Why don’t you do what I fucking ask? All the time I’m talking here and you’re taking no fucking notice! ROIGHT?’ Viklund concluding, ‘Belief has its own momentum. It does or it doesn’t claim us as its own.’

There was a sudden bleakness in this confession which Maddox hadn’t been prepared for: it was as if Viklund were confiding: don’t you see, we’re both fucked up?

As it was, he was watching Maddox without turning his head, his pupils lodged in the corners of his eyes, a suddenly antagonistic, fierce, unsmiling look: all his reserve appeared to have vanished.

‘Without the anguish, farewell to God and hello to perdition, there’d be nothing there at all. Style bereft of content. At the heart of it, otherwise, would be a liking for decoration, something to distract us from an otherwise blank wall.’

He could see – felt aggrieved – that Viklund was speaking – pleading, almost – from exhaustion, someone, foreseeing his end, determined to attract an audience (a congregation, it was turning out), appealing beyond the ‘aesthetic provenance’, as he invariably described it, to something altogether more demanding and, at the same time, conscious of its irrelevance, he was suggesting, the one sign of its authenticity: a religionist’s not an aesthete’s, or even a humanist’s passion.

‘Would all this go down well, I wonder, next door?’ Maddox gestured at the wall.

The facetiousness Viklund dismissed with a wave of his hand, the strange, inelegant hand with its small, immaculately cared-for fingers.

‘Aesthetes don’t illuminate anything. The struggle goes on elsewhere.’

Maddox was, he realised, endeavouring to suppress a feeling of hostility, one which had been there from the moment Viklund had taken up his offer to visit him at home: he, out of deference, had always gone to him, a normal expression of their friendship which neither of them had queried until now.

Viklund, he suspected, had never liked children: something which might have inclined him to stay away in the past. Out of that had evolved a pattern neither had disturbed. Yet even then, the hostility, he realised, was defensive: ever since leaving Simone’s house the previous evening he’d been in a state of shock, of not knowing from which direction the next attack might come: the Medical Council, Taylor, Devonshire, Doctor Death himself. The tension, of a paroxysmal nature, one anxiety attack succeeding another, the residual level of anxiety scarcely receding, was causing him not only to sweat but to breathe in a peculiarly irregular manner, he disguising his discomfort by repeatedly moving in his chair, keeping his hands and his arms occupied, breathing deeply and slowly as far as the irregular pattern would allow, willing, almost, the expelled carbon dioxide to remain inside his lungs.

Here was Viklund, speaking to him as if he were a normal human being and all the while he was struggling to contain a disturbance which had little if anything to do with Viklund at all, or with the room, or the house, or with anything he could identify. His body – its reactions – had a life of its own, the brain, sitting on top of this disaster – his stomach contracting as he endeavoured to control the expansion and dilation of his lungs – surveying the catastrophe with a helplessness he recognised as not exclusively his. In rooms up and down the surrounding streets, let alone around the town – at the geriatric day-care centre, at the North London Royal – others would be enduring a not dissimilar sensation: a feeling of being manipulated by a presence other than their own, a feeling that their lives were coming to a halt. He was doing his best not to get to his feet and walk about the room, his arms folded across his chest to constrain the involuntary movements of his body: he was doing his best not to provide Viklund with the evidence – to be communicated presumably to Charlotte, to Simone – that would confirm his worst misgivings, his illness the consequence of a faithless existence, his insistence that the hedonistic principle was the only one that counts.

All this time and energy wasted, he reflected, in being ill; all this time wasted either confessing or denying it: all this time driven by feelings over which, other than by chemicals, he had no control: the irresponsibility of his relationship with Simone: somehow that, and aesthetics and Taylor, even Laycock, Doctor Death, Donaldson and Devonshire were connected. He was in a situation from which he couldn’t withdraw – other than by way of the tube station platform. Why, subconsciously, had he chosen that, handing on his affliction, in its most tormented form, to those whom he loved and was loved by, as well as to those who were not otherwise involved? The evidence of his failure (to do something) was vividly before him, Viklund suggesting that the seeds of it lay in his abandonment of the faith of the Florentine masters by whom, otherwise, his life had been consumed: the failure to make a coherent statement of his life now that it was, so plainly, even if not pre-empted by him, coming to an end.

An image of ‘Death’ came to him in a spectral form, not all that different from the emaciated figure he had seen coming out of and going into Simone’s consulting-room; nor, now he came to take more regard of it, from the figure sitting in the chair before him. He was even aware of Berenice’s recriminations coming, renewed, through the party-wall: ‘What will that cunt next door think? He says I’m fucking nuts. Right?’ he wondering if she were referring to him or her equally submissive neighbours on her other side.

He was withdrawing into a position from which Viklund would no longer be able to retrieve him (the purpose, he concluded, of his unprecedented visit). Lunacy had no other source than his denial of the divine nature of the origins of life (if it was good enough for Giotto, Fra Angelico, Alberti, it should be good enough for him), to him an electro-chemical event, to Viklund something beyond definition, beyond understanding, beyond the scope of the imagination.

‘I’m not sure I’m waiting to be saved, other than in a medical sense,’ he said. ‘And that, as far as I can tell, is underway. As for Taylor, he fits into a pattern which was there before I ever felt like this,’ something helpless in his tone of voice as well as his gestures, his hand flailing before him as if in dismissal, in reality to suggest to Viklund he listen to the voice coming through the wall.

‘You’re wanting to hit me, roight!’

‘No.’

‘You want to fucking hit me!’

‘I don’t’

‘You’re wanting to fucking kill me. Roight?’

‘No.’

‘You’re wanting to fucking kill me because I don’t want you in my fucking house!’

‘No.’

‘You’re wanting to fucking kill me!’ something of a scream.

‘I’ll fucking kill you, you cunt!’

‘You want to fucking kill me! I told you!’ screaming. ‘Roight?’

‘I’ll kill you, you cunt!’ a door slamming, the sounds continuing, the words inaudible.

A second door slammed. The walls shook. The glass vibrated in the windows. Debris rattled down the chimney and crumbled in the sealed-off fireplace. An impediment of some sort was lodged inside Maddox’s throat: what he had hoped might once more be under his control appeared to be so no longer.

‘Are you all right?’

Viklund had risen, with difficulty, from his chair, pushing himself up against the arms, coming to stand by Maddox’s chair while Maddox, suddenly aware of how frail Viklund was, went through all the sensations of being choked – strangled, even, by an invisible hand, something which enclosed his neck. His hand went to his chest, Viklund, if feebly, striking his back. His eyes filled with tears: he indicated the kitchen, managed to exclaim, ‘Water!’ and waited, alternately doubling over and straightening, while Viklund went to the kitchen and returned moments later with a beaker.

He spluttered, swallowed, endeavoured to speak, swallowed again, and then, with an effort, stood.

Taking deep breaths he walked to the window, almost as if he intended walking through it and into the street (anywhere to get away from here), turned, breathed more deeply, and walked back across the room.

‘I don’t know what it is. Tension.’ His throat, as he spoke, began to clear: the distinct impression that something was trapped there began to fade. He swallowed, swallowed again, exhaled, vigorously, and added, ‘I’ll be all right. I’m better already. A demon departing, so to speak,’ smiling at Viklund’s shaking his head.

‘Let’s hope,’ Viklund said, and added, ‘What’s the tension about?’

‘It comes from nowhere,’ he said. ‘Hormonal. Inside the head. Missing letters in the DNA,’ knowing he was playing into Viklund’s hands, the older man’s alarm nevertheless subsiding, he appearing about to fall, holding onto the back of Maddox’s chair. Shadows Maddox had rarely seen fell across Viklund’s face, deepening the hollows around the eyes, within the cheeks, below his jaw: a mask, an almost diabolical expression, confused – confounded: a fearful look which intensified as he, in turn, examined Maddox’s face. He came to my rescue without a second thought, he reflected. His faith is authentic, something about which he has no choice, as natural as breathing, aware of the opportunity for choice in me, perhaps, even, at this point, envying it.

‘I’m all right,’ he said again. ‘Perhaps I should walk you back, or call you a cab. How did you get here? You arrived so quickly. I forgot to ask.’

‘I have the car,’ Viklund said.

‘Have you parked it?’

‘The driver’s with it.’

‘Outside?’

‘Better than leaving it on a meter, don’t you think?’ the suggestion of a smile: something disagreeable and yet disarming had passed between them, Maddox wasn’t sure what: the intrusion of wealth, the suggestion it isolated Viklund more decisively than anything else: his house, his paintings, a chauffeured car – and faith, of an indiscernible but significant nature.

Division was suddenly more apparent than anything which, previously, might have united them: no wonder Viklund had left belief implicit in a relationship which could well have foundered on it.

‘I’ll walk you to the car,’ he said, adding, ‘Where is it?’ looking round for Viklund’s coat.

‘He’ll see me come out. I wondered if we might talk more.’

Viklund had turned, crossing to his chair, stooping over it, indicating decisively his intention of sitting down, the car, the notion of someone waiting in it (surely not Ilse?) of little or no concern. What a curious impression, Maddox reflected, Viklund must have of service; it was, after all, a cardinal’s temperament, a worldly accountability subsumed by a spiritual one, or, more readily, he assumed, the other way around.

Maddox drank again: it had been a mistake to accede to his friend’s suggestion he come to the house – the residue of a family home from which anything connected with familial intimacy had been removed; or, more nearly, in reality, had flowed away. It was desertion, he realised, that lay at the heart of his illness – looking round at the anonymous room, previously two rooms, the connecting arch a square-shaped structure, the opening into the equally anonymous kitchen. No wonder Simone rarely wished to stay: no wonder he was glad to escape to her house, its walls covered with mementoes from one stage of her life or another (a consciously recorded advancement): photographs, drawings, paintings, prints, artefacts, maps, testimonials, even framed pages of manuscript (hers and others’ from the several books to which she’d contributed essays or introductions), the furniture, too, an accumulation from the past, the house too small to contain all she would have wished to put in it: an interior expressing richness, as opposed to wealth, intimacy, knowledge, diversity, appreciation, even rapacity, conviviality, warmth: health.

His ambition – recent, faltering, indecisive, inconclusive – had been to pull the rug from under Donaldson, he as significant a proponent, if not manufacturer, if not manipulator of the New Philistinism as any, certainly the one, in his experience, closest to hand. As it was (right now, too) he was suffering – badly: subject to sudden, involuntary sensations – like killing himself precisely at the moment when it might have been the last thought in his head; subject in general, to a tyranny of effects, many identified deceptively as causes, as if retribution, the form of, had been quietly amassing throughout his life, itself bereft of trauma or retributory desires. A life consumed by a desire to do/be good, guilt otherwise swiftly arising – to illuminate, expand, enhance (ideas, interpretations, people). For this he was being presented with an incomprehensible bill: a pauper (of sorts), he had consumed modestly throughout his life – to be presented with the evidence he had consumed an inordinate amount (enough for several people, if not more: who? when? where were they?). Nothing, so the bill suggested, had he chosen but the best.

And here was Viklund – yet again – the one on whom he had most relied, for guidance, for encouragement, sceptical of Maddox’s revolutionary mission but admiring (supportive, in itself) of the way he’d gone about it: someone whose own revolutionary pretensions had been artfully concealed, art, as propaganda, of a more elusive, subtle, intransigent nature, that ‘thing’ he had never spoken about, that ‘thing’ on the behalf of which he prayed, presumably, each week at the Danish Church.

No point in defending himself, or proposing, even, a different basis on which they might meet. His own misfortunes were grieved over, genuinely, by (he could see) his still-loving friend, but their causes were, to Viklund, painfully apparent: his father’s death, for instance, long before his mother’s, Taylor’s trial, much in the media at the time, and to which he had expected to be called as a witness, his sectioning, the causes of and the recovery, if incomplete, from that, his emergence, Simone vividly in mind, from what he had been slow to realise was a secular version of hell: anomalies in the brain’s DNA which triggered off hormonal defects amounting to disarray: genetics, epigenetics, chromosone deficiences, a constitutional disorder, an epidemiology of frightening proportions: the dreaded ‘Hox’ genes with their ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – the mutatory engine-room of deviant behaviour – finally, however, the absence of Christ or the equivalence thereof: he had been walking down the road – a road – or so he had thought, to salvation, and Viklund, unbeknown to him, had been walking down another, in a contrary direction, to the same (not least, as he had lately discovered, on Sundays: a particular time, a particular place, where universality could be recognised), less to enlightenment, or so it had seemed, than to something singularly more overwhelming.

All these years, assuming he had been doing one thing and he had, in reality, been doing another. And Viklund, his hands extended behind him to the arms of the chair, having waited for Maddox’s acquiescence, had slowly, stiffly sat down and was now waiting, having, evidently, more to say which he wasn’t inclined to do from a standing position.

‘Shouldn’t we invite your driver in?’ he asked.

‘It’s not me he normally hangs around for, but Ilse. I make a change. He has a computer which amuses him for hours.’

‘Computer?’ Maddox said, dissuaded from sitting.

‘A device he carries in his pocket. It’s scarcely out of his hand, even when he’s driving.’ More relaxed still, he leant back in the chair, his arms stretched out beside him. ‘If he dislikes the job he can always leave. I’ve heard no complaints. Ilse, for instance, doesn’t like me going out unaccompanied, terrified of something happening if no one is around.’

If Viklund were indicating a sharing of afflictions, Maddox thought, he wasn’t inclined to go along with it, demonstrating his changing mood as well as his recovery by walking up and down, such discourtesy, he further reflected, complemented by something he wouldn’t previously have considered: a determination to emancipate himself from Viklund’s charm: behind it, glaringly, lay the ritualistic cannibalism of the sacred feast, the consumption of God’s son in response to an atavistic appetite: the action of primitives, if anything was.

Nevertheless, breathing more freely, oppressed by Viklund’s presence but disinclined to carry discourtesy further by asking him to leave, he looked down on his friend, reminded – obscurely – of how he had never gone in for purchasing the objects he had discerningly admired, either on his own or others’ behalf – approaches from Sotheby’s and Christie’s consistently (at the time, seemingly, perversely) dismissed. Something climactic now, however, was about to happen, he suspected, Viklund’s own discomfort set aside, as if they were both, in his friend’s estimation, about to die – not a one-sided approach to death but a mutually convened arrival, Maddox as close to it, in Viklund’s eyes, as himself, he no longer Viklund’s successor but his spiritual accomplice.

Further evidence, he reflected, of declining powers which any good-natured doctor would not be disinclined to point out. ‘The Socratic suggestion we should spend no time reflecting on death a singularly wise one, endorsed by Epicurus and your favoured Lucretius, in contrast, let’s say, to Aurelius, who thought of little else – all positivists, however, in this regard, for even by not-thinking we offer it a significant place, the only thing not to contemplate, the one deferring to the unimaginable by resignation, the other by acceptance, both, in my view, producing commendable results.’

He was speaking to ease his throat, repeating much of what he had said before, anxious, at the same time, to reassure Viklund he was, relatively, back to normal as well as to prepare himself for, if not pre-empt, what he imagined might come next.

‘Montaigne appears to overlook that the decline of sensory perception is distressing in itself, the method as painful as the final result.’

His voice had developed a drawl, as if, perversely, he were suggesting that lucidity was merely another symptom of the condition he was endeavouring to hide: that everything was a symptom of what he was endeavouring to hide, not least his pacing to and fro, an agitation as indicative of his discomfort as if he’d started stuttering – a childhood complaint, ironically, eased, if not disappearing, whenever he was driven in a car – or, as previously, as if he’d started choking, or had been unable to get out of his chair. Now he was simply stating he was unable to get into it.

A childish disinclination to respond to Viklund in anything other than a defensive way was forcing him to avoid looking in his direction, aware merely of a wraith-like figure which came and went in the corner of his eye. He was concentrating on the window as he progressed towards it, and the street outside, then on the opening to the kitchen as he paced the room in the opposite direction. Surely it was plain to Viklund he wished his friend to go? What’s this? What’s happening to me? he mentally enquired: why am I disturbed by someone I’ve known for almost the whole of my adult life, and to whom I feel as close as I do to anyone, outside my family, and Simone?

‘I’ve only a matter of weeks to live,’ Viklund said, the tone restrained and, because of that, defiant. ‘Six might be a reasonable guess. Inevitably, I’m driven to think of other things. Whether, for instance, I should come by car. Or walk. Or where Kellaway would park it. I’ve to decide whether to end it in the way I’ve previously suggested or whether I should allow it to take its natural course. “Natural” being a word I’m currently having problems with. It doesn’t feel natural, for instance, to feel like I do at present.’

He’d paused; Maddox, too: something along these lines he’d been expecting – definitive, inescapable, final – rejecting the thought in much the same way, he reflected, as he had rejected much in his own life, setting it aside, with restraint, in the hope that, having done so, it would do the only decent thing and go away.

A fresh agitation coincided with this realisation: an awareness that Viklund was imposing on him at a time when even he would have conceded he didn’t wish to be imposed upon at all, certainly not by something as overwhelming as this.

At the same time he was conscious of a curiously revivifying thought: not an article, for Devonshire, on Taylor – an arts page leader – but a book, encapsulating the art of the previous fifty years, its title immediately apparent, in lower case, to indicate the inconsequentiality he had so often gone on about: as it happened.

‘How certain are they?’ he enquired.

‘I’m playing stoppage-time, I believe they call it,’ Viklund said. ‘Injury time,’ he added.

He was smiling, as if he had considered what he was about to say before confiding it.

‘Does Ilse know?’

‘Why upset her now when she’ll be upset enough when it happens? In the end I’ve concluded I have to tell someone. I hope you’ll forgive me.’ The look came up, plaintive, something little short of supplication: this I don’t have to go on about, the look suggested. What is friendship for, if not, at the very least, this sort of confession? ‘The whole of Ilse’s life, despite my discouragement, my frequent discouragement, has been focused on me. Not a warrantable sacrifice, by any means. But one I’ve been sufficiently lax to take advantage of. She went off once, for instance, with a fellow she still sees. Affection, I should say, rather than love, or, God forbid it, passion. Otherwise,’ he continued, ‘there’s only been me. Plus, of course, the times we’ve lived in.’

Watching Maddox’s expression, he smiled: the thin lips parted to the diminutive, yellow teeth: something of a dandy’s gesture in the way he flicked his arm to one side, Maddox immediately reminded of his uncle, the parodied engagement he’d had with everything, in itself concealing, he’d assumed, something imperturbable yet possibly alarming.

‘Those geniuses we’ve spent our life examining. Justification, in your case, for claiming we’re in decline.’ He paused again. ‘I wouldn’t, for my part, concede it’s the end of everything. In regard of the species you’re convinced is heading for extinction.’ Raising one shoulder, he dipped his hand in the side pocket of his jacket, holding up a phial. ‘I need this, at the moment, to keep me going. Could you get me some water? My tea’s gone cold.’

Maddox went through to the kitchen, found a glass, half filled it from a bottle in the fridge and took it back, standing by Viklund after he’d taken it. Whatever he’d been holding in his hand he’d swallowed and, drinking from the glass, he handed it back. ‘I’ve been intending to tell you for a while. Not least when walking the other day. As time’s shortened, my resistance to burdening you has weakened. And now, today, I thought, I’d better take a chance. How curious, I’d been thinking, we should both cave in together. Then I was aware, in more buoyant mood, you have a significant length of time to go and I might therefore hand on everything which is positive on my side to use at your discretion.’

‘Is there anything specifically,’ Maddox said, ‘you’d like me to do? Is there anything,’ he went on, his tone despairing, ‘you’d like to tell me?’

He moved backwards, as if physically to accommodate whatever Viklund had to say, sitting on the arm of his chair, suggesting, by his posture, a readiness to spring up again.

‘My only concern is that whatever impetus my death may give you you use discreetly. I don’t care,’ he waved his arm again, ‘what you do, as long as you do it with conviction. Conviction, should it occur, lies at the heart of it. The approach to your conviction is what I most rely on. The approach, as far as I’m concerned, is all that counts. The result I leave to you.’ He smiled, a roguish expression. ‘The house, of course, I’ve left to Ilse. Not that you’d want it, in any case. My papers, to which you have exclusive access, I’ve left to the college archive.’

He was on his feet before Maddox had risen, turning to the door. ‘Kellaway will be glad to see me. I told him I wouldn’t be long.’

Maddox followed him to the hall where, having confirmed his decision to leave, Viklund waited for him to retrieve his coat and stick.

Holding the coat to the other man, he realised how skeletal Viklund’s arms were as he slid them in the sleeves; how childlike, even, were the shoulders, how thin the neck and, alarmingly, how vulnerable the hair receding from the scalp, and was conscious of his intimacy with the man, something he’d scarcely been aware of over all these years: the texture of the skin, the colour of the hair, the way it had been rounded at the back of the head, even his odour: something of his father, the fastidiousness, the confederacy, which passed between them, implicit, unhurried, self-declared – the delicacy, even, in Viklund’s case – a sensitivity which, having found its outlet, was, almost deliberately, being withdrawn, at the same time declaring, ‘I’ve given you a reason for going on. My case may be worse than yours. Use it to measure how much there’s still to do.’ All he said, however, as, turning at the door, he embraced Maddox, instead of shaking his hand, was, ‘As we’ve always known, fortuity plays its engaging part, thank God,’ turning to the street, towards which he waved his arm.

A car, parked amongst others, pulled out into the road. As it came forward Maddox could see the peaked cap of the driver. ‘His idea,’ Viklund said, anxious to identify elements of his life with which he was not in accord.

The car pulled up. The man, dressed in a grey uniform, got out. Viklund, registering Maddox’s expression, ‘Ilse’s idea, which Kellaway was keen to endorse. They hatched it up together,’ taking Maddox’s hand and shaking it, a sign their farewell had been said in the house. ‘Let’s have another walk before it’s too late. Or perhaps you can wheel me round by then. Kellaway sometimes comes when there’s no one else. I hate to be alone when Ilse’s out. Odd, don’t you think, after all these years? As if everything material is being unconsciously dispensed with,’ turning the final remark to the surprisingly youthful figure of the driver, the eyes almost buried beneath the peak of the cap, the mouth, more broadly visible, smiling. ‘The car we hire by the year. It evidently saves on tax. Kellaway by the month. He’s taking a year out. Before university. He looks twelve but he’s really nineteen. He’s to study medicine. Or is it French?’

‘Neither,’ the youth responded, familiar, evidently, with Viklund’s rejuvenated mood, adding to Maddox, ‘Law. Mr Viklund’s aware of it, but cynical, too. The political nexus of the future. He’s loath to agree. He thinks I should do something useful.’

‘Law displacing politics,’ Viklund said, winking at Maddox. ‘He has the right if not the true idea, youth ahead without our even knowing. Any fool can do it.’

‘Like art,’ the young man responded. ‘Anyone can, and most of them have.’

‘Most of them do,’ Viklund said, ducking to the rear door as the young man held it open. ‘Though I never get in the last word,’ he added. ‘Art, of course, I wouldn’t recommend. It’s either on you, or it isn’t. Most of those afflicted, however, can easily brush it off,’ the door closing, his face plaintively visible behind the glass, his figure shrunken in the interior of the car, he waving, the youthful chauffeur nodding, smiling, as it drew away.

Returning inside Maddox washed up the three mugs and the glass, staring into the tiny yard outside the kitchen window, not sure, even now, what had been the purpose of Viklund’s visit: fear, a desire to tell someone to whom the news would be significant: assigning to him a task he couldn’t himself complete: promoting the virtues, however reduced, of staying alive: the handing-over of a tradition he hoped he would sustain.

And, returning to fear: the abandonment of something he had taken delight in in favour of something unimaginable: the enquiry that lay at the back of his announcement: is self-death acceptable as grace? Wasn’t Christ’s knowledge of the context within which he was acting another form of self-submission? The quandary, too, of the Apostles’ Creed – the text, in his own case, learnt by heart in company with his mother, his father, his brother, his sister, though never his uncle, and in the chapel, too, at Quinians – the confession of belief in a Christ who prior to his resurrection descended for three days into hell having previously assured the thief (to his right, his left?) that he would that day be with him in paradise – a paradise which Viklund, now it had come to the crunch, was finding elusive. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? no apostasy, exactly, but something of a secular nature he wished to confide, obvious in his proposal they return to the park to walk again. Finally, farewell.

Meanwhile, all this alongside his sudden conviction – his ‘vision’, even – away from all that, though tangentially, in some way, connected to it: he should ‘programme’ Taylor into the contents of a book, art in society transposed into art as society, the bleeding heart of ‘consciousness’ abandoned in favour of a heart more clinically defined.