12

Getting up in the night, looking out at the narrow street: the narrow houses, the curtained windows, the companionable feeling of people asleep, awake, lying there, thoughts, he assumed, not unlike his own, dreams of a peculiar intensity and nature: descending the stairs, aware that Viklund’s visit had left something of his presence in the house, something of his instruction to be responded to. Drifting off, his thoughts, to his former wife, her present husband (‘into thy hands’), a feeling of displacement that took him back to Viklund, then his sons, their differing temperaments, careers, Simone, Taylor (‘we are our relationships’), his own disassociated presence, the confusion that characterised his current life: a ship (of old) moored in midstream, waiting for a favourable wind and tide, true element of nature.

Out there, too, were all those women: the life-class, the support group, the Auschwitz-focused legatees, Berenice’s voice audible through the party wall, ‘fucking’, the only word discernible.

Tat twam asi.

This art thou: his anguish not due to circumstance: miscreant genes.

Something along those lines: ‘You are not an epistemologist,’ he had written, in red ink, on one of Taylor’s essays (the influence of science on the methodology of art, foreshadowing so much of what was to come): those tutor-room encounters recalled, in this instance, in the middle of the night, everything, otherwise, slipping away: separated from something: divided from what? the intelligence and naïvety he associated with Simone; they, the two of them, hand in hand, even at sixty, he nearer seventy, he never sure which aspect of her nature he was engaged with or controlled by, the sophist who sat through accounts of sexual incongruity, failure, incompetence, impotence, finally, loneliness, terror, the fear of being unloved, unpossessed, unknown, unquieted.

The Midlands schoolgirl, socially subdued, familiarly suppressed, riding on a boyfriend’s bike, she on the mudguard behind the seat, her arms around his waist, or sitting, sideways, on the crossbar, enclosed by his arms, waiting, if not for a kiss, a further stage in her enlightenment: intelligence, on the one hand, rapacity, on the other: everything inverted in the middle of the night, freedom for one, servility to another.

It was as if, in a curious way, a part of him had ‘happened’: it had matured, reached satiety, and had then expired, the residue – a witless, shiftless remainder – living on as if expiration had not occurred, the removal of the integral part of him, the organism functioning, deludedly, as normal.

Too late for reflection, yet reflecting all the while, not sure, in the event, where such reflection led: the way affects moved through the system: a mind without reference to itself: that organism which existed (looking down) above his legs, his chest, his shoulders, his thoughts competing with Berenice’s voice in the next-door room, the contentiously responding voices of her all-night junkies: life! life! an impulse to lie down, he, such as he was, resisting, dreams activated while wide awake: the impression, bodily, of being in two places at once, here and here, neither identified, neither familiar: the maelstrom of his present condition, life existing in the region of his head, his stomach, his neck conflagrating, or so it seemed, disengaging him from everything.

That again …

He looked through the window from the inside of the restaurant wondering if his brother would come; wondering, even, if he’d remembered. Paul had rung him: they’d arranged to meet for lunch at a place his brother frequented in the City.

He’d travelled there by bus, disinclined to use the tube, comforted by its slow progress (what did speed mean to him any more?), its dreamlike enclosure by the streets: the intermittently shifting traffic, the juxtaposition of stylishly incongruous buildings: shop windows, plastic surrounds, stone walls, brick, finally glass edifices reflecting one another against a fractious sky, a maze of mirrors and distorted, wavering elevations: the nomenclature of a vast Caucasian-Semitic-Indo-Asian tribe: the multifarious faces (each with its ‘mind’, its unholy perceptions), figures, focused elsewhere, processing to and fro.

He had wanted air (security), he had wanted to get out, away, he reflected, from his own reflection; away, for one thing, from thoughts of Simone, his culpability, his sense of receiving displaced by an absence of giving, his negligible contribution to their tenuously joined-up lives. Hercules, Plato reported, felt like this (Plato, Socrates and Lysander), aware of the dull unfolding – Berlioz, Delacroix … Carlyle, James, Hopkins – of a predictable life where hormones inconsistently manoeuvred, he like no other, yet like them all.

The restaurant was full, the table, he’d been relieved to discover, booked by his brother. He’d arrived early, springing off the bus, reminded, vividly, of the pain in his hips, his ankles, the joints of his toes, surprised how swiftly the City was changing, glass-fronted, metal-fluted, a quaintly domesticated institutional grandeur, personalised brick and stone and plastic façades – the narrow alleyways which the streets had become – the feeling of intimacy impersonally confined: the inadvertent passages, footpaths, the residue of churches, scarred, pale stonework bleached like bone, a skeletal residue between the impassively reflecting towers – he spotting his brother crossing the road, the slender, athletic, prematurely white-haired figure darting between the contending streams of traffic, looking up once to see where, in relation to the buildings opposite, he intended to go – approaching the restaurant, brushing down his hair, briskly, distracted, his thoughts on other things, scarcely, Maddox reflected, on the prospect ahead, a task – an inconvenience – he’d set himself in the middle of the day, coming in, breathless, the waitress nearest the door recognising him with a smile and, a strange intimacy in the crowded interior, a wave, pointing to the table, his expression lightening as he identified Maddox sitting there.

‘Been here long?’ stepping round the table, insisting Maddox rise to embrace him, clasping him to him, Maddox a broader, stockier figure, his brother, after breathing heartily beside his ear, sliding into his seat, beside the window, Maddox retaking his own: the attenuated features of his brother’s face, sharp, inquisitive, eagerly engaging: a bird of prey, a warning glint as he examined Maddox across the table, the face, Maddox reflected, behind the smile, evoking warmth, camaraderie, affection (disillusionment, too, the way things had gone).

‘Not very.’

‘I asked them to reserve it. Not always possible.’ Paul indicated the privileged space beside the window, signalling, as he did so, to the waitress who had greeted him coming in at the door, another waitress, however, approaching, offering each of them a menu, his brother detaining her, familiarly, with a hand on her arm, until the food was ordered, Paul, once she had gone, reinforcing the impression he hadn’t much time to lose. ‘How are you feeling?’ direct, to the point.

‘Nuts. Anxious. Other than that …’ his brother smiling, the youthful, at-one-time-Church-loving candour, the affectionate tyro (over sixty years of age) with little, if anything, left to lose, learn, control or dismember: the spiritual exorcist turned broker.

‘I’m pretty good,’ Paul said. ‘Rarely better,’ suggesting – promoting – an example his brother might follow: the tailored suit, the blue shirt collar, the red tie: a sombre presence behind a genially unaffected one. ‘I got your message from Cary’ (his wife). ‘She assumed it must be money. I told her not. Who’s paying for your therapy? Gerry? Charley? I hear good reports of her in the City. Your kids? It can’t be cheap.’

‘I was paying for it myself,’ he said. ‘I can afford it. For you, too, if you want in,’ his brother smiling, Maddox adding, ‘I’ve dropped it. Charley must have told you. I’m back on the National Health.’

‘Any good?’ His brother, having ordered a drink by signalling to a waiter across the room – familiarity, once more, in operation – received it, Maddox indicating his own – ordered while he was waiting – was only half consumed.

‘How do you measure these things? Every few weeks I see a psychiatrist. One day a week I attend a geriatric clinic. The place is clean. The food like school dinners. The staff kind. The other patients recessive, confused, terrified, incorrigibly defensive. Auschwitz at the back of most of their lives. At the back of mine, in a curious way, too. Don’t ask why. Peer support, or so it’s described. The reassurance which comes from the knowledge, it’s suggested, if not insisted, you’re not alone. Not alone,’ he carelessly repeated.

His brother was smiling (again): a lean, attentive face, focused, acute, unlike his own: something of their father’s asperity, his sensitivity; something of their Uncle Joseph’s ability to move enliveningly into and out of any world he chose. And something, too, of their mother’s nature: the school secretary (without whom the place couldn’t function) and Sunday School leader (at the Cathedral, during and after the war), Paul’s own religious curiosity encouraged and promoted by her: his catechism learnt by heart by the age of thirteen, recited in instalments each Sunday afternoon: his (curious) indifference to cars, or anything mechanical: his decision, challengingly announced, at the age of eighteen, to go into the Church (‘take up the priesthood, for God’s sake!’ their uncle’s ambiguous cry): an open-minded, free-thinking, apostolically inclined aspirant: an ability to deter (discomfort) evil in all its genially recognised forms. ‘What happened to the therapy?’

‘I married her.’ He smiled. ‘Almost. Your kind of thing.’ His brother was no longer living with his wife, to whom, however, he remained affectionately connected: his recent address, and telephone number, Maddox had had to get from her, his brother, as in the rest of his life, persistently on the move. ‘She’s being threatened by complainants to the Medical Council as a result.’

Paul, having taken his glass, drank deeply, put it back on the table – still retaining it, however, in his hand, a strangely disowning gesture. He frowned: presumably, his brother, having gone nuts once, could do so again. ‘Get another. There are lots around.’

‘And fuck her, too?’ this, no doubt, evidence of regression.

‘What’s she like?’

‘Likeable. Enigmatic.’ He added, ‘I scarcely know her. Probably,’ he went on, ‘she has the same problem.’

He realised, not for the first time, that his habit of wanting to discompose his brother, interrupting his rhythm, was to do with a familial disappointment that Paul had left the Church – left, that is, in as cavalier a fashion as he’d joined it: somewhere out there, amongst the tall, glass-fronted buildings, each implacably reflecting its neighbours, opaque to its own interiors, was the arena, banked by computers, where his brother ‘entertained’, the vocational view he took of his operations, work an ‘enlivenment’ in much the same way as the Church, at one time, had represented an ‘enlivenment’, too: what his brother had described as ‘an appropriate exchange: illusion in place of disillusion: what do you think?’

Paul, to this extent, represented the family, an element and projection of it: its aspirations towards a wider world: his father, his uncle, his mother, his sister – finally, of course, the aspirations of Maddox himself, roamer of the aesthetic seas. Above all, regarding his brother, he recalled their uncle’s advocacy of the same, Paul an extemporised version of himself (their uncle had never married, Paul, to this extent, in lieu of a son, his protégé), as disapproving of his ordination as he was exultant at his ‘reclamation’: ‘a winner, from now on, whatever he does.’

Only on his defection (from the Church) to a bank, then the Stock Exchange, finally to a merchant bank, had Maddox’s admiration of his younger brother faltered, something of the epicurean in his nature, implicit once, now conspicuously to the fore, as, indeed, there was, and had been, in their uncle’s (as there had been, too, in Viklund’s). Paul, after all, had ‘enjoyed’ the Church – in a curious way, had relished it – identifying it less with duty or vocation than good intentions, if not downright pleasure (the pleasure he spoke most frequently of as ‘doing as opposed to being good’, an antediluvian interpretation, to Maddox’s mind). Sermonising had appealed to him, the ritual of service, the giving and the celebration of the host, evidence of a theatrical appetite, one of which, inevitably, he had quickly tired (‘the same performance, I realise, every time: do forgive me’): his popularity amongst clergy and congregations alike (his invitations to speak at churches, high and low, across London), a strange fervour associated with such a genial, seemingly spiritual enterprise: the prospect, amounting to promise, of higher office: ‘the spiritual credential of our family’, in their father’s words, transferring its authenticity to the material credibility of a bank: ‘First time they’ve had an ex-pastor in the place, can’t fail,’ Paul had explained, consistent with his mission, ‘to do all of them some good.’

‘Money can’t be that bad, after all,’ their father had suggested, hiding his disappointment more efficaciously than his brother had concealed his jubilation. ‘Didn’t Doctor Johnson concede its acquisition an innocent amusement?’ the same innocence, or so it had seemed – perhaps the same gullibility – which had warranted and sustained, for a while, his brother’s ecclesiastical career, informing Paul’s conclusion: ‘the same mission, Matt, by different means.’

Distracted, Maddox turned his attention to the street, a process of abstraction setting in, Paul, in his turn, diverted by someone grasping his shoulder, looking up, indicating Maddox: ‘My art historian brother, Matt. Professor Emeritus by any other name,’ the stranger, on his way to an adjoining table, reaching across to shake Maddox’s hand, smiling, offering, on his part, ‘No mistaking the one with money,’ his brother’s laughter, effortless, light, infectious, almost singing (liturgical, Maddox concluded), his uncomplicated receptivity to others.

It was, he reflected, that Paul had remained, still was, a credential (an endorsement, of some sort) which he, Maddox, had always cherished (admired: looked up to: he had a weakness for uncomplicated people, seeing them, for one thing, as so unlike himself) – a registration of belief (in something) which, to a degree, he had always envied. Paul was ‘healthy’, open, accessible, Maddox, his brother (labouring under the epithet Mad Ox), was evidentially not: unhealthy, enclosed. Remote.

Watching Paul acknowledging figures at a nearby table, he realised, not for the first time, that his brother was charismatic. Previously he had assumed him to be merely remarkable: adaptable, resilient, vocationally inclined, much in his nature, since it elicited no problems, taken for granted. Closeness in a family, however, often precluded a broader look: something undoubtedly of their father in his nature, but, more demonstrably, of their uncle, the St Albans macaroon: ‘the singing signore’, as one of his friends had described him, the frequenter of theatres, clubs and bars ‘in town’, a dropper of names, a provider of vehicles – discounts, to their father’s horror, no problem, trade-in prices his ‘speciality’, many of their customers acquired on his London forays: ‘I go into town to work, not to play. Don’t let your father mislead you. Most of our custom comes London way. Ask Lucy (their mother). She knows what a good team we are,’ something of the Josephean efflorescence even more apparent in Paul as he grew older – particularly at that moment as his brother turned back to him, their uncle’s excitation evident in his face as well as his manner.

‘Quite a crew.’ His brother indicated the men he’d been speaking to. ‘Arseholes, in reality. You could walk through them in daylight and not know they were there,’ a new-found cynicism replacing the charm: was his brother on the point of giving up this ‘career’, too, the opportunities for doing as opposed to being good unequivocally reduced? ‘Money and more money,’ his brother was saying, signalling the room.

He wanted Paul to be happy: the protective care he had exercised over his brother at Quinians: Maddox Major, Maddox Minor – a label Paul, understandably, had resented and instinctively fought against, his quicksilver reaction to (almost) everything deriving from a subordinate attribution: to be happy, that is, just as Maddox had wanted their sister – their older sister, who had shared few of their privileges – to be content. Familial responsibility, he assumed, had always resided in him, the eldest son: art, the general consensus, had never been an adequate response: ‘engagement’ not commentary or analysis had always been their trade.

He was reminded at that moment – his brother now turned to speak to someone else who, confidingly, had crossed the restaurant to speak to him – of a curious incident which had occurred after their father had died.

Having heard the news from the hospital in St Albans, he had driven there the following morning and, before visiting his mother – ill as well, at home in bed – he had asked to see his father’s body.

There’d been a delay of a quarter of an hour: he was then directed down corridors to the back of the building where he was met by a man in a khaki overall. Taken into a room with chairs and no window, illuminated solely through plastic panels in the ceiling, he was again requested to wait, aware of movements beyond a further door.

Some moments later the overalled man had reappeared from the corridor outside and, indicating the door opposite, announced, peculiarly, that his father was ‘ready’. Half expecting him to be sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, transparently alive, Maddox opened the door and went inside.

The room was even smaller than the one in which he had Waited: illumination, again, came from plastic panels in the ceiling. On a bier in the centre of the room his father lay beneath a shroud, its edge drawn up beneath his chin, his arms and hands laid across his chest. At each corner of the bier a candle burned.

His father’s eyes were closed, the features of his face, as the head itself, considerably shrunken, to the proportion, almost, of a child’s. The hands – he’d scarcely been aware of them in recent years, other than when he had watched him construct his bench – were curiously gnarled, as if having been engaged over a lifetime in manual labour: suffered, overused, exhausted, the backward curl of the thumb indicating, misleadingly (as with Viklund, he was reminded), someone of an exclusively practical nature.

It was the head, however, which absorbed him, the exaggerated feature of the nose, first in profile, then face on as, helplessly, not sure what he was doing, he circled the body. It was as if – the first impression he’d had on entering the room – his father were posing: at any moment he would rise and, in his usual, unstressed voice, enquire, ‘How was that? Was it how it should be? Was I all right? What do you think?’ as he might after a demonstration run in the new model of a car. ‘Will they be pleased?’ followed by an invitation to come home with him.

He hadn’t been sure, at that point, what he was thinking or what he should do. Almost mechanically, he had lowered his head and kissed his father’s brow: its coldness, its hardness, like a piece of stone, had appalled him: nothing he associated with his father was there at all: something strange, inanimate, something unrecognisable, had, alarmingly, taken his place.

Moments later, unable to decide what he felt, he found himself walking round the bier, wringing his hands and enquiring, ‘What shall I do now?’ a surprising question, and a surprisingly piteous voice, not his at all, he no more aware of where it, or the question, had come from than he was of what had prompted him to come here in the first place. Tears, conspicuously absent when he’d first arrived, were running into his mouth, his voice, such as it was, repeating the startling question, that part of his mind aware of what was happening standing back appalled.

It was a denatured presence that had come out of the room, wiping its tears on the back of its hand, insufficiently composed even to take out a handkerchief: something more urgent had taken over. He had come to the hospital not to see his father, or even, however pressingly, to say goodbye, but to bring him back (take him home); the finality of what he had seen had severed everything he had previously, however tenuously, considered to be ‘himself’: a warm and receptive part of him had been wrenched out: whatever it represented, it had been left on the bier, the candle-lit, over-illuminated – artificially illuminated – windowless room a place from which all he had known of life, of affection, all he had known of nature, all he had known of art, had been removed: nothing, he had concluded at that moment, was worth the living.

Now he was looking at a refined version of those features, animated by impatience and displeasure: his brother, his last distraction gone, had turned his attention back to the table.

As the food was eaten he talked about his job, the people he worked with, enquired after his nephews: ‘I tried to get Charlie in on the racket. He wouldn’t have it. Said he was onto better. “Television is a vacuum,” he said, “you can have a hell of a good time filling it.” That boy will go far. He’s got a lot of Joseph in him. No universals, only chance,’ his tone not unlike that of their uncle. ‘So what is the prognosis?’ he asked finally. ‘They’ve taken you off the anti-psychotic medication and put you onto an anti-depressant. Is that progress or regression? Is it doing any good?’

‘It takes a while to have effect,’ he said. ‘On the whole,’ he went on, anxious to reassure him, ‘I’m very much better. I tried several,’ he added, ‘before settling on this one. At one point, with one of them, I thought I was dying. Not any longer.’ He smiled, in illustration. ‘I’m much improved.’

Once again, the image of his father returned, and once again he dispersed it by focusing on his brother.

‘You’re not short of money.’

‘Why do you equate everything with poverty?’ he asked.

‘It is, for some,’ Paul said. ‘You couldn’t have made much as a teacher, for instance. Even a professor. How much was it worth?’

‘Enough,’ he said.

‘Is the underlying problem us?’ he suddenly enquired, flinching, visibly, and adding, ‘We had a good childhood. Quinians. Lots of people got sent away.’

‘Sure.’

‘It can’t be that.’

‘Did you have a bad time at Quinians,’ Maddox said, ‘looking back?’

‘You were always there to look after me. After you left,’ he waved his hand, ‘I floated.’

It was the gesture alone that suggested unease: his brother was eating quickly: he had, presumably, somewhere else to go (something else to do, someone else to see). Already others were leaving the restaurant. He waved to the waiter for another drink. ‘You?’ he enquired, Maddox shaking his head. ‘I’m supposed to be off alcohol with the medication.’ He indicated his glass. ‘Water,’ he said to the waiter. ‘Still.’

‘If it’s not psychological, what do you think it is, assuming psychological means anything?’ his brother said.

‘Biological. But what’s biological? Electrical. Chemical. Hormonal.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing unusual. Uncomfortable, perhaps. Difficult to acknowledge. No one likes to admit they’re nuts. Not even doctors like to diagnose it. Not least if they’re afflicted by it themselves. The stress is on how well you are. Trying to impersonate someone who knows what’s going on is a significant part of the battle.’

‘Why you?’ He examined Maddox intently, coldly, almost ruthlessly, defences of a sort, Maddox concluded, in place. ‘Why not me? Or Sarah? Why weren’t our parents nuts? What’s so special, or so inadequate, it should happen to you?’

He was, Maddox realised, about to mention ‘art’, unsure of its reception: ‘art’ had, for Paul, always been an ‘excuse’, offered gratuitously to cement its intrusion into an otherwise straightforward, practical, ‘no problem’ life.

‘There’s art, of course.’ Maddox offered it slyly, glancing up as the waiter returned. A bottle was unscrewed, two glasses filled, ice and lemon already in each.

It was Maddox who murmured, ‘Thanks.’

‘Is that what it is?’

‘Like religion. Out of touch.’

‘I was always suspicious of Viklund.’

‘Why?’

‘Much of what he said was out of touch. That television series. Another world.’

‘I found it inclusive,’ Maddox said.

‘It’s one reason I left the Church.’ His brother gazed at him blankly.

‘Why?’

‘Religion is politics. Exclusivity, not the other way around. Negotiating not with God but with one another. It’s why they wear frocks. Cross-dressers. Surrogate lovers. If God is a man then they’ll be a woman. Spiritually, in your vernacular, painting pictures by numbers.’ He gestured round, startled by his own reaction. Although people had left, others had come in, some acknowledging his brother’s presence as they did so, every table crowded. ‘The patriarchal society. A self-delusional world, Mammon and God much the same thing.’ An unusual complicity had enveloped their encounter, Maddox wondering why, since it was based, very largely, on a denigration of both their worlds. ‘Where there’s men there’s power. Hormonal, in your terms. When women move in as in the Church, you can be sure that the sources, as opposed to the resources of power, have moved elsewhere. Women selling bonds. Okay. Investment managers. Fine. Women bishops. Inevitable. Women running anything, other than as surrogates: no chance.’ He shook his head, still eating: chewing and thinking appeared to be complementary activities where his brother was concerned, a characteristic of Paul’s he had noticed before. ‘The real bananas have moved elsewhere.’

‘Bananas?’

‘Balls. Force of nature. The simulation of power is a turn-on for women.

‘So where does that leave us?’ Maddox asked.

‘Afloat.’ His brother laughed, his hand indicating movement again. ‘Swimming.’ Raising his glass of water he drank: conceivably, Maddox reflected, he needed to dilute the alcohol he’d drunk already.

‘You think I’ll just get better.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll tell the psychiatrist.’

‘I should.’

‘And the former therapist.’

‘I’d leave that well alone.’

‘You would?’

‘Particularly if, as you say, you’re screwing up her career.’

‘How are things with you?’ he said, diverting Paul’s attention.

His brother was looking round. ‘I thought she might be here. We usually meet at lunchtimes. I could have introduced you. We book a room and fuck until two o’clock. She’s a martinet for time. Martinis, too. That sort of thing.’ He turned his gaze to the street outside. ‘Where are they all going?’ he enquired, indicating the crowds, the traffic.

Maddox, having looked forward to meeting his brother, suddenly felt defeated: an energy here, in Paul, in the restaurant, in the street – on the road, on the pavement – which he couldn’t in any way match: life, once engaged in this way, sustained its own momentum: it welcomed no intrusion, probably, he reflected, scarcely even noticed it. He might, to this degree, be invisible, crushed, if not by people, the places they chose to occupy.

He wondered what Simone would make of Paul, or, worse, what he would make of her: her composure, his casualness; her reflectiveness, his restlessness. He assumed Paul saw him as a liability, not least because of his illness: that, if anything, disqualified his past, and authenticated Paul’s own.

‘What was that about Viklund?’ he asked.

‘He drew you back,’ Paul said, ‘to something of no importance. Who gives a fuck who painted what, when, or how? The only relevant thing is you happen to be alive this minute. Don’t waste the fucking time. They didn’t. The ones who painted the fucking pictures.’ He gestured to the street. ‘None of this will happen again. What we are will have gone for good.’

His brother had been drinking: had perhaps come to the restaurant from a bar where, briefly, he’d been engaged with people he undoubtedly considered ‘real’: a phenomenologist in motion (rarely, he concluded, if ever arrested: everything moves, and always will).

‘Surely you look to the past to illuminate the present. Isn’t that what consciousness,’ Maddox said, ‘is about? The capacity to look back, as well as forward, as well,’ he continued, ‘as around.’ He, too, waved his arm at the street, then, for reinforcement, at the surrounding tables.

The tendentiousness appeared to irritate his brother: there was, after all, this residual authority in Paul: he was an operator, a functionary, a practitioner. If everything moved, then he moved with it: you couldn’t get much more ‘authentic’ than that. Whereas he himself was always standing still, a denial (if an illusion) of the first imperative of nature.

The vertical lines had hardened between his brother’s eyes: something here, he reflected, of their mother: the masters, even the head-teacher of the school where she had worked had been intimidated by her – had been said to be actively afraid of her.

‘So which of us goes nuts?’ his brother said, drawing a line beneath everything.

‘Sure.’

Severity in Paul’s face mellowed to something approaching despair.

‘Which isn’t what I meant to say.’

Having finished eating, Paul pushed his plate away, waving to the waiter to take it, a gesture reminiscent of his behaviour at home when he’d signal Mrs Tyndal, their domestic, to do the same, an arrogance which neither time nor age had improved. Placing his elbows on the table, he picked up his water again, something prohibitive and exclusive about the two-handed gesture, cradling the glass between his palms. ‘You might so easily have gone into the Church,’ he said. ‘You had the temperament. At the time I felt I was doing you a favour. Completing our family’s commitment. Providing a stamp of acceptance. Doing it,’ he concluded, ‘instead of you.’

‘I thought,’ Maddox said, ‘it was the other way around,’ surprised by, if not suspicious of this sudden confession.

‘Unworldly, for you, wouldn’t be quite the word. All those books you bought. You were only fifteen. The next thing, I thought, he’ll be a priest. That earnest look that came over you in church, in chapel. As for me.’ He put the glass down. ‘Some of the mysticism still hangs around. Fucked by God. It taught me a lot. Largely I shouldn’t be there. Also, at the time, a great deal about people. After a while they assume you’re a cipher. Social work, to the point where you begin to assume you’re a rumour put around by someone else.’ He gestured to the street. ‘Consciousness works in bits and pieces, the whole being inconceivable.’

Maddox had seldom heard his brother in this mood before: he leant to the table to physically as well as mentally encourage him.

‘A parasite,’ he went on. ‘If you were paid pro rata you’d be chasing corpses, pregnancies, divorced couples who want to marry, an unsecularised solicitor-cum-mortician, in a chasuble one day, a cassock the next, jeans and sweater the day after. Take my word,’ leaning back. ‘The secular and the divine. You see which one I’ve chosen.’

Maddox, in response, drew back too. Paul was suggesting, frustratedly, that he’d gone into the Church in order to forestall his brother, his older brother, doing the same, to relieve him, presumably, of an onerous task, something which, with his occluded nature, could only have done him harm: spontaneously, Paul had pre-empted a disaster, sacrificing himself on behalf of someone who, even at that age, he could see should not be encouraged to be more of what he already was, otherworldly, ‘spiritual’, ‘soul-searching’ – when (his brother could authenticate this), he’d ‘been there’, no ‘soul’, in his view, to be found.

‘Those books.’ Paul shook his head. ‘Jesus.’ He shook his head again. ‘Those fucking saints, miracles that never happened. Didn’t it ever strike you, none of that was real?’

‘Those happened to be books on painting,’ he said.

‘At fifteen?’ He resisted shaking his head. ‘The fourteenth fucking century!’ something jubilant in his brother’s response. Though leaning back from the table, he had now extended his arms towards it, holding its edge with the tips of his fingers, a gesture which reminded Maddox, sharply, of a similar gesture, made by himself, when visiting Taylor. Did Paul see him in an equivalent light? Had madness, at least the potential of, been so apparent as a youth, a child?

‘I was pre-empted,’ he enquired, ‘by you?’

‘Kind of.’

‘Or were you persuaded by my absorption that there was something there worth going into?’

‘I might have been.’ Already he was losing interest, looking round, anxious, it seemed, not only to be disengaged from the table but from Maddox as well. ‘I wanted also,’ he said, ‘to be different. In this respect, more different than you. If you could absorb yourself in all those fucking books, I thought, I can do it for real. A light-headed gesture at the time, but since I couldn’t think of anything else, religiosity being very much a part of Mother’s and Father’s lives, particularly Mother’s, she seeing it as a form of community work before community work had even been invented, I thought I’d chip in as well. If not one chip ahead. Instead of looking at God you’d have first to look at me!’ He laughed, lightly, removing one hand from the table and waving it at Maddox. ‘That Sunday School crap. The catechism learnt by the age of thirteen. Would anyone believe it?’

He was looking round the room again, maybe still looking for his latest partner, anxious to introduce her, one further illustration of his message. ‘Think about it,’ he went on, signalling to someone on the way out. ‘There’s nothing in our background, genetically speaking, or otherwise, which would predispose you to crack up. That must have come out of not what you are but what you’ve done. Spent most of your life, like Viklund, with your head up your fucking arse. I’m speaking candidly, brother. No one else will find the time, or know you as much to tell you. I love you. I want to see you come through. I don’t want to feel I spent my time being a fucking saint for nothing. Consciousness doth make cowards of us all, if it doesn’t first drive you round the fucking bend. Life is there to be lived, not studied. Studying maketh no man. Nor woman, come to that. Knowledge moveth no one. It only dries you up. You went off into art, I went up the pole with Jesus. One of the two of us changed position. What’s all this crap, by the way, about prison?’

He’d released the table and, pushed back from it, folded his arms: self-containment, exclusivity: reproach.

‘What prison?’

‘This guy you’ve been to see. The one who murdered his kids.’ He paused. ‘And wife.’

‘Who told you?’

‘What does it matter, for fuck’s sake, who told me? Charlotte. I rang her to see how you were.’ He shook his head, a more than condemnatory gesture. ‘Haven’t you enough trouble without getting caught up in that?’

‘How caught up?’

‘For fuck’s sake.’ His brother was looking round once more, less to identify someone across the room than to measure the distance to the nearest tables, disinclined, suddenly, to be overheard. ‘“A former student,” she said.’

‘He asked me to go and see him.’

‘You didn’t have to go.’

‘I thought I should.’

‘There you are! A fucking priest!’

‘Charlotte didn’t have to tell you. You didn’t have to ring. Just as easily you could have rung me.’

‘To be told that everything was fucking perfect?’ He waved his hand, the gesture restrained. ‘You,’ he went on, ‘didn’t have to tell her. She’s enough on her plate with Gerry. Or are you anxious to keep her involved? You don’t honestly think she’s going to come back? She’s well out of it. I’ve never seen so many books in one house.’

‘I hardly have one at present.’

His brother examined him in silence: a lateral movement of his head, scarcely discernible, indicated which way his thoughts were moving.

‘As for Gerry,’ he said, assured that Maddox had nothing further to add, ‘bullshit. That’s his charm. Can’t complain. Plenty of it, I’d say, around. As for Charlotte, she doesn’t wish to see you hung out to dry. She wants to see you up and about.’

‘She told you about Simone.’

‘Some time ago,’ he said. ‘And now she comes up with this fucking student.’

‘Former student.’

‘So what?’ He shrugged, unfolding his arms. ‘For fuck’s sake. He killed his fucking family. What’s all this to do with you?’

‘I used to be his tutor. He wrote asking me to visit him. I knew his wife. As a student. Before they married.’

‘Know, biblical? Or social?’

‘Both.’

His brother didn’t respond: incredulity gave way to bemusement: aspects of Maddox were being revealed which, post-sectioning, post-North London Royal, were still capable of causing surprise.

‘He asked you to go and see him because you fucked his wife.’

‘Before he knew her.’

His brother shrugged again.

‘I admired him as a student. I wrote testimonials for him, both at the time he left and later. I thought, at one time, I might have been called at his trial.’

Paul was delaying what, moments before, might have been his departure: behind his back other figures were leaving, several calling out but receiving no response, his brother turned resolutely away from the rest of the room: over half the tables had emptied. ‘What’s he want?’

‘What did the thief want on the cross?’

Maddox turned to the window: the grid-locked traffic, the crowd, denser than before, passing on the pavement: suddenly he had a measure of how far he was separated from what he was inclined to call his brother’s world. ‘I had the feeling he wanted me to write him up. In something other than a journalistic fashion. See him, as you might describe him, focused on the present, as a phenomenon. See him, in his terms, along conceptual lines.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

‘See what he did in terms of everything around him. Immortality. In a fashion.’

His brother was examining him with increasing concern: his eyes had darkened, his mouth tightened: a grimace – of apprehension – mask-like, characterised his features.

‘Does he know you’re receiving treatment?’

‘No reason why he should.’

‘Does he know you were sectioned?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘You haven’t told him?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you think you should?’

‘I don’t see why.’

Clearly, Paul was thinking, ‘two of them together’: would the worse of the two drive the lesser down?

‘What does your former therapist think?’

‘I should leave well alone.’

‘Not advice you’re inclined to follow?’

‘Evidently not.’

‘And she’s going to be struck off?’

‘That’s still some way ahead.’

‘Because of you.’

‘Two clients have made accusations. That’s as far as it goes.’

‘Jesus.’

‘As you say.’

‘And I should know.’

His brother watched him in silence. Finally, he added, ‘Do you think the treatment you’re getting is effective?’

‘As far as I can tell.’ He paused. ‘Some days I feel worse. Progress is not in an even line.’

His brother moved closer to the table. ‘I could put you in touch with someone I believe could help.’

‘Who?’

‘Someone who wouldn’t fuck around. It wouldn’t interfere with your present treatment. It’d be complementary. He might even find out why you’re so pissed off.’

‘I’m not pissed off.’

‘Suicidal.’

Maddox waited.

‘He wouldn’t put up with all this crap.’

‘Yours?’ Maddox said.

‘Yours.’

Now his brother waited, intense: a reminiscence of a childhood encounter: any moment one of them would call out for a parent or their uncle to adjudicate.

‘This would be free,’ his brother went on. ‘He comes expensive but I want to pay. It’s something,’ he added, earnestly, ‘I want to do.’ The table creaked beneath his weight: urgency, and something more intangible, characterised his manner. He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve asked around. He’s highly recommended. You won’t lose anything by going. He’s already agreed to see you once.’

‘Agreed with you?’

‘A colleague of mine who recommended him.’

‘I’m being put out to tender?’ he said.

‘Oh, fuck you.’ His brother drew back.

‘I probably don’t need to see anyone,’ Maddox said. ‘Apart from those I see already. I appreciate what you’ve done,’ he added.

‘Sure.’

His brother’s head turned to survey the tables, most of them now deserted. A moment later he took Maddox’s arm. ‘See him once. No obligation. Do me a favour. If he tells you to piss off, nothing lost. One great man to another. He knows your writing. Collects pictures.’ Pausing, he concluded, ‘I do, too.’

A final, unexpected endorsement.

‘Since when?’

‘Since recent.’

‘What kind?’

‘Picture fucking pictures. What kind are there? Paintings. Definitely not religious.’ He laughed, his hand retained on Maddox’s arm: no escape, his tightening grip suggested. ‘What d’you say?’

‘Okay.’

‘To see him?’

‘Right.’

‘I’ll ring you and give you the time. The rest,’ he released his arm, ‘is up to you.’

‘So you came with this already set?’

‘Why not? I want to see you better. That’s another thing,’ leaning back, at ease, his purpose accomplished, anxiety, animosity, even, no longer evident in his face or figure. ‘You need an interest. Something other than art. Are you still reviewing?’

‘I’ve been fired.’

‘There you are.’ His brother spread out his hands. ‘I thought we’d never see it.’ He waved his hand. ‘All that crap. How could you go on so long?’ waving for the bill, the waiter coming across the now deserted restaurant.

‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Maddox said.

‘Fuck that,’ his brother said. ‘Let’s walk. I don’t want to go back indoors after this.’

‘Where?’ he said when, the bill paid, he’d followed Paul out.

‘The river. It’s years,’ his brother said, ‘since we’ve been down there,’ linking his arm in his in much the same manner Viklund had done, walking in the park. ‘Moments like this you realise how far we’ve come from St Albans.’

‘Or how little.’

‘Or how little. What would Mother and Father say if they could see us now? Going the same way, would you say, at last?’

They were moving south, lost, Maddox reflected, in the energy of the crowd, he no longer sure how much more of his brother’s charm, his disingenuousness, he could take: inertia, of a peculiar sort, absorbed him. At odd moments he had the impression he was walking with his uncle, the same companionable arm in his, the same monologue (work, colleagues, women): a similar attraction along with a similar longing to escape. From what? An irrelevance which, nevertheless, captivated his senses: this, and only this, was what life, as he should have known it, was ‘about’: plus, an unquestioning curiosity, in prolonging the event, to see where it might lead.

A feeling, too, whenever he had been with his uncle, and now with his brother, that something significant had been purposely left unsaid, an element of their lives, common to all three, which only his uncle, now Paul, knew anything about: ‘what shall I do now?’ his strange enquiry while walking aimlessly around his father’s corpse, unnerved, beyond his understanding, weeping, as if his father, had possessed the answer, one, perversely, all these years, held from him and which now, he presumed, he would never know.

Were his own attachments deeper than he had previously imagined, more concrete, more specific, formulated in another time, another place? Had he, throughout his life, been focused on events which were tangential to them, while ‘reality’ (that word again) went on elsewhere, he oblivious, unknowing?

His brother was laughing, animated, stimulated by what he must have considered his ‘success’. ‘As for the paintings, nothing much you’d like. Of course, none of this futuristic fucking stuff. I thought of asking you but then thought he’s never asked me about investing. Fuck him, I’ll buy this shit myself. Though I have advised your kids, by the way. And Charley and Gerry. And Sarah, though she hasn’t much and refuses hand-outs. A bit like you in that respect. Who gives a fuck, after all, about money?’ his final enquiry suggesting, surprisingly, he had problems in this area himself.

‘Other than that,’ he continued, ‘I find I’m going against earlier convictions. Put a black hole in front of you and ask where the fuck are we in all that? Then I ask, why have I bought all these fucking paintings? I look at them for an hour or so. About “about”, is all I come up with. The point of a point is a circle. The snake, consuming its own tail, comes finally to its head. “Eat that,” the fucker tells itself. That’s more or less where I am at present. Whereas you, unlike me, take all that crap to heart. Cary, by the way, has got a lover. What does a woman do at fifty? Fifty-five, in her case, come to that. “Don’t think,” I tell her, “it has to last for ever.” What I told her when we divorced. They go away at weekends and screw the fuck out of one another. A different place each week. Sandra, on the other hand, the one to whom I would have introduced you, wants five kids. Intends to retire at thirty and pump them out over the next ten years. Private schools. Nannies. “God Christ, do you think I’m made of money?” I tell her. “Bonds will be over and out before you finish.” She says, “Sweetheart, not before I’m done.” At her age, and my age, I have to watch my back. Eighty, I’ll be, with teenage children. At her age she’ll get laid by someone else. That’s why, I guess, I’m looking at pictures. Maybe, after all, there’s something in it. Maybe, after all, I’ve been missing out. Maybe eternity is all we have, endlessness, our kid, going on for ever.’

They were threading through the sidestreets past Petticoat Lane, the old churches, the cemeteries, the occasional oasis of original Georgian houses, the residue of a Regency city which, Maddox realised, he knew little about, pausing at plaques to read the inscriptions, the extended booms of stalk-like cranes manoeuvring high above their heads.

‘We used to walk round here in the old days,’ his brother said.

‘I don’t remember,’ Maddox said.

‘Or was it with Joe? The old bugger. Though he was more West End. Or was it when we came to town with Father to view a new model and he brought us here as a matter of course? Didn’t we go on the river to Hampton Court, and another time to Greenwich? Must have been,’ he concluded.

It was the river they gazed at, finally, leaning over the rails by the Tower, the bridge to their left, the Belfast moored on the opposite bank, the crowds threading their way into the Tower behind, another queue onto the boats at the pier, his brother’s attention, however, focused on the river, flowing eastwards, to their left, the tide going out.

‘You’ll give this chap a go?’

‘Sure.’

‘Don’t have to hang in if it doesn’t work out.’

‘That’s right.’

‘This is on me, a retirement present. You think that might be at the heart of it?’

‘No,’ Maddox said. He shook his head.

He had leant like this on a metal rail, overlooking, on that occasion, a beach, with his brother, Paul having announced his intention of going into the Church. He couldn’t remember, of the several resorts the family had visited over those years, which one it was – the sea, on that occasion, relatively calm: the boats, the sails, the recollection of a harbour to his right, houses rising up a slope behind: the smell of seaweed, the salty tang, figures reclining or running to and fro on the beach, a paradisiacal sensation, associated with his brother’s decision and the place itself, and which, in his early teens, he had come to associate with art, specifically, magically, with Florentine names, with Siena, Padua, a humanising fervour which, unlike his reaction to his brother’s ‘calling’, he had wished to expand and sustain.

Later, Paul had summoned a taxi, his hand on Maddox’s back as he stooped inside, saying, ‘I won’t come with you. I need to think. Not about you. My pissed-up life. I haven’t been down here for a very long time. I think I’ll walk,’ Maddox wondering if he hadn’t an afternoon appointment at the nearby hotel, cynical about Paul, he reflected, as he was about himself. ‘I feel charged,’ his brother went on, grasping his chest. ‘Glad that we met, and hoping we’ll do it again before long. Let me know, by the way, how you get on with this chap. His name is Isaacs. You may have heard of him.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘If it doesn’t work out I might try him myself,’ waving his arm, laughing, as the taxi drew away.

Even then, perhaps more obviously than before, something significant, if not crucial, had been left unsaid: it was as if, he reflected, there were no language in which to express it, no action or sign to convey it, no gesture, no name, merely, startled by the conclusion, the language of omission. At one point, walking through the narrowing streets towards the river, avoiding the main road, coming out at Pepys’s house above Tower Hill, his brother had enquired, ‘It’s not to do with ageing? Something as incontrovertible as that? I’m old enough, more than old enough, to pack it in. I don’t think, despite suggesting otherwise, I’ll hold Sandra for very long. On the other hand,’ he’d paused, ‘do you think it’s to do with something in us? The three of us, if you count Sarah? What do you think?’ Maddox declining – unable – to give an answer, wondering at his reluctance to do so and at the curiously unquestioning look on his brother’s face, as if he himself were assured of the answer, something he knew and, at Maddox’s lack of response, felt it still necessary, if not his duty, to keep to himself.

A familiar desire to return to St Albans sprang to mind – to revisit the park, the tiny, grass-banked Roman theatre, but not the Cathedral, the one place which, apart from their vanished home, had meant most to him at the time – and with which, in his youth, he had had the strongest connections: drunks had been sprawled around the gate the last occasion he’d gone there.

Now, seated in the taxi, lulled by its slow progress through the congested streets (lurching its way towards the Exchange and then, beyond, turning north from Holborn), the familiarity of the buildings induced a feeling that, whatever he felt about his home near Camden Lock, its modest proportions, its meagre possessions, its disreputable neighbours, it was something to which he now belonged (but of which he could easily divest himself: a skin to shed, like any other). Yet he felt exhausted rather than exhilarated by the conversation with Paul, wondering if, despite appearances, he had done more for his brother than Paul had done for him. In one sense, he’d been written off (as something little short of a disaster), his brother reluctant to admit it, at least until he had offered him one more chance: art had fucked him up: the new man, Isaacs, would reverse it.

Despite his exhaustion, he endured a curious feeling of exclusion – displacement, even: he would have liked, for instance, to have seen his brother’s pictures (something in common at last), aware, too, that Paul’s pursuit of eternal vigour had become something of an affectation, offered more by way of provocation, of intent or challenge.

At which point his preoccupation with Taylor returned: grief for his wife and children overwhelmed him, flinging him back, stunned, against the taxi’s seat, conscious of the rear of the driver, of the traffic in the road beyond – as if he were once more in his uncle’s car, being driven in it on that first occasion, the hallucinatory smell he associated with it, and the galvanising juxtaposition of the bonnet against the irregularities of the view ahead.

Set down in the street, he discovered his brother had paid the driver, disturbed that he hadn’t noticed, disturbed at being patronised, his reaction deflected by a further thought: a recognition of the care his brother had shown him, his avuncular if no longer convincing charm, mannered and self-conscious, concealing a doubt as significant as his own, as if Paul, too, had been flung back on resources which, if previously much talked about, he suspected might not be there.