As It Happened

She was in bed and had been asleep, turning to him, releasing the cat which, sensing his intrusion, fled to the door and out. ‘Do you want to give it some food?’ she said, adding, ‘In compensation,’ he returning to the kitchen, opening the fridge, getting out the tin, scooping a spoonful into the bowl, wondering why she slept with the cat at all, and then, unsure whether he’d bolted the front door, going back down to discover he had.

By the time he’d returned to the bedroom she was snoring and, breathless, he was panting: crawling in beside her, he pressed himself against her back, cupped his hand around her breast, pleased that she was naked, and felt her back ease into his groin. In no time at all he was asleep himself.

She was up before him, the breakfast cereals set out on a tray on the roof. They sat at the garden table, he half awake, aware that by now, normally, she might well have been working, hesitating to ask her why not, he giving her an account of the previous day, the conversations with his brother, his sister, not withholding, however, the latter’s final observations. He felt refreshed (unintruded-upon, surprisingly so: untransgressed): on waking, in the middle of the night, they’d swiftly joined and, just as swiftly, fallen asleep again.

Without make-up, her hair brushed, a housecoat buttoned beneath her chin, he in a dressing-gown, they might have been any normal couple, companionable, relaxed, at ease with one another.

‘Aren’t you working?’ he finally asked.

‘I need time to think.’ The paleness of her skin without makeup, the unaccustomed lightness, as a result, around her eyes, drama of any sort missing from her expression: instead, a sleepy acquiescence, he, too, inclined to assume, if only for a while, that nothing unusual was happening.

‘Let’s get married,’ he said.

‘Sure.’ Leaning back, she laughed, one finger extended to the table, her breakfast finished, indicating the cat could lick her bowl. Finally, she set it on the flagstones, the cat lowering its head, its metal identity cylinder clinking against the bowl’s side, they watching it together. ‘Afraid I might run off?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Some place to run to.’ She gestured round. ‘Is this what you get from your family? Marriage.’

‘Leave,’ he said, ‘while the going’s good.’

‘I’d better meet them.’

‘You better had.’

She was in a good mood but, though he thought he knew the reason, and was reluctant to disturb it, he wasn’t convinced. Overhead, swifts swooped, squeaking, above and between the roofs. Higher up, house-martins fluttered, ducked and dived in slower patterns. A feeling of contentment absorbed him at that moment, she watching him, smiling.

‘Does it need a warranty?’ she asked.

‘To match the one,’ he said, ‘I had before.’

‘Plus three of mine.’

‘Would you,’ he enquired, ‘get married again?’

‘And go against your family?’ her smile extended. Moments later she raised her head to watch the birds fluttering into the cavities beneath the eaves, turning then to watch the cat. Finally, she stooped to a nearby plant to pull off several dying petals. He watched her fingers extend to each stalk, the sifting sound as the petals came away, she screwing them in her palm and dropping them into a basket beneath the table. Her gardening tools and gloves were laid on a bench behind her: a picture of control, sufficiency: no need of marriage, the gesture implied, I’m on my own, he wondering if he evoked a similar image (I’m nuts, he reflected, in any case). How much time would she take off work? How much, for instance, could she afford? the speculation sufficient for him to conclude she’d already worked out what she intended to do, ‘with everything,’ he said, involuntarily, aloud, glancing at her as she looked across.

‘“With everything” what?’

‘Some thought.’ He waved his hand.

‘Sounded like an order in a restaurant.’

‘I was wondering,’ he gestured round, ‘where we go from here.’

‘We needn’t go anywhere,’ she said. ‘Unless there’s something today you want to do.’

‘I’d like to spend it with you.’

‘I have people coming this afternoon. Other than that I’m okay.’

‘How about this evening?’

‘Sure.’

All the time he was testing the ground, unsure of her intentions; unsure, even, who she was, blind to his own appeal. If he hung in long enough, he reminded himself, it wasn’t unlikely he might find out, and then, distracted, ‘as long as she will have me,’ speaking aloud.

She was glancing across again: he was, he reflected, concerned himself, something stirring at a moment when there was no immediate need of it. Here they were, on her roof, in the early sunlight, birds and insects overhead, flowers, a morning breeze: ‘We’re going on,’ she said, reaching across to take his hand.

‘Why?’

‘We have no alternative, Matt.’

Her strength – at least, his awareness of it – flowed down her arm and into his hand.

‘I believe your family haven’t done you much good. What’s the analyst you say your brother has found?’

‘Someone,’ he said, ‘a colleague recommended.’

‘Whom you’re inclined to go along with?’

‘Wouldn’t that be your advice?’ They had discussed his continuing therapy several times, both at the point they had themselves discontinued it and at regular intervals since.

‘I’m not really in a position to judge,’ she said. ‘It depends who it is. I’d say if you felt you needed it you should go ahead. On the other hand,’ she continued, ‘what is “need”? I’m beginning to suspect the word myself.’

He was, increasingly, coming across elements in her he didn’t understand: elements he perceived but didn’t recognise. To a large extent she was a woman in the process of being created – by him; alternately, she had, to this degree, been created by three previous husbands, and probably by several other unnamed men. It was as if her own perception of herself had started at zero, a tabula rasa, an idealised opacity, the purpose of each relationship to raise herself up, man by man, step by step, to an ascendancy, a self-realisation, about which she would have no doubts: an assessment of herself placed vividly in a far from hypothetical world: the route of all her relationships pointed in the same direction.

Where he was in this progress he had no idea: finality in her discovery of herself had no doubt arrived some time before he had appeared. Perhaps this was the key to the relationship, less a continuing process of self-awareness than a celebration – of her having arrived at her goal, he the created or resurrected one.

Yet it was as if that part of his own life which had, evidently, gone on without him would continue its passage without her, he, engaged by her, moving in one direction while, in reality, this unknown element was moving in another – the consequence of which would be announced, as on the previous occasion, in a catastrophic manner.

Looking across at her, his hand more firmly clenched in hers, he suspected much of his appeal was realised in his helplessness, a curiously unfounded and unfounding nature, something, conceivably, not unlike her own.

‘I don’t think, on reflection, it’s analysis you need,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘I came to that conclusion once we’d started. Process and habit, for instance, are already in place. It’s how you administrate rather than how you change them that’s relevant at our age. Of that,’ she continued, ‘I’m convinced.’ Her other hand came over, enclosing his. ‘What you want,’ she concluded, ‘is us.’

Her directness made him laugh: it reminded him of his sister: behind every sophisticate was something of the reverse, having to struggle not unduly to get out.

Delighted to have amused him, she watched him with a smile, humour, he reflected, not her strongest suit. ‘Fun, after all,’ she said, ‘is what we’re after. That,’ she went on, ‘and keeping up with our chums.’

So they sat across the table from one another, the flowers around them, the birds above them, sweeping low, in squeaking flocks, in the morning light, their hands held, each secure in the knowledge, he presumed, of what the other wasn’t rather than what the other was.

The house was in Ladbroke Road, at the back of Notting Hill Gate, tall, stuccoed, cream-painted, one of a terrace. A single bell beside the yellow door indicated that, unlike the houses adjoining, the place wasn’t divided into flats.

A considerable time elapsed before, having rung the bell a second time, the door was finally opened. An elderly woman, small, stooped, with unruly hair, her face deeply faceted with vertical lines, from within which a pair of indifferent, exhausted eyes gazed out, enquired, ‘Yes?’ closing the door to little more than an aperture.

He gave her his name.

Stepping behind the door, she opened it wider.

A hallway stretched down to a flight of stairs up which a large dog was slowly climbing, its massive rear haunches, overhung by a drooping tail, swinging ponderously, painfully, even, from side to side.

Having closed the door the woman indicated a door to his left. ‘He’s in there if he’s come down,’ she said. ‘If he hasn’t you’ll have to wait. He’s in a pretty foul temper, I can tell you.’

She disappeared at the rear of the hall, a door closing: moments later came the fluctuating sound of popular music: an announcer’s voice, terminated abruptly, was followed once again by music, presumably from another station.

Pushing open the door she’d indicated he entered what was evidently the front room of the house. Its ceiling was cavernous and cracked: a piece of moulding in one corner was missing. A desk was arranged with its back to the tall, curtained, bay window, its surface, apart from an uncovered manual typewriter, strewn with books, magazines and papers. Recesses on either side of a marble fireplace, caryatids supporting the mantelpiece, were occupied by shelves, their irregular spaces, horizontally and vertically, crammed with books. Similarly, the wall opposite, above a large cabinet, several drawers and the cupboard of which were open, as if subjected to a recent search, was also occupied with shelves, the books, as if long abandoned, stacked in disorderly rows. At the back of the room, facing the desk and adjacent to the door, a low bookcase, glass fronted, was overhung by numerous ill-assorted paintings in a variety of singularly inappropriate frames. No common denominator, at first glance, was discernible, other than they were naturalistic – figures and landscapes, still lifes and interiors – no skill of any sort evident in their representation or design.

The centre of the room was dominated by a buttoned leather couch on which were strewn a number of rugs, several of them frayed. An armchair, also leather-covered, was arranged diagonally to the fireplace which the couch itself was directly facing. The low suspension of the chair suggested that the springs were broken, the seat resting on the floor. Piles of books in the hearth further suggested that the fireplace itself was rarely if ever used. A second chair, half-upholstered, with wooden arms, stood at the back of the room, adjacent to the rear wall. Cardboard boxes, containing variedly coloured files, were strewn around it as if recently discarded. A smell of tobacco, faded cloth and decaying paper, underlain by damp, dominated the room, the tall, heavily curtained windows, tassels at the base of the curtains sweeping the floor, looked out, across a small, railed forecourt, to the street. From below, the sound of bottles being broken indicated there was a basement.

Not sure which area of the room to occupy, he crossed to the window. More substantial stuccoed houses, with front gardens, were visible through a barrier of trees opposite. Glancing at the desk, beside which he was standing, his attention was drawn to a sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter, the projecting half already typed on. Stooping to read it, his eyes screwed up without his glasses, he deciphered, ‘Eternity is not a problem, temporality is all the rage. Neither the contents nor the layout of your bill shows, in my view, the slightest improvement and, as I have observed on several previous occasions, they do not in any way warrant a response …’

Aware of the creaking of woodwork outside the door, he was examining the paintings at the back of the room when a small, dishevelled man came in.

Older than himself, unshaven, a cardigan arranged around a curiously misshapen body, his uneven shoulders dipping to one side, his expression was one of consternation, fierce, choleric, the cheeks inflamed, the nose also, the eyes, small, dilated, dark, intense. White hair was flung backwards and upwards from a prominent brow: tight, wirely sprung curls rose in successive tiers. His look of surprise at seeing Maddox turned suddenly to one of disappointment. ‘Who are you?’ Saliva spurted from the corner of his mouth, his lips gleaming. An expression, one of enquiry, revealed several irregularly projecting teeth.

‘Maddox,’ he said, putting out his hand, and added, lamely, when this appeared to increase the man’s displeasure, ‘Matthew.’

Ignoring his hand, the man turned back to the door, losing, as he did so, a downtrodden slipper and, returning to the hall, called, ‘Somebody’s arrived.’

A muffled voice, presumably that of the woman who had shown him in, came from the rear of the hall, the sound of music increasing.

‘The dog had to fetch me,’ he called.

‘You make your own arrangements,’ the voice came out, quaveringly yet clear, its subsequent remark drowned by the ringing of a telephone, evidently in the hall, the man announcing, ‘I’m taking no calls. You answer it. It’s always you they’re after.’ Returning to the room, he closed the door, retrieved his slipper, scuffing his foot inside it several times before securing it and, tapping the pockets of his cardigan, crossed to the desk. Examining its surface for several seconds, moving books and magazines and papers aside, he finally announced, ‘I’ve lost my glasses. Not that it matters. I won’t need them,’ turning to Maddox to conclude, ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I had an appointment,’ Maddox said. ‘Arranged by a colleague of my brother’s.’

‘Your brother.’

‘Paul Maddox,’ Maddox said.

‘Your father, I imagine, must be dead.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your mother, too.’

He nodded.

‘Distressed by their dying?’ Saliva spurted from his mouth.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Unnatural, otherwise.’

‘Yes.’

‘How many brothers have you?’

‘One.’

‘Sisters?’

‘One.’

‘Older?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fucked her?’

‘No.’

For further confirmation, after a moment, he shook his head.

‘Brother?’

‘No.’

‘Younger?’

‘He’s younger.’

Maddox was standing in front of the desk as he might, fifty-odd years before, have stood before the headmaster at Quinians: not dissimilar feelings passed through his head, not least those associated with subordination, misdemeanour, subterfuge, and dread.

His inquisitor, meanwhile, had picked up several loose sheets of paper from the desk, holding each one, closely, to his eyes before, releasing them, they drifted back to the desk or onto the floor. Finally, sitting in the chair behind the desk, the woodwork of which creaked as it took his weight, his glance turned to the sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter. Examining the print, his head lowered to its surface, the eyes screwed up, he enquired, ‘You don’t mind if I sit?’ waving his hand to add, ‘You sit where you like. Or stand. My wife, if you ask her, might bring us a cup of tea. Or coffee. Shout down the hall and ask her. Which do you prefer?’

‘Whichever is convenient,’ Maddox said.

‘Neither,’ the man said, ‘but it doesn’t prevent you from asking. I would ask for tea. Which means she will bring me coffee. Which is the one that I prefer.’ Looking up, finally, to glance at him directly, he added, ‘Get the picture?’

Maddox returned to the hall, walked down to the door at the rear, from behind which the music still emerged, knocked on it and, receiving no response, pushed it open.

A small, sparsely furnished room overlooked an overgrown garden at the rear: two worn, upholstered chairs were set diagonally facing a tall, sash window. The room was empty, the radio standing on a cabinet behind the door. A carpet, its design faded, and holed in several places, covered much of the otherwise stained wood floor.

Returning to the room at the front he reported, ‘No one there,’ hesitating to close the door in case he was to be despatched on a further errand, and added, when there was no response from the figure behind the desk, its head stooped once more to the typewriter, ‘Should I look elsewhere?’

‘To find her?’ the figure enquired. ‘Or simply to piss off?’

‘To find her.’

‘No bother.’ The figure straightened. ‘She’ll probably make it. But not until you’re leaving. Do you smoke?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Mind if I do?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Would you say you’re an equable fellow?’

‘On the whole,’ he said, pausing before he offered his response, ‘I am.’

A packet of cigarettes had been produced from the cardigan: a box of matches was raised from the litter of books and papers on the desk. A match was struck and, having been held to the cigarette, was dropped, still burning, on the floor. Leaning back, the figure remarked, ‘You look pretty healthy to me.’

‘I feel quite well,’ he said.

‘Any reason why you shouldn’t?’

‘None.’

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ He gestured with the cigarette. ‘After you’ve closed the door. There’s a hell of a draught. Mild, at this time of the year, but inconvenient, at my age.’

Having crossed to the door and closed it the man called, as if Maddox had removed himself a considerable distance, ‘Sit on the couch. That’s where most of you sit,’ Maddox removing several books and a rug from the end furthest away from the desk, turning to the silhouetted figure behind it.

‘Your brother Paul’s colleague suggested you’d attempted to jump under a train. Not an experience you’d have every day, but not to that extent unusual. Were you prosecuted for the inconvenience?’

‘No,’ he said, the thought, previously, never having occurred to him.

The springs creaking beneath him, he endeavoured to change his position.

‘What do you think to the pictures?’

The man was leaning on the desk, his elbows on either side of the typewriter as if whatever was written there were still his principal concern. His head he cupped in his hands, the cigarette, held in one of them, smoking by his ear.

‘Not good,’. Maddox said, assuming that anything less than candour would earn his questioner’s disfavour.

‘Why in front of a train?’

‘I wasn’t aware I was going to do it until I did. Which is the curious thing about it,’ he said.

‘Quite common.’

‘Really?’

‘Premeditation is rarely involved. At,’ he went on, ‘the critical moment.’

‘I see.’

‘Sectioned?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long?’

‘Fifty-six days. I was in for about eight weeks. Two months,’ he amended.

‘Apart from trains, what other methods attracted your attention?’

‘Not any. I hadn’t,’ he continued, ‘given it any thought.’

‘If you had, what other methods would you recommend?’

‘Pills?’ Maddox suggested, thinking of Viklund.

‘Hard to get hold of. In a hurry. Forethought there, if anything.’

‘What would you recommend?’ Maddox said, returning, he reflected, the ball to his court.

‘It’s a question of opportunity,’ the man responded. ‘Personally, I’d choose pills because I’m a doctor. You, on the other hand, would have to save up. Your anti-depressants, for instance. Little less than a hundred, your size and weight, to make sure. Paracetamol, I’d say, likewise. You might, then again, strike lucky and get away with less. You never know. That’s the magic of the thing. As I see it, the problem is, other than having a medical, or a veterinary qualification, you have an infinite number of choices. Lorries, cliffs, bridges. Rivers. Even the humble kitchen knife has proved invaluable on numerous occasions. Also, of course, the bathroom razor. It’s the way the world is. Doctors are especially vulnerable. Sitting day after day listening to people with boils on their balls and thinking who’d do this for a living? As for women.’ Returning the cigarette to his mouth he blew out a cloud of smoke.

Maddox, for his part, gazing into the light, had moved into an abstracted state, wondering, even, if he’d got the right address, or, if he had, he’d registered with the appropriate occupant inside.

‘Married?’

‘Divorced.’ He spoke as if in a dream.

‘Children?’

‘Three.’

‘What?’

‘Sons.’

‘Look after you?’

‘They’re all concerned.’

‘Would you say you’re delusional?’

‘No.’

‘How are you fixed for money?’

‘I have a pension.’

‘Enough?’

‘Yes.’

‘House okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any worries?’

‘Not immediate.’

The head, having been withdrawn from the hands, was now a confused shape against the light: a skein of smoke drifted across the window.

‘What are you taking?’

‘Dothiepin,’ he said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Thioridazine, whenever things get bad. Less and less, recently,’ he added.

‘National Health.’

‘Yes.’

The man got up, picked up the packet of cigarettes and the box of matches and shuffled to the chair by the empty fire. Sinking into it, he sighed, and, with two hands, sparks flashing from the cigarette, hoisted one thigh over the other.

‘Not much of a life,’ he said, and added, ‘Yours, I imagine, you think is no better.’

Maddox could see, for the first time, the distortion of the man’s figure, the ribs pushed out to one side, the shoulder above them lowered. The teeth protruded unevenly, almost fragmented, the eyes, more clearly visible, suggesting a lava-like effusion, dark, reddened. He recalled a not dissimilar quality, if more diffuse, he’d occasionally witnessed in Simone.

‘Not that the fees add up to much, compared to what you make selling pictures.’

‘I don’t sell pictures,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I write about them.’

‘Berenson made a fortune.’

‘I believe he did.’

‘And this latter-day Berenson. Viklund.’

Surprised, even disconcerted, Maddox asked, ‘Do you know him?’

‘Dan and I go back a long way.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘No reason why you should.’ The cigarette, hanging from the corner of his mouth, trailed out another stream of smoke. ‘I followed his series. The re-emergence of the species in when did he say it was? As if.’ He paused. ‘New philistinism, in your case. But, then, when did it ever stop?’

The door opened: the woman who had let him in reappeared, one hand retained on the doorknob behind.

‘Where’s the dog?’ she said.

‘It’s upstairs,’ the man told her. ‘It had to come up and fetch me.’

The telephone rang once more in the hall outside, the previous ringing having ended abruptly, as if an extension had been lifted in another room. The sound of music was audible again.

‘Answer it,’ the man said. ‘Or ask the dog.’

‘You answer it,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve other things to do.’

‘What other things?’

‘Other things,’ the woman insisted. ‘If you don’t want me here I’ll be outside.’

The door was closed. Moments later the telephone stopped. The woman’s voice, faintly, came from the hall.

‘We could have asked her for your tea,’ the figure said by the empty fire. ‘And me for my cup of coffee.’

‘I’m okay,’ Maddox said, reluctant to approach the woman again.

Stubbing the cigarette, half smoked, in the hearth, the man took out and lit another. ‘Sure?’ he said, holding it up.

‘No,’ he said.

‘I’d hate to leave you worse than when you came in. What do think to the psychiatric profession?’

‘I’ve found them helpful, on the whole,’ he said.

‘If you’re asking me about orthodoxy I haven’t got one. Freud a junkie. Adler an idler. Jung a fucker of his women patients. Cunt is very much part of the system. Are you an admirer of the muse of Lichfield? You’ll find the whole of it in there. What did you want to see me about?’

‘I don’t know. You were recommended,’ Maddox said, helplessness, he reflected, evident on both their parts.

‘By a colleague of your brother’s.’

‘Yes.’

He surveyed Maddox for several seconds through a cloud of smoke.

‘I can’t do anything for you, of course.’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t stop people killing themselves. It’s a reasonable thing to do. It’s the ones who don’t that I normally address. The tube station at Notting Hill, for instance, is just as convenient as the one at Camden Town. Though the one at Camden Town, being a junction, has four lines, the corresponding number of platforms, and a proportionately greater number of trains. In that respect, you’re fortunate having it on your doorstep. You weren’t fucked by your father?’

‘No.’

‘Amongst men of your age there’s an awful lot of that around. Unmentioned over the previous thirty years and suddenly the fashion. The nineteen forties and ’fifties were particularly strong. Possibly the war, soldiers returning, an, at the time, unbroachable postscript. How about your mother?’

‘No.’

‘Sister?’

‘No.’

‘That used to be pretty strong. Keep it in the family. Threat of scandal. Neighbours?’

‘No.’

‘Relatives?’

‘No.’

‘Vicar?’

He shook his head.

‘Rabbi?’

‘No.’

‘Priest?’

He shook his head again.

‘Mullah?’

‘No.’

‘How about school?’

‘None there either.’

‘A pretty fuckless childhood.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you brought up?’

‘St Albans.’

‘St Albans.’ He brushed cigarette ash from his cardigan. ‘I’ve had one or two interesting cases from there. Anything I’ve missed? Or should I say anyone?’

He shook his head.

‘Doesn’t seem much fun if you haven’t been fucked by somebody. Other than your wife and what might be described as your female peers.’ Lifting his thigh once more with both hands he lowered it to the ground, grasped the other thigh and lifted it over the first. The slipper, suspended from the upraised foot, fell off. The foot was bare. ‘You may have been told, my principal subject is incest. Are you aware what the most significant problem is for members of a family who, knowingly or unknowingly, have been separated at birth, or shortly thereafter, and are suddenly reunited?’

Despite an increasing desire not to disappoint his interlocutor, he was obliged to shake his head again.

‘G.S.A. Genetic Sexual Attraction. An irresistible desire to fuck one another. The respectable mother attracted to her long-lost son. Son to mother. Father to daughter. Daughter to father. Sister to brother. Brother to sister. Brother to brother. Sister to sister. It suggests the principal underlying element in family life is grievously overlooked at present. Oedipus, who, after all, was never aware he was fucking his mother, doesn’t come into it. This is Dionysus, without the alcohol.’ Stroking with both hands his upraised knee, he added, ‘My name is Isaacson, by the way, not Isaacs. Your intermediary, when he rang, had got it wrong.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’ll have to be overlooked at present. What are your feelings on euthanasia?’

‘I feel okay about it,’ he said. ‘Each case to be taken on its merit.’

‘How well do you know Dan Viklund?’

‘I succeeded him at the Drayburgh. Before that, long before that, I was his student. At the Courtauld.’

‘He got me out of Germany. Before the war. He had quite a line in that sort of thing. My parents, who hesitated, didn’t make it. Similarly my sister. Similarly my brother. The Notting Hill tube station, either east or west, doesn’t nearly come into it.’

He contemplated Maddox through a cloud of suddenly exhaled smoke.

‘I ended up at a Quaker residential school, within a year had passed my exams and seven years later qualified as a doctor in time for the Korean War. Or, rather, out of gratitude to the British nation – and the United Nations – I volunteered. Read Boswell?’

‘I have,’ he said.

‘Biography or diary?’

‘Both.’

‘A necessary in-filler to what the genius wrote. I thought, at the time, I’d do the same. The equivalent of the Rambler essays. The Adventurer, The Idler. Dilatory titles, but exemplary. I got blown up.’

Smoke, once more, was exhaled between them.

‘What by?’

‘A bomb. By mistake. American. But you don’t want to hear my sordid story.’

‘I’d like to,’ Maddox said, relieved, to a degree, their roles had been reversed.

‘Every few years a piece of shrapnel works its way out. Abdomen. Arm. Leg. I’ve got them on the mantelpiece, if you’d care to look. If I hadn’t been a medic I’d have died. A tourniquet on both my legs and an arm. It fucked me up for quite a while. Could say I never recovered.’

He regarded Maddox through the thickening smoke, an assessment of some sort underway, if not completed.

‘What school were you at?’

‘St Albans. After that, the north of England. During the war years and after,’ he added.

‘Religion?’

‘No.’

‘Agnostic?’

‘Yes.’

‘Atheist?’

‘Still to find out.’

‘Not apostate Jewish?’

‘My father was.’

‘Problem?’

‘Not really.’

‘But some.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Mother?’

‘The same.’

‘I’ve read your reviews.’ He gestured to the wall behind Maddox’s back. ‘Not, in your view, a wasted talent.’

‘No.’

‘Most people affect to like them.’

‘I’m trying,’ he said, ‘to keep up with you.’

‘I was called Kike at school, Quakers notwithstanding. At one time, a group of twelve men with a charismatic leader might well have been treated with suspicion. St Paul, too, I’m not sure about. Sexual invert?’

‘No.’

‘Telling people what they know already is how I stay in business. As you’re probably aware, knowledge and awareness are different things.’

‘You think so.’

‘I do.’

Maddox’s mood of abstraction had increased, he struggling to keep the figure before him in focus, its features, seemingly, fused together. He had noticed this hallucinatory effect before, either with people whose conversations bored him or with those whose presence was reassuring, a tendency he associated with ageing, if not his medical condition, the seemingly manic mask that represented Isaacson – if he’d got the name correct – acquiring a conspiratorial intensity, the eyes dilated, the hair, as he spoke, darting to and fro at the back of his head as if a second, more sinister presence lurked behind him.

‘This philistinism you go on about. A self-degenerating force that can’t be controlled. A mannerist age. Most of them are. Irrelevant. Too obvious. What do you think?’

‘I wonder,’ Maddox said, ‘what precisely I’m doing here. Discussing what I know already, or merely having the privilege of paying to listen to you.’

‘The paintings,’ Isaacson said, ‘are by me.’

Turning, Maddox looked at them again. ‘Good job you stuck to psychiatry,’ he said.

‘I did them in my youth, which is a considerable time ago, before the Korean War. I went to Jerusalem on an extended visit, for no accountable reason, and, without warning, psychosis intervened. Voices. People there whom no one else could see. Definitive views on everything. The sort of thing you get with LSD. Things to come. Much of it in the Talmud.’

He waited, smiling, his head on one side.

‘Did you recover?’

‘That’s for you to decide.’ He spread out his arms. Cigarette smoke drifted up again.

‘What should I do,’ Maddox said, ‘in a not dissimilar situation?’

‘How not dissimilar?’

‘Things destabilising,’ he said. ‘Forces coming from inside, but experienced as coming from the outside, on a scale and with a strength greater than anything I’ve previously known. Approaching, say,’ he added, half smiling, ‘the size of an aircraft-carrier to someone paddling in the sea.’

‘Were you paddling?’

‘I think so.’

‘Pathology, in your case, I wouldn’t know about. My sort of intervention, nowadays, is unfashionable. Symptoms like yours are primarily seen as functional disorders. Hormones, enzymes, genes. You name it. Cognitive behavioural therapy may be more your thing. Consciousness inserted between awareness and action. Rather along the lines of what we’re doing now. You feeling pissed off when you arrive, I in bed, having forgotten about you, the dog coming up to fetch me. It doesn’t like visitors and only comes up when they arrive. By pissing around we’re both distracted. What you get from me you won’t get from anyone else. I won’t ask you, for Yahweh’s sake, to revert to a Jew.’ He laughed, a brief, inconsequential sound, the prominent teeth once more displayed. If anything, Maddox reflected, he felt confident about him because of the irregularity of the teeth, an authenticity, of a sort, engagingly revealed. ‘What you want is something to replace what you were doing before you felt inclined to put an end to what you were doing, accidie leading to cachexia a not uncommon complaint amongst – how should I describe it? – people like you. I take it you’re still reviewing. Or have you something of interest up your sleeve?’

He extended his hand.

‘I’m thinking of writing about a former student of mine who I visited recently in prison.’

‘What’s he do?’ Isaacson said.

‘Killed his wife and children.’

‘Eric Taylor,’ Isaacson said.

‘You heard about him?’

‘I was asked to appear at his trial. After the defence read my curriculum vitae they changed their mind. I don’t know why. It was his idea to invite me.’

‘Did you meet him?’

‘A time and place were appointed, and then cancelled. Your services, they told me, are no longer required. The defence of insanity, you’ll remember, was not sustained. Anything else you have in the kitchen?’

‘An analyst I went to and with whom I am now half living, therapy abandoned, has been reported to the Medical Council by two of her clients who cite the irregularity of our relationship, along with accounts of being propositioned along similar lines themselves.’

‘There you go again,’ Isaacson said, stubbing the second cigarette out, half smoked, in the hearth. ‘There’s no end to these complications. I’ll be telling you my problems next, and asking your advice.’ Waving his hand again, he signalled Maddox to continue.

‘I’m inclined to turn what might be described as pathology into a metaphysical proposition.’

‘Why not? Philosophy’s in the doldrums. So’s psychiatry, come to that. These rituals we once went in for are still of use. Self-validating assertions can be negative, too. “I’m the worst person in the world, doctor. I’m a failure. No one loves me. I’m just about the most incomprehensible shit you’ll ever come across.” Apart from the facts of age, height, weight, address, occupation, income, marital status, children, the rest is self-appraisal. Validation comes in any form you like, but principally in the shape of the perception, “I see myself in this light.” The seeing and the I involved, whatever the substance of the perception, substantiate the self which the analysand assumes is missing. As the two of us are doing now. Screwing your therapist or analyst, for instance, isn’t par for the course but I wouldn’t exclude it. It appears, from where I’m sitting, to have served you well. She’s not still charging you, I take it?’

Maddox’s posture on the couch had changed: from one of alertness – square-shouldered, upright, confrontational – he’d relaxed into one not unlike that of Isaacson himself, lying back, his legs crossed, his hands, in his own case, placed beside him to balance himself amongst the protruding springs – which, he’d now discovered, it was the purpose of the rugs, and perhaps the scattered books, to conceal. Maybe it was the analogy between his posture and his situation, described to Isaacson, that prompted him to laugh, a realisation that his inclination to write about Taylor was being reinforced by the other man, a realisation Isaacson had come to, too.

‘As for transcendental solutions – an areligious milieu to you; an acultural one, to me – I’d ask you to look at the pictures on the wall. Not much to you, but meaningful to me. A reminder of questions I once asked and answers I’d otherwise have forgotten. Irrelevant, now, of course, for questions and answers, after a certain age, no longer count. As for Taylor, whom I never met, I suspect you’ll find the same. The total, whatever it adds up to, rarely matters. Why, I’m inclined to ask, did you pick on him? What’s his attitude to you?’

‘Vengefulness. See where I’ve ended up. See where my wife and children the same.’

‘Did you buy it?’

‘Some I did.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s true.’

‘Some of it.’

Isaacson waited.

‘Maybe you could help me,’ he added.

‘Blow me away.’ Isaacson extended his hand again: an invitation, physically, to place something in it.

‘To what degree is it cultural, to what degree something else?’

‘No dice.’ Pointing a finger at his chest, he added, ‘Bang!’ Pointing the same finger at Maddox, he exclaimed, ‘Bingo! Shot you first. You’re dead! Y.P.’

‘Why pee?’

‘Your problem.’

The door had opened again.

‘Are you wanting tea?’ the woman said, not appearing in the door but, her hand presumably on the handle, remaining in the hall outside.

‘It’s too late for that,’ Isaacson said. ‘We’re into business. If you came round the door you’d see.’

‘Mr Cavendish is due in ten minutes.’

‘Ask him to come back.’

‘You ask him.’

‘I won’t tell him anything. It’s up to you.’

The door was closed.

A moment later Isaacson got up, with considerable alacrity – an alacrity not previously shown – and, in crab-like strides, crossed, with one slippered and one bare foot, to the door. Opening it, he called, ‘What the fuck do I pay you for if you won’t answer the fucking door?’

‘What you paid me for you still owe,’ came the voice from outside.

Isaacson closed the door and came back to his seat. Lowering himself into it with difficulty, he said, ‘Either you piss off or Cavendish does. Do you know him, by the way?’

Maddox shook his head.

‘Someone with more good intentions you’d have to crawl a fucking long way, I can tell you, to find.’

‘Maybe,’ Maddox said, ‘I’m the same.’

‘Think so?’ Isaacson said. ‘I haven’t noticed,’ adding, ‘If your friend needs advice, vis-à-vis the Council, she’s only got to ring. Don’t ask her to come round. I’ve enough to deal with at present. Remember the Camden Town tube has a definite edge.’

‘I’m inclined to see it all,’ Maddox said, as he got up, his legs and back aching more than he’d been previously aware, ‘in the form of contracts. There’s a contract for me to live. Taken out without my knowledge, signed on my behalf, not by me. There’s an endless stream of contracts that flows from it. To do with family. Friends. Jobs. Education. With everything I think and do and feel. Endlessly we endorse, renege, or renegotiate, or endeavour to. Like, for instance, the contract I have with you. Similarly, the one you have with Cavendish. Unilaterally, we absent ourselves from some, as others do with us. Always at a price. I absented myself from the primary one in attempting to take my life. Taylor’s contract, too, with his family, even with himself, he decided was null and void. Hamlet,’ he went on, perplexed as to why he was suddenly so engaged, ‘is composed of nothing else. It’s the terms of these contracts that we’re preoccupied by throughout our lives. In my case, the initiating one.’

Isaacson was looking up at him with an expression less of surprise than amusement: the trivialisation of something – Maddox wasn’t sure what – was now involved, he feeling the compression of the springs against his back and thighs even though he was now standing, crossing to the door with the curious sensation the couch was strapped to his shoulders.

Isaacson, reaching into his cardigan pocket, had produced another cigarette. Lighting it with a match, waving the flame before him, he said, ‘The contractual world is your invention. Make an appointment.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Not too long.’ He threw the match, still burning, into the hearth. ‘I have a secretary, but she’s rarely here. My wife, as you can see, is no fucking good.’

Hearing a sound behind him as he opened the door he turned to see Isaacson getting out of his chair. ‘Look at this,’ he said, crossing to the desk.

Pulling open a drawer he searched in it for several seconds, taking out several sheets of paper from which, finally, he extracted a photograph. Yellowed, folded over at the corner, he straightened it, fiercely, before holding it out. ‘What do you think?’

A young man in uniform was standing to attention, the head, close-cropped, thrust up powerfully from the square-set shoulders, the arms thrust down, the hands fisted, the thumbs to the front. ‘A contract, too, in its own sort of way.’

‘You,’ Maddox said.

‘Korea. Before I got hit. The thought of it might do some good. After Jerusalem, of course.’

His thumb closed over the photograph, returning it to the drawer. ‘See you sometime,’ he added, ‘if you so decide,’ turning back to his chair.

After letting himself out of the front door, Maddox glanced across at the front room window: the shape of the desk and the chair behind it were visible between the tasselled curtains, Isaacson, having returned to the desk, was stooping over the typewriter, attempting to decipher the print on the rolled-in sheet of paper. A moment later, as Maddox turned away, he was surprised to see the figure he identified as Doctor Death approaching from the direction of Notting Hill, he nodding, startled, as the figure passed, receiving a nod of acknowledgement in return – glancing back before he’d gone much further to see the figure mounting the steps to Isaacson’s door, the door opening immediately he rang and, with a look in his direction, its head bowing, the figure stepping inside.