16

The model was, ironically, black, and insisted on wearing shorts: a muscular, moustached and bearded figure who had entered the room wearing a broad-brimmed, black felt hat, angled sharply to one side, a cloak, also black, and khaki trousers with bulging, buttoned pockets at the calves, his feet shod in boots which reached above his ankles.

Naked, but for his shorts, he appeared aloof, glaring at the women with a cornered, baleful expression, Maddox finding it difficult to disassociate this aura from the figure itself, and difficult, too, to distinguish between the shadows and the colour of the skin, this a rationalisation, he concluded – as was his inability to follow the articulation of the hips inside the shorts – of his longing for the sense of dispossession which had characterised the young Kosovan mother, a sense subtler, however, than the one characterised by humiliation, truculence and pride, before him now. He wished he hadn’t come (had mentally given up on the life-class as he had on the support group), fingering the stinging at his neck which had irritated him throughout the night, staining the sheets, the pillow, his pyjama top, wondering where the blade had been, what contact it had had with other blood before penetrating his skin.

His own indignity, too, he’d been assessing: the privileges – his own as well as those he shared with others – which enhanced his life, looking across at Genius as, groaning, scuffing his booted feet, he charcoaled the sheet of paper before him, other, identical sheets, screed with charcoal, his earlier efforts, strewn on the floor beneath his own and adjoining easels: a curious, white-skinned, exclamatory version of the half-naked figure in the centre of the room, Genius, his and the model’s eyes, without a trace of mutual recognition, occasionally meeting – the self-preoccupied, occluded gaze of the damned.

His attention – he was drawing very little – drifted to the women – past Duncan in his beret (playing the part), seated disconsolately on his donkey, rarely attempting to mark his paper despite a perplexed, obsessive scrutiny of the model – the stoical, intrepid, fearsome women who drew uncomplainingly, devoutly, devotedly (they might so easily have been in church, in chapel, principally the synagogue), hand-maidens, hand-men, none of them a virgin, the former spoken for by men, the latter, presumably (Duncan alone in doubt), by women, penetrated, the majority, penetrating, presumably, the other two.

Rachel, as usual, he singled out, wondering why, with Simone in the background, he found her so attractive: the activity of her breast as she drew, her arm, her delicate, thinly muscled arm, thrust out to the easel: a hand, darkened by charcoal, which he might, so easily, stretching over, kiss: the shower of dust descending from her drawing, smeared across her overalled front, the streaks of dust across her cheeks as, intermittently, she drew back her hair (too long, and yet enchanting), a figure – the epitome – of application (dedication, domesticity, strength): the ascendancy of ends beyond her means: the shading-in of shadows hopelessly confused with the colour of the skin.

And Ailsa (Mrs Loewenstein), sensitively featured, drawing with her sleeves rolled above her elbows, a jumper beneath her smock: coloured fingers (wrists and arms) as if having plunged her limbs in blood, indecipherable shapes splayed out before her, she drawing successive, repetitive shapes on tinted paper, becalmed in widowhood (fighting in a strange arena, locked into an aperceptive view of herself); Mary (Mrs Sutor) creaking on her donkey as she laboured at her board, eyes levelled, for an instant, above its upper edge, scuffling at the sheet before her, harrying its surface: sensitised Rachel (moving back to her), frail, tensed, braced as though against a storm, he, too, taking in something of the elements – their unpredictability, their intransigence – scouring his drawing, features and figure wrenched out of its carbon-slivered surface, forcing depth into and out of a two-dimensional form.

Rachel once again distracting: the intimacy of their close encounter, she, in the confined, jostled, crowded space, beside him, feet apart, drawing some distance above his head, sturdily, engrossed, enthralled, he seated, his attention returning to Mrs Sutor (Mary), a fastidious dresser, on his other side, her belted skirt, her blouse, equipped for summer – lightness, efflorescence – a restless figure, hair folded back beneath a ribbon, a schoolgirl style, its fringe drawn up above her brow, her thigh potently outlined along her donkey, crouching … dysfunctional Sheba (abrupt departures to the crêche to see her child) beyond, waiting, as if for a revelation, before her easel poking at the paper: Susannah (Mrs Samuels) a plain, high-breasted figure with the shoulders of a pugilist, labouring at her easel as she might at cleaning out an oven, hand, arm and shoulder applied from one direction, then the other, Jeanette, the retired, diminutive teacher, consulting her drawing, on a donkey, scoring in a line, looking up with a furrowed, enquiring, self-acclamatory smile, forehead puckered with concentration: the wheezing, groaning, tropically attired, booted, bare-armed, short-trousered figure of Genius, the boots, at intervals, stamping on the wood-block floor, Maddox looking round, perplexed, at his fellow artists wondering why he was here at all.

Something fortuitous in his engagement; something self-enquiring (tortuous): something in common with them all: ‘Where are you from?’ curiosity aroused at the beginning of the term, the turning-away in disappointment, a signal, a code, not recognised or given: serving a sentence, or so it seemed to him, the attention he paid this peculiar, ostracising class: serving out a sentence, leaving from the start (what Taylor, for instance, had painfully discovered: no talent, no gift, no freedom of expression), starting from scratch (the studios he’d visited, on invitation, as a critic), the distance he maintained to preserve his judgement, Rachel a template for the others – himself, too, if the truth were known: a generality of women, a specificity of men: women of a particular persuasion, suffered, skirting the edge of a previous if scarcely referred-to disaster, phantoms occupying their strips of paper, his, too, for no reason he could account for, attempts to relocate themselves graphically defined.

Invariably he felt exhausted returning from the life-class (no afternoon sleep, for one thing): placing his drawings on the living-room floor, intending, in a different context, and with a more focused concentration, to identify more clearly what he might have done – pinning one, and then several to the wall, to come across them by surprise as, over the next day or two, he entered the room from the stairs or the kitchen, or merely raised his head from something he was reading or from talking on the phone, allowing them, momentarily, to be the centre of his life.

As for what was, in reality, going on in his life in general, he had little or no idea, events overtaking him, not he initiating or supervising them: tubing up the hill that evening to hear, coming in the door, a voice droning on – anonymous, ingratiating, male again – in Simone’s room, the door to the office ajar, the light flashing on the answering machine, the telephone ringing moments later, then cutting off as a message was recorded (another voice: male, anonymous, urgent, he not troubling to listen): her allegiance – constant, unwavering – to things outside.

Aching, he climbed upstairs to find the table laid for supper and something cooking in the oven: she had – his heart, warmed, turned over – anticipated his coming! taciturnity (in him) was not the answer. Here, in reality, was the focus of his life: domesticity, a female world to ascend to, after a life of reminiscence, recreating the time he lived in in order to rearrange the past: feeding the cat, its identity cylinder clinking melodiously against the bowl as it ate, watching it licking its lips, once finished, pausing to look up to see if there might be more: licking once again, the rasp of its tongue on its fur in the silence of the house, it raising its head as the doorbell rang and, moments later, a different voice in the hall below, the previous client leaving.

From the window overlooking the street he caught a glimpse of a stout, middle-aged, raincoated figure, a centrally balding head uncovered, crossing to the steps leading down to Heath Street, buttoning its raincoat as it went: a client departing, he reflected, as if from a brothel. What had people done before analysis had been invented? drink, drugs, promiscuity, religion, or were they simply obliged to discover resources within themselves? And now? his thoughts distracted by the sound of Simone’s feet on the stairs, the soft padding of her soles (flat-heeled shoes) against the carpet, the creaking of the woodwork, he going to the landing to receive her, watching her pause, a few steps down, seeing him, her face flushed, untired, excited. ‘I’ve another appointment. Could you turn off the oven? It’ll be overcooked. Are you okay? I’ll be an hour. Give it forty minutes. Sorry,’ and was gone, returning moments later, scampering up the stairs, pressing her lips against his, squeezing his hand, then, for a second time, was gone, as elusive, as intangible, as mysterious as ever.

He climbed upstairs and opened the roof door, the cat, pinned, he assumed, all day indoors, preceding him. The air was cool, the light fading: to the south, the declivity of the Thames was covered by a mist: lights glimmered from the scattered tower blocks, the skyline invisible. Back there, between the houses, was the pilgrim route to St Albans, the road which, at some point, he would have to take himself; meanwhile, directly below, the thirty-foot drop to the tiny, enclosed yard at the rear.

He hadn’t told Simone of the incident with the intruder, anticipating – at least, over the telephone – her concluding it had been his fault: if he’d had an answering machine, like everyone else, he wouldn’t have felt obliged to scamper inside, leaving the front door open. Of course, he could have been killed. What was he doing here, sitting amongst her flowers, the evidence, as was the cat, of her overwhelming, more meaningful occupation?

Perhaps she merely wanted a man, there when required, dismissed whenever not, he, for his part, bent on a mission – here on a mission – to accomplish something, to achieve something (if he hadn’t, as yet, discovered what), drawing pictures one day a week in one location, something little different in another, the purpose of both, one ‘release’, the other ‘expression’, still obscure.

Caught, he reflected, in art’s mesmeric embrace, he was struggling to release himself from something else entirely: a vengeful, insatiable appetite which not only had he energised but evidently created, the expression, the formulation of a witless, unperceiving, negating nature. Heaven, which had seemed so accessible, if not present, a few hours before, was no longer to be found in this place at all.

Having sat absently at the garden table, he began to wonder where else he might look, the cat, attracted by his immobility, leaping into his lap, he stroking it – unusually, for him – for reassurance, as if the animal might say what its mistress was up to – what his mistress was up to – what he himself might be destined for: another night-time visitant who might complete what the previous one had only tentatively started.

Simone was good (positive, outward-going), he self-enclosed, abandoned to vagaries he no longer knew how to analyse or control. No wonder he had gravitated (instinctively) to women – curiously, of a particular kind, not a premeditated choice at all yet circumstantially defined: elderly, artistically inclined if not appropriately gifted, they as precariously placed on the periphery of their lives, he suspected, as he, for different reasons entirely, was placed peripherally on his (and, he reflected, on the edge of theirs). No wonder they had little if any time for him, only listening to his appreciation of their drawings, their paintings with a smile: despite his lack of graphic skill, he would, he reflected, have made a good teacher, the suffering mad ox, a bovine resuscitant, remnant of a herd otherwise extinct (transported, slaughtered, fed to the dogs), he alone surviving, he of the bleeding anxious heart, his aspiration for a better understanding, for self-control, his yearning to transpose fear, terror, premonitions of something even worse, into something acceptable – even revelatory.

What an arsehole, his flaky, black intruder might (must) have thought, the person he had been closest to, other than Simone, for as long as he cared to remember: his killer, his assassin: the details of his eyes, his nose, his strangely – as Isaacson’s – divergent teeth: someone – evidently – in poorer shape than he was, the particularities of his odour (the smell of fear – he recognised it – evident, too), the colour of his skin, the aura – the ‘essence’ (back to that again) of someone else with, demonstrably, nothing left to lose: civility, candour. Condescension – life lived at the apex of what was gradually, as far as he could tell, coming to resemble the outline of a cross: the via dolorosa along which presently he was heading. Was this what he had been planning – what, unknowingly, had been planned for him – all along: self-sacrifice on a previously unmeditated scale: another God-invested recipient of the Order of the Lost?

Returning downstairs, looking for distraction, he was suddenly aware he’d forgotten to turn the oven off, the smell of burning rising up the stairs, he descending briskly to the kitchen, opening the oven door: a rectangular metal container smouldering on the upper shelf: picking it up in a cloth, taking it to the sink, running cold water around it, spooning off the surface of the contents to the level of something other than blackness underneath: placing the scraped-off debris in a newspaper – pastry, of some sort, recognisably a fish and vegetable mixture, spooning it into a separate dish, replacing it in the turned-off oven to keep warm.

Opening the window to let out the smoke, he descended to the backyard – the sound of another male voice interspersed with Simone’s, passing her room – placing the newspaper in a black bin-liner, taken from a roll, characteristically, thoughtfully, placed by her behind the back door, securing the bag and placing it in the dustbin (to be taken up twice a week to the street entrance to be emptied, a task frequently performed by himself), looking up at the parapet, reflecting that, up there, he had contemplated leaping down, registering, suddenly, the significance of the fall, the imperative which had taken possession of his life, insistent (not to be ignored). He would, he reflected, look back no more.

When she finally appeared it was with an anguished expression, standing in the living-room door, he absorbed in the television: floods, starvation – preceded by a fanfare announcing the news: showbiz! – unnumbered, if not innumerable dead, dysentery, cholera, skeletal figures, skulls misplaced as heads, unvaryingly black, passing, re-passing, condemningly, reductively, senselessly, ceaselessly, to and fro. ‘What happened?’

‘Floods.’ (Civil war: tribalities: ‘So what’s the diff?’ he wanted to ask.)

‘What’s happened?’ evidently aghast.

‘Madagascar.’

‘In the kitchen.’

‘I forgot the oven.’

‘Is it burnt?’

‘Some I saved. Decide if you want to throw it out,’ still on the screen.

‘All you had to do was switch it off.’

Not connected to her mood, not connected to his own reflection, he got up and turned the television off.

‘I was feeding the cat. I assumed it was still cooking. I went on the roof.’ He paused, aware, for the first time, of how vexed she was. ‘I must have been distracted.’

Already, however, she had disappeared to the kitchen.

‘It’s uneatable,’ she said, when he followed her in.

‘Let’s find something else.’ Already he was opening the refrigerator door.

‘I made it specially. I went,’ she said, peculiarly distressed, ‘to all this trouble.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She was staring at his neck.

‘What’s happened to your collar?’

He felt beneath his chin: his fingers, when he withdrew them, were smeared with blood. With stooping, bagging the burnt food, he had, he assumed, reopened the cut.

‘A guy came into the house last night.’

‘What guy?’

‘Trying to get in Berenice’s next door.’

He’d gone to the sink, turned on the cold water and, running his hand beneath it, dabbed at his neck.

‘Have you got some lint?’

She’d gone to a cupboard in the corner: reaching up, she lifted down a biscuit tin. From inside she methodically took out scissors, antiseptic cream, plasters, a roll of lint: cutting off a piece, she handed it to him and watched him dab at his neck.

‘That’s no good,’ she said, insisting, then, on looking.

‘A scratch,’ he told her.

‘A cut.’

‘A scratch. The cat would have dug deeper.’

‘Did he do it with a knife?’

‘By accident. I shouldn’t have turned my back. I gave him ten pounds and he left. We made a deal. My mind keeps reverting to contracts. These deals,’ he went on, ‘we’re making all the time without our always being aware. Contracts!’ he concluded, definitively, even now not knowing why.

‘You paid him to go?’

‘It seemed the best thing. He requested more. We compromised. The relevance of that,’ he went on, increasingly confused, ‘appeared to dominate everything. On the other hand.’ He paused. ‘He wasn’t quite with it.’

‘Was he drugged?’

‘That’s what I assumed.’

‘From next door?’

‘He was trying to get in next door. He said they owed him money. He was hoping to get in either through an upstairs window, which appeared unreal – Berenice has grilles and shutters on her downstairs windows – or across the roof. There’s a trap-door in mine which would have given him access, he thought, to the one in hers. Though, unlike mine, I’m sure Berenice’s is bolted. Her house is a fortress.’

She was watching him with a shadowed expression: impossible to decide what she was thinking.

‘Did you call the police?’

‘It was part of the deal,’ he said, ‘that I didn’t.’

They were facing one another across the kitchen: the bleeding, as far as he could tell, had stopped: white blotches on her cheeks, a darkening of her eyes. In a curious way, she reminded him of his intruder: perplexity, rage. Incomprehension.

‘Let’s get something to eat,’ he said.

‘You ought to report it.’

‘He won’t come back.’

‘Of that you can’t be sure.’

She was already looking round, going, finally, into the next room, returning with several sheets of newspaper: her back to him, her elbows flung out demonstratively on either side, she scraped the remnants of the food into the paper and screwed it up.

‘I’ll take it down. The rest’s gone down already,’ he said.

When he returned she was heating a pan of soup, the extractor fan whirring above the oven (why hadn’t he thought of that?), the window, which he’d opened, closed. There was no end, her gestures inferred, to what he didn’t understand, something atrophied in her nature countering something equally magnanimous, she wrenched, seemingly, between the two, continually presenting herself in a confusing, varying light.

‘It was done by a knife?’ her back still to him.

‘He had it at the back of my neck. When I turned, he mustn’t have pulled it away. He didn’t intend to do it, I’m convinced.’

‘So what was it doing at the back of your neck?’

‘A precaution.’ He paused. ‘On his side,’ he added.

He had, after all, invited the man to kill him: a gesture which, morally, would have let him, Maddox, off the hook.

‘Shouldn’t you go to the hospital?’ More statement than enquiry.

‘A scratch.’

‘A cut.’ She paused. ‘Have you any idea where the knife has been?’ Again, he reflected, less enquiry than statement.

Turning to him, she held a spoon with which she’d been stirring the soup. Her eyes, he was surprised to see, were full of tears: not sorrow, however – rage.

He spread out his hands. ‘How do I know?’

‘Did you put anything on it?’

‘Antiseptic.’ He added, ‘Like yours.’

She turned back to the soup.

A moment later she turned it off: the contents of the pan poured into two bowls.

She took them through to the other room, the table already prepared (earlier in the day, by her).

Neither, as they ate, was inclined to talk: when they had finished, the silence lengthened.

‘You realise,’ she said, finally, ‘you might have been infected.’

‘With what?’

‘Think.’

A demonstrative gesture with her spoon. Her eyes, once more, were full of tears: powerlessness, in any situation, roused her fury.

Something, in his case undemonstrative, was gripping him inside: a reciprocal anger which brought to mind, absurdly, the image of Taylor, of a particular form of destitution: without her, without this place, without this part of her life, he was – unlike her – finished.

‘Anything is possible with those people you have next door. There’s no knowing what blood the knife might have been in contact with.’

She was picking up her bowl, having left much of her soup, and was going through to the kitchen: he could hear a cupboard door being slammed: something childlike, he reflected, in her reaction, the finality of which he couldn’t bear to think about. Despite the brevity of her absence, the sight of her, he knew, would ease him. Yet he continued sitting there undecided, persuaded – terrified – he might lose her: that she didn’t love and, as a moment like this showed, never had.

‘The blade might easily have been infected,’ she said, behind his back, having, evidently, returned. ‘I’m basing that on the kind of people who live next door. The ones I’ve asked you to move away from, time and time again.’

He waited, no longer sure of his response.

‘Don’t they take as well as deal in drugs?’

‘I hardly know anyone,’ he said, ‘who doesn’t,’ adding, ‘in that part of town. I’m no authority, and I might be wrong. Even Viklund, when it comes down to it, has a drug he believes – he hopes – can kill him.’

He had turned in his chair to confront her: now he picked up his bowl and took it past her into the kitchen. He placed it, and hers, in the washing-up machine by the sink.

The kettle, which she’d evidently switched on, came to the boil, the extractor fan still whirring above the oven.

‘Shall we call it a day?’

His enquiry came with scarcely any preparation: if the relationship were to be terminated, if he were to be executed, let her get it over.

‘Call what a day?’

He gestured round: something magnetic in her nature: he felt the force of it drawing him in: first the burnt food, then the scratch (little enquiry about the nature of the assault): when disassembly of anything took place how swiftly it happened.

‘All this.’ He swung out his arm again. ‘Common sense, if it is common sense, appears scarcely to have been involved from the start.’

She was considering carefully – too carefully – what he was saying, an expression on her face he’d only previously seen on the first day of their encounter; engaged, yet distant: objectivity was being measured, recorded, assessed: he wouldn’t have been surprised if, at any moment, she had taken out a file – his file – and started making notes: the way she could write while not looking at the page but at her subject (the way, absorbed, some of the women drew at the life-class), an automatic, almost somnolent reaction.

He added, ‘I don’t know where I am with you. Whereas I feel you know precisely where you are with me. What it is you want. What it is you don’t. Everything’s so partial. Living,’ he went on, ‘contrary lives. I reducing mine, you expanding yours. All this,’ he gestured round once more, ‘proposed by my former wife on the recommendation of her current husband. A man I scarcely know, and what I do know, I invariably object to or dislike. The bullshitting Gerry with his buccaneering.’

He was sweating: much of what he was saying came out of a part of him to which he rarely gave expression: a part which, for much of his life, without his being aware of it, he had elected to keep hidden: unforbearing, confused, obscure – a vacuum: that area which once might have been occupied by what his brother Paul would refer to, contemptuously, as ‘religion’: spirituality of some sort, if not quite the same thing – something to which, at the best of times, he had felt himself only tenuously attached: the Quinians injunction, facile, well intentioned: blank.

Her own reaction, seeing him pinioned there, or so it must have seemed, had been to come forward, smiling, taking his shoulders, drawing him against her: he could feel her heart – he assumed it was her heart – beating against his chest, matching, seemingly, his agitation.

‘All I’m suggesting is what anyone would. It’s like scratching you, for instance, with a used needle. The previous user might have been okay. With your neighbours there’s a possibility not. Don’t we need, after all, to look out for one another? Don’t we do that – haven’t we done that all along? Isn’t this a difficult passage we have to get through?’ She was speaking by his ear, her breath warm against his neck. ‘Don’t you see what a shock it is? You might have been killed. I’ve asked you to leave that place before. If he’s come in once he could come in again. Why don’t you sell the place and come and live up here?’

‘With you?’ He was holding her at a distance, pulling back.

‘Separately. At least I’d know where you were. There’s not much time left for either of us. Give us, at the most, twenty years. After that, if we’re still here, deterioration will inhibit almost everything.’

‘You’d like us to keep going?’

‘I’d like to.’

‘I realise,’ he said, ‘we’ve only just started. That there’s a great deal about one another we scarcely know.’ He was pausing again, their relationship full of reservations: a list of extenuating circumstances, of carefully, or even carelessly crafted exemptions, underlying everything.

‘Why don’t we go upstairs?’ she said, he aware, suddenly, of a reciprocal desperation: if he was prepared to go to the edge, she, she was suggesting, was prepared to go with him: commitment had gone past the point of no return, he lying back, some time later, in her bed, gazing out at the nearby house with its ivy-covered walls, its curiously leaning chimneys, the image of Isaacson coming to mind, and his intruder, Simone having gone through to the bathroom, the water splashing in the bath and – a unique occurrence – the sound of her singing, a light, almost frivolous, uncharacteristically childish voice, celebratory, he thought, if not triumphant.

He was drawing, as instructed, an animal that he liked and one that he didn’t, Beth’s figure, a cardigan over her track suit, bowed to her drawing, blocking the light from the window. Her hair was conspicuously thicker, and greyer, at the back (receding over her forehead), a distorted, arthritic silhouette, her groans accompanying her laboured movements – not least her inclination to hide the paper before its necessary pinning-up on the wall or the back of the door.

Alex, as usual, had gone into a corner, his thin, ochre-coloured hair brushed smoothly to the rear of his head, a spectral mask suspended over his sheet of paper, his right arm vigorously employed, forwards and backwards, as he scored in his message for the week, his drawing-board tilted conspiratorially towards him: tight-lipped, an intense, preoccupied if not tormented figure, each violent lateral then vertical stroke of his crayon accompanied by a brief, indecipherable exclamation: evacuee from Dunkirk, dispossessed, inadvertent (unprepared) liberator of Belsen: furious, violent, self-lacerating gestures as if he were responsible for both (contracts abandoned, disengagement impossible), the table creaking to maximise his complaint.

Anna, the crepuscular creature with her winsome, forgiving, forbearing smile, was, Melissa had announced, back in the geriatric ward at the North London Royal (the base from which most of them had originally emerged), her drawing from the previous week still pinned to the door, a statement of some sort – three carefully tinted flower-beds – of which, because of her absence, Melissa had forbidden discussion, she sitting immediately behind Maddox, writing a letter (perhaps to her: he suspected not) as they painted and drew, Judith, the Jerusalemite (‘why not make it the world’s first universal city and stop all this killing?’ her earlier morning’s suggestion), stabbing at her drawing, to one side of Maddox (sharing the same rocking table) – as if ridding it of an infestation, an assortment of pencils, crayons and chalks, cornered as she entered the room, laid before her, not looking up as she substituted one for another. Fragments of chalk had attached themselves to the sleeves of her dress, a voluminous, cape-like creation which enveloped both her and the chair – and from the hem of which her tiny, slippered feet protruded, tapping silently, alternately, on the wood-block floor.

Ida, the cockney housewife, was singing as she drew, a robust, if misleading demonstration of her lightness of spirit, flicking paint at her picture, leaning back, her neatly jumpered and trousered figure, her head, a powerfully configurated feature with large, dark, almost luminous eyes and a prominent, arc-like nose, the mouth generously extended with lipstick (a painstaking grimace, even in repose), held with incongruous delicacy to one side, she screwing the paper up and, raising it above her, holding it there, illustrationally, drawing attention to the gesture, before dropping it on the floor.

‘Don’t make the room untidy, Ida,’ Melissa said, scarcely taking her eyes off the letter. ‘Others have to use it,’ adding, ‘Five more minutes. I’ll want to see the screwed-up one, of course, as well as any previous or subsequent effort,’ re-reading her correspondence with silently moving lips before signing it with a flourish, pausing, and adding an exclamation mark to the final sentence.

The women formalised the room: gave it strength – he and Alex, he reflected, singularly apart, a masculine intrusiveness, synonymous, in Alex’s case, with violence, a suicidal imperative scarcely constrained – not least, he further reflected, against the background of the work of other day-patients also pinned to the walls: inchoate colours, invariably abstracted: confusion, doubt, remonstration, something struggled-for, if notably not achieved.

A dog, he’d drawn, a blackened hulk against a diagonally rising skyline, and a snake, a coloured spiral, a series, in effect, of interlocking spirals, he, too, inclined, surprisingly, to hum as he drew, crayoned, charcoaled or painted, singing sub voce – the words mentally recalled – texts learnt in the Cathedral at St Albans – Sunday School, Morning Service, Evensong, later, Crusaders – and in the chapel at Quinians – inclined to do the same in the life-class, the movement of his hand and eye prompting a reciprocal activity associated with sound – of a singularly devotional nature. Abstruse, otherwise, the act of drawing or painting; instinctual, unthinking – prompt, precise: the vaguest sensation of distraction, of his mind felicitously engaged.

He was coming to identify his mind with what he would have been inclined to call a mechanical process: a machine serviced by a variety of lubricants and fuels, overlooked by technicians who came on the scene when the mechanism refused to function in an agreeable way: hormones, neurones, synapses: his vocabulary was increasing, the dozen or so transmitters which flashed between neurological extremes, more dextrous, more complex – more unfathomable – than the mechanisms which determined the motion of a car, but an enterprise, nevertheless, which could be identified exclusively in terms of function, perpetuation (self-perpetuation) its principal concern.

Fortuity (again: Lucretius) governing his existence, taking him from one person to another, one circumstance to another, while tenuously – obsessively – finally, good-naturedly, he endeavoured to identify a pattern (a synchronicity) which, as much was now reminding him, had not been there in the first place. Extraordinary claims made on behalf of extraordinary events would not, in the end, evoke anything other than the nature, not the purpose, of the process he’d recognised – and at the very least acknowledged – he listening, some time later, this in mind, to Melissa encouraging her recalcitrant charges, mortified in more ways than one, to extemporise on their drawings or paintings, Alex’s boss-eyed face demonstrating once again the indefatigable fury which drove him, mentally, to the edge of chasms and gorges, a dynamo of distress, the graphic delineation of which appeared more to exacerbate than diminish or assuage.

‘Why does he do it?’ Maddox enquired of Melissa. ‘Alex comes up each week with these wild-eyed charges, men attached to bombs, descending rockets, or being torn apart by uniformed figures, the iconography almost too conformist, and – good old Alex, mild-mannered like the rest of us – after presenting us with his suicide note, turns up the following week to deliver yet another. As it is,’ he gestured to the relevant drawing on the wall, ‘we were asked – he was asked – to draw an animal he liked and one he disliked, and he comes up, yet again, with a figure in a cage. The analogy’s obvious, repetitive, malignant. Life is unliveable. Too much to bear. Yet here we are, apart from Anna, who’s back in the nut-house, still living it. What we want to know from him is where do we go after the bomb has dropped, the rocket has landed, the victim been abused by the uniformed figures? What the fuck do we do when we’ve come to the edge, gone over, and dropped? If life is how he describes it, what are all of us doing here?’

The ‘fuck’, in this context – women, lunatic or otherwise, present – was, he realised, a mistake: silence registered the rebuke before Melissa, measuring it precisely, responded, ‘Do you think it is unbearable?’ adding, ‘Life,’ turning the question to the rest of the room, like she might, conversationally, have enquired about the weather, Alex’s pinched, drained, post-Dunkirk-Belsenic face, the eyes leeched, or so it seemed, of colour, gazing across at Maddox with a singularly appealing and appreciative expression, a grateful, retributory fervour …

‘Mine isn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be here,’ Maddox said. ‘But isn’t Beth’s, or Judith’s, or Ida’s focused around the unbearable? After all,’ he went on, glancing at the women he’d named, each bemused at being included, ‘we hear, when it comes down to it, very little different, week after week.’

‘What does Alex think?’ Melissa persisted, crossing her legs beneath her patchwork skirt, her arms folding across her bloused front, Alex taking time to respond, the familiar fissures in his face invigorated by his effort to focus on what, on other occasions – reluctant to talk about them – he would refer to as his ‘feelings’ – intangible ‘events’ which went on remotely and yet vividly, annihilatingly, somewhere ‘inside’. Taking his cue from Melissa, he crossed his legs too, displaying, as he did so, sockless feet, his pullover, home-knitted and too large, hanging around his withered chest in folds.

‘I don’t know what I think,’ he said. ‘I only know what I feel. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?’

‘Whether it’s thought or feeling is irrelevant,’ Maddox said. ‘It’s always the same. Week after week. Monotony, I’d say, was our greatest problem. We appear to be sustaining our symptoms, not eradicating them. Suffering, you could say, to the point of self-indulgence. It sits on us like a rock, inhibiting thought and feeling. Life, despite all our advantages, not least the facilities here, lived beyond recognisable limits.’ He indicated Beth’s drawing of a dog in flames, curling red and yellow patches flickering from its head, its shoulders, along its haunches, down its tail, out of its eyes, its ears, its mouth, its nose, adding, ‘I suppose that, too, is a metaphor,’ recognising too late the swastika on its flank. ‘Here we are telling each other we’re nuts and nobody appears to listen.’

‘At least we’re talking about it,’ Melissa said, her cheeks flushed, her eyes alight, her hands tucked tightly beneath her arms.

‘In circles,’ Maddox said.

‘So what are your priorities?’ Melissa gestured at his drawings.

‘One’s a dog, the other’s a snake.’

‘Which one do you like?’

‘The dog.’

‘A symbol of death.’

‘Of devotion, companionship, acceptance, loyalty, service.’ He might have gone on, but couldn’t think of anything else.

‘And the snake?’

‘Sinister. Subversive. Scheming.’ These epithets, too, ran out.

‘Phallic,’ Melissa suggested.

‘Like Alex, but without being repetitive. I merely drew what came into my head.’

Melissa re-crossed her legs. ‘You brightly colour the snake and do the dog in monochrome. Black,’ she concluded.

Her arms tightened across her blouse.

‘What’s phallic?’ Ida enquired, her face, constructed from a variety of tints and colours, bright, inquisitive, engaging.

‘It relates to a penis,’ Melissa said.

‘What’s a penis?’ Ida further enquired. ‘Something you pour out?’

‘A cock,’ Alex said, the half-circle of faces suddenly enthralled.

‘A hen cock or a cock cock?’ Ida persisted: innocence, ignorance? bemusement, perhaps …

‘A cock like I’ve got,’ Alex said.

‘I didn’t know you kept hens, Alex,’ Ida said. ‘You’ve never mentioned it before.’

‘A cock like I have between my legs,’ Alex said, increasingly confused.

‘It’s symbolic,’ Melissa said, to clarify the situation.

‘It just looks like a snake to me,’ Ida said. ‘Comfy, wriggly, friendly,’ she expanded.

‘And a cock,’ Alex insisted, some sort of violation involved: colour had risen to his sunken cheeks, his eyes acquiring a feverish, pinkish tinge.

‘I like all animals,’ Ida said, straightening her jumper, the outline of her brassière evokingly revealed.

‘Cocks, too, Ida,’ Alex persisted.

‘Hens especially,’ Ida confirmed.

‘We’re all barmy,’ the silent until now Judith said. ‘Which is why we’re here. Isn’t that right?’ she added, appealing to Melissa.

‘It’s not a term I would use,’ Melissa said, her arms unfolding.

‘What would you use, Melissa?’ Ida enquired, this her first ever involvement in a discussion, as far as Maddox recalled, she invariably complaining, plaintively, ‘everything’s above my head’.

‘Unwell,’ Melissa said. ‘Despondent. But determined to understand why and, having discovered that, to anticipate getting better. Better,’ she went on, ‘through understanding. And by sharing that understanding,’ she concluded, ‘with others.’

‘Not better through distraction?’ Maddox said.

‘Not distraction for its own sake,’ Melissa said. ‘But by association. Of knowing in your suffering you’re not alone.’

‘I feel worse in the morning,’ Ida said, carried away, not least by Alex’s attention and the controversy she’d provoked. ‘When I wake up I don’t want to live. I don’t want to live for most of the day. My mother was the same. She put on her make-up. Finished her ironing. Hoovered the house. Washed the bathroom. And the toilet. Then went to the bedroom and swallowed her pills. A neighbour was coming to take her out and saw her through the letter-box. Just her feet. As if she’d changed her mind and gone to the door but died in the hall before she reached it.’

‘Then, of course,’ Melissa said, ‘you did the same.’

‘My son-in-law called when he wasn’t supposed to.’ Ida pulled down her jumper: the figure, the gesture implied – correctly, Maddox reflected – of a woman younger than she looked (not seventy-five, let’s say, he conjectured, but sixty-seven), her face alone betraying her decline, the heavy lines bracketing the over-painted mouth, the tinted cheeks smeared unevenly with dabbed-in lipstick, the mascaraed cavities around the eyes – pain, he reflected, rarely so graphically defined. ‘Though my father treated her badly,’ Ida went on, pausing before confirming, ‘when he was alive.’

‘Whereas Matthew’s method was a tube train,’ Melissa said, anxious to draw Maddox in, or on, she seeing him as her principal challenge.

‘Thoughtless, even to attempt it,’ Maddox said. ‘Involving others. I’m not sure, even now, how or why it occurred.’

‘The intention, nevertheless, was clear,’ Melissa said.

‘I’d say the intention was obscure,’ he said, wondering if this were true: obscurity certainly characterised his subsequent attempts to explain it: far worse circumstances, the geriatric support group suggested, could produce less dramatic results.

‘The thoughtlessness, as you describe it, in involving others shows how compelling the gesture was,’ Melissa said.

‘Are we grading the efficacy of our suicidal intentions,’ Maddox said, ‘in order to point the way to others? Ida, pills. Me, tube trains. Anna, poor Anna, ever higher windows.’

‘We’re here to get rid of anger by expressing it, in this case, visually,’ Alex said. ‘That’s the value of our coming. And to see, in doing that, we’re not alone.’

It was the most eloquent statement that Alex, in Maddox’s experience, had ever made, derived, he assumed, from another authority and possibly learnt by heart. ‘I wouldn’t want any man to go through what I’ve been through,’ he said. ‘I see bodies, in flashback, every night, like strings of meat, still living, hung on hooks. The eyes, the eyes alone, showing what’s been done to them.’ He waved his arm to encompass the room. ‘You’ve no idea,’ he concluded.

‘Post-traumatic stress,’ Melissa said.

‘Fuck what you call it, I call it hell,’ Alex said, his anger, like his eloquence, unprecedented on any previous occasion.

‘I don’t wish to talk about it,’ Beth said, her arthritic figure pinioned, so it seemed, to her chair, an attempt to move ending in something of a convulsion. She waved her arm as Melissa turned towards her. ‘It’s too painful for public discussion. That’s my feeling.’

‘If we don’t talk about it, what’s the point in coming?’ Alex said.

‘I don’t like your language, either,’ Beth said.

‘Soldier’s language,’ Alex said.

‘All soldiers don’t talk like that,’ Beth persisted.

‘All soldiers haven’t been through what I’ve been through,’ Alex said. ‘If you’d seen what I’d seen you wouldn’t be so glib.’

‘I have seen what you’ve seen,’ Beth said, ‘and I don’t want to say any more about it.’

‘Walking carcases made into carcases by well-fed men, with families and children and dogs,’ Alex said, his confidence decreasing.

‘I don’t wish to hear any more.’ Beth covered her ears. ‘I’m not well. I shouldn’t have to listen to any of this. I’ve lived through it. He’s only witnessed it. I know what it’s like from the inside,’ she pleaded.

Silence returned, broken by the sound of people passing – voices, feet – in the corridor outside.

‘Something as important as this can’t be left in the air,’ Melissa said. ‘What does Judith think?’ she added.

‘I’d like to go to the toilet,’ Judith said. Rising from her chair, she added, ‘Is that all right?’ moving to the door, on the back of which the drawings and paintings were pinned.

‘I prefer no one to leave until the end of the session,’ Melissa said.

‘I have to go,’ Judith said.

The drawings and paintings disappeared as the door was pulled open, reappearing as it closed behind Judith’s back.

‘She always goes when it’s getting difficult,’ Alex said. ‘All that Jerusalem stuff she goes on about. The Jews and the British. The Arabs. That soldier. I agree with the Universal City. But you’d think she’d lived in a fucking cave. Ten to a room. One toilet for twenty. Do you know what it was like in the Gorbals? Do you think the Jews there, like me, didn’t have to suffer?’

‘On that scale, and with that intensity, probably not,’ Maddox said.

‘Oh, fuck you!’ Alex said, weeping into his hand.

Later, walking back up the hill, he concluded he should finish at the clinic: the discursive nature of the exercise: they had done all that could reasonably be expected. Most who attended did so for two days a week, some, a minority, like him, one day only. Most stayed for several months, occasionally, in one or two instances, for two or three years, he adding up the length of time in his own case (six months?) – entering Simone’s front door as he might have entered his own, her voice alternating with a woman’s in her consulting-room, his exhaustion suddenly apparent. The whole arrangement – the rearrangement – he had made of his life was leading him no nearer to where, he assumed, he ought to go (enlightenment, of some sort, elusively at hand).

Was he, after all, in terminal decline? Simone had arranged an appointment at a clinic in Westminster: after a period of incubation he would be tested: an agonising seven to ten days before the result was known. Meanwhile they would entertain one another by different means. What would his former wife and his children make of this? Decrepitude, absorption by depravity, by dissolution, by which, living how he did, where he did, he was exclusively surrounded.

Climbing the stairs, feeding the cat, preparing the food he’d brought in for supper: setting the table; while, below, he heard one client leave, another arrive, the interval of silence followed by the closing of a door.

In suspension: sitting in the kitchen, watching, in a glass-fronted oven, the food cooking: the bubbling of the cheese-covered surface of the dish (calculations completed to make sure it wouldn’t burn). Quite soon he might be killed: several nights after his confrontation with his intruder he’d answered a ring at the door to find Berenice standing there. The flickering eyelids, the pouching and the shadowing of the skin beneath, the dark-eyed, venomous expression, a dress which revealed the surprisingly firm outline of her breasts, the skirt flared out in a schoolgirl fashion, her sturdy, bare, athletic legs, her feet bare, too, he noticed, she immediately enquiring, ‘Did you ring the fucking police?’ an earth-bound, dissonant, gravelly sound from which he extracted the words – their immediacy, their implication – only after several seconds, meanwhile staring at her with a glazed expression which only fitfully came alive with recognition.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Wayne was taken in last night. He says you fucked him up.’

‘Who’s Wayne?’ increasingly confused.

‘The one you were talking to the other night.’

‘The one who tried to break in your door?’

‘He only wanted to talk. I asked him to come back another time.’

‘He said he wanted to kill you. It’s a wonder,’ he said, ‘he doesn’t blame you.’

Forces, of an obscure nature, were being assembled: thief indebted to thief, Maddox, in this arrangement, not included.

Yet all he was thinking of were his vacillating moods, how reality – his perception of what, schematically, he took to be reality – shifted from one moment to another – unlike, for instance, his perception of the figure standing before him now: someone habitually he heard rather than saw, nevertheless an intimate (in some respects, the most intimate) part of his domestic life, more consistently and persistently present even than Simone: someone who, judged by the prevalence of her voice through the party-wall, rarely if ever slept, he, at times, imagining her suspended from her ceiling, bat-like, head down, feet attached to the plaster, eyes open – her mouth likewise – a liquid, venomous, accusing stare which, now she was at his door, he refused to acknowledge.

‘Maybe you should tell him it wasn’t me. There must,’ he went on, ‘be plenty of alternatives, you amongst them. You told him, after all, you’d called the police. And Isaiah. The one he threatened through the door. All he did with me was walk in the house when I wasn’t looking in order to break into yours. Apart from threatening me with a knife and taking ten pounds, that’s all that happened.’

‘Ten pounds?’

Incredulity gave way to something more reflective: he saw her lips extend, broaden, and realised, apart from the blemished skin, what an attractive mouth she had: a different culture, a different class: what, given the opportunities he’d had, for instance, might she have turned into?

‘Presumably,’ he shrugged, ‘he was taken in for more than that.’

Gazing at him, still transfixed – transported, even – by calculation: how much, he wondered, might she demand?

‘There’re no sort of things you want?’ she asked.

‘Like what?’

‘Soap. Hair shampoo.’ She waited, registering his surprise. ‘Make-up.’

‘I don’t use make-up,’ a smile, eerily, crossing her features, her lips parting to surprisingly cared-for teeth: as swiftly presented, however, as retracted: pain galvanised by pain: he got the message. ‘Or your girlfriend?’ she enquired.

‘I’ll let you know,’ he said, ‘if we ever run out,’ adding, ‘I’d appreciate you putting in a good word with Wayne. I’m sure if he works it out he’ll see it couldn’t have been me.’

‘When Wayne’s in trouble we are,’ she said, more obscure demands he presumed waiting to be presented. ‘You ring the police about us?’ she added.

‘I haven’t,’ she glancing off, in response, along the street, retreating to his gate, uncertain what to add, her voice, her manner – her thoughts and speculations – in abeyance, glancing up, after calling, ‘I’ll see you,’ with a wave, he acknowledging it (how friendly) to realise it had been directed upwards, to her house, Isaiah undoubtedly watching from a window.

Death, he was thinking in Simone’s kitchen, endeavouring to match the timing of his cooking with her return, might be closer than he’d thought. Since the intrusion he’d got out the step-ladder again and climbed through the ceiling into the roof space, a tiny area confined by diagonally sloping beams. Balancing on the joists, he’d opened the trap-door leading onto the roof itself. Several tiles, he’d observed, required replacing, concluding, otherwise, it would take little effort to climb over the party-wall, by the chimney, to the trap-door on Berenice’s side. Having discovered the route, he was surprised, considering what went on next door, and considering, too, its accessibility, that it hadn’t been used before. Previously, his own perception, conveyed reassuringly to Simone, had been that foxes rarely killed near their holes: it was in Berenice’s interest to keep things as they were. At least, this was what he concluded as he examined the food in the oven and, Simone delayed, switched it off.

He had little left to lose: his best energies had been expended. Taylor alone remained as a subject. With Viklund, he was surprised to discover, he was inclined to keep his distance. He was, nevertheless, tormented by the women to whom, throughout his illness, he had become connected. He recalled allusions to Judaism in his past (discriminatory, swept derisively aside): a relative who had occupied a cobbler’s premises in a sidestreet in St Albans; a brother of the same who had occupied the premises of a tailor, Maddox an Anglicised version of an otherwise unpronounceable name. And Paul, who, at the time of his ordination, had gone to considerable trouble first to examine and then disown their past: ‘continuity, our present lives,’ he’d concluded, ‘by a different name.’ All he knew, at the moment, was that his connection to these women was visceral, to do with maternity, creativity, an idealisation of some sort, art and sex ineluctably combined – watching, enthralled, as they drew or painted, or, as at the day-centre, refused to examine their pasts – pasts which allegedly had no depths but which nevertheless went down for ever. Why did he feel so at ease with them?

Then she was coming up the stairs, the sound preceded by that of the front door closing. ‘I don’t make notes immediately after every session,’ she said, embracing him, taking in the smell of the food, exclaiming, ‘Wonderful! No burning.’

And then an evening of watching the news, phone calls, he, during the latter, lying on the bed upstairs, listening to the radio. When, finally, she came up, she said, ‘How do you feel about a night on your own? I’m particularly tired and need to rest,’ he responding, ‘I won’t disturb you. I could sleep on the floor or the settee downstairs.’

‘I prefer alone,’ she said, so that, once more, he was walking down the hill, heart ringing with rejection while reproachfully he reflected, she needs time on her own, as I do myself, aware of the moon before him, to the south, a skein of cloud passing across its surface, the configuration of the trees beneath which he walked, glancing, for distraction, into the shop windows beyond Chalk Farm before turning into his street, looking up, instinctively, at Berenice’s windows, listening, after opening the front door, for any incriminatory sound, securing the door without putting on the light, indifferent to whether there was anyone there or not, moments later sitting in the darkness, in the downstairs room, wondering what it was, since it could be dismissed so easily, he and Simone shared.