17

He’d done overseas lecture tours frequently in the past, invariably when the children were young: a reasonable (well-paid) excuse to escape the rigours and routines, the stultifying predictability of domestic life. The difficulty with most of them had arisen when it had come to parting from the women to whom he had, on many of these occasions, become attached. Everywhere, or so it had seemed, there was someone waiting to be delivered from an aversion to habit, the majority of them, he had been surprised to discover, of Judaic origin, something of which he was unaware at the moment of attraction, and all, without exception, the product of a mixed relationship, nearly always Jewish and Catholic (on two occasions Presbyterian). It was as if instinctively he were drawn less to a race or a culture than to a conflict of a specific, but indefinable, and unresolvable nature: something beyond belief, or idealisation, beyond faith or identification, a hinterland of displacement which echoed something of the same within himself. So della Francesca in the States, Cimabue and Giotto in Canada, the pre- and early Renaissance in a curious three-month tour of Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru, the cultural emissaries he had met on the way, the resourceful, flawed, self-determined women, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned, waiting, inexplicably, to be ‘delivered’. Of what? To whom? a connection which remained obscure from first meeting to departure, a receptivity on both sides instantly perceived and, in almost every instance, painfully ended.

On each occasion he had endured the curious sensation of leaving an integral part of himself in the hands of someone who, despite the intimacy involved, remained both a stranger and yet more familiar than anyone else he had known. Soon, when new enterprises were suggested, he was aware that there was very little of what he had come to suspect might be ‘himself’ to take with him, to the extent that the sense of loss – the aching sense of omission – which he had come to associate with travel persuaded him to desist. After all, there was Charlotte (what did she represent but an early, unheeding aspiration? neither of her parents, unlike his, had had any religious affiliation), and their three sons. No wonder, one by one, all four of them had left, he, he finally concluded – prior to Charlotte’s leaving – having departed long before them.

Now there was Simone to come home to, as perplexing a union as any he had prospected, let alone encountered, no departure from her (as this evening) without an awareness it might be the last; similarly, too, her departures for lectures, conferences, seminars, ‘weekends’, she having merely to leave the room for him to become aware of the possibility of removal as opposed to absence, a reminder of that element within himself which singularly, as he had got older, had failed to reassure or even remind him of who or what or even where, let alone why, he was.

Associated with this feeling was the one he had experienced on numerous occasions at airports: the significance, at Simone’s, sitting on her roof, of the passing of aircraft overhead, the alignment of the airport with the setting sun, expiration inseparable from a diurnal, observable pattern, subliminal, for the most part, its resonance all the greater and, after so many months, inseparable from those feelings he associated with both her and her house: the echoes of those restrained and restraining looks of women he had left behind – and who, alarmingly, epitomised in Simone, were capable, suddenly, of leaving him: looks of desertion, amounting, almost, to annihilation, associated with the Americas, Eastern Europe, Russia, Israel: letters, telephone calls, clandestine, for the most part, even pursuing visits, the feelings of disruption, disloyalty, fracture, immense. So many disassociated lives coalesced, at this instant, in Simone: when would he ever learn? what would he ever learn? the final sensation, with her, he had come to rest: the definitive image of a specific face, evaluated through Giotto, Masaccio, so much else: Bathsheba, Judith, Mary, Martha, elusive in its meaning, if focused, sensationally, in its charms, his susceptibility associated with arrival, a constant re-arrival, with return, a constant re-return, with a final awareness of coming in.

The warrant came from a prison in the north of England; and then, surprised, having ‘processed’ Taylor to the back of his mind, he realised, coincidentally, from the town to which he had been evacuated during the war, Quinians standing enigmatically on its western skyline (braced, once more, from the viewpoint of the town, against the setting sun).

The grey stone encirclement of the prison walls had been visible from the school’s upper (dormitory) windows, its lateral extension breaking up the vertical escarpment of mills and warehouses and, at the summit of the opposing ridge, the soot-encrusted outline of the town’s municipal buildings.

Even more conspicuous, at the centre of the prison, stood the structure from which the cell blocks radiated like the spokes of a wheel. From the station, leaving or arriving by train, the barbican-like presence dominated the view, its greyness a foil to the brickwork of industrial, commercial and domestic buildings which enclosed it on every side.

Absorbed so constitutionally within the context of the town, its silence, and air of containment, had reduced its significance to Maddox over the years when, on leaving and arrival, he had gazed at it, either from carriage windows or remotely, from the school playing-field or the school itself. Now, however, arriving in response to the invitation from Taylor, it reasserted its presence in a singularly oppressive way. In a curious sense, it had, after years of benignity, come dramatically alive, the familiar feeling, long ago abandoned, of returning to school, displaced by something remindful, painfully, of abandonment, of deceit and disloyalty, of betrayal, the sensations he associated with the journey overlain by something which, if he had anticipated it more astutely, he would have seen could only do him harm: a visit into the past. The book with which he had begun the journey had long been abandoned by the time the train had passed beyond the southern stretches of the York Plain and into the once colliery-infested hill-land of South Yorkshire, the absence of the pits endorsing the feeling of desolation.

Getting out of his seat as the train approached the town, he crossed the carriage to the opposite window to see the once familiar edifice come into view – inconveniencing the passengers there and finally going to the door to gaze out at the remaining mill shapes bulked in the valley bottom, then, once again, at the serpentine grey stone walls of the prison – in the distance, on the furthest skyline, enclosed by trees, the profile of the school.

It was as if, entering the prison, through a gate which he had walked past many times (the ironically named Love Lane leading directly to it from the station), he were returning to a community he already knew, a further adjunct, an extended dormitory, of the school itself – expecting, even, familiar faces, familiar responses: teachers, youths, the benevolent Head with his Quaker aspirations – smiling at the warder who examined his warrant, smiling at those who searched his clothes, the bag of cigarettes, food and chocolate – and, a last-minute decision, unsure of its perversity, the drawing-block and oil crayons (taken away separately to be looked at).

Cleansed, seemingly, he was led into a recently constructed building adjacent to the central yard. Looking up, and outwards, he was aware only of the overcast sky, no sign of any reassuring external structures. Moments later, he was sitting in a recently decorated room smelling of paint and, possibly, detergent – sitting on a plastic chair at a plastic table, other identical chairs and tables unoccupied around.

The door opened: a figure he failed to recognise entered, the face rotund, the eyes recessive: a heavy jowl overhung the collar of a light blue shirt: dark trousers scarcely restrained a protuberant gut. A warder, having closed the door, stood beside it – an elderly man, white-haired, genially featured, nodding and smiling at Maddox, an extension, seemingly, of his own good intentions, an endorsement of any positive sentiment he might have: white shirt, dark tie, dark trousers, Maddox taking in these details as he would those of a scene he might be obliged, almost formally, later, to account for to someone else.

Taylor extended his hand: ‘We’re allowed to shake hands,’ derisively, adding, ‘How are you? Was the journey okay?’ retaining his hand, the gesture drawing him to an engagement he would otherwise have tried to avoid.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘And you?’ releasing his hand, enquiring, mentally, an engagement with what? something at that point he couldn’t name, sitting once more, having stood at Taylor’s entrance, Taylor himself rearranging his chair on the other side of the table, repositioning it once more before he finally sat.

‘I’m fine, too.’ He gestured round. ‘It’s been repainted. Just for you,’ smiling. ‘Kidding. They said, “We’ll have the interview room repainted, Peter.” Did I tell you I’ve changed my name? By deed poll. “Now someone’s agreed to come to see you.” Or words to that effect,’ Maddox leaning on the table with his elbows, a companionable gesture intended to set both of them at ease, glancing round at the framed reproductions hanging on the cream walls. ‘I chose them. Poor Vincent. One lunatic to another. I’ve really made myself at home up here. What d’you think? They aren’t quite up to Piero. As for Tommaso. No dice. Do you realise he must have died by the age of twenty-seven? Like Girtin. Another prodigal talent. Art, wouldn’t you say, transcends love? You must have found that out yourself. Being, as you are – your fondest impersonation, and the one I always preferred – a wise old man. Another of your maxims. Choosers can’t be losers. Or was it the other way around? What d’you think? Didn’t Viklund invariably end a statement with the interrogative? The ball always in your court. Or, rather, ball back in your court. Or for ever hold your tongue. Whether you cared to play or not. I’ve been thinking about that. You and he together. Me in here. A suspended life. An unreturnable cargo. An unreclaimable deposit.’ He gestured again at the room, disinclined, Maddox concluded, to allow him to respond. ‘Masaccio the greatest, in my view, not only because of his lost potential. Do you remember the old Medici prints? No longer around, I discovered. Vincents you can get in Woolworths. Johnny went out and bought them. A redecorating fund.’ He indicated the warder behind, his back. ‘“You’re an artist, Mr Taylor,” they said. “This should be up your street. Pictures for the interview room.”’ He smiled, a snarling expression, the teeth discoloured, one of them missing at the front of his mouth. ‘John had to be taken into account. Inmates, likewise. Feel at ease with the familiar, even if they don’t enjoy it. Attending art classes, I a studio assistant. Cimabue’s workshop not, I might tell you, a suitable comparison. Odd, nevertheless, that what is meaningful, if not inevitable to one generation, is inaccessible to another. It suggests that those of us who are one thing at the present are something significantly other later on. What d’you think? Ball in your court,’ he concluded, ‘so to speak,’ waiting for Maddox to respond before continuing, reassured, or so it seemed, by his silence, ‘This is my tutor, John,’ turning to the warder, the chair creaking beneath his weight. ‘Years ago. A lasting influence,’ adding directly to Maddox, turning back to the table, ‘John’s a fan. Believes in redemption. Values life like you and I would value,’ pausing to consider. ‘What would we value, art aside? Something greater? I doubt it. In terms of flesh and blood what is there to value that hasn’t been, how should I put it? fucked up by one or both of us?’

His look remained calm, almost indifferent: it was, Maddox reflected, as if once again he were the prisoner and Taylor his visitor, their roles, in this case, explicitly reversed: the plastic chair creaked as Taylor readjusted his position. Mimicking Maddox, he had leant his arms on the table, Maddox further reflecting that he was here only to be abused, consoling himself with the thought that in an hour or so he’d be on his way, via Love Lane, its cottages and trees, to the station.

‘Do you remember Pemberton hanging out for Courbet?’ Taylor went on. ‘I thought that odd. A Francophile in the middle of the twentieth century plumping for a realism of a particularly pedantic kind. As well as, in Courbet’s case, a very mixed kettle of fish. And Degas. That, to some degree, I understood. As a basis, a basis only, mind, for everything. And Giacometti. The fourth dimension. As if three, for God’s sake, were not enough. Pre-dating all that, of course, Piero. Your rebirth of man. Preposterous, when you come to think of it. Innocent, too. Innocence! As if we could ever have enough. As if anything or anyone ever was,’ he turning in his chair to remark to the figure behind him, ‘This is a man you should admire. Believes art is in terminal decline,’ returning his look to Maddox to add, ‘That fifties return to nature is all right for people without a visual imagination but for people like us, it hardly works. I’m back with Soutine. Trees like cauliflowers, faces like squashed tomatoes. Art up its arsehole. Nowhere to go but everyone to go with. This, by the way, should there be any doubt, is the anti-depressant talking. I’m loaded up to the eyeballs with amitriptyline. You do any art?’

Maddox waited, subdued. ‘A life-class,’ he finally announced.

‘That’s interesting.’ Taylor waited, too, before adding, ‘I always thought that odd, a fellow who never drew or painted teaching in an institution devoted to little else. You’d have thought absence of participation would put you off. I have, by the way, you’ll be pleased to hear, been revising my essays. I got the police, of all people, to retrieve them from my house. I burnt most of them some time ago, retaining those on which you’d written some of your asperic comments. Rebecca didn’t approve, of course. She’d acquired, by the time I came to know her, an aversion to seeing your writing. Perspicacious, some of your stuff. Took the breath away, foresight, I’d say, your strongest suit. Informed of what is to come around the corner and it comes up behind instead.’

He was leaning back, laughing, a staggered, fractured sound, as if he were finding the visit more of an ordeal than his manner suggested.

Intending to distract him, Maddox said, ‘I was at school here. I know it well,’ adding, ‘Quinians,’ glancing at the warder to receive a signal of recognition. ‘It has some of the feelings of returning home.’

‘Home’s the last word I would use for this place,’ Taylor said. ‘Apologies to John, and that,’ adding, ‘I’m in a special unit. John is one of the screws. We get on well, though didn’t when I arrived. I was fucked up with largactil, which he was instrumental, I might add, in getting changed. An archangel in disguise beneath that uniform, is John. I’ve sent his name to Downing Street as a suggested recipient of a national award. He doesn’t agree with it, but, in my view, he deserves it. As it was, before I came here, I was on my way to a medical unit. The psychiatrist who saw me happened to have a daughter at the Drayburgh. By the time I’d finished extolling the place he put me down as stable.’ He tapped his head. ‘Cognisance. Awareness. Reality of other people. Van Gogh syndrome not allowed. “Are all geniuses mad?” Ergo, I, who am not a genius, must be relatively sane. Put him on the spot. “I believe you are,” he said, meeting my gaze. What are your drawings like, I wonder?’

For a moment, unsure he was being addressed directly, Maddox paused. ‘Not good.’ He indicated Taylor might laugh. ‘I go as much for the company as anything else. Though I was always curious to know what it was like. As you say, odd to be at the Drayburgh and not have any practical experience. I always felt deferential to those who had.’

‘Were you deferential?’

The enquiry came with a look of surprise.

‘I thought I was.’

‘On reflection,’ Taylor said, ‘you probably were.’ He turned to one side. ‘Why is he deferential to me? I used to ask. I only come from Norfolk. On one of my finer efforts you wrote, “There is nothing more illuminating I can add,” I taking it, initially, as an insult. Until I realised, flatteringly, what you meant. I imagine you’ve forgotten.’

‘I was inclined to write at length on all of them,’ Maddox said.

‘Viklund was more reticent. Epigrammatic. Keen to come down, I heard, on inaccuracies, not, as you were, on generalisations. Wrong church. Wrong chapel. Wrong date. Interpretations treated with reservation. One of your strong points. Looking in not always detrimental to looking at. Un Viklund-like, if you don’t mind my abusing him.’ Turning to the warder, he called, ‘Professor Maddox is an art historian, John, his involvement with me an infinitesimal part of his overall vocation. Emeritus Professor, I should call him now. Nevertheless, where I’m concerned, a bona fide credential.’

The warder nodded, unsmiling on this occasion, a resistance to being Taylor’s foil hardening his expression.

‘John and I have discussions. Who is the best painter? He likes Velázquez. Thought, with that, he’d catch me on the hop, knowing my predilection for the Florentines. I got back with Rembrandt. Self-scrutiny. Van Gogh,’ he gestured at the walls, ‘was a compromise. Woolworths, and all that. The common man. There are lots of common men in here. How common I scarcely need to describe. And women, too, I suppose, out there. The world, as it is, has become a strange place. Stranger even than when I was out.’ He held his head a moment, as if recalling. ‘John is not a common man, I should add.’

‘I think Peter is trying to impress us, Mr Maddox,’ the warder said, speaking for the first time, something other than a formal relationship evident both in his voice and the unfolding of his arms: an urgent desire, perhaps to mediate.

‘Circumstances unmade me,’ Taylor said. ‘John and I are endeavouring to fit the pieces together. With the hope we don’t come up with the previous whole. We have to keep it quiet. Otherwise,’ he tapped his nose, ‘everyone will be at it and we’d have no peace at all.’ A tightening of the skin was evident around the eyes: a rash was visible inside the collar of his shirt, one reminiscent of a rash he recalled seeing on Berenice’s cheek, a connection between his neighbour and Taylor suddenly apparent.

‘I never really got on with Rebecca,’ Taylor said.

He was leaning on the table more firmly, looking at Maddox directly: one cheek had been pulled in as if he were biting the skin inside.

‘A difficult woman to deal with,’ he added.

‘I always found her very open. Full of curiosity. Expansive,’ Maddox said.

‘Naturally.’ Taylor watched him with a smile. ‘You would.’ A moment later, he added, ‘She was very much bound up with her family.’

‘She rarely referred to them,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’ It was as if he were talking, confidingly, about someone else who, the next moment, was scheduled to enter the room. ‘A curious case of self-possession. This East End mystique you get in London, and foreign as hell to someone like me. Though hell, retrospectively speaking, is no longer foreign at all. At first, however,’ he pointed a finger at Maddox, ‘I was very intrigued. Coming from Norfolk. But alienating, claustrophobic. Oppressive. Particularly after we married. I was telling John before you arrived, though he’s pretty bored by most of it now. He’s strong on family himself. Four grown-up children, one almost as old as me. I had two. They both took after their mother. As if, in her case, Rebecca’s, she couldn’t live without her family. Not even when, between us, we had a pretty good one of our own.’

Having examined his expression, Taylor had glanced away. His head, a moment later, he propped on his hand, his look, abstracted, drifting to the wall behind Maddox’s head. ‘You never found that, not knowing her so well. When all’s said and done, carnal knowledge is pretty superficial, wouldn’t you say? Talked up, of course. But ambivalence always shows. Wanting to escape the East End, in her case, and “do” the West End. Particularly Cork Street. A cultural invasion, not a voyeuristic one. Yet always drawn back. The atavistic imperative, her family. No longer relevant to me. That atavism I got rid of. Even when she didn’t want it she couldn’t, she discovered, we discovered, live without it. Boom. There it was. All the time. Ask John. He knows the sort of thing. With the East End, however, it was something else. Not merely familial but tribal. The war. The blitz. Class cohesion. The mixture you always get. Russians. Lithuanians. Greeks. Turks. Bulgars. Poles. Chinese. You get the picture?’

Releasing his hand from his head, he rubbed his nose.

‘Can get on your wick if you give it a chance. Her father was a dominant man. So were her sisters. Three, but with all the space they filled they might have been seven. Most of the things I had have disappeared. Some of the paintings I did at the Drayburgh. Not many after. Some of the essays. Despite the fact that women aren’t good at painting, the best of them derivative, Rebecca did quite well. Found her own line. All those, her family have removed. I’m trying to get their ownership sorted out. They went in the house and took the lot. Furniture. Pictures. Clothes. Everything to do with me they got rid of. Much of what she knew about painting came from me. Apart from a sentimental attachment to art, as a means to an end, until you and I came along she didn’t know a Botticelli from a Bonnard. Between the two of us, I’d say we taught her quite a lot.’ He smiled, the provocation, Maddox assumed, complete.

‘Was she religious?’ he said.

‘Not really.’

‘She never mentioned church. Or God.’

Taylor laughed, surveying Maddox down the length of his nose.

‘Synagogue, for Christ’s sake.’

He laughed again.

‘Not Christ’s sake. Abraham’s fucking sake.’ He shrugged, spreading out his arms. ‘Excuse me, John,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Another ten p I owe you,’ adding, ‘Religions, in my book, are political organisations. Primarily, secondarily, finally. Hence the pogroms, the Inquisition, the Holocaust. Religious sentiment, on the other hand, is an intrinsic affair. Institutionalised, it acts, thinks, proselytises as any self-interested body – faith, pronouncements, edicts the instruments at its disposal. Fear the primary one. Without that the whole thing would disappear. In that respect I blame her family. They were as blindly addicted to their mythology as Marx, for similar reasons, was to his. Poor Beccie, another piece of ideological meat. In the end, I felt I was married to her sisters. And her brother. They were never out of the house. “Why don’t you discourage them?” I’d ask her, and, as swiftly as anything, she’d say, “They are my family,” as if they had precedence, which, indeed, they had, over the one she and I had created.’

Pausing, he invited Maddox to respond, Maddox, for his part, refocusing his look on Taylor who, as he spoke, appeared to be getting larger all the time, an oppressive, weighty presence which was gradually enveloping the room. The warder, caught between restraint and conciliation, gazed bemusedly at the back of Taylor’s head.

‘“Look at my family,” I’d tell her,’ Taylor went on. ‘“They don’t come round seven days of the week.” “That’s because they live in Norfolk,” she said. “That,” I said, “is because I wouldn’t want them,” she dressing the children like facsimiles of her sisters, even though one of them was a boy. Like you, Professor, I’m against cultural identity. The most boring fucking thing in the world. The parochialisation of human nature. The trivialisation of human nature. Subservience of the self in deference to the whole. A partial whole, at that. Fuck the family. There’s nothing good come out of it. I’m here, after all, to prove it. Irrefutable. Undeniable. Not to be ignored.’

Maddox, contrary to his previous impression, now found himself listening to Taylor as if from a distance, his former pupil’s figure receding before him, his voice, too, transposed, as if he were listening to it from inside his head. He wondered if he should mention Simone, the geriatric day group, anything that might turn the conversation back to something less obsessive. What would Taylor make of that – registering it as an endorsement, no doubt, of his present state of mind? In any case, his own reflections were becoming confused with the atmosphere of the room – even with the expression of the warder, a visitor, so it seemed, to the scene, he listening to Taylor with increasing interest, at one point leaning forward to catch precisely what he said.

‘I came to London a virgin. And left it,’ Taylor went on, ‘as something else. I’m taking steps to reconstitute myself in the light of that. Eric Taylor is dead. Completed. An aberration. Peter is back to where he started. Returning to the virginity with which he began. John will tell you. He has it all worked out.’ He turned to glance at the warder, smiling. ‘I’ve plenty of time. I’m waiting to be unearthed. Like your lectures. Inspiriting at the time. A sense of immanence. The inference of a second chance. You see it, otherwise, all around you. Knowledge without understanding. Knowledge which will kill us in the end.’

Maddox found himself gazing at the warder, as if measuring his own attentiveness in the other man’s eyes, sharing, he concluded, an unconcealable element of alarm: at any moment he imagined the man stepping forward and announcing the visit at an end.

‘Are Rebecca’s family still in touch?’ he asked, anxious to return Taylor to something real.

‘I have a letter from their lawyer. We are, would you believe it, quarrelling over the money. When the mortgage is paid off there’ll be quite a lot, the value of the property having gone up. I never had sufficient money when I lived there and now, assuming they can sell the house, I’ll have more than I know what to do with. They, of course, are saying I shouldn’t have any. Her sisters, her brother. She died intestate. Something of an irony there. Then again,’ he pushed his chair back from the table, ‘fuck the money. When I leave this place it’ll only be to go to another. If you keep coming back, Professor, I can keep tabs on what’s going on. Launch a crusade. Phenomenological art no longer the fashion. Join your brigade. Everything no longer confined to expression.’

Having pushed back his chair from the table, he indicated to the warder his intention to leave.

‘Last few minutes, Peter,’ the warder said, indicating, in turn, there was time in hand.

‘Not a holiday camp.’ Taylor took out a handkerchief and blew his nose: his eyes had filled with tears. ‘Irrelevance another thing I would like to study. Was it you or Viklund who was keen on Lucretius? Chance! Nil igitur mors est ad nos. Epicurean, don’t you think? I’ll send you my conclusions. Might mark them, if you like. Would appreciate your comments. What is suffering? my principal concern. Similarly, when everything counts and nothing adds up what is the bottom line? Plus, what is the significance of murder in the light of biological determinism? Has it got a future? Why aren’t animals brought to account? If you’d make your remarks in red ink I’ll be able to identify them more quickly. We might publish the results as question and answer. “A Convict’s Reply to Questions Raised by a Novel Consensus”. Might make a splash. Not least in that paper you write for. I recall you did Greek and Latin at school. Two languages, after all, in which everything has been expressed. We might do the same for English. Have to make an effort, otherwise,’ he paused, half turned from the table, ‘nothing gets done. This room, for instance, I wouldn’t mind turning over to Angelico. “Illumination from a Dark Interior”, I the fuel, John, here, for instance, the wick.’

He was on his feet, moving to the door, waving an arm in dismissal.

‘Good of you to come. Not a place, otherwise, to recommend, Having been here to school, you’ll understand. Good at last, Professor, to have something else in common. Destiny, you might almost say, has driven us together. Remember me to Viklund,’ the warder nodding to Maddox as he followed Taylor out. ‘I’ll send another warrant,’ came floating from the corridor outside.

In the train, watching the familiar landscape pass, his thoughts moved on from Taylor to recollections of Taylor’s wife, she evidently the first of a subsequent pattern. Of what? Displacement. Disaffection, an instinctual response to something similarly fractured within himself, his notion of writing about Taylor reduced, not least by the brevity of the visit and the length of the journey, to speculations about himself, the fortuitous connections which were linking up disparate elements of his life, Simone alone an unassimilated feature.

For no reason he could account for, once home he rang not her, to say he was back, but Isaacson, enquiring if he might see him again.

Having taken some time to be brought to the phone, he announced, ‘I’ve nothing available. The next two weeks are solid. So is the third. I already have far too many people demanding to be seen. Next month might be the best option.’

‘How about tomorrow?’ he enquired, it now being mid-evening.

‘Ten-thirty,’ Isaacson responded.

‘A.m., or p.m.?’

‘Yours to decide.’

‘A.m.’

‘Come early. There’s a chance I’ll be out.’

Talking to Simone later in the evening he declined her suggestion he might go up, telling her of his encounter with Taylor, responding to her curiosity as to how it had gone by replying, ‘Dementia. Simulated or otherwise, I couldn’t decide. Perhaps you’d better go up the next time, I believe he’s stringing me along,’ adding, ‘I’m seeing Isaacson tomorrow.’

‘I didn’t know.’ He sensed her apprehension.

‘I’ve only just decided.’

‘To see him what about?’

‘I’m not sure until I get there. I’m leaving everything to chance.’

‘Will you talk about Norman?’

‘If that’s okay with you.’

‘It is,’ she said, uncertain.

‘What progress have you made yourself?’

‘I’ve received notification from the Council,’ she said. ‘They’ve passed the complaints back to the Preliminary Screener. Good thing or bad, I can’t decide. I’m waiting their decision. It’s more likely the Proceedings Committee will ask to see me. This according to Symonds.’

‘How about the detective?’

‘I’m having to hurry him on. He’s followed him to two appointments. One to Isaacson. One to someone I’ve never heard of. He thinks there may be others. He knows a goldmine when he sees one. I’m paying him over the odds, though Symonds recommended him.’

‘Who recommended Symonds?’

‘Colleagues.’

‘Who are they?’

‘For God’s sake, you’re not getting suspicious yourself?’

‘I wondered. Norman must have followed me here, at some time. I am, I assume, part of the equation.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She sounded relieved. ‘I’ll get to the bottom of this or sink. As for Isaacson, watch your back.’

‘I’m not at all sure he’s as tricky as you make out. He sounds tricky, but curiously isn’t. I’m sure, if he isn’t nuts, which must be a possibility, he’s harmless.’

‘In the sixties, when I first heard of him,’ she said, ‘he was known affectionately as Mic Isaacson. Psychiatry without the doctorial manner. A companionable, no-nonsense, down-to-earth, no-pill-required agenda. Then, after his seminal The Sequencing of Sexual Behaviour, apes back into fashion, collusional patterning, he was more widely known as Micky Isaacson, something of an intimate, endearing diminutive, anti-psychiatry’s principal spokesman. Then, after further consolidation with Incest and Family Rites, he became more formally celebrated as M. F. Isaacson. I needn’t go on. He’s simply known as Isaacson now, a throw-away point of reference. Keep your wits about you if he happens to talk about me. God knows what he and Norman, or Cavendish, are up to.’

‘I shouldn’t think it’s anything other than what we already know, or, at least, suspect,’ he said.

‘When will I see you?’

He registered the plaintive note in her voice.

‘I’ll ring you as soon as I’ve seen him,’ he said. ‘There is absolutely no reason to worry.’

‘Are you going on the tube?’ she said.

‘I’d intended to,’ he said.

‘Take care of that, too,’ she told him, after a relevant pause.

It was Isaacson himself who opened the door: in shirtsleeves and a pullover plainly too small to accommodate his curiously distorted body, the trousers uneasily suspended below the waist, the shirt protruding in the gap between, a cigarette alight, the smoke of which he waved away with the cigarette-holding hand as he preceded Maddox down the hall, calling over his shoulder, ‘Good of you to come,’ enquiring, as they reached the door into the front room, ‘Do you want tea? We’d better get the order in,’ Maddox declining, Isaacson closing the door behind them, indicating the couch, ‘Sit,’ crossing to the collapsed armchair by the fireplace, sinking down, groaning, between its rug-covered arms.

The familiar springs once again indented Maddox’s back and thighs: swivelling in the couch, he faced Isaacson to his left.

‘I don’t normally see anyone as quickly as this,’ Isaacson said. ‘It had better be something important. Though what’s important?’ he added, before Maddox could reply. ‘Fuck all, at the moment. How about you?’

‘I wondered what your conclusions were after my previous visit,’ Maddox said.

He shook his head, looking at him, however, with genuine surprise, his strangely contorted features suddenly enlivened. He gestured to the wall behind Maddox’s back.

Turning, he saw that the paintings previously hanging there had been removed: stained wall-covering indicated their irregular positions, hooks still protruding from the plaster.

‘The Old Philistinism.’ Isaacson waved his cigarette, the smoke spiralling above his head.

‘Where have they gone?’

‘Burnt.’

‘Why?’

‘Every time I looked at them they reminded me of you. I’ve been looking for a reasonable excuse to dispose of them for over forty years. Until you came along I didn’t have one. I would say I was waiting for the licence. Good?’

‘Good.’ A definitive response, he assumed, was what Isaacson was after.

‘I’ve hardly slept a wink since I burnt the fucking things. Pissed all over me, you did. What punishment have you lined up this time?’

‘Is this the reverse therapy that people go on about?’ he asked.

‘What reverse therapy? And who,’ Isaacson enquired, ‘goes on about it?’

‘My partner,’ Maddox said.

‘You’ve mentioned her before. Been called before the NMC by one or more of her clients.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Heard any more?’

‘She has.’

‘Is that why you rang?’

‘No.’ A moment later, he added, ‘I went to see Taylor, this one-time student of mine.’

‘In good shape?’

‘Not really.’ He paused, readjusting the springs beneath him. ‘He’s putting on weight. Talks abstractly. Appears to be retreating into dementia. If not already there. Asks for my support.’

‘What’s your complaint?’

‘I’ve little to offer.’

‘He evidently thinks you have.’

The cloud of smoke thickened above Isaacson’s head.

‘You don’t mind if I smoke?’ he added.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Cancer. Plus heart condition. Apart from that.’ He waved his hand. ‘Nicotine works wonders. It’s the delivery by inhalation that causes the problem. Once solved there’s no reason we shouldn’t live a relatively contented life.’

‘He’s changed his name to Peter.’

‘What was it before?’

‘Eric.’

Isaacson glanced at the blank wall behind Maddox’s back. ‘S’hardly worth the effort. You’re not called Peter, by any chance?’

‘Matthew.’

‘Of course.’

‘Identification with the saint,’ Maddox suggested.

‘Why?’

‘Cockerel.’

‘I see.’

‘Betrayal.’

‘Quite.’

‘As a prelude, I believe, to killing himself. I rather got the impression he invited me in order to be certain. And to put the warders off their guard. Even suggesting I come again. It was, after all, his original intention.’

‘Doesn’t mean he can’t change his mind.’

‘Can’t live with the thought of what he’s done.’

‘Can’t live without it, either. How about you? Any similar persuasion?’

‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘But, then, like him, you can’t be sure.’

Isaacson stubbed out his cigarette, leaning to the hearth to do so, then, reaching into the recesses of the chair beneath him, produced another, together with a box of matches. ‘As your renamed collegiate chum no doubt is finding out. Go down with a smile. If not.’ Lighting the cigarette, he threw the match towards the hearth.

‘He’s been moved to a town where I was at school,’ he said.

‘Has a resonance,’ Isaacson suggested.

‘It integrates him more closely with my past. It’s that, I suspect, I came to see you about.’

‘Not much of an excuse,’ Isaacson said, and added, ‘Taylor is an effect. The cause, we assume, must lie elsewhere.’

‘Where?’

‘You tell me. It’s my time you’re wasting, otherwise,’ he said. ‘I’m only here to listen.’ Having waited for Maddox to respond, he added, ‘Did you dislike the paintings as much as you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wondered.’

‘Ridding yourself of them gives you the opportunity,’ Maddox said, ‘to start again.’

‘Generous of you to say so.’ Hoisting one thigh with both hands, Isaacson laid it across the other, massaging the upper knee, then, more clumsily, the one below it. ‘As for Peter, we’re obliged, in the end, to enquire who gives a fuck? A great deal of time and money, and, in your case, distraction, would be saved if he went ahead with what he intended. I’m not here to save life, as I explained on your previous visit. What do you think? As Daniel, our confrère, might have asked.’

‘How well did you know him?’

‘Hardly at all. At the time. He and his father were patients of my father, along with several diplomats from the Swedish Embassy. He and my father got on well, not least because of a common interest in pictures. My father had a modest collection. It was because of them, I sometimes think, he refused to leave. Along with my mother. A suspicion on my part. Nevertheless, because Dan could provide me with papers, they insisted I should. False documentation, as it turned out, but it got me to Belgium. From there a prearranged passage to Britain. I’d asked to go to America. I wanted to become an actor.’

He studied Maddox through a thickening cloud of smoke, having spoken, at intervals, with the cigarette in his mouth, other times exhaling, thoughtfully, towards the ceiling.

‘What else do you think I ought to tell you? Nothing about contracts. I took all that on board without saying a word.’

‘I apologise for that,’ Maddox said.

‘It’s probably why you came. Indentured. To whom? To do what? The source, you might say, of all your problems. Doctors often complain that the commonest characteristic of their patients is a tendency not to reveal the purpose of their visit until they are about to leave. As for contracts, you got all that from Laycock.’

‘I probably did.’

‘Laycock got it from Donne. “No man is an island”. Unless you’re a woman.’

His strange, misshapen body was readjusted in the chair.

‘The individual, per se, does not exist. What you,’ he went on, ‘are struggling to confound.’

‘Mistakenly?’ Maddox enquired.

‘What do you think?’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘I knew Laycock. He died in 1955. In Battersea. Neglected. The sort of genius the English occasionally throw up. Blake. Bunyan. Angels seen in trees. Something so obvious it scarcely needs remarking.

‘He influenced you,’ Maddox suggested.

‘He gave a lecture at the UCL Medical School. Elderly. Inconspicuous. Talked of his encounters with Freud, Jung and Adler. Was the first to point out they worked in threes, consistent with early mythology. Three Graces. Three Sisters. Three Brothers. Three Wise Men. Id, ego, superego. Premiss, antithesis, synthesis. Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three a mystical number. “The Fallacy of the Trinity”, his catchy title. Disassembled what was then the whole of psychoanalysis. He’d been doing it for years, no one taking any notice. Couldn’t answer some of the questions because of his hearing. Used it, I thought, to avoid the meretricious. As for “corporate presence” and the jargon he invented, long before his time, “we are our relationships” the theme tune of the fifties. As it is,’ he blew out a cloud of smoke, ‘it was a method of perceiving, whereas invariably he was criticised for it being the perceived itself. I found it useful when I came to write on incest, still the most unmentioned, if not unmentionable element of everyday family life, nuclear or otherwise, maritally sanctioned or not. Fucking,’ he continued, ‘is a serious effect. From it,’ he concluded, ‘everything else flows.’

‘Did you see him again?’ Maddox asked.

‘I ran what was called “The Lecture Society” amongst the students. Invited him back for another. He declined. Said he was too old to do it more than once. “I’ve given you a pointer,” he said. “It’s up to you to see where it goes.” But he invited me to visit him. He lived in an apartment block with a wife who was blind. In Battersea. They used to communicate by ringing bells, he ringing one to indicate where he was, she likewise. He played a game with her while I was there, ringing the bell then moving to another room, she ringing hers, following him, evidently familiar with the humour, it ending with an embrace. Quite squalid, the set-up. Not unlike here. My wife has a dislike of housework. The woman who comes in leaves us in a worse state than when she arrived. Feel obliged to use her. Lone parent. Five children. “Why so many, when the fathers leave you every time?” I ask her. “I like the feeling,” she said, “of being fucked.”’

He waited for Maddox to respond, inhaled, then exhaled, adding, ‘Laycock’s relevance will eventually be recognised, of course. He delineated the line between what he described as the intrinsic and the extrinsic self, delineated, that is, in order to destroy, no such line, contra almost everyone in his time, existing. A post-Cartesian romance. Most psychiatrists, for instance, have never heard of him. Many, if not most, use his techniques without their being aware of it. His discoveries, if they could be described as such, certainly his insights, have been integrated, if misunderstood, without most practitioners who deploy them being aware of their source. A mythical man, you might describe him.’

He waved his cigarette in Maddox’s direction, a linear pattern of smoke rising above his curiously featured head. ‘Meet another who likewise has disappeared into the woodwork. Patients still arrive, their problem invariably the same, a suspicion, amounting to a conviction, they don’t exist. Evidence of what, at one time, was referred to as ‘the Laycock phenomenon’. Corporate man, and woman, incorporated to the point where they’ve disappeared. When I assure them, à la Laycock, that this is a reasonable assumption, the tide, to some degree, is turned. Of course, once inducted into the system, since many of them happen to be executives, they have an unfair advantage over their colleagues and subordinates. In no time at all more of the same are knocking at the door. The individual, as you’ve discovered in your case, doesn’t exist, a Cartesian fallacy, he or she a rumour put about by someone else, invariably similarly afflicted parents assuming, inductively, that the shape of a nose or a face, or that a language, or even a race, should make a difference. Laycock, if we’d only known it, put a positive stop to that. Maybe, for instance, your former student is right. He didn’t commit his murders, per se, but his constituency did it for him. Or, as Laycock would have it, as him.’

The unevenly angled teeth were exposed in what Maddox assumed to be an ingratiating smile. The cigarette, little more than half smoked, was stubbed out in the hearth: an accumulation of stubbed-out remains was visible amongst the books and papers scattered there.

‘Laycock’s greatest problem was pain. Who feels it? Us or I? Cellular differentiation never quite worked. Particularly if you had toothache, or were lined up to be shot. Even then, he transposed perception at what he called the unicellular level into something which, at extremes, could be registered as what he termed universal fusion. Hence his singling out of Christ, an anti-Semitic response from which he and his reputation never quite recovered. “We are all Nazis”. Nevertheless his conception of Christ as “collusional disfavour” was, for me, the most convincing of his studies. Similarly, Taylor’s response to what, no doubt, he no longer perceives to be himself. As for Laycock, the poor bugger died with his recognition registering zero. If not minus. Not only ignored but buried. I used to see his widow. She asked me to speak at his funeral. He believed in a God, but not one, as he described it, that anyone would wish to put about. In addition, she saw anti-psychiatry as a travesty of what he represented, and reproached me for being involved. I said, “We only disagree on form, not content.” That she wouldn’t buy. Nevertheless, I spoke at her funeral, the only medical person present. Laycock, you see, I couldn’t match. For one thing, I’m too lazy. For another, unlike him, I hate being ignored.’

His laughter was answered by a banging at the door, to which, still laughing, he called out, ‘Come,’ raising his thigh with two hands and setting both slippered feet on the floor.

‘Are you finished?’ The door remained shut, the voice evidently that of his wife.

‘Not for a long time. Why don’t you listen to the radio?’ he responded.

Silence he registered by raising his hand. ‘She doesn’t want to,’ he added. ‘What was it you wanted to ask?’

‘Who was the patient who followed me in last time?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ His laughter having subsided, he examined Maddox with a frown. ‘Why?’

‘You said his name was Cavendish.’

He felt in the chair beside him, producing the now crumpled packet of cigarettes. ‘I can’t persuade you to try one?’ he asked. ‘Prove at least I’ve done something,’ extracting a cigarette as Maddox shook his head, feeling down, once more, for the matches, adding, ‘I like matches. Something visceral, is it, in striking up a flame?’ doing so as he spoke.

The expended match he threw in the hearth.

‘My partner has him as a client,’ he said.

‘Fuck me.’ He examined Maddox through an extending cloud of smoke. ‘A serial analysand. I’ve had them before.’

‘A serial complainant,’ Maddox said, ‘as likely. He might not approve of what he sees in here.’

‘He shows no sign of it,’ Isaacson said. ‘He brought me a bottle of wine the other day. Cigarettes on several previous occasions.’

‘Do you smoke when he’s here?’

‘With his permission.’

‘How about cavalier views, and swearing?’

‘I don’t think I’m responsible for either,’ Isaacson said, suddenly severe.

‘He’s the one who’s reported her to the Medical Council.’

‘No expletive, you notice.’

‘Under a different name.’

‘I see. Or, rather,’ he said, ‘I don’t. What would Laycock have made of that? He, too, you know, was taken off the Register. Prescribing drugs in inordinate amounts, some for his wife, often taking them himself. Relatively common, in those days, but frowned upon, rather, since. “If Sigmund got away with it,” he complained, “why not I?” Like royalty, in that respect. Never underestimated his own potential.’

He leant back in his chair, the springs creaking, the wooden structure groaning. ‘Look here,’ he continued, ‘I haven’t billed your brother, as he requested. Nor you. Mark this one down to a friend of the family. Viklund, and all that. Anything else I can help with? In the sixties I was much criticised for the number of suicides amongst my patients. Frequently I took on cases no one else would touch. I only take stable people at present, stability measured by executive status, or the wife of – quite a lot of those. Self-destruction as a way of life not as a terminal event very much my present line. I don’t want someone like you on my hands. Think of the tabloid reaction. Patient of Isaacson dead again. At one time I appeared more frequently at coroners’ courts than I did at psychiatric clinics. I was even tempted to buy a house close to the one at St Pancras in order to save on travelling. I’ve had my dose of what, once, was referred to as the Roman way. Romantic is far more like it. As for Cavendish. Is he citing you in his complaint?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he recognise you when you saw him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll look an arsehole appearing for two psychiatrists. “One I fuck, the other I talk to.” Can see it all over the national press. You’ll be able to sell serialisation, if Cavendish hasn’t beaten you to it.’

He coughed: phlegm rattled in his chest; moments later a laugh emerged, a ruminative sound, harsh, derisive.

‘What are his motives?’

‘You tell me. I only know him to talk to.’ He waved his cigarette, smoke moving in a band around his head. ‘Some collect stamps. Others, Cavendish, for instance, defamations. I can see the temptation. Rich area to move in. Keeps you busy. Can talk about yourself, a different one each time. Daytime study up symptoms. A lot to choose from. Night-time write up complaints. Background study on Medical Council procedures. Post-traumatic shock is popular at present. Though, in my experience, is being overtaken by non-traumatic inertia. Accidie, so-called, at one time. Cachexia, by others, anoesis the one I prefer, consciousness without awareness. An awful lot around. Pollution, the media, additives, too many people, asteroids, terrorism.’ He waved his hand.

‘Would you like my partner to get in touch with you?’

‘Sure.’

‘She’s hired a detective.’

‘Good.’ Incredulity displaced by amusement.

‘Cavendish has at least one other analyst he goes to.’

Some other grievance caused Isaacson to look away: he hoisted himself up in his chair, grimacing, the structure creaking once more beneath him.

‘Not Jewish?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Enlightenment, even where defamation is concerned, ensures today a broader target. Has anything happened to your partner?’

‘Her lawyer suggests she’ll be called before the Preliminary Proceedings Committee.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Cavendish calls himself Norman.’

‘His given name with me.’

‘His surname with her.’

‘Any other disasters I might facilitate?’ He was hauling himself forward, stooping, bending, pressing upwards, groaning with the effort, waving Maddox away, however, as he rose to help. ‘I’m part of the post-pre-post-pre-Raphaelite-post-philistine revival,’ crossing to the cupboard behind the door, swinging round from that, saying, ‘She’s been in here before me,’ turning to his desk, opening a drawer, taking out a bottle, then a glass, searching the books and papers on his desk, finally extracting a cup and saucer, pouring the contents of the former into the latter, his eyes narrowed against the smoke of the cigarette which now hung in the corner of his mouth. ‘Cognac. All she’s left. Provided by our friend. Another gift. Be registered, I imagine, as a bribe. Or poisoned. A drunk as well as a psychiatrist. Do you think he sports a hidden camera? How about it?’ handing Maddox the glass into which he poured a measure, pouring rather more into the cup, raising it and declaring, ‘To Laycock. And his successors. That’s both of us. Good health!’