19

They were drawing the Albanian refugee, the Kosovan mother: she had put on weight, the rotundity of her body more pronounced, a feeling of fecundity, of richness, he wondering what the women in the room made of it, how much they identified with her sensuality, the unconscious movement of her hips, her thighs as, abstractedly, she eased her position, he watching her as intently as he watched the other mysteries in the room – Rachel, Mary, Hannah, Ruth – speculating on their origins, then his own, speculating on the model’s origin and his own, disavowing its relevance.

Here they were, in this room, intent on delineation; that, he concluded, as far as it went, no further recognition required: Masaccio’s tormented Edenic figures, joined in rejection, joined in awareness, joined in departure, joined in love.

He had been engaged – still was – in giving an account of himself (as graphic as the figure before him now): at the present, in this location, partially there (much yet to be discovered, recovered, examined, laid bare), Simone engaged on an identical venture, stripped of illusion: the peculiar markers they had each laid down, the possibility of professional disgrace in her case, of something as specific, the result of a blood test, in his, the image of Isaacson coming to him: Taylor’s pronouncement, murder the signature at the foot of every page – his pencil returning to the sheet of paper, his gaze moving on from its engagement with the model to Rachel … And Viklund, whose coffin he had seen glide behind the curtain at the crematorium the previous day, he taking Ilse’s arm as they left, the child they’d never had, but now the one appointed.

She hadn’t been to St Albans before: they drove there one afternoon in her car, parking by the Cathedral, going in (alcoholics assembled around the gate): the impression of an ark inverted (two of everything notably not inside: two of them, instead, alone): the colour of the fabric, the height of the windows, the sepulchral light: outside, the greenery of the Abbey’s former site, the place of Alban’s execution – the echo of a belief which, for his part, he assumed he had outlived. Sainthood, for instance, he had taken for granted (as, at one time, he had done the prophets): something separate from existence, not to be absorbed or even followed: suffering where the mind departed from the body, took its leave, going where and for what he had no idea … taking her to the place he had once considered home, nothing of the house or the showroom remaining, the latter, fronting the London Road, a parade of shops, the site of the house behind occupied by several others. ‘Might just as well never have been there,’ he said. ‘Except we were. The same sort of visit we can make to your place. And find out,’ he added, ‘who you really are.’