Part Three

1

A yellow beam of light, from one side of the apparatus, meets a blue beam of light projected from the other; the colours coalesce to form an electric green. As the green dissolves the blue beam of light has been changed to red: the colour in the centre of the apparatus, beneath an inverted reflector, changes to a vibrant orange.

‘No colour’s ever constant,’ Kendal says.

Coloured discs revolve on either side, and from a third aperture below is projected an amorphous shadowed mass that changes its shape rhythmically in the centre of the coloured beams.

Kendal is a small man, slight; he has dark, almost melancholic features, thin and sharp, the eyes large and full of liquid, glistening: hands like tiny claws manipulate the knobs and switches.

‘When the thing’s complete there’ll be a dozen beams, each projected through a multicoloured disc, each disc revolving,’ he he tells me, ‘at a different speed. You can do the same thing, too, with the revolving form. The thing’s invisible, you see.’ He switches it off.

The beams disappear.

We’re standing in the dark.

He feels behind him, against the wall.

‘You can even switch it off,’ he adds, ‘in cycles. So the form dematerializes slowly; or, conversely, you can let it come on as quickly as you like.’

The room, suddenly, is full of light.

The apparatus, with its switchboard, stands on a table in the centre of the room.

Other shapes, in metal and plastic, in wood and hardboard, partly dismantled or in the process of erection, stand on the other tables, or on the floor. The walls are festooned with wires, metal strips, and with racks containing welding, soldering and metal cutting tools.

‘Is this the students’ work, or yours?’

‘Theirs. My own,’ he says, ‘is over there.’

On a box, in the corner of the room, stands what appears to be an Easter egg; it’s made of glass, its surface pitted with tiny scratches. Inside, distorted by the glass, is an assemblage of glistening rods and plates. A cable runs from the box to a plug on the wall.

‘If you turn off the light I’ll switch it on.’

He pulls the box out to the centre of the room.

‘Hold onto your hat,’ he says, and laughs.

I turn off the light.

For a moment the room is dark.

Then, faintly, a reddish glow appears. A low humming tone emerges from the bowl: the light, as if fractured, moves in odd patterns across the walls; alternating electronic notes, long, then short, oscillating, then abrupt, accompany the movement of the light itself. The colours change; the original red disintegrates; a kaleidoscopic frieze of colours blends slowly in the air around my head; a second, contrasting rhythm of electronic notes begins. The colours darken. In the bowl itself, with a sharper intensity of light, the assemblage of metal rods and plates revolves slowly, first one way then the other.

The other objects in the room appear to move; it’s as if, suddenly, they’ve acquired their own momentum. The oscillation of light and shadow corresponds, it seems, with the rhythm of the electronic tones.

The sounds grow more complex; the colours disintegrate; one side of the room has turned bright blue; the centre of the room is yellow. The air around my head turns green.

Kendal, too, like some strange component of the machine, is moving round the room himself; at odd moments he disappears in shadow; at others, only his features are alight, the sharp nose and cheekbones, the gloomy, melancholic eyes. Then, like a block of wood, he fuses with the tables, the other assemblages, the tools, the walls.

‘What do you think of it?’ he says.

‘I don’t know where I am,’ I tell him.

‘Still here, I hope,’ he says. ‘I’ll switch it off.’

He crosses to the plug.

The light, abruptly, disappears.

The sound has stopped.

I turn on the light beside the door. The room seems smaller, more compact, lifeless; some debris of the light itself.

‘The idea is to get three or four of these.’ He indicates the glittering bowl. ‘The variables, at the moment, are limited. And limitation in a thing like this is definitely a sign of impotence,’ he adds.

‘If the movements are definable, however many variables you have, the limitations,’ I tell him, ‘will be always there.’

‘That’s the trouble with this kind of art.’ He shakes his head. ‘Like the impressionists with that tedious, repetitious brushstroke: the texture of the thing, in a way, can never change.’

‘What does Wilcox think?’

He looks across. ‘He’s threatened to close us down.’ He begins to smile. ‘What’s an artist need with an electric wire?’

He picks up one of the soldering tools.

‘“What’s this, then? For mending somebody’s fuse?”’ He runs his small, mouse-like hands across the bench. ‘When I tell him we’re in the post-art age he goes a sort of red. “What’re thee, then, Kendal? A bloody mechanic? While there’s a tube o’ paint, a canvas and a brush you’ll not say art’s dead in my bloody college.”’

Kendal has a small moustache; he might, quite easily, I imagine, have been a dentist, a locksmith, the inventor of some improbable toy. The bench we’re standing at is littered with metal tubes, with wire, with electronic circuits, with alternators, electric motors, bulbs, plugs, reflectors, pliers; a welder’s visor, a metal grinder and a machine for moulding plastic sheets stand on an adjoining bench against the wall.

‘Wilcox,’ he says, ‘is a kind of fossil. Preserved by the remoteness of the air up here. Provincial life.’ He waves his hand. ‘He comes in of an evening with a dustpan and a brush. An hour, sometimes, before the cleaner’s due. If I don’t lock everything away I’m sure, next morning, I’d find it gone.’

‘He’s invited me to dinner.’

‘He never has.’

‘Tonight.’

‘He’s coming here?’

‘To pick me up.’

He begins to pick up pieces from the benches, putting them hastily in cupboards by the wall.

‘I couldn’t find the house, he says, alone.’

‘I better get these away before he comes. He’s usually at home on Monday nights.’ He adds. ‘That’s why I’m here. They’d be in the dustbin if I left them out.’

I go out to the hall. The door to Wilcox’s office is standing open: it’s half-past six. Two cleaners, with mops and buckets, are working round the desk. On the wall, beyond the desk, is a rack of bottles, small, frosted, like the ones for holding acids in a chemistry lab.

‘You’ve got here, then?’

Wilcox is standing in the passage that leads out from the hall to the back of the college.

‘I’ve just parked it in the yard.’

He looks over to the office. At the same time as he sees the cleaners he sees the light in Kendal’s sculpture room.

‘By God: what’s happening there?’ He strides across.

Kendal, it seems, has reconnected one of his machines; there’s a whirring sound from inside the room and a familiar purplish glow appears within the open door itself.

‘That’s not Kendal running up current, then?’

He steps inside the room.

‘What’s going on in here, then? A mothers’ meeting, is it, or can anybody join?’

The two women cleaners in the office have doused their cigarettes. Mops in hand, they saunter to the hall.

‘Do you know how much we pay in electric bills?’

A fainter, less challenging voice has answered from inside.

‘There’s not just this, you know.’

The purplish light goes out.

‘There’s the heaters in the life room. There’s the lighting for every evening class. There’s the electricity for the kiln. There’s money pouring out of here like water.’

Some object, it seems, has fallen over.

The Principal’s figure reappears. He rubs his arm. There’s a slight cut above his brow.

He limps across. The light in Kendal’s room goes on; the cleaners, relighting their cigarettes, turn back towards the Principal’s office.

‘Just pouring out,’ he says. ‘The electric here.’

He gestures to the yard.

‘If you wait by the car, I shan’t be long.’ He goes to the stairs. ‘They’re not expecting me tonight, you know.’

His voice, a moment later, echoes from the rooms above.

‘And what’s going on in here? A mothers’ meeting, is it, or can anybody join?’

‘I thought once,’ Kendal says, emerging from his room, ‘of electrifying the handle to the door. I could always have found an excuse, afterwards. Not to mention being able to justify the expense,’ he adds.

He looks to the stairs.

‘As it is, the sod’s too devious by half.’

He locks the door.

‘That, at least, I’ve changed. Once locked there’s nobody else but me can go inside.’ He calls to the cleaners. ‘You can give me a miss tonight, my dears.’

‘Won’t Mr Wilcox notice, then?’ Their cigarettes alight they sidle to the door.

‘He’s taking Mr Freestone to dinner, then.’

‘Ooh,’ they say. They look across.

‘I’m not saying who’s paying, though,’ he says.

He goes to the glass doors that open to the street. He waves goodnight.

‘I’ll go while the going’s good.’

He disappears.

‘Is he taking you out, or going to his home?’ the cleaners say.

‘His home.’

‘Tell us what it’s like.’

‘I will.’

‘Nobody’s ever been inside.’

I go out to the yard. The Armstrong Siddeley is parked at the foot of the steps. Hendrick’s sports car has already gone. The lights are out in the modelling shed.

I try the boot, find it locked; try the doors: they’re locked as well.

I light a cigarette: he appears in the doorway after a little while, silhouetted briefly against the light inside.

‘Not smoking are you?’

‘I’ve stubbed it out.’

‘I don’t like smoke, you know, inside the car.’

He produces from his pocket a bunch of keys.

‘By God, the money that’s wasted in a place like this.’

He gets inside; the lights come on.

‘Jump in,’ he says. ‘It won’t take long.’

The car smells like his office; a stale smell of senna pods and weakened tea.

‘They don’t make them any more.’ He taps the car. ‘Not like the ones, you know, they have today.’

The engine starts. The car moves off.

We turn into the street.

I lose track of the route after a little while: the road dips down towards the valley, then turns off, it seems, towards the west.

Buildings loom up on either side; after a while it appears we’re driving through a tunnel. Trees enclose the road; an occasional light flies past.

‘Look at that, then,’ Wilcox says.

He taps his finger at the petrol gauge.

‘There’s a garage on the road up here.’

His voice is quieter now, his face lit up by the reflected glow from the lights outside.

An illuminated garage sign appears some time later in the road ahead; the car turns in towards the pumps; the window’s lowered. Wilcox, with a strangled ejaculation, puts out his head. He calls to the attendant: the petrol, after a moment, flows into the tank behind.

I can hear it gurgling inside the car.

‘That’s a nuisance.’

Wilcox, stooping forward, is tapping at his chest.

‘I’ve come without my purse.’

‘You better tell him before he puts it in.’

‘It’s already in. God damn and blast.’

He taps his pockets once again.

‘It’s not in that. Nor that. I could have sworn …’ He brings out a handkerchief, a pair of gloves: having looked at them briefly, shaking the latter out, he puts them back. He brings out a wallet. ‘Not in that.’

The attendant, his face perspiring, appears at Wilcox’s side.

‘That’s two pounds, twenty pence,’ he says. ‘If you count the oil as well.’

He passes inside a can of oil.

‘I got that to put in when I got back home.’ Wilcox holds the can out for my inspection. ‘It’s not worth looking at the dipstick here.’ He lowers his voice. ‘These attendants, you know, can never tell. Say you need a thing when it’s really full. I look in the garage, you know, when I’m by myself.’ His voice is harsh, almost inaudible, confiding. ‘You haven’t got a couple of pounds or so yourself?’

I reach inside my pocket.

Something tells me to shake my head.

I bring the money out.

‘That’s very good of you,’ he says. He adds, ‘If you’ve got a tip, you know, it goes down well.’

I pass another coin across.

‘I usually call in here,’ he says. ‘They give you good service, if you treat them well.’

The attendant’s face has disappeared; the car moves off.

‘Cold tonight.’ He winds the window.

The darkness of the road returns; I’m reminded, briefly, of Kendal’s oscillating glow: a pair of white, wooden gates, however, materialize after a while where the headlights of the car converge.

‘Be a chap. There’s a catch at the top. Just push them back.’

I get out, step round the front of the car, find the catch: the gates slide into gravel the other side.

‘You need to push.’

His head sticks out from the side of the car.

‘A bit harder,’ he says. ‘But mind the wood.’

I can feel it splinter beneath my hand; I wonder whether to uproot it from its hinge: one side of the gate is stuck.

‘The knack’s to lift it,’ Wilcox says.

I hoist it up: it slides across the gravel; the car comes past.

‘If you could just close them now, old man.’ His head leans out. ‘There’re not many people come past at night. But it’s best, you see, to have them shut.’

I lift them back.

‘And set the catch.’

I set the catch.

As I climb back in he says, ‘It’s a longish drive. The house, you see’s, in a kind of wood.’

The trunks of trees, like sentinels, glide slowly past.

A house appears, low down, made up of white plaster-work and wood. A light, fainter than the beams of the car, glows inside a lattice window. The roof, it appears, is made of thatch.

‘Not many people know we’re here.’

The engine stops.

‘The house, I mean. But for the gates, you’d never tell.’

He gets out from the car.

‘We don’t often have a fire, in any case. A cold shower on a morning’s a damn good thing. A walk in the woods. There’s nothing wrong,’ he says, ‘with God’s good gifts.’ He swings his hand. ‘All the tools of existence you’ll find round here.’

The inside of the house is colder than the air outside. Even Wilcox, after opening the door, has clapped his hands.

‘We’re here, my dear,’ he shouts, and adds, ‘Thatch keeps you warmer in the winter, cool in summer, and lasts, in my view, a damn sight longer than any stone.’

Beams loom blackly above our heads: whitewashed walls, stained by soot, enclose the hall on either side. From the door at the end of the hall appears a light. It’s held by a woman with whitish hair.

‘Here’s young Freestone,’ Wilcox says. ‘Not too late for the food, I hope?’

‘No,’ the woman says. ‘Just right.’

No sooner has she appeared, however, than the woman turns and, with the light, vanishes into the room beyond.

‘Straight ahead: no dithering,’ Wilcox says as if, by the warmth of this encounter, I might, quite easily, be overwhelmed. ‘The food awaits us, lad. Anon. Anon.’

Three places have been set at a bare, rectangular table, one at its centre, halfway along one side, and the two others, some considerable distance away from it, at either end.

‘Food. Food. That’s what a man craves for in the evening,’ Wilcox says.

The woman, as if her mission has been completed, has disappeared. There’s a faint tapping then a kind of groan from a room at the back of the house.

‘Take a seat,’ Wilcox says. He’s already found his own place at one end of the table.

He tucks a napkin in the collar of his shirt.

‘I should sit in the middle, old man. Half-way between the two. I think that’s best.’

He hums to himself a moment. There’s a further faint tapping from the back of the house.

‘Don’t want to wash your hands?’

‘No thanks.’

He gestures round. ‘You won’t find a modern house like this. Dedication. Art. Nowadays it’s nothing but bricks and regulations; trade unions,’ he adds, ‘and how much they can get. In the old days they built a place for living in, not for seeing how much they could squeeze you for. Just look at this.’

He knocks his fist, sharply, against the table. It too, like the beams, is black with age. Apart from a spoon set in each place, a salt cellar and two glasses, one in front of Wilcox’s place and one in front of mine, the table itself is completely bare. The light immediately above it comes from a yellowish shade. I can barely, in the shadows, make out the shape of Wilcox’s face.

‘Fancy water?’

I shake my head.

‘The wife doesn’t drink. Liquids. At night. They’re not much good.’

The door has opened. A tray appears. Standing on it are a metal jug, three plates, and a metal scoop. The woman’s head, white-haired, manifests itself beyond.

‘Here we are. Worth waiting for is that.’

A faint cloud of steam, almost incandescent despite its faintness, rises from the jug.

‘Stew.’

‘Soup.’

The two words collide, it seems, above my head. I can imagine the looks which, in the shadows, converge from either end of the blackened table.

‘The grocers were closed,’ the woman says.

‘Closed?’

‘By the time I got there.’

‘No idea of service. Not nowadays,’ Wilcox says. ‘Open a couple of hours they think they’ve done enough.’

The metal scoop, after some further hesitation, is inserted in the jug.

A thin, watery liquid is lifted out.

‘No finer sustenance came from God’s good elements,’ Wilcox says.

The woman’s bowl is filled, then his.

Finally, scraping the scoop in the bottom of the jug, she turns to mine.

The liquid filters in.

‘Potato. Grown in the ground outside that window there.’ Wilcox, it appears, is drinking his. There’s the slurping of liquid against his lip, a smacking of the lip against the spoon; then comes a kind of gulp and a rasping sigh. ‘What better sustenance could you find than that.’

The woman, in shadow till now, stoops, briefly, towards the light; dark, cavernous eyes look out, sharply, first at Wilcox and, then, less feverishly, at me.

‘Could you pass the salt?’

‘Salt?’

‘In front of you.’

She’s already taken her place at the end opposite to Wilcox. Apart from sliding the salt along the blackened wood there’s no means of conveying it to her other than by getting up.

I push back the chair, pick the cellar up and take it down the table.

I wonder, for a moment, whether I might take it back.

The white grains settle on her soup. Without waiting for the cellar I go back to my chair.

No sooner have I sat down than Wilcox smacks his lips again.

‘It could do with a bit of salt. You’re right.’

He looks at me: I can see the two shadows where his eyes belong and the bold protuberance of his nose between.

‘Be a chap.’

I get up from the chair again.

I reclaim the cellar, take it down the table, wait for Wilcox to use it then take it back. Passing my own bowl I shower it with several grains: I replace it in front of the woman’s plate.

There’s a kind of groan. I wait. No other sound, however, follows it. I go back to the chair.

‘Minerals; carbohydrates: the potato’s got almost everything,’ Wilcox says. ‘With that and milk you could live a long and exceedingly healthy life,’ he adds.

The woman herself, apart from an identical smacking of the lips, makes no comment of any sort at all.

Only now, accustomed to the gloom, do I see the pictures hanging on the wall, their subject-matter indistinguishable in the feeble light. A fireplace is overhung by a wooden beam; in a metal grate stand several blocks of wood, unlit, above them a metal cauldron attached to a chain which disappears into the shadows of the chimney overhead.

Apart from two chairs, half-upholstered, set either side of the unlit fire, there’s no other furniture in the room at all.

‘Damn cold.’

I nod my head.

‘Outside.’ He gestures round. ‘Appreciate it,’ he says, ‘when you get in here. It’s the straw, you know. Not like your modern tiles.’

A spoon is scraped round the bottom of a bowl: from the opposite end of the table comes a kind of groan; lips are smacked. A chair scrapes back.

‘Finished, Freestone?’ Wilcox says. His own spoon, as if in illustration, he rattles in the bowl. ‘One large potato, per person, per day, fresh from the garden: this nation wouldn’t be what it is today. You’d see some difference, then. You would.’

The woman reappears, her bowl in her hand, moving down to the opposite end; she picks up Wilcox’s plate, takes mine, sets them on the tray with the ladle and the empty jug and then, like some manifestation of Kendal’s light-machine, vanishes abruptly.

‘Heavy meals late at night.’ The Principal shakes his head. ‘No good. Digestive juices: they never get a chance. They need to recuperate, you know, themselves. Need the rest. What sort of stomach do you have if the juices are champing up food all night as well?’ He smacks his lips. ‘Treat your stomach right, the rest will follow. Good digestion, Freestone, is the key to a well-directed life. If you don’t digest things well everything else, you’ll find, will go astray: work, concentration, application, anything you care to mention.’

My hands, it seems, have begun to tremble.

My teeth, a moment later, begin to chatter.

‘Take Kendal, for example. These weird ideas he has. They come, primarily, from an unbalanced diet. His juices, as a consequence, get out of hand; they send garbled, or over-sensationalized messages to the brain: the brain reacts: instead of an artist, modelling with his clay, or painting at his canvas, you get a man who ends up making electric bells. And he’s not aware. He’s not aware. When I talk to him he thinks I’m mad: you can see his stomach inwardly revolting. What it sends to the brain the brain can’t understand. It obeys whatever directions the stomach gives, but in essence the brain is as confused as Kendal is himself: after all, we are, first and foremost, a living body: and the reason that we live is because we eat. Only by consuming certain elements of our environment do we survive: if those elements are in any way unbalanced then our existence itself becomes unbalanced. We can only put things right by a conscious act of will.’

The door once again has opened: the tray appears, the whitened head beyond.

‘Kendal comes from the new brigade: the let-it-happen boys. They think life’s made up of all sorts of instincts: sit back and let it happen. You can see it in his face.’

The tray, clutched in a pair of claw-like hands, is set down once more at the end of the table. It contains three apples, three plates, two knives and a piece of cheese.

‘He doesn’t realize that art, like life, is a conscious act of will. It comes from the stomach: it needs direction. Direction implies discipline: discipline implies skill, skill implies tradition, taste, tuition. In other words, in a nutshell, it demands a school of art.’

One plate, one apple, one knife are carried down to the end of the table. A second plate and an apple are brought to me. The third apple remains with the woman at the opposite end.

‘Like potato, cheese is one of life’s organic foods. One of the mind’s ingredients,’ Wilcox says. His knife, in anticipation, is already raised.

I get up, pick up the cheese, and carry it down to the opposite end; the woman herself, for a moment, appears surprised. She gives a groan; there’s a rasping in her throat: she moans.

Wilcox, as if alarmed, has coughed the other end.

‘No. No. Go ahead. Ladies first. Even if they haven’t put in a day’s hard work,’ he says.

The woman cuts a piece. She lays it on her plate, beside the apple. Having put down the knife beside her plate she makes no other kind of move at all.

I carry the cheese to the other end.

‘Here it comes: life’s providence,’ Wilcox says.

He takes over half of the remaining lump.

The remnant I carry back to where my apple stands, knife-less, beneath the light.

I rub my hands.

‘No need to peel the skin. Half the goodness lies beneath the skin. People don’t realize that, you know. The same with potatoes: a good wash, that’s all they need. And often,’ Wilcox adds, ‘not even that.’

The cheese is hard.

‘Fresh cheese,’ he says, ‘of course, has not had time to conglomerate.’ He chews his apple. ‘By conglomerate I mean, not had time to synthesize. The elements are not, as it were, in equilibrium. They need time, like all things, to settle down. To achieve harmony. To acquaint themselves with one another.’

A soft, hesitant munching comes from the opposite end.

‘That’s why we’re here. A new element in the college. It demands acquaintance of all the rest. It needs time, as it were, to conglomerate.’

I feel now he’s speaking, not so much for my benefit, as for that of the woman at the other end; it might, for all I know, be a nightly homily which passes one way along that blackened table whenever Wilcox comes home from work.

‘The same principle applies to a work of art; each part is separate yet an integral part of all the rest.’

‘All for one, and one for all.’

The room, the sound of munching apart, grows quiet.

I’m aware of the silence, too, outside the house.

‘Reality disintegrates,’ Wilcox says, ‘in direct proportion to the amount of synthetic foods that people nowadays are encouraged to consume. The last war, for instance, the greatest catastrophe the world has ever known, was a direct consequence of certain elements on the continent eating too much bread.’

I look across: the eyes, faintly, have glistened in the light. The familiar image of Wilcox fades away: it might, quite easily, be another man who’s sitting there. I’m reminded again of the strange distortion of objects effected by Kendal’s eccentric lights.

‘Too much carbohydrate, for instance, can affect the brain in any number of ways. Not only,’ Wilcox says, ‘does the body grow fat, but it uses up energy in a way which nature never intended. The history of bread-eating peoples, for instance, would indicate that strife, particularly inter-denominational strife, is a natural consequence of the consumption of too much bread.’

‘What about the Chinese?’

‘The Chinese have rice, which is just as bad.’

My feet, in reaction to the cold, have banged against the floor; even the chair has begun to tremble.

‘Should we light the fire?’

‘The fire?’

I indicate the grate.

‘We don’t have a fire in there.’ He smiles; his teeth, discoloured, glitter in the light. ‘Except at Christmas, mind. We sometimes light it then.’ He rubs his hands. ‘There’s a fire in the other room, in any case,’ he says.

He clears his throat. His cheese has gone; he clatters his knife against his plate.

The woman rises.

As she passes round the table she collects the knives; she piles the plates, puts the apple cores on the tray and with the empty cheese plate carries them out.

‘We can go in the other room for toddy. The good lady,’ Wilcox says, ‘will bring it in.’

He pushes back his chair; we rise. I cross over to the door.

Wilcox, with a grunt, has followed me through. His shoulder catches mine as he pushes past.

‘Straight ahead.’

The door directly opposite is closed.

‘I shan’t be a second, old man.’

He disappears; his footsteps fade away to the back of the house.

I try the door handle.

I turn the handle, press my weight against it and feel it give.

Somewhere at the back of the house a chain is pulled.

Wilcox, his head bowed, has reappeared.

‘Anything the matter?’

I press against the door.

‘It’s stuck.’

‘Probably locked.’

He rattles a bunch of keys inside his pocket. He makes no attempt to try the door himself.

He fits a key: the door swings back.

‘Of course, a night like this, you don’t need a fire. The air being fresh,’ he says, ‘it’s more in the way of a stimulant than anything else.’

A faint glow erupts; a yellowish shade is mounted on a plastic bowl.

‘Heat, I always think, discourages circulation. I’m sure there must be a connexion between the incidence of heart disease and the prevalence of central-heating and open fires. In the old days, the fire was used primarily for cooking, little else. Vigorous exercise was the answer to people who felt the cold, you know. That,’ he says, ‘and work itself.’

The fireplace, in confirmation of these remarks, is standing empty. Made of brick it contains a rusted grate that appears never to have seen either coal or wood. Two chairs, identical to the ones in the other room, are set on either side. On a sideboard stands a photograph and, beneath a casement window, a narrow desk.

On the wall are hung a number of pictures in the style of the English post-impressionists, the simplified shapes reduced to an almost illustrative flatness: a nude, a landscape, the interior of a room.

The photograph on the sideboard is that of a young woman, her hair brushed back, her eyes starting, dark, piercing, with an almost maniacal intentness.

‘Daughter. Married,’ Wilcox says.

He sits down in one of the chairs and slaps his legs.

‘It’s good to get home of an evening. What d’you think?’

Expecting no answer, he doesn’t look up.

‘Home, too, is related to digestion in a way that people, on the whole, don’t understand. Family life, that of husband, wife and child, depends almost entirely, if it’s to achieve any kind of harmony, on the balance of nutrients that each member of the household gets. Once an imbalance in the intake of nutrients occurs – one member of the family eating out of tune, as it were, with all the rest – it’s like an orchestra with a discordant member: the emotional harmony of the whole of the family is, quite markedly, disturbed.’

The door has opened; the tray, clutched between two claw-like hands, manifests itself again.

The whitened head appears. The tray’s set down, cautiously, beside the empty hearth.

‘Sugar, too, is another enemy. Tooth decay, in certain native tribes, for instance, is virtually unknown. So is heart-disease,’ he says.

Having released the tray and straightened, the woman glances anxiously at Wilcox, sees there, evidently, no further desire maturing, and turns quietly to the door.

‘Would you like a chair?’ I ask.

She pauses for a moment, confirms from my expression that it’s her and not Wilcox who’s been spoken to, and, after a further moment’s indecision, glances over at Wilcox then slowly shakes her head.

‘I’ve one or two things to do,’ she says.

The door, after a moment’s hesitation, is quietly closed.

A jug and two glasses are standing on the tray.

‘Fruit-juice toddy,’ Wilcox says.

He half-fills one of the glasses, sips it, then pours a slightly smaller quantity into the other.

He leans across, holds the glass out, motions for me to taste it, then, nodding, waits for my remark.

‘What kind of fruit?’

‘Citrus.’

He sips his own.

‘Unsweetened. Natural juices only, mind. With citrus,’ he adds, ‘you get the sun.’

He leans back in his chair.

He sighs.

‘I thought of inviting Kendal once. He’s been at the college, you know, two years. Studied in London. I don’t think, unless you feel someone’s sympathetic, you should invite them to your home. After all, invitations, like disagreeable food, can be a matter of digestion.’

He sips his drink again.

‘One of the reasons you got the job.’

‘The food.’

‘No, no. Well-built. Thick-set. Can knock them into shape. It’s what they understand round here.’ He waves his arm. ‘All art’s related, you know, to a particular place. You wouldn’t get Siennese painting, for example, going on in Florence. Nor would you find Constable painting his great landscapes in the middle of Madrid. It’s what these let-it-happen boys can never understand. Full of abstractions because they’re easy to transmit. Real art comes from particular places, from particular people doing particular things.’

He presses the glass against his lips.

‘That’s one of the reasons I asked you here.’ He takes a sip. ‘It’s a question of morality, you see, as much as anything else.’

I look across.

‘Of deciding what you want from life, determining its value, then pursuing it. The same principle,’ he says, ‘that you apply to painting. Or to any of the arts, if it comes to that.’

He finishes the glass, leans to the jug, half-fills it again and takes a sip.

‘You’ve been to the Newmans’, I understand.’

He looks across.

‘Mr Newman’s been a great benefactor since his daughter came to the college. He’s agreed to put money into one or two schemes I have.’ He says, ‘I can’t mention them, of course. As yet. When they come to fruition you’ll be the first to hear. The rest of the staff, that is, as well.’

He clears his throat.

‘I wouldn’t want to jeopardize these plans.’ He shows his teeth. ‘By a too intimate relationship with the family. I mean, by communicating to them ideas about art which might, as it were, contradict certain attitudes they may have formed themselves.’

‘Has he offered,’ I ask him, ‘to buy your work?’

‘No, no. It’s the college I’m talking about,’ he says. ‘If we want to attract a better kind of student, and recruit, as a consequence, a better kind of staff, we require facilities to do it with. What we have to offer at present isn’t adequate by any standards. For instance, in the study of the Old Masters we have scarcely anything at all to offer the aspiring student. Verrocchio and Donatello worked essentially from studios, you understand, where every facility for the student was provided by the master; in this age of diminishing public patronage it’s encouraging to find, as it were, a private patron; someone who’s prepared to accept the master’s insight into things and provide the material wherewithal with which, given good fortune, he can put his particular disciplines into practice.’

The jug is empty. He gazes at his glass.

‘It’s not often the opportunity provided by Mr Newman arises in the Arts. Usually assistance of this kind is given to the Sciences; it would be unfortunate if someone were to persuade him that the Fine Arts aren’t Fine, for instance, any longer, but responsible for turning out devices not unlike the ones that Kendal has. Mr Newman agrees with me that art is to do with the observation of real, verifiably present life. He doesn’t go in at all for these fashionable abstractions.’

He looks across.

‘I only thought I’d mention it. Not in the way of a warning, you understand. More in the nature of an invitation. A plea for help. The beneficiaries, after all, will be the college’s future students.’

He gestures round.

‘What do you think of the paintings, then?’

I get up from the chair. I stamp my feet. I bang one hand against the other.

‘You haven’t got a drop of Scotch?’

‘Scotch?’

‘Anything to warm you up.’

‘My dear Freestone,’ he says, ‘I’m warm already.’

I bang my arms against my chest.

‘Central heating: it’s what I’ve been saying about circulation. A night like this, a meal inside you.’ He waves one arm above his head. ‘You see how that college undermines you. I suppose you’ve got the same sort of thing at home as well.’

He gets up quickly, crosses the room, and pulls open a door which, until now, I haven’t noticed. From the shadows he hauls out what, at first sight, appears to be an electric fire. He sets it down beside the hearth.

It’s a metal box. A large red cross is painted on the lid.

‘We keep our medical concoctions, you know, in here.’

Stooping to the light he rummages about.

‘Here it is.’ He holds up a bottle. ‘A drop of this’ll set you right.’ He reads the label. ‘“For all colds, flu, or disturbances caused by inclement weather.”’

He takes my glass.

A stream of yellowish-looking liquid is poured inside.

‘Drink that, and you won’t complain about the cold again.’

He watches me avidly as I take it from his hand.

‘Don’t gulp it. You can savour the taste as well as enjoy the benefit,’ he says.

I swallow it down. There’s a bitter, acrid taste against my tongue, then a burning sensation somewhere in the throat. A moment later it’s as if my stomach’s being removed: there’s a tearing, convulsive sensation somewhere in my chest.

‘I can almost taste it now myself.’

He replaces the bottle inside the box.

I begin to gasp.

‘We brew it up from fungi, and from toadstools you can find in almost any wood. You’ve got to know which ones to pick. Some native toadstools, of course, are toxic. One bite, you know, and you can drop down dead.’

He carries the box back to the cupboard in the wall.

‘Nature provides its remedy for almost anything,’ he says.

He comes back to his chair; there’s a burning sensation now around my neck; it spreads out to my arms and then, more certainly, with a sudden rush, towards my legs.

‘Brandy, you see, which has the same effect, is an intoxicant. You could say, in the end, it does more harm than good. But that,’ he gestures to the cupboard door, ‘you could drink as often as you like. You could enjoy it as a beverage, as well as a remedy for feeling cold. You’ve probably caught it in the modelling room. If the models didn’t demand those ridiculous fires they’d all feel the benefit, I’m sure of that.’

I sink down in the chair. Movement now, except from a horizontal position, seems virtually impossible. I can only see Wilcox through a kind of a haze.

‘What I might have checked was how long we’ve had that remedy in stock. You’re supposed to renew it every year. It must be three or four years old, at least. On the other hand,’ he says, and looks across, ‘it’s had more time to mature than most. It’s always a benefit, with these medicines, if they’re never rushed. Life nowadays,’ he adds, ‘prohibits remedies, of course, like that. It’s got to be a needle, or a pill, or rushing off to some hospital bed. In the old days nature made the pace; now we’re governed, like Kendal’s devices, by electric current and little else.’

I’m aware of some further conversation from the other side of the empty fireplace; then, some time later, I find I’m standing in a studio. Its walls are white, a white curtain is drawn across a skylight immediately above my head; to one side a flight of steps leads up to a wooden gallery on which are stacked a number of canvases, their sides lettered and numbered like the spines of books.

Wilcox has evidently gone to some trouble to bring me here; I have a vague recollection of keys being turned, bolts being drawn and chains removed; of lights being switched on brighter than those inside the house; we’ve crossed, to get here, a stretch of garden: the night air alone, as if fulfilling Wilcox’s claims for it, has – relatively – brought me to my senses.

‘It’s really why I asked you back. It’s not everybody, you know, I let in here.’

An old type of studio easel on castors occupies the centre of the floor. A rectangular-shaped canvas, set vertically, and almost as tall as Wilcox himself, is covered by a paint-flecked sheet.

‘Most of my compositions I keep up here.’ He gestures to the gallery overhead. ‘This is the one I’m working on at present.’

He removes the sheet.

Several overalled figures are standing round a hole: there’s a pile of sand, a cement-machine, a lorry loaded with bricks, a telephone pole, a road, made up of cobbles, a house, with a man standing at a door and a woman at the gate, stooping to a pram, and, in the sky, an aeroplane is passing by, leaving behind it a streak of vapour. On the branch of a tree which frames the picture a bird is standing with its beak wide open; on closer inspection, amongst the leaves, I can make out a nest containing three as yet unfinished eggs.

‘I’m just doing those,’ he says. ‘Blackbird’s. The blue matches the blue of the mother’s dress.’

Faint lines on the barer patches of the canvas indicate that the picture itself has been squared off; each workman is carefully posed against the hole, the stitches on each overall drawn in, the wedges of clay beneath each boot, the rime of dirt beneath each nail. One of the workmen smokes a cigarette: ‘Fight Cancer’, the lettering on a poster, is outlined on a wall beyond his head.

‘It’s a scene from contemporary life,’ he says. ‘Nothing you could get in a photograph, or on a film. The composition, as you can see, is a conception in itself: it’s all determined, nothing arbitrary, or accidental. There’s nothing electric, you know, in that.’

A pool of water has collected amongst the cobbles: it reflects not only the leaves of the tree, the bird, the face of one of the workmen, but the aeroplane itself.

‘A symbol of life and death.’

He gestures to the canvas.

‘The puddle?’

He shakes his head.

He points irritably to the workman with the cigarette: his head, I realize, is reflected in the puddle.

‘The bird gives out a warning.’

His finger, short, square-ended, hovers above the open beak.

‘The messenger.’

His finger moves up towards the plane.

‘Between heaven and earth. While up above.’ He looks across. ‘The harbinger of death.’

‘The plane.’

‘The bringer of catastrophe.’ He nods his head.

‘It looks like a passenger plane to me.’

‘It’s a symbol, merely, of domination from the air,’ he says.

Perhaps the distillation of toadstools and fungi moves into a second cycle of effect.

I begin to smile. I can see Wilcox’s face begin to redden.

‘A picture within a picture. You can’t get that, except with art. There’s not any fortuitous effect anywhere in that picture. It’s all measured out. The product of the will.’

He staggers back, his foot caught in the sheet; he drags it out from between his legs.

‘You’ll find it coming back. When these let-it-happen boys have had their day. You’ll find the old values coming through. You’ll find the public growing disheartened by these ephemeral, fortuitous effects that people like Kendal, for instance, try to produce. They’ll come back to pictures by people who put down exactly what they see, but in compositions created by good taste, tradition, by the instinct of the eye and hand, and by the intelligence which is the natural and inevitable outcome of a good digestion.’

Only seconds later, it seems, we’re standing in the yard outside; I can see the house several feet away, the casement windows, the plaster and timber-work, the edge of the thatch and have a vague recollection, before we finally emerge, of Wilcox, panting slightly, climbing to the gallery and bringing down several of the canvases stacked up there. I have an impression of other workmen gathered round a hole; of fishermen at a quay unloading fish; of a male figure with an arm upraised, one leg forward, one leg back; of soldiers, with tears in their eyes, gathered round a grave: now, however, Wilcox is looking at his watch. A barn-like structure behind us has just been locked.

‘You’ll have to be going,’ he says. ‘It’s getting late. The last bus goes, I should think, in twenty minutes. You’ll just have time to walk to the stop.’

‘Aren’t you going to drive me back?’

‘I’ve just put the car away, old man,’ he says.

I’ve no recollection of this at all; certainly the car has vanished from the front of the house.

‘The bus gets you there in half an hour. It’s a damn good service, I’ll grant you that.’

He turns to the drive.

‘I’d better say goodnight. To your wife,’ I tell him.

‘Oh, I’ll say it for you,’ he says. ‘She’ll be in bed.’

I splash through several puddles as we walk to the gate.

‘I’ll leave you here,’ he says. ‘You can see the road. Straight ahead, then over to your right.’

‘How far’s the stop?’

‘About a mile.’

He slaps my back.

‘It was good of you to come.’

As I turn to the gate he suddenly calls, ‘Is it true, by the way, about your wife?’

His figure’s several feet away, scarcely visible beneath the trees.

‘This hospital she’s in: it’s not one of these for mental cases, then?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You mean she’s mad.’

‘More sane,’ I tell him, ‘than you or I.’

‘She’s not been certified, then?’

‘She volunteered.’

‘We should have been informed.’ He rubs his face. He comes no closer in the dark. ‘A thing like that: you can never tell.’

‘She’s well looked after, on the whole,’ I say.

‘I mean the staff we employ at the college,’ he says. ‘It reflects on us, a thing like that. We’ve a responsibility to the students, after all,’ he adds.

‘I’ll see,’ I tell him, ‘what the hospital says.’

‘I’d have a word with them, if I were you.’

‘I will.’

‘And explain the situation. They’ll understand. They’ve dealt with cases like this before.’

‘I’ll get onto them,’ I tell him, ‘right away.’

‘Mention my name,’ he says, ‘it could do the trick.’

His feet crunch off along the drive.

I turn to the road.

I find no stop at all that night. I pass occasional trees, animals in fields, an empty house. Finally, I reach the garage. The lights are out, the doors are closed.

I hitch a lift on a passing lorry. Dawn is breaking by the time I reach the town; perhaps the toadstool and fungi distillation moves on into some third and more devastating cycle of effect: as soon as I reach my room I fall asleep and a day and another night have passed before I wake again.