‘Scarcely,’ he’d told her, thrilled, nevertheless, by the flighty voice, the frail, delicately featured, elfin figure who had remained, seemingly contented, certainly unobtrusive, in the background of Viklund’s extravagant, at times turbulent if not mysterious life.

  Now she came to the door, knocking, Maddox standing to embrace her, to kiss her cheek, first one side then the other, then the first side once again – a formality he invariably resisted – to feel his hand taken between hers, squeezed, retained, while she exclaimed, ‘It’s so good to see you, Matt!’ he adding, mentally, in parenthesis, ‘alive’. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you. Any more coffee? Cakes, perhaps, instead of biscuits. I never realised Loreen had brought up those. And you’ve scarcely eaten any,’ turning to indicate the girl who had followed her in.

  ‘One each, or was it two, Matt?’ Viklund said, standing, meticulously attentive to domestic detail whenever his wife was present. ‘The coffee’s cold, otherwise I believe we’re both all right,’ the girl collecting the cups and saucers, stacking them on the tray, returning with it to the door, Ilse turning, too. ‘Don’t let him leave, Dan, without saying goodbye. So rarely do we see you, Matt,’ she added before the door was closed – Maddox, by this remark alone, recalling those occasions when he had almost haunted their home, at that time off the Cromwell Road, having been offered a room there, Viklund, on that occasion unwell, exhausted, listless, inert, seemingly about to expire, ‘Hiatus Drayburghia,’ he’d suggested to Maddox, whom he’d called in to help. ‘Mind you don’t catch it. I’m fed up with the place. But for Felix. So many regressive students. All they’re interested in are introductions to Cork Street.’

  Re-seating himself, he said, as if prompted by his wife’s appearance, ‘What of Taylor? Any more news of him?’

  ‘I’ve received a visitor’s pass,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Good Lord.’ Viklund put his hands together, a prayerful gesture, the fingers pointing up, the thumbs, indicating, misleadingly, someone of a practical nature, curled back: the knuckles he pressed against his lips, tapping them slightly as he breathed out.

  Maddox looked up at the plasterwork again: the frieze of animals, birds, vegetation: even there, in the fortuitous circumstances of a leased house, something of Viklund’s nature was oppressively defined.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Maddox said.

  ‘In prison?’

  ‘They’d hardly allow him out.’

  ‘I’m not familiar with the procedures.’ Viklund glanced away. ‘In wartime, of course, it was different. I visited a number of prisons then,’ a sudden leniency apparent in his manner, as if a digression, if not canvassed for, were a necessity at present. ‘I was once invited to visit an acquaintance – no stronger than that – in Paris, after his arrest, convinced, once there, I’d be arrested myself. Only,’ he released one hand from its prayerful gesture and waved it in the air, ‘he’d agreed to co-operate, his captors wondering what the effect would be on his former colleagues if he were suddenly to reappear. I couldn’t tell them. Nor could I tell them if the news of his arrest had got around. It was done discreetly at his girlfriend’s, who was also taken in.’

  ‘What happened next?’ Maddox asked: it was unusual of Viklund to talk of his past in such detail.

  ‘I had the impression his arrest had been what, in peacetime, would have been described as an administrative error, one department not knowing what another was doing. That he’d been turned, as the saying went, already. As it was, having been reassured by me it would be best if he were released, they shot him. I assumed, at the time, they were fingering me, wondering how far my influence went. Not a few of the resistance at that time were informers, their only means of staying alive. The Germans, with their familiar thoroughness, affected, even in that peculiar world of loyalties and self-interest, to keep a system of checks and balances: so much coming from one side, so much going to another. As the son of a neutral diplomat, it was the closest I came to being arrested myself. As it was …’ He paused, abstracted, almost to the point, Maddox reflected, of confessing he was a collaborator: so many drawings, so many paintings, so many sculptures, to stay alive. ‘Close shaves,’ he added, ‘were something of a norm, rather than, as with Taylor, being the exception.’ Looking across, his head at an angle, he smiled: something of a more intimidating nature crossed his mind, crossed and re-crossed, as if he were struggling to restrain it.

  ‘How well do you remember Taylor?’ Maddox asked.

  ‘An inanimate character. Droll. Recessive. Or have I confused him with someone else?’

  ‘Distant. Recessive. Bright. But very,’ Maddox said.

  Viklund looked up once more at the painting above the fireplace.

  ‘Something visceral,’ he added, following Viklund’s gaze.

  Something visceral, too, he reflected, in Viklund’s response to the garish, lavishly painted nude.

  ‘His essays were outstanding. More cinquecento than quattro-,’ he added, as if building on something Viklund already knew. ‘Also,’ he paused, Viklund’s gaze returning to his, ‘his religious identification was very strong. Wrote as a believer, one instant, as a sceptic the next. His paintings were not dissimilar. More application than intuition. He followed Felix in that. But without the talent.’

  ‘Norfolk?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Viklund’s enquiry had been direct, his eyes fixed fiercely on him: blue, intense, suddenly, characteristically, viciously alert. ‘For how long are you allowed to see him?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Strange his inviting you.’

  ‘I was his tutor. Perhaps no one else is inclined to go.’

  ‘No relatives.’

  ‘I assume there were.’

  ‘Not inclined, I imagine, to get involved.’ He paused. ‘According to the papers and the televison at the time, his neighbours found him pleasant. His family, too. In which case …’ He paused again, inviting Maddox to continue. ‘Have you any experience of murder?’

  ‘The only person I’ve been close to killing,’ Maddox said, ‘is myself.’

  ‘Of course.’ Viklund’s look was turned away. ‘How does your psychologist friend explain it? His case, I mean,’ he added.

  ‘She doesn’t.’

  ‘Have you discussed it?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Depression, whatever that means, was suggested at the time.’

  Maddox didn’t respond.

  ‘Though, since most of us get depressed without, apparently, killing anyone …’ Again he waited. ‘Particularly one’s wife.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And children.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Two.’

  Maddox paused. He’d been reluctant to ask Simone for an explanation, afraid, he suspected, she might provide one; afraid, too, of coming to a conclusion about something which eluded analysis as well as definition: it wasn’t ‘explanations’, he concluded, he was looking for, or anticipated, either.

  ‘And himself,’ Viklund said. ‘He failing, in that respect, like you.’

  ‘I think he was more intent,’ he said. ‘He’s attempted to do the same in prison, and is evidently under close supervision.’

  ‘I hope he appreciates you going. After all, in one sense,’ Viklund said, ‘some might see it as an endorsement of what he’s done, if not a gratuitous involvement in something in which they have little to lose, if anything at all. I, on the other hand,’ he smiled, testing Maddox’s reaction in a by now familiar manner, ‘know neither is the case.’ His smile fading, his tiny teeth concealed. ‘Does he know you were prompted to do something not dissimilar?’

  ‘I don’t see how he could. In reality,’ he added, ‘there’s no comparison.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘His first name, I believe, was Derek.’

  ‘Eric.’

  ‘Not very grand.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Domestic, rather than archetypal.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Though an interesting subject. If one is capable of looking at these things. Suicide, or, as I would call it, self-election.’

  ‘Non-election,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Precisely.’ His look had intensified, his eyes shadowed, the receding hair-line drawn down to his brows, a deep, vertical declivity between.

  ‘When it first appeared in the news I couldn’t remember his name. His first name,’ Maddox said. ‘I thought that very odd. He was my student for almost four years. Apart from his first name,’ he went on, ‘I remembered him so clearly.’

  Reality was imposed upon something, he reflected, but what? the configurations of his own life, for instance, reaching beyond feeling, beyond thought: merely a blankness: nothing – the nothing that something was imposed upon but which was included in reality itself: his examining, for instance, via Taylor, his own capacity for self-destruction, if not the destruction of others – the war, everything, by inference, as well as direct experience, he had envisaged.

  Examining, too, the furthest reaches of compassion, his motive, if only one of them, in going to see Taylor at all: this rage, in his own case, though not in Taylor’s, to stay alive – a rage which had subsided, again, in his case, to quiet perturbation, finally to a compulsive gesture of dissent; subsequently, that failing, a return to the ‘flow’, the submission, biological in origin and expression, which took him casually, haphazardly, along with everything else: this room, their two figures, those trees outside the window (decades of growth and pruning) – everything directed towards the light – awareness creeping into hands and feet, limbs, head, body, events, a slow, inexorable dissolution; awareness arrested by distraction.

  It was as if, he concluded, the event involving Taylor paralleled, or echoed, something not only in his own but in Viklund’s life.

  ‘Are you in a fit state to get involved?’ Viklund said. ‘Won’t this add unduly to what troubles you at present?’

  ‘It might distract it,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Distraction won’t last long.’ The response came quickly, Viklund leaning forward.

  ‘It might clear something up for both of us,’ he said.

  ‘Wasn’t his wife a student as well?’

  It was this Viklund had been intending to ask all along.

  Maddox looked away, avoiding his friend’s expression.

  The previous evening he and Simone, watching the news, had witnessed an interview with the distraught parents of a seven-year-old child who was missing: a girl – the tear-streaked faces, the mask-like confrontation with something beyond the imagination, an involvement with prurience indistinguishable from the prurience of the daughter’s possible fate, an involvement with something which only gratuitously involved themselves, murder, the possibility of, a specious form of entertainment.

  ‘She was.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His response came out without any stress.

  ‘Were you her tutor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was in the years you lectured to?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Glancing back at Viklund, he added, ‘Rebecca.’

  ‘One never knows where these strands from earlier in one’s life might lead. The significance of attachments which you thought you’d long ago abandoned. Suddenly, out of nowhere …’ he waved his hand.

  The girl had knocked at the door and re-entered with the tray, setting it down once more beside Viklund. ‘Shall I pour?’ she said.

  ‘Matthew will do it,’ Viklund said.

  It was as if a dividing line had been drawn and, recognised, lightly stepped across.

  ‘What was she like?’ Viklund said as, with an acknowledging gesture to Maddox, the girl went out.

  ‘Attractive.’

  ‘Talented?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were she and Taylor connected at the time?’

  ‘Shortly after.’

  ‘Of course, relationships between students and staff were prohibited,’ Viklund said as Maddox got up. Crossing to Viklund’s chair he poured the coffee, the tray set on a low table beside him. ‘It was included in the contract at the Drayburgh when I first arrived. So delicately phrased I asked Saunders, the then Registrar, what it meant. “You may not fuck the students,” he replied, adding, thoughtfully, “Either sex applies.”’ He paused. ‘Deleted, of course, in your time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Though left implicit.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And at the Courtauld.’

  ‘The Courtauld, too.’

  ‘In my time it was written in.’

  ‘Not in mine.’

  ‘But left implicit.’

  ‘Of course. Charlotte, for my part, never complained.’

  Viklund smiled: a tendentiousness, familiar to Maddox, lightly played.

  ‘What was Rebecca’s background?’

  ‘East End.’ He waited. ‘Her father was a tailor. Ironical, her surname, when she married. Robust. Good-humoured. An oddly contrasted couple. He with very little humour. She, I thought, a lot.’

  He paused again: so much of this had come out without preparation, a summary, he concluded, he’d been assembling, if only for himself, for some time. Having filled one cup and placed it beside Viklund, he filled a second, added milk, and returned to his chair. Despite having moved it closer, something of the formality of their encounter still remained: a discourse, rather than a conversation, he suspected, had been intended, Viklund inclined to tell him something to which, he had already decided, there would be no adequate response.

  ‘And all we have by way of explanation was that Taylor was depressed?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware.’

  ‘So have you been, recently,’ he said. ‘At least, diagnosed as such,’ he added.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No similar inclination, I take it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Taylor, of course, is younger.’

  ‘In the midst of life.’

  ‘Almost.’

  Something dream-like about the proportions of the room, as if, a not uncommon occurrence, he was suddenly aware of this conversation having happened before, in precisely the same location, and in precisely the same form, absorbed Maddox completely; as if, in effect, his life had been lived not once but several times, if not, conceivably, simultaneously, touching at certain points where the congruity between the several versions had suddenly, without warning, overlapped.

  ‘Look here!’ Viklund was getting up, alertly, as if having contemplated the action for some time. ‘Let’s take a stroll. The air is stifling. I’ll fall asleep if I sit any longer. Nothing to do with you, of course. Far from it. I realise the importance of staying awake. I ought to walk, though rarely have anyone to walk with, other than Ilse, and she’s quite bored with me after all this time. The chauffeur, sometimes. And the girl. No, really,’ he went on, ‘I need someone fit and young, like yourself,’ laughing as he turned to the door.

  In the hall Ilse reappeared, the dog, sensing a change in the atmosphere, scampering behind her, a small, tousle-haired animal which, at its impetuous approach, Viklund pushed away with his foot. ‘I’ll take him,’ he said. ‘I’ll take him,’ in response to a silent enquiry from his wife. ‘Give me the lead. No need for him to mope in here,’ a coat lifted from the rack by the door into which, with Ilse’s and the girl’s assistance, he thrust his arms, a hat, a trilby, set at a rakish angle on his head. ‘Just the job for Matthew and me. No telling how long we’ll be. Don’t wait up!’ laughing once again.

  Moments later they were crossing the road at the front of the house to a gate set in the park hedge the other side. ‘As you can see, they’ve made up for the elms. Like missing teeth in a familiar mouth, but finally I’ve got used to them,’ indicating a footpath leading to a further gate which, in turn, via a road, gave access to the centre of the park.

  ‘Something we were saying back there in the house,’ he added, releasing the dog, ‘reminded me I saw a man shot dead in the street, in Paris, at the end of the war. There one minute, gone the next.’ He waved his arm, as if anticipating a similar event taking place on the path before them. ‘A collaborator, I was told. What I’m getting at,’ he waved his arm again, a man much given, Maddox recalled, to involuntary physical movement, before leaving the house refusing a walking-stick held out to him by Ilse – presumably, like releasing the dog, to leave himself free of impediments, ‘is the barrier between something like myself and that,’ stabbing at the air before him. ‘A restlessness I could never trust, or even accept, and which, as a result, I filled with pictures. Well, principally pictures,’ with a laugh. ‘Anything, in other words, which proved, if in one sense only, to be static. A religious convocation, don’t you think? Looking for steadfastness, certainty, and so on. Pictures, of course,’ he went on, ‘invariably of a reflective nature. None of your Nicholsons. Ilse’s idea. The Tissot I like. More painter than illustrator, the damned English disease. As for the rest,’ waving his arm before him. ‘A space between being here and being there,’ adjusting his trilby to a more rakish angle, a sudden alacrity evident in his movements ever since he had risen from his chair in the house, ‘which, a religious aspiration, you’ll think, I’ll be glad to be rid of. The same goes, I assume, for you. Weren’t you foreclosing on that space when you leapt at the line? Or, rather, in your text, the leap was provided for you. In the thrust at the line. As it turned out, a premature expectation. This allegiance, Matt, to a space that doesn’t exist. That indifference I’ll be glad to be rid of. A nightmare, don’t you think? You, of course,’ he glanced across, ‘have your wonderful children. And their children. I’ve only got the dog,’ calling, ‘Jefferson! Jefferson!’ bringing it to heel, the animal, for a moment, followed by a bigger dog, trotting behind. ‘Your journalism, too. We mustn’t forget that. A determination, in your case, to tear the space apart and fill it with something, anything, irrespective of the cost.’