‘Poor fellow.’ Viklund shrugged, glancing away.

  ‘Naturally, later, I set all this aside for fear of Charlotte getting to hear of it. Finally, however, I told her. It, and much else, much later, part of the reason for our break-up. Her break-up. I think I’d have gone on with the marriage if it had been left to me. A pretty damn silly thing to say. What I mean,’ he faltered again, ‘it was she who left though it was I who left the house.’

  ‘She’s happily remarried, however,’ Viklund said, dismissingly, this subject, for several years, having rarely come up. At the time, to Viklund, he had reported the divorce as little more than a formality.

  ‘She feels she’s done the right thing. Is that happiness? I wonder. As for Taylor, he was a very involving student. I recognised some of my own aspirations, not in him, but in his facility. To some degree I rather envied him, yet, at the same time, out of guilt as much as admiration, wished the best for him. I certainly did my best by him. He talked of painting, particularly Florentine painting, as if he were engaged in it himself, not reporting or interpreting it. Yet, despite that, perhaps even because of it, he lacked any kind of distinction in his own work. Rather like Pemberton, but without the flair. Looking back, rather than forward. Unlike his wife. Her touch of originality unmistakable. Only a touch, however. Nothing substantial.’

  ‘Even then,’ Viklund said, ‘enough to turn him against her.’

  ‘Evidently she gave up because of him. Seeing how her work undermined him. That, of course,’ he went on, ‘and the children. Most of the talented Drayburgh women gave up once they had children.’

  ‘Probably applies no longer,’ Viklund said, his tone still dismissive. ‘Though it must have made it all the worse, in their case, a husband endeavouring unsuccessfully to do what his wife did with ease. And which, the worst rub of all, she abandons in his favour.’

  They’d left the principal path and, aimlessly, it seemed, crossed the area of grass to the left, following the dog, which had run off in that direction. Walking on, they came to the top of the embankment looking on to the zoo, pausing to gaze over at the concrete terraces of the bear enclosure and, directly in front of them, the more recent structure of the elephant house. Two of the animals were being sprayed by an attendant with a hose, the view partly obscured by trees. Viklund, abstracted, seemingly distant, had paused to watch, the dog running to and fro at the foot of the embankment, searching the base of the zoo’s railing.

  ‘What Taylor was doing instinctively,’ Maddox said, inclined, after some hesitation, to pursue the subject, ‘I was doing by application, a curious image, if inverted, of his future relationship with his wife. Even then, at that stage, it warned me off. I’d rather modelled myself on your detachment. How did you describe it? Hauteur. All the while I was looking for signals that he knew me in ways more intimate than I knew him. That she’d told him, negatively, a great deal about me. She certainly knew a great deal about me. At different moments I must have told her everything. And then my final humiliation, of course, in running off. I think, even at that stage, she’d had visions of setting up as a professor’s wife.’

  ‘You’re quite preoccupied by it,’ Viklund said, again dismissively. He had taken Maddox’s arm and turned him away from the zoo and once more along the top of the embankment in the direction of his house. ‘Whereas I,’ he suddenly added, ‘am pointed a different way entirely.’ He laughed, his arm more firmly in Maddox’s. ‘Get rid of the past. I’ve no inclination to recall it. I have no wish to remember. Only,’ he went on, stressing the phrase, ‘to get rid. Nothing,’ he waved his free arm, ‘that can be remembered can be retained. Yet, at the same time, the notion of cessation is unacceptable. I’d like to be remembered even if I have a wish not to remember. The same, I suspect, is true for you. The decline, amounting to the disappearance, of what we know as sensibility. The capacity to reflect, assimilate, conclude. A childish perception, for sure, but one which gives me no rest. I resent the cessation of awareness. Put it as simply as that. As if we’ve been put in a packet which, after a certain amount of time, has to be disposed of, contents and all. Why the contents? Surely they could, and should be preserved. Otherwise we’re reduced to assuming that everything we’ve judged estimable in life has little or no validity at all. Childish, as I say, to wish to retain, but compulsive. If we are meant to die it’s gratuitous to be sustained by a desire to live!’

  So Viklund, Maddox reflected, had achieved neither resignation nor acceptance: his identification with the finest elements in his own life had rendered him incapable of letting them go. It was as if his friend and former mentor envied him the involuntary nature of his experience on the tube station platform – an event which, outside the family, had been reported (to Devonshire, Donaldson and others) as an ‘accident’, a misrepresentation he wasn’t sure he’d got away with. Surely everyone, by now, knew precisely what had happened, suspicion emboldened into fact. Reminded of the incident – principally by the direction of Viklund’s thoughts – he recalled, vividly, how compulsion to do one thing had been met by an equally, if not more powerful inhibiting force: caught between two such conflicting elements, it was as if he were frozen – had been frozen – in mid-flight, flung forward and back at precisely the same moment, self-restraint, self-resistance, a death-in-life posture insecurely secured.

  ‘All this, I assume, is old-fashioned.’ Viklund was indicating the zoo – the chatter, the cries and screeches of animals and birds in the hidden enclosures – they passing its outer limits on their left. ‘Fastening up animals a reflection, I assume, of what we do with ourselves, playing safe with something that shouldn’t be confined. This appetite to contain and define amounts, does it not? to a recognition, unacknowledged, for the most part, that everything comes to an end, as plain an observation as remarking it must therefore have a beginning. From what, however? To what effect?’

  It was the zoo, Maddox reflected, which absorbed both of them, the cries and screeches, the occasional movement of figures between the enclosures, even the smell, coming to them on the southerly breeze. Was it this spot to which Viklund had intended to proceed since their entering the park? Even the dog, he noticed, was subdued, its scurrying to and fro at an end, and was walking beside Viklund, its tail lowered, occasionally glancing up as if questioning, silently, the direction in which they were going. Was it this Viklund was intending to point out, the confinement of both their lives, his, Maddox’s especially, in something of a self-constructed prison, the ‘envelope’ of the body one thing, the ‘cage’ of the mind another, the construct of circumstance a third? ‘Beware where you go after your near death,’ he might have been saying. ‘Beware, too, where you go with Taylor. If art is to be – has been – abandoned take care what you put in its place: promiscuity, distraction, self-enquiry. None of these will be enough.’ In which case, he reflected, what was Viklund suggesting? The animal and bird cries, which had appeared to bemuse his friend, were beginning to alarm Maddox himself. He was glad to respond to Viklund’s suggestion they move on: the paroxysmal screeches paralleled, in a curious way, the wave-like consistency of his anxiety attacks (a recent feature of his illness). Here they were, reneging, to some extent, on Viklund’s work, and, by inference, on his own – as casually, as rakishly, even, as his friend had set his trilby on his head, as if to defy his age and, even, his appeal to women: a dandy, a macaroon, not all that different from his uncle Joseph.

  ‘Things we appreciate are, by definition, there to be discarded,’ Viklund said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘Discounting everything seemingly an irresistible urge at this age, not necessarily, of course, at yours. Getting rid of it all,’ he swung his free arm again, his hand clutching the dog’s leash, ‘has a positive attraction, not least because everything that has gone before has deceived us as to its significance. There’s something intractable in nature, it appears at first, only for us to discover there isn’t. Extinction alone guaranteed. Everything in the process of dissolution. Quite right we don’t acknowledge it at the time. Recognition at such a moment would require a response and, inevitably, should recognition have occurred, it would not be positive.’

  ‘Or provoke us,’ Maddox said, ‘to appreciate the moment more.’

  ‘Persuading us to cling on tightly!’ Viklund laughed – a barking sound – the dog looking up, startled, as if it had suddenly been called. ‘Take our house on Crown lease. I’ve assigned that to Ilse. Yesterday I realised my last will and testament was thirty years old, and the one before that I made at the end of the war. On my father’s advice, he not, at the time, having long to live and I, I assumed, as one should at that age, destined to live for ever. Well, that episode, as you can see, is at an end. Which brings me back to yesterday. In a wholly nominal way, I’m broke, having handed over everything to her. If she wishes she could push me into the street. All I’d have left is Jefferson. And I can’t be sure of him. He responds to me more than he does to her, though she’s the original owner. It was her idea to get him,’ glancing down at the dog, still reluctant, it seemed, to go in the direction they were proceeding, trotting by his side as if waiting a contrary instruction. ‘I’ve had no corresponding desire to yours, to bring my life to an end, but, inevitably, at this stage, I foresee the possibility of doing so. Is inertia sufficient to hold one back? Should we exercise our option to pre-empt? Are we little, if nothing more than a neurological function, triggered and controlled by chemicals which, fortuitously or otherwise, may or may not be there? Are we merely a mutation which, by repetition, has acquired a “spetial” authenticity? An authenticity which, because of its novelty, we go on so much about? A difficult thing to let go. You’ll know from your earlier interest in cars,’ the barking sound a vibration passing now into Maddox’s arm. ‘It’s the preemption I’m inclined to go on about. Its voluntary or involuntary nature. Is freewill another neurological function, aimless, artless, misleading, imprecise? These questions! You see why I had to get out of the house. To sit in there and think at all is becoming, for me, impossible. The room, particularly that room, and those paintings, with their inference – arrogance, even, in light of their quality – they’ll live on even if, or when, we don’t, are an imposition. After a certain age. My age, for instance. I’ve been, I’ve concluded, in that respect, imposed upon too long. Either they go or I do! Do you get that feeling? At a certain stage you start to say goodbye. No sooner introduced to life than we endeavour to secure it. No sooner secure than we’re obliged to let go. It lives us. After that point I’m not at all sure what we are supposed to do.’

  ‘A welcome challenge, in that case,’ Maddox said, angling his arm to facilitate Viklund retaining his grip on it. ‘After all, everything we do now we can be pretty damn sure is something we won’t do again. I’m glad I came to see you. It’s loosened everything up. Perhaps we have more in common than we thought.’

  Perhaps, he reflected, Viklund was knowingly ‘loosening’ him up (characteristically, if obscurely, another favour). Alternately, too, came the thought that his friend might have wanted him, Maddox, to do his dying for him: to stand between him and death as art had stood in before – an art which no longer provided a defence, that short cut to life which, ironically, meant more than life itself: an ignominious entity known as ‘Maddox’, a representative – an active and (presently) ongoing representative of a process known as ‘dying’, life, the absence of, in motion: someone known to him, if not affectionately attached: someone he could count on, someone he could trust (someone who had had a foretaste of the very thing) – no longer, death, an advance into ‘nothing’, but into ‘something’ (associated profoundly with his friend): would Maddox do the trick, perform the exercise, before he, Viklund, was obliged to do it himself, life, with all its accoutrements (children included, in Maddox’s case) voluntarily thrown aside?

  All he was confronted with, so far, however, was a figure pitched irresolutely towards a tube train line, waiting – involuntarily or otherwise – to be saved, salvation as procurable, at that instant, as freedom would be for the animals and the birds should the walls of their enclosures fall down. He, Maddox, had stepped out (had been hurled) from his enclosure – into what? A misalliance with someone whose nature, whose motives, even, were growing increasingly elusive: the longer he observed them the more perplexing they became: life was there to be lived as opposed to a life that was there to be lost.

  ‘Let’s sit down.’ They had come to a fountain marking the convergence of several footpaths, the paths themselves laid out, at their conjunction, in a curvilinear pattern, benches arranged asymmetrically on either side. The sun was out, the air, despite the southerly breeze, warm, if not warmer than when they had set out.

  Viklund undid the buttons of his overcoat, freeing his figure, freeing his legs, the dog, reassured by the sudden lack of movement, taking its place beneath the bench. Some distance away, beyond the irregularly sited trees, the spires of the Danish Church were visible: conceivably, because of their proximity and visibility, Viklund had chosen this place to sit, a feeling, in the ease with which he reclined, that he had sat here on not innumerable occasions before. He had closed his eyes, his head, the remarkable boulder-like protrusion above the now loosened collar of his overcoat, thrown back, an aspiration, a specific desire, Maddox suspected, passing through his companion’s mind: the furrowing of the brows, the tightening of his mouth.

  Conversely, he might have been in pain, their walking, previously, a distraction from it. Reluctant to disturb him, Maddox merely moved his position on the bench.

  ‘I like it here,’ Viklund added suddenly and, reverting to their previous conversation, went on, ‘Like being requested, on pain of death, to solve a problem when the significant integers have been deliberately, we can only assume, withheld. Commissioned, on the one hand, prevented, on the other. The problem in a nut shell.’ Opening his eyes, examining the scene before them down the length of his nose, he suddenly announced, ‘To come to the point, after all this prevarication, I have two pills.’ He paused. ‘Of an anonymous colour. In a box where they have been for a very long time. If, for instance, my medical condition were to become irreversible, I could, within three or four minutes, taking either one, be gone from the scene. Similarly, Ilse, who doesn’t presently know of their existence, if we took one each. I used, occasionally, when younger and their use appeared hypothetical, to take them out of the box and examine them. They even came with a putty-like substance, with which, in order to secrete them, you could attach them to the inside of the mouth. I got them during the war. From a fellow who had several. I assume they haven’t lost their potency. The trouble is, I could only find out by using them. Not a good idea if they didn’t work. On the other hand, assuming they do, they provide what, paradoxically, might be called a life-line. A lift from this life into something which, by inference, might be better. The older one gets, curiously, the less reason I feel I have had to use them. A comfort knowing they are there. But also a threat, even a challenge. Such tiny little things, and yet such power. A world of mystery, both what they do and how they do it. The proximity to something definitive and small, a convenience almost, promotes a peculiar feeling. Abstract, in one sense. And yet not quite.’

  Having lowered his head, he glanced at Maddox who, half angled towards him while he spoke, had been examining his expression. ‘Less messy than your method. At least, I assume so. The fellow who gave them to me said he had witnessed their use – he was in the Resistance – and they had been, without exception, effective. I recall him saying that, curiously, those who were most reluctant to use them were the ones who kept them on their person. Spontaneity, not knowing, less than seconds before, what will happen. Something similar, I discovered, in my case. Now, of course …’ He glanced towards the church. ‘Odd thing to talk about. Taylor, I suppose. Would you have imagined, as little as ten years ago, for instance, we’d be sitting here, discussing this? Decline for men, I’m told, as opposed to women, comes with a rush. Fair, one moment, something else the next. What do you think? Do you find all this intrusive?’

  ‘Helpful,’ Maddox said, yet didn’t know why. Viklund, for some reason, was laying himself open to being examined, probed, a feeling that he no longer had anything to lose dominating his manner. On the other hand, he was also conscious of his friend looking to him to provide a suitable response to a question neither of them, as yet, had raised, as if each of them were circling the unmentioned subject, casting glances at it, at one another, but referring exclusively to other things, death, as a subject, a mere distraction.

  ‘Art, taste, determined by a neural condition, the differences between us,’ Viklund went on, ‘so slight that, increasingly, as our resilience runs out, they become indistinguishable. The dilution of the species by repetition, to the point of irrelevance, if not excrescence.’ He smiled. ‘Is that,’ he concluded, ‘authoritarian?’

  He was, however, no longer looking at Maddox: it was as if a fresh dimension to his life had been revealed, something concealed, previously, by erudition, by sophistry – by insight, even, one perception distracting another; as if, greedily, he were holding on to something which much in his nature, to his surprise, disinclined him to release, he, Maddox, something of a challenge, one which, at this point, at least, he was anxious to acknowledge. ‘Even this, even this,’ he appeared to be saying, art an exercise synonymous with confinement, reduction, removal; synonymous, that is, with displacement, even the highest, even the best: the superlative, the exemplary, the revelatory: all this, he appeared to be saying, had misled him (to its true intent), an entropic misadventure, an entropic exercise, decay – disintegration – displaced by something worse.

  Maddox was tempted to shout: to get to his feet, to cup his hands to his mouth, to scream, as if a spirit of immeasurable proportions, having seized him, was about to be released. Yet, sitting there, all he was governed by, exclusively, was fear; an exclamatory impulse to ask for reassurance – wondering, in that instant, if he were indeed regressing; that, rather than moving on – the sensation of release – his medication, his treatment as a whole, even Simone, were progressing his decline.