Wondering, too, if Viklund’s presence, his responses, weren’t doing the same, a curious, vascular sensation, located in the upper half of his body yet governed by his brain, his sense, his sensibility, as if, once again, he were feeling the vibration of the descending then exploding bomb, the indifference of its flight, the indifference of its damage, reducing his sense of exclusivity to nothing, at the centre of everything (in the region of his heart) an otherwise indiscernible and inexpressible fear of which the waves of anxiety he was feeling were merely the slightest reflection.

  And yet, he didn’t wish to leave: he no longer knew what he wanted from Viklund, nor what Viklund, any longer, wanted from him, other than attendance (in itself, no mean demand), each exposing a wound to the other, a vulnerability neither knew, even at this late stage, how to cope with, either within themselves or in relation to each other.

  Maybe, vis-à-vis the Danish Church, Viklund was moving back to an evaluation of himself (a continuing reference) which might well have come to him first in the Capella Scrovegni in Padua, the levering open of a door to something so serene, so implacable, so delicate, so robust and complete, that no other feeling, spiritual or otherwise, not even love for his wife, had ever surpassed it. It was, after all, the ‘anoetic indifference’ of death, as he had once described it, in reference to Giotto, that preoccupied him now – preoccupied him now to the exclusion of everything else, a soullessness which neither love nor constancy, nor faith, nor belief, could arrest or distract: nothing to note but disappearance, excision, darkness. Blank.

  ‘Shall we walk?’ After sitting for some time in silence, Viklund rose. As if waiting precisely for this signal, its own thought processes having arrived at the same conclusion, the dog rose, too, and Viklund, stooping, reminded of its presence, stroked its head, the first gesture of affection he had shown the animal since setting out.

  ‘Back to the ranch,’ he added, thrusting his arm in Maddox’s again: whatever he had hoped to achieve by their walk had either been realised or abandoned.

  ‘Indifference a difficult thing to grasp when difference, seemingly, is what it’s all about. How to discard everything we might have saved. All we certainly treasured. Not greedily. Dispassionately. Lovingly. Much of which has been thrust on us. Urged on us, even, as a gesture of faith, constantly on the lookout for what has justified that faith in the first place,’ Maddox, as Viklund spoke in this curious manner, awkwardly matching his stride to that of the other man, so that they walked at a pace scarcely brisker than a shuffle. ‘Taking on board the injunction to live then obliged to pitch it back again. What do you think? A post-mortem on your case would suggest you had everything to live for. “No excision necessary”, the verdict of the court.’

  He thrust his arm deeper into the crook of Maddox’s, squeezing his lower arm against his side, Maddox reminded again how thin and frail he was. It wasn’t, he reflected, sympathy or understanding he wanted from Viklund but clarity of mind – from someone, he realised, whose own condition gave him cause for alarm: Viklund was grappling with something he, Maddox, had only glimpsed, a fear not so much of dying as of a closing-down of sensibility, of consciousness itself.

  ‘Since everything is appropriate to its circumstances, if not, it ceases to exist, what is this appropriate to, I wonder?’ Viklund added, his gaze moving along the façade of the Nash terraces towards his house, its presence, at the moment, obscured by trees. ‘Misery, confusion – confusion, certainly – terror, in your case, appear to be the appropriate reactions. To what? Everything round here? Is there something we’ve missed which drives us to these conclusions? If not, where does the incongruity lie? In Taylor? In the circumstances in which we live? Are both of you, to that extent, neural aberrations? Am I?’

  Was this, then, what Viklund was requesting? Was he, at this stage, ‘consistent with his circumstances’? Or was something significant missing? Maybe it was Taylor he had wished to talk about, pre-empting any reaction in Maddox which might have resulted from their meeting. Had they both, he and Viklund, gone beyond the ‘appropriate’: were they now on a descending scale – into the inappropriate – having previously convinced themselves – been assured by others, even – they were safely on a scale ascending? Were they being, in one of Simone’s phrases, describing, his current state of mind, ‘plucked down’ (the corollary, presumably, of being fucked up)? ‘Nothing lasts for ever,’ another of her paradigms, ‘eternity, in that case,’ she had concluded, ‘out of the question.’ Nothing, similarly, went on for good, ‘Time,’ in that case, too,’ she’d further concluded, ‘a moral attribute,’ life appropriate to circumstance an ambivalence: the impulse to leap at the line united him with what was everlasting. Was he, in short, living his own conversion?

  ‘Facing up to death amounts to facing down life, don’t you think?’ Viklund went on. ‘Eradication of life, wouldn’t you say, was our overall business? Only at this point does it become apparent,’ gesturing at the park ahead, as if, oddly, to indicate himself. ‘Consistency, now the veil is down, with what in reality is all around. Quite a conclusion. How are we to separate, now we’ve established this link between us, this supernormal connection?’

  Was this the last he was to see of Viklund, his mentor, friend and colleague? Was this the preamble to his taking out his box and testing the efficacy of one of the pills (conceivably offering the other, to be taken then or later, to Ilse)? Or, like his absurd lunge at the line, would he only discover he was back in the circumstances, if not worse, in which he had started? Were the circumstances appropriate to his action, his action to its circumstances? Was affluence, of the sort Viklund enjoyed, not the antithesis but the progenitor of morbidity – poverty, ill-health, insecurity, like art, merely distractions (death visiting, in short, less destructively)? Was Viklund, like himself, locked into a logic which, once introduced, sustained its own momentum, one initiated, in their case, by their introduction to art – anterior time anteriorly extended: a momentum governed by a dynamic which, they were alarmed to discover, having been persuaded otherwise, came, in this instance, exclusively from themselves?

  Detaching his arm from Maddox’s as they reached the gate leading, across the road, to his house, Viklund called the dog and re-attached the leash to its collar, the animal seemingly reconciled to their return. It, too, Maddox reflected, might have been thinking: its bright eyes, its wagging tail, its demonstrations of affection, loyalty, gratitude, Viklund, too, suddenly energised, in a not dissimilar manner, his face flushed, looking up at the windows of the house with a startled, enquiring, engaged expression, as if seeing it for the first time: the tall windows at the side, fronting a strip of garden, the windows higher up – coming finally to those of his study, overlooking the park, on the top floor, a look of surprise which faded to one of disaffection: this I have acquired, this I dispose of.

  Replacing his arm in Maddox’s, as if whatever had passed between them was now permanently secured, the dog’s leash in the other, they crossed the road.

  ‘We must do this more often, weather permitting,’ he said. ‘Now we are both free. A companionable experience, much passing between us, even if, particularly when, we say nothing at all!’ the barking, ‘Hah!’ then ‘Hah!’ again. ‘I don’t recall our having that before. I appreciate it. Immensely. Expediency on top of us, so to speak, decline, if not extinction, inextricably bound up, let us hope, with renewal. In decline, shall we say, we renew? Nature’s law!’

  He was smiling, the dog, associating a return to the house perhaps with food, now tugging at the leash. ‘A really jolly walk,’ he said to Ilse who met them in the hall. ‘Jefferson would have preferred it to have been more active. But then, we can’t all have what we want, and even he is getting old. Another day, another walk,’ he added, indicating the girl who had appeared from the kitchen below. ‘Loreen can take him on the next one.’

  ‘I should be getting back,’ Maddox said to Ilse’s invitation to stay to lunch. ‘I’ve enjoyed the morning as much as Jefferson,’ he added, with a laugh.

  ‘But you must stay to lunch,’ she said. ‘Dan will be so disappointed at you leaving.’

  ‘Don’t pester him,’ Viklund said. ‘He’ll come another day, I haven’t a doubt,’ returning with Maddox to the door where, shaking his hand, he added, ‘Come any time. I’m almost invariably in. Give me a ring before you leave. Make sure I’m still alive,’ winking, Ilse, her hands clenched together, smiling behind.

  As he walked back along the front of the Nash terraces he endured the curious sensation that Viklund was walking beside him, even to the extent of feeling the pressure of his arm inside his own, the next moment talking aloud, ‘Nothing is arrested, nothing is still, another of Simone’s aphorisms,’ adding, formally, a figure ahead turning at the sound of his voice, ‘I await my execution with equanimity,’ recalling Simone’s enquiry when hearing this phrase, facetiously presented, ‘Why do you call it execution?’, he describing the image of a crowded room, inclined to recur not infrequently in his dreams, at the door of which, at irregular intervals, a figure appeared, beckoned, and led one of the occupants out, the numbers declining, one by one, until, finally, having been distracted by the antics around him, as, indeed, had everyone else, there was only himself, the empty door, the imminently expected figure, a feeling of helplessness conjoined with apprehension, heightening the terror which he associated with the imagined physical sensation of being consumed by fire.

  This was the illness which brought him awake each morning, an anxiety, the source of which he identified in everything around – he, however, he reminded himself, descending Parkway at the time, the vehicles in the road going in the same direction, the houses converted on the ground floor into shops, their contents a scarcely acknowledged distraction, as if the accessibility of so much – restaurants, cafés, travel and house agents: sportswear, toys, pets, paintings, books – were a reminder of all he had to lose: an implacable extension of that repertoire of fear which appeared, misleadingly, to emanate from everything which passed across his field of vision.

  A reminder, too, of all from which he was now detached, as if everything, even himself, all he had considered, tortuously, to be himself, were no longer his to dispose of; as if everything were being presented in order to be removed, the scale and intensity of this removal, an ever-quickening enterprise, the sole purpose of his senses to record, animate, quantify, respond to: recognise. ‘Everything moves,’ he reported once again, noting the sunlight now as a filtering beam flecked with dust flung up by the traffic, the deadening, indissoluble conjunction of scent and sound, ‘a part and yet apart’, he further noted, ‘a singular subtraction’, as if, having passed from the vicinity of the stuccoed royal terrace, he were once more back with that fragment of himself to which the ‘him’, divergent from the ‘self’, insensibly belonged.

  4

  The telephone woke him: a rattle, first, inside his head, the sound bursting outwards, enveloping the room, the bed, the detritus of books and papers, the files and folders, even the dust, he noticed, floating upwards in the light from the window, he crossing to the landing and into the other room, the phone by the double bed. He must have simply got back from Viklund’s, lain down and, peculiarly exhausted, fallen asleep.

  ‘I wondered if our morning’s conversation had disconcerted you,’ Viklund said after his initial introduction.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It clarified any number of things.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Has it,’ Maddox enquired, ‘disconcerted you?’

  ‘Not at all.’ A cheery note at the repetition of the phrase, ‘I felt heartened by it, as a matter of fact. Heartened,’ he repeated. ‘I was hoping that you might have had a similar reaction.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Good luck, of course, tomorrow. We might have spoken more of that,’ Maddox confused, scarcely awake, before recalling Taylor.

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll look forward to hearing, Matt. Ilse sends her love. She omitted to mention it on your leaving, she was so concerned you stayed to lunch.’

  ‘Next time,’ Maddox said.

  Replacing the phone, he was about to leave the room, rising from the double bed on the edge of which he had been sitting, when it rang again. Assuming it to be Viklund he lifted it directly and enquired, ‘Was that too abrupt? What did we forget?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Simone said. ‘What a curious thing to ask.’

  Confused for a second time, he said, ‘I’ve been talking to Dan. I thought he was calling back. He’s concerned, talking of death, his, he might have had what he’d describe as a negative effect.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I, too, was ringing to see how you are.’

  ‘I’m well,’ he said, remaining standing. ‘How did your day go?’

  ‘My day is still going,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been talking to a client who has no one in the world, she says, to love. My immediate response might have been to say, “How about yourself? As good a place to start as any.” Instead, my dear, I thought of you. I have someone to love so why do I suggest she take a grip on herself? Continually,’ she added, ‘I’m overstepping the mark. Ever since,’ pausing for a response and getting none, ‘I’ve taken up with you. I was hoping I’d find you at home. Merely to hear your voice. And here I am, making protestations which are singularly ill-received.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You can ring me any time you like.’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘I shall be waiting.’ He sat down, once more, on the edge of the bed.

  ‘How is your friend Viklund?’

  ‘Braced,’ he said. ‘Preoccupied with dying. He was looking to me, I thought, for reassurance. Not that I provided any. He usually comes up with Lucretius, who allegedly committed suicide, when he talks of nature and dying. Today not a word. Nor of Plato’s admonition against such speculation. Nor of Aurelius, who spent the whole of his life thinking of little else. Nor of Seneca, another of his favourites, who also killed himself.’

  Why was he telling her this: was this his reaction to Viklund, buried beneath the rest?

  ‘Why waste one’s life prospecting its end?’ he added, ‘is usually his bottom line. Plato invariably his chosen text. Socrates’ death …’

  He waited, puzzled by his conversation.

  ‘It sounds as if it’s cheered you,’ she said.

  ‘On reflection,’ he said, ‘it has.’

  ‘It’s odd when, for no conceivable reason, I find I’m missing you. We were only together a few hours ago.’

  ‘I’m in my recovery phase,’ he said. ‘Things, on the whole,’ he went on, ‘are looking up,’ yet all he could think of at that moment was her. She was looking up. He was looking up to her, carried along by what he, too, was beginning to call her ‘charge’: that force which carried her – carried him, whenever he was with her – from one bountiful moment to the next: he was, he concluded, relying on it entirely.

  ‘Doctor Death, as you call him, is my next client. I wonder if he’ll turn up. Last week he didn’t, but rang Mrs Beaumont to apologise and make an appointment for today. He’s in a manic state. At least,’ she paused. ‘I think he is.’

  Uncertainty was, he reflected, something new in her, specifically where her work was concerned: perhaps, he further reflected, it was why she was ringing.

  ‘I always think I should be in the house whenever he’s there,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I’m perfectly safe,’ she said. ‘He’s harmless. I haven’t a doubt. That’s been his problem. Though I shouldn’t talk about it. At least, not now.’

  ‘Why aren’t you sure he’s manic?’ he said, his unease increasing.

  ‘I have the curious feeling he’s rehearsing his symptoms. Nothing unusual, of course, in that. On the other hand,’ she paused, ‘he’s very convincing. It could be real. Yet at times I feel he’s playing a game. I usually have Mrs Beaumont in when he’s here. Today she wasn’t available.’

  ‘I’d better come up,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all.’ She was instantly dismissive. ‘I can handle these situations, Matt. After all, my dear, I’ve been doing it for years. I’d feel defeated if you should even think of it.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I think I shall.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said again, fiercely. ‘I’m quite capable of dealing with it on my own. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You know the prohibition I put on talking about my clients. Not always kept to, I know. But on this occasion I have to insist. You must allow me to make my own judgement.’

  ‘Okay.’ The bed creaked as he shifted his weight.

  ‘Was it all death and dying with Viklund?’ she said.

  ‘We talked about Taylor. I haven’t seen him for fifteen years, possibly more, and suddenly, out of the blue, I see him tomorrow. It was useful talking to Viklund. He used to come in and give lectures after his retirement, whenever I invited him, and Taylor made himself conspicuous by asking the most pertinent questions. And invariably querying the answers. Viklund was much taken up with him at the time. Whenever I invited him in, he’d say, “Will genius be there, who knows all the answers?” He became quite focused on him, and on the student who subsequently became Taylor’s wife. He gave her a prize on one occasion when he came in to judge a Sketch Club. He was quite taken by her flair.’

  ‘What’s his view of Taylor now?’ she said.

  ‘Like mine,’ he said, ‘but more faded. I knew them both much better, of course.’

  ‘Do you want to come up this evening?’ she said.