‘I’ll leave it as it is,’ he said.

  ‘You think so?’

  The helicopter chuntered once again, an exhausted and exhausting sound. Something Devonshire said was drowned by the roar of the engine and the percussion of the rotor blades: the glass in the window vibrated more severely.

  ‘I’ll have to ask Donaldson to review “British Art”,’ Devonshire said. ‘At least he’ll give a more balanced picture.’

  ‘Balanced with what?’ he enquired, his own voice lost, he assumed, in the overhead sound, for next he heard Devonshire remarking, ‘I’m inclined, in his case, to think he can.’

  ‘He likes to screw women artists, of course, and to get pissed with the male ones. Or is it the other way around? He’ll write whatever they tell him.’

  ‘At least he writes well. By well,’ he said, ‘I mean convincingly. Your postscript, for instance, on the desultory nature of British public sculpture doesn’t resonate well, either. “An ossified honeycomb”. Montgomery, in Whitehall. Viscount Slim caricatured as “an incorrigible wanker”. “Field Marshal His Royal Highness, George, Duke of Cambridge mounted less on a horse than something extruding from his bowels”. Then music, God help us. This in a piece on art. I have someone to write on music, who certainly wouldn’t agree with your gratuitous aside. Mahler “unique in twentieth-century music, every note a false one, unless borrowed from someone else”. I think a rest from your fortnightly pieces would do us both some good.’

  ‘You’re not inclined to print it?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Am I fired?’

  He waited for Devonshire to make up his mind, or, having made it up, to decide how he might care to express himself.

  ‘We’re not a public school notice-board. I like to think,’ he went on, ‘that our arts pages carry more weight than those of any paper. In fact, I’m pretty damn well sure they do. I’m not inclined to allow them, even out of loyalty, to be fucked up.’ He paused. The helicopter, meanwhile, had retreated, like an insect, he reflected, having had its fill. ‘Let’s give it a break. Until Donaldson’s away in the summer. You could well have recovered your resilience by then.’

  ‘Resilience is not a requirement at this stage,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps it’s ageing,’ Devonshire said, safe in the limitations of his youth and apparent good health.

  Replacing the receiver, he lay on the double bed: here he and Simone slept whenever she stayed over, both of them, however, if sleeping together, inclined to spend the time at her place, ‘civilisation’ of a sort involved, ‘civility’ suggested, not least by the age of the building (eighteenth-century) and its immediate environment close to the summit of the Hampstead hill. There he could be ‘different’: there was history to commemorate, associations of a definitive nature to take into account, a past resonating with the present: Johnson, Southey, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickens: Marx, Freud – Moore, Hepworth, Mondrian: the list went on, concluding, finally, close to the crest of the hill, with Simone Leiter (her maiden name), an inheritor of a legacy which he, Matthew Maddox, marooned in the detritus at the foot of the hill, could only partake of as a visitor.

  But she: he was confused (seduced) by her completely – she who had known Bowlby, Winnicott, Ivan Illych (briefly), Laing, Esterson, Cooper, whose current friendships (he had met quite a few of those involved, immobilising himself in the process: why had she chosen him, not them?) included luminaries from the Tavistock, where she’d trained, the Analytical Forum, the prestigious Cenacle Foundation for Psychoanalysis, where she did most of her lecturing; whose entrée into equivalent American, Swiss, Austrian and Italian centres of analytical propaganda had been commented on in the press; she who, from amongst her clients, acquaintances (relatives, even), colleagues and friends, had chosen a burnt-out case, a luminary (at one time) whose luminosity had expired a little while before – not only burnt out, he reflected, but teetering (once more) on the edge – whose powers of recovery were very much in question, whose regression (to what?) was, if not imminent, certain.

  She, on the other hand, someone whose approach to him, over a series of appointments, he had seriously misjudged; who had herself been the initiating party; who had had three husbands – what faith in marriage! the remnant of a passing age – having learnt ‘a great deal from each’. What, in the process, was she learning from him; what, disregarding a tutorial role, had he in his possession, by way of appearance, intellect or reputation – by way of destiny, even, or potential, at his age, of any sort – which would draw her in his direction, someone as enigmatically self-possessed, self-sufficient as Simone?

  Each occasion he approached her house, even though he had a key, something she’d handed to him, he his to her, at the beginning of their relationship, it was with the expectation, entering the wood-panelled hall (Mrs Beaumont in the room on one side – a judge’s former wife, someone not needing the income, merely the twice- or occasionally thrice-weekly distraction – Simone in the room on the other), that he could, quite easily, peremptorily, without warning, his usefulness expired, be dismissed – a challenging note to this effect left on the table in the hall or even with Mrs Beaumont, suggesting she had, as expected, changed her mind, with an afterthought, only, he might leave his key, a saucer or a small receptacle provided (she much given, he recalled, to collecting miniature, artfully constructed, ingeniously decorated wooden boxes (along with her prints), a relevance here though of what, as with everything else, he couldn’t be sure).

  This was his regressive state, referred to, bluntly, by Devonshire, the one, along with other manifestations of arrested development, that he brought with him whenever he mounted the indented stone steps from Heath Street to his beloved’s abode (loft, refuge, sanctuary). Women, as a species, eluded him – increasingly so whenever he reflected on what had happened to his wife, she a woman alone, at the time, as she’d frequently pointed out, in a house of men, not hesitating, once three of them had gone, to start thinking of and for herself, coming to the conclusion that, other than their children, there was, bearing Maddox’s infidelities, if invariably of a trivial nature, in mind, little if anything any longer to bind them together: a menopausal conclusion which had finally taken her, by tortuous routes, into the arms of the peripatetic Gerry, who had borne her along, had carried her along, as lightly as a breeze. ‘Why not?’ had been her response, salvation, of a sort, for her, if of an incredulous nature, something of the reverse for Maddox, the Mad Ox epithet restored as, bereft suddenly of wife and children, and a shared home, he spun around not quite knowing where or who or why he was, nor what it was he intended, or had intended to do.

  She, Charlotte, had, in the process, grown opaque, having previously been nothing but transparent – transparency, in his mind, associated with domesticity, their mutual absorption in it. Had their lives really been reduced to a preoccupation with food, clothing, accommodation, holidays, finance? had they really not noticed one another on either side of the marital bed, meeting in the middle in occasional, mannered, repetitive embraces, getting up each morning like a pair of mechanics totally aborbed in the outrageous demands of the machine they managed? A sense of wonderment at her advancement – a postgraduate degree in her middle fifties – coincided with the unmistakable signs of his own decline, an abyss of obscurity opening before him, one into which, if he wasn’t mistaken, he had now descended (been hurled – lowered, certainly, without his permission) – so dark, so deep, so sudden its first appearance, associated with fears, the intensity and scale of which he could only liken to his childhood experience of sitting under an audibly descending bomb (which could descend no further, seemingly, other than into him), imagining, as he did so, the totality of extinction; a feeling, then, that he was lost for ever, that everything was lost for ever, that there was, no longer, anywhere to go – a feeling which, less than sixty years later, diverted, in the interval, by art – belief, fidelity, something – had returned and, in returning, dramatically, sensationally increased.

  While he was descending into his self-designated pit, Charlotte was climbing – higher and higher: effortlessly, with, so it seemed, invisible wings: a female precocity, a female facility, a female felicity: a return to academe (a study of Sanskrit, yet another seminal source), and then, further released, ascending higher, energised by her elevation, her abandonment of him in favour of the twice-married Gerry (‘three times for luck, Matt, what d’you think?’ he at the announcement of their intention as he genially took over), who had, on his own confession, ‘never read a book’ since taking his engineering degree – though secretly addicted, Maddox had subsequently discovered, to children’s stories: Richmal Crompton, W. E. Johns, Romany, several volumes of which Charlotte had found beneath his bed (before their marriage), confiding the discovery to Maddox as a source, but one of many, of his endearing, irresistible charm.

  In no time at all, after their marriage, she was working in his office; shortly after that she had a department of her own, ‘handling people’, according to Gerry, her principal if hitherto unrecognised talent, ‘although,’ he’d gone on, ‘she handled you and the kids in a commendable fashion: if we’d looked more closely we might have known,’ sharing Gerry’s peripatetic course, no sooner installed in one IT company than headhunted for another, his unstressed, juvenile appeal the source, seemingly, of his entrepreneurial skill, ‘first a curiosity, then a need’ his self-proclaimed approach to exploiting what he referred to, phonetically, as ‘ticknology’.

  Plus: a dulled, postdated attempt to acknowledge Maddox’s presence in his current wife’s former life (‘most men my age pick a bird twenty years younger: I picked an eagle, Matt, in full flight’) by mentioning, at intervals, whenever they met, the art gallery he’d visited in Tel Aviv, Houston or Hong Kong, ‘good old Charley!’ his invariable identification of the source of what he called his ‘late development’: ‘she’s taught me a lot of new habits, and not only in bed. Know what’s the first place I ask for when I hit a new town? The picture gallery. Hell, I’ve even bought one or two. You must come round, Matt, and tell me, tell us, what you think,’ Maddox, so far, no subsequent invitation having arrived, spared this final, horrific humiliation. ‘We’ve got to take care of the mentally ill. No stigma to me, I can tell you, at all. Hell, I’ve seen executives go down like ninepins in this shit-arsed world we live in. Know what I do? Take care of the fucking creeps. No one else gives a fuck. We only live once. Let’s keep us alive!’

  Wifeless, childless, careerless, ‘good old Matt’ listened to ‘good old Gerry’ extolling ‘good old Charley’s’ progress through the ranks of the ‘born again’, wondering when, or if, his second birth might be forthcoming, something close to dementia, so far, the only sign of change – other, that is, than the arrival of Simone, the ultimately, to him, unknowable presence who dominated his life to the exclusion, virtually, of everything else. His wife – his former wife – luxuriated, meanwhile, in the provisions of her new existence: severely ‘pruned’ by the previous exigencies of domestic life, she was blossoming in her maturity: in his maturity: hadn’t he, after all, done some of the pruning: wasn’t he, over and beyond Gerry’s acknowledgement, responsible for some of the late fruition? Plus, of course, the impression she and Gerry created of a couple who had been endearingly, successfully, unmorbidly married to one another throughout their adult lives, apophthegms, ‘what’s life for if not to be lived?’ thrust magnanimously in Maddox’s direction – in much the same fashion, he recalled, that Simone had been suggested as a ‘suitable helper’.

  He, Maddox, Mad Ox, Oxey, whatever appellation he went under, was ‘finished’ – ‘completed’, had come to the end of the track. It didn’t need Devonshire, juvenility again, to remind him, nor Charley, to suggest, to the contrary, he was going through a ‘potentially positive’ phase. The finished article was before him now: his morning (flinching) gaze into the mirror revealed, after almost seventy years, the features of a stranger: the eyes that looked out were, from within, the eyes of his youth, the eyes that gazed back were those of a wizened creature: whose the terror, who the witness to an otherwise unnameable horror? whose the look of confusion, disbelief, incredulity: doubt? As Charley acquired increasing faith in her destiny, her former husband was, deservedly, it seemed, losing sight of his: behind everything, he concluded, a reservoir of fear, restrained by what he could only describe as a wall of distraction (art as serviceable in this respect as any). The wall, or part of it, in his case, had collapsed: all who failed to recognise ‘life’ as a distraction were forever on the point of being engulfed. He could feel the ‘force’ building up behind his back (towering above him, about to descend), resistant to examination, resistant to scrutiny, except at its own discretion: resistant, even, in his case, until recently, to acknowledgement. How could Simone, at that point, step away and, instead of consultation, exploration, explanation, suggest an involvement which abandoned, if not precluded analysis in favour of demonstration? In the presence of a force he couldn’t pretend to understand, except as a denial of life as he knew it, another reality was about to impose itself, greater if not infinitely greater than that perceived by the senses, a reality inclined to erupt – predisposed to erupt – out of ‘nowhere’, a mystical empire invoked tokenly by some, the majority of whom, as far as he was aware, were either insane or dead.

  He was intrigued by small things (willingly distracted: a learner, in this field, anxious to begin): in the house, without his jacket, he invariably wore a track-suit top, a present from one of his sons, a reference to a sporting past, if only at school, and the inference he might take exercise. Occasionally he would find himself with one sleeve pulled up, the other down, always, he noticed, the left sleeve up, as if about to undertake a physical if not a menial task; yet, he reminded himself, he was right-handed: his left hand, he recalled, was the one more frequently in use in his love-making with Simone. Was this what, vocationally – unconsciously, empirically, even – he was now about: structuring his life to an activity which had preoccupied him in his youth, and which, if only with difficulty, absorbed him at present? Was this one further absurdity of old age, on the threshold of which he stood (lingering, understandably hesitant, reluctant to go in)?

  He was still ‘young’: Simone frequently reminded him – encouraged him – not indisposed to discovering evidence of ‘youthfulness’ in herself. What, otherwise, was the purpose of her make-up, her choice of clothes, the ‘difficult’ problem she had, professionally, of ‘what to do with her legs’: short skirts, medium skirts, long skirts, or trousers? The drawn-up sleeve, as a consequence, troubled him, as did his recent habit of talking aloud, invariably, he assumed, to consolidate a thought, or feeling, reassuring himself that ‘it’ and ‘he’ were there, identifying his behaviour, however, as a further measure of decline: ‘Thus, and no further: I must put a stop to this,’ only to discover his self-admonition had been spoken aloud.

  He thought he might ring Simone, less to speak to her directly (she’d be busy) but merely, if Mrs Beaumont weren’t in for the day, to hear the sound of her recorded voice: its authority, its formality, its composure, its self-possession, a quality which, even now, rarely failed to ignite him. He could tell her he’d been fired, by a juvenile. Other than Devonshire and Donaldson knowing, he felt obliged to tell someone, dismissal, to this degree, brought under his own control: ignominy, defeat. On the other hand, no more contentious reviews, the contentiousness of which invariably continued in subsequent weeks’ correspondence columns, Maddox’s latest offering echoing down the pages, connecting him less with a world he understood than with something he was now consciously fleeing from. Why be ‘real’? Hadn’t he done enough to be something else entirely? Let it slip away. Let everything slip away. He was speaking aloud. ‘I’ve moved on to, I am moving on to, other (higher) things – otherwise, uppermost in your (and Devonshire’s) mind today the lining of a budgerigar’s cage tomorrow.’

  Yet what were these ‘higher things’? Something responded to, presumably, through the senses, they themselves, however, comprising an increasingly moribund system, yet sufficiently alert to register its own decline: nature’s analgesic, a step-by-step submission to extinction, relief achieved, ironically, by an awareness of the deterioration it was increasingly less able to observe. Here he was, not unlike an athlete turning up, in old age, for a race he might have run in his twenties (did run in his twenties, thirties, ever onwards), primed to expectancy, to achievement, confident of the outcome despite his rivals’ youth: Devonshire, Donaldson, the latter someone he had taught, for God’s sake (almost everything he knew), at the Drayburgh, ambitious (like Taylor) but (unlike Taylor) garrulous to the point of inanity, accommodating his lack of talent by transferring his garrulity to the printed page, he, Maddox, ironically, the first, if not the only one, to point him in this direction. Images of supersession in both an ascending and descending scale had dominated his mind since Devonshire’s call. If he were to be tortured in this way had he acquired, or re-acquired, sufficient resilience to absorb the perversities involved?

  A Roman sense of abnegation, devoid of religiosity, he couldn’t subscribe to (it would have to come upon him, like everything else at present, unawares). Understanding which came from knowledge and, conversely, knowledge which came from understanding, had, presumably, passed him by. Ever since the incident on the tube station platform he had reverted to a view of reality governed by two diametrically opposing forces, one that presumably went on for ever, and that could be perceived as such in a transcendental form – first glimpsed in services experienced as a child and a youth, following his parents’ instruction, in St Albans Cathedral and the Quinians school chapel, but most potently – overwhelmingly – in the Arena Chapel murals (‘like witnessing a birth’) a sensual, galvanic, protean force – and a corresponding protean presence implicit in the impulse, hitherto unregarded, to take his own life, its scenario writ large in a universe where species devoured species, galaxies galaxies, in an aimless appetite to survive.