In regarding her as he set out the food he was aware of what an incredible choice both of them had made.

  On more than one occasion she had remarked that she worked from ‘instinct’ not ‘theory, or even common sense’: something, for reasons of which he wasn’t totally aware, that had not characterised her previous choice of husbands, men who, in their separate photographs, looked curiously alike, balding, each one, at the front of the head (one wearing a moustache, which, she confessed, she hadn’t ‘liked, though it played no part in our separation’): knowledgeable if not vulnerable eyes (perhaps, he reflected, they had that in common), assertive, determined, thin-lipped mouths, a suggestion they saw her as only one stage in their own advancement: prominent (dominant) noses (‘men of the world, not apart from it,’ she’d observed, he wondering if, in this respect, she were making him an exception). Not brothers, exactly, he’d remarked to himself, but an affinity of a sort, identifying their natural habitat as that of the schoolroom, conceivably a church: priests of an uncommon denomination, she either the object or the subject of their faith.

  Markers, she saw them, for her part, of the progress of her emancipation, she affectionately viewing the three of them, in retrospect, as instructors, appropriate, each of them, to each stage of her development, the first persuading her in the direction of medicine, finally analysis (a further need implied of enlightenment of a disingenuous, if not seductive nature, esoteric, mythic, unnervingly secure).

  Her study, overhead, adjacent to her bedroom, was lined with books which, other than her, at one time, omnivorous appetite for reading, had no recognisable theme in common. ‘I intended to be a biologist,’ she’d once explained, ‘but gave it up for people, mind more interesting, in that respect, than matter,’ going on to announce, ’I always felt I was born for a life different to the one I lived and could only approach it in stages. Hence the marriages, I guess,’ concluding, ‘Even now, when I’m convinced I’ve arrived at where I intended to be, I have a strong feeling I should be somewhere else,’ looking at him intently, he, at the ferocity of the look, glancing reflectively away.

  Now he merely admired the curve of her leg, the sturdiness of its support belying the slimness of the ankle, the tantalising line where the calf disappeared beneath the hem of the dress, the sway of her body as she responded to something reported at the other end, the half-twist of her waist as, still speaking, she turned to smile at him, indicating she would soon be finished, the dying finality of her voice, chilling in its severity, as she disengaged from her caller.

  Moments later she was sitting at the table, the image of expectancy as, childlike, she waited to be served.

  Having told her of his sacking (dismissal or suspension) by Devonshire – largely to pre-empt what, on other occasions, he welcomed and encouraged, her edited account of her day in the consulting-room below – she immediately responded, ‘It’ll leave you free,’ a curious reaction: he felt free, if not too free, already, ‘to do what you want. Look at the way you sweated over your article the last few times,’ to the point, she might have said, where syntactical errors crept glaringly in, he blind to most of them until, showing her the copy (a rare occurrence: he seldom took her to the galleries either, anxious to preserve the singularity of his view), she blithely, at times incredulously, pointed them out: a sure sign, she’d concluded, of the artificiality of his position (one he’d used as an indicator of his returning health). ‘Isn’t it prostitution to have a historian resorting to these tricks?’

  ‘Tricks?’

  ‘Conceits. A requirement to write something which, if informative, is there to entertain. Not normally something you’d go in for.’

  He’d waited, surprised, if not distressed by her response.

  ‘After all, you were taken on by his predecessor, who’d been there long before you, who was as old as you and who shared many of your sentiments.’

  ‘They’re not sentiments,’ he responded.

  ‘Weren’t you driven into opposition by a need to come up with something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not, after all,’ she went on, ‘his generation. He had to get rid of you sometime.’

  He watched her arrange her food in separate piles: an unconscious exercise, signalling what?

  ‘However much you dislike it,’ she said, having waited for his further response, ‘Devonshire was bound to fire you in the end. The reviews had got so negative. Okay for you. You thought what you were reviewing was negative, too. More than negative, cynical, gratuitous. Fine. But not for him. He won’t change his perceptions any more than he can change his age. However ephemeral, without something positive he can’t, presumably, sell his paper. That, we can assume, is supposed to be his job.’

  ‘It’s not his paper. Even if he likes to think so,’ he said.

  Again she reassembled her food: the delicate fingers, the delicate hands, the knife and fork manoeuvred like surgeons’ instruments, probing, exploring: opening up.

  ‘Who cares if culture goes one way and you go another? Your integrity is intact without having to advertise it every other week.’

  ‘Like Donaldson.’

  ‘A performer. An entertainer,’ she said. ‘You’re not.’

  It – life, everything: she – could go on without him; that, after all, was what filled him with despair, pain not so much at inertia, or even profusion, but irrelevance. True for everyone, he reflected, so why should he be different? Irrelevance had its own agenda, fortuity a doctrine much exercised in his youth (the world an oyster: seize your chance). Alternately, he didn’t wish to diminish what had, at the time, appeared as a miracle, watching Charlie emerge from between Charlotte’s legs, an experience he’d never subsequently come to terms with, a mystery which neither time nor later births had in any way reduced.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, dismissing it. ‘That and Viklund in one day. I’m not altogether sure what he was after, either. Everyone I know appears keen I abandon everything. Or, at least, are anxious to discourage me.’

  ‘That’s not true, either,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t take one setback as final,’ she added.

  Resourcefulness, he reflected, was her principal tool: she wasn’t a fool: the presumption inferred must be he was. ‘Wife, children, job,’ he said. ‘All I’ve got left is you.’

  ‘That’s not true, either,’ she said again.

  The food reassembled on her plate: the delicate disposition, he assumed, of her thoughts and feelings: voiced and unvoiced thoughts blended seamlessly, he unsure, in his own case, which was which. Had he told her about Donaldson or not?

  ‘You can still write. Devonshire’s proscription, or, indeed, anyone else’s, needn’t stop you. You could put it, for instance, into a book.’

  Her food having been sorted to her satisfaction, she began to eat, thoughtfully, her mind, he concluded, on other things.

  There was, he reflected, something tenuous in their relationship, not least the hold he’d imagined he’d had on it. Confident of his own reactions, he was, nevertheless, persuaded by her views not to deny so much as to amend them, something, with Charlotte, he’d rarely done. The inference was that she knew more and better, something, in his present state, he was inclined to go along with (the superstition surrounding psychoanalytical theory giving her an indisputable edge), he persuaded, if not seduced by her accounts not only of others’ feelings but, more seductively still, of her own: her need for a constant commentary on what was, or was not – the two mellifluously divided for examination – going on. ‘I like your smile,’ she’d told him on one occasion. ‘I’ve never seen anyone smile so thoughtfully. There’s a great deal behind it, not merely melancholy, that intrigues me. As if you’re inviting me into a space you’re anxious, for my sake, I might fill. I feel I’m being hauled in,’ she’d expanded, ‘at the end of a line. I know it’s going on, but, as you see, I’m not inclined to call a halt,’ smiling to confuse him.

  He felt, in any case, disinclined to talk: he wanted time to think (an inclination to withdraw, not necessarily of a pathological origin), such conclusions he might come to, not to be separated – impossible to separate – from his being with her. With her beside him – more nearly, with her holding his hand, or holding him elsewhere, he felt free to think, or do, anything, a childlike imperative he was more than reluctant to oppose: hedonism, if of a depleted nature, dominated every aspiration.

  ‘Now you have an opportunity,’ she suddenly intruded, ‘to clear the ground, move on, see what might come up when everything you’ve previously been familiar with has been discounted.’

  ‘Therapy,’ he said, ‘in another form. Down here,’ he added, indicating the table, ‘and up there,’ indicating the ceiling, its inference of her bedroom.

  ‘Where therapy ends is clearly defined,’ she said, briskly. ‘On the other hand, you could say we’re constantly renegotiating where the boundaries might be …’

  He heard her continue, or thought he did, his own reflections distracted, as they had been increasingly over the previous weeks by the studio window opposite. It represented, he concluded, something of his own condition, the function of the window to admit indirect light – for clarification, examination, expression – encumbered on the inside, its purpose thwarted, by vegetation, specifically climbing plants, placed there, deliberately, he assumed, along its lower edge.

  The relevance he was attaching to the window echoed a state of mind he associated with himself: the problems he was confronting were ones which, by definition, warranted no solution: relevance, as opposed to indifference, was one, the evidence of the soul, as distinct from the spirit, another; the purpose of his suffering, a third; the requirement (logical, feasible, extremely practical) to do away with himself an immediate and compelling fourth. He had instinctively (without thought) given himself another chance, stymied, by his failure to recognise what ‘him’ and ‘self’, combined, might, in the best of all possible worlds, add up to (the inference of self-division), otherwise disassociated partners contentiously opposed within a single frame. He was, he realised, looking to her to identify, if not what he was, what he was becoming, an ongoing process, he assumed, which had no end. All he came up with, however, was her charismatic, impenetrable, mysterious gaze, like the light reflected from a pool, obscuring rather than revealing.

  Absit omen.

  Was this the source of her fascination, not her appearance nor her manner, though they were seductive enough, but the fact that he had invested in her the means of deciphering what he could no longer decipher for himself? asking her, in effect, to gaze in through the window, ignore, if not remove the encumbrance – the self-propagating accumulation of a lifetime of neglect – and describe to him (God help him) what she saw.

  Such an analysis, if true, was unacceptable: he had his own resources (DV): it was up to him, the allegorical significance of the window opposite a distraction. No good looking to someone else to reverse a process, much of which, spontaneously or otherwise, he’d conjured up himself, not even her: addle-brained Maddox, aka Mad Ox, who had endeavoured to re-shape the sensibility of his time, disfiguring his own in the process – he now venturing to discover where the source of such an authority, if not within himself, might be, its voice, its imperative, still echoing in his brain: ‘all you have done, all you represent, all you think you are, is fit only to be discarded.’

  A sensibility founded on his earliest experience of a motorcar, isolating its beauty from its function (an instinctive exercise), returning the machine, therein, to its rightful owners, his father, his uncle, in whose recalled appearance, the latter, he recognised a foreshadowing, curiously, of both Donaldson and Viklund.

  They were sitting by the fire, the meal finished, watching the news, his arm around her, he focused not on the screen but the sheen of her stocking where it protruded from the hem of her skirt, such aesthetico-sexual sensations, associated with their relationship, something, too, he had failed to analyse, an excitation which never failed to distract him: the curve of her breast beneath the buttoned front of her dress, the shape of her hand as it enclosed his own, the two resting on his trousered knee: a conjunction of desire and reflectiveness which he had come to identify as the dominant feature of their relationship. Meanwhile, spectacularly before them, aircraft bombed, buildings (people, too, presumably) disappeared, explosions illuminated the night sky above a silhouetted city: skeletal figures passed silently before them. Finally, a dog was rescued from a hole (a reckless pursuit of a rabbit).

  Transitory events foreshadowing a transitory future.

  Later, in bed, he watched the moon through the muslin drape on her window, a three-quarter shape illuminating a patchwork of cloud passing across its surface, a lamp, a light, a governance of some sort, he listening to her breathing, nasal, then oral, then nasal again. Soon she would be snoring (so would he), a struggled, snarling, self-possessive sound (how remote they were from one another) which he scarcely associated with her at all, turning on his side to watch her strange, anonymous, unknown face, illuminated by the filtered light from the window, that of another creature drawn into the bed beside him, transposed by sleep into something oblivious, distant, disowning.

  It had been his relationship with his mother she had focused on – been focused on – in the last appointments before her declaration, the date of which they commemorated each month, anxious for the monthly count to add up to a year. Yet his mother was a non-participatory figure, as far as he recalled, in his background, no significant emotions associated with her at all (‘perhaps that was the problem’). Overall, he had liked her, her most intimate relationship in the family inevitably with her daughter, his sister Sarah, she precociously, something of a ‘mother’ herself, solicitous of her younger brothers (‘practising’, they’d described it, for when she was older; ‘I shan’t have children,’ had been her reply, ‘you two have worn me out entirely’). He’d admired his mother: her self-possession, her composure, her ability to get things done (a prefiguring of Simone, he suspected, in this respect): the tweed suits and pork pie hat she invariably wore in public, the briskness, the compactness, the absence of extremes either in her apperànce or her manner, her accounts of school life, viewed from her position as secretary, attracted him, in retrospect, immensely, not least his memories of mealtimes, particularly the ritualistic evening affair, whenever they were home together (a Mrs Tyndal coming in to clean and cook, before, during and after the war), for him, again, in retrospect, the highlight of the day, his father’s account of the day’s adventures in the showroom and garage alternating engagingly with her own, he, on these occasions (frequent, questioned interruptions, eager, flush-faced, from his brother Paul, more measured enquiries from Sarah), drawn to the conclusion he was essentially a listener, an observer: a recorder, too, keeping a diary for much of the time, considered, by the others, an affectation, if not subversive.

  In which case, with this pacific background to draw on, wherefrom his appetite for art, and a particular art, at that, something so remote from his place and time he could give no adequate account of it? Similarly, from where had he extracted, from where had arisen, a hitherto unsignalled – undiagnosed, unformalised and unsuspected – appetite not to live? in the half-light of Simone’s bedroom, holding up his hand to examine it, configurated, in that light, as if a stranger’s – not he, he reflected, lying beside Simone, or she lying beside him, but two enigmas (two problems waiting to be ‘solved’) laid unknowingly side by side.

  She stirred, her head turning towards him on the pillow, the eyes still closed, the lips parted: a position of trust, each sleeping, unnerved, beside someone they scarcely knew, someone who, in his case, had conceivably ‘lost touch’ (with everything, looking to Taylor, he presumed, absurdly, to set him ‘right’: the privilege, the authoritative task of evil). So much for sleep, and anticipation, his nerves – his hand was shaking – on edge; so much for relaxation; so much for what had taken place only moments after getting into bed, a prolonged, sustained encounter where sensuality rather than sensibility, or reflection, had played its exclusive part.

  What he hadn’t faced up to was his sectioning (something definitive, overly definitive, in his life at last), something of which he was sensationally ashamed and inclined, at first instant, to deny. Nor had he faced up to his mother’s death, an event precipitating the first, though, at the time, he’d considered it to have little, if anything, to do with it. Preceding that, of course, had been the measured decline of his previous powers – measured, that is, in the ascendancy of Charlotte, of his sons, of almost everyone he knew.

  He’d been standing on the northbound platform of Camden Town tube station, intending to walk on Hampstead Heath, when, as the train came in, he’d been seized by what, afterwards, he had described, vividly, as a giant hand. Flung towards the line, he had caught the edge of the driver’s cab and been hurled backwards across the platform. Moments later a face was gazing down, joined by others: he was raised towards the curved surface of the ceiling, the motion continuing, the ceiling, however, drawing no nearer. He resented, and was alarmed by, terrifyingly, the intrusion of others, his mind, curiously, occupied by the one speculation: has this been enough?

  Moments – days, hours – previous to that, it seemed, he had been with his mother. She was, in this recollection, lying in a bed, her face unrecognisable from the one he knew, the cheeks drawn in, the mouth, devoid of teeth, wide open.