She was sucking at the air, the suction of her lungs producing a gurgling sound inside her throat.

  A cylinder had been positioned by her neck, a tube, running from it, disappearing inside the collar of her nightdress.

  A shrivelled, cadaverous creature whom he was willing to die.

  Paul, his brother, and Sarah had been and gone, they work and other responsibilities to respond to, he sitting there until he could bear the waiting no longer, getting up, crossing the ward from the alcove where she was lying, and descending the stairs to the hospital entrance.

  Passing a stall beside the reception desk, he saw a pile of writing pads and a box of pencils. Buying one of the pads and two of the pencils, along with a pencil sharpener, he returned upstairs to the ward.

  Earlier, he had distracted himself by making words from the name of the nurse written on a board in the alcove, opposite the bed: Liebermann, regretting he hadn’t a pen or a pencil to write them down, recollecting the list as best he could in order to distract himself from the labouring of the figure beside him: the stentorian breathing which, at intervals, faltered, he assuming, at one point, she might be dying, at another, when the breath was suspended for several seconds, amounting, he guessed, to more than a minute, concluding she had died, feeling the relief that the struggle was over, only, with a staggered intake, a resistant gurgle, for the breathing to be resumed.

  At intervals the nurse had come in, felt his mother’s pulse and, with a nod, departed. Now, however, sitting beside her, he began, laboriously, to draw her face, sketchily at first, page after page until, his confidence growing, despite his lack of skill, the figures, the faces of The Deposition in the Capella Scrovegni vividly in mind, he was drawing not only her face but her head, the caverned eyes, the protuberant nose with its flaring nostrils, sucking at the air, the chasm of her mouth, gasping, grasping, almost biting at the air, the gurgling in her throat, her snores increasing.

  The disarray of her hair against the pillow, prongs of it projected across her brow, white, brittle, dishevelled, like strands of wire.

  At one point her eyes had opened: a bleared examination of the room before her, the drowsy shifting of the pupils in his direction and, having registered his presence in the chair, the eyelids lowered, mechanically, stiffly, tiny apertures remaining, filling at intervals with liquid which, with his handkerchief, leaning forward, he wiped away.

  Then, his drawing finished – completed, satiated – feeling he could draw no more, he had left, driving home, St Albans to London, the telephone ringing as he arrived, he lifting it to hear his sister’s voice announce that the hospital had rung to tell her that, not long after his departure, their mother had died. ‘I’m constantly going, not arriving, when the moment comes,’ he said, unable at that instant, at his sister’s enquiry, to understand what he had meant.

  After the incident on the tube station platform he had come to in an observation room: a bed and a chair were screwed to the floor. A window, high in the wall, its sill level with his chin, was, he discovered, similarly secured.

  In the centre of the door was a glass panel: it offered a view of the corridor outside and of the upper two-thirds of any watching or passing figure. He had wept; he had wept a great deal, having little if anything else to do. Several times a day and occasionally, if he were awake, at night someone had unlocked the door and asked him how he was. He had no clothes: one side of his body, his chest and – or so it felt like – his back, were severely bruised. No bones, he’d been assured, were broken.

  Much of the time he stared at his legs, at his feet, at his arms, at his abdomen. He was, he’d told himself, complete, an indivisible hole, his hands held before him to measure how far they might reach; nothing was extraneous; his flesh occupied a space he could legitimately call his own: his limbs reached to what was neither him nor his. Otherwise, he’d concluded, the whole of space eluded him.

  At intervals he’d been given a bath: he’d noticed from time to time how his smell (he presumed it was his smell) dominated the room: someone stood over him, invariably foreign, male (circumspect, aloof): jeans and trainers; a vaguely athletic figure. He’d been an athlete once himself, hence his awareness of his body, of its potential and excesses: a decent, enquiring (‘Are you all right?’), empirically minded sort of chap (much like himself), the kind who, quite reasonably, he might have encountered on the moon, coming out of a crater to shake his hand as, confused and apprehensive, he descended from his rocket, he the representative of another time, another space, one he could legitimately call his own, not the one he had left for – disowning the one he had left behind.

  He’d asked for a transplant, a suggestion made to him by a fellow patient. Acceding to his wishes, they’d put him to sleep, he waking to enquire if the process were complete: everything, he’d concluded, was down to him, someone whose face was growing increasingly familiar appearing at the door, glancing in – entering, on occasion, casualness (familiarity) characterising his manner, enquiring, ‘How are you, old fellow?’ as he might of a child or a dog.

  ‘Have I been transplanted?’ he’d asked, adding, ‘Is the machinery in place?’ convinced, if they had, they would never tell. ‘The same old, reliable matter,’ they said, touching his arm, his shoulder, his head. ‘I prefer absolution,’ he told them. ‘A question of habit, of custom,’ holding on to that which existed at the conjunction of his legs. ‘Without a past, the very next instant is with us now,’ he’d said.

  He’d been moved (invited) to ‘Death’s Head Valley’, so inscribed on a door by an institutionalised hand, most of the day and all of the night subdued by a drug whose name he knew but could never pronounce (endeavouring to do so to Charlotte, several times, and once to Gerry – smiling, cheerful, full of bounce – and, more often, to his sons, to Paul, to Sarah). ‘The hole of what I am,’ he said, each time, explaining, days passing.

  From ‘Sleepers Only’ he’d been moved (no invitation) to ‘Sometimes Awake’, the night-time grimaces, the groans, the sighs. ‘When I recover (when I recover) I shall be restrained. The drugs are speaking,’ he often announced, the recollection of his relatively recent past coming to him – lying in Simone’s bed, at this point – with unexpected force, wave after wave of excitation, spasm after spasm erupting in the darkness, he on the point of waking her up, the vibration of his body something he couldn’t control.

  Helplessness, a recurring feature of his recent illness, appeared, paradoxically, to take charge of his system: a chemical outrage (amongst the structures inside his skull), his recollection of Kavanagh’s ‘No one knows the causes, though many, unfortunately, profess to do so,’ something Simone (and others) had taken exception to, her objections, however, never defined, increasing the sensation this was ‘something’ that had little, if anything, to do with ‘him’, an internalised storm which otherwise, quite easily, might have been experienced – probably had been – by someone else: spectated, that is, not suffered ‘here’.

  Instead, convulsions focused around his abdomen, emanating, seemingly, from his stomach, a visceral evacuation which brought him upright in bed, assured that a previous, curled position, foetal in shape, could not subdue or contain it.

  He was standing on the roof, looking across and between the moonlit chimneys, the distant phalanx of lights which indicated London a reflected, ochreish glow on the underside of the clouds. The coldness of the air revived him, as did the flagstones against his bare feet, his arms wrapped, vibratingly, around his chest. Inside, convulsions had given way to tremoring, stillness finally returning, a sense of isolation – a solitariness heightened when he raised his head and, looking elsewhere than at the now faded light, recognised the star shapes to the north and west: the Great Bear, the North Star, the navigational incubus of his early life, looking out from the dormitory windows, ‘into the past’, forgetful of how far back in time he was.

  Then, like a ghost, she drifted out of the door leading onto the roof, bare-footed, too, wraith-like, her face re-formulated, yet again, by shadow, extending her arms, taking him to her, he aware of the warmth of her body, and of how cold, in his nightclothes, he was.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I felt you get up.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you,’ he said, adding, ‘Shakey,’ as she took his hand, held it to the light, watched it vibrating, her fingers gripping his wrist: the release of his hand, the tightening of her embrace, drawing him once more against her.

  And fear, a residual dread which, despite his distractions, despite her, rarely left him: a trajectory of himself, out into the stars: yet here, flushed, the insinuating benevolence of her voice, its intention to reassure him: despite the darkness, despite something intolerable going on for ever, she, he, it, they were here, there, somewhere, he absorbed at that instant by the fragrance of her skin.

  6

  He didn’t understand what his children did, the ebb and flow of their affairs, the emergence (divergence) of their children moving them ever further on, the names and dates of births confusing him as he had seen the names of his own children confuse his father, the oppressive gaze of his clouded-irised eyes as he, engulfed by Charlie, Joseph, Steven, searched their faces, gauging their reactions, with little, at that stage, to guide him: ‘am I responsible for all this?’ posterity itemised in flesh and blood, corroborated by a legacy of cars, built-in obsolescence, remodelling.

  Yet Maddox had been ‘fortunate’: ‘a fortunate life’ was, to some degree, how he’d diagnosed his illness: ‘it could have been worse’ (he might have not recovered, even, previously, he might have died), ‘an anomaly that I should have been afflicted’, indicating his condition less by gesture than the haunted look in his eyes.

  Haunted by what? fortuity, chance, obliquity: another nature could, quite easily, have been formulated by his parents: something in the way of Paul’s, a good-natured fellow – or Sarah’s (much the same): his parents’ – and Paul’s and Sarah’s – appetite for service, his father a JP, his accounts of cases, at mealtimes, taking over, on certain days, from activities in the showroom: the pavonine figure of his uncle Joseph standing, poised, on the sidelines, cheering life, and specifically his family, on, an embarrassingly garish spectator, particularly in Maddox’s life, coming up on one occasion, in a Wolseley, of course, after Maddox had got his First Team colours, to Quinians, startling the boys and the masters by his cries, allegedly of encouragement, the players curious as to which of them he was attached, his affectations, of dress and manner, his enthusiasm (genuine), a foil to the Quakerian sobriety of the school and the industrial environment at the foot of the hill, his uncle, later, the principal promoter of his career (‘can’t you interest yourself in work of a later generation?’) inspecting paintings and sculptures at Maddox’s invitation with a curious inattention, amounting to blindness (‘they don’t speak’), not what Maddox did but what he was, the focus of his concern.

  In his uncle’s, and in his parents’ incredulity, he recognised his own incredulity at the progress of his children, inspecting, occasionally, by invitation, the offices or premises where they worked, listening to their accounts of their activities, the complexity and significance of which eluded him. ‘The fact is, I feel a child in our children’s eyes, as they, at one time, were in mine,’ he had explained to Charlotte when she enquired, over the phone, how these occasions had gone, ‘their worlds as confusing to me as mine must have been to them, as children,’ observing, finally, ‘It’s curious there’s no word in the English language that denotes one’s children once they’re adults, older than we were, for instance, when we had them, other than “offspring”, which sounds more technical than human,’ confounded as much by this as by their variegated roles, as if, wordless, they had less departed than simply parted from him.

  Was he falling into the trap which, unwittingly, he’d been preparing throughout his life: a mechanism which would remove uncertainty (the bait) and, once reassured, the lid would close?

  Rhetoric, he was reminded, his strongest suit, ‘enquiry without resolution’ his current theme.

  Fulviam ego ut futuam?

  Entrapped: lying once more, with Simone, her head on his shoulder, her hand between his legs, attaching him more securely to her and the bed: the delicacy of her fingers, the hollow of her palm, the comfort of her breasts, he reflecting on his progeny, his route to posterity or extinction still secure, the moon invisible now beyond the frame of the window, its light, however, still shadowing the muslin, the shape of the roof-tops opposite recalling his and Simone’s gaze from the garden, embracing one another, enclosed by the plants, the cat, aroused by their disturbance, beside them (lying now on Simone’s side of the bed).

  The reflection of London on the underside of the clouds, he awake as she slept on his shoulder, energy, he reflected, in repose, as if he, too, existed simply – eloquently, even, potentially – to be restored to something like, if not more than, his former self, the fortitude, the measure, the strength and coherence of a family behind him: lying beside her, seemingly redundant, and yet enthralled, cohabiting a place he didn’t know. He had come too far, his children, once following, now scarcely discernible ahead – he quietening his voice, his perceptions, his views, diminishing his gestures, moving from, if not into, once again, something he neither knew nor understood, resisting his falling-back, as he waved them on, they caught in a momentum exclusively their own.

  A limited perspective, the view from the window to the darkened roofs, the steadying assurance of her breath, the submission of her body to something more exclusive than itself, the absence in her being asleep at all, her removal to somewhere neither he nor she, on waking, might discern, the abandonment of what, moments before, she had been on the roof. Once more, internally, he was reaching for a line, an escape, in this instance, from the cavalier object in his head, pursuing his identity before destroying it, a prescription for release, paradise, or confinement, hell.

  He was preparing a document: no longer letters to Devonshire and Donaldson, or the mythical figures he had, for some time, been calling to account, or even to himself. A document to whom? A presence whose significance he had once taken for granted, invisible, obscure, as if addressing a wasteland, a horizonless sea, nature no longer an impediment, no longer of account.

  There was something in his and Simone’s relationship which echoed that between a celibate priest and a favoured parishioner, something – contractually – which shouldn’t have been allowed, uncertainty – anxiety, even – evident in Simone herself which, initially, she’d denied, and then dismissed. Sleeplessness, at this point, gave his suspicion edge, he turning again to regard her, the strange abandonment so close to death, an abandonment to something other than nature: absolution, submission, he anxious for the same himself, the relegation of consciousness to an unspeaking process, he fingering the encounter of the coming day as if he, not Taylor, were imprisoned, guilt of an abstract, exclusive nature transferred perversely to himself.

  Already, mentally, he was pleading on his own behalf, the prospectus – a prospectus – of his past recited: his filial, marital, paternal credentials, fidelity as son, as husband, as father, a residue of virtue extracted from each one, free for anyone, Taylor in particular, to examine. As if, in reality, it were his own wife and children he had killed, the potential always present, to destroy everything he had created, everything he was responsible for: those nights, those similar nights, when he’d lain awake, not Simone but Charlotte given to the same abandonment beside him, the thought, I am responsible for creating all this: their pain (his children’s), as well as their joy, the inclusivity of their lives devolved exclusively on him: a feeling he was transferring to Taylor – his accountability to someone, to something, charged as he was, or so it felt, with an absolute crime, the occasion and the nature of which he couldn’t otherwise imagine: a will to destroy everything that had anything to do with himself, a corresponding volition to escape abandoned – even here, beside her, security of a kind he had rarely known, loved separately, for himself alone, not for the associations he brought with him, absolved of parents, children, wife, now job, absolved of Devonshire, Donaldson, absolved of everything, he reflected, except himself, the most savage, the most unpredictable, the most wearisome burden of all.

  7

  He’d visited the prison on several occasions, a peculiar situation when he’d been written to by a former Quinians schoolfriend: the Bastillian severity of its walls looming over the streets in north-east London, the gate within a gate designed, perversely, it seemed, to oblige the visitor to lower their head: the crossing from the gatehouse to a taller building, within which, along with the other visitors, he was shown to a room divided by what looked like cattle stalls, his friend coming in from one side, he shown to a seat in a cubicle on the other.

  The introductory declaration by his friend he hadn’t forgotten, his rage on discovering Maddox had brought no cigarettes, the sole purpose, it was explained, of his visit, he at the time preoccupied by thoughts of loyalty, allegiance, confederacy: the past.

  Disengaged, he had listened to his friend’s account of being ‘fitted up’, this unbelievable appeal followed by a request that Maddox find a psychiatrist who would plead on his friend’s behalf. ‘Another month in here and I’ll be completely off my head,’ the baleful and wholly credible glare through the grille in the wooden panel: someone, this, whom he had liked at school, one of four brothers varyingly described as Major, Major-Minor, Minor, Mini-Minor (Minor-Minimus for a fifth brother due later) to the amusement of their peers, he, Major-Minor, an enthusiast at sport, something dislodged, however – evidently still dislodgeable – in his nature, inclined aimlessly to ignore convention, rules, enclosure or discipline of any kind, a burly, precociously muscled youth for whom Mad Ox had seemed a suitable partner. Failing to reappear at the end of school holidays – accounts of a voyage as a deckhand on a tanker bound for the Persian Gulf – he had finally been removed by his parents and sent to a naval college, their parting, for Maddox, at least, a memorable event, he bound for orthodoxy, his friend for something, imaginably, more rumbustious (a mark of failure, on his own behalf, in Maddox’s mind at the time).