Maddox, recalling his own past, was contrasting the youth he had known with the figure he was confronting now: the bright provincial with his unlikely passion for something that had happened in Florence, in Padua, in Assisi six hundred or more years before: the sagacity, the weight, the density – the probity, the anguish – the intensity of those muralled figures, gazing out, their horizontally configurated, shadowed eyes, as if, Taylor had suggested at the time, from Plato’s cave.

  Reality at last! they cried.

  ‘Executing murals for a living comes very close,’ Taylor intruded on his thoughts, ‘to executing something, or even someone else. What do you think, Herr Professor?’

  It was, he concluded, as if indeed they were back in the tutor room: the same confinement, the same bleakness (functional at the Drayburgh, something other here), the same scuffling feet outside the door. Only different was the emanation summoned by the place and the two of them together, Taylor unaware, presumably, of the nature of the effect he was having, Maddox considering whether he might tell him of his recent difficulties, not least of the event precipitating his sectioning, and the nature of the experience associated with that.

  ‘I’m inclined to see us as equals, rather than as tutor and student,’ he said, aimlessly, unable to penetrate or decipher Taylor’s increasingly hostile expression. Even that, he reflected, was aimless, as if, having prepared one text for their encounter, Taylor was substituting another: retribution, of a sort, had been displaced by a memory of something else: an allegiance, even a confederacy, surviving over all these years, as if both were embarked on a common cause.

  ‘I intended, at some point, to take up painting again,’ Taylor said, leaning back, the chair creaking beneath his weight, his hands, still clasped, falling into his lap. ‘It’s been suggested. An atmosphere not unlike the Drayburgh, wouldn’t you say? Apart from the dances, the dinners, the parties. The Drayburgh hostel. Self-portraits, I thought, might be my line. Not who you paint, or how, but what. Necessary, of course, to have an agent. On the outside. I thought of you. Do a favour. Remember the advice you gave me, from time to time? “Don’t make your essays too personal.” Struck me hard. Viklund as well. Those lectures. Questions he avoided, I thought, at the time. In reality, questions to which there aren’t any answers. Absurd, when we’re born with the facility to enquire, to be met, at the end of the day, by nothing but silence. A dysfunction built into the system, I’d say. “This is not autobiography”, another of your remarks. Personality all the go, now, of course. Before my time.’

  The skin had lightened on Taylor’s forehead, the furrow deepening between his eyes, expectation and resignation flickering, alternately, in his expression, a shadowed, angered, beaten look, Maddox’s feelings of remorse, and identification, increasing. Helplessness of a new sort at Taylor’s helplessness intensified. Gratuitous involvement, he reminded himself, not required: keep the horror of what’s happened in mind.

  A dominant and domineering expression, as a result, appeared to take possession of Taylor’s features, he leaning further back from the table, surveying Maddox down the length of his nose: a guarded look, withdrawn, circumspect, less inviting judgement than providing it.

  ‘Though I recall, too, you discouraging me from painting, suggesting I apply for the Courtauld. Encouraging me,’ he went on, ‘to follow your example. Even invoked Pemberton, on your behalf, the two of you together. Methuselah, for Christ’s sake. On the other hand, you’ll not know what it’s like, painting yourself to death. An exercise I’ve resisted all these years. The monumentality, for instance, of all those figures …’

  The whiteness of Taylor’s forehead gave way to a redness which extended upwards from his collar, across his neck, his cheeks, reaching the fringes of his thinning, brushed-back hair: Maddox was confronting not the grown man but a sullen, swollen replica of the student, the virginal, agrarian look, distorted and malformed.

  ‘There was a surgical element involved I didn’t appreciate at the time,’ Taylor went on. ‘Di Bardone had a problem, wouldn’t you say, in the way he incised those ocular expressions? When I pointed it out you said you rather liked it. The reference, I mean. Weren’t you called Mad Ox at school? That, too, I recall. A tutorial confidence, a tutorial confession. Confession and confidence being much to the fore. In both of us.’ He paused, before adding, ‘Mr Tutor,’ paused again, and went on, watching Maddox intensely, ‘Those cars, for instance. How you drew a distinction between aesthetics and function. I thought that aesthetical, too. Preciously so. “Art has no purpose”, one of your maxims. Though it might reasonably be described, I would have thought, as useful. Impressed me, however, at the time, no end. What else has no purpose? I mentally enquired. Almost everything, I concluded. Mythology, on my part. Evidently not on yours. The New Philistine Agenda. Quite a thing. Read up on it, of course, every week you wrote. The whole of the second half of the century given over to the very thing! Art up its own arsehole, so to speak. Wonderful! Somebody who can sum it up. The omnipotent eye. God praise to that fellow from – where was it? – St Albans! You and Viklund, who, the latter, wanted no part of it. Confined himself to history. Wily old man! How is he? Still around?’ not waiting for Maddox to respond before concluding, ‘Maddox, I thought, at least the real thing!’

  Maddox leant back, exchanging glances once more with the warder; perhaps he too stood in awe of Taylor’s situation: Taylor who, once his antagonism had been expressed, was inclined to talk of, if not transpose it to other things. Something Maddox could recognise in the light of his recent experience: a suspension of grace, of forgiveness, looking to Taylor to inform him of how things were on the other side (is hell as bad as they make out? he could guarantee that, of course, himself). Yet, the other side of what? Lunacy, he reflected, unlike his own, of a permanent nature, beyond hope, beyond forgiveness, beyond atonement, Taylor a correspondent from a kingdom that parodied his own. Or was it, he reflected, the other way around? a state of mind, certainly, into which, helplessly, despite advice and medication, despite even love (‘love is not enough’) he felt he was being drawn, Taylor an emissary, too, beyond – far beyond (his ultimate horror) the reach of anyone.

  No difference, in that case, between them, he examining yet again the changes in his former pupil’s face, a Faustian regression summoned up, he concluded, from his fevered imagination.

  ‘Who else has been to see you?’ he asked, the collateral of the past, he was suggesting, available to both of them, the most significant event of all, the greatest divide between them, the crime itself.

  Taylor had shaken his head: intrusion of this sort, at least, he could no longer complain about.

  ‘Is this your only visit?’

  ‘Naturally.’ He waved his hand. ‘My parents, fortunately, are dead. My brother and my sister have both been once. Even an uncle. Other than that, no one. You were the last I could think of. Pemberton wouldn’t want to include me in his c.v. I thought you, on the other hand, might feel an obligation. Knowing both of us,’ he added. ‘Intimately, in one case.’ A moment later, he added, ‘I’ve been told I’ll be killed by the other cons. Murdering peers okay. Murdering minors, not.’ He shrugged, bringing his body back to the table.

  ‘I thought I’d make an experiment. As relevant, pace experiments, as any other. An experimental age, you could say. A unique, artistic enterprise involving not mineral and vegetational elements, but human flesh and blood. How to live the unliveable, surely of interest, at the very least, to succeeding generations, as the race as a whole plunges off, vocationally, into, if not the unknown, extinction. An enterprise on a scale unprecedented in our time. A paradigm, I thought, outparadigming every other. Something unique, at least, in that. Something you alone might appreciate. Record it in a book. How you like. A series in your paper. Television. Film. Any manner of forms, though the content, as with all art, remains the same. In this instance, you could say, the subject is the human condition, but expressed in an unprecedented manner. At least, something rarely, if ever, done. Certainly not with this degree of deliberation. Such consciousness involved. Someone trained, by masters, you might say, in observation and expression. An art consistent with the times. Surely, with this degree of awareness, never considered, let alone done before.’

  The warder, once more, had glanced at his watch: shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and back again, he examined, stolidly, frankly, blankly, Maddox’s reaction: curiosity, finally, as much as anything, as if to enquire, ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘I gave up painting some time ago. A belated acknowledgement of your suggestion. Teaching scarcely left me any time for it. The headmaster wrote to me the other day asking if there was anything I wanted. What he would describe as a humanitarian gesture. One of the teachers, an art teacher, a woman, might come. A colleague, and humanist, too. Sent me messages before and after the trial. I never replied to them. In no mind to. Out of it, at the time, and afterwards …’ He waved one arm, in a gesture reminiscent of Viklund. ‘With you I thought there’d be an incentive. In at the beginning, since you knew us both. As if, having been your student, I’m looking to you for an explanation. Something as imbecilic as that. Otherwise, as I say, a twenty-first-century version of a hitherto unconceived twenty-first-century art. Vasari’s Vasari, ahead of your time.’

  He smiled, to expose once again his seemingly neglected teeth: a sudden warmth went out to him from Maddox, unpremeditated, unexpected, unconsidered, as much to do with grief as guilt, a warmth for someone beyond the reach of consolation, beyond the reach of anything that might possibly be imagined: ‘the end of everything’: the phrase came to mind, something coincidental with the feelings he associated with his recent past – relevant now to someone he’d known, someone he’d admired, someone who had promised much (someone he’d taught), someone he’d been partly instrumental in destroying, in putting where he was.

  ‘I don’t think this adds up to much. To you, I mean,’ Taylor said, watching him intensely.

  ‘It adds up to a great deal,’ he said. ‘Though I couldn’t put a word, or words, to it.’

  ‘All that count are facts. Isn’t that what you used to say?’ A moment later, as Maddox shook his head, he added, ‘At least, it’s someone to speak to. Here I can’t describe it.’

  ‘I’ll come again,’ he said, ‘if you like.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ Taylor said. ‘It may do more harm than good. Raising expectation,’ he added. ‘Though of what I’ve no idea.’

  It was, Maddox felt, as if he were divesting himself of a child, one without protection of any kind, both the expression and victim of an otherwise inexpressible force, a feeling which bled into his own experience of the previous months, particularly that experience which medication was endeavouring to appease.

  Taylor got up from the table, the warder, startled, stepping forward.

  His wrists, curiously, held together, Taylor turned to the door; perhaps, for an instant, he had thought of adding something else but, without glancing back, he waited for the door to be opened, then preceded the warder out.

  Some moments later a second uniformed figure appeared, glancing in enquiringly at Maddox who, having risen, was still standing by the table. Getting no response from him, the warder enquired, ‘Shall I show you out?’ indicating the corridor, waiting for Maddox to step before him.

  Outside the main gate he paused: the traffic flowed by beyond a parapet: an aircraft lumbered overhead. Rain was falling: it hissed on the cobbled precinct leading to the gate. He pulled his raincoat on, recalled the inquisitive faces of the warders stationed inside and glanced back at the walls. Something implacable, conveyed by the height and texture of the stone, echoed something similarly featured within himself, something uncherished, unlovable, merciless, antipathetic to everything he might otherwise, before his visit, have cared about. Fear, which had preceded his arrival, and which had been revived during his visit, was vividly reignited.

  Thrusting his hands in his pockets he walked away, his head bowed, enduring the curious sensation not that he was leaving the building behind but that he was taking a vital part of it with him, reluctant to look behind him to dissuade himself, breaking, finally, into a run, deciding not to travel back on the tube but to take a bus, anything to avoid going, once more, beneath the ground, anything to avoid reliving what had been, and, he presumed, still was, an ungovernable desire to do away with himself.

  The rain had lightened as he reached the house, his fatigue, however, increasing. He no longer knew what to make of Taylor. He recollected how he himself had splayed his fingers on the surface of the plastic table, wondering at the gesture, as if signalling he might leave at any moment, the preliminary movement to departure, or, conversely, a sign he was growing increasingly attached to being where he was.

  What he couldn’t recall was at what point he had removed his hands, for towards the end he had been sitting, obliviously at the time and only now remembered, with them in his lap. It was as if the unimaginable in their lives had gone by default, life, as he’d experienced it at that moment, a process of extinction, in his case by his own hand – in the case of Taylor, also by his own hand; signalling, however, at the end of the interview, as Maddox had understood it, that what he had done he’d done on behalf of others, an inexorable and unavoidable exercise.

  ‘Mad.’ He’d spoken aloud, shrugged, and endeavoured to dismiss the thought. ‘Not knowing what I think,’ he’d gone on, still aloud, ‘until I hear it, or write it down,’ sitting in the kitchen, desperate for the company, the presence, the comment of Simone, picking up a pen from the table, extracting an already written-on sheet of paper from one of several piles scattered on the table top, and writing, ‘Taylor’, crossing it out, substituting ‘Eric’, pausing before continuing, ‘are you invoking amnesia? A desire to eradicate what can’t be faced is, I have to tell you, common to us both, if, in my case, at a singularly lesser level …’

  He’d put the pen down: they were both attempting, if disinclined, to talk about something which could scarcely be spoken about: no language, no image: not simply a handing-back of life, but of death, an improbable if irrepressible enterprise: an unalterable good expunged not by an unalterable evil but by the same unalterable good:. ‘I did this,’ he spoke aloud, ‘in order to start again.’

  He wrote quickly, obscurely, scarcely aware of what he was writing and, having written it, tore it up. So much for that: inverting goodness into vice, vice into virtue. He wondered if he hadn’t expected too much of Taylor, his precocious and at one time respected student; whether, should he send his message, as Taylor’s elected amanuensis, it might confuse, if not provoke, him further, confound the suicide watch of the warders, subvert their best, more likely ambivalent intentions – he who had expunged his family, they disinclined to expunge themselves. Was not Taylor, in short, commandeering him as a witness, the archivist of his perverse adventure, to exhume what he’d done, to define it retrospectively, the one who, in certain circumstances, knew him better than most, who had witnessed him in formation, the incubus before the revelation? Was Taylor giving him as good a reason to live as any, turning dross into something which, however perversely, offered illumination, presenting his own survival, after initial doubt, as a revelatory gesture? Observe and closely mark (this may not, need not happen again: the human involvement in a seemingly inhuman exercise, the nature, the unique nature of the individual involved), hauling Giotto, as he did so, into the picture.

  He was hesitating, curiously, from writing anything further, the pen, however, still in his hand. The conclusion he had come to was that Taylor had, after all, proved to be his ultimate pupil, the Baptismal precursor to his revelatory scheme: the conventional oil or gouache paintings, the pencil, ink and conté drawings he’d done at the Drayburgh the afterglow of a tradition that had been expunged by art-as-action, not as contemplation, refinement, encapsulation – transposition – but simply, and gratuitously, nakedly art-as-life: no longer synthesis by paint and brush, hammer and chisel, clay and spatula, but by kitchen knife, a rudimentary, practical, domestic tool, as close to life, in this case – in this definitive case – as death, Giotto’s giant step, in the process, remeasured – to be found longer, broader (more encompassing) than first pronounced. Taylor had come good – unasked: all he had learnt, all he had been taught at the Drayburgh, not in the life-room, the sculpture-room, the antique-room, but in his tutorial encounters with Maddox put to explicit, demonstrable, definitive use: he had gone over the edge in the process – the process of validating Maddox, the process of proving him right. Mad Ox had given him his line: his wife, his progeny, his origins subsumed by a desire to be ‘real’, conceptualism taken to a demonstrably absurd and comprehensively destructive end – as effortlessly as Mad Ox had opened the world of Florentine trecento art, the principle, the premise, the solution the same: out of the blandness of Norfolk had emerged the shape, had he known it, of things to come.

  His immediate reaction was to return to his earlier impulse, to write to Devonshire, not so much a revision or amendment as a re-visioning, in the boldest terms, of his review of the British Millennial Exhibition, his original contribution a preamble to what would now be a comprehensive clearing – atomisation – of the ground: Lucretius – Lucretius! all over again! All those parodists painting pictures, plus conceptualism posing as an avant-garde – while Taylor, effortlessly, perversely, in its final context, blew away the dust, drew the record straight, offered the sum total in tendering the final account. ‘Over the edge’, ‘beyond providence’: he wrote the phrases down: the provisional titles came to mind, conceptual art turned on its head, the Christian ethic, after two thousand years, definitively endorsed, if not transcended, divinity and inhumanity indivisibly one: Taylor’s event presented as Maddox’s final statement, Ruskin out Ruskined – by perversity – at last.