He thought for a moment she might go on speaking, but, turning to look at him directly, she smiled again, nodding.

  ‘Taylor,’ he said, ‘was responding, or thought he was – still thinks he’s responding – to something inclusive, not exclusive, as you suggest. All he’s asking is for what he did to be seen in the widest possible context, something he thinks I can do for him.’

  ‘Have you told him you’ve been ill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘I doubt it. I was absent from reviewing for a while, but he wouldn’t know the reason. Devonshire only took me back because of it. Didn’t wish to be seen regressive, and has regretted it ever since. His present resolve is to treat me as normal in order to show going nuts for him is no different from having measles, or flu, or a broken leg.’

  ‘In a sense, he’s right.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  ‘In your case, I mean.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  She was looking at him strangely – not unlike the expression he associated with their first encounters, an aloofness of a clinical nature, mentally stepping back in order, paradoxically, to examine something more closely.

  ‘Insanity,’ she said, ‘is exclusive. To assume otherwise is to misunderstand it completely. I think something perverse, on your side, is creeping in. I’m frightened for you.’ She added, ‘I think, as with Norman, Taylor can still do a lot of damage. The enlightenment that you and your friend Viklund go on about is not, in my view, enlightenment at all. More nearly it’s the arrest of a particular kind of perception which galvanises, or appears to, because it’s arrested. I feel, I felt, I was freeing you from all that.’

  ‘Immaturity,’ he suggested.

  ‘Innocence. Viklund, despite his appearances, and manner, is guilelessness writ large.’

  He watched an insect, a bumble-bee, move from flower to flower: at each it paused, probed, flew on. Overhead, another aircraft whined up from Heathrow, a frill of condensation flickering from its tailplane and wings. Distracted by the sound, she glanced up, too, the horizontal lines at the base of her neck accentuating her look of concern, bordering, he felt, on disaffection.

  ‘That was your philosophy, which, at the time, you were keen for me to know about.’ Having lowered her head, she smiled. ‘We are here to destroy and to be destroyed. A dispassionate view of history confirms it. Wars, pogroms, disease, personal as well as communal disasters. The annihilating experience of marriage, motherhood, paternity. It’s because the pain of destructiveness is too much that we come to understandings. If I don’t hurt you you won’t hurt me. Self-interest moves on to an interest in others. Pain, in its mental and physical forms, persuades us, finally, to compromise. Interest in others turns to affection, affection to love, a species of self-love externally confirmed. We love ourselves for loving others. Finally we reach the stage of, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me”, which, of its nature, evolves into “I’ll love you even if you don’t love me”, our exegesis, as you remarked, of the tyranny of nature, of, you concluded, our unrequested end.’

  He smiled, listening to her encapsulation of what he had – tendentiously, for the most part, certainly defensively – explained: his own ‘governance’, he’d described it, pleased – rejoicing – that she recalled it, and, having recalled it, was now discounting.

  He was reminded, once again, of his instinctual response to Taylor: someone so far outside his experience – their experience (they were in this together) – must count as something – he realising, too, in that instant, how much he loved her, how completely she over-reached his life, securing him to something he couldn’t live without: loving her, in effect, at that moment, for her attempt to dress herself in his (metaphysical) clothes in order to show how absurd he looked.

  ‘What did you think when you heard it?’

  ‘I thought it,’ she said, ‘an unusual defence.’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘I never found out. I wondered, nevertheless, if I could bring you back to earth.’

  She was smiling once again.

  ‘And now?’

  Colour, once more, had risen to her cheeks.

  ‘Self-interest is an indeterminate term,’ she said. ‘I’m always inclined to oppose it. Cynicism,’ she added, ‘given a plausible face, “we are our relationships” a partial truth, like,’ she went on, ‘so much else you put my way. The volition towards pleasure is as much a natural volition as a desire to destroy. You mustn’t, to that degree, take Taylor as confirmation of your thesis.’

  Birds swooped across the roof: swifts, their high-pitched squeaking echoing between the houses. Higher up, house-martins traced more jagged loops, fluttering and falling, diving and climbing, pursuing, he assumed, an invisible, from this distance, cloud of midges.

  ‘What other conclusions did you come to?’

  ‘Not a lot.’ She re-crossed her legs, composure of some sort returning: they had long ago released one another’s hands. ‘I was more interested in you describing art as something useless which, the moment it has a use, becomes something else, utility combined with aesthetics a craft, aesthetics combined with nothing, art. Plus, your evocation of an environment in which the machine had passed the point of service, we obliged to service it. And how, generally, what couldn’t be pronounced until the moment it was expressed, creating precedent in the process, was fastened in with what you described as “mechanics”. That we are mechanics, without choice, art currently, as a result, a mechanism too. The impression, for instance, you create, that you and Viklund, and now Taylor, are the last of the cultural Mohicans.’

  She was laughing, leaning back, he following her gaze to the nearby roofs: the attic windows, the variegatedly angled chimney-pots, her own neat enclosure of plants and flowers – more than ever, he reflected, a refuge.

  Below, at intervals, the telephone rang: the swift cutting-off as it recorded a message: the inaudible muttering of a voice.

  ‘Your view of art as history, of anything as history, come to that. Your admiration for a tradition, a humanist tradition, which is now extinct and which, helplessly, it seems, you feel obliged to revive. I suspect the perversity of Taylor’s return to your life is the seal on the verdict you’ve been looking for. Comes, as it were, at an opportune time, philistinism ending not in suicide but murder, then suicide. An explanation of your impulse to self-destruction. He killing others as himself, the two, to him, unlike you, indistinguishable. “We are our relationships”, his final message.’

  He didn’t wish Taylor to be ‘wrong’; that, too, she could see: his requirement that murder (of ‘himself’) should be seen as the inevitable outcome of the way things were, the absolution he was seeking without hope of achieving.

  ‘Maybe we should lie down,’ she said. ‘Recover from all this. I’ll bolt the front door. Mrs Beaumont isn’t due today, and I’ve fed the cat.’

  Things were more real than they seemed, he reflected, following her down, the slimness of her figure, the texture of her hair, her vulnerability and her determination suddenly apparent, conformity, compliance with everything, or most things, perversely or otherwise, not on her agenda: an ability, he further reflected, to cast herself off, independent, self-reliant (to an extraordinary degree) – a self-reliance which she was inviting him to share, changing its nature, its form, its purpose.

  And later, in bed – abandonment of a sort, since it was mid-afternoon – he endured the curious sensation they’d been cast off together, invisibly suspended, surveying the angle of the tiles outside, the sagging line of the older houses, the confirmatory lines of those that had been restored, his feeling, increasingly engendered on each of his visits, once in her bedroom, that they were indeed afloat: the wood-panelling, the reflective figure beside him, her eyes, too, turned to the window – until, finally, lulled by a rhythm which came from them both, she placing her arm around him, he turned on his side, the shape of her body impressed against his back.

  His old terror had been that he might survive, his new one that he wouldn’t, he, recently, noticing the vagaries of his mind much more, wondering if they were vagaries at all and not the evidence of a parallel existence. Particularly clear were his experiences of ‘another place’, full of warmth and familiarity (a feeling induced by being in her bed). The moment these sensations were recognised, however, they vanished, as if consciousness alone had dispelled them.

  An involitional drama, an involutional exercise: not to be alone, not to be suspended (not to be out of a job) and then, quite simply, not to be afflicted, ‘nuts’ the condition that looked over the edge, saw what was there, helped solely by familiarity to claw its way back: a neural conflagration with no physical manifestation other than a knitting of the brows, the rocking forward and backward over the axis of the arms, the second-by-second confrontation with what he assumed were the principal questions of existence: why? who? how? where? a mutatory device engaged, seemingly, on its own destruction.

  All his decisions, he’d concluded, at the onset of his illness, had been wrong: wrong in space, in time, in sequence: not the right action for the wrong reason, nor the right reason for the wrong action: instead, an accumulation of defects, a litany of excuses (excesses, confessions) – less regret, remorse, contrition, than statement of fact.

  One of those mornings, early in their relationship, for instance, he had found himself walking up the hill from his backstreet dwelling by Camden Lock to that welcome enclosure of Georgian, pre-Georgian, Queen Anne dwellings where Simone had her consulting-room as well as her domestic quarters and, for the first time, as he approached her door, saw emerging from it the skeletal, dark-haired, pale-featured, black-suited individual, a briefcase in one hand, a portable telephone in the other, whom he had immediately personified, to Simone’s displeasure, moments later, meeting her in the hall, as Doctor Death. ‘Aids?’ he’d enquired (searing eyes gazing portentously from a skull-like head), to which she’d responded, ‘Far from it,’ disinclined, at that point, to discuss it. She: her dark hair, on that occasion, lustred to perfection: the delicacy, in the morning light, of her porcelain features, the refinement of nose and brow, dark eyes, thick-lashed, extended laterally with eye-shadow, a hint of blue across the lids, each eye opaque but for its reflection – of the one he was disinclined to see, at that stage: himself – nothing visible of what lay beneath: cheeks subtended to a percipient chin, incised above a percipient mouth, the whole of her face – its asperity, its bird-like gaze – pointing to enquiry: why? her figure, in its fifties, drawn forward to all-consuming, engaging breasts, moving before her, sensual, sensuous, informing: grand. And legs, high-heeled, even in her domestic quarters, the persuasive endorsers of a quisitive nature, the preternatural ‘what is it all about?’ implicit in the frankness of her look: the framing cheeks, the framing brow: creator, expeller, adviser, judge, her house an arbour on the pilgrim route to St Albans, the Romano-British Christian martyr, he, Maddox, approaching his seventieth year …

  No wonder Doctor Death had responded in the way he had, much scope, in Simone’s appearance, to be misconstrued, not least by someone persuaded (determined) it could be. Perhaps, he concluded, she should dress for work in a less celebratory fashion, her clothes, he recalled, mannered to Paris rather than Rome, less line involved than substance (lascivious, for instance, his own response, illicit, warm): the agate ring she twisted on the third finger of her left hand, the stone she gazed into as if into herself: what stars! what moon! what future – he waking some time later to find her still compressed against his back, he turning over to embrace her, his still to hold, he still hers to do likewise.

  He had taken to writing when all else had failed, he, sleepily inspired, reclining in bed, she, restless, having got up, preparing their supper: the sound of crockery and cutlery and cooking utensils coming up the stairs from the kitchen. Earlier, she had been pottering with her plants on the roof above his head: she was ‘into’ everything, he reflected, he checking her past, his own, for errors, mind subsumed by drugs: dothiepin, thioridazine, the side-effects, previously, of seroxat too extreme, in his case, to bear: irregular heartbeat, sensational headaches, convulsive jaw movements, nausea, anxiety increased, not so much wrestling, as Aurelius might have had it, as dancing (to death), wheeling and gliding – pots crashing more vigorously in the kitchen, determination and concentration two of Simone’s more obvious traits, even sleeping a convulsionary sound.

  He was reading Lucretius (again: a Viklund recommendation): a copy of De Rerum Natura by his bed, another by Simone’s. Waiting for supper, he’d just put it down: everything was chance, he not so much a god’s, or the gods’ or even ‘the Father’s’ invention as an asymmetrical, unprogrammed, irrelevant aside, a disencumbrance disencumbered. And Plutarch, Epicurus, Seneca, Cicero, Pliny, practitioners whose practitioning embraced a curious disposition: what was inexplicable abandoned to the divine, an ineradicable omission – life, his life, his and Simone’s life, an omission – crime, brutality, passion, efficaciously slotted into position, an irrefragable part of an indissoluble whole. ‘You deal with the best in human nature, I the worst,’ Simone had written in one of her cryptic notes, posted whenever she was away, with protestations of ‘I love you’, arriving invariably after she was back (‘that’s all right: it’s what I felt’), ‘What’s the diff, Professor?’ A sophist (she!), he not so much a philosopher (or professor) in response, as a pillager, as Major-Minor, his former schoolfriend, had once remarked, irreality his saviour, what was redeemable, in Simone’s life, an ethic, a passion – a vocation, even (pace Taylor), passed to him. What was owed, in his case, exceeded what was given, duty seceding to rights.

  Building a dossier on himself, he reflected, as others might be building one on her: turning over in the bed to see the photograph of himself she kept beside it, a tiny original of him seated on her roof, wondering, as he did so, on her preparations in the kitchen. Wondering on her.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ he spoke aloud, savouring the words, finally the meaning, ‘I’ve failed’: marriage, paternity, posterity, vocation, job: the imprimatur he’d franked on Simone’s life, even if it were a joint decision. Plus, the curious sensation that immobilised him each morning, that he was about to be taken into the street and shot: that he had informed on his neighbours (the worst of his dreams), dealers in crack, plus prostitution, extortion, theft, fencing: Berenice’s minder who spent his days in bed, the nights marshalling her punters: black, close-cropped, bulbous, a buttress, he, of the narcotics trade, Maddox, by comparison, a ‘clerc’, an observer, reporter, redundanteur, spectator: Plato’s cavern, he standing at the mouth, avoiding the shadows, identifying the objects stranded outside.

  He’d been drawn to Laycock’s theories of supra-indifferentiation (and supra-disregard) in his youth: unfashionable in the forties when they’d first appeared (the effect of war on the ‘cerebral imagination’), the individual a synthesis of external ‘charges’, pressures reflecting subliminal as well as overt forces – theories Simone had favoured herself but which he, carelessly at first, then vigorously, had abandoned, genes and epigenetics his current principal ‘charges’, specifically the influence of methyl groups of chemicals on gene formation, the methylation as much, if not more, an influence than the determinology of the genes themselves: new species formed (misbehaving chromosomes misbehaving on the part of something else: aneuploidy) seeing himself, seeing Taylor, as the precursors of an otherwise unpredictable event – the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ of mutatory research – he determined to e-mail or fax, or simply post to Devonshire his revised exegesis on post-twentieth-century art, phenomenology taken, in the instance of Taylor, to its logical, amoral, definitive end.

  Already she was on the stairs, he with the Lucretius (affinity with nature: affinity with circumstance) still in his hand, she calling, ‘Supper’s ready,’ passing by the bedroom door with a wave, on the way to the roof to collect herbs, a pair of scissors in her hand: the sound of her feet on the flagstones: the creaking of the ceiling, the telephone ringing, the sound of a voice recording a message: everything normal (the atmosphere so unlike that of his own house, where the telephone scarcely rang at all).

  ‘The despair,’ he said to her over supper, ‘that humanity is succeeding,’ they eating at the table beside the familiar window, she, anxious for distraction, perpetually on the move, ‘whereas, with you, it’s the horrible feeling that it might easily lose. What a combination. The ball, however, in your court. Your turn,’ he told her, ‘to knock it back.’

  She remained distracted (had been since waking), glancing about her, not least towards the window as if, from there, she expected otherwise unseen support.

  ‘Maybe I should go ahead with Taylor, without involving you,’ he continued. ‘I can get the copy faxed in the High Street. That alone should startle Devonshire. Even then,’ he paused, ‘I ought to see Taylor again. The idea of handing something in before Donaldson, of course, is out of the question. I must have been ranting when I first came in,’ pausing again before enquiring, ‘Is this mania, do you think?’

  ‘That’s for you,’ she said, ‘to decide,’ turning her gaze to him, a moon-like expression, calm, abstracted, reproaching him, it seemed – or removing him, or about to, from her life. ‘Maybe you should pursue it, to see where it leads.’

  ‘Shall I stay the night?’ he asked.

  ‘I need time to myself. You, too,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ moving her food about her plate, examining it, as if undecided whether to eat it or not. ‘I’d like to see you tomorrow,’ she added.

  ‘Should I see your letter?’ he said. ‘The one from the Council.’

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with it now,’ dismissing the suggestion with a wave of her hand. ‘Let’s keep the two things separate. You with Taylor, I with this,’ her gaze returning to the window, the steps of someone passing below them, in the street. ‘It’s odd, but since we’ve talked about it, I have the feeling we’re being watched. That the place is being watched. Obsessional behaviour, of course, is infectious, provoking a similar response in the victim.’