‘You can call me any time,’ Kavanagh said. ‘No need to keep to your one day a week,’ Maddox reassured that, should the line to which he was attached drag him under – or, conversely, snapping, plunge him, alive, to the foot of the stairs – there was someone here he could talk to, who understood – the phrase came to him at that moment – the language of the dead.

  10

  It was Viklund who woke him, ringing in the middle of the afternoon (that morning his monthly appointment with Kavanagh), he roused by the telephone and, for a moment, not sure where he was – initially assuming he was at Simone’s, reminded of her threatened situation, conceivably the end of her professional life, the instrument of destruction, in this instance, no one but himself.

  Picking up the receiver from beside the bed – he’d been sleeping on his back, fully clothed, as he invariably did in the afternoons, on the double bed in the front room – he listened to Viklund’s courteous, nevertheless insinuatory voice as if it were an element of a dream itself: the surge of confusion which increased rather than dissipated itself on waking, he recoiling from answering so that, after Viklund’s, ‘How did you get on with Taylor?’ he remained silent, ‘Did your visit go ahead?’

  ‘It went very well,’ his opinion going out without reflection. ‘He’d rationalised, or was attempting to, the experience along the lines of an artistic event convened less by him, he merely being its instrument, than others.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me. You. All of us,’ gesturing around the otherwise empty room. ‘Laycock’s “reductive imperative”, if you’ve ever heard of it. We subsume what we don’t like as a matter of form. Truth to his materials, another way of putting it, his materials, in this particular demonstration, being his family and himself, A Family Group, as it were, the title of his composition, a long-established, indeed, honourable theme.’

  Was that right; or was he transposing Taylor’s experience into something constructed facetiously by himself?

  ‘Expressing what is there without his necessarily being aware of it,’ he added.

  ‘Deranged.’ The dog was barking in the background: concurrence or disagreement, hard to tell. On odd occasions, more in rebuke than with affection, Viklund would remark, ‘That dog knows everything,’ examining it with apprehensive eyes. ‘Not a term, I realise, you’d prefer to use,’ he added, sketching his distance not from him but Taylor.

  ‘I’d thought of writing about him along those lines,’ Maddox said, ‘he practically inviting me. Certainly it would get up Devonshire’s nose. Being an opportunist, he’d feel obliged to use it.’

  ‘Pulling down the temple as long as you aren’t in it,’ Viklund said. ‘Wouldn’t opportunism,’ he went on, ‘be levelled at you? Not to mention trivialisation,’ he concluded, ‘if done in haste.’

  So Daniel thought he was mad as well, shovelling him out of his life along with Taylor.

  ‘It has an authenticity of its own,’ he said. ‘Both the event and Taylor’s perception of it,’ he dancing, he was convinced, at the end of a rope – in the same way he had danced when he was a student and Viklund a professor: so much was known by the older man, so much was revealed, and so much held in reserve, either as a challenge, genially extended, to be discovered, or, more obscurely, to be divulged at a strategically chosen moment.

  Processes – convolutions of thought and feeling – pursued in eradicating his illness, a biochemical digression, fomented by ageing, from the norm, preoccupied him exclusively at that moment: a strategy of defence, a disintegration of his personality accompanied by, until that moment, a subliminal appetite not to live, formed and re-formed itself, graphically, strenuously, in Maddox’s brain – the thought coming to him at that moment that Taylor must have concluded, been actively recalling at the time of their meeting, that he, Taylor, might well have followed Maddox into the Raybourne Professorship of Art History at the Drayburgh in much the same way as Maddox had followed Viklund into the same post. A luminary he might have been at the Courtauld, a junior curator at the Tate, early papers followed by the equivalent of Viklund’s early and pre-Renaissance series on television (the charm of youth challenging Viklund’s persona of wartime engagé) and his subsequently celebrated books: a life of attainment, his precocious, fevered, inventive mind springing up all over the place: a glorious reputation, no wife and children dead at all.

  Instead, obscurity in a comprehensive school, somewhere in the north-east of London, a light extinguished beneath a bushel, a misconceived determination to be the ‘real thing’.

  He had, he recalled, written Taylor a testimonial, to whom it may concern, on his leaving the Drayburgh, and a second, specific one, several years later, at Taylor’s request (coming out of the blue) when he’d applied for a post in the Department of Fine Art at Reading University (‘an hour from London,’ Taylor had written in his requesting letter, ‘just the right distance from where I live now, I’m sure I’ll be all right’), presumably a last attempt by Taylor to retrieve himself.

  Had he, in that second reference, voiced his misgivings: someone intent on one course when they’d have been better off, years before, pursuing another: someone addicted, mesmerically, to giving subjective reactions a convincing air of objectivity?

  Weren’t they all, on the other hand, doing that all the while?

  He’d assumed his application had been rejected: he’d heard no more about it, neither thanks for the receipt of, nor a report of what had happened. Had he – even – been called for an interview? His wife, too, had been ‘invalidated’ by not dissimilar circumstances, ‘visited’ not by Gabriel but Maddox before he, Taylor, had met her. Even she, even the prospect of a post that would have elevated him above the rank of schoolteacher, even that which had been most precious, had gone the wrong way. And now his (Laycockian) brush with the nature of time, of ‘civilisation’: with several wild blows, with a multitude of wild blows, he’d got rid of the lot.

  All that remained was an analysis of what had happened.

  ‘Was he vengeful?’

  The voice casual, deferential.

  ‘Not more than I’d expected.’

  ‘Did he respond to your interpretation?’

  ‘He offered it himself. Or, rather,’ he paused, ‘much of what I’d concluded came after I’d left.’ After pausing again, he suddenly went on, ‘It reminded me of reviewing the galleries on a regular basis, not knowing on the day I went round what I’d write. Invariably, at night, I’d go to sleep my mind a blank. The following morning I’d get up and write a review without a second thought. I became subject to a process, and a product, I could neither understand nor control. Odd, don’t you think?’ his final enquiry a Viklundian rejoinder.

  ‘Familiar.’ Viklund’s voice faded, as if he’d turned his head to confront someone coming into the room.

  ‘Morbidity, finally, of course, got hold. That and exhaustion. It’s just as well I gave it up. Now I just have the Devonshire pieces, though I’m afraid I’ve been fired from that. He was always uneasy after my sectioning. Not surprising. I felt uneasy after the same. He finds the pieces too abusive. Morbidity, too, of course. Possibly exhaustion. If not lunacy. Am I still recovering, with something new to offer, or am I going mad? Am I, do you think, regressing?’

  ‘I get the feeling,’ Viklund said, ‘you’ve been revivified by Taylor. I imagine you see that as morbidity as well.’

  ‘Not really.’ Mischief, of a familiar nature, was being passed along the line. He wondered if, bored by his current situation, and by a so far unmentioned source of ill-health, Viklund wasn’t looking for something more than entertainment. ‘I’ve a feeling,’ he went on, playing along with his friend, ‘particularly after visiting Taylor, that this is primarily an age of deceit, the self, as we describe it, on the one hand, asking to be saved, on the other, suppressing to the point of denial the realisation that there’s little if anything worth saving. That all those disasters which become the meat of our reported lives estrange us. A suggestion that the worst goes on over there, and that the over there is always over there, not least,’ he hurried on, ‘when it’s over here and we don’t wish to acknowledge it. Except, of course, when it’s over there. Isn’t that what Taylor’s suggesting?’

  Without waiting for Viklund’s response, he added, ‘Displacing everything, obsolescence the principal obsession.’

  A heavier breathing at the end of the line, alternating with no breathing at all, Viklund conceivably turning his head to engage, visually, someone else in the room, suggested to Maddox that his friend and he had arrived at a significant point of disagreement: a perception, he suspected, had been arrived at, of his (Maddox’s) own situation, which was too disagreeable to be acknowledged, let alone condoned.

  Or was this his illness speaking?

  Was there something significantly different still to be revealed?

  Was this what Simone had stepped back from, or decided to approach from an alternative direction: more intimate, more sensual, more loving: more complete – a healing gesture, intrinsic to her nature, perhaps, not to Viklund’s?

  Or was she, like Viklund, resisting an abhorrent view of him, her commitment only partial – demonstrably so? Was he focusing on something irredeemable in his nature which, inexorably, was coming to the surface, beyond hope, beyond meaning, beyond any reasonable explanation? Was Taylor, whatever he represented, claiming him at last, a revenge he’d always anticipated (it had been lurking out there somewhere) but had hoped had gone away?

  ‘I recall your reaction to Taylor’s use of the phrase – I believe it was his,’ Viklund said, his voice still restrained, ‘in describing the excesses of Giotto’s fateful expressions – “mascaraed excesses” – which you referred to as the bewilderment of their emergent roles, the antecedents of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, the same resonance, if more weathered, you traced to Rembrandt’s self-portraits and which you thought had been diversified into the body, or the embodiment, of the paint in Picasso and Matisse. A bewilderment, you suggested, amounting to terror, which we – presumably you – had not yet come to grips with. Had “subsumed”, the word you used, to the point where distraction would finally consume us all. And I recall his stare as you answered. Intense. Obsessive. Other-worldly. And I wondered, what do these two get up to together? But after all, or so you tell me, it was a woman you had in common. What do you think?’

  The final enquiry came abruptly – a sudden alacrity and alertness – contrasting vividly with the tone which had preceded it, a harshness returning to his voice.

  Viklund wasn’t, he concluded, glancing away to address someone else in the room, but was speaking with a lowered head, consulting something lying on his desk – his elongated, lectern-like desk – in his study, he seated on the bench before it.

  He had often sat there himself, the room, at the top of the house, with its two square windows looking directly onto the park. Facing the windows, and immediately below them, was the desk, itself of sufficient length, with its sloping surface, to accommodate any number of books laid side by side, the bench before it, not unlike a pew, similarly sufficient to accommodate several people sitting side by side.

  The two of them, frequently, had sat there together, examining texts and reproductions, or simply gazing out of the windows, they facing, in the evening, the setting sun, as well as the trees which had replaced the diseased elms in the park. The ecclesiastical, almost monastic atmosphere of the room, with its white-painted walls, unlike any other room in the house, otherwise rich with wallpaper, possessed – he imagining his friend at the end of the line – an atmosphere not unlike that of the Danish Church a few hundred yards along the road, which he had only recently discovered Viklund and Ilse attended each week, occasionally several times, Ilse not reluctant to go on her own but invariably capable, evidently, of persuading Viklund to go with her.

  Devotional, his nature, he reflected, all this while, and all this while, absorbed in aesthetics, he had never noticed, Viklund leaving this inference to speak for itself: an ecclesiastical saboteur, licensing faith in an age of disassociation, God an aetiological exercise, the significance of which he’d left each artist guilelessly to dissemble: not ‘humanity’ emerging for the first time, a phenomenological exercise, in Maddox’s interpretation, but God, discarding the prospect of no return, opening his arms to redemption: not the disassociative catastrophe Maddox himself had been entertaining (going on about) all these years under the illusion he and Viklund were engaged on the same thing.

  All these years, his mentor, friend and colleague had been drawn to him as a protagonist: saw his illness, no doubt, as the inevitable conclusion not so much of his lack as loss of faith – a faith which, unknown to him, Viklund had been preserving, witnessing Maddox’s illness, as well as his humiliation (sectioning: peer-group support: what peers!), above all, perhaps, his identification, guilt-ridden, with Taylor (Taylor committing what Maddox had commissioned) – witnessing all this as a definitive form of retribution, forgiveness for which lay, exclusively, now, in Viklund’s prayerful hands (and not in those, framed, in Simone’s consulting-room).

  He was, he concluded, revisualising his founder (imagining him in that upper room), confident of what would finally happen, if he, Viklund, had anything to do with it: the action of a friend, on the one hand, of a Salvationist, on the other. Here, too, was a reference to his past which Viklund, presumably, was playing on, a suggestion that retrieval lay not in the direction of the Danish Church but in his own formative experience involving his home town’s cathedral, St Albans, the interior – too large, too remote: too grand – he had absorbed and finally fled from as a child: Viklund the diplomat, consistent with the training and manners absorbed in his youth before art – or as art, the interpretation of (another diplomatic exercise) – took over.

  ‘I merely wanted to be sure you hadn’t been bowled over by Taylor.’

  He might, he thought, have said ‘evil’.

  ‘Hardly,’ Maddox said.

  ‘You are, as you yourself have observed, in a highly impressionable state.’

  ‘The conclusion I came away with,’ he said, ‘was to do with prodigality. Too many people doing too little and much the same thing. Prodigality the source, paradoxically, of the species’ destruction. Taylor’s vision of the same. Of he, him, himself, overwhelming everything.’

  Not necessarily true, if only abstracted from the confusing impression of his visit: a point to start from, something to play back into Viklund’s court.

  And, inevitably, an indication he wished Viklund to keep talking (challenging, prompting): that he still cherished this sensitive, elegant provocateur, his demeanour, now he considered it, less that of a diplomat than a sage, inference his method rather than statement, implication if followed through, rather than fact. Taste, sensitivity, fidelity: art politicised in favour of belief: an ideological interpretation, after all (the thought no sooner realised than he wondered if it were true).

  He was moving onto treacherous ground: his own treachery, his own ground (occupied now by Taylor): the delusion of ‘explanation’ was not only his but shared with someone he admired, even deferred to, excusing Viklund as the representative of an older, if largely defunct generation, an observer of war, of exclusion, betrayal, extermination, explaining, again, as an observer, the effect of a disaster greater than anything imagined when the century had begun: the age of means subduing ends, everything, it must have seemed to Viklund, as with Taylor, as with himself, coming to an end.

  And yet what was Viklund, in his discreet, self-effacing yet nevertheless – because of that – authoritative role intending to defend – hoping, even at the last moment, the nightmare of his aberrated behaviour concluded, to be handing on to Maddox? a tradition of doubt, of rejection, of repulsion countered by one of acceptance, forgiveness, atonement, a suggestion not that everything was coming to an end but, renewed, was once more beginning (faith as art moving to its summation in the Sistine Chapel roof), he, Viklund, preparing the way which Maddox would more thoroughly establish.

  No wonder, he reflected, Viklund had stayed clear of the High Renaissance – God becoming man – the beginning of the slope (man becoming ‘other’: Laycock), down which the species was descending at an ever-increasing rate, drawn on, mesmerically, by the prospect, the vanity, of its own destruction.

  This man was both for and against him, art as graven image, as spiritual exposition: the salvationary imperative (Laycock again: the ‘individual’ a romantic conception, ‘Christ revealed’ its template): the moral nature of ‘progress’, progress confused with expansion, man made ‘real’, the ‘individual’ made real, by his figurative advances.

  Here was Maddox, on the other hand, with his notion of self-preservation – substituting for a previous notion of self-assertion – taking himself off to a weekly life-class as he took himself off to the geriatric clinic, a fallen angel in Viklund’s imperium, imperium in imperio, falling, Viklund was hoping (inferring, suggesting), no more.

  ‘I don’t want you to be swept away,’ his friend was saying, as he might to a child, adding, more firmly, ‘by Taylor’s anomic disposition. Or would you refer to it as anoetic, consciousness without awareness?’

  ‘Awareness devoid of consciousness,’ Maddox responded. ‘Displacement no longer a correlative of art.’ He paused. ‘Maybe I should come round. Or you come here. Better than talking over the phone. This thing, to me, has become important.’

  ‘I don’t mind coming,’ Viklund said, eagerness evident in his voice, an unexpected development. ‘It’s time I saw where you live. I’ve been anxious,’ he went on, ‘about you living on your own. I don’t believe Charlotte and her new husband like it either.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  He waited.

  ‘She’s rung me on several occasions to ask how you are.’

  Concern: love – magnanimity in his wife, so lacking in himself, he was always anxious to discern.

  ‘She could easily have rung Simone.’