‘She has.’

  ‘Odd she never told me.’

  ‘It’s good to be surrounded,’ he paused, ‘by people who care.’

  Back to that: Taylor, presumably, had cared: ‘Love,’ he had evidently written in a note read out in court at the time, ‘is not enough.’

  ‘I’ll see you soon,’ Viklund said, putting the receiver down at the other end.

  Scarcely a quarter of an hour later his friend, supported by a walking-stick, appeared at the door, stooping as he came in, as if to indicate the diminutive proportions of the building, pausing, once inside, before the door was closed, to gaze at the houses opposite, the symmetry of doors and windows in the low, one-storeyed façades. ‘As both of us have remarked in the past, my place, really Ilse’s place, is far too grand,’ stepping from the narrow hall into the ground-floor through-room as if he were climbing a ladder, allowing Maddox to take his coat, to lay it over a chair, accepting not the offer of a drink but tea, Maddox talking to him from the kitchen, coming through, finally, and sitting down opposite the spot where the fireplace might have been, in its place, the cavity sealed off, a television set.

  ‘Time we talked,’ his visitor said, the mug of tea untouched on the low table Maddox had placed beside him. ‘Quite soon,’ he added, ‘it’ll be too late.’

  There was, after all, a confederacy between them: the legacy of pictures, sculptures.

  ‘Back to iconography, for instance,’ Viklund said. ‘I felt drawn at the beginning not to life but art, and was immediately impressed when you drew my attention to motor-cars. Flesh into metal, and back again,’ facetiousness in his tone as well as glance.

  His friend was dressed in the familiar dark grey suit, a filament of a lighter, vertical line passing through it: light-coloured socks, the slim, sharply pointed, thin-leathered, handmade shoes, the handkerchief pointing up from the lip of the breast pocket, a lighter-coloured waistcoat visible between the lapels of the jacket, the white shirt and diagonally patterned tie, pink and grey: a uniformity of appearance which Viklund had affected since the moment Maddox had first known him. As far as he could recall he’d been dressed in a similar, if not an identical manner at the first lecture Maddox had attended at the Courtauld, and consistently so, later, at the Drayburgh: a uniform, saddening, almost childish, Viklund had thought congruous with his calling as a gentleman, if more pertinently, a diplomat: serenity, composure, exactness: something entrancingly ‘away’ from life, Pemberton, too, he recalled, inclined to suits, dark and, minus patterning, even more anonymous.

  ‘We’ve both been pulling on the same rope, but,’ Viklund said, ‘in divergent directions, not maximising our effort, only convinced of the one thing, the nature of the opposition at the other end, identified by both of us as aggressive, redundant, obscene.’

  A moral disposition in both of them, he wondering if the familiarity of his own home, and Viklund’s agreement to be in it, licensed a renewed examination of his life-long friend (and, he was beginning to recognise, rival).

  He took in the particularities of the face, the sharpness, now the flesh had left it, of the projecting forehead, the darkening cavities, as if moulded by a finger, from within which the eyes gazed out – a look characterised by an unusual candour, one he associated with Viklund’s early years: an unblinking, unwittingly oppressive stare (the misleading impression of boyish expectation).

  And the mouth, thin-lipped, flexed between bracketed incisions, a self-deprecating grimace creeping in with age, braced to pain, or the prospect of, above it the assertive, autocratic, avian nose: all this, and sensibility, too, from an amalgam, Maddox reflected, of reptilian, apean, human resources, a million million years from spark igniting gas to God’s aesthete – bent, or so it appeared, on a final evangelical mission.

  Through the walls, as ever, came Berenice’s frenetic, expostulating, self-exonerating voice: the intimacy of her domestic regime: ‘I’ve just tidied the fucking room and you’re fucking it up already,’ followed by the inevitable, ‘Right?’

  Or, rather, ‘Roight?’

  ‘You cunt!’

  Viklund’s head went up to acknowledge the sound, pausing before enquiring, ‘Would you say we’re divergent, or on the same line?’

  ‘The same line. Though we might dispose of the rope,’ he added.

  The tiny, yellowing teeth appeared: something circumspect in his manner evident at once, a probity which came from values, from a predilection not necessarily his own. He, too, he might have been saying, had had a father – an uncle, even – who had played a determining role in his earliest life, putting in place a refinement he might otherwise never have had: fortuity, on the one hand, predestiny, on the other. ‘What’s the diff, Professor?’ he was mentally enquiring, recalling Simone’s observation on the contrary nature of their careers.

  And she, what was her place in Viklund’s imperium? Would news of her predicament confirm what Viklund had suspected all long – a professional misjudgement on her part?

  On both their parts.

  It’s odd,’ he said, ‘when we’ve been so close, that what was there in you, so significantly, was never recognised by me until now,’ the strangeness of Viklund sitting in a place where he had never sat before striking him at that moment with renewed force. This is a reductive experience, he warned himself, he’s here on a missionary expedition. ‘Faith on one side,’ he added, ‘something considerably less on mine.’

  ‘Not less,’ Viklund said, ‘different,’ the tone light, inconsequential, the suggestion thrown away.

  ‘What I’ve been, and am going through, might be seen as a consequence of what I rejected, consciously, in you,’ he said.

  ‘Not, as you supposed, that I’m seeking a deathbed conversion.’

  Maddox shook his head. ‘I assume you held such beliefs all along and chose, rightly, not to impose them on me. At this point of our lives, however, they’re scarcely important. Certainly Lucretius wouldn’t approve. Nil igitur mors est ad nos, extinction or life continuing in another, or even similar form, irrelevant.’

  ‘I’m not here to convert,’ Viklund said, still smiling. ‘I’m not asking you to share anything at all. The antidote to despair isn’t further rejection. There’s a great deal of resistance to art being about anything at all. That, I scarcely need to add, is still very strong.’

  ‘The best of both worlds,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Aestheticism, as an end in itself, however, has never been my line. I merely suggest, it doesn’t have to be yours. I believe you’ve discovered that for yourself.’ He lifted his head: once more through the party-wall came Berenice’s cry: ‘Why don’t you do what I fucking ask? All the time I’m talking here and you’re taking no fucking notice! ROIGHT?’ Viklund concluding, ‘Belief has its own momentum. It does or it doesn’t claim us as its own.’

  There was a sudden bleakness in this confession which Maddox hadn’t been prepared for: it was as if Viklund were confiding: don’t you see, we’re both fucked up?

  As it was, he was watching Maddox without turning his head, his pupils lodged in the corners of his eyes, a suddenly antagonistic, fierce, unsmiling look: all his reserve appeared to have vanished.

  ‘Without the anguish, farewell to God and hello to perdition, there’d be nothing there at all. Style bereft of content. At the heart of it, otherwise, would be a liking for decoration, something to distract us from an otherwise blank wall.’

  He could see – felt aggrieved – that Viklund was speaking – pleading, almost – from exhaustion, someone, foreseeing his end, determined to attract an audience (a congregation, it was turning out), appealing beyond the ‘aesthetic provenance’, as he invariably described it, to something altogether more demanding and, at the same time, conscious of its irrelevance, he was suggesting, the one sign of its authenticity: a religionist’s not an aesthete’s, or even a humanist’s passion.

  ‘Would all this go down well, I wonder, next door?’ Maddox gestured at the wall.

  The facetiousness Viklund dismissed with a wave of his hand, the strange, inelegant hand with its small, immaculately cared-for fingers.

  ‘Aesthetes don’t illuminate anything. The struggle goes on elsewhere.’

  Maddox was, he realised, endeavouring to suppress a feeling of hostility, one which had been there from the moment Viklund had taken up his offer to visit him at home: he, out of deference, had always gone to him, a normal expression of their friendship which neither of them had queried until now.

  Viklund, he suspected, had never liked children: something which might have inclined him to stay away in the past. Out of that had evolved a pattern neither had disturbed. Yet even then, the hostility, he realised, was defensive: ever since leaving Simone’s house the previous evening he’d been in a state of shock, of not knowing from which direction the next attack might come: the Medical Council, Taylor, Devonshire, Doctor Death himself. The tension, of a paroxysmal nature, one anxiety attack succeeding another, the residual level of anxiety scarcely receding, was causing him not only to sweat but to breathe in a peculiarly irregular manner, he disguising his discomfort by repeatedly moving in his chair, keeping his hands and his arms occupied, breathing deeply and slowly as far as the irregular pattern would allow, willing, almost, the expelled carbon dioxide to remain inside his lungs.

  Here was Viklund, speaking to him as if he were a normal human being and all the while he was struggling to contain a disturbance which had little if anything to do with Viklund at all, or with the room, or the house, or with anything he could identify. His body – its reactions – had a life of its own, the brain, sitting on top of this disaster – his stomach contracting as he endeavoured to control the expansion and dilation of his lungs – surveying the catastrophe with a helplessness he recognised as not exclusively his. In rooms up and down the surrounding streets, let alone around the town – at the geriatric day-care centre, at the North London Royal – others would be enduring a not dissimilar sensation: a feeling of being manipulated by a presence other than their own, a feeling that their lives were coming to a halt. He was doing his best not to get to his feet and walk about the room, his arms folded across his chest to constrain the involuntary movements of his body: he was doing his best not to provide Viklund with the evidence – to be communicated presumably to Charlotte, to Simone – that would confirm his worst misgivings, his illness the consequence of a faithless existence, his insistence that the hedonistic principle was the only one that counts.

  All this time and energy wasted, he reflected, in being ill; all this time wasted either confessing or denying it: all this time driven by feelings over which, other than by chemicals, he had no control: the irresponsibility of his relationship with Simone: somehow that, and aesthetics and Taylor, even Laycock, Doctor Death, Donaldson and Devonshire were connected. He was in a situation from which he couldn’t withdraw – other than by way of the tube station platform. Why, subconsciously, had he chosen that, handing on his affliction, in its most tormented form, to those whom he loved and was loved by, as well as to those who were not otherwise involved? The evidence of his failure (to do something) was vividly before him, Viklund suggesting that the seeds of it lay in his abandonment of the faith of the Florentine masters by whom, otherwise, his life had been consumed: the failure to make a coherent statement of his life now that it was, so plainly, even if not pre-empted by him, coming to an end.

  An image of ‘Death’ came to him in a spectral form, not all that different from the emaciated figure he had seen coming out of and going into Simone’s consulting-room; nor, now he came to take more regard of it, from the figure sitting in the chair before him. He was even aware of Berenice’s recriminations coming, renewed, through the party-wall: ‘What will that cunt next door think? He says I’m fucking nuts. Right?’ he wondering if she were referring to him or her equally submissive neighbours on her other side.

  He was withdrawing into a position from which Viklund would no longer be able to retrieve him (the purpose, he concluded, of his unprecedented visit). Lunacy had no other source than his denial of the divine nature of the origins of life (if it was good enough for Giotto, Fra Angelico, Alberti, it should be good enough for him), to him an electro-chemical event, to Viklund something beyond definition, beyond understanding, beyond the scope of the imagination.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m waiting to be saved, other than in a medical sense,’ he said. ‘And that, as far as I can tell, is underway. As for Taylor, he fits into a pattern which was there before I ever felt like this,’ something helpless in his tone of voice as well as his gestures, his hand flailing before him as if in dismissal, in reality to suggest to Viklund he listen to the voice coming through the wall.

  ‘You’re wanting to hit me, roight!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to fucking hit me!’

  ‘I don’t’

  ‘You’re wanting to fucking kill me. Roight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re wanting to fucking kill me because I don’t want you in my fucking house!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re wanting to fucking kill me!’ something of a scream.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you, you cunt!’

  ‘You want to fucking kill me! I told you!’ screaming. ‘Roight?’

  ‘I’ll kill you, you cunt!’ a door slamming, the sounds continuing, the words inaudible.

  A second door slammed. The walls shook. The glass vibrated in the windows. Debris rattled down the chimney and crumbled in the sealed-off fireplace. An impediment of some sort was lodged inside Maddox’s throat: what he had hoped might once more be under his control appeared to be so no longer.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Viklund had risen, with difficulty, from his chair, pushing himself up against the arms, coming to stand by Maddox’s chair while Maddox, suddenly aware of how frail Viklund was, went through all the sensations of being choked – strangled, even, by an invisible hand, something which enclosed his neck. His hand went to his chest, Viklund, if feebly, striking his back. His eyes filled with tears: he indicated the kitchen, managed to exclaim, ‘Water!’ and waited, alternately doubling over and straightening, while Viklund went to the kitchen and returned moments later with a beaker.

  He spluttered, swallowed, endeavoured to speak, swallowed again, and then, with an effort, stood.

  Taking deep breaths he walked to the window, almost as if he intended walking through it and into the street (anywhere to get away from here), turned, breathed more deeply, and walked back across the room.

  ‘I don’t know what it is. Tension.’ His throat, as he spoke, began to clear: the distinct impression that something was trapped there began to fade. He swallowed, swallowed again, exhaled, vigorously, and added, ‘I’ll be all right. I’m better already. A demon departing, so to speak,’ smiling at Viklund’s shaking his head.

  ‘Let’s hope,’ Viklund said, and added, ‘What’s the tension about?’

  ‘It comes from nowhere,’ he said. ‘Hormonal. Inside the head. Missing letters in the DNA,’ knowing he was playing into Viklund’s hands, the older man’s alarm nevertheless subsiding, he appearing about to fall, holding onto the back of Maddox’s chair. Shadows Maddox had rarely seen fell across Viklund’s face, deepening the hollows around the eyes, within the cheeks, below his jaw: a mask, an almost diabolical expression, confused – confounded: a fearful look which intensified as he, in turn, examined Maddox’s face. He came to my rescue without a second thought, he reflected. His faith is authentic, something about which he has no choice, as natural as breathing, aware of the opportunity for choice in me, perhaps, even, at this point, envying it.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said again. ‘Perhaps I should walk you back, or call you a cab. How did you get here? You arrived so quickly. I forgot to ask.’

  ‘I have the car,’ Viklund said.

  ‘Have you parked it?’

  ‘The driver’s with it.’

  ‘Outside?’

  ‘Better than leaving it on a meter, don’t you think?’ the suggestion of a smile: something disagreeable and yet disarming had passed between them, Maddox wasn’t sure what: the intrusion of wealth, the suggestion it isolated Viklund more decisively than anything else: his house, his paintings, a chauffeured car – and faith, of an indiscernible but significant nature.

  Division was suddenly more apparent than anything which, previously, might have united them: no wonder Viklund had left belief implicit in a relationship which could well have foundered on it.

  ‘I’ll walk you to the car,’ he said, adding, ‘Where is it?’ looking round for Viklund’s coat.

  ‘He’ll see me come out. I wondered if we might talk more.’

  Viklund had turned, crossing to his chair, stooping over it, indicating decisively his intention of sitting down, the car, the notion of someone waiting in it (surely not Ilse?) of little or no concern. What a curious impression, Maddox reflected, Viklund must have of service; it was, after all, a cardinal’s temperament, a worldly accountability subsumed by a spiritual one, or, more readily, he assumed, the other way around.

  Maddox drank again: it had been a mistake to accede to his friend’s suggestion he come to the house – the residue of a family home from which anything connected with familial intimacy had been removed; or, more nearly, in reality, had flowed away. It was desertion, he realised, that lay at the heart of his illness – looking round at the anonymous room, previously two rooms, the connecting arch a square-shaped structure, the opening into the equally anonymous kitchen. No wonder Simone rarely wished to stay: no wonder he was glad to escape to her house, its walls covered with mementoes from one stage of her life or another (a consciously recorded advancement): photographs, drawings, paintings, prints, artefacts, maps, testimonials, even framed pages of manuscript (hers and others’ from the several books to which she’d contributed essays or introductions), the furniture, too, an accumulation from the past, the house too small to contain all she would have wished to put in it: an interior expressing richness, as opposed to wealth, intimacy, knowledge, diversity, appreciation, even rapacity, conviviality, warmth: health.