His ambition – recent, faltering, indecisive, inconclusive – had been to pull the rug from under Donaldson, he as significant a proponent, if not manufacturer, if not manipulator of the New Philistinism as any, certainly the one, in his experience, closest to hand. As it was (right now, too) he was suffering – badly: subject to sudden, involuntary sensations – like killing himself precisely at the moment when it might have been the last thought in his head; subject in general, to a tyranny of effects, many identified deceptively as causes, as if retribution, the form of, had been quietly amassing throughout his life, itself bereft of trauma or retributory desires. A life consumed by a desire to do/be good, guilt otherwise swiftly arising – to illuminate, expand, enhance (ideas, interpretations, people). For this he was being presented with an incomprehensible bill: a pauper (of sorts), he had consumed modestly throughout his life – to be presented with the evidence he had consumed an inordinate amount (enough for several people, if not more: who? when? where were they?). Nothing, so the bill suggested, had he chosen but the best.

  And here was Viklund – yet again – the one on whom he had most relied, for guidance, for encouragement, sceptical of Maddox’s revolutionary mission but admiring (supportive, in itself) of the way he’d gone about it: someone whose own revolutionary pretensions had been artfully concealed, art, as propaganda, of a more elusive, subtle, intransigent nature, that ‘thing’ he had never spoken about, that ‘thing’ on the behalf of which he prayed, presumably, each week at the Danish Church.

  No point in defending himself, or proposing, even, a different basis on which they might meet. His own misfortunes were grieved over, genuinely, by (he could see) his still-loving friend, but their causes were, to Viklund, painfully apparent: his father’s death, for instance, long before his mother’s, Taylor’s trial, much in the media at the time, and to which he had expected to be called as a witness, his sectioning, the causes of and the recovery, if incomplete, from that, his emergence, Simone vividly in mind, from what he had been slow to realise was a secular version of hell: anomalies in the brain’s DNA which triggered off hormonal defects amounting to disarray: genetics, epigenetics, chromosone deficiences, a constitutional disorder, an epidemiology of frightening proportions: the dreaded ‘Hox’ genes with their ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – the mutatory engine-room of deviant behaviour – finally, however, the absence of Christ or the equivalence thereof: he had been walking down the road – a road – or so he had thought, to salvation, and Viklund, unbeknown to him, had been walking down another, in a contrary direction, to the same (not least, as he had lately discovered, on Sundays: a particular time, a particular place, where universality could be recognised), less to enlightenment, or so it had seemed, than to something singularly more overwhelming.

  All these years, assuming he had been doing one thing and he had, in reality, been doing another. And Viklund, his hands extended behind him to the arms of the chair, having waited for Maddox’s acquiescence, had slowly, stiffly sat down and was now waiting, having, evidently, more to say which he wasn’t inclined to do from a standing position.

  ‘Shouldn’t we invite your driver in?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not me he normally hangs around for, but Ilse. I make a change. He has a computer which amuses him for hours.’

  ‘Computer?’ Maddox said, dissuaded from sitting.

  ‘A device he carries in his pocket. It’s scarcely out of his hand, even when he’s driving.’ More relaxed still, he leant back in the chair, his arms stretched out beside him. ‘If he dislikes the job he can always leave. I’ve heard no complaints. Ilse, for instance, doesn’t like me going out unaccompanied, terrified of something happening if no one is around.’

  If Viklund were indicating a sharing of afflictions, Maddox thought, he wasn’t inclined to go along with it, demonstrating his changing mood as well as his recovery by walking up and down, such discourtesy, he further reflected, complemented by something he wouldn’t previously have considered: a determination to emancipate himself from Viklund’s charm: behind it, glaringly, lay the ritualistic cannibalism of the sacred feast, the consumption of God’s son in response to an atavistic appetite: the action of primitives, if anything was.

  Nevertheless, breathing more freely, oppressed by Viklund’s presence but disinclined to carry discourtesy further by asking him to leave, he looked down on his friend, reminded – obscurely – of how he had never gone in for purchasing the objects he had discerningly admired, either on his own or others’ behalf – approaches from Sotheby’s and Christie’s consistently (at the time, seemingly, perversely) dismissed. Something climactic now, however, was about to happen, he suspected, Viklund’s own discomfort set aside, as if they were both, in his friend’s estimation, about to die – not a one-sided approach to death but a mutually convened arrival, Maddox as close to it, in Viklund’s eyes, as himself, he no longer Viklund’s successor but his spiritual accomplice.

  Further evidence, he reflected, of declining powers which any good-natured doctor would not be disinclined to point out. ‘The Socratic suggestion we should spend no time reflecting on death a singularly wise one, endorsed by Epicurus and your favoured Lucretius, in contrast, let’s say, to Aurelius, who thought of little else – all positivists, however, in this regard, for even by not-thinking we offer it a significant place, the only thing not to contemplate, the one deferring to the unimaginable by resignation, the other by acceptance, both, in my view, producing commendable results.’

  He was speaking to ease his throat, repeating much of what he had said before, anxious, at the same time, to reassure Viklund he was, relatively, back to normal as well as to prepare himself for, if not pre-empt, what he imagined might come next.

  ‘Montaigne appears to overlook that the decline of sensory perception is distressing in itself, the method as painful as the final result.’

  His voice had developed a drawl, as if, perversely, he were suggesting that lucidity was merely another symptom of the condition he was endeavouring to hide: that everything was a symptom of what he was endeavouring to hide, not least his pacing to and fro, an agitation as indicative of his discomfort as if he’d started stuttering – a childhood complaint, ironically, eased, if not disappearing, whenever he was driven in a car – or, as previously, as if he’d started choking, or had been unable to get out of his chair. Now he was simply stating he was unable to get into it.

  A childish disinclination to respond to Viklund in anything other than a defensive way was forcing him to avoid looking in his direction, aware merely of a wraith-like figure which came and went in the corner of his eye. He was concentrating on the window as he progressed towards it, and the street outside, then on the opening to the kitchen as he paced the room in the opposite direction. Surely it was plain to Viklund he wished his friend to go? What’s this? What’s happening to me? he mentally enquired: why am I disturbed by someone I’ve known for almost the whole of my adult life, and to whom I feel as close as I do to anyone, outside my family, and Simone?

  ‘I’ve only a matter of weeks to live,’ Viklund said, the tone restrained and, because of that, defiant. ‘Six might be a reasonable guess. Inevitably, I’m driven to think of other things. Whether, for instance, I should come by car. Or walk. Or where Kellaway would park it. I’ve to decide whether to end it in the way I’ve previously suggested or whether I should allow it to take its natural course. “Natural” being a word I’m currently having problems with. It doesn’t feel natural, for instance, to feel like I do at present.’

  He’d paused; Maddox, too: something along these lines he’d been expecting – definitive, inescapable, final – rejecting the thought in much the same way, he reflected, as he had rejected much in his own life, setting it aside, with restraint, in the hope that, having done so, it would do the only decent thing and go away.

  A fresh agitation coincided with this realisation: an awareness that Viklund was imposing on him at a time when even he would have conceded he didn’t wish to be imposed upon at all, certainly not by something as overwhelming as this.

  At the same time he was conscious of a curiously revivifying thought: not an article, for Devonshire, on Taylor – an arts page leader – but a book, encapsulating the art of the previous fifty years, its title immediately apparent, in lower case, to indicate the inconsequentiality he had so often gone on about: as it happened.

  ‘How certain are they?’ he enquired.

  ‘I’m playing stoppage-time, I believe they call it,’ Viklund said. ‘Injury time,’ he added.

  He was smiling, as if he had considered what he was about to say before confiding it.

  ‘Does Ilse know?’

  ‘Why upset her now when she’ll be upset enough when it happens? In the end I’ve concluded I have to tell someone. I hope you’ll forgive me.’ The look came up, plaintive, something little short of supplication: this I don’t have to go on about, the look suggested. What is friendship for, if not, at the very least, this sort of confession? ‘The whole of Ilse’s life, despite my discouragement, my frequent discouragement, has been focused on me. Not a warrantable sacrifice, by any means. But one I’ve been sufficiently lax to take advantage of. She went off once, for instance, with a fellow she still sees. Affection, I should say, rather than love, or, God forbid it, passion. Otherwise,’ he continued, ‘there’s only been me. Plus, of course, the times we’ve lived in.’

  Watching Maddox’s expression, he smiled: the thin lips parted to the diminutive, yellow teeth: something of a dandy’s gesture in the way he flicked his arm to one side, Maddox immediately reminded of his uncle, the parodied engagement he’d had with everything, in itself concealing, he’d assumed, something imperturbable yet possibly alarming.

  ‘Those geniuses we’ve spent our life examining. Justification, in your case, for claiming we’re in decline.’ He paused again. ‘I wouldn’t, for my part, concede it’s the end of everything. In regard of the species you’re convinced is heading for extinction.’ Raising one shoulder, he dipped his hand in the side pocket of his jacket, holding up a phial. ‘I need this, at the moment, to keep me going. Could you get me some water? My tea’s gone cold.’

  Maddox went through to the kitchen, found a glass, half filled it from a bottle in the fridge and took it back, standing by Viklund after he’d taken it. Whatever he’d been holding in his hand he’d swallowed and, drinking from the glass, he handed it back. ‘I’ve been intending to tell you for a while. Not least when walking the other day. As time’s shortened, my resistance to burdening you has weakened. And now, today, I thought, I’d better take a chance. How curious, I’d been thinking, we should both cave in together. Then I was aware, in more buoyant mood, you have a significant length of time to go and I might therefore hand on everything which is positive on my side to use at your discretion.’

  ‘Is there anything specifically,’ Maddox said, ‘you’d like me to do? Is there anything,’ he went on, his tone despairing, ‘you’d like to tell me?’

  He moved backwards, as if physically to accommodate whatever Viklund had to say, sitting on the arm of his chair, suggesting, by his posture, a readiness to spring up again.

  ‘My only concern is that whatever impetus my death may give you you use discreetly. I don’t care,’ he waved his arm again, ‘what you do, as long as you do it with conviction. Conviction, should it occur, lies at the heart of it. The approach to your conviction is what I most rely on. The approach, as far as I’m concerned, is all that counts. The result I leave to you.’ He smiled, a roguish expression. ‘The house, of course, I’ve left to Ilse. Not that you’d want it, in any case. My papers, to which you have exclusive access, I’ve left to the college archive.’

  He was on his feet before Maddox had risen, turning to the door. ‘Kellaway will be glad to see me. I told him I wouldn’t be long.’

  Maddox followed him to the hall where, having confirmed his decision to leave, Viklund waited for him to retrieve his coat and stick.

  Holding the coat to the other man, he realised how skeletal Viklund’s arms were as he slid them in the sleeves; how childlike, even, were the shoulders, how thin the neck and, alarmingly, how vulnerable the hair receding from the scalp, and was conscious of his intimacy with the man, something he’d scarcely been aware of over all these years: the texture of the skin, the colour of the hair, the way it had been rounded at the back of the head, even his odour: something of his father, the fastidiousness, the confederacy, which passed between them, implicit, unhurried, self-declared – the delicacy, even, in Viklund’s case – a sensitivity which, having found its outlet, was, almost deliberately, being withdrawn, at the same time declaring, ‘I’ve given you a reason for going on. My case may be worse than yours. Use it to measure how much there’s still to do.’ All he said, however, as, turning at the door, he embraced Maddox, instead of shaking his hand, was, ‘As we’ve always known, fortuity plays its engaging part, thank God,’ turning to the street, towards which he waved his arm.

  A car, parked amongst others, pulled out into the road. As it came forward Maddox could see the peaked cap of the driver. ‘His idea,’ Viklund said, anxious to identify elements of his life with which he was not in accord.

  The car pulled up. The man, dressed in a grey uniform, got out. Viklund, registering Maddox’s expression, ‘Ilse’s idea, which Kellaway was keen to endorse. They hatched it up together,’ taking Maddox’s hand and shaking it, a sign their farewell had been said in the house. ‘Let’s have another walk before it’s too late. Or perhaps you can wheel me round by then. Kellaway sometimes comes when there’s no one else. I hate to be alone when Ilse’s out. Odd, don’t you think, after all these years? As if everything material is being unconsciously dispensed with,’ turning the final remark to the surprisingly youthful figure of the driver, the eyes almost buried beneath the peak of the cap, the mouth, more broadly visible, smiling. ‘The car we hire by the year. It evidently saves on tax. Kellaway by the month. He’s taking a year out. Before university. He looks twelve but he’s really nineteen. He’s to study medicine. Or is it French?’

  ‘Neither,’ the youth responded, familiar, evidently, with Viklund’s rejuvenated mood, adding to Maddox, ‘Law. Mr Viklund’s aware of it, but cynical, too. The political nexus of the future. He’s loath to agree. He thinks I should do something useful.’

  ‘Law displacing politics,’ Viklund said, winking at Maddox. ‘He has the right if not the true idea, youth ahead without our even knowing. Any fool can do it.’

  ‘Like art,’ the young man responded. ‘Anyone can, and most of them have.’

  ‘Most of them do,’ Viklund said, ducking to the rear door as the young man held it open. ‘Though I never get in the last word,’ he added. ‘Art, of course, I wouldn’t recommend. It’s either on you, or it isn’t. Most of those afflicted, however, can easily brush it off,’ the door closing, his face plaintively visible behind the glass, his figure shrunken in the interior of the car, he waving, the youthful chauffeur nodding, smiling, as it drew away.

  Returning inside Maddox washed up the three mugs and the glass, staring into the tiny yard outside the kitchen window, not sure, even now, what had been the purpose of Viklund’s visit: fear, a desire to tell someone to whom the news would be significant: assigning to him a task he couldn’t himself complete: promoting the virtues, however reduced, of staying alive: the handing-over of a tradition he hoped he would sustain.

  And, returning to fear: the abandonment of something he had taken delight in in favour of something unimaginable: the enquiry that lay at the back of his announcement: is self-death acceptable as grace? Wasn’t Christ’s knowledge of the context within which he was acting another form of self-submission? The quandary, too, of the Apostles’ Creed – the text, in his own case, learnt by heart in company with his mother, his father, his brother, his sister, though never his uncle, and in the chapel, too, at Quinians – the confession of belief in a Christ who prior to his resurrection descended for three days into hell having previously assured the thief (to his right, his left?) that he would that day be with him in paradise – a paradise which Viklund, now it had come to the crunch, was finding elusive. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? no apostasy, exactly, but something of a secular nature he wished to confide, obvious in his proposal they return to the park to walk again. Finally, farewell.

  Meanwhile, all this alongside his sudden conviction – his ‘vision’, even – away from all that, though tangentially, in some way, connected to it: he should ‘programme’ Taylor into the contents of a book, art in society transposed into art as society, the bleeding heart of ‘consciousness’ abandoned in favour of a heart more clinically defined.

  11

  That night, having agreed to spend it apart, he said, involuntarily, without being aware he was about to say it, on the phone to Simone, ‘I’ve a feeling this unipolar illness is turning into a bipolar affair. I’m not sure it’s not mania determining things at present, or something, if not more obscure, no less extreme. I wonder if I’m on the wrong drug. Lithium, for instance, instead of dothiepin, or one of the post-prozac derivatives.’

  ‘You could have lithium now,’ she said, ‘as a booster. You don’t have to stabilise before you take it, although it’s preferable,’ she added, the doctor speaking in the immediacy of her response: distant, circumspect: exact.

  ‘Yet I don’t want to be on a drug at all,’ he said. ‘If I go back to Kavanagh and ask to be reassessed I’ve a feeling he’ll do what he’s suggested before. Bring me in for observation, with a heavier dose of everything. Prognoses, as you know, in mental health, aren’t always to be relied on. The doctor’s often as much in the hands of the patient as the patient is in the hands of the doctor. What do you think?’ this final enquiry reminding him once again, inconsequentially, of Viklund.