The urgency of his appeal silenced her at the other end. ‘Since Viklund came to see me I’ve had this urge to crack on with Taylor. Which I know you won’t approve of. However, since I’m nuts, I’m no longer sure what I ought to do.’

  ‘You’d better come up this evening,’ she said, he sensing – a chill around his heart – her disinclination he should do so: she had a more urgent problem than his own.

  She had, he was vividly reminded, a curious confidence both in his recuperative powers, now fully engaged, and in his underlying strength. It was as if his official designation – Emeritus Professor – placed him, cerebrally as well as emotionally, in an impregnable position. He had, on this occasion, scarcely referred to her anxieties at all. ‘How are you making out with Death?’ he enquired.

  ‘His name is Norman,’ she said.

  ‘Norman. I thought you were being affectionate.’

  ‘His given name is Brian.’

  He had his own recollections of sitting opposite Simone in her consulting-room: the seductiveness, for one thing, once he was familiar with the routine, of her dress: the relatively short skirts, the occasional long ones: her androgynous suit of trousers and jacket; her attempts to obviate her breasts; the high heels alternating with low ones, he placing himself, on each occasion when variations in her appearance significantly characterised their encounters, in a representative position. What would most men feel? What do I feel? Is she signalling I shouldn’t take note of her efforts, or that I should? Norman, he assumed, could have been no different.

  Her response to his initial enquiry came with a lowering of her voice. ‘I’ve spoken to two more colleagues whom I trust. They recommend Symonds, the lawyer I mentioned. He’s evidently seen several cases through the Medical Council. Only one of his clients had to appear before the vetting committee and the charges against him were dropped. The same, he thinks, will happen on this occasion, though the worrying thing is the climate has changed. He suggests I conscientiously reject the allegations and show willingness to cooperate.’

  ‘Has Norman been to see you again?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A lunatic. Nobody will believe a word he says. One look at him and they’ll know it’s ridiculous.’

  ‘That you can’t rely on. There is, of course, the other complainant. And,’ she went on, ‘there’s also you.’

  ‘I’m not complaining.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Her laughter came from the other end, a lightening of her voice as she continued, ‘I thought, with him, I was making progress. I thought, in some respects, he was coming good.’

  ‘What was his problem?’

  ‘A not uncommon one with men.’ He waited (she waited): did he fit, had he fitted into this category himself? ‘Their wives, after having had children, no longer want sex. Their clitorises are desensitised, often, after childbirth, though they’re unaware of the cause. They even suggest to their husbands that they “relieve” themselves elsewhere, disowning any involvement, reducing sex, inadvertently, to a lavatorial function. To men who are dependent on their wives this is often distressing if not abhorrent. If they do have sex with someone else their wives invariably leave them, or they themselves feel obliged to leave. Inevitably this provokes even deeper anxieties. Norman was different in this respect. Having been deserted by his wife and children, whom he still loved, he was suffering not merely from impotence and frustration but a defensive hatred of women. A not unusual outcome.’

  It was the most she had ever confided in him about one of her patients, a curious form of discretion, he had always thought, considering the intimacy of their relationship. Conceivably, until now, she had considered him, to some degree, still to be a patient: hence the potency of the charge against her. Consequently, there had been, perhaps, a desire to keep him away from her work, or her work away from him, a difficult thing to do, certainly a challenge, in a house arranged the way it was. Involvement, if only peripherally, with her clients was unavoidable: he and they came and went through the same front door. It might even have been this that had provoked Death into making his charge. Additionally, she might, perversely, have anticipated the situation and, disarmed by its inevitability, have found it difficult to confront: to some degree, at least in his case, it was true, he, too, perversely, an arbiter of her fate.

  What, he wondered, had she seen in the three previous men she had married (something, presumably, on each occasion, ‘permanent’)? As far as he could tell it had been, primarily, an educative function, her own origins, in as much as she was prepared to talk about them, frustratingly obscure: from one she had learnt ‘a great deal about science’, from another about the Stock Exchange (he was a broker), and from the first, the doctor, ‘a great deal about people’: a comprehensive, if not definitive list. Perhaps his sobriquet would be ‘culture’. Yet she gave little, if any sign of it, the Dürer prints in the consulting-room misleading and, like all her pictures, of sentimental value only (a gift from a previous admirer which had remained in place by default rather than intent: ‘they provide suitable subjects for comment, all else failing’), a suggestion, here, of a Nordic sensibility, which she clearly didn’t possess, and behind which, he presumed, she could safely hide: she ‘liked’ them, she confessed, but, unlike some of her other, largely, to him, inconsequential pictures, wasn’t ‘fond’ of them. With this response, curiously, he had always felt relieved.

  Several of her clients were endowed with what she approvingly described as ‘artistic natures’, though none of them were practitioners: producers, directors, actors (‘interpreters’ – rather than ‘originators’, painters (‘messy: their work, in any case, gives them access to other things’) or sculptors (‘dirty and, quite rightly, physically rather than psychically engaged’), the ‘creative process’, nevertheless, ‘of interest’ to her, yet only so far as it was commented upon by someone else. She read reviews, knew what was on at the cinema and in the theatre, as well as the whereabouts of ‘interesting-sounding’ exhibitions (to which she rarely went, unless he or someone else accompanied her, in each instance, thereby, a social rather than what she would have described as an ‘internal’ event).

  He, too, as a commentator, was divorced from immediate involvement with the ‘creative process’ (something so accessible, at least in ascription, it might easily have been purchased in a shop), his belated approach to direct participation, involving the life-class, had left him more bemused by his fellow aspirants, the majority of them women, the majority of those Jewish, than he was by the results he aspired to and had patently failed to achieve. ‘It’ – creativity – belonged to an area of experience – of knowledge – which he had, so far, only superficially examined, drifting into psychoanalysis, or psychotherapy, on the way and instinctively withdrawing; or, rather, from which he had been withdrawn by someone else.

  The mystery of his attraction to her had deepened (was deepening all the while), no resolution or illumination forthcoming. Examining his features in the mirror as he shaved he occasionally saw a younger, more recognisable, altogether more familiar and reassuring face gazing out. It was a shock to pass a shop window and see reflected there a figure he had to glance at twice, sometimes more, to recognise: white-haired, hunched, unconsciously stiff-necked, an incredulous, startled, even frightened expression gazing out: that additional spasm of alarm as he mentally confirmed it was himself. On one occasion he had been walking with Charlie, his eldest son, and as they crossed the road (they were on their way to introduce Charlie to Simone, an event which, despite his misgivings, though not hers – ‘I’m sure we’ll like one another: we have you in common’ – had gone off remarkably well) his attention had been drawn to two men approaching them from the other side, only to realise, concentrating deeply on what he was saying (apprehension uppermost at the forthcoming encounter), that the elderly figure whom he had dismissingly assumed to be in his eighties, if not older – stiffened movements, a shock of white hair – and the vibrantly younger, bigger, bolder figure beside him were, in fact, a reflection of himself and his son in the window of a shop directly opposite.

  ‘Mind’, whatever it was, was absorbing him more and more: a feeling of his being subject to it rather than it being subject to something he might, otherwise, reasonably have called ‘himself’, the evidence that such a thing existed merely his acknowledgement of a bubble-like effusion inside his skull (he, like everyone else, had got ‘it’), with more cells than stars in the universe (who, he wondered, had counted?), he looking to Simone to elucidate it further, something which, perversely, so it seemed to him, she refused to do. It was as if, at times, she were disowning not only her own knowledge but her accreditations: as if, more pertinently, she were disembarrassing herself of the material of a lifetime, going back to – wishing to go back to – a period of her life, more pertinently, to another person, she had known intimately, devotedly, before ‘all this’ began. At times he would find her gazing at him as if he weren’t there or were a different person entirely, an abstracted look inspired by a recognition of something deeply familiar, which he could not associate with or identify. Behind – beyond – her lay an area of experience she was unwilling, perhaps unable, to disclose, while other areas – her lives with her husbands – she would refer to without rancour, recalling her involvement like she might have recalled the contents of a favoured book or film – ‘we can pick up on that’ she might easily have told him, ‘when it comes round again’ – anxious for him to share what, clearly, had been a ‘positive experience’.

  Apart from being born and brought up and having gone to school in a Midlands town, he knew little about her: she had a brother who had gone abroad, with whom she was rarely in touch, and a sister, likewise, who still lived in a Midlands town and, apart from having had children, ‘had no career’, she expressing surprise that he should be astonished she’d married a butcher. ‘Why?’ she had said.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not me, it’s her,’ she responded.

  ‘Or your family, or background,’ he told her.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, dismissing it.

  His own early life, apart from that recounted in her consulting-room, appeared similarly to be of little interest to her: her eyes glazed over whenever he described incidents from his childhood in St Albans and his teenage years at Quinians (‘was it fee-paying?’ was all she had asked: some sort of opprobium there), he assuming she’d heard much the same before, from a variety of sources, and that now their relationship was on a more intimate footing it was of no relevance any longer, material which, domestically, could be discounted.

  A mystery, she, as was her science, if it was a science. ‘I’ll try anything once,’ he’d told Charlotte on her suggestion he see a psychoanalyst outside, or apart from, the National Health treatment he was receiving: on the basis of ‘empiricism’ – a discipline he’d always responded to throughout his relatively unvariegated life – he’d taken up what, as posed by Charlotte, and, if more irritatingly, by Gerry, he’d concluded was a reasonable, if not colourful challenge.

  As it was, Simone was less inclined to discuss her ‘subject’ than he Was his, his resumed intermittent stints reviewing the galleries holding out to her little if any interest, she accompanying him on one occasion, at his suggestion, only for him to discover, surprisingly (he’d been looking forward to it), she was a distraction, precipitating his reactions and devitalising his final comments.

  The reviews she did read, again at his prompting, she did so with an air of enclosure, the newspaper held up as if to the light but, in reality, to conceal her face, he, excluded from judging her reaction, obliged to observe the reverse side of the paper and her extended arms and hands, and specifically the delicacy – the endearing delicacy – of her fingers and nails, the extraordinary slenderness of her wrists, an infuriating mixture of infatuation and irritation which not even repetition in any way appeased.

  Having read his piece – an even more peculiar as well as irritating habit – she would lower the paper and invariably remark on an item adjacent to it (‘Have you seen this photograph? Have you read what’s written here?’) so that finally, when he enquired, ‘What do you think?’ she’d reply, as if reminded (so memorable the effect), ‘You have a gift for this sort of thing. It seems to come so easily,’ or, worse, ‘I wonder what the artist thinks.’

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily come easily,’ he’d suggest, and enquire, ‘What about the content?’

  ‘Oh, the content,’ she’d respond, ‘is very good,’ as if this were the least of the piece’s merits.

  The situation now in place whereby he would no longer be writing at all, unless he could summon up another opening – relatively impossible at his age – she’d welcomed. ‘Isn’t it, when it comes down to it, trivialisation?’ she enquired when he insisted loss, of some sort, might be involved. ‘The sort you despise. I’m glad to see you out of it. You’re not a hack, and never could be. Certainly,’ she went on, ‘never should be,’ adding, when Devonshire came up in their conversation, ‘Why don’t you tell him to fuck himself? He undoubtedly does, in any case,’ a lowering of her guard – a descent into colloquialism – which he was both startled by (what did it reveal which she’d previously kept hidden?) and welcomed. Was this the otherwise unmentioned heritage of the Midlands town excitingly re-emerging? Was it the same – he’d had little experience of anything similar himself – she was hoping to unearth in him?

  The latter he doubted: he had no such instincts, nor the equivalent experience to offer in response to opposition, from wherever it might come. Rules had governed his life, sporting or otherwise, at Quinians, and had continued to do so throughout his career: even the dissolution of his marriage had followed a code of practice determined by solicitors and accountants. His relationship with Simone alone had taken him into an area where previously he had never ventured, involving him exclusively in an event the outcome of which could in no way be predetermined. He’d even, earlier, gone mad by rules: the climactic event itself, a selfish, unilateral action, had followed a familiar method – predictable, callous, involving blameless other people. He’d been subsequently treated by rules (prescribed medication, formal confinement) and was, to a large degree, pursuing the same. Simone alone was a sign – as he suspected he was for her – of the breaking-up of a structure which had dominated his life. Even Taylor, he reflected, was bound up in this: he, too, had recoiled from what amounted to a gift as a theoretician in a hopeless attempt to function as a practitioner, an exponent, someone governed by intuition – he had responded exclusively to that – something which, if infinitely more modestly, certainly not definitively, Maddox was doing himself, at little or no cost, with his life-class.

  Taylor, in the end, had sacrificed his reason (‘getting in touch with his feelings’): he, Maddox, had done the same, with singularly, searingly, lesser results. This, he reflected, was what they had in common, parity of unreason, if nothing else.

  Nothing stood still, everything moved, he and Simone no exception.

  Where he, or they, were moving to, however, he had no idea. What in him was changed, was changing still, by being observed? Was he in the process of being evolved? And she? Was she, in a similar way, evolving too, en route to somewhere where, not unlikely, so unpredictable the process, neither of them would meet, or be able to meet again?

  So men with problems often had the same one (how close to a whore did she have to be?) as far as the clinician was concerned: their wives no longer wanted to fuck: did not welcome (further) physical intrusion (their biological function, to this degree, complete): all those men he passed in the street, ‘Brian’, or Norman, amongst them, dying before their partners, sexuality suspended: the psychological equivalent of turning over a stone, insects scattering in every direction. No wonder, he reflected, dealing repetitively with this, she wanted out (running for cover, in her way, too): no more analysis, no more complaint, no more toleration, no more patience: no more inclination to listen: no longer origins, hers, his, or anyone else’s. Only now: that which would not come again: imperative: a blessing.

  She’d never had children, something which, seemingly, was becoming her principal virtue, enlightenment, on the other hand, of some sort, still her goal, fucking, she must have concluded, a way of being, not of (needlessly) spreading herself around.

  She was still talking, much of it, he was alarmed to discover, having gone unheard: a recapitulation of male desire, female unreceptivity. ‘What about women?’ he heard himself enquire.

  ‘Unable to form adequate relationships with men. Frigidity. Displacement.’

  ‘But then everything,’ he said, despairingly, ‘is a symptom. Infinity,’ he went on, ‘which can’t be imagined, causes disappearing into the same, their sources speculated on but never disclosed.’

  He was endeavouring to bring the subject back to himself, but courteously, without imposing on, or interrupting, what she evidently wished to say. There was something other than what she had mentioned so far – or he had missed while, an increasingly uncontrollable habit, he was ‘thinking’.

  ‘And Norman’s name is Brian?’

  ‘Usually I think of them by their given names. His was an exception, his surname so like a given name itself. “Brian” seems foreign as a result.’ As if another subject had come to mind, she added, ‘It’s one of the reasons I’ve gone off the work. Or could.’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Its predictability. The mixture of intimacy and objectivity is highly seductive. Particularly to women. They get in on things in a way that would otherwise be proscribed. Men, on the other hand, see it as a surrogate form of seduction. Not being a man, of course, I can’t be sure. It’s merely my experience.’

  He felt liberated by her statement; and, prompted by the thought, liberated too, bizarrely – disgracefully – by the prospect of Viklund’s death: that obstacle out of the way, he was thinking, along with that involvement out of her way, too: the sadness, the loss, in the case of Viklund, the gain, in the case of Simone.