‘The male clients, I suppose, always want to fuck. I did,’ he said, adding, ‘It’s not unlike a cerebral form of prostitution. That must appeal to women, too. A visceral reward substantiated by financial remuneration.’

  ‘I’ve never had a problem with that,’ she said, adding, ‘until now. Though I wouldn’t wish to agree. At some point a relatively objective recognition of what is involved is arrived at, and that, for me, is the bait, as you’d say, at the end of the line.’

  It was as if speaking on the phone, and not face to face, had liberated her – liberated both of them – the threat of suspension having focused her thoughts and feelings in a way which, much to her surprise, she found she welcomed.

  ‘Dan,’ he said, thinking he had chosen the moment well, ‘has told me that he has only a few weeks to live.’

  ‘When did he tell you that?’ The immediacy of her response, his invocation of ‘Dan’ in place of the familiar ‘Viklund’, suggested her interest was immediately aroused.

  ‘He came today. He hasn’t told anyone else. In fact, knowing him, I suspect he finds it difficult to do so.’

  ‘Not his wife?’

  ‘He saw no point. Distressing her, he said, before the event. In that I believe he’s mistaken. Having told me he may well tell her. Having rehearsed it, so to speak. He was evidently trying to tell me the other day, in Regent’s Park. He has two pills which he’s been saving. Given him during the war. Maybe, after all this time, they won’t be effective. That, too, he’s uncertain about. No Senecan aloofness. As for Rothko, de Staël, Van Gogh, Haydon. The list is endless. All go against his lifelong hidden religious belief. I don’t suppose, with that, he wanted it to interfere with what he would call the iconography. The aesthetics. The dating.’

  His thoughts ran on, he no longer aware if he were speaking or merely reflecting. Had he mentioned Haydon? Who else? Were these his own preoccupations, in place since, if not before, his own ‘incident’, as he now described it?

  ‘He still has a choice.’ Her voice came clearly in his ear: she was, he assumed, speaking not about Viklund but, more compellingly, about himself: if he should think of it again. ‘He can let the illness run its course.’

  ‘He can.’

  ‘Do religious scruples count? Isn’t he more sophisticated than that? All the precedents you mention. He must have thought of them, too. Telling you,’ she went on, slowly, ‘is probably his decision. He will go ahead at the time, and wants you to know.’

  ‘His background,’ he said, ‘was diplomacy. Even after all this time I have difficulty determining what he thinks. Or, more, what he feels. During the war he got up to any number of things he’s reluctant to talk about. Was he a double agent, reporting to the Germans as well as the Allies? He certainly seems to have been in with both. Or something even more elusive. He’s lived, no doubt as he’ll die, an enigma. God’s diplomat. With what end in view? Disassociation. God’s abrogation of the turgid deal.’

  For a while, reflecting on this, neither of them spoke.

  ‘Is that,’ she said suddenly, ‘what’s given you a high?’ adding, ‘The mania you mentioned at the beginning of your call.’

  She was, conceivably, reversing her suggestion he might come up: talking had calmed him down.

  ‘I thought if I rang you,’ he said, but added nothing further.

  The silence resumed.

  ‘I feel less manic than elevated,’ he went on.

  ‘It’s a decisive moment for both of us,’ she said, abruptly, wishing, he concluded, to cut him off. ‘We must pull through this together,’ much warmth, however, returning to her voice, much camaraderie, he thought, expressed.

  Yet the impracticality of what she was saying was evident to them both, his own problem a mystery, hers in the hands, he assumed, of a lunatic. Or, assuming the information was correct, two lunatics. A moment later he amended this to three, he more tangible as evidence than anything suggested by the other two.

  There was her resilience, however, a quality, he had come to the conclusion, he was singularly without. Her enthusiasm for whatever she was doing, whether on the roof, or in the kitchen, or ‘enfranchising’, as she called it, a client, was infectious, heartwarming, something he was incapable of doing without. On several occasions he had seen her come in from the successful delivery of a lecture, from a seminar, a conference, her latest paper having been read (papers they’d pored over together, examining the syntax, the spelling, the construction, before having Mrs Beaumont print them out), and had been aware – poignantly aware – of the value she placed on approval, on appreciation by both her peers and her students, she candid as to the value she gave it, yet needing it as a measure of where she stood. The prospect of being summoned before the Preliminary Proceedings Committee, after a lifetime of struggling to get where she was, had affected her, and him, more deeply than either of them, he suspected, was prepared to acknowledge. He, for his part, at this stage, merely wished to enquire how she could hope to deal with people who were nuts and not be drawn into their obsessions: how, furthermore, could she hope, or believe, she could deal with them on her own, Mrs Beaumont apart, and not be turned aside, be unaffected by – be absorbed by – what they brought in through her own front door?

  He’d rarely thought of her, until recently, as helpless; vulnerable, certainly, but with an impressive strength – one more than sufficient to cope with what her vulnerability, her openness, might expose her to. He had always looked up to her, been intimidated by her, afraid both of and for her, something inviolable about her appearance and manner, a sense of self-sufficiency, of authority, the most obvious thing about her. He loved her yet, to a large extent, didn’t know where he was with her, discovering her, for the most part, as he went along – a stumbling, erratic enterprise – aware at every moment he, not she, might have misjudged the situation: the suspicion, there all the time, that he had overlooked – was still overlooking – a significant part of their relationship, something obvious, viewed from a distance, but not from where, more intimately, both of them were now standing.

  But for his preoccupation with Taylor, he’d almost given up on identifying in art, if not in people, least of all in himself, cause and effect: in letting go of himself he had, at one point, assumed he was letting go of everything, only to realise, almost too late, he’d been letting go of a relic, something from which life had silently departed.

  Having abandoned himself to her he was increasingly sensitive to her accounts of her (male) colleagues at the Tavistock, the ubiquitous Analytical Forum, the North London Royal (what embarrassment there, he wondered, when it was discovered he was her partner?), as well as in and around Harley Street, looking for a sign, any sign, of a commitment, an attraction, an affiliation of any sort, elsewhere. Why did she, had she, looked to him? Why was it him who had found his way, if at her prompting, upstairs when there were so many, bonded in a common interest, who might, more easily, have preceded him?

  Had preceded him: there were, and had been, other men in her life apart from her husbands: her progress had been almost uniquely marked out by her relationships with men (none of whom, in retrospect, did she view with disfavour: a wholesome, generous, open-ended perception of what he could only assume was a communal venture). Viklund’s end, for instance, was, as far as he understood it, characterised by mysticism, less to do with art than his peripatetic childhood and youth: the streets of the European capitals where he’d been brought up, the Swiss and French schools he’d allegedly attended. Simone’s goal, on the other hand, was to do with enlightenment – of some kind – achieved, not least, through the intimacy of three consecutive marriages (each one a demonstrable step forward: progress of a sharply definable if idiosyncratic nature), one which, in some way, atoned for a childhood she rarely mentioned, an insecurity which the eclectic nature of the contents of her home bizarrely confirmed: too meticulously ordered, too much under her control: the machinery of communication – e-mail, internet, faxes, radio, television (the cable channels, though she rarely watched them, fed into the house from beneath the pavement outside, he alone, when bored, inclined to flick through them – desolation of some sort – reluctant to have them in his own home: her ‘antennae’, she called them). If he could manage without, why couldn’t she?

  Why should she? he would have heard her reply.

  At which she would have laughed: she saw him as something of a recluse, growing more reclusive all the while. She didn’t question it or complain, for it meant whenever she was inclined to invite him up he was free to respond. Only occasionally, when she enquired, largely out of curiosity rather than reproach, where was it all going? was he unable to give a convincing reply: he was retired, for one thing (he had a bus pass to prove it, an unnecessary piece of council indulgence, in his case); for another, he was mad – or had been, sufficiently so, to make no difference. Something ineluctable in his nature, he’d concluded, had captured both of their imaginations, something disturbing yet mesmerically, if not charmingly unresolved, he narcissistically enquiring of its nature, she unable, or reluctant to give it a name. There it was: there he was: somehow caught up in a desire not to live, an impulse which, consciously presented, he would have wholeheartedly denied. Was it this, however obscurely defined and experienced, he had to own up to (bring into the open)? Was it this Viklund was inviting him to deliver – he showing the way, if not by advice, by example? Was it this Simone was tinkering with herself, the final problem (disowned by Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius): death itself?

  He had had an agenda: he had wanted to rewrite the present in the way, when younger, he (and Viklund) had attempted to rewrite the past. His reflections on the pre- and early Renaissance had echoed down from that time to the present – and been displaced (were being displaced) and abandoned, Rome, not Florence, moved to the centre. The ‘retrieval’, as he’d called it, of the post-war years had attempted to revive an ethic which technology had destroyed – other than for him and one or two other crazy creatures who still banged on, for instance, about ‘humanism’ – a humanism, in effect, which had died before he’d been born, certainly before he’d been recognised as a ‘critic’: victims of a ‘fall-out’, it had been argued, of an even more insidious nature. There’d been hope but now, in these later years, unless he were mistaken, it had been extinguished (‘noise’, for one thing, had taken its place: almost anything, almost anywhere). His latest comment on the scene, his laboured attempt, post-sectioning, had been intended to delay if not reverse the same, to turn the race (the species) back, to look to the past, a coherent, systemised past, in order to bring it into the present (revivifying the ghosts still wandering there).

  Here he was, throwing in his hand (one moment), the next on the equivalent of a (delapidated) soap-box, that same hand held by someone else; someone, for one thing, who spoke of ‘correlatives’, ‘parameters’, paradigms, who saw behaviour in terms of credible patterns: the universality of human nature, the diversity of custom: primitivism writ large, Simone a deist, he’d concluded, Viklund, for his part, something of the same.

  ‘It doesn’t look as though you need to come up.’

  She’d been talking for a while, without his being aware, he responding sharply, ‘I feel easier having talked it through,’ wondering if, in effect, they had, or if, once more, the ‘subject’ that lay significantly between them had been avoided. ‘I wonder if I’m ill at all. The temptation is to jack in the pills and see if I float,’ waiting for her response, which didn’t come, and adding, ‘Let’s leave it for tonight. I feel we’ve covered a lot of ground,’ wondering, too, if his support of her had been enough: there was a great deal more she might have wished to hear, not least in response to those self-conscious demands when, almost as a child, she plaintively enquired, ‘Do you love me?’ he responding, since it was solicited, with, in his view, an unconvincing, ‘Yes.’

  What was she asking, and what did he need in return? on both sides, he was inclined to think, building up barriers, identifying, in his case, a line of retreat (his life unimaginable without her) – as clearly as she was identifying hers. And at what a price (everything at stake).

  Mysterium tremendum: that towards which everything aspired: a ridiculous concept to imagine in her cosy, eighteenth-century house; but on her roof, at night, looking at the stars, the moon, smelling the perfume of the plants around his feet, even with the sound of aircraft overhead, their headlights flaring through the vapour, he was aware of a momentum of which he was an indisputable part: everything moves, and always shall, the microscopic inclusion of himself, of her, his arm around her waist, as if he were retrieving her, she retrieving him, neither, any longer, with anything to lose.

  12

  Getting up in the night, looking out at the narrow street: the narrow houses, the curtained windows, the companionable feeling of people asleep, awake, lying there, thoughts, he assumed, not unlike his own, dreams of a peculiar intensity and nature: descending the stairs, aware that Viklund’s visit had left something of his presence in the house, something of his instruction to be responded to. Drifting off, his thoughts, to his former wife, her present husband (‘into thy hands’), a feeling of displacement that took him back to Viklund, then his sons, their differing temperaments, careers, Simone, Taylor (‘we are our relationships’), his own disassociated presence, the confusion that characterised his current life: a ship (of old) moored in midstream, waiting for a favourable wind and tide, true element of nature.

  Out there, too, were all those women: the life-class, the support group, the Auschwitz-focused legatees, Berenice’s voice audible through the party wall, ‘fucking’, the only word discernible.

  Tat twam asi.

  This art thou: his anguish not due to circumstance: miscreant genes.

  Something along those lines: ‘You are not an epistemologist,’ he had written, in red ink, on one of Taylor’s essays (the influence of science on the methodology of art, foreshadowing so much of what was to come): those tutor-room encounters recalled, in this instance, in the middle of the night, everything, otherwise, slipping away: separated from something: divided from what? the intelligence and naïvety he associated with Simone; they, the two of them, hand in hand, even at sixty, he nearer seventy, he never sure which aspect of her nature he was engaged with or controlled by, the sophist who sat through accounts of sexual incongruity, failure, incompetence, impotence, finally, loneliness, terror, the fear of being unloved, unpossessed, unknown, unquieted.

  The Midlands schoolgirl, socially subdued, familiarly suppressed, riding on a boyfriend’s bike, she on the mudguard behind the seat, her arms around his waist, or sitting, sideways, on the crossbar, enclosed by his arms, waiting, if not for a kiss, a further stage in her enlightenment: intelligence, on the one hand, rapacity, on the other: everything inverted in the middle of the night, freedom for one, servility to another.

  It was as if, in a curious way, a part of him had ‘happened’: it had matured, reached satiety, and had then expired, the residue – a witless, shiftless remainder – living on as if expiration had not occurred, the removal of the integral part of him, the organism functioning, deludedly, as normal.

  Too late for reflection, yet reflecting all the while, not sure, in the event, where such reflection led: the way affects moved through the system: a mind without reference to itself: that organism which existed (looking down) above his legs, his chest, his shoulders, his thoughts competing with Berenice’s voice in the next-door room, the contentiously responding voices of her all-night junkies: life! life! an impulse to lie down, he, such as he was, resisting, dreams activated while wide awake: the impression, bodily, of being in two places at once, here and here, neither identified, neither familiar: the maelstrom of his present condition, life existing in the region of his head, his stomach, his neck conflagrating, or so it seemed, disengaging him from everything.

  That again …

  He looked through the window from the inside of the restaurant wondering if his brother would come; wondering, even, if he’d remembered. Paul had rung him: they’d arranged to meet for lunch at a place his brother frequented in the City.

  He’d travelled there by bus, disinclined to use the tube, comforted by its slow progress (what did speed mean to him any more?), its dreamlike enclosure by the streets: the intermittently shifting traffic, the juxtaposition of stylishly incongruous buildings: shop windows, plastic surrounds, stone walls, brick, finally glass edifices reflecting one another against a fractious sky, a maze of mirrors and distorted, wavering elevations: the nomenclature of a vast Caucasian-Semitic-Indo-Asian tribe: the multifarious faces (each with its ‘mind’, its unholy perceptions), figures, focused elsewhere, processing to and fro.

  He had wanted air (security), he had wanted to get out, away, he reflected, from his own reflection; away, for one thing, from thoughts of Simone, his culpability, his sense of receiving displaced by an absence of giving, his negligible contribution to their tenuously joined-up lives. Hercules, Plato reported, felt like this (Plato, Socrates and Lysander), aware of the dull unfolding – Berlioz, Delacroix … Carlyle, James, Hopkins – of a predictable life where hormones inconsistently manoeuvred, he like no other, yet like them all.

  The restaurant was full, the table, he’d been relieved to discover, booked by his brother. He’d arrived early, springing off the bus, reminded, vividly, of the pain in his hips, his ankles, the joints of his toes, surprised how swiftly the City was changing, glass-fronted, metal-fluted, a quaintly domesticated institutional grandeur, personalised brick and stone and plastic façades – the narrow alleyways which the streets had become – the feeling of intimacy impersonally confined: the inadvertent passages, footpaths, the residue of churches, scarred, pale stonework bleached like bone, a skeletal residue between the impassively reflecting towers – he spotting his brother crossing the road, the slender, athletic, prematurely white-haired figure darting between the contending streams of traffic, looking up once to see where, in relation to the buildings opposite, he intended to go – approaching the restaurant, brushing down his hair, briskly, distracted, his thoughts on other things, scarcely, Maddox reflected, on the prospect ahead, a task – an inconvenience – he’d set himself in the middle of the day, coming in, breathless, the waitress nearest the door recognising him with a smile and, a strange intimacy in the crowded interior, a wave, pointing to the table, his expression lightening as he identified Maddox sitting there.