Obliged to get out of bed, the phone in the other room where, on her rare visits, they slept, he picked it up.

  ‘How are you?’

  He was well.

  ‘We didn’t say much on our previous call.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I’m relieved you’re back. I take it the weekend and your paper went well,’ imitating, he noticed, her interrogative tone.

  ‘I was thinking much of you.’

  ‘I of you,’ he said. ‘When you’re away, a tabula rasa on each occasion,’ a baby crying from across the street, Berenice mercifully silent through the party-wall.

  A light went on behind a curtain: the crying stopped.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ arranging the time. She might have suggested his coming-up now, or her coming-down, her e-mail read, faxes examined, messages listened to, he concurring, however, tonight was too late, unease at her absence brought to an end.

  ‘Much love!’ the sound of her voice.

  ‘Much,’ he confirmed.

  The sound of her laughter.

  ‘Much,’ he repeated (a bottomless well).

  How far, reflecting, back in bed, having curtained his window, the top ajar, should speculation go? Two miles away – less than that, a mile-and-a-half – two tube station stops beyond Chalk Farm, the pilgrim route to St Albans, over the crest of Holly Bush Hill, she, he imagined, would be pottering around her flat, the lamplight on the panelling, the cretonned furniture she went in for, rugs with extravagant Iberian designs (‘murillos’, she called them), intimacy in her domestic life as in her work, something of a whore in this situation, too, a lending not of her body but of her mind, her acuity, her spirit, a reinforcing of a persona not her own.

  Dreams, when they came, had involved, over recent nights, a house he had left forty-seven or more years before, reinhabiting its rooms – deserted, in some dreams, in others cluttered with the furniture which, unseen for all that time, was more familiar than his own: a fireguard he’d forgotten, bought when his younger brother was born; a cot, a Victorian creation, with embellishments, carved animals in relief at either end, its woodwork glowing in the light from the nursery fire: their biblical names, Matthew, Paul, Sarah, his elder sister, his imagination fired, finally, into wakefulness by Simone’s call: his brother’s jobs, his high-pitched, almost hysterical apprehension, as a child, peculiar in the context into which he was born, youthful, in appearance, even at sixty, ‘engaged and engaging’ in his description of Paul to Simone who, he had discovered belatedly, had a liking for sensitive, high-minded men (something of the same which, if extinguished, she’d located in him): had ‘gone into the Church’ in his early twenties, a process phrased at the time as if into a building (St Albans Cathedral and Abbey remains at the end of the road), ‘coming out’ at the age of thirty-one, God ‘a misplaced endeavour, sought but not found (knocked, but not opened)’ his (credible) reasons, rather than excuses, relief, Maddox recalled, to both of them, at this confession (‘I gave it a try’), apprehension, so conspicuously evident in his youth, disappearing, never to return, Paul passing, as if by means of a natural process, an evolutionary procedure (‘the ethic’s much the same’) into ‘banking’: discretion, sobriety, fidelity to a system, much play made at the time with the parable of the talents: ‘praise by employment’, a ‘secularised religion’, ‘work as prayer’, water into wine displaced by rock dust, clay and ore into concrete, brick and steel: the pointed, inquisitive, curiously trusting Maddox face tuned to application, tuned, too, specifically, to belief – in what, in Maddox’s own case, however, he no longer had any idea, vocation, initially, in his brother’s case, as also in his …

  his thoughts, at that instant, turning to their sister Sarah, vocational solely in maternity (heavy on her now), a biblical source of their names in common – but something else, he, a man as well as a brother, incensed on her behalf, she forging ahead throughout her life, a forager on her own as well as their behalf: strength, fortitude, dispassion, he privy to her nature, all things seen by him, in his youth, as if by her. How could Bully have walked away from her? the nickname, given affectionately, initially, by her, licensed by his surname Bulford, christened Charles.

  Three Charleses in the family, as Sarah had pointed out, if Charlotte’s equally affectionately ascribed ‘Charley’ counted.

  Was this – she the most religious of the Maddox family – the triumvirate she was always seeking (Father, Son and Holy Ghost), Paul’s apostasy, at the time, decried (bitterly) by her, while ‘lost to the Church’ their father’s ambivalent cry had greeted both Paul’s ordination as well as his subsequent recantation – his ‘reconversion to mundanity’ as Sarah had described it: ‘Wasn’t there room for another saint in St Albans?’ ‘Paul’ possessing, Maddox had assumed, at least for his sister, a canonical ring.

  Plus: why was she so much stouter – taller, broader – than Paul and himself? femininity, giving her grace as a child, now endowing her with bulk, mass, scale: the inscrutability with which she looked over her children’s lives displaced by a familiar Maddox moral fervour, sensitive not so much to the proverbial ‘catch’ in life as its explicit moral resolution, as if, pro Maddox, their ends were not relative or personal but universal: ‘materialising death’, as she had once described it, distinguishing artfully between body and soul: a prescient sister, predicating Bully’s departure long before he had even thought of it, a passion for renewal, a reinvigoration, post-children, post-grandchildren, living subsequently, contentedly, enliveningly, engagingly, on her own.

  Placed by their father in the seats of his cars, lined in an intoxicatingly scented row behind his showroom windows, the light reflecting off their bonnets – mudguards, roofs – the ‘massage’, as he called the paintwork, the odour of metal, oil, leather, polish sensationally, entrancingly, erotically combined, the garage and showroom fronting the old Roman road leading in from the south, ‘straight as an arrow’ his father’s claim on his own behalf printed in lower-case gold letters across his principal showroom window: an allusion to probity, speed, openness (honesty, reliability, directness, common sense), proven Maddoxian traits. From this, Paul had, Maddox had always assumed, acquired his early religious and later secular conviction.

  From this, too, had Maddox acquired his appetite for art: the nebulae of his early Albanian life.

  And school: sent away, with Paul, by his parents because of the bombs, Sarah alone remaining, a familial retainer, it had seemed, at the time: the ancient brick building enclosed by others of a more recent, formal design, facing eastwards, on a hill in Yorkshire, the coat-of-arms and inscription on the gates those of the manor’s original owner

  nosce teipsum

  taken over, the injunction, by the nineteenth-century ‘proprietary school for boys’, set, the inscription, on a scroll beneath the design of a lion rampant either side of an open book, ‘Fierce in Faith’ the title of the school anthem:

  … and strong in duty,

  keenly tuned to nature’s beauty:

  trust in justice, truth and learning,

  faith for which our hearts are yearning,

  moving on, his thoughts, from those of his sister – vocational, too, in later life, in teaching – his sons, his former wife: generational, too, the dissolution of disbelief, prompting Charlotte, a post-marital gift, to send him to Simone, a woman who, in treating several of Gerry’s colleagues, after he had finished with them, had ‘impressed’ her – the ‘mystic woman’ on Holly Bush Hill, singularly not prone, he’d discovered for himself, to disbelief, or doubt, or hesitation.

  Far from him to complain: altruism’s roots not to be examined: the image of the labyrinth with something terrible happening at either end.

  As usual, in the early hours of the morning, he woke, got up, sat in the kitchen, then, drinking tea, walked through to the other room, Berenice active through the wall. On many (most) evenings he fell asleep to the sound of her voice – waking, finally, scarcely rested, to find her still talking: from the moment she woke until the (dubious) occasions she fell asleep, the staccatic, bass-based, pneumatic crescendo, heightened by coke, amphetamines, what else, the suffix ‘Right?’ finalising each sentence, self-exculpation the dominant tone:

  non utile dulce

  how did he say rock-drill in Latin?

  Charley had visited him once, to reassure herself about the house: scented, radiant – ‘effulgent’ the word that came to his mind, bringing a message of reassurance from their sons, she sitting where he was sitting now, facing the non-functional fireplace and, at the sudden incursion of Berenice’s voice, had risen, spontaneously, as if hoisted by invisible hands, gazing incredulously to the door and then the window.

  ‘Berenice has the ability to shift you,’ he had said, ‘when not even in the room,’ anxious to reassure her about the virtues of his living in an otherwise characterless house.

  Now he listened without complaint, the content of her speech muffled by the wall, the gravel-crunching, visceral, gravitational bass transposed to something of an abstract sound, ‘fuck’, in its various declensions, resonating through the brickwork, and the final, interrogative, affirmative, ‘Right?’

  Reverie at three a.m. gave way, an habitual visitation, to preparing himself for execution, waiting, numbered, the beckoning call.

  Clinging mentally, meanwhile, to Simone.

  Tomorrow was his ‘group’.

  With this recollection he went back to bed. Was it in a dream or had he in reality gone recently to Berenice’s door and, despite the canine five-second warning, rung the bell, Isaiah putting his head out of the upstairs window to announce, behind his back, that someone, below, was ringing the bell, to hear Berenice enquire from the rear of the building, ‘Is it that cunt from next door?’ he merely requesting, on this occasion, that she lower the volume of her radio?

  preferring the sound of her voice

  living, increasingly, a synthetic exercise, mandatory, on the one hand, volitional, on the other

  the past reduced to a tunnel, the future an ever-widening plain

  recalling, as he did each night – each day, each morning – the incident on the Camden Town tube station platform, waiting, with others, for a northbound train, when, as the train drew in, he had been seized by what he could only describe – had insistently described – as a giant hand, one finger of which was the width of his chest, and flung at the line, striking the corner of the driver’s cab to be thrown back across the platform. Screams, he recalled, from someone watching. Cries of a more personal nature from himself

  nolens volens

  sectioning: confusion and distress of an unprecedented nature

  followed, months later, by Charley’s suggestion (insistence) he visit ‘a woman in Hampstead’ recommended by Gerry (‘naturally he’s concerned’): people he had employed had gone to her with ‘beneficial’ results (more amenable, in reality, to Gerry’s cost-cutting knife). ‘It won’t jeopardise your National Health treatment,’ his wife had advised, the woman’s address, he’d noticed, on the pilgrim route to St Albans, its one establishing credential: the abbey-turned-cathedral which, even as a child, he had likened to an upturned boat, he, Paul and Sarah, their mother and father, trapped inside, a reductive, alarming, sinking sensation he associated with a sense of extinction, a degalvanising experience scarcely – its impersonality, its vastness – to be identified with something as directly appealing as the notion – a notion – of a personal God, creativity, in that instant, replaced, obscurely, by an appetite for comment.

  And now, equally obscurely, a lightening of the heart at the association with something he had always mentally avoided.

  She, at the first meeting, he had, initially, scarcely noticed: she had, he observed, a liking for prints: Durer: a harsh, unsensuous, graphic presence: the hare (victim), the praying hands (supplication), the unyielding, anachronistically sensually-lipped self-portrait (her?) – and melancholia: a dreamlike, abstracted, oppressive gaze, the latter positioned immediately behind her head: a condition, he assumed, she identified with most if not all of her patients (clients, analysands) – and noticed, too – could scarcely fail to – the wood-panelling which gave the room a feeling of confinement, the room itself adjacent to the front door of the house, a sensuous woman in an ambivalent setting, they sitting not knee to knee as, at one time, he might have imagined, but facing each other beside, not on either side of a desk.

  There was a table for writing – a Victorian cabinet and desk adjacent to the window – and a fireplace, conceivably the original one, black, cast-iron, an odd, idiosyncratic, domestic touch; and, more startingly, a cat, he only aware of its presence as it stirred, rising from an upholstered chair, itself covered by a travelling rug, its eyes, almost luminescent, turned in his direction before, having risen, it turned once more and settled.

  The light on him, he had faced the window, a skein of muslin shading the view to the narrow street outside – scarcely more than an alley, cobbled, with a long flight of stone steps leading up to it from Heath Street below. Directly opposite was visible the lower half of a large, through-floor window, evidently of a studio, with smaller, street-level windows either side of a metal-studded door.

  Here he was, confronted, unexpectedly, by ‘art’, talking of things he had never considered, or even been drawn to before: an imperative – coming out of where? as a result of what? – to fling himself, almost abstractly (directed by forces which, seemingly, at the time, had nothing to do with him) in front of a train, forces – a force – which, at her request, he described as ‘elemental’, then, persuaded into allegory by the Dürer prints, he suggested, colourfully, he could more graphically describe as ‘synonymous with the Demon King himself’.

  ‘What Demon King?’ she had enquired, scepticism in her repetition of the phrase.

  ‘The one I assume tempted Christ to leap from the mountain,’ the analogy coming to him as he spoke. How odd, the promptness of his response, he’d reflected, in the silence that followed, avoiding her look, his attention, once more, drawn to the studio window opposite: the inside of the single, massive pane was cluttered with plants.

  Finally, glancing back at her, he had noticed her make-up, the dark colouring above the even darker eyes: a penetrative, yet almost disingenuous gaze, abstracted (melancholic?) self-contained. And had noticed, too, the lace frill of her blouse which, high-necked, showed within the opening of her formal, sharply cut dark jacket.

  On greeting him – shown in by a receptionist occupying a room across the hall – his attention had been drawn to the length of her skirt, cut halfway across her calf, and the square-heeled shoes which extended the slimness of her ankles: so much was contained, so much was revealed, a composed, self-possessed, self-referential figure, her appearance a signal that ‘psychology’, or even ‘science’, had an unavoidable personal edge. Like God, he reflected, as he (as we, he mentally amended) were taught: something he associated with sacrament, if not with sainthood: a few yards down the hill, immediately below the house, shielded from it by equally ancient domestic buildings, was the original lane which led northwards to the St Albans hills: a choirboy collar, dark skirt: a spiritual rather than psychic mentor, he a supplicant (the praying hands), a potential devotee, turning, reluctantly, towards an awareness of ‘higher things’ (the piercing, astringent directness of the Dürer portrait). The phrase came to him as unexpectedly as his earlier reference to the Demon King, turning his look once more in her direction, taking in another feature of her appearance: a ring on the third finger of her left hand, on her right hand another ring (a bracelet, gold, thin, on her delicate left wrist).

  A second swift glance to confirm the first: her mouth, thin-lipped, tinted with a near-natural colour: broad, receptive, braced, seemingly, to an appetite not yet acknowledged, let alone fulfilled.

  Perhaps, he’d reflected, they had something in common, she, too, a supplicant; all these years prescribing to others: refinement, repetition, exclusivity (associated with the house and its location); art for God’s sake, at one time, in his case, obeisance to nature, conceivably, in hers: the slender, rather suffered hands, held lightly, one within the other. So much of what he said she had, he assumed, in one form or another, heard before: the externalising of an energy (the Demon King) which came exclusively from within – he aware of her examining stare, the supposedly ‘objective’ look which took him in, he scrutinised, disconcertingly, in the direct light from the window, her own face and figure silhouetted against it. Only as he rose to leave did the face, once more, present itself as something companionable, informal, reassuring, the inquisitive, or seemingly inquisitive nose, the nostrils small, dilated, the indentations on either side, like thumb prints, suggesting playfulness, a remnant of childhood which the clarity of her other features assertively disowned, a suggestion, in effect, of ‘another nature’, lightly contained, elusive, self-amused.

  Intrigued, he had set his scepticism aside; he couldn’t afford – in a sense, didn’t even ‘believe’ in the visits, yet decided he should: he could borrow the money from Gerry, or one of his sons; from Paul, or Sarah – dismissing the idea, surprised, however, by the urgency – the recklessness, almost: he had never borrowed from any of them, or even thought of it (half his pension still going to Charlotte, even though, he suspected, she didn’t need it): a further encounter the following week, a third a few days later, several on alternate days, finally, absurdly, daily visits: a fish, he reproached himself, being deftly wound in.

  ‘You are in control,’ she told him. ‘You are in charge. You can always change it. It’s up to you how frequently we meet. I can only suggest it. I’m not inclined,’ she’d concluded, strangely, ‘to make conditions.’

  It was the familiar interrogative tone that had warned him – warned her, too, he suspected – that they were crossing or had already crossed a line. Perhaps, too, he reflected, it had been the cat at that first visit, not merely its presence but its unconscious regard; she, he thought, like him, unaware of the animal until it stirred, turning, instinctively, to remove it, he discouraging her. ‘It’s no bother,’ he’d told her. ‘I rather like it there,’ reassured by its presence, the animal, a dark, ochreish creature, circling once more in the chair before settling down.