‘Why not? I want to see you better. That’s another thing,’ leaning back, at ease, his purpose accomplished, anxiety, animosity, even, no longer evident in his face or figure. ‘You need an interest. Something other than art. Are you still reviewing?’

  ‘I’ve been fired.’

  ‘There you are.’ His brother spread out his hands. ‘I thought we’d never see it.’ He waved his hand. ‘All that crap. How could you go on so long?’ waving for the bill, the waiter coming across the now deserted restaurant.

  ‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Fuck that,’ his brother said. ‘Let’s walk. I don’t want to go back indoors after this.’

  ‘Where?’ he said when, the bill paid, he’d followed Paul out.

  ‘The river. It’s years,’ his brother said, ‘since we’ve been down there,’ linking his arm in his in much the same manner Viklund had done, walking in the park. ‘Moments like this you realise how far we’ve come from St Albans.’

  ‘Or how little.’

  ‘Or how little. What would Mother and Father say if they could see us now? Going the same way, would you say, at last?’

  They were moving south, lost, Maddox reflected, in the energy of the crowd, he no longer sure how much more of his brother’s charm, his disingenuousness, he could take: inertia, of a peculiar sort, absorbed him. At odd moments he had the impression he was walking with his uncle, the same companionable arm in his, the same monologue (work, colleagues, women): a similar attraction along with a similar longing to escape. From what? An irrelevance which, nevertheless, captivated his senses: this, and only this, was what life, as he should have known it, was ‘about’: plus, an unquestioning curiosity, in prolonging the event, to see where it might lead.

  A feeling, too, whenever he had been with his uncle, and now with his brother, that something significant had been purposely left unsaid, an element of their lives, common to all three, which only his uncle, now Paul, knew anything about: ‘what shall I do now?’ his strange enquiry while walking aimlessly around his father’s corpse, unnerved, beyond his understanding, weeping, as if his father, had possessed the answer, one, perversely, all these years, held from him and which now, he presumed, he would never know.

  Were his own attachments deeper than he had previously imagined, more concrete, more specific, formulated in another time, another place? Had he, throughout his life, been focused on events which were tangential to them, while ‘reality’ (that word again) went on elsewhere, he oblivious, unknowing?

  His brother was laughing, animated, stimulated by what he must have considered his ‘success’. ‘As for the paintings, nothing much you’d like. Of course, none of this futuristic fucking stuff. I thought of asking you but then thought he’s never asked me about investing. Fuck him, I’ll buy this shit myself. Though I have advised your kids, by the way. And Charley and Gerry. And Sarah, though she hasn’t much and refuses hand-outs. A bit like you in that respect. Who gives a fuck, after all, about money?’ his final enquiry suggesting, surprisingly, he had problems in this area himself.

  ‘Other than that,’ he continued, ‘I find I’m going against earlier convictions. Put a black hole in front of you and ask where the fuck are we in all that? Then I ask, why have I bought all these fucking paintings? I look at them for an hour or so. About “about”, is all I come up with. The point of a point is a circle. The snake, consuming its own tail, comes finally to its head. “Eat that,” the fucker tells itself. That’s more or less where I am at present. Whereas you, unlike me, take all that crap to heart. Cary, by the way, has got a lover. What does a woman do at fifty? Fifty-five, in her case, come to that. “Don’t think,” I tell her, “it has to last for ever.” What I told her when we divorced. They go away at weekends and screw the fuck out of one another. A different place each week. Sandra, on the other hand, the one to whom I would have introduced you, wants five kids. Intends to retire at thirty and pump them out over the next ten years. Private schools. Nannies. “God Christ, do you think I’m made of money?” I tell her. “Bonds will be over and out before you finish.” She says, “Sweetheart, not before I’m done.” At her age, and my age, I have to watch my back. Eighty, I’ll be, with teenage children. At her age she’ll get laid by someone else. That’s why, I guess, I’m looking at pictures. Maybe, after all, there’s something in it. Maybe, after all, I’ve been missing out. Maybe eternity is all we have, endlessness, our kid, going on for ever.’

  They were threading through the sidestreets past Petticoat Lane, the old churches, the cemeteries, the occasional oasis of original Georgian houses, the residue of a Regency city which, Maddox realised, he knew little about, pausing at plaques to read the inscriptions, the extended booms of stalk-like cranes manoeuvring high above their heads.

  ‘We used to walk round here in the old days,’ his brother said.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Or was it with Joe? The old bugger. Though he was more West End. Or was it when we came to town with Father to view a new model and he brought us here as a matter of course? Didn’t we go on the river to Hampton Court, and another time to Greenwich? Must have been,’ he concluded.

  It was the river they gazed at, finally, leaning over the rails by the Tower, the bridge to their left, the Belfast moored on the opposite bank, the crowds threading their way into the Tower behind, another queue onto the boats at the pier, his brother’s attention, however, focused on the river, flowing eastwards, to their left, the tide going out.

  ‘You’ll give this chap a go?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t have to hang in if it doesn’t work out.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘This is on me, a retirement present. You think that might be at the heart of it?’

  ‘No,’ Maddox said. He shook his head.

  He had leant like this on a metal rail, overlooking, on that occasion, a beach, with his brother, Paul having announced his intention of going into the Church. He couldn’t remember, of the several resorts the family had visited over those years, which one it was – the sea, on that occasion, relatively calm: the boats, the sails, the recollection of a harbour to his right, houses rising up a slope behind: the smell of seaweed, the salty tang, figures reclining or running to and fro on the beach, a paradisiacal sensation, associated with his brother’s decision and the place itself, and which, in his early teens, he had come to associate with art, specifically, magically, with Florentine names, with Siena, Padua, a humanising fervour which, unlike his reaction to his brother’s ‘calling’, he had wished to expand and sustain.

  Later, Paul had summoned a taxi, his hand on Maddox’s back as he stooped inside, saying, ‘I won’t come with you. I need to think. Not about you. My pissed-up life. I haven’t been down here for a very long time. I think I’ll walk,’ Maddox wondering if he hadn’t an afternoon appointment at the nearby hotel, cynical about Paul, he reflected, as he was about himself. ‘I feel charged,’ his brother went on, grasping his chest. ‘Glad that we met, and hoping we’ll do it again before long. Let me know, by the way, how you get on with this chap. His name is Isaacs. You may have heard of him.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘If it doesn’t work out I might try him myself,’ waving his arm, laughing, as the taxi drew away.

  Even then, perhaps more obviously than before, something significant, if not crucial, had been left unsaid: it was as if, he reflected, there were no language in which to express it, no action or sign to convey it, no gesture, no name, merely, startled by the conclusion, the language of omission. At one point, walking through the narrowing streets towards the river, avoiding the main road, coming out at Pepys’s house above Tower Hill, his brother had enquired, ‘It’s not to do with ageing? Something as incontrovertible as that? I’m old enough, more than old enough, to pack it in. I don’t think, despite suggesting otherwise, I’ll hold Sandra for very long. On the other hand,’ he’d paused, ‘do you think it’s to do with something in us? The three of us, if you count Sarah? What do you think?’ Maddox declining – unable – to give an answer, wondering at his reluctance to do so and at the curiously unquestioning look on his brother’s face, as if he himself were assured of the answer, something he knew and, at Maddox’s lack of response, felt it still necessary, if not his duty, to keep to himself.

  A familiar desire to return to St Albans sprang to mind – to revisit the park, the tiny, grass-banked Roman theatre, but not the Cathedral, the one place which, apart from their vanished home, had meant most to him at the time – and with which, in his youth, he had had the strongest connections: drunks had been sprawled around the gate the last occasion he’d gone there.

  Now, seated in the taxi, lulled by its slow progress through the congested streets (lurching its way towards the Exchange and then, beyond, turning north from Holborn), the familiarity of the buildings induced a feeling that, whatever he felt about his home near Camden Lock, its modest proportions, its meagre possessions, its disreputable neighbours, it was something to which he now belonged (but of which he could easily divest himself: a skin to shed, like any other). Yet he felt exhausted rather than exhilarated by the conversation with Paul, wondering if, despite appearances, he had done more for his brother than Paul had done for him. In one sense, he’d been written off (as something little short of a disaster), his brother reluctant to admit it, at least until he had offered him one more chance: art had fucked him up: the new man, Isaacs, would reverse it.

  Despite his exhaustion, he endured a curious feeling of exclusion – displacement, even: he would have liked, for instance, to have seen his brother’s pictures (something in common at last), aware, too, that Paul’s pursuit of eternal vigour had become something of an affectation, offered more by way of provocation, of intent or challenge.

  At which point his preoccupation with Taylor returned: grief for his wife and children overwhelmed him, flinging him back, stunned, against the taxi’s seat, conscious of the rear of the driver, of the traffic in the road beyond – as if he were once more in his uncle’s car, being driven in it on that first occasion, the hallucinatory smell he associated with it, and the galvanising juxtaposition of the bonnet against the irregularities of the view ahead.

  Set down in the street, he discovered his brother had paid the driver, disturbed that he hadn’t noticed, disturbed at being patronised, his reaction deflected by a further thought: a recognition of the care his brother had shown him, his avuncular if no longer convincing charm, mannered and self-conscious, concealing a doubt as significant as his own, as if Paul, too, had been flung back on resources which, if previously much talked about, he suspected might not be there.

  13

  It wasn’t Simone ringing, but his sister; for a moment, since – characteristically – she didn’t give her name, he was uncertain who it was, the almost formal, ‘How are you, Matthew?’ followed by enquiries about his sons. Then he recognised the ebullient tone which, if constrained, had characterised their encounters in the past – increasingly rare in recent years: she it was who invariably called, or wrote, he rarely calling her, her tone on this occasion cautious, anxious to point out her appreciation of the distance he’d insisted, if largely by default, on maintaining between them. Paul, he assumed, had rung her, conceivably Charlotte. ‘I’m in the district. I wondered if you were in.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Submission of this sort was comparatively new: it had been with him now for over a year, pre-dating the incident on the tube station platform. He couldn’t recall a moment, throughout this time, when he’d decided anything significant for himself: he was adrift – ‘hanging in’, as Paul would have it, largely, he assumed, to see what might happen. He would, at that point, he concluded, have a choice – a feeling of fear, amounting to terror, visiting him at predictable intervals throughout the day, strongest in the morning, fading towards evening, an unliveable life to a bearable life within the span of every twenty-four hours.

  Listening to his sister’s voice he realised all he had generated in his brother had been a feeling of concern – one, evidently, he’d transmitted to their sister, but one which, curiously, he didn’t share himself. Describing to her the route to the house, he was reminded she’d never, previously, been invited, driven now to invite herself, something in her manner, not least its note of restraint, which recalled his former wife: the ‘woman role’ she’d adopted for herself – had mandated, almost – in their early family life (their mother’s absorption in other things), the eldest sibling foraging ahead, prospecting for the first time what things were ‘like’, coming up, finally, with laughter, the ebullience, much of which rubbed off on Paul, little, Maddox reflected, on himself: a domineering, matriarchal urge which had swept her swiftly into marriage, children, a career, and, in her sixties, back out again, she, self-proclaimed, a ‘human being again’.

  He met her at the door, having watched for her at the upstairs window, strangely excited, almost unnerved – not sure, despite their long relationship, what, on this occasion, he might expect from her. That she’d made a specific journey to see him he had no doubt. Moments before, between her telephone call and her arrival, he’d rung Simone, leaving a message in the hope, if within hearing distance, she might have responded, anxious, increasingly anxious, for her to return the call as he stood waiting for Sarah, glimpsing her, finally, in the street below, startled by her appearance.

  Considerably stouter than before and, he reflected, looking proportionately older, but for her raised head, examining the numbers, he might not have recognised her, an anonymous figure in a characterless coat, a scarf tucked into its collar: a homely, practical, no-nonsense figure, the head turned stiffly towards each door, no evidence of the animation he associated with her, or of the Josephean vivacity of his brother which had characterised the afternoon.

  Having hurried down he’d called her from the door, she having passed the gate, an iron grille construction opening onto the shallow forecourt of the house, immediately below the ground-floor window: all he had there, as in the backyard, were several plantless, weedful pots left by the previous owner.

  He saw her face ignite, spontaneously, warmly, relieved: the Maddox face, a stubborn, if ageing facsimile of much of what he had seen in their father, a singular combination of sensitivity, reticence, foreboding – little of the quixotic, the enigmatic, the epigrammatic, certainly the didactic he associated with their uncle, he stepping forward to release the gate, she looking up at the house, startled, then at him, before thrusting out her arms and – more her wish, as with his brother, than his – embracing him.

  The force of her arms around his shoulders reminded him of the expansiveness, the openness and generosity which had characterised her as a child and a mother: it was, on this occasion, a maternal presence, a consciously presented one, he was submitting to, the strange sensation of calling her name, ‘Sarah!’, a possessive tone, summoning her from a distance, the involuntary movement backwards at the sound of his voice before she turned towards him.

  At her insistence he showed her the house, taking her coat, laying it on a chair in the through-room, stepping into the kitchen where he’d already boiled the kettle, opening the door to the yard, taking her out to look at the pots he had scattered there, she lamenting the lack of flowers, the yard itself paved, the soil enclosed in a narrow border circuiting the edge.

  She looked up at the rear of the building: the landing window, the back bedroom window, then at the houses opposite and on either side: the symmetry, the butterfly roofs with their central gutter, a concertina-like effect against the fading light of the sky. ‘Reminds me of our home. Much smaller, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She laughing, taking his arm as companionably as Paul had done. He was suffering (he was oppressed), he was to be relieved, he was there to be rescued: adversity of some sort had overwhelmed him. No one knew why. Everyone guessed. Charlotte leaving him, for instance – his retirement, the sequence of their father’s and their mother’s deaths. And now the former student: death in its most macabre form. No doubt she’d heard about that (bound, he reflected, to impress everyone).

  She was wearing a jacket beneath her coat, square-cut, oddly fashionable: she bought all her clothes from Oxfam, she had told him on a previous occasion: ‘cheap, good quality, a very wide choice’. Underneath the jacket was a jumper, around her neck a string of beads, red, vivid, like drops of blood, intended, he suspected, to amuse, the clothes, otherwise, sombre. Her skirt, long, ended at her ankles, full, capacious, her feet shod unobtrusively in flat-heeled shoes: a mixture of practicality and second-hand fashion, vaguely facetious, carelessly conjoined.

  Without her coat, her face flushed – with urgency, curiosity, goodwill – her hair flung up and backwards in a characteristic Maddox fashion, like a stilled impression of someone moving at speed (an effect which reminded him of Viklund), he was aware of another woman, a comparative stranger, someone who had little to do with him, someone in conflict with the one who had appeared in the street, stepping towards him, suddenly uncertain, she now a vitalising figure, taking his arm securely, turning him towards the rear door of the house, saying, ‘What have you got upstairs?’ Berenice’s voice audible from an adjoining window, ‘Will you keep quiet, you cunt? I’m talking on the fucking telephone,’ Sarah, startled, unable to locate the sound, looking across the low dividing-wall up which, in the past, the previous tenant had vainly trained several climbing plants.

  ‘My neighbour.’

  ‘Good God,’ glancing at the adjoining window, Berenice’s remonstrating figure inside.

  ‘I’m the cunt who lives next door. Not the one she’s presently addressing. He’s inside.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘Definitely not art history. The police look in from time to time. They even observed her from a neighbour’s room across the street. Otherwise a stream of brutalised figures pass swiftly in and out.’