‘How does she afford to live here?’

  ‘The house is owned by the council. So are half the properties in the street. A post-war decision to knock most of them down to build tower blocks was belatedly rescinded. These are the vestiges of the properties they bought before the decision was reversed. The result is what they call a mixed community. More mixed than community, I’m afraid,’ he added.

  They’d returned inside the house, he reminded that he liked his sister, over and beyond her being his sister: her late-life stoutness gave her substance (scale, strength, sobriety, judgement): solid, stoical, self-amused, femininity without the affectation, her image of herself, he imagined, corresponding to the way she dressed. Or, alternately, the other way around. Her almost proprietorial inspection of the two rooms upstairs – the papers, books and folders, scattered on the floor, the desk, the bed, the chair in the bedroom at the rear, the comparative bareness of the one at the front, prompting her to enquire, ‘Who sleeps in here?’

  ‘We do, when Simone comes,’ he said. ‘Though we usually sleep at her place.’

  ‘How is she?’

  Primed, he suspected, by Charlotte and Paul.

  ‘Well. I, I can’t help feeling, a current liability.’

  She had always been inclined, contrary to her own experience of marriage – a middle-aged husband leaving for a significantly younger woman – to a view that Charlotte shouldn’t have left him, at least not for the husband she ended up with. Yet for Maddox it had always seemed a positive move, he laying no great claims to his role either as a husband or a father, much though the effort he’d put into both. No one was complaining, other than Sarah. On the whole, he concluded his wife – his ex-wife – had made a bold choice, Gerry a refreshing change from anyone previously she might have known, most of all an academic who, relatively late in life, was, surreptitiously, without informing anyone, searching for a connection between himself and a disinterested universe, species devouring species in order to survive, galaxies similarly confronting galaxies. Someone looking for common sense in the face of such brutalisation was not someone an ageing wife could, with much expectation, time running out, be overly entertained or cheered by. A declining belief in virtue being able to sustain itself characterised, profoundly, the latter years of their pre-Gerry existence.

  Simone, too, was looking for something – scarcely aware a search was in progress. This alone, he suspected, was the thing that had drawn them together: a presentiment that something significant was about to occur, in which Doctor Death, aka Norman, aka Brian, and Taylor, played, comparatively, little part. Simone, during her mandatory analysis (seven years, she’d told him), must have examined to the point of extinction the past which she was presently averse to describing. With her he experienced the feeling that she knew – was aware of – everything before it happened, singularly so, with the possible exception of Death, though he, too, she might well have suspected (had already suggested something along these lines), was not all he claimed to be – a not infrequent analytical experience, he imagined, on both sides of the analyst’s room: not only ahead of her patients, clients, engagés, analysands, but in many respects, perhaps to her own consternation, ahead of herself – so far ahead, in his case, that for much of the time she was out of sight, waiting patiently, occasionally impatiently, for him to catch her up.

  ‘We nevertheless get on well,’ he said, speaking directly from his thoughts. Indicating the way downstairs, he added, ‘Would you like tea, or something stronger?’

  ‘What’s stronger?’

  ‘Wine.’

  ‘No gin?’

  That’s her fuel, he reflected.

  ‘Afraid not. I’m fortunate to have wine. Alcohol is advised against with my medication.’

  ‘Is it doing any good?’

  Scepticism in her enquiry: all, he reflected further, to the good. On the other hand, what had Paul or Charlotte told her?

  ‘On the whole,’ he said carefully, ‘I’m better than I was. Pathology at an end. No longer susceptible to psychotic phases. Though I’m never quite sure what they are, the brain adjusting in its own sweet way, “clinical” a word, in mental health, lacking, I would say, definition.’

  Having reached the room downstairs she’d turned, facing him in much the same manner she might have done fifty years before, determined to say something but not sure what it was, or, if she were sure, how precisely to go about it.

  ‘I tried several pills before finally settling on this one. One or two of them almost killed me. Though, on reflection, that might have been the idea.’

  She’d turned away, selecting a chair – curiously, the one Viklund had chosen, adjacent to the television set and the fireplace.

  ‘Could you get that replaced?’ She indicated the walled-up opening.

  ‘The house is exactly as it was when I first moved in. I don’t feel inclined to change a thing.’

  ‘A house without a fireplace isn’t really a home. It needs a focus. Otherwise,’ she gestured at the television.

  ‘I’m sure it does.’

  Relieved to have expressed something, she smiled and said, ‘Tea. Have you a biscuit to go with it?’

  He talked through from the kitchen, describing his encounter with Paul, presuming that earlier she had heard Paul’s own description of it.

  ‘Still something of the cavalier?’ she asked.

  ‘Like Joseph,’ he said, ‘without the affectation.’

  She laughed, the sound filling the house: it even silenced Berenice’s voice audible through the party-wall.

  ‘To some degree,’ he went on, ‘he’s something like me.’

  ‘How like you?’

  Having given her the tea and arranged a low table to put it on – a duplication of the arrangement he’d made with Viklund – he said, ‘Reorientating himself in a way he’s suspicious of.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ she said, less enquiry than proclamation. ‘Manoeuvring himself to die. At least, trying not to.’ She’d spoken condemningly, a tone, he calculated, of self-reproach.

  A compact figure, seated, she pulled down her jacket and loosened the beads which had slipped above the lapel.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘He was always much influenced by you. As we all were, of course,’ she added.

  ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’

  ‘That cultural high-flying? The equivalent, your equivalent, of Joseph’s flamboyance. I think Paul went into the Church because of you. A cultural hauteur he couldn’t otherwise match. At least, you couldn’t in those days. Now that science has shown the primacy of matter, the scene, as Paul was the first to acknowledge, has changed. I felt when I married poor Arthur, who was only a mathematics teacher, I was crawling away from a house where my expectations, as defined by you, were so pathetic they hadn’t even been noticed. That school you and Paul went to whose name sounded like a medicine.’

  ‘Quinians.’

  ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘Quinian Hall. The original house around which the school was built. Originally Quinians’ Proprietary School, set up by nineteenth-century philanthropists disillusioned by the education provided for their sons.’

  She wasn’t much interested in this and wondered why, suddenly, he was: perhaps that, too, he had misjudged: more had gone on there than he had realised.

  ‘They didn’t send me away because of the bombing,’ his sister said. ‘They assumed I was expendable. Odd,’ she went on, ‘because at first I thought it was because they loved me more and couldn’t bear to do without me.’

  ‘Perhaps they couldn’t,’ he said, anxious to prompt her, curious to see, at this late stage of their lives, what she might come up with: something relevant to his own dilemma, or something, even, to hers. ‘You were certainly indispensable,’ he added.

  ‘Domestically!’ She laughed: a clattering sound, not unlike hands clapping.

  ‘Paul rang you up,’ he prompted again.

  ‘He’s worried about you. We all are. Those symptoms you describe. What are they about? Manoeuvring to die is maybe what all of us are up to. In the process, of course, discovering how to live.’

  She, too, she was suggesting, had had her problems: still had her problems: his suffering, if it were such, was not exclusive.

  She was looking up, her head lowered, her eyes shadowed. She wore little if any make-up. Simone, by comparison, though deploying it discreetly, probably used a lot. Certainly before she went down on a morning she spent a long time in the bathroom, one wall of which was given over almost entirely to a mirror: a frank, uncompromising image it offered to anyone, particularly at that hour, gazing into it. She, too, he reflected, was much preoccupied with ageing, though resolutely not with ‘age’: age, she was inclined to suggest, rather like Kavanagh, didn’t count. What did was something arrived at or acquired by application, to do exclusively with her job. Negativity, day after day, had to be confronted by something; if not by something positive, at least by something distracting.

  Like make-up.

  ‘Paul’s arranged for me to see someone a colleague has recommended. I assume it’s a colleague. A materialistic crew normally, the ones he hangs around with. Like all Paul’s enthusiasms, not to be taken at face value, he today telling me he’s buying pictures.’

  ‘Only to sell on. They’re scarcely in his house ten minutes.’

  ‘So all that “change of life” is bullshit?’

  ‘Paul does lots of things on impulse.’ His sister smiled, raising the cup of tea, saluting. ‘This woman he has at the moment is the silliest he’s come up with. Scarcely thirty and intends to retire at thirty-five and have five children. Paul, foolishly, thinks by him. Eighty years old with teenage children!’

  ‘Has he told you that?’

  ‘She did. He brought her round. He thinks I’m a fount of familial wisdom. Charlotte had rung him asking if he’d see you.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘See how you are.’

  ‘It’s reassuring,’ he said, ‘so many want to help. An embarrassment of riches. I’m fortunate, very fortunate,’ he added.

  ‘We feel you’re moving away from us. Even further away,’ she went on, ‘than you were before. We feel, in a way, you’re not coming back.’

  Once more Berenice’s voice came through the wall, the only audible words, as usual, ‘fucking’ and ‘roight?’

  ‘I haven’t come back. I’ve departed. Where to,’ he said, ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I re-read your article, by the way. The one you wrote at the time of Daddy’s death. “We are here to kill and be killed.”’

  ‘We are here to destroy and be destroyed.’

  ‘It’s so evidently not the case.’

  ‘You think so.’

  It was odd, he thought, that Paul hadn’t mentioned this: not a few had remarked on it at the time. But then, ideology was, along with the Church, a thing he had abandoned long ago.

  ‘I know so!’ His sister was triumphant. ‘Nicholas,’ she added, mentioning one of her sons-in-law, ‘follows your reviews. Over the past few years, he says, they’ve become increasingly negative. Not surprising. What’s happening, what has happened, in your private life must have played a significant part. Paul told me today, for instance, you’ve been fired. It was always absurd, an academic involving himself in contemporary events. You’re no wiser, in that respect, than anyone else. History, to a large degree, is fiction. So are retrospective views of art.’

  He didn’t respond, looking into the space behind her, the opening to the kitchen. To one side was a window facing the yard, a round table and four chairs placed before it. Moments ago, they’d been standing there, somewhere, he strangely concluded, where neither of them belonged.

  ‘It’s not a negative view,’ he finally announced, ‘considering the scale and extent of male destructiveness. Nor the reverse of it,’ he went on, ‘when the same destructiveness is deployed in disassembling the past and recreating it in the light of the present. Destruction is the basis of love. I won’t hurt you if you won’t hurt me. Out of that emerges the inevitable need for succour and protection, first from the consequences of our destructiveness, then out of a requirement to distract the destructiveness of others. From this collusion of interests grows mutual regard. Out of mutual regard grows affiliation. Out of affiliation grows affection. Out of affection grows love. If I love you will you love me? Out of that emerges the final, sanctifying ethic, I’ll love you even if you don’t love me, our exegesis of a life we were never free to choose.’

  She had heard all this before. Her gaze turned to follow his, then, disillusioned, was turned back again.

  ‘This killer you’ve befriended.’

  Maddox shrugged: incomprehension, even horror, was evident in her look – something familiar from their earliest encounters: his unworldliness had always alarmed if not enraged her: he lived – had spent most of his life – not in the present century but one, as she’d been inclined in the past to point out, ‘six of them ago’.

  What had happened then that appeared to be relevant now? He was no longer sure: Savonarola, the inspirer of Michelangelo, had been burnt alive, the crowd throwing stones to dislodge the flesh still hanging from the bones, the remains ground down and thrown into the Arno: everything, at an alarming rate, was, in his life, moving backwards. Something inexplicable was happening, specifically to him, something he could look on only, paradoxically, with the same concern as his brother and sister – but not the concern, he realised, with a shock, of Simone: whatever she saw did not discourage her.

  Something he hadn’t acknowledged: he might, at this moment, quite easily, have been dead, this posthumous existence a ghost-like phenomenon. Sectioning, too, had been a death: what had emerged, by way of chemicals, was not something he knew, any longer, how to recognise, or even, he was beginning to suspect, respond to: a spectral presence bordering on what Simone, undoubtedly – and Neil, the t’ai-chi-addicted life-class instructor – would have described as ‘essence’, the ‘substance’ of which, presumably, he represented – and was living – now.

  ‘He used to be my student. I had an affair with his wife, before he met her, for which, at the time, had it been discovered, I might have been fired. Why he wanted to see me I’m not sure. He isn’t either. Although he’s unaware of it, we have attempted-suicide in common, his consciously determined, mine not. The fact that he’s unaware of it affects the way I see him.’ He paused, unsure if any of this had registered: she was, after all, he reflected, like his brother, like their uncle, or even perhaps their father: weren’t cars, at the time, a distraction, rather than a requirement: wasn’t pleasure the principle involved?

  The structure on which he was basing – had based – everything was beginning to shake. He was beginning to shake: he could feel the tremor pass through his body, into his arms, his hands, down to his legs, his feet: familiar convulsions were taking place in the region of his heart. His voice thickened, an odd, inarticulate sound emerging from his mouth, he turning his head aside, thankfully, as the telephone rang.

  At first he was inclined to let it ring: the instrument stood on a bookshelf within reach of where his sister was sitting. She, startled by the sound, had also turned.

  He rose, lifted the receiver, and heard Simone’s voice.

  ‘I got your message.’

  ‘I’m with my sister,’ he said. How swiftly she could put him at his ease, just as on other occasions how swiftly she could alarm him. ‘I’ll come up later,’ he added.

  ‘Whenever you like. I’ll be in bed. I’ve had a tiring day. Probably like you.’

  The phone was replaced the other end: one of her list of calls, he assumed, she had to make, seeing her clearly, at that moment, standing, stooped to the names, to see who else remained.

  ‘I’m not keeping you?’ Sarah said.

  ‘I’m glad of a chance to talk,’ he said.

  ‘That was her.’

  ‘Simone.’

  ‘Is she English?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware.’

  She waited: she might, the next instant, enquire if he had a photograph.

  ‘I feel, with Taylor, my former student, I have something in common. He was the brightest, if not the best, of those I dealt with. Precocious, but not aware of it. I thought, at the time, he might have done anything. Anything other than painting. Politics. Religion. Business. Even the Chair at the Drayburgh when I left. Unfortunately, he only wanted to paint. Unlike his wife he hadn’t the talent.’

  ‘Paul doesn’t think it’ll do much good. Seeing him,’ she said.

  ‘He got in touch with me. Not I with him.’

  ‘You didn’t have to respond.’

  ‘I’d have felt much worse not,’ he told her. ‘I’m perhaps the one person left he can talk to.’ He waited. ‘One way forward,’ he added, ‘is to do the things I would have done if I hadn’t been ill. Certainly, in those conditions, I’d have gone and seen him. A residual duty, curiosity, self-help, illumination, what you will.’

  He turned to the window, looking out to the yard. Another thought struck him.

  ‘I was watching a blackbird out there the other day. Pulling up a worm. A cat came over the wall. The blackbird didn’t see it. The cat crept up. When, finally, quivering on its haunches, it was about to spring, I tapped the window. The bird flew up, the cat shot off. The worm, presumably, returned to its hole. A chain of destruction ending with a species with the unique capacity to destroy itself. I’m inclined to think the destruction will go on unimpeded, licensed, after all, by nature. What stronger endorsement could it have than that?’

  ‘You’ll go on seeing him?’ statement, rather than enquiry.

  ‘Not without his permission. If he’s transferred to a unit outside London they may decide it’s better he sees no one. Least of all someone who, from past association, might disturb him.’

  She appeared to be gazing at him as if from a distance. He, too, seemed to see her from a long way off, an increasingly diminishing figure who, at that instant, he wanted to call back: soon, he reflected, she would disappear entirely, beyond his reach, beyond his touch.