‘Is an appetite for such a life as the one I’ve described a sign, not of morbidity, but of the cold-heartedness of others? Am I the only one to recognise reality, that an existence based on species devouring species, galaxies annihilating galaxies, is not only unacceptable but wrong? Free will doesn’t operate amongst birds and beasts, least of all original sin. In which case, morality is a fiction and not an explanation of, or even an excuse for, a universe based on force. It’s why,’ he went on, ‘I responded to Giotto. No more Gods to fuck around. No more to atone to. No more Gods, thank God, for anything.’

  ‘I thought all his paintings were religious,’ she said. ‘The ones you and Viklund authenticated, dismissing most of the rest.’

  How often in the past had she looked over his shoulder, provoked, as the whole family were, by an enthusiasm on his part he couldn’t, other than by his absorption, communicate. Now he merely shook his head. ‘Were religious,’ he said. ‘In reality were, and are, increasingly, something else.’

  Berenice’s voice had faded, possibly to another room: invariably his speculation, on the rare occasions she fell silent, was that one of her customers, her clients, her participatory addicts, who bore the brunt of her reproaches, her self-exonerating speeches, had struck her down (cut her up, disposed of her – a frequent thought – in black bin-liners – so many, normally, taken from her house), he listening, hopefully, for confirmatory signals: banging, cries, the sound of a saw, a hammer, the thump of weights being dragged across the floor. Inevitably, fantasies, wishes, scarcely mobilised, the recriminatory expletives would confirm that immortality, in her case, was assured.

  ‘Even when you were younger I always thought you too intense.’ His sister sank back in her chair, in much the same fashion Viklund had – in his case, to indicate, despite signals to the contrary, he felt at home. With Sarah, the gesture was one of resignation. ‘Do you remember the times I tried to josh you out of it?’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘And Paul.’

  ‘All of you. Such biblical names, too,’ he added. ‘Sarah. Matthew. I wonder what they intended? Paul was telling me he went into the Church to pre-empt my doing the same. Either that,’ he went on, ‘or to placate Mother. The masters at Quinians thought the same. Going by the reproductions I used to pin up in my locker. To end up with what? A visitation on a tube station platform that even now I can’t explain. Condoning, or otherwise, a different matter.’

  ‘Did Paul say that?’ she said. ‘Pre-empting?’

  ‘He sought to divert me from what, even at that age, like you, he recognised as morbidity. As for the Cathedral. There it was. Down the road. Our weekly attendance. No avoiding. Religiosity built into the house, built into the business, “straight as an arrow” in lower-case gold lettering across the showroom window, the Roman examplar immediately outside. On top of that, the war. Nothing quite so socially cohesive could have been invented to bring God and Mammon side by side. The notion of divine participation, an absolute evil prompting, on our side, an absolute good. I don’t think anyone who experienced it, as a child, of a certain age, ever quite got over it. On formative years it had an indescribable and largely unexplored effect. Goodness exemplified in flesh and blood, in coal and steel. At Quinians, away from the bombing, though we could see the glow from Sheffield burning beyond the skyline, the constant thread of conversation amongst the younger boys was the number of aircraft, on the other side, shot down, guns captured, ships sunk, miles retaken. The blackout gave a strange homogeneity to everything. Plus, at Quinians, the sound of antiaircraft guns from a nearby battery, its searchlights, ethereally, at night, probing at the sky, the throbbing of aircraft overhead. Everything compounded a sense of destiny, where we were, what we were, above all else, who we were. The sense of a highly visible force dominating everything on behalf of a common good. Not a mile from the school, in the valley bottom, between us and the town, was a factory given over to the manufacture of tanks. We’d run down the hill to watch them go by, Valentines, Churchills, their tracks leaving white weals on the tarmac, they rattling off to their testing-ground outside the town where they’d bounce around at speed in half-wooded countryside before they were shipped off, tarpaulined, on goods trains to the south.’

  Breathless, one anxiety attack coalescing with another, prompted, no doubt, by what he had described: the absence, in the present, of any equivalent.

  ‘All the time,’ he went on, holding his chest, ‘a natural force relocating itself. Implacable. Irresistible. God help us, never ending.’

  It was as if he were outside the room, suspended above it, endeavouring to get back. Little of what he had intended to say, what his sister, no doubt, had intended to say, had been expressed.

  ‘How are you?’ he concluded.

  Enough here to reassure her, he reflected, he was completely off his head, she resting her elbows on the arms of the chair, her hands, lightly held together, pressed against her mouth, gazing at him over the top of them.

  ‘I’ve rarely been better. Which is why I’d very much like you to be the same.’

  ‘Still teaching.’

  ‘Long retired. Though I help in a local school.’

  ‘Sounds like Mother.’

  ‘It does.’ She paused. ‘I take art lessons, too, like you. A foundation course. On top of which,’ she paused again, her hands lowered, still clenched together. ‘The children. The grandchildren. There doesn’t seem time enough. Women,’ she released one hand, ‘are better at that sort of thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ his thoughts dominated at that moment by the reflection that he and she and Paul came from a common stock, the father he’d walked around, weeping, the morning after his death, a helplessness that had increased rather than decreased with time. What had been removed from him that hadn’t, evidently, been removed from Paul and his sister? she, for instance, increasingly absorbed in life, absorbed in pleasure, a simple, unadulterated hedonistic drive: acceptance instead of resignation, openness instead of reserve, sympathy in place of disillusionment.

  ‘Friendship. Companionship. The social instinct is more pronounced in women than men. At least, is expressed in a different way. Maybe because of subjugation, a sense of sharing a common situation. Like the war. But permanent, and women only. Men’s feelings are expressed, where not in work, in sport. In addition, women talk about their feelings, men invariably, because of the reasons given, not.’

  ‘I talk,’ he said, belligerently, ‘about little else. And have been given much encouragement to do so. After all, who are the great talkers, in this respect, philosophers apart? Freud. Jung. Adler.’ He paused, waiting for her response. Getting none, he added, ‘However, there is not much left to say.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a lot,’ she said, ‘but we don’t know how to say it. What can’t be communicated,’ she went on, ‘is what our parents used to call “God’s pasture”.’

  ‘What can’t be communicated,’ he said, ‘doesn’t appear to be my problem. As for “God’s pasture”. Clearly something we can’t imagine needn’t necessarily dispose us to assume it isn’t there. Infinity, for instance.’

  ‘Or a new colour.’

  ‘Or me in a better mood.’

  Evenings at home when the two, or the three of them had competed in banter: the shadowed living-room at the sunless back of the house, the never altogether absent smell of leather, fumes, polish, fuel; that odour that came in on their father’s clothes never entirely overcome by the smell of cooking, or of the pipe tobacco he smoked.

  Competed, too, in attracting the attention of their uncle, the genial guardian of the place, whose flamboyancy both bemused and intimidated them as children, and distracted, if not openly amused them later on: the glazed stare with which Sarah would listen to accounts of the plays he’d seen, her eyes moving from detail to detail of her uncle’s coat, his cravat, his collar, his cuffs, his tie-pin, his cuff-links, his turn-ups, his shoes, his words adjuncts of his appearance. Finally, after this examination, her eyes would turn to his face: his moustache, his full-blooded, full-lipped mouth, his conspicuous nose, his neatly trimmed brows, his suavely cut hair – his twinkling, galvanising, dark-brown eyes: something here which gave the impression of a mask, just as, with his clothes, came the impression of a costume, one which might just as well have been worn by, or borrowed from, someone else.

  To some extent she had modelled her behaviour on what she had seen and heard: a temperamental, loquacious, opinionated performer who took over the living-room whenever her brothers were home from school, determined, on each of these occasions, to re-assert her ascendancy. Something of her histrionics Paul had taken on himself, a ‘longing to wear a dress’ a later facetious excuse for his entering the. Church, and a ‘disillusionment with wearing frocks’ an even later excuse for leaving it.

  ‘Paul has suggested someone you could speak to,’ Sarah said, entering his thoughts.

  ‘He sees it as complementary to what I’m up to at present.’

  Recapitulation, he assumed, while she assessed where their conversation might be going: she looked to the window, the darkening street, in much the same fashion as Viklund had looked out, equating what was in the room with what might be outside it, he struck by the insistence with which Viklund remained in and constantly revivified his thoughts.

  As if prompted by the silence, once more, through the party-wall, came the sound of Berenice’s voice.

  ‘That woman certainly comes across. Don’t you ever complain?’

  ‘We have an understanding.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Sorts.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘How much each other can stand.’

  Perversity – obscurity, even – was something Sarah instinctively responded to: her legs crossed, her hands splayed on her knee, she said, ‘You’re sure there’s nothing more we can do?’

  ‘It was Paul’s idea to suggest this other man. I’m determined, as far as I can, to manage on my own. All this, as I’ve said, is new to me. Ten years ago, five years ago, even less, I wouldn’t have believed any of this could have happened. Looking back, you could say it fits into a pattern, but not necessarily one I recognise.’

  She looked across intensely. ‘What pattern?’

  ‘Weren’t we supposed to have come from merchants? Artisans. Tailors. Cobblers. Ending up as the first car salesmen in St Albans? Joseph, nowadays, I imagine, would be a hustler, somewhat on the lines of Paul. Do you remember how he used to talk of built-in obsolescence as if it were a feature for which there’d be a charge?’

  Amity, of a sort, had been restored; Sarah having extended her sympathy – her understanding, her involvement – as far as they could reach. Her own life, she was suggesting, had been extended, too, if in the opposite direction, to expectancy, anticipation, not to anxiety and doubt.

  Yet, he too, he reflected, was expectant: he was looking to something – looking for something – something to which, finally, he might attach himself – like Simone, for instance. He and his sister and his brother might, from time to time, still call to one another, as now, but – bleak, impassable, intransigent – they were aware of the increasing distance between themselves: something sad and absolute about all that.

  ‘Weren’t our family Jews? Didn’t father convert at a significant moment of his youth, in order to further his chances? Weren’t we enclosed in a system we were intended to endorse? Wasn’t Paul the imprimatur placed, finally, on all of us? One he dismissed when he realised it didn’t count?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Doesn’t it have an effect?’ Maddox said.

  His sister shrugged. ‘Sectarianism of any sort I despise. Tradition kills. It doesn’t augment. It diminishes. Embraces. Stifles. I hate the thought of our being anything other than ourselves. Who gives a fuck,’ she smiled, ‘who or what we were in the past?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s like dragging a corpse around,’ she said. ‘Catholic. Muslim. Hindu. Protestant. Haven’t we, as a family, outgrown these things? Whatever Mother and Father deployed in the past, we don’t have to oblige them any longer.’

  So that was it: it didn’t count – hadn’t counted: an imperative, not a choice.

  ‘More tea?’

  The irony didn’t elude her.

  ‘You have your partner to see,’ she said.

  ‘Not quite a partnership yet.’

  ‘Do you like her?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Does she like you?’

  ‘I believe she must.’ A moment later, he added, ‘She’s all I have at present.’

  ‘Barring me. And Paul. And Charlotte. Your children. Even Viklund, I gather, is still around. I never knew whether you were his amanuensis or he was yours. Is he well?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘Paul says you may have compromised Simone’s position with the Medical Council.’

  ‘I’m corroborative evidence. Her complainants are two of her clients. One look at her principal accuser there’ll be no case to answer. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘But for you.’

  ‘If every doctor, particularly in her field, were suspended because of a relationship with a client there wouldn’t be many around.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Exaggerating.’

  ‘Naturally. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be you.’

  She was showing signs of leaving, looking round for her coat. A moment later she was rising, putting out her arms. ‘You always were the prodigal child,’ she added, he rising, too, she holding him against her. ‘Paul,’ she went on, releasing him, ‘told me you’d been fired.’

  ‘A good week, on the whole. I’m expecting the ground to open and swallow me tomorrow.’

  A certain bleakness, and lack of conviction here, he thought, yet, laughing, she was picking up her coat with one hand, still retaining him, however, with the other. ‘You might take Paul as an example. He has a fine sense of the irrelevance of running when all you need to do is walk. It hasn’t done him badly.’

  She was smiling, he now holding the coat while she slipped her arms inside.

  At the door she added, ‘You don’t have to end up losing instead of fearing God,’ turning, as if to mystify him further. ‘The thing that’s lost is still around,’ stepping into the street, closing the gate behind her. ‘Joseph, alone, remained true to his faith. What did he become? A peacock!’ moving away, not glancing back, he waiting at the door until she’d reached the corner where, sensing he was still watching, she turned and waved.

  14

  She was in bed and had been asleep, turning to him, releasing the cat which, sensing his intrusion, fled to the door and out. ‘Do you want to give it some food?’ she said, adding, ‘In compensation,’ he returning to the kitchen, opening the fridge, getting out the tin, scooping a spoonful into the bowl, wondering why she slept with the cat at all, and then, unsure whether he’d bolted the front door, going back down to discover he had.

  By the time he’d returned to the bedroom she was snoring and, breathless, he was panting: crawling in beside her, he pressed himself against her back, cupped his hand around her breast, pleased that she was naked, and felt her back ease into his groin. In no time at all he was asleep himself.

  She was up before him, the breakfast cereals set out on a tray on the roof. They sat at the garden table, he half awake, aware that by now, normally, she might well have been working, hesitating to ask her why not, he giving her an account of the previous day, the conversations with his brother, his sister, not withholding, however, the latter’s final observations. He felt refreshed (unintruded-upon, surprisingly so: untransgressed): on waking, in the middle of the night, they’d swiftly joined and, just as swiftly, fallen asleep again.

  Without make-up, her hair brushed, a housecoat buttoned beneath her chin, he in a dressing-gown, they might have been any normal couple, companionable, relaxed, at ease with one another.

  ‘Aren’t you working?’ he finally asked.

  ‘I need time to think.’ The paleness of her skin without makeup, the unaccustomed lightness, as a result, around her eyes, drama of any sort missing from her expression: instead, a sleepy acquiescence, he, too, inclined to assume, if only for a while, that nothing unusual was happening.

  ‘Let’s get married,’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’ Leaning back, she laughed, one finger extended to the table, her breakfast finished, indicating the cat could lick her bowl. Finally, she set it on the flagstones, the cat lowering its head, its metal identity cylinder clinking against the bowl’s side, they watching it together. ‘Afraid I might run off?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Some place to run to.’ She gestured round. ‘Is this what you get from your family? Marriage.’

  ‘Leave,’ he said, ‘while the going’s good.’

  ‘I’d better meet them.’

  ‘You better had.’

  She was in a good mood but, though he thought he knew the reason, and was reluctant to disturb it, he wasn’t convinced. Overhead, swifts swooped, squeaking, above and between the roofs. Higher up, house-martins fluttered, ducked and dived in slower patterns. A feeling of contentment absorbed him at that moment, she watching him, smiling.

  ‘Does it need a warranty?’ she asked.

  ‘To match the one,’ he said, ‘I had before.’

  ‘Plus three of mine.’

  ‘Would you,’ he enquired, ‘get married again?’

  ‘And go against your family?’ her smile extended. Moments later she raised her head to watch the birds fluttering into the cavities beneath the eaves, turning then to watch the cat. Finally, she stooped to a nearby plant to pull off several dying petals. He watched her fingers extend to each stalk, the sifting sound as the petals came away, she screwing them in her palm and dropping them into a basket beneath the table. Her gardening tools and gloves were laid on a bench behind her: a picture of control, sufficiency: no need of marriage, the gesture implied, I’m on my own, he wondering if he evoked a similar image (I’m nuts, he reflected, in any case). How much time would she take off work? How much, for instance, could she afford? the speculation sufficient for him to conclude she’d already worked out what she intended to do, ‘with everything,’ he said, involuntarily, aloud, glancing at her as she looked across.