‘What are you taking?’

  ‘Dothiepin,’ he said.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Thioridazine, whenever things get bad. Less and less, recently,’ he added.

  ‘National Health.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man got up, picked up the packet of cigarettes and the box of matches and shuffled to the chair by the empty fire. Sinking into it, he sighed, and, with two hands, sparks flashing from the cigarette, hoisted one thigh over the other.

  ‘Not much of a life,’ he said, and added, ‘Yours, I imagine, you think is no better.’

  Maddox could see, for the first time, the distortion of the man’s figure, the ribs pushed out to one side, the shoulder above them lowered. The teeth protruded unevenly, almost fragmented, the eyes, more clearly visible, suggesting a lava-like effusion, dark, reddened. He recalled a not dissimilar quality, if more diffuse, he’d occasionally witnessed in Simone.

  ‘Not that the fees add up to much, compared to what you make selling pictures.’

  ‘I don’t sell pictures,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I write about them.’

  ‘Berenson made a fortune.’

  ‘I believe he did.’

  ‘And this latter-day Berenson. Viklund.’

  Surprised, even disconcerted, Maddox asked, ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Dan and I go back a long way.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No reason why you should.’ The cigarette, hanging from the corner of his mouth, trailed out another stream of smoke. ‘I followed his series. The re-emergence of the species in when did he say it was? As if.’ He paused. ‘New philistinism, in your case. But, then, when did it ever stop?’

  The door opened: the woman who had let him in reappeared, one hand retained on the doorknob behind.

  ‘Where’s the dog?’ she said.

  ‘It’s upstairs,’ the man told her. ‘It had to come up and fetch me.’

  The telephone rang once more in the hall outside, the previous ringing having ended abruptly, as if an extension had been lifted in another room. The sound of music was audible again.

  ‘Answer it,’ the man said. ‘Or ask the dog.’

  ‘You answer it,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve other things to do.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘Other things,’ the woman insisted. ‘If you don’t want me here I’ll be outside.’

  The door was closed. Moments later the telephone stopped. The woman’s voice, faintly, came from the hall.

  ‘We could have asked her for your tea,’ the figure said by the empty fire. ‘And me for my cup of coffee.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ Maddox said, reluctant to approach the woman again.

  Stubbing the cigarette, half smoked, in the hearth, the man took out and lit another. ‘Sure?’ he said, holding it up.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I’d hate to leave you worse than when you came in. What do think to the psychiatric profession?’

  ‘I’ve found them helpful, on the whole,’ he said.

  ‘If you’re asking me about orthodoxy I haven’t got one. Freud a junkie. Adler an idler. Jung a fucker of his women patients. Cunt is very much part of the system. Are you an admirer of the muse of Lichfield? You’ll find the whole of it in there. What did you want to see me about?’

  ‘I don’t know. You were recommended,’ Maddox said, helplessness, he reflected, evident on both their parts.

  ‘By a colleague of your brother’s.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He surveyed Maddox for several seconds through a cloud of smoke.

  ‘I can’t do anything for you, of course.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t stop people killing themselves. It’s a reasonable thing to do. It’s the ones who don’t that I normally address. The tube station at Notting Hill, for instance, is just as convenient as the one at Camden Town. Though the one at Camden Town, being a junction, has four lines, the corresponding number of platforms, and a proportionately greater number of trains. In that respect, you’re fortunate having it on your doorstep. You weren’t fucked by your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Amongst men of your age there’s an awful lot of that around. Unmentioned over the previous thirty years and suddenly the fashion. The nineteen forties and ’fifties were particularly strong. Possibly the war, soldiers returning, an, at the time, unbroachable postscript. How about your mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sister?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That used to be pretty strong. Keep it in the family. Threat of scandal. Neighbours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Relatives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Vicar?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Rabbi?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Priest?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Mullah?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about school?’

  ‘None there either.’

  ‘A pretty fuckless childhood.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where were you brought up?’

  ‘St Albans.’

  ‘St Albans.’ He brushed cigarette ash from his cardigan. ‘I’ve had one or two interesting cases from there. Anything I’ve missed? Or should I say anyone?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Doesn’t seem much fun if you haven’t been fucked by somebody. Other than your wife and what might be described as your female peers.’ Lifting his thigh once more with both hands he lowered it to the ground, grasped the other thigh and lifted it over the first. The slipper, suspended from the upraised foot, fell off. The foot was bare. ‘You may have been told, my principal subject is incest. Are you aware what the most significant problem is for members of a family who, knowingly or unknowingly, have been separated at birth, or shortly thereafter, and are suddenly reunited?’

  Despite an increasing desire not to disappoint his interlocutor, he was obliged to shake his head again.

  ‘G.S.A. Genetic Sexual Attraction. An irresistible desire to fuck one another. The respectable mother attracted to her long-lost son. Son to mother. Father to daughter. Daughter to father. Sister to brother. Brother to sister. Brother to brother. Sister to sister. It suggests the principal underlying element in family life is grievously overlooked at present. Oedipus, who, after all, was never aware he was fucking his mother, doesn’t come into it. This is Dionysus, without the alcohol.’ Stroking with both hands his upraised knee, he added, ‘My name is Isaacson, by the way, not Isaacs. Your intermediary, when he rang, had got it wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’ll have to be overlooked at present. What are your feelings on euthanasia?’

  ‘I feel okay about it,’ he said. ‘Each case to be taken on its merit.’

  ‘How well do you know Dan Viklund?’

  ‘I succeeded him at the Drayburgh. Before that, long before that, I was his student. At the Courtauld.’

  ‘He got me out of Germany. Before the war. He had quite a line in that sort of thing. My parents, who hesitated, didn’t make it. Similarly my sister. Similarly my brother. The Notting Hill tube station, either east or west, doesn’t nearly come into it.’

  He contemplated Maddox through a cloud of suddenly exhaled smoke.

  ‘I ended up at a Quaker residential school, within a year had passed my exams and seven years later qualified as a doctor in time for the Korean War. Or, rather, out of gratitude to the British nation – and the United Nations – I volunteered. Read Boswell?’

  ‘I have,’ he said.

  ‘Biography or diary?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘A necessary in-filler to what the genius wrote. I thought, at the time, I’d do the same. The equivalent of the Rambler essays. The Adventurer, The Idler. Dilatory titles, but exemplary. I got blown up.’

  Smoke, once more, was exhaled between them.

  ‘What by?’

  ‘A bomb. By mistake. American. But you don’t want to hear my sordid story.’

  ‘I’d like to,’ Maddox said, relieved, to a degree, their roles had been reversed.

  ‘Every few years a piece of shrapnel works its way out. Abdomen. Arm. Leg. I’ve got them on the mantelpiece, if you’d care to look. If I hadn’t been a medic I’d have died. A tourniquet on both my legs and an arm. It fucked me up for quite a while. Could say I never recovered.’

  He regarded Maddox through the thickening smoke, an assessment of some sort underway, if not completed.

  ‘What school were you at?’

  ‘St Albans. After that, the north of England. During the war years and after,’ he added.

  ‘Religion?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Agnostic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Atheist?’

  ‘Still to find out.’

  ‘Not apostate Jewish?’

  ‘My father was.’

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But some.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘I’ve read your reviews.’ He gestured to the wall behind Maddox’s back. ‘Not, in your view, a wasted talent.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Most people affect to like them.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ he said, ‘to keep up with you.’

  ‘I was called Kike at school, Quakers notwithstanding. At one time, a group of twelve men with a charismatic leader might well have been treated with suspicion. St Paul, too, I’m not sure about. Sexual invert?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Telling people what they know already is how I stay in business. As you’re probably aware, knowledge and awareness are different things.’

  ‘You think so.’

  ‘I do.’

  Maddox’s mood of abstraction had increased, he struggling to keep the figure before him in focus, its features, seemingly, fused together. He had noticed this hallucinatory effect before, either with people whose conversations bored him or with those whose presence was reassuring, a tendency he associated with ageing, if not his medical condition, the seemingly manic mask that represented Isaacson – if he’d got the name correct – acquiring a conspiratorial intensity, the eyes dilated, the hair, as he spoke, darting to and fro at the back of his head as if a second, more sinister presence lurked behind him.

  ‘This philistinism you go on about. A self-degenerating force that can’t be controlled. A mannerist age. Most of them are. Irrelevant. Too obvious. What do you think?’

  ‘I wonder,’ Maddox said, ‘what precisely I’m doing here. Discussing what I know already, or merely having the privilege of paying to listen to you.’

  ‘The paintings,’ Isaacson said, ‘are by me.’

  Turning, Maddox looked at them again. ‘Good job you stuck to psychiatry,’ he said.

  ‘I did them in my youth, which is a considerable time ago, before the Korean War. I went to Jerusalem on an extended visit, for no accountable reason, and, without warning, psychosis intervened. Voices. People there whom no one else could see. Definitive views on everything. The sort of thing you get with LSD. Things to come. Much of it in the Talmud.’

  He waited, smiling, his head on one side.

  ‘Did you recover?’

  ‘That’s for you to decide.’ He spread out his arms. Cigarette smoke drifted up again.

  ‘What should I do,’ Maddox said, ‘in a not dissimilar situation?’

  ‘How not dissimilar?’

  ‘Things destabilising,’ he said. ‘Forces coming from inside, but experienced as coming from the outside, on a scale and with a strength greater than anything I’ve previously known. Approaching, say,’ he added, half smiling, ‘the size of an aircraft-carrier to someone paddling in the sea.’

  ‘Were you paddling?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Pathology, in your case, I wouldn’t know about. My sort of intervention, nowadays, is unfashionable. Symptoms like yours are primarily seen as functional disorders. Hormones, enzymes, genes. You name it. Cognitive behavioural therapy may be more your thing. Consciousness inserted between awareness and action. Rather along the lines of what we’re doing now. You feeling pissed off when you arrive, I in bed, having forgotten about you, the dog coming up to fetch me. It doesn’t like visitors and only comes up when they arrive. By pissing around we’re both distracted. What you get from me you won’t get from anyone else. I won’t ask you, for Yahweh’s sake, to revert to a Jew.’ He laughed, a brief, inconsequential sound, the prominent teeth once more displayed. If anything, Maddox reflected, he felt confident about him because of the irregularity of the teeth, an authenticity, of a sort, engagingly revealed. ‘What you want is something to replace what you were doing before you felt inclined to put an end to what you were doing, accidie leading to cachexia a not uncommon complaint amongst – how should I describe it? – people like you. I take it you’re still reviewing. Or have you something of interest up your sleeve?’

  He extended his hand.

  ‘I’m thinking of writing about a former student of mine who I visited recently in prison.’

  ‘What’s he do?’ Isaacson said.

  ‘Killed his wife and children.’

  ‘Eric Taylor,’ Isaacson said.

  ‘You heard about him?’

  ‘I was asked to appear at his trial. After the defence read my curriculum vitae they changed their mind. I don’t know why. It was his idea to invite me.’

  ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘A time and place were appointed, and then cancelled. Your services, they told me, are no longer required. The defence of insanity, you’ll remember, was not sustained. Anything else you have in the kitchen?’

  ‘An analyst I went to and with whom I am now half living, therapy abandoned, has been reported to the Medical Council by two of her clients who cite the irregularity of our relationship, along with accounts of being propositioned along similar lines themselves.’

  ‘There you go again,’ Isaacson said, stubbing the second cigarette out, half smoked, in the hearth. ‘There’s no end to these complications. I’ll be telling you my problems next, and asking your advice.’ Waving his hand again, he signalled Maddox to continue.

  ‘I’m inclined to turn what might be described as pathology into a metaphysical proposition.’

  ‘Why not? Philosophy’s in the doldrums. So’s psychiatry, come to that. These rituals we once went in for are still of use. Self-validating assertions can be negative, too. “I’m the worst person in the world, doctor. I’m a failure. No one loves me. I’m just about the most incomprehensible shit you’ll ever come across.” Apart from the facts of age, height, weight, address, occupation, income, marital status, children, the rest is self-appraisal. Validation comes in any form you like, but principally in the shape of the perception, “I see myself in this light.” The seeing and the I involved, whatever the substance of the perception, substantiate the self which the analysand assumes is missing. As the two of us are doing now. Screwing your therapist or analyst, for instance, isn’t par for the course but I wouldn’t exclude it. It appears, from where I’m sitting, to have served you well. She’s not still charging you, I take it?’

  Maddox’s posture on the couch had changed: from one of alertness – square-shouldered, upright, confrontational – he’d relaxed into one not unlike that of Isaacson himself, lying back, his legs crossed, his hands, in his own case, placed beside him to balance himself amongst the protruding springs – which, he’d now discovered, it was the purpose of the rugs, and perhaps the scattered books, to conceal. Maybe it was the analogy between his posture and his situation, described to Isaacson, that prompted him to laugh, a realisation that his inclination to write about Taylor was being reinforced by the other man, a realisation Isaacson had come to, too.

  ‘As for transcendental solutions – an areligious milieu to you; an acultural one, to me – I’d ask you to look at the pictures on the wall. Not much to you, but meaningful to me. A reminder of questions I once asked and answers I’d otherwise have forgotten. Irrelevant, now, of course, for questions and answers, after a certain age, no longer count. As for Taylor, whom I never met, I suspect you’ll find the same. The total, whatever it adds up to, rarely matters. Why, I’m inclined to ask, did you pick on him? What’s his attitude to you?’

  ‘Vengefulness. See where I’ve ended up. See where my wife and children the same.’

  ‘Did you buy it?’

  ‘Some I did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Some of it.’

  ‘Some of it.’

  Isaacson waited.

  ‘Maybe you could help me,’ he added.

  ‘Blow me away.’ Isaacson extended his hand again: an invitation, physically, to place something in it.

  ‘To what degree is it cultural, to what degree something else?’

  ‘No dice.’ Pointing a finger at his chest, he added, ‘Bang!’ Pointing the same finger at Maddox, he exclaimed, ‘Bingo! Shot you first. You’re dead! Y.P.’

  ‘Why pee?’

  ‘Your problem.’

  The door had opened again.

  ‘Are you wanting tea?’ the woman said, not appearing in the door but, her hand presumably on the handle, remaining in the hall outside.

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ Isaacson said. ‘We’re into business. If you came round the door you’d see.’

  ‘Mr Cavendish is due in ten minutes.’

  ‘Ask him to come back.’

  ‘You ask him.’

  ‘You ask him.’

  ‘I won’t tell him anything. It’s up to you.’

  The door was closed.

  A moment later Isaacson got up, with considerable alacrity – an alacrity not previously shown – and, in crab-like strides, crossed, with one slippered and one bare foot, to the door. Opening it, he called, ‘What the fuck do I pay you for if you won’t answer the fucking door?’

  ‘What you paid me for you still owe,’ came the voice from outside.

  Isaacson closed the door and came back to his seat. Lowering himself into it with difficulty, he said, ‘Either you piss off or Cavendish does. Do you know him, by the way?’

  Maddox shook his head.