Rachel, as usual, he singled out, wondering why, with Simone in the background, he found her so attractive: the activity of her breast as she drew, her arm, her delicate, thinly muscled arm, thrust out to the easel: a hand, darkened by charcoal, which he might, so easily, stretching over, kiss: the shower of dust descending from her drawing, smeared across her overalled front, the streaks of dust across her cheeks as, intermittently, she drew back her hair (too long, and yet enchanting), a figure – the epitome – of application (dedication, domesticity, strength): the ascendancy of ends beyond her means: the shading-in of shadows hopelessly confused with the colour of the skin.

  And Ailsa (Mrs Loewenstein), sensitively featured, drawing with her sleeves rolled above her elbows, a jumper beneath her smock: coloured fingers (wrists and arms) as if having plunged her limbs in blood, indecipherable shapes splayed out before her, she drawing successive, repetitive shapes on tinted paper, becalmed in widowhood (fighting in a strange arena, locked into an aperceptive view of herself); Mary (Mrs Sutor) creaking on her donkey as she laboured at her board, eyes levelled, for an instant, above its upper edge, scuffling at the sheet before her, harrying its surface: sensitised Rachel (moving back to her), frail, tensed, braced as though against a storm, he, too, taking in something of the elements – their unpredictability, their intransigence – scouring his drawing, features and figure wrenched out of its carbon-slivered surface, forcing depth into and out of a two-dimensional form.

  Rachel once again distracting: the intimacy of their close encounter, she, in the confined, jostled, crowded space, beside him, feet apart, drawing some distance above his head, sturdily, engrossed, enthralled, he seated, his attention returning to Mrs Sutor (Mary), a fastidious dresser, on his other side, her belted skirt, her blouse, equipped for summer – lightness, efflorescence – a restless figure, hair folded back beneath a ribbon, a schoolgirl style, its fringe drawn up above her brow, her thigh potently outlined along her donkey, crouching … dysfunctional Sheba (abrupt departures to the crêche to see her child) beyond, waiting, as if for a revelation, before her easel poking at the paper: Susannah (Mrs Samuels) a plain, high-breasted figure with the shoulders of a pugilist, labouring at her easel as she might at cleaning out an oven, hand, arm and shoulder applied from one direction, then the other, Jeanette, the retired, diminutive teacher, consulting her drawing, on a donkey, scoring in a line, looking up with a furrowed, enquiring, self-acclamatory smile, forehead puckered with concentration: the wheezing, groaning, tropically attired, booted, bare-armed, short-trousered figure of Genius, the boots, at intervals, stamping on the wood-block floor, Maddox looking round, perplexed, at his fellow artists wondering why he was here at all.

  Something fortuitous in his engagement; something self-enquiring (tortuous): something in common with them all: ‘Where are you from?’ curiosity aroused at the beginning of the term, the turning-away in disappointment, a signal, a code, not recognised or given: serving a sentence, or so it seemed to him, the attention he paid this peculiar, ostracising class: serving out a sentence, leaving from the start (what Taylor, for instance, had painfully discovered: no talent, no gift, no freedom of expression), starting from scratch (the studios he’d visited, on invitation, as a critic), the distance he maintained to preserve his judgement, Rachel a template for the others – himself, too, if the truth were known: a generality of women, a specificity of men: women of a particular persuasion, suffered, skirting the edge of a previous if scarcely referred-to disaster, phantoms occupying their strips of paper, his, too, for no reason he could account for, attempts to relocate themselves graphically defined.

  Invariably he felt exhausted returning from the life-class (no afternoon sleep, for one thing): placing his drawings on the living-room floor, intending, in a different context, and with a more focused concentration, to identify more clearly what he might have done – pinning one, and then several to the wall, to come across them by surprise as, over the next day or two, he entered the room from the stairs or the kitchen, or merely raised his head from something he was reading or from talking on the phone, allowing them, momentarily, to be the centre of his life.

  As for what was, in reality, going on in his life in general, he had little or no idea, events overtaking him, not he initiating or supervising them: tubing up the hill that evening to hear, coming in the door, a voice droning on – anonymous, ingratiating, male again – in Simone’s room, the door to the office ajar, the light flashing on the answering machine, the telephone ringing moments later, then cutting off as a message was recorded (another voice: male, anonymous, urgent, he not troubling to listen): her allegiance – constant, unwavering – to things outside.

  Aching, he climbed upstairs to find the table laid for supper and something cooking in the oven: she had – his heart, warmed, turned over – anticipated his coming! taciturnity (in him) was not the answer. Here, in reality, was the focus of his life: domesticity, a female world to ascend to, after a life of reminiscence, recreating the time he lived in in order to rearrange the past: feeding the cat, its identity cylinder clinking melodiously against the bowl as it ate, watching it licking its lips, once finished, pausing to look up to see if there might be more: licking once again, the rasp of its tongue on its fur in the silence of the house, it raising its head as the doorbell rang and, moments later, a different voice in the hall below, the previous client leaving.

  From the window overlooking the street he caught a glimpse of a stout, middle-aged, raincoated figure, a centrally balding head uncovered, crossing to the steps leading down to Heath Street, buttoning its raincoat as it went: a client departing, he reflected, as if from a brothel. What had people done before analysis had been invented? drink, drugs, promiscuity, religion, or were they simply obliged to discover resources within themselves? And now? his thoughts distracted by the sound of Simone’s feet on the stairs, the soft padding of her soles (flat-heeled shoes) against the carpet, the creaking of the woodwork, he going to the landing to receive her, watching her pause, a few steps down, seeing him, her face flushed, untired, excited. ‘I’ve another appointment. Could you turn off the oven? It’ll be overcooked. Are you okay? I’ll be an hour. Give it forty minutes. Sorry,’ and was gone, returning moments later, scampering up the stairs, pressing her lips against his, squeezing his hand, then, for a second time, was gone, as elusive, as intangible, as mysterious as ever.

  He climbed upstairs and opened the roof door, the cat, pinned, he assumed, all day indoors, preceding him. The air was cool, the light fading: to the south, the declivity of the Thames was covered by a mist: lights glimmered from the scattered tower blocks, the skyline invisible. Back there, between the houses, was the pilgrim route to St Albans, the road which, at some point, he would have to take himself; meanwhile, directly below, the thirty-foot drop to the tiny, enclosed yard at the rear.

  He hadn’t told Simone of the incident with the intruder, anticipating – at least, over the telephone – her concluding it had been his fault: if he’d had an answering machine, like everyone else, he wouldn’t have felt obliged to scamper inside, leaving the front door open. Of course, he could have been killed. What was he doing here, sitting amongst her flowers, the evidence, as was the cat, of her overwhelming, more meaningful occupation?

  Perhaps she merely wanted a man, there when required, dismissed whenever not, he, for his part, bent on a mission – here on a mission – to accomplish something, to achieve something (if he hadn’t, as yet, discovered what), drawing pictures one day a week in one location, something little different in another, the purpose of both, one ‘release’, the other ‘expression’, still obscure.

  Caught, he reflected, in art’s mesmeric embrace, he was struggling to release himself from something else entirely: a vengeful, insatiable appetite which not only had he energised but evidently created, the expression, the formulation of a witless, unperceiving, negating nature. Heaven, which had seemed so accessible, if not present, a few hours before, was no longer to be found in this place at all.

  Having sat absently at the garden table, he began to wonder where else he might look, the cat, attracted by his immobility, leaping into his lap, he stroking it – unusually, for him – for reassurance, as if the animal might say what its mistress was up to – what his mistress was up to – what he himself might be destined for: another night-time visitant who might complete what the previous one had only tentatively started.

  Simone was good (positive, outward-going), he self-enclosed, abandoned to vagaries he no longer knew how to analyse or control. No wonder he had gravitated (instinctively) to women – curiously, of a particular kind, not a premeditated choice at all yet circumstantially defined: elderly, artistically inclined if not appropriately gifted, they as precariously placed on the periphery of their lives, he suspected, as he, for different reasons entirely, was placed peripherally on his (and, he reflected, on the edge of theirs). No wonder they had little if any time for him, only listening to his appreciation of their drawings, their paintings with a smile: despite his lack of graphic skill, he would, he reflected, have made a good teacher, the suffering mad ox, a bovine resuscitant, remnant of a herd otherwise extinct (transported, slaughtered, fed to the dogs), he alone surviving, he of the bleeding anxious heart, his aspiration for a better understanding, for self-control, his yearning to transpose fear, terror, premonitions of something even worse, into something acceptable – even revelatory.

  What an arsehole, his flaky, black intruder might (must) have thought, the person he had been closest to, other than Simone, for as long as he cared to remember: his killer, his assassin: the details of his eyes, his nose, his strangely – as Isaacson’s – divergent teeth: someone – evidently – in poorer shape than he was, the particularities of his odour (the smell of fear – he recognised it – evident, too), the colour of his skin, the aura – the ‘essence’ (back to that again) of someone else with, demonstrably, nothing left to lose: civility, candour. Condescension – life lived at the apex of what was gradually, as far as he could tell, coming to resemble the outline of a cross: the via dolorosa along which presently he was heading. Was this what he had been planning – what, unknowingly, had been planned for him – all along: self-sacrifice on a previously unmeditated scale: another God-invested recipient of the Order of the Lost?

  Returning downstairs, looking for distraction, he was suddenly aware he’d forgotten to turn the oven off, the smell of burning rising up the stairs, he descending briskly to the kitchen, opening the oven door: a rectangular metal container smouldering on the upper shelf: picking it up in a cloth, taking it to the sink, running cold water around it, spooning off the surface of the contents to the level of something other than blackness underneath: placing the scraped-off debris in a newspaper – pastry, of some sort, recognisably a fish and vegetable mixture, spooning it into a separate dish, replacing it in the turned-off oven to keep warm.

  Opening the window to let out the smoke, he descended to the backyard – the sound of another male voice interspersed with Simone’s, passing her room – placing the newspaper in a black bin-liner, taken from a roll, characteristically, thoughtfully, placed by her behind the back door, securing the bag and placing it in the dustbin (to be taken up twice a week to the street entrance to be emptied, a task frequently performed by himself), looking up at the parapet, reflecting that, up there, he had contemplated leaping down, registering, suddenly, the significance of the fall, the imperative which had taken possession of his life, insistent (not to be ignored). He would, he reflected, look back no more.

  When she finally appeared it was with an anguished expression, standing in the living-room door, he absorbed in the television: floods, starvation – preceded by a fanfare announcing the news: showbiz! – unnumbered, if not innumerable dead, dysentery, cholera, skeletal figures, skulls misplaced as heads, unvaryingly black, passing, re-passing, condemningly, reductively, senselessly, ceaselessly, to and fro. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Floods.’ (Civil war: tribalities: ‘So what’s the diff?’ he wanted to ask.)

  ‘What’s happened?’ evidently aghast.

  ‘Madagascar.’

  ‘In the kitchen.’

  ‘I forgot the oven.’

  ‘Is it burnt?’

  ‘Some I saved. Decide if you want to throw it out,’ still on the screen.

  ‘All you had to do was switch it off.’

  Not connected to her mood, not connected to his own reflection, he got up and turned the television off.

  ‘I was feeding the cat. I assumed it was still cooking. I went on the roof.’ He paused, aware, for the first time, of how vexed she was. ‘I must have been distracted.’

  Already, however, she had disappeared to the kitchen.

  ‘It’s uneatable,’ she said, when he followed her in.

  ‘Let’s find something else.’ Already he was opening the refrigerator door.

  ‘I made it specially. I went,’ she said, peculiarly distressed, ‘to all this trouble.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She was staring at his neck.

  ‘What’s happened to your collar?’

  He felt beneath his chin: his fingers, when he withdrew them, were smeared with blood. With stooping, bagging the burnt food, he had, he assumed, reopened the cut.

  ‘A guy came into the house last night.’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘Trying to get in Berenice’s next door.’

  He’d gone to the sink, turned on the cold water and, running his hand beneath it, dabbed at his neck.

  ‘Have you got some lint?’

  She’d gone to a cupboard in the corner: reaching up, she lifted down a biscuit tin. From inside she methodically took out scissors, antiseptic cream, plasters, a roll of lint: cutting off a piece, she handed it to him and watched him dab at his neck.

  ‘That’s no good,’ she said, insisting, then, on looking.

  ‘A scratch,’ he told her.

  ‘A cut.’

  ‘A scratch. The cat would have dug deeper.’

  ‘Did he do it with a knife?’

  ‘By accident. I shouldn’t have turned my back. I gave him ten pounds and he left. We made a deal. My mind keeps reverting to contracts. These deals,’ he went on, ‘we’re making all the time without our always being aware. Contracts!’ he concluded, definitively, even now not knowing why.

  ‘You paid him to go?’

  ‘It seemed the best thing. He requested more. We compromised. The relevance of that,’ he went on, increasingly confused, ‘appeared to dominate everything. On the other hand.’ He paused. ‘He wasn’t quite with it.’

  ‘Was he drugged?’

  ‘That’s what I assumed.’

  ‘From next door?’

  ‘He was trying to get in next door. He said they owed him money. He was hoping to get in either through an upstairs window, which appeared unreal – Berenice has grilles and shutters on her downstairs windows – or across the roof. There’s a trap-door in mine which would have given him access, he thought, to the one in hers. Though, unlike mine, I’m sure Berenice’s is bolted. Her house is a fortress.’

  She was watching him with a shadowed expression: impossible to decide what she was thinking.

  ‘Did you call the police?’

  ‘It was part of the deal,’ he said, ‘that I didn’t.’

  They were facing one another across the kitchen: the bleeding, as far as he could tell, had stopped: white blotches on her cheeks, a darkening of her eyes. In a curious way, she reminded him of his intruder: perplexity, rage. Incomprehension.

  ‘Let’s get something to eat,’ he said.

  ‘You ought to report it.’

  ‘He won’t come back.’

  ‘Of that you can’t be sure.’

  She was already looking round, going, finally, into the next room, returning with several sheets of newspaper: her back to him, her elbows flung out demonstratively on either side, she scraped the remnants of the food into the paper and screwed it up.

  ‘I’ll take it down. The rest’s gone down already,’ he said.

  When he returned she was heating a pan of soup, the extractor fan whirring above the oven (why hadn’t he thought of that?), the window, which he’d opened, closed. There was no end, her gestures inferred, to what he didn’t understand, something atrophied in her nature countering something equally magnanimous, she wrenched, seemingly, between the two, continually presenting herself in a confusing, varying light.

  ‘It was done by a knife?’ her back still to him.

  ‘He had it at the back of my neck. When I turned, he mustn’t have pulled it away. He didn’t intend to do it, I’m convinced.’

  ‘So what was it doing at the back of your neck?’

  ‘A precaution.’ He paused. ‘On his side,’ he added.

  He had, after all, invited the man to kill him: a gesture which, morally, would have let him, Maddox, off the hook.

  ‘Shouldn’t you go to the hospital?’ More statement than enquiry.

  ‘A scratch.’

  ‘A cut.’ She paused. ‘Have you any idea where the knife has been?’ Again, he reflected, less enquiry than statement.

  Turning to him, she held a spoon with which she’d been stirring the soup. Her eyes, he was surprised to see, were full of tears: not sorrow, however – rage.

  He spread out his hands. ‘How do I know?’

  ‘Did you put anything on it?’

  ‘Antiseptic.’ He added, ‘Like yours.’

  She turned back to the soup.

  A moment later she turned it off: the contents of the pan poured into two bowls.

  She took them through to the other room, the table already prepared (earlier in the day, by her).

  Neither, as they ate, was inclined to talk: when they had finished, the silence lengthened.

  ‘You realise,’ she said, finally, ‘you might have been infected.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Think.’

  A demonstrative gesture with her spoon. Her eyes, once more, were full of tears: powerlessness, in any situation, roused her fury.