‘It’s normally upstairs,’ she’d said, ‘or out in the street. Mrs Beaumont,’ she’d added, naming the receptionist who had shown him in, ‘should keep an eye on it.’

  ‘It’s really all right,’ he’d insisted.

  ‘It comes in when I’m not looking.’ The sudden informality had lightened her mood.

  Perhaps the high collar of the blouse, with its chorister’s lace frill, hid the evidence of ageing, the sharply cut jacket, similarly, with its unwinged collar, curtailing speculation. The crossing of her legs, beneath the skirt, both attracted and bemused him, a form of defiance, he’d reflected, but in the face of what?

  ‘Is she a tease?’ he had asked Charley on the phone, having first had to give a résumé of his encounter to Gerry, the overseer of the event, whose seemingly guileless nature had so much attracted his wife to him in the first place. ‘Sounds a good lay. How about it, Matt?’ he’d concluded, to be reproached by Charlotte when she immediately took over: ‘The instincts and intellect and morality of a mouse,’ she’d affectionately complained. ‘Like all women in these situations, she has to draw a line between selflessness and presence.’

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Gerry enquired in the background.

  ‘Matthew,’ Charley said, ‘will know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do,’ he said, anxious, as he had always been since the break-up of their marriage, to discover what, in his wife’s reasoning, might have led to their divorce: why so free with Gerry and never similarly with him? Children, he’d concluded, the inhibiting factor. ‘Find, I suppose,’ he said, ‘a middle line.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  An exhalation (self-justification) came familiarly from the other end.

  ‘Identity,’ she’d added.

  ‘Oh, identity!’ he heard Gerry calling. ‘Obtained at any broker. Cheap at any price.’

  ‘Simone’s no magician,’ Charley had gone on, a door closing, the sound of Gerry’s commentary suddenly cut off. ‘The change, if it is to come, has to come from you,’ she’d concluded.

  ‘I’m not expecting magic,’ Maddox said. ‘Though there was a cat in the room.’

  ‘Are you suggesting she’s a witch?’

  His wife’s – his former wife’s beleaguered cry rang out in a familiar warning.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ he said. ‘It’s purely,’ how should he describe it? ‘empirical at present.’

  The odd thing was, though married for over thirty years, whenever he spoke to, or even thought of Charlotte, no image of her, familiar or otherwise, came to him: the vivacious, blooming, expansive – and, let’s face it, extravagant creature he had first picked up at the Courtauld and subsequently seen maturing, step by visible step, over the following decades, had disappeared from his memory as well as his imagination, replaced by a cipher, a voice familiar only at the end of a telephone. They rarely met (the last occasion she had come was to confirm his referral to the psychiatric department of the North London Royal, his sectioning, at that time, at an end: ‘we can’t have you living on your own without knowing how you are,’ a mixture of guilt and attachment with which he had become increasingly familiar). Should he encounter her in the street he was convinced he would pass her by without any sign of recognition, she increasing in size in her post-menopausal years, her innate good humour subdued, he had assumed, by her stewardship over their sons – to be subsequently re-ignited by Gerry’s tasteless, animalistic presence. After all, it was in her interests – and Gerry’s – he should come to no harm as a result of her defection (‘we don’t want that,’ she’d told him, ‘hanging over our heads’).

  ‘Simone knows what she’s doing,’ she’d finally told him. ‘The woman is no fool.’

  Foolishness, however, was what he was presently absorbed by. To support, in the past, a wife and three children on what, at the best, might have been described as a vocational disposition, was foolishness enough (how many times had he thought of giving it up?). Greater foolishness was to see his wife depart for what, at the time, she had described as ‘a livelier camp’: the jolly, peripatetic (vocational in his way, too) MD, in Maddox’s view, epitomised juvenility itself.

  In their last meeting in her consulting-room, Simone had merely said, as if to confirm the room’s domestic atmosphere, ‘I shall have to bring these appointments to an end,’ he unsure, for a moment, what she meant. Had he said something to offend her? Was he too recalcitrant a client (patient, analysand)? Was what he had revealed too boring? Was he ‘cured’?

  Most of the time, despite her prompting, he had talked little about his past, convinced he had little, if anything, to complain about: his younger brother, his older sister, his automobile-focused father, his mother – a secretary when her three children had left home, not in his father’s showrooms – too familiar and domestic – but in a local school. He had, on the other hand, felt obliged to talk about cars, the Wolseley in particular: its name had, like the thought of his younger brother’s potential sainthood, a canonical ring.

  Its odour, too, he had been significantly attracted to, an intoxicating smell, the appeal of which had only increased with time – as had the potency of his recollection of watching the movement of its bonnet, and specifically its radiator cap, against the contour of the road ahead: an aesthetic sensation, visceral and overwhelming, which had scarcely lost its power. What else? Away to school in the north because of the bombing, with his younger brother Paul: an unnecessary precaution he’d thought at the time (not many bombs on St Albans) but, since everyone with ‘sense’ had done it, he’d felt obliged to go along with it. It hadn’t ‘transformed’ him in any way; he had even felt an odd reluctance, at the end of each term, to remove himself from what, later, he had been inclined, portentously, to describe as the ‘provenance’ of the place – its unique situation at the brow of a hill overlooking the enigmatic municipal buildings of the nearby town, identifying himself unobtrusively and, for the most part, undemonstratively with what, in his maturer letters home, he had referred to as the ‘industrial conflagration’ in the valley below: the mill and factory chimneys, the triangulated slag heaps and the headgears of the collieries, several of which were visible on or around the surrounding hills, the polluted streams, the dams serving the mills, the even more polluted river: a dour and unavoidable presence which, in an indiscernible way, had thrilled him, the evidence of a dynamism which he rarely, if ever, associated with the south, least of all with St Albans.

  Yet, when she had said, ‘I shall have to bring these appointments to an end’ (not ‘terminate’ them, he had noticed), the formality of the declaration had been sufficient, first, to alarm him and then, triggered by his alarm, to lead him to suspect a challenge, he blurting out, ‘You mean we’re getting nowhere?’ about to add, ‘I’m too defensive?’ as startled by this enquiry as he had been by the attempt of ‘another’ presence to hurl him in front of a train, continuing, however, ‘I know what you mean,’ she waiting in a by now familiar manner for anything further he might add, he finally announcing, ‘I see you less as a therapist than as a woman. It’s been the problem all along, as if I’m here to entertain, distract, rather than examine or explain,’ waiting as if – a curious sensation – he’d been suspended from the ceiling, or thrust up from the floor, his gaze fixed not on her face but on her hands – hands which, he realised, he’d long felt a desire to hold.

  ‘It happens occasionally,’ she’d said, adding, ‘but not previously with me,’ her hand, her left hand, the one with the ring and the bracelet, waved helplessly in the air.

  ‘I shouldn’t see you again?’ he’d suggested.

  ‘Under different conditions,’ she said, ‘I suppose you could.’

  ‘What conditions?’

  It was as if these conditions, these precise conditions, had been anticipated, rehearsed.

  ‘Not today. Another day.’ Again, the wave of the hand. ‘At a café, perhaps. Away from here.’

  ‘Somewhere neutral.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A decision already taken: no longer suggestion, fact.

  ‘Okay.’ Equally crude and direct.

  She’d moved in her chair: the same long skirt, the same jacket, a similar high-necked blouse: formal, anonymous, contained.

  ‘You think I ought to continue.’ He gestured round as if to suggest a venue different to this. ‘With someone else.’

  ‘That’s up to you. There are people I could suggest. I wouldn’t wish to dissuade you. There are clearly things waiting to be discovered.’

  ‘But not with you.’

  ‘Not in this context.’ She waved her hand again. A moment later, she added, ‘It’s a significant event to feel an urge to kill yourself, particularly,’ she went on, ‘if you identify it with a force coming from somewhere else.’

  His gaze, as it frequently did, returned to the window, specifically – he hadn’t realised it until now – to the view of the artist’s studio, with its vast through-floor window – unused, he’d assumed, because of the density of plants strewn on the inside of the pane: that was its significance, he reflected: it had reminded him of something.

  ‘I don’t feel it’s likely to happen again,’ he said.

  ‘That you may have felt before the first occasion.’ She was looking at him directly, as if, having got so far, predictably, she no longer knew which way to go.

  Already he was standing. ‘Maybe we should just shake hands,’ he said. ‘See how we feel after we’ve had time to think.’

  ‘Fine.’ Expectation and disappointment encapsulated in a single sound.

  Having risen herself, she extended her hand.

  For the first time he took it in something other than a formal manner, delaying releasing it until he felt hers withdraw.

  They were stepping back, she into the room, he into the hall.

  ‘Shall I call you?’ he said. ‘Or you call me?’

  ‘Either,’ she said.

  ‘Fine.’

  No Mrs Beaumont: she only came in two days a week, Simone herself opening the door on other occasions. Conceivably, she’d chosen a day when her receptionist wouldn’t be there: nor the cat, fastened in, presumably, upstairs.

  ‘Until we hear from one another.’ He smiled, suddenly alert: it was like the conclusion to a quarrel. Having opened the front door himself, he paused on the steps outside. ‘It’s been coming for some time,’ he added, continuing with a smile, ‘It won’t mean you’re unfrocked, or whatever they do on these occasions?’

  ‘I doubt it. Unless,’ she paused, ‘you’ve a cause for complaint.’

  ‘None at all,’ he said. Having followed him to the door she’d stepped back inside, he turning, descending the steps, glancing back moments later, not having heard the door close, to see her emerge, he waving, she waving too before, stepping back once more, closing the door behind her.

  Walking to the tube that morning: the bizarre fibreglass shop fronts: an aeroplane – a Dakota – in vertical descent, a gigantic pair of ill-shaped boots, a simulated pine-wood rocking-chair sufficient to accommodate a giant, gargantuan android human figures, dissimilitude, seemingly, the theme – changing his mind, turning back on his tracks and setting off, past Chalk Farm, up Haverstock Hill, the dome of St Paul’s, at one point, visible behind, emerging, from the steepest ascent, into cleaner air, as if from a lake of pollution: the demarcation line, he always felt, between his place and hers. Up Rosslyn Hill into Hampstead High Street: boutiques, cafeterias. Up the final steps to the summit of Holly Bush Hill, the prospect below, briefly visible, extending to the Thames and the familiar smear of hill-land at Crystal Palace, the view still fresh, brilliant, sparkling (his state of mind), Mrs Beaumont just arrived, in the hall, as he let himself in (a key of his own): ‘How are you, Matt?’ a conspiratorial smile (a medical as well as social enquiry), the door to her room already open, the phone ringing, the constrained voice of a caller, male, on the answering machine, the message, continuing, indecipherable, following him up the stairs – Simone already up (the cat he’d seen in the street, sitting on an adjacent window-ledge, stretching itself, as it recognised him, yawning, turning away), she dressed, coming through from the sitting-room to the kitchen, post in her hand, the interior’s narrow window looking out to the backs of the encroaching houses: the formalised embrace as she prepared herself for the day: some clients, he knew, she had seen already, her earliest, one day a week, scheduled at five-thirty: dark-suited, long-skirted, he an envious glance – her activity, her absorption – turning on the kettle, putting a tea-bag in a mug (already prepared: showing she had thought of him), she sitting companionably at the kitchen table, examining her correspondence (voluminous), laying it aside, aware of his gaze, if not his inspection, she somewhere to go, something to do, he, he reflected, nothing

  ex nihilo nihil fit

  little (he) to communicate this time of day, nevertheless, she sitting there, braced, he, sitting, too, the tea once made, full of admiration.

  Amare!

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ she said. ‘I’ve delayed my next appointment,’ adding (when he protested – ‘I’ll be all right’) – ‘I need to get out before I start again. I ought to do it every morning,’ so that, not much later, his tea drunk, she fetching a coffee through from the sitting-room, they were descending the south-westerly slope of the hill to the clinic off Fitzjohn’s Avenue, above the Finchley Road, a recently constructed building of red brick and matching tile, domestic in its proportions of walls to windows to roof to door, pausing on the brick wall fronting the forecourt, where they sat, knee to knee, he holding her hand, at her prompting, before, seeing others entering – signalling or averted looks – he decided it was time to go in; on this occasion, unlike previous ones, they having scarcely spoken: observations on the weather (mild), and the buildings, domestic, they had passed – Edwardian, villa-like constructions – something, he conjectured, on her mind, the conference in Vienna – Vienna itself – her lecture scarcely mentioned: the journey back, a colleague sick in the aircraft: ‘Some of us are getting too old for these outings.’ ‘Not so,’ he told her, alarmed: should she go again? an imponderable presented as if to conceal another.

  ‘I’m glad you’re back,’ he finally declared. Perhaps, he reflected, she’d been waiting for this, he waiting for – and receiving – something in return: her offer to accompany him to the clinic – imagining, then, her walking back up the hill (halfway down the slope to the Tavistock Clinic, her one-time home), wondering why their conversation had lagged, both the previous night and this morning, as if, solemn, silent, each had identified an interlocutor in the other that neither of them could recognise.

  ‘We seem two different people since you went away,’ he suggested, the brightness of her face of earlier that morning fading (she had spent much time on her make-up); even her coat, a casual affair, she’d slipped on without her usual enquiry as to her appearance.

  ‘I’m not much company today. I rarely sleep well after a trip,’ she said, adding, ‘which is why I didn’t ask you to stay last night.’

  Such freedom, he reflected, yet it was as if a principle, undefined, unmentioned, had suddenly divided them, she waiting for him to go before she turned away, calling, ‘You’ll come up afterwards?’ waving.

  He waved too, nodding, the sliding doors opening before he reached them, focusing, as best he could, on the ordeal before him, his one-day-a-week submission, as he saw it, to the self-defined day clinic ‘for the older person’, a self-inflicted form of retribution which, at present, he saw no way of bringing to an end.

  Such tact! Beth already there, and Alex, his thoughts, at that instant, turned, curiously, to Rachel, the benevolently featured life-drawing widow, her sensibility, her sensitivity, her perplexity – her suffering: what else? – evident in her harried features as well as her drawing, qualities which he identified, prospectively, as his own: a vitality, too, he identified exclusively with women, the pain of separation on him now, as if, at any moment, he might rush back up the hill, overtake her, move ahead of her, be at the house when she returned: that tentative first meeting in a High Street café, sitting in ‘civvies’, as she’d described it, though not much different, in appearance, from before, their previous clinical encounters disassembled, two respondents to a formal invitation: stillness as opposed to agitation: a post-engagé misalliance

  noli me tangere

  yet he had, taking her hand between his own, talking of the past, she knowing much more of his: three marriages, in her case, each, in her view, less a failure than a ‘moving-on’, ‘stages’ to where she was at present, brought out, her husbands, as credentials: a catalogue of virtues, a modicum of vices, this woman Charley (and Gerry) had landed him with, more than he could handle, an unnatural division, he suspected, between thought and feeling – and action – between the formality of their previous encounters and the formalised informality of this.

  Beth the first person he saw as he entered the reception room: the wary ‘good-morning’ as they milled around the table by the window – looking out to a garden at the back – its surface set out with cups and saucers, a tin of biscuits, the apparatus for making tea and coffee. In the centre of the room a circle of half-upholstered chairs with wooden arms, his thoughts engaged still with Simone: the glimpse of her departing figure, wrapped in thought (her inelegant coat), head bowed, shoulders stooped, age – their relationship, too – maturing into reflectiveness: his impression as she walked away from him.

  Beth had taken her seat across the room: the one she sat in every week: tall, thin, dark, bowed by an unspoken physical affliction, legs sheathed in a track-suit bottom, a cardigan, her arms not in the sleeves, around her shoulders, beneath, a jersey the same dark colour as the trousers, inclined to move with difficulty whether standing or sitting, the Guardian one of two newspapers available on the coffee table before her, opened on her lap, a cup of tea in one hand, its saucer on the arm of her chair, Maddox noticing the way the daylight came into the room, lighting up the circle of chairs, not unlike the life-class without the model, a totemic, druidic, congregatory event, five women, he and Alex – a sixth woman entering the room, poling herself along with a stick, easing with a sigh, a stiff articulation, into a chair, accepting an offer of tea from across the room, Richard, the charge nurse, a tall, cadaverous figure, holding up a cup in greeting, celebrants, each, of a new, unspoken, unclaimable religion – a new, unspoken, unclaimable routine, sobriety, excision; its characteristics, death – its environs – its provenance