Something, in his case undemonstrative, was gripping him inside: a reciprocal anger which brought to mind, absurdly, the image of Taylor, of a particular form of destitution: without her, without this place, without this part of her life, he was – unlike her – finished.

  ‘Anything is possible with those people you have next door. There’s no knowing what blood the knife might have been in contact with.’

  She was picking up her bowl, having left much of her soup, and was going through to the kitchen: he could hear a cupboard door being slammed: something childlike, he reflected, in her reaction, the finality of which he couldn’t bear to think about. Despite the brevity of her absence, the sight of her, he knew, would ease him. Yet he continued sitting there undecided, persuaded – terrified – he might lose her: that she didn’t love and, as a moment like this showed, never had.

  ‘The blade might easily have been infected,’ she said, behind his back, having, evidently, returned. ‘I’m basing that on the kind of people who live next door. The ones I’ve asked you to move away from, time and time again.’

  He waited, no longer sure of his response.

  ‘Don’t they take as well as deal in drugs?’

  ‘I hardly know anyone,’ he said, ‘who doesn’t,’ adding, ‘in that part of town. I’m no authority, and I might be wrong. Even Viklund, when it comes down to it, has a drug he believes – he hopes – can kill him.’

  He had turned in his chair to confront her: now he picked up his bowl and took it past her into the kitchen. He placed it, and hers, in the washing-up machine by the sink.

  The kettle, which she’d evidently switched on, came to the boil, the extractor fan still whirring above the oven.

  ‘Shall we call it a day?’

  His enquiry came with scarcely any preparation: if the relationship were to be terminated, if he were to be executed, let her get it over.

  ‘Call what a day?’

  He gestured round: something magnetic in her nature: he felt the force of it drawing him in: first the burnt food, then the scratch (little enquiry about the nature of the assault): when disassembly of anything took place how swiftly it happened.

  ‘All this.’ He swung out his arm again. ‘Common sense, if it is common sense, appears scarcely to have been involved from the start.’

  She was considering carefully – too carefully – what he was saying, an expression on her face he’d only previously seen on the first day of their encounter; engaged, yet distant: objectivity was being measured, recorded, assessed: he wouldn’t have been surprised if, at any moment, she had taken out a file – his file – and started making notes: the way she could write while not looking at the page but at her subject (the way, absorbed, some of the women drew at the life-class), an automatic, almost somnolent reaction.

  He added, ‘I don’t know where I am with you. Whereas I feel you know precisely where you are with me. What it is you want. What it is you don’t. Everything’s so partial. Living,’ he went on, ‘contrary lives. I reducing mine, you expanding yours. All this,’ he gestured round once more, ‘proposed by my former wife on the recommendation of her current husband. A man I scarcely know, and what I do know, I invariably object to or dislike. The bullshitting Gerry with his buccaneering.’

  He was sweating: much of what he was saying came out of a part of him to which he rarely gave expression: a part which, for much of his life, without his being aware of it, he had elected to keep hidden: unforbearing, confused, obscure – a vacuum: that area which once might have been occupied by what his brother Paul would refer to, contemptuously, as ‘religion’: spirituality of some sort, if not quite the same thing – something to which, at the best of times, he had felt himself only tenuously attached: the Quinians injunction, facile, well intentioned: blank.

  Her own reaction, seeing him pinioned there, or so it must have seemed, had been to come forward, smiling, taking his shoulders, drawing him against her: he could feel her heart – he assumed it was her heart – beating against his chest, matching, seemingly, his agitation.

  ‘All I’m suggesting is what anyone would. It’s like scratching you, for instance, with a used needle. The previous user might have been okay. With your neighbours there’s a possibility not. Don’t we need, after all, to look out for one another? Don’t we do that – haven’t we done that all along? Isn’t this a difficult passage we have to get through?’ She was speaking by his ear, her breath warm against his neck. ‘Don’t you see what a shock it is? You might have been killed. I’ve asked you to leave that place before. If he’s come in once he could come in again. Why don’t you sell the place and come and live up here?’

  ‘With you?’ He was holding her at a distance, pulling back.

  ‘Separately. At least I’d know where you were. There’s not much time left for either of us. Give us, at the most, twenty years. After that, if we’re still here, deterioration will inhibit almost everything.’

  ‘You’d like us to keep going?’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘I realise,’ he said, ‘we’ve only just started. That there’s a great deal about one another we scarcely know.’ He was pausing again, their relationship full of reservations: a list of extenuating circumstances, of carefully, or even carelessly crafted exemptions, underlying everything.

  ‘Why don’t we go upstairs?’ she said, he aware, suddenly, of a reciprocal desperation: if he was prepared to go to the edge, she, she was suggesting, was prepared to go with him: commitment had gone past the point of no return, he lying back, some time later, in her bed, gazing out at the nearby house with its ivy-covered walls, its curiously leaning chimneys, the image of Isaacson coming to mind, and his intruder, Simone having gone through to the bathroom, the water splashing in the bath and – a unique occurrence – the sound of her singing, a light, almost frivolous, uncharacteristically childish voice, celebratory, he thought, if not triumphant.

  He was drawing, as instructed, an animal that he liked and one that he didn’t, Beth’s figure, a cardigan over her track suit, bowed to her drawing, blocking the light from the window. Her hair was conspicuously thicker, and greyer, at the back (receding over her forehead), a distorted, arthritic silhouette, her groans accompanying her laboured movements – not least her inclination to hide the paper before its necessary pinning-up on the wall or the back of the door.

  Alex, as usual, had gone into a corner, his thin, ochre-coloured hair brushed smoothly to the rear of his head, a spectral mask suspended over his sheet of paper, his right arm vigorously employed, forwards and backwards, as he scored in his message for the week, his drawing-board tilted conspiratorially towards him: tight-lipped, an intense, preoccupied if not tormented figure, each violent lateral then vertical stroke of his crayon accompanied by a brief, indecipherable exclamation: evacuee from Dunkirk, dispossessed, inadvertent (unprepared) liberator of Belsen: furious, violent, self-lacerating gestures as if he were responsible for both (contracts abandoned, disengagement impossible), the table creaking to maximise his complaint.

  Anna, the crepuscular creature with her winsome, forgiving, forbearing smile, was, Melissa had announced, back in the geriatric ward at the North London Royal (the base from which most of them had originally emerged), her drawing from the previous week still pinned to the door, a statement of some sort – three carefully tinted flower-beds – of which, because of her absence, Melissa had forbidden discussion, she sitting immediately behind Maddox, writing a letter (perhaps to her: he suspected not) as they painted and drew, Judith, the Jerusalemite (‘why not make it the world’s first universal city and stop all this killing?’ her earlier morning’s suggestion), stabbing at her drawing, to one side of Maddox (sharing the same rocking table) – as if ridding it of an infestation, an assortment of pencils, crayons and chalks, cornered as she entered the room, laid before her, not looking up as she substituted one for another. Fragments of chalk had attached themselves to the sleeves of her dress, a voluminous, cape-like creation which enveloped both her and the chair – and from the hem of which her tiny, slippered feet protruded, tapping silently, alternately, on the wood-block floor.

  Ida, the cockney housewife, was singing as she drew, a robust, if misleading demonstration of her lightness of spirit, flicking paint at her picture, leaning back, her neatly jumpered and trousered figure, her head, a powerfully configurated feature with large, dark, almost luminous eyes and a prominent, arc-like nose, the mouth generously extended with lipstick (a painstaking grimace, even in repose), held with incongruous delicacy to one side, she screwing the paper up and, raising it above her, holding it there, illustrationally, drawing attention to the gesture, before dropping it on the floor.

  ‘Don’t make the room untidy, Ida,’ Melissa said, scarcely taking her eyes off the letter. ‘Others have to use it,’ adding, ‘Five more minutes. I’ll want to see the screwed-up one, of course, as well as any previous or subsequent effort,’ re-reading her correspondence with silently moving lips before signing it with a flourish, pausing, and adding an exclamation mark to the final sentence.

  The women formalised the room: gave it strength – he and Alex, he reflected, singularly apart, a masculine intrusiveness, synonymous, in Alex’s case, with violence, a suicidal imperative scarcely constrained – not least, he further reflected, against the background of the work of other day-patients also pinned to the walls: inchoate colours, invariably abstracted: confusion, doubt, remonstration, something struggled-for, if notably not achieved.

  A dog, he’d drawn, a blackened hulk against a diagonally rising skyline, and a snake, a coloured spiral, a series, in effect, of interlocking spirals, he, too, inclined, surprisingly, to hum as he drew, crayoned, charcoaled or painted, singing sub voce – the words mentally recalled – texts learnt in the Cathedral at St Albans – Sunday School, Morning Service, Evensong, later, Crusaders – and in the chapel at Quinians – inclined to do the same in the life-class, the movement of his hand and eye prompting a reciprocal activity associated with sound – of a singularly devotional nature. Abstruse, otherwise, the act of drawing or painting; instinctual, unthinking – prompt, precise: the vaguest sensation of distraction, of his mind felicitously engaged.

  He was coming to identify his mind with what he would have been inclined to call a mechanical process: a machine serviced by a variety of lubricants and fuels, overlooked by technicians who came on the scene when the mechanism refused to function in an agreeable way: hormones, neurones, synapses: his vocabulary was increasing, the dozen or so transmitters which flashed between neurological extremes, more dextrous, more complex – more unfathomable – than the mechanisms which determined the motion of a car, but an enterprise, nevertheless, which could be identified exclusively in terms of function, perpetuation (self-perpetuation) its principal concern.

  Fortuity (again: Lucretius) governing his existence, taking him from one person to another, one circumstance to another, while tenuously – obsessively – finally, good-naturedly, he endeavoured to identify a pattern (a synchronicity) which, as much was now reminding him, had not been there in the first place. Extraordinary claims made on behalf of extraordinary events would not, in the end, evoke anything other than the nature, not the purpose, of the process he’d recognised – and at the very least acknowledged – he listening, some time later, this in mind, to Melissa encouraging her recalcitrant charges, mortified in more ways than one, to extemporise on their drawings or paintings, Alex’s boss-eyed face demonstrating once again the indefatigable fury which drove him, mentally, to the edge of chasms and gorges, a dynamo of distress, the graphic delineation of which appeared more to exacerbate than diminish or assuage.

  ‘Why does he do it?’ Maddox enquired of Melissa. ‘Alex comes up each week with these wild-eyed charges, men attached to bombs, descending rockets, or being torn apart by uniformed figures, the iconography almost too conformist, and – good old Alex, mild-mannered like the rest of us – after presenting us with his suicide note, turns up the following week to deliver yet another. As it is,’ he gestured to the relevant drawing on the wall, ‘we were asked – he was asked – to draw an animal he liked and one he disliked, and he comes up, yet again, with a figure in a cage. The analogy’s obvious, repetitive, malignant. Life is unliveable. Too much to bear. Yet here we are, apart from Anna, who’s back in the nut-house, still living it. What we want to know from him is where do we go after the bomb has dropped, the rocket has landed, the victim been abused by the uniformed figures? What the fuck do we do when we’ve come to the edge, gone over, and dropped? If life is how he describes it, what are all of us doing here?’

  The ‘fuck’, in this context – women, lunatic or otherwise, present – was, he realised, a mistake: silence registered the rebuke before Melissa, measuring it precisely, responded, ‘Do you think it is unbearable?’ adding, ‘Life,’ turning the question to the rest of the room, like she might, conversationally, have enquired about the weather, Alex’s pinched, drained, post-Dunkirk-Belsenic face, the eyes leeched, or so it seemed, of colour, gazing across at Maddox with a singularly appealing and appreciative expression, a grateful, retributory fervour …

  ‘Mine isn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be here,’ Maddox said. ‘But isn’t Beth’s, or Judith’s, or Ida’s focused around the unbearable? After all,’ he went on, glancing at the women he’d named, each bemused at being included, ‘we hear, when it comes down to it, very little different, week after week.’

  ‘What does Alex think?’ Melissa persisted, crossing her legs beneath her patchwork skirt, her arms folding across her bloused front, Alex taking time to respond, the familiar fissures in his face invigorated by his effort to focus on what, on other occasions – reluctant to talk about them – he would refer to as his ‘feelings’ – intangible ‘events’ which went on remotely and yet vividly, annihilatingly, somewhere ‘inside’. Taking his cue from Melissa, he crossed his legs too, displaying, as he did so, sockless feet, his pullover, home-knitted and too large, hanging around his withered chest in folds.

  ‘I don’t know what I think,’ he said. ‘I only know what I feel. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?’

  ‘Whether it’s thought or feeling is irrelevant,’ Maddox said. ‘It’s always the same. Week after week. Monotony, I’d say, was our greatest problem. We appear to be sustaining our symptoms, not eradicating them. Suffering, you could say, to the point of self-indulgence. It sits on us like a rock, inhibiting thought and feeling. Life, despite all our advantages, not least the facilities here, lived beyond recognisable limits.’ He indicated Beth’s drawing of a dog in flames, curling red and yellow patches flickering from its head, its shoulders, along its haunches, down its tail, out of its eyes, its ears, its mouth, its nose, adding, ‘I suppose that, too, is a metaphor,’ recognising too late the swastika on its flank. ‘Here we are telling each other we’re nuts and nobody appears to listen.’

  ‘At least we’re talking about it,’ Melissa said, her cheeks flushed, her eyes alight, her hands tucked tightly beneath her arms.

  ‘In circles,’ Maddox said.

  ‘So what are your priorities?’ Melissa gestured at his drawings.

  ‘One’s a dog, the other’s a snake.’

  ‘Which one do you like?’

  ‘The dog.’

  ‘A symbol of death.’

  ‘Of devotion, companionship, acceptance, loyalty, service.’ He might have gone on, but couldn’t think of anything else.

  ‘And the snake?’

  ‘Sinister. Subversive. Scheming.’ These epithets, too, ran out.

  ‘Phallic,’ Melissa suggested.

  ‘Like Alex, but without being repetitive. I merely drew what came into my head.’

  Melissa re-crossed her legs. ‘You brightly colour the snake and do the dog in monochrome. Black,’ she concluded.

  Her arms tightened across her blouse.

  ‘What’s phallic?’ Ida enquired, her face, constructed from a variety of tints and colours, bright, inquisitive, engaging.

  ‘It relates to a penis,’ Melissa said.

  ‘What’s a penis?’ Ida further enquired. ‘Something you pour out?’

  ‘A cock,’ Alex said, the half-circle of faces suddenly enthralled.

  ‘A hen cock or a cock cock?’ Ida persisted: innocence, ignorance? bemusement, perhaps …

  ‘A cock like I’ve got,’ Alex said.

  ‘I didn’t know you kept hens, Alex,’ Ida said. ‘You’ve never mentioned it before.’

  ‘A cock like I have between my legs,’ Alex said, increasingly confused.

  ‘It’s symbolic,’ Melissa said, to clarify the situation.

  ‘It just looks like a snake to me,’ Ida said. ‘Comfy, wriggly, friendly,’ she expanded.

  ‘And a cock,’ Alex insisted, some sort of violation involved: colour had risen to his sunken cheeks, his eyes acquiring a feverish, pinkish tinge.

  ‘I like all animals,’ Ida said, straightening her jumper, the outline of her brassière evokingly revealed.

  ‘Cocks, too, Ida,’ Alex persisted.

  ‘Hens especially,’ Ida confirmed.

  ‘We’re all barmy,’ the silent until now Judith said. ‘Which is why we’re here. Isn’t that right?’ she added, appealing to Melissa.

  ‘It’s not a term I would use,’ Melissa said, her arms unfolding.

  ‘What would you use, Melissa?’ Ida enquired, this her first ever involvement in a discussion, as far as Maddox recalled, she invariably complaining, plaintively, ‘everything’s above my head’.

  ‘Unwell,’ Melissa said. ‘Despondent. But determined to understand why and, having discovered that, to anticipate getting better. Better,’ she went on, ‘through understanding. And by sharing that understanding,’ she concluded, ‘with others.’

  ‘Not better through distraction?’ Maddox said.

  ‘Not distraction for its own sake,’ Melissa said. ‘But by association. Of knowing in your suffering you’re not alone.’

  ‘I feel worse in the morning,’ Ida said, carried away, not least by Alex’s attention and the controversy she’d provoked. ‘When I wake up I don’t want to live. I don’t want to live for most of the day. My mother was the same. She put on her make-up. Finished her ironing. Hoovered the house. Washed the bathroom. And the toilet. Then went to the bedroom and swallowed her pills. A neighbour was coming to take her out and saw her through the letter-box. Just her feet. As if she’d changed her mind and gone to the door but died in the hall before she reached it.’