‘Then, of course,’ Melissa said, ‘you did the same.’

  ‘My son-in-law called when he wasn’t supposed to.’ Ida pulled down her jumper: the figure, the gesture implied – correctly, Maddox reflected – of a woman younger than she looked (not seventy-five, let’s say, he conjectured, but sixty-seven), her face alone betraying her decline, the heavy lines bracketing the over-painted mouth, the tinted cheeks smeared unevenly with dabbed-in lipstick, the mascaraed cavities around the eyes – pain, he reflected, rarely so graphically defined. ‘Though my father treated her badly,’ Ida went on, pausing before confirming, ‘when he was alive.’

  ‘Whereas Matthew’s method was a tube train,’ Melissa said, anxious to draw Maddox in, or on, she seeing him as her principal challenge.

  ‘Thoughtless, even to attempt it,’ Maddox said. ‘Involving others. I’m not sure, even now, how or why it occurred.’

  ‘The intention, nevertheless, was clear,’ Melissa said.

  ‘I’d say the intention was obscure,’ he said, wondering if this were true: obscurity certainly characterised his subsequent attempts to explain it: far worse circumstances, the geriatric support group suggested, could produce less dramatic results.

  ‘The thoughtlessness, as you describe it, in involving others shows how compelling the gesture was,’ Melissa said.

  ‘Are we grading the efficacy of our suicidal intentions,’ Maddox said, ‘in order to point the way to others? Ida, pills. Me, tube trains. Anna, poor Anna, ever higher windows.’

  ‘We’re here to get rid of anger by expressing it, in this case, visually,’ Alex said. ‘That’s the value of our coming. And to see, in doing that, we’re not alone.’

  It was the most eloquent statement that Alex, in Maddox’s experience, had ever made, derived, he assumed, from another authority and possibly learnt by heart. ‘I wouldn’t want any man to go through what I’ve been through,’ he said. ‘I see bodies, in flashback, every night, like strings of meat, still living, hung on hooks. The eyes, the eyes alone, showing what’s been done to them.’ He waved his arm to encompass the room. ‘You’ve no idea,’ he concluded.

  ‘Post-traumatic stress,’ Melissa said.

  ‘Fuck what you call it, I call it hell,’ Alex said, his anger, like his eloquence, unprecedented on any previous occasion.

  ‘I don’t wish to talk about it,’ Beth said, her arthritic figure pinioned, so it seemed, to her chair, an attempt to move ending in something of a convulsion. She waved her arm as Melissa turned towards her. ‘It’s too painful for public discussion. That’s my feeling.’

  ‘If we don’t talk about it, what’s the point in coming?’ Alex said.

  ‘I don’t like your language, either,’ Beth said.

  ‘Soldier’s language,’ Alex said.

  ‘All soldiers don’t talk like that,’ Beth persisted.

  ‘All soldiers haven’t been through what I’ve been through,’ Alex said. ‘If you’d seen what I’d seen you wouldn’t be so glib.’

  ‘I have seen what you’ve seen,’ Beth said, ‘and I don’t want to say any more about it.’

  ‘Walking carcases made into carcases by well-fed men, with families and children and dogs,’ Alex said, his confidence decreasing.

  ‘I don’t wish to hear any more.’ Beth covered her ears. ‘I’m not well. I shouldn’t have to listen to any of this. I’ve lived through it. He’s only witnessed it. I know what it’s like from the inside,’ she pleaded.

  Silence returned, broken by the sound of people passing – voices, feet – in the corridor outside.

  ‘Something as important as this can’t be left in the air,’ Melissa said. ‘What does Judith think?’ she added.

  ‘I’d like to go to the toilet,’ Judith said. Rising from her chair, she added, ‘Is that all right?’ moving to the door, on the back of which the drawings and paintings were pinned.

  ‘I prefer no one to leave until the end of the session,’ Melissa said.

  ‘I have to go,’ Judith said.

  The drawings and paintings disappeared as the door was pulled open, reappearing as it closed behind Judith’s back.

  ‘She always goes when it’s getting difficult,’ Alex said. ‘All that Jerusalem stuff she goes on about. The Jews and the British. The Arabs. That soldier. I agree with the Universal City. But you’d think she’d lived in a fucking cave. Ten to a room. One toilet for twenty. Do you know what it was like in the Gorbals? Do you think the Jews there, like me, didn’t have to suffer?’

  ‘On that scale, and with that intensity, probably not,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Oh, fuck you!’ Alex said, weeping into his hand.

  Later, walking back up the hill, he concluded he should finish at the clinic: the discursive nature of the exercise: they had done all that could reasonably be expected. Most who attended did so for two days a week, some, a minority, like him, one day only. Most stayed for several months, occasionally, in one or two instances, for two or three years, he adding up the length of time in his own case (six months?) – entering Simone’s front door as he might have entered his own, her voice alternating with a woman’s in her consulting-room, his exhaustion suddenly apparent. The whole arrangement – the rearrangement – he had made of his life was leading him no nearer to where, he assumed, he ought to go (enlightenment, of some sort, elusively at hand).

  Was he, after all, in terminal decline? Simone had arranged an appointment at a clinic in Westminster: after a period of incubation he would be tested: an agonising seven to ten days before the result was known. Meanwhile they would entertain one another by different means. What would his former wife and his children make of this? Decrepitude, absorption by depravity, by dissolution, by which, living how he did, where he did, he was exclusively surrounded.

  Climbing the stairs, feeding the cat, preparing the food he’d brought in for supper: setting the table; while, below, he heard one client leave, another arrive, the interval of silence followed by the closing of a door.

  In suspension: sitting in the kitchen, watching, in a glass-fronted oven, the food cooking: the bubbling of the cheese-covered surface of the dish (calculations completed to make sure it wouldn’t burn). Quite soon he might be killed: several nights after his confrontation with his intruder he’d answered a ring at the door to find Berenice standing there. The flickering eyelids, the pouching and the shadowing of the skin beneath, the dark-eyed, venomous expression, a dress which revealed the surprisingly firm outline of her breasts, the skirt flared out in a schoolgirl fashion, her sturdy, bare, athletic legs, her feet bare, too, he noticed, she immediately enquiring, ‘Did you ring the fucking police?’ an earth-bound, dissonant, gravelly sound from which he extracted the words – their immediacy, their implication – only after several seconds, meanwhile staring at her with a glazed expression which only fitfully came alive with recognition.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Wayne was taken in last night. He says you fucked him up.’

  ‘Who’s Wayne?’ increasingly confused.

  ‘The one you were talking to the other night.’

  ‘The one who tried to break in your door?’

  ‘He only wanted to talk. I asked him to come back another time.’

  ‘He said he wanted to kill you. It’s a wonder,’ he said, ‘he doesn’t blame you.’

  Forces, of an obscure nature, were being assembled: thief indebted to thief, Maddox, in this arrangement, not included.

  Yet all he was thinking of were his vacillating moods, how reality – his perception of what, schematically, he took to be reality – shifted from one moment to another – unlike, for instance, his perception of the figure standing before him now: someone habitually he heard rather than saw, nevertheless an intimate (in some respects, the most intimate) part of his domestic life, more consistently and persistently present even than Simone: someone who, judged by the prevalence of her voice through the party-wall, rarely if ever slept, he, at times, imagining her suspended from her ceiling, bat-like, head down, feet attached to the plaster, eyes open – her mouth likewise – a liquid, venomous, accusing stare which, now she was at his door, he refused to acknowledge.

  ‘Maybe you should tell him it wasn’t me. There must,’ he went on, ‘be plenty of alternatives, you amongst them. You told him, after all, you’d called the police. And Isaiah. The one he threatened through the door. All he did with me was walk in the house when I wasn’t looking in order to break into yours. Apart from threatening me with a knife and taking ten pounds, that’s all that happened.’

  ‘Ten pounds?’

  Incredulity gave way to something more reflective: he saw her lips extend, broaden, and realised, apart from the blemished skin, what an attractive mouth she had: a different culture, a different class: what, given the opportunities he’d had, for instance, might she have turned into?

  ‘Presumably,’ he shrugged, ‘he was taken in for more than that.’

  Gazing at him, still transfixed – transported, even – by calculation: how much, he wondered, might she demand?

  ‘There’re no sort of things you want?’ she asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Soap. Hair shampoo.’ She waited, registering his surprise. ‘Make-up.’

  ‘I don’t use make-up,’ a smile, eerily, crossing her features, her lips parting to surprisingly cared-for teeth: as swiftly presented, however, as retracted: pain galvanised by pain: he got the message. ‘Or your girlfriend?’ she enquired.

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said, ‘if we ever run out,’ adding, ‘I’d appreciate you putting in a good word with Wayne. I’m sure if he works it out he’ll see it couldn’t have been me.’

  ‘When Wayne’s in trouble we are,’ she said, more obscure demands he presumed waiting to be presented. ‘You ring the police about us?’ she added.

  ‘I haven’t,’ she glancing off, in response, along the street, retreating to his gate, uncertain what to add, her voice, her manner – her thoughts and speculations – in abeyance, glancing up, after calling, ‘I’ll see you,’ with a wave, he acknowledging it (how friendly) to realise it had been directed upwards, to her house, Isaiah undoubtedly watching from a window.

  Death, he was thinking in Simone’s kitchen, endeavouring to match the timing of his cooking with her return, might be closer than he’d thought. Since the intrusion he’d got out the step-ladder again and climbed through the ceiling into the roof space, a tiny area confined by diagonally sloping beams. Balancing on the joists, he’d opened the trap-door leading onto the roof itself. Several tiles, he’d observed, required replacing, concluding, otherwise, it would take little effort to climb over the party-wall, by the chimney, to the trap-door on Berenice’s side. Having discovered the route, he was surprised, considering what went on next door, and considering, too, its accessibility, that it hadn’t been used before. Previously, his own perception, conveyed reassuringly to Simone, had been that foxes rarely killed near their holes: it was in Berenice’s interest to keep things as they were. At least, this was what he concluded as he examined the food in the oven and, Simone delayed, switched it off.

  He had little left to lose: his best energies had been expended. Taylor alone remained as a subject. With Viklund, he was surprised to discover, he was inclined to keep his distance. He was, nevertheless, tormented by the women to whom, throughout his illness, he had become connected. He recalled allusions to Judaism in his past (discriminatory, swept derisively aside): a relative who had occupied a cobbler’s premises in a sidestreet in St Albans; a brother of the same who had occupied the premises of a tailor, Maddox an Anglicised version of an otherwise unpronounceable name. And Paul, who, at the time of his ordination, had gone to considerable trouble first to examine and then disown their past: ‘continuity, our present lives,’ he’d concluded, ‘by a different name.’ All he knew, at the moment, was that his connection to these women was visceral, to do with maternity, creativity, an idealisation of some sort, art and sex ineluctably combined – watching, enthralled, as they drew or painted, or, as at the day-centre, refused to examine their pasts – pasts which allegedly had no depths but which nevertheless went down for ever. Why did he feel so at ease with them?

  Then she was coming up the stairs, the sound preceded by that of the front door closing. ‘I don’t make notes immediately after every session,’ she said, embracing him, taking in the smell of the food, exclaiming, ‘Wonderful! No burning.’

  And then an evening of watching the news, phone calls, he, during the latter, lying on the bed upstairs, listening to the radio. When, finally, she came up, she said, ‘How do you feel about a night on your own? I’m particularly tired and need to rest,’ he responding, ‘I won’t disturb you. I could sleep on the floor or the settee downstairs.’

  ‘I prefer alone,’ she said, so that, once more, he was walking down the hill, heart ringing with rejection while reproachfully he reflected, she needs time on her own, as I do myself, aware of the moon before him, to the south, a skein of cloud passing across its surface, the configuration of the trees beneath which he walked, glancing, for distraction, into the shop windows beyond Chalk Farm before turning into his street, looking up, instinctively, at Berenice’s windows, listening, after opening the front door, for any incriminatory sound, securing the door without putting on the light, indifferent to whether there was anyone there or not, moments later sitting in the darkness, in the downstairs room, wondering what it was, since it could be dismissed so easily, he and Simone shared.

  17

  He’d done overseas lecture tours frequently in the past, invariably when the children were young: a reasonable (well-paid) excuse to escape the rigours and routines, the stultifying predictability of domestic life. The difficulty with most of them had arisen when it had come to parting from the women to whom he had, on many of these occasions, become attached. Everywhere, or so it had seemed, there was someone waiting to be delivered from an aversion to habit, the majority of them, he had been surprised to discover, of Judaic origin, something of which he was unaware at the moment of attraction, and all, without exception, the product of a mixed relationship, nearly always Jewish and Catholic (on two occasions Presbyterian). It was as if instinctively he were drawn less to a race or a culture than to a conflict of a specific, but indefinable, and unresolvable nature: something beyond belief, or idealisation, beyond faith or identification, a hinterland of displacement which echoed something of the same within himself. So della Francesca in the States, Cimabue and Giotto in Canada, the pre- and early Renaissance in a curious three-month tour of Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru, the cultural emissaries he had met on the way, the resourceful, flawed, self-determined women, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned, waiting, inexplicably, to be ‘delivered’. Of what? To whom? a connection which remained obscure from first meeting to departure, a receptivity on both sides instantly perceived and, in almost every instance, painfully ended.

  On each occasion he had endured the curious sensation of leaving an integral part of himself in the hands of someone who, despite the intimacy involved, remained both a stranger and yet more familiar than anyone else he had known. Soon, when new enterprises were suggested, he was aware that there was very little of what he had come to suspect might be ‘himself’ to take with him, to the extent that the sense of loss – the aching sense of omission – which he had come to associate with travel persuaded him to desist. After all, there was Charlotte (what did she represent but an early, unheeding aspiration? neither of her parents, unlike his, had had any religious affiliation), and their three sons. No wonder, one by one, all four of them had left, he, he finally concluded – prior to Charlotte’s leaving – having departed long before them.

  Now there was Simone to come home to, as perplexing a union as any he had prospected, let alone encountered, no departure from her (as this evening) without an awareness it might be the last; similarly, too, her departures for lectures, conferences, seminars, ‘weekends’, she having merely to leave the room for him to become aware of the possibility of removal as opposed to absence, a reminder of that element within himself which singularly, as he had got older, had failed to reassure or even remind him of who or what or even where, let alone why, he was.

  Associated with this feeling was the one he had experienced on numerous occasions at airports: the significance, at Simone’s, sitting on her roof, of the passing of aircraft overhead, the alignment of the airport with the setting sun, expiration inseparable from a diurnal, observable pattern, subliminal, for the most part, its resonance all the greater and, after so many months, inseparable from those feelings he associated with both her and her house: the echoes of those restrained and restraining looks of women he had left behind – and who, alarmingly, epitomised in Simone, were capable, suddenly, of leaving him: looks of desertion, amounting, almost, to annihilation, associated with the Americas, Eastern Europe, Russia, Israel: letters, telephone calls, clandestine, for the most part, even pursuing visits, the feelings of disruption, disloyalty, fracture, immense. So many disassociated lives coalesced, at this instant, in Simone: when would he ever learn? what would he ever learn? the final sensation, with her, he had come to rest: the definitive image of a specific face, evaluated through Giotto, Masaccio, so much else: Bathsheba, Judith, Mary, Martha, elusive in its meaning, if focused, sensationally, in its charms, his susceptibility associated with arrival, a constant re-arrival, with return, a constant re-return, with a final awareness of coming in.

  The warrant came from a prison in the north of England; and then, surprised, having ‘processed’ Taylor to the back of his mind, he realised, coincidentally, from the town to which he had been evacuated during the war, Quinians standing enigmatically on its western skyline (braced, once more, from the viewpoint of the town, against the setting sun).