The grey stone encirclement of the prison walls had been visible from the school’s upper (dormitory) windows, its lateral extension breaking up the vertical escarpment of mills and warehouses and, at the summit of the opposing ridge, the soot-encrusted outline of the town’s municipal buildings.

  Even more conspicuous, at the centre of the prison, stood the structure from which the cell blocks radiated like the spokes of a wheel. From the station, leaving or arriving by train, the barbican-like presence dominated the view, its greyness a foil to the brickwork of industrial, commercial and domestic buildings which enclosed it on every side.

  Absorbed so constitutionally within the context of the town, its silence, and air of containment, had reduced its significance to Maddox over the years when, on leaving and arrival, he had gazed at it, either from carriage windows or remotely, from the school playing-field or the school itself. Now, however, arriving in response to the invitation from Taylor, it reasserted its presence in a singularly oppressive way. In a curious sense, it had, after years of benignity, come dramatically alive, the familiar feeling, long ago abandoned, of returning to school, displaced by something remindful, painfully, of abandonment, of deceit and disloyalty, of betrayal, the sensations he associated with the journey overlain by something which, if he had anticipated it more astutely, he would have seen could only do him harm: a visit into the past. The book with which he had begun the journey had long been abandoned by the time the train had passed beyond the southern stretches of the York Plain and into the once colliery-infested hill-land of South Yorkshire, the absence of the pits endorsing the feeling of desolation.

  Getting out of his seat as the train approached the town, he crossed the carriage to the opposite window to see the once familiar edifice come into view – inconveniencing the passengers there and finally going to the door to gaze out at the remaining mill shapes bulked in the valley bottom, then, once again, at the serpentine grey stone walls of the prison – in the distance, on the furthest skyline, enclosed by trees, the profile of the school.

  It was as if, entering the prison, through a gate which he had walked past many times (the ironically named Love Lane leading directly to it from the station), he were returning to a community he already knew, a further adjunct, an extended dormitory, of the school itself – expecting, even, familiar faces, familiar responses: teachers, youths, the benevolent Head with his Quaker aspirations – smiling at the warder who examined his warrant, smiling at those who searched his clothes, the bag of cigarettes, food and chocolate – and, a last-minute decision, unsure of its perversity, the drawing-block and oil crayons (taken away separately to be looked at).

  Cleansed, seemingly, he was led into a recently constructed building adjacent to the central yard. Looking up, and outwards, he was aware only of the overcast sky, no sign of any reassuring external structures. Moments later, he was sitting in a recently decorated room smelling of paint and, possibly, detergent – sitting on a plastic chair at a plastic table, other identical chairs and tables unoccupied around.

  The door opened: a figure he failed to recognise entered, the face rotund, the eyes recessive: a heavy jowl overhung the collar of a light blue shirt: dark trousers scarcely restrained a protuberant gut. A warder, having closed the door, stood beside it – an elderly man, white-haired, genially featured, nodding and smiling at Maddox, an extension, seemingly, of his own good intentions, an endorsement of any positive sentiment he might have: white shirt, dark tie, dark trousers, Maddox taking in these details as he would those of a scene he might be obliged, almost formally, later, to account for to someone else.

  Taylor extended his hand: ‘We’re allowed to shake hands,’ derisively, adding, ‘How are you? Was the journey okay?’ retaining his hand, the gesture drawing him to an engagement he would otherwise have tried to avoid.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘And you?’ releasing his hand, enquiring, mentally, an engagement with what? something at that point he couldn’t name, sitting once more, having stood at Taylor’s entrance, Taylor himself rearranging his chair on the other side of the table, repositioning it once more before he finally sat.

  ‘I’m fine, too.’ He gestured round. ‘It’s been repainted. Just for you,’ smiling. ‘Kidding. They said, “We’ll have the interview room repainted, Peter.” Did I tell you I’ve changed my name? By deed poll. “Now someone’s agreed to come to see you.” Or words to that effect,’ Maddox leaning on the table with his elbows, a companionable gesture intended to set both of them at ease, glancing round at the framed reproductions hanging on the cream walls. ‘I chose them. Poor Vincent. One lunatic to another. I’ve really made myself at home up here. What d’you think? They aren’t quite up to Piero. As for Tommaso. No dice. Do you realise he must have died by the age of twenty-seven? Like Girtin. Another prodigal talent. Art, wouldn’t you say, transcends love? You must have found that out yourself. Being, as you are – your fondest impersonation, and the one I always preferred – a wise old man. Another of your maxims. Choosers can’t be losers. Or was it the other way around? What d’you think? Didn’t Viklund invariably end a statement with the interrogative? The ball always in your court. Or, rather, ball back in your court. Or for ever hold your tongue. Whether you cared to play or not. I’ve been thinking about that. You and he together. Me in here. A suspended life. An unreturnable cargo. An unreclaimable deposit.’ He gestured again at the room, disinclined, Maddox concluded, to allow him to respond. ‘Masaccio the greatest, in my view, not only because of his lost potential. Do you remember the old Medici prints? No longer around, I discovered. Vincents you can get in Woolworths. Johnny went out and bought them. A redecorating fund.’ He indicated the warder behind, his back. ‘“You’re an artist, Mr Taylor,” they said. “This should be up your street. Pictures for the interview room.”’ He smiled, a snarling expression, the teeth discoloured, one of them missing at the front of his mouth. ‘John had to be taken into account. Inmates, likewise. Feel at ease with the familiar, even if they don’t enjoy it. Attending art classes, I a studio assistant. Cimabue’s workshop not, I might tell you, a suitable comparison. Odd, nevertheless, that what is meaningful, if not inevitable to one generation, is inaccessible to another. It suggests that those of us who are one thing at the present are something significantly other later on. What d’you think? Ball in your court,’ he concluded, ‘so to speak,’ waiting for Maddox to respond before continuing, reassured, or so it seemed, by his silence, ‘This is my tutor, John,’ turning to the warder, the chair creaking beneath his weight. ‘Years ago. A lasting influence,’ adding directly to Maddox, turning back to the table, ‘John’s a fan. Believes in redemption. Values life like you and I would value,’ pausing to consider. ‘What would we value, art aside? Something greater? I doubt it. In terms of flesh and blood what is there to value that hasn’t been, how should I put it? fucked up by one or both of us?’

  His look remained calm, almost indifferent: it was, Maddox reflected, as if once again he were the prisoner and Taylor his visitor, their roles, in this case, explicitly reversed: the plastic chair creaked as Taylor readjusted his position. Mimicking Maddox, he had leant his arms on the table, Maddox further reflecting that he was here only to be abused, consoling himself with the thought that in an hour or so he’d be on his way, via Love Lane, its cottages and trees, to the station.

  ‘Do you remember Pemberton hanging out for Courbet?’ Taylor went on. ‘I thought that odd. A Francophile in the middle of the twentieth century plumping for a realism of a particularly pedantic kind. As well as, in Courbet’s case, a very mixed kettle of fish. And Degas. That, to some degree, I understood. As a basis, a basis only, mind, for everything. And Giacometti. The fourth dimension. As if three, for God’s sake, were not enough. Pre-dating all that, of course, Piero. Your rebirth of man. Preposterous, when you come to think of it. Innocent, too. Innocence! As if we could ever have enough. As if anything or anyone ever was,’ he turning in his chair to remark to the figure behind him, ‘This is a man you should admire. Believes art is in terminal decline,’ returning his look to Maddox to add, ‘That fifties return to nature is all right for people without a visual imagination but for people like us, it hardly works. I’m back with Soutine. Trees like cauliflowers, faces like squashed tomatoes. Art up its arsehole. Nowhere to go but everyone to go with. This, by the way, should there be any doubt, is the anti-depressant talking. I’m loaded up to the eyeballs with amitriptyline. You do any art?’

  Maddox waited, subdued. ‘A life-class,’ he finally announced.

  ‘That’s interesting.’ Taylor waited, too, before adding, ‘I always thought that odd, a fellow who never drew or painted teaching in an institution devoted to little else. You’d have thought absence of participation would put you off. I have, by the way, you’ll be pleased to hear, been revising my essays. I got the police, of all people, to retrieve them from my house. I burnt most of them some time ago, retaining those on which you’d written some of your asperic comments. Rebecca didn’t approve, of course. She’d acquired, by the time I came to know her, an aversion to seeing your writing. Perspicacious, some of your stuff. Took the breath away, foresight, I’d say, your strongest suit. Informed of what is to come around the corner and it comes up behind instead.’

  He was leaning back, laughing, a staggered, fractured sound, as if he were finding the visit more of an ordeal than his manner suggested.

  Intending to distract him, Maddox said, ‘I was at school here. I know it well,’ adding, ‘Quinians,’ glancing at the warder to receive a signal of recognition. ‘It has some of the feelings of returning home.’

  ‘Home’s the last word I would use for this place,’ Taylor said. ‘Apologies to John, and that,’ adding, ‘I’m in a special unit. John is one of the screws. We get on well, though didn’t when I arrived. I was fucked up with largactil, which he was instrumental, I might add, in getting changed. An archangel in disguise beneath that uniform, is John. I’ve sent his name to Downing Street as a suggested recipient of a national award. He doesn’t agree with it, but, in my view, he deserves it. As it was, before I came here, I was on my way to a medical unit. The psychiatrist who saw me happened to have a daughter at the Drayburgh. By the time I’d finished extolling the place he put me down as stable.’ He tapped his head. ‘Cognisance. Awareness. Reality of other people. Van Gogh syndrome not allowed. “Are all geniuses mad?” Ergo, I, who am not a genius, must be relatively sane. Put him on the spot. “I believe you are,” he said, meeting my gaze. What are your drawings like, I wonder?’

  For a moment, unsure he was being addressed directly, Maddox paused. ‘Not good.’ He indicated Taylor might laugh. ‘I go as much for the company as anything else. Though I was always curious to know what it was like. As you say, odd to be at the Drayburgh and not have any practical experience. I always felt deferential to those who had.’

  ‘Were you deferential?’

  The enquiry came with a look of surprise.

  ‘I thought I was.’

  ‘On reflection,’ Taylor said, ‘you probably were.’ He turned to one side. ‘Why is he deferential to me? I used to ask. I only come from Norfolk. On one of my finer efforts you wrote, “There is nothing more illuminating I can add,” I taking it, initially, as an insult. Until I realised, flatteringly, what you meant. I imagine you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘I was inclined to write at length on all of them,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Viklund was more reticent. Epigrammatic. Keen to come down, I heard, on inaccuracies, not, as you were, on generalisations. Wrong church. Wrong chapel. Wrong date. Interpretations treated with reservation. One of your strong points. Looking in not always detrimental to looking at. Un Viklund-like, if you don’t mind my abusing him.’ Turning to the warder, he called, ‘Professor Maddox is an art historian, John, his involvement with me an infinitesimal part of his overall vocation. Emeritus Professor, I should call him now. Nevertheless, where I’m concerned, a bona fide credential.’

  The warder nodded, unsmiling on this occasion, a resistance to being Taylor’s foil hardening his expression.

  ‘John and I have discussions. Who is the best painter? He likes Velázquez. Thought, with that, he’d catch me on the hop, knowing my predilection for the Florentines. I got back with Rembrandt. Self-scrutiny. Van Gogh,’ he gestured at the walls, ‘was a compromise. Woolworths, and all that. The common man. There are lots of common men in here. How common I scarcely need to describe. And women, too, I suppose, out there. The world, as it is, has become a strange place. Stranger even than when I was out.’ He held his head a moment, as if recalling. ‘John is not a common man, I should add.’

  ‘I think Peter is trying to impress us, Mr Maddox,’ the warder said, speaking for the first time, something other than a formal relationship evident both in his voice and the unfolding of his arms: an urgent desire, perhaps to mediate.

  ‘Circumstances unmade me,’ Taylor said. ‘John and I are endeavouring to fit the pieces together. With the hope we don’t come up with the previous whole. We have to keep it quiet. Otherwise,’ he tapped his nose, ‘everyone will be at it and we’d have no peace at all.’ A tightening of the skin was evident around the eyes: a rash was visible inside the collar of his shirt, one reminiscent of a rash he recalled seeing on Berenice’s cheek, a connection between his neighbour and Taylor suddenly apparent.

  ‘I never really got on with Rebecca,’ Taylor said.

  He was leaning on the table more firmly, looking at Maddox directly: one cheek had been pulled in as if he were biting the skin inside.

  ‘A difficult woman to deal with,’ he added.

  ‘I always found her very open. Full of curiosity. Expansive,’ Maddox said.

  ‘Naturally.’ Taylor watched him with a smile. ‘You would.’ A moment later, he added, ‘She was very much bound up with her family.’

  ‘She rarely referred to them,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ It was as if he were talking, confidingly, about someone else who, the next moment, was scheduled to enter the room. ‘A curious case of self-possession. This East End mystique you get in London, and foreign as hell to someone like me. Though hell, retrospectively speaking, is no longer foreign at all. At first, however,’ he pointed a finger at Maddox, ‘I was very intrigued. Coming from Norfolk. But alienating, claustrophobic. Oppressive. Particularly after we married. I was telling John before you arrived, though he’s pretty bored by most of it now. He’s strong on family himself. Four grown-up children, one almost as old as me. I had two. They both took after their mother. As if, in her case, Rebecca’s, she couldn’t live without her family. Not even when, between us, we had a pretty good one of our own.’

  Having examined his expression, Taylor had glanced away. His head, a moment later, he propped on his hand, his look, abstracted, drifting to the wall behind Maddox’s head. ‘You never found that, not knowing her so well. When all’s said and done, carnal knowledge is pretty superficial, wouldn’t you say? Talked up, of course. But ambivalence always shows. Wanting to escape the East End, in her case, and “do” the West End. Particularly Cork Street. A cultural invasion, not a voyeuristic one. Yet always drawn back. The atavistic imperative, her family. No longer relevant to me. That atavism I got rid of. Even when she didn’t want it she couldn’t, she discovered, we discovered, live without it. Boom. There it was. All the time. Ask John. He knows the sort of thing. With the East End, however, it was something else. Not merely familial but tribal. The war. The blitz. Class cohesion. The mixture you always get. Russians. Lithuanians. Greeks. Turks. Bulgars. Poles. Chinese. You get the picture?’

  Releasing his hand from his head, he rubbed his nose.

  ‘Can get on your wick if you give it a chance. Her father was a dominant man. So were her sisters. Three, but with all the space they filled they might have been seven. Most of the things I had have disappeared. Some of the paintings I did at the Drayburgh. Not many after. Some of the essays. Despite the fact that women aren’t good at painting, the best of them derivative, Rebecca did quite well. Found her own line. All those, her family have removed. I’m trying to get their ownership sorted out. They went in the house and took the lot. Furniture. Pictures. Clothes. Everything to do with me they got rid of. Much of what she knew about painting came from me. Apart from a sentimental attachment to art, as a means to an end, until you and I came along she didn’t know a Botticelli from a Bonnard. Between the two of us, I’d say we taught her quite a lot.’ He smiled, the provocation, Maddox assumed, complete.

  ‘Was she religious?’ he said.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘She never mentioned church. Or God.’

  Taylor laughed, surveying Maddox down the length of his nose.

  ‘Synagogue, for Christ’s sake.’

  He laughed again.

  ‘Not Christ’s sake. Abraham’s fucking sake.’ He shrugged, spreading out his arms. ‘Excuse me, John,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Another ten p I owe you,’ adding, ‘Religions, in my book, are political organisations. Primarily, secondarily, finally. Hence the pogroms, the Inquisition, the Holocaust. Religious sentiment, on the other hand, is an intrinsic affair. Institutionalised, it acts, thinks, proselytises as any self-interested body – faith, pronouncements, edicts the instruments at its disposal. Fear the primary one. Without that the whole thing would disappear. In that respect I blame her family. They were as blindly addicted to their mythology as Marx, for similar reasons, was to his. Poor Beccie, another piece of ideological meat. In the end, I felt I was married to her sisters. And her brother. They were never out of the house. “Why don’t you discourage them?” I’d ask her, and, as swiftly as anything, she’d say, “They are my family,” as if they had precedence, which, indeed, they had, over the one she and I had created.’