Pausing, he invited Maddox to respond, Maddox, for his part, refocusing his look on Taylor who, as he spoke, appeared to be getting larger all the time, an oppressive, weighty presence which was gradually enveloping the room. The warder, caught between restraint and conciliation, gazed bemusedly at the back of Taylor’s head.

  ‘“Look at my family,” I’d tell her,’ Taylor went on. ‘“They don’t come round seven days of the week.” “That’s because they live in Norfolk,” she said. “That,” I said, “is because I wouldn’t want them,” she dressing the children like facsimiles of her sisters, even though one of them was a boy. Like you, Professor, I’m against cultural identity. The most boring fucking thing in the world. The parochialisation of human nature. The trivialisation of human nature. Subservience of the self in deference to the whole. A partial whole, at that. Fuck the family. There’s nothing good come out of it. I’m here, after all, to prove it. Irrefutable. Undeniable. Not to be ignored.’

  Maddox, contrary to his previous impression, now found himself listening to Taylor as if from a distance, his former pupil’s figure receding before him, his voice, too, transposed, as if he were listening to it from inside his head. He wondered if he should mention Simone, the geriatric day group, anything that might turn the conversation back to something less obsessive. What would Taylor make of that – registering it as an endorsement, no doubt, of his present state of mind? In any case, his own reflections were becoming confused with the atmosphere of the room – even with the expression of the warder, a visitor, so it seemed, to the scene, he listening to Taylor with increasing interest, at one point leaning forward to catch precisely what he said.

  ‘I came to London a virgin. And left it,’ Taylor went on, ‘as something else. I’m taking steps to reconstitute myself in the light of that. Eric Taylor is dead. Completed. An aberration. Peter is back to where he started. Returning to the virginity with which he began. John will tell you. He has it all worked out.’ He turned to glance at the warder, smiling. ‘I’ve plenty of time. I’m waiting to be unearthed. Like your lectures. Inspiriting at the time. A sense of immanence. The inference of a second chance. You see it, otherwise, all around you. Knowledge without understanding. Knowledge which will kill us in the end.’

  Maddox found himself gazing at the warder, as if measuring his own attentiveness in the other man’s eyes, sharing, he concluded, an unconcealable element of alarm: at any moment he imagined the man stepping forward and announcing the visit at an end.

  ‘Are Rebecca’s family still in touch?’ he asked, anxious to return Taylor to something real.

  ‘I have a letter from their lawyer. We are, would you believe it, quarrelling over the money. When the mortgage is paid off there’ll be quite a lot, the value of the property having gone up. I never had sufficient money when I lived there and now, assuming they can sell the house, I’ll have more than I know what to do with. They, of course, are saying I shouldn’t have any. Her sisters, her brother. She died intestate. Something of an irony there. Then again,’ he pushed his chair back from the table, ‘fuck the money. When I leave this place it’ll only be to go to another. If you keep coming back, Professor, I can keep tabs on what’s going on. Launch a crusade. Phenomenological art no longer the fashion. Join your brigade. Everything no longer confined to expression.’

  Having pushed back his chair from the table, he indicated to the warder his intention to leave.

  ‘Last few minutes, Peter,’ the warder said, indicating, in turn, there was time in hand.

  ‘Not a holiday camp.’ Taylor took out a handkerchief and blew his nose: his eyes had filled with tears. ‘Irrelevance another thing I would like to study. Was it you or Viklund who was keen on Lucretius? Chance! Nil igitur mors est ad nos. Epicurean, don’t you think? I’ll send you my conclusions. Might mark them, if you like. Would appreciate your comments. What is suffering? my principal concern. Similarly, when everything counts and nothing adds up what is the bottom line? Plus, what is the significance of murder in the light of biological determinism? Has it got a future? Why aren’t animals brought to account? If you’d make your remarks in red ink I’ll be able to identify them more quickly. We might publish the results as question and answer. “A Convict’s Reply to Questions Raised by a Novel Consensus”. Might make a splash. Not least in that paper you write for. I recall you did Greek and Latin at school. Two languages, after all, in which everything has been expressed. We might do the same for English. Have to make an effort, otherwise,’ he paused, half turned from the table, ‘nothing gets done. This room, for instance, I wouldn’t mind turning over to Angelico. “Illumination from a Dark Interior”, I the fuel, John, here, for instance, the wick.’

  He was on his feet, moving to the door, waving an arm in dismissal.

  ‘Good of you to come. Not a place, otherwise, to recommend, Having been here to school, you’ll understand. Good at last, Professor, to have something else in common. Destiny, you might almost say, has driven us together. Remember me to Viklund,’ the warder nodding to Maddox as he followed Taylor out. ‘I’ll send another warrant,’ came floating from the corridor outside.

  In the train, watching the familiar landscape pass, his thoughts moved on from Taylor to recollections of Taylor’s wife, she evidently the first of a subsequent pattern. Of what? Displacement. Disaffection, an instinctual response to something similarly fractured within himself, his notion of writing about Taylor reduced, not least by the brevity of the visit and the length of the journey, to speculations about himself, the fortuitous connections which were linking up disparate elements of his life, Simone alone an unassimilated feature.

  For no reason he could account for, once home he rang not her, to say he was back, but Isaacson, enquiring if he might see him again.

  Having taken some time to be brought to the phone, he announced, ‘I’ve nothing available. The next two weeks are solid. So is the third. I already have far too many people demanding to be seen. Next month might be the best option.’

  ‘How about tomorrow?’ he enquired, it now being mid-evening.

  ‘Ten-thirty,’ Isaacson responded.

  ‘A.m., or p.m.?’

  ‘Yours to decide.’

  ‘A.m.’

  ‘Come early. There’s a chance I’ll be out.’

  Talking to Simone later in the evening he declined her suggestion he might go up, telling her of his encounter with Taylor, responding to her curiosity as to how it had gone by replying, ‘Dementia. Simulated or otherwise, I couldn’t decide. Perhaps you’d better go up the next time, I believe he’s stringing me along,’ adding, ‘I’m seeing Isaacson tomorrow.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’ He sensed her apprehension.

  ‘I’ve only just decided.’

  ‘To see him what about?’

  ‘I’m not sure until I get there. I’m leaving everything to chance.’

  ‘Will you talk about Norman?’

  ‘If that’s okay with you.’

  ‘It is,’ she said, uncertain.

  ‘What progress have you made yourself?’

  ‘I’ve received notification from the Council,’ she said. ‘They’ve passed the complaints back to the Preliminary Screener. Good thing or bad, I can’t decide. I’m waiting their decision. It’s more likely the Proceedings Committee will ask to see me. This according to Symonds.’

  ‘How about the detective?’

  ‘I’m having to hurry him on. He’s followed him to two appointments. One to Isaacson. One to someone I’ve never heard of. He thinks there may be others. He knows a goldmine when he sees one. I’m paying him over the odds, though Symonds recommended him.’

  ‘Who recommended Symonds?’

  ‘Colleagues.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘For God’s sake, you’re not getting suspicious yourself?’

  ‘I wondered. Norman must have followed me here, at some time. I am, I assume, part of the equation.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ She sounded relieved. ‘I’ll get to the bottom of this or sink. As for Isaacson, watch your back.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure he’s as tricky as you make out. He sounds tricky, but curiously isn’t. I’m sure, if he isn’t nuts, which must be a possibility, he’s harmless.’

  ‘In the sixties, when I first heard of him,’ she said, ‘he was known affectionately as Mic Isaacson. Psychiatry without the doctorial manner. A companionable, no-nonsense, down-to-earth, no-pill-required agenda. Then, after his seminal The Sequencing of Sexual Behaviour, apes back into fashion, collusional patterning, he was more widely known as Micky Isaacson, something of an intimate, endearing diminutive, anti-psychiatry’s principal spokesman. Then, after further consolidation with Incest and Family Rites, he became more formally celebrated as M. F. Isaacson. I needn’t go on. He’s simply known as Isaacson now, a throw-away point of reference. Keep your wits about you if he happens to talk about me. God knows what he and Norman, or Cavendish, are up to.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think it’s anything other than what we already know, or, at least, suspect,’ he said.

  ‘When will I see you?’

  He registered the plaintive note in her voice.

  ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I’ve seen him,’ he said. ‘There is absolutely no reason to worry.’

  ‘Are you going on the tube?’ she said.

  ‘I’d intended to,’ he said.

  ‘Take care of that, too,’ she told him, after a relevant pause.

  It was Isaacson himself who opened the door: in shirtsleeves and a pullover plainly too small to accommodate his curiously distorted body, the trousers uneasily suspended below the waist, the shirt protruding in the gap between, a cigarette alight, the smoke of which he waved away with the cigarette-holding hand as he preceded Maddox down the hall, calling over his shoulder, ‘Good of you to come,’ enquiring, as they reached the door into the front room, ‘Do you want tea? We’d better get the order in,’ Maddox declining, Isaacson closing the door behind them, indicating the couch, ‘Sit,’ crossing to the collapsed armchair by the fireplace, sinking down, groaning, between its rug-covered arms.

  The familiar springs once again indented Maddox’s back and thighs: swivelling in the couch, he faced Isaacson to his left.

  ‘I don’t normally see anyone as quickly as this,’ Isaacson said. ‘It had better be something important. Though what’s important?’ he added, before Maddox could reply. ‘Fuck all, at the moment. How about you?’

  ‘I wondered what your conclusions were after my previous visit,’ Maddox said.

  He shook his head, looking at him, however, with genuine surprise, his strangely contorted features suddenly enlivened. He gestured to the wall behind Maddox’s back.

  Turning, he saw that the paintings previously hanging there had been removed: stained wall-covering indicated their irregular positions, hooks still protruding from the plaster.

  ‘The Old Philistinism.’ Isaacson waved his cigarette, the smoke spiralling above his head.

  ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘Burnt.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Every time I looked at them they reminded me of you. I’ve been looking for a reasonable excuse to dispose of them for over forty years. Until you came along I didn’t have one. I would say I was waiting for the licence. Good?’

  ‘Good.’ A definitive response, he assumed, was what Isaacson was after.

  ‘I’ve hardly slept a wink since I burnt the fucking things. Pissed all over me, you did. What punishment have you lined up this time?’

  ‘Is this the reverse therapy that people go on about?’ he asked.

  ‘What reverse therapy? And who,’ Isaacson enquired, ‘goes on about it?’

  ‘My partner,’ Maddox said.

  ‘You’ve mentioned her before. Been called before the NMC by one or more of her clients.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Heard any more?’

  ‘She has.’

  ‘Is that why you rang?’

  ‘No.’ A moment later, he added, ‘I went to see Taylor, this one-time student of mine.’

  ‘In good shape?’

  ‘Not really.’ He paused, readjusting the springs beneath him. ‘He’s putting on weight. Talks abstractly. Appears to be retreating into dementia. If not already there. Asks for my support.’

  ‘What’s your complaint?’

  ‘I’ve little to offer.’

  ‘He evidently thinks you have.’

  The cloud of smoke thickened above Isaacson’s head.

  ‘You don’t mind if I smoke?’ he added.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Cancer. Plus heart condition. Apart from that.’ He waved his hand. ‘Nicotine works wonders. It’s the delivery by inhalation that causes the problem. Once solved there’s no reason we shouldn’t live a relatively contented life.’

  ‘He’s changed his name to Peter.’

  ‘What was it before?’

  ‘Eric.’

  Isaacson glanced at the blank wall behind Maddox’s back. ‘S’hardly worth the effort. You’re not called Peter, by any chance?’

  ‘Matthew.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Identification with the saint,’ Maddox suggested.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cockerel.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Betrayal.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘As a prelude, I believe, to killing himself. I rather got the impression he invited me in order to be certain. And to put the warders off their guard. Even suggesting I come again. It was, after all, his original intention.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he can’t change his mind.’

  ‘Can’t live with the thought of what he’s done.’

  ‘Can’t live without it, either. How about you? Any similar persuasion?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head.

  ‘But, then, like him, you can’t be sure.’

  Isaacson stubbed out his cigarette, leaning to the hearth to do so, then, reaching into the recesses of the chair beneath him, produced another, together with a box of matches. ‘As your renamed collegiate chum no doubt is finding out. Go down with a smile. If not.’ Lighting the cigarette, he threw the match towards the hearth.

  ‘He’s been moved to a town where I was at school,’ he said.

  ‘Has a resonance,’ Isaacson suggested.

  ‘It integrates him more closely with my past. It’s that, I suspect, I came to see you about.’

  ‘Not much of an excuse,’ Isaacson said, and added, ‘Taylor is an effect. The cause, we assume, must lie elsewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You tell me. It’s my time you’re wasting, otherwise,’ he said. ‘I’m only here to listen.’ Having waited for Maddox to respond, he added, ‘Did you dislike the paintings as much as you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wondered.’

  ‘Ridding yourself of them gives you the opportunity,’ Maddox said, ‘to start again.’

  ‘Generous of you to say so.’ Hoisting one thigh with both hands, Isaacson laid it across the other, massaging the upper knee, then, more clumsily, the one below it. ‘As for Peter, we’re obliged, in the end, to enquire who gives a fuck? A great deal of time and money, and, in your case, distraction, would be saved if he went ahead with what he intended. I’m not here to save life, as I explained on your previous visit. What do you think? As Daniel, our confrère, might have asked.’

  ‘How well did you know him?’

  ‘Hardly at all. At the time. He and his father were patients of my father, along with several diplomats from the Swedish Embassy. He and my father got on well, not least because of a common interest in pictures. My father had a modest collection. It was because of them, I sometimes think, he refused to leave. Along with my mother. A suspicion on my part. Nevertheless, because Dan could provide me with papers, they insisted I should. False documentation, as it turned out, but it got me to Belgium. From there a prearranged passage to Britain. I’d asked to go to America. I wanted to become an actor.’

  He studied Maddox through a thickening cloud of smoke, having spoken, at intervals, with the cigarette in his mouth, other times exhaling, thoughtfully, towards the ceiling.

  ‘What else do you think I ought to tell you? Nothing about contracts. I took all that on board without saying a word.’

  ‘I apologise for that,’ Maddox said.

  ‘It’s probably why you came. Indentured. To whom? To do what? The source, you might say, of all your problems. Doctors often complain that the commonest characteristic of their patients is a tendency not to reveal the purpose of their visit until they are about to leave. As for contracts, you got all that from Laycock.’

  ‘I probably did.’

  ‘Laycock got it from Donne. “No man is an island”. Unless you’re a woman.’

  His strange, misshapen body was readjusted in the chair.

  ‘The individual, per se, does not exist. What you,’ he went on, ‘are struggling to confound.’

  ‘Mistakenly?’ Maddox enquired.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘I knew Laycock. He died in 1955. In Battersea. Neglected. The sort of genius the English occasionally throw up. Blake. Bunyan. Angels seen in trees. Something so obvious it scarcely needs remarking.

  ‘He influenced you,’ Maddox suggested.

  ‘He gave a lecture at the UCL Medical School. Elderly. Inconspicuous. Talked of his encounters with Freud, Jung and Adler. Was the first to point out they worked in threes, consistent with early mythology. Three Graces. Three Sisters. Three Brothers. Three Wise Men. Id, ego, superego. Premiss, antithesis, synthesis. Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three a mystical number. “The Fallacy of the Trinity”, his catchy title. Disassembled what was then the whole of psychoanalysis. He’d been doing it for years, no one taking any notice. Couldn’t answer some of the questions because of his hearing. Used it, I thought, to avoid the meretricious. As for “corporate presence” and the jargon he invented, long before his time, “we are our relationships” the theme tune of the fifties. As it is,’ he blew out a cloud of smoke, ‘it was a method of perceiving, whereas invariably he was criticised for it being the perceived itself. I found it useful when I came to write on incest, still the most unmentioned, if not unmentionable element of everyday family life, nuclear or otherwise, maritally sanctioned or not. Fucking,’ he continued, ‘is a serious effect. From it,’ he concluded, ‘everything else flows.’