‘“The Process” was what?’ Maddox enquired.

  ‘You’ll have to ask him. More of a label than anything else. Individuation a Cartesian myth. We live under the illusion of individuality. In effect, corporately, we are the one thing. Laycock, its proposer, was taken for a fascist. Though brain biology, as I understand it, appears to be proving him right. Something, culturally, of an endorsement of your views on what you at one time referred to contemptuously as “Cartesian art”. The dying phase of which, in conceptualism, we are seeing now.’

  Maddox, for a while, didn’t respond, watching Viklund, whose smile, while speaking, had scarcely faded.

  ‘You got him out of Berlin,’ he finally said, adding, ‘Isaacson.’

  ‘My father did. His parents, foolishly, refused to leave. They were under surveillance and thought they wouldn’t make it. With Michael, their youngest child, they thought there’d be a chance. Not least by their appearing to be going about their normal business. His father was, amongst other things, a doctor at the embassy. They tried later, however, and didn’t succeed. I was merely a go-between. My father, by that time, had been moved to Rome.’

  Viklund held his chest: his smile had faded, his breathing suddenly heavy, his cheeks unnaturally shadowed, almost yellow in the afternoon light.

  ‘There’s something I’ve written,’ he added, ‘which I’d like you to take. It may start you off. If not in the direction you intended. Who knows? You may come back to it. See what you think.’

  He indicated a foolscap envelope lying on the table beside the tea-tray and his chair. ‘Two items, not unconnected. Something you might bite on. It may even change your mind on Taylor. Each time we look to the past we inevitably rewrite it. A Second View, I thought you might call it. Or, what was that title you once suggested? As it happened.’

  ‘Lower case.’

  ‘A half attempt at something. Even if, at one time, you thought it was the whole.’

  ‘Did you know Laycock?’ Maddox asked, suspecting this was where Viklund might be leading.

  ‘In there.’ He gestured at the envelope. ‘I went to him as a patient. He, too, was recommended. By Michael. I don’t suppose he mentioned that.’

  Maddox shook his head.

  ‘Discreet, surprisingly, in some things. Not, unsurprisingly, in others.’

  ‘How did you find Laycock?’

  ‘He was living in Battersea. Neglected. Short of funds. In a rundown apartment, looked after by his wife who was blind. They communicated, much of the time, with bells. More of a game they’d invented, with an elemental edge. The sound of a bell used frequently has something of a ritual about it. It was shortly after the war. My father had been posted to London. I’d decided already to make it my home. It was one reason why he came. He thought I was disturbed. It was at his suggestion I got in touch with Michael. His family name was Froy, Isaacson his mother’s family name, and that of the relative he came to stay with in England. Similarly Michael. His given name was Avram.’ He paused. ‘That’s how I got to Laycock.’

  Maddox was silent: the sound of the girl singing somewhere below them, in the kitchen, came faintly to the room.

  ‘To what purpose?’ he finally enquired.

  ‘To get what had happened into perspective. One I was lacking at the time. In reality it was a question of faith. Art, as I’d come to see it, particularly the period in which, by that time, I’d absorbed myself, had been ravished by religion. I really went to Laycock to ask about God. In the process about myself. I wish I had him now to refer to. I wonder what he would have made of this? At that time, because of our neutrality, I’d rather viewed the war as a spectator event. Spectatorship, so-called, particularly of an event of that kind, unprecedented, making up its horrendous rules as it went along, carpet-bombing, fire-bombing, the nuclear bomb, the camps, detachment and involvement a schizoid process. I rather used Florentine painting to recover my faith. I rather used Laycock to discover what that faith was about. Until the war started, for instance, I’d not focused on anything. Pleasure apart. My parents bought pictures. Something they had in common with Michael’s parents. Sold long ago. I’ve never been one for possessions, unlike Ilse, who regards them as indivisible from something she calls “home”. I’ve never wanted to belong. Or anything, for that matter, to belong to me. Like children. Even the dog, as you see, I often resist.’

  He shrugged. ‘I became acquainted, because of my parents, with a lot of artists. And writers. Particularly writers. I also saw a lot of disagreeable and singularly unforgettable sights. Rather like your experience on the tube station platform. Something that, seemingly, came from elsewhere but, in reality, from within oneself. What you might call, in your case, Taylor’s nightmare. As it was,’ he waved his hand, in a characteristic gesture, ‘a revised view, not only of myself but of everyone, I thought was called for. Michael, who at that point was still at medical school, and with whom I’d renewed contact, recommended Laycock, who he’d got to know while a student. I found him impressive. Unperturbed. Something of a prophet with an other-worldly voice. That of someone who had witnessed more than might reasonably be accounted for. Been to the summit of the mountain and come back to report. In his own peculiar way, as I withdrew, or so it seemed, from life, aghast, no longer able to make an excuse for it, or offer even the most spurious recommendation, he turned me round and pointed me back. Despite the neglect he’d suffered, he saw life not as a challenge or a gift, not in any moral terms at all, “rather like God, in that respect”, he told me, but, blankly, as the only thing there is. “That gives it,” he said, “its definition. You never know what it might come up with. In addition to which,” he drew his hand across his throat, “you can end it any time you wish. Another admirable property.” He had an extremely unfashionable and, at the time, much criticised view of human nature, and this, for my money, and at that time, seemed to run directly counter to it. Of course, it was nothing of the sort. He was offering nostrums to a very young and extremely privileged fellow who had been dismayed to discover that, until then, despite appearances to the contrary, he had been living on the edge of things. It was, I realised afterwards, the providence of suicide that finally persuaded me. That, and his refusal to see existence as anything other than an indivisible whole. All those things from which we instinctively recoil. A curiously religious ethic. “Disassociate at your peril”, another of his dictums, after which he would enquire, “What do you associate with ‘peril’?” I liked him. I saw him for a year. In the end we chatted, like you and Michael, as if I’d dropped by for tea. Which, in most respects, I had. He needed the money. I needed reassurance. Humanity, as I then saw it, not merely possessed but was the instrument of its own destruction, the process already in place. But for him, I’d never have ended up at the Courtauld. Or the Drayburgh. Or the College. You and I would never have met, nor, let’s face it, experienced much of what we have. Your brother, by the way, rang me since we last spoke.’

  He waited for Maddox’s surprise to express itself, more with a raising of his arm than any other gesture.

  ‘He wanted my view on how you were. I told him, confidently, much improved.’

  ‘Did he make any comment himself?’

  Maddox, once more, was examining the room: the Matthew Smith above the fireplace: a misplaced enthusiasm for, if not a northerly misconception of – what? a Mediterranean exuberance, mentally putting it and his brother together, as if Paul had, at that moment, entered the door.

  ‘He said you gave him the impression of someone reading a book on a train who, absorbed for a very long time – a lifetime, in fact – looks up to be confused by what he sees. Where is he? Where is he going? For what purpose? He thinks of you as a “confounded man”, meaning, I assume, not of this world, or, if you are, not in agreement with it. “He’s accepted nothing,” he said, hoping, as a last resort, that Isaacson might set you right.’

  ‘I don’t agree with the diagnosis,’ Maddox said. ‘But he probably has.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Irrelevance,’ he said. ‘Something to that effect. Disengagement. Charm of his sort leads to connection. Galvanised by example, rather than dictum or direction. Probably the same went for Laycock and you.’

  ‘Probably,’ Viklund said. ‘Hard to gauge how much influence these encounters have. Ineffective, seemingly, at first. Then something shows on the surface, perceptions and receptivity change, to the point where you suspect magic has intervened. Your magic. Something struggled for and achieved oneself. It has all the appearance of being yours. As for Taylor, I should stay plugged in. Apart from a residual curiosity, you never know where it might lead. As with Laycock, “face the front”.’

  He had begun to tire: his tea remained untouched, his head laid back against the chair. Finally, his eyes had closed. ‘Maybe I should rest,’ he said. ‘I’ve talked too long. Let’s meet again. Take the essays. Which is what they are,’ gesturing at the manila envelope. ‘Tell me what you think. I won’t get up. Give me your hand,’ Maddox standing over him, his thumb seized in that curious grasp, the eyes briefly opening. ‘Nothing unusual,’ he added. ‘I often drop off like this,’ Ilse, whom Maddox called out to from the hall, coming up once more from the kitchen to see him to the door. ‘Come soon,’ she said, embracing him. ‘There’s so much, Dan thinks, for you to do,’ gesturing at the envelope as if she knew its contents.

  It was, he reflected, walking away, not unlike his last encounter with his father, even the same question rising spontaneously to his mind, ‘What shall I do now?’ – the delight which had greeted him on his arrival, the climactic, or so it had seemed, animation, followed abruptly by tiredness and a desire he should leave. He wondered if it would be the same for his children: the unLaycockian sensation of the solitariness, amounting to the abandonment, of each existence, the suggestion that union is illusory, that, as in birth, ‘everything separates, distinction is all’, a phrase, he recalled, Taylor, much given to statement as well as insight, had underlined in one of his essays and which he had queried at the time. Perhaps, after all, he knows more than I do – more, even, than I ever will know, arriving home to find the envelope a distraction, his thoughts refocused, again to the north.

  Sitting in the kitchen, opening the envelope with a knife, he discovered two files of paper, separately secured, reading the introductory paragraphs to each to realise both were sequential accounts of Viklund’s early career, not least his years in Berlin, Rome and Paris before and during the Second World War: Camus, Mrs Picabia, Guttuso, Sartre, Malraux, Breton, the encounters alternating with descriptions of journeys to Lisbon, Stockholm, one to London (his first: a piano recital, Myra Hess, at the National Gallery), the mention of packages carried but not the contents – he ringing Viklund to leave a message with Ilse expressing his appreciation, Viklund himself, however, coming on the line.

  ‘I’m awake. Sorry to have dropped off. No reflection on you. I rather wish I’d extended them. They were written at the time I saw Laycock. He, by the way, very much a League of Nations man. The first to suggest, in the thirties, when he saw the way things – inevitably, in his view – were going, that Jerusalem, for instance, should be declared a Universal City. Very much a confirmation of his “indifferentiation”, as I understood it. Didn’t get far, as we’ve seen, but you’ll get a disciple’s feeling for the unity of art and social progress, the latest, if perverse expression of which, I take it, from what you’ve said, is Taylor. Start off in hope, with Laycock and Viklund – Isaacson, too, if you wish – and end up with your portent of what’s to come.’

  ‘I take the hint,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure, not having read it, I recognise the agenda.’

  ‘Pragmatism in lieu of ideology. See, when you fit the pieces together, and end up with Taylor, what a faithless enterprise it has become.’

  ‘An evangelical mission, after all,’ Maddox said, suddenly subdued. ‘I’m beginning to lose faith in faithlessness and, partly because of Taylor, more certainly because of Simone, I’m registering something different. Conversion, perhaps,’ he added.

  ‘Not to anything prescribed. Find your own as it happened. See what I was like as a youth. Measure it with what you feel at present. The train arrives at the station, the preoccupied reader looks up. Immediately come to mind the primary questions.’

  Viklund’s voice, reanimated, just as quickly faded.

  ‘That’s all,’ he said, ‘I have to say. Can’t stick my chin out too far, particularly in your direction.’

  They were the last words he heard from Viklund: a phone call later that evening from Ilse told him that his friend had been taken into intensive care, at University College Hospital – ironically, where Isaacson had undergone his medical training – and that he was too ill to be visited. ‘He collapsed,’ she said, ‘as he watched the six o’clock news. I think, though he insists on watching it, it gets him down. “I’ve always been one for a certain kind of realism,” he says, whenever I complain. What does that mean? Is there a certain kind? I’ve always believed there was only one.’

  ‘If unknowable,’ Maddox said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised you should come to that conclusion. Someone with your sensibility, Matt. As you’re aware, he sees you very much as his successor. He’s always hoped, particularly in the later years, when his mind has wandered, you’ll be kind to him. He’s taken up many of his father’s attitudes which, throughout his life, have meant so much to him. “Neutrality is mine,” he sometimes complains, “by second nature. Even God is neutral in my pantheistic heaven. I rather regret that he isn’t.”’ She added, swiftly, ‘I’m not sure what that means, either. The man I’ve been married to all these years has remained a mystery to me from the start. And now, I suppose, I shall never know. Other than he was a mystery. “He divested himself,” he once said, “in art.”’

  The following morning, lying beside Simone, turning on the radio by the bed, he heard the announcement of Viklund’s death, a testament to his national and international reputation. ‘Celebrity at last,’ he said to Simone. ‘I wonder if he used his pill,’ the rest of the day, having returned home, taken up with answering the telephone – a piece, dictated, for Devonshire’s arts pages (‘So you need me, after all. Do you think I’m up to this?’), requests from other papers, a radio and a television interview, the former done over the telephone, the latter in the street (Berenice and Isaiah incredulous at their window), he finally leaving the house, having spoken at length to Ilse, and returning to Simone’s. ‘No one knows I’m here,’ reaching her in the evening, crawling into her bed, pulling the covers over him, dismayed by his reaction. ‘Somehow Viklund, Taylor, Isaacson, Laycock, you and I, are all bound up in this together. But I’m not sure why,’ his thoughts moving on, once more, to his walking around his father’s bier, his curious, unheralded lamentation, ‘What shall I do now?’

  Yet again, aircraft were lumbering noisily overhead, the guttural, crackling roar of their engines, Simone, the next morning, after he had spoken to Ilse again, bringing up a letter to where he sat on the roof, standing by him as he read it, a summons for her to appear at a yet-to-be-decided date before the Preliminary Proceedings Committee of the Medical Council.

  ‘I’ve rung Symonds,’ she said. ‘He’s convinced the charges will be dismissed. At the worst I’ll get off with a warning. Evidently Norman has gone to a newspaper with the story.’

  He was gazing up at her, perplexed by her composure. Smilingly, she added, ‘At the worst, we can serve an injunction. Norman’s evidently approached them with similar claims before. It appears to be a pastime. What a sinister fellow he is. Is the world made up of people like that?’

  ‘What a curious question for someone like you to ask. You should be telling me,’ he added.

  The bell had rung in the house below.

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ she said, retaking the letter. ‘Are you staying? We can talk in an hour, if you’re prepared to wait.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring Ilse again. She’s not inclined to be visited, but at some point I’ll have to go down.’

  Yet he remained on the roof, watching the aircraft, the birds, swooping between the eaves, the flowers, the insects, getting up at one point to ease his back, his legs, his neck, yawning, stretching, his thoughts moving on from Ilse to Viklund, to his father, his mother, to his devastation by a force which only now was he beginning to understand, and, finally, restoratively, to Simone: the way she had chosen to ring Symonds before showing him the letter, her restraint in keeping him abreast of what was going on, not only her need but her ability to stand alone – another unLaycockian gesture to match a similar impulse of his own.

  Viklund dead, his mother, his father, Taylor’s wife and children – sometime soon, presumably, Taylor himself: hadn’t he been signalling that before he left: or would there be further trips to that northern town? And Viklund: hadn’t he offered him an identical engagement, the line between a life worth living and a life worth not, Laycock, Isaacson, an evolving pattern, one which he would have the privilege to complete, a tenuous juxtaposition of meaning with meaning – surprised, at that instant, to see the cat start up by his feet where evidently it had lain (he’d almost trodden on it), he reaching down to lift it, placing it in his lap, sitting there, stroking it – an unusual custom for him – aware, once more, of the flowers, their movement in the breeze, the incongruity of their appearance amongst the roofs, the oddity, too, of his own situation: the chimney-stacks, the aerials, the insects, the birds – the aircraft, forming and reforming, amidst vapour, above his head, a confirmation of something which, elusively, refused to be identified.