ist dies etwa der Tod?

  Two had died since his joining the group, Alex, seemingly, about to join them – a gaunt, lean, angular figure, with a sharply featured, fleshless face, dilated cheeks, brow furrowed laterally and vertically above pale, almost colourless eyes, a soldier, traumatised by Dunkirk: preponderance of women, two statutory men, the day beginning with a solicitous, enquiring, cautious conversation, prompted and sustained by Richard: sandals on his feet, a sporting, genial, enterprising man, hair sprouting in confusion above and below his head, features quizzical, suspended, furrowed: ‘How are you this morning, Anna?’ a slight, crepuscular, apprehensive figure, bulbous eyes protruding from a tiny face, her posture in her chair erect: evacuated, as a child, from Breslau, her origins finally a cipher: ‘Judith?’

  ‘Very well, Richard,’ beneath her breath, a slim, white-haired, full-breasted woman, in her youth (a photograph previously passed around) a celebrated beauty: a sensuous, appealing, enquiring face: had shot, in her youth, a British soldier, had never left Jerusalem until her marriage (resentment that the camps not part of her legacy: pain – distress – of a diurnal nature), she, like the majority of the others, like Maddox, living alone.

  ‘Sally?’ a sprightly, bird-like presence, inquisitive, close-set eyes, companionable, contentious: ‘Not too good. I had a bad night.’

  ‘Bad nights are normal,’ Beth, twisting in her chair. ‘Don’t you take pills?’

  ‘Too many.’

  ‘I get up and read.’

  ‘I listen to the radio,’ insomnia a common thread, Maddox dismayed to be included, his geriatric group pre-dating his first visit to Simone: a thoughtful collation, abandoned if not by relatives, friends, their own cohesiveness.

  ‘How are you, Matthew?’

  ‘Pretty good.’ Never inclined to say less, courtship, in his case, unlike with the others, starting anew.

  Déraciné: off the shelf, back in use.

  When the tea, the coffee and exchanges had been completed they filed, separately and with difficulty, for the most part, into an adjoining room: a narrow, light-filled interior with windows looking onto a central lawn surrounded by and interspersed with beds of flowers. Tables, chairs, cupboards and easels were formally arranged in a classroom fashion; paints, already mixed in cake tins, stood on the tables, brushes, pastels, pencils, charcoal and crayons set out, too. The previous week’s exercises had been pinned to the door, a half-circle of chairs confronting them. Melissa, a stout, broadly featured, middle-aged woman, vivaciously dressed in a patchwork skirt and a maroon blouse, was seated on the central chair, indicating to each of them as they came in that they might care to take their places beside her.

  Maddox, far gone in thought, took in the images before him: a bird, its beak bigger than its body, a boat, appearing about to sink, a horse with, seemingly, five legs, a baby, lying in a crib, the edges of which were engulfed by flames, several figures being fired upon by others, a garden comprised entirely of flowers: last week’s instruction (differentiated strictly, by Melissa, from suggestion) had been to draw the first thing that had entered their heads.

  ‘What do you think was in your mind when you painted your animal, Ida?’

  ‘I’ve always liked animals,’ a swarthy, muscular, working-class woman, pre-empted from an overdose by the unexpected arrival of a son-in-law: paint, fortitude, resourcefulness: pills, heights: the apartment, in Beth’s case, in Vienna, the jackboots on the stairs, the humiliation of her father, her mother, her sisters, none of whom she saw again (grief interminable at their departure): Anna, he reflected, scarcely alive, three attempts at suicide; pale, thin – skeletal – holding a brush, when she painted, in a tremoring hand, transferring colours from cake tin to paper, watery washes indicating a flower-bed (an unvarying image), the proportions of a grave.

  Nor could he accustom himself to Alex’s soldierly horrors, resuming in old age (he was eighty-seven): his picture of a figure sheltering in a cave, its features, like its limbs, distorted, a figure, in a previous week’s drawing, falling down a cliff, another crushed beneath a rock, a face, its eyes bolting from its head, graphically, linearly, weekly depicted.

  Criticisms by others, a criticism of himself.

  Meanwhile, at the top of the hill, Simone analysing her analysands – her engagés, her therapees – a line of exclusivity marked by the space between their two confronting chairs, while he, fulfilling his National Health role ‘for the older patient’, submitted himself to a routine which he admired – to the point of idealisation – but the efficacy of which, he suspected, he hadn’t entirely grasped. At intervals – invariably at lunchtimes – he would be called in to see Kavanagh, the presiding consultant, a genial, companionable, youthful figure, in shirtsleeves and jeans – not unlike, in his informality, the charge-nurse Richard: discussion of his medication – dothiepin, thioridazine – he unsure if his behaviour were merely consistent with that of the world around, an irresistible urge to destroy himself a not unreasonable proposition, his curiosity, in this respect, vividly ignited: what was it like? was that – is this – the limit of endurance, he, otherwise, a chemical aberration?

  His days, as he’d known for some time, were numbered.

  He was, on the other hand, discovering his past, reminded by Plutarch of the significance of depression in the lives of Socrates, Plato, Heracles and Lysander: anxiety, terror (Carlyle, Tolstoy, Michelangelo), an integral part of any excelling view of human nature, dismay – despair – as an equitable rejoinder to the perversity of nature cyclically destroying itself, as healthy a sign, he concluded, as any.

  Without dread, nothing is real

  without psychosis, sanity unconvincing

  absit invidia

  absento reo

  Of what, after all, was reality comprised? an awareness, subliminally as well as otherwise, of what was going on at present, as well as what had preceded it, and the invisible and unknowable extension of the same that not only went on for ever but, a moral proposition, went on for good. Pain, otherwise, of a, so far, exclusively mental sort, had produced little if any further illumination. How could he absorb himself in a reclamatory process which eluded his understanding? How, in short, could he believe in something that possibly didn’t exist?

  All his relationships, he could safely assume, were based on a perception of himself which provided little if any insight into anything other than what had been arranged: that system of beliefs (paternity, loyalty, dedication) which had sustained him to the point where, consistency alone the dominant feature, he had cracked – in a fashion: his fashion (come to that, in Ida’s and Anna’s fashion, too). He was, he had been, overcome by a sense of fear – alarm, dread – which emanated, or appeared to do so, from all inanimate as well as animate matter, a fear that broached the bounds not only of all he had previously known (a lot) but all that previously he might have imagined.

  He was, on the other hand, intact; as a consequence, his awareness of the past amounted to little more than a sense of separation: there it lay, here he was, between the two a gulf which no amount of speculation would allow him to cross, pain an intermediary between one thought and the next, one feeling and another. He was, as he’d come to regard it, not only within but the instrument of a process which had, in its exclusivity, little to do with what previously he had considered – he might have considered, however tentatively – to be himself.

  Or, as he was coming to propound it, his self: there ‘it’ lay (all he had been, and was – unwittingly, for the most part); here he was, divorced from ‘it’ completely.

  Somewhere there was an image, not necessarily of himself, but of a gnarled and suffering creature which, having ventured outwards all its life, in its final days had returned to its past: a forgotten, an unconsidered, at least unconsidered until now to be relevant past, one which came back to it in ‘snatches’ – bouts, spasms – paroxysmal, unsolicited, uncalled-for, a reassertion of something which, in his own particular experience, had attempted to hurl him in front of a train (to ‘execute’ him, he had no doubt), the equivalent, he had imagined, of that force which had tempted Christ to hurl himself from the peak of a mountain (no suggestion of salvation in his own case whatsoever).

  He was, he recalled, into reverie, persuasion, reflection, opposed to dispersal, dissemblance, obtuseness, doubt: singularity, in his case, governed all, his achievements – struggles, confrontations (failures, even: he might have learnt from those) – had come to nothing. Thoughts of ending it – since his tube train encounter – had absorbed him completely, interspersed as they were with a longing – a sceptical, rear-guarded, almost posthumous longing – for Simone – all the while composing requests, reports, pronouncements, the ‘what-if?’ at the beginning of every line. He was, he’d discovered, in the process of making amends: a life unlived, or, in his more recent speculations, lives unlived. Where was he now? where had he been? a reasonable expression, his enquiries, of his variegated gifts: no peaceful expiration in a bed, more the albatross brought down at the apogee of its flight, or, in his case, in the midst of its final, fluttering descent.

  This was how it happened – an event with a name but without a prescription – he had been a success, art a synonym for life: known as as known by: where he had been others were inclined – were persuaded, were cajoled, were encouraged – were challenged (were finally obliged) – to follow.

  There was, after all, a code he’d always lived by (he had always unwittingly subscribed to): it had something to do with a forgotten time: not consciously forgotten, merely set aside, initially, he suspected, for examination, analysis, reflection – relevances, records, evidence of some sort, an elusive configuration (it had the potential to acquire a shape), elements within as well as without, he the agent if not the organ of destruction – recalling, at that instant, crouching with his mother in a cupboard beneath the stairs: a sense of upheaval, finally of terror, expectation, the oscillating moan of aircraft overhead. And then, out of this excitation, the screeching, he assumed, of an object, increasingly louder, in its invisible descent: the vibration of the ground: the same vibration inside his head: something indisposed to his isolation, specific, spectacular, all-powerful, conclusive – his mother, in his recollection, wearing a nightdress underneath a coat, her ankles bare above the wool lining of her slippers: the whiteness of the skin, the blueness of the veins: her silent face, her silent stare, an abstracted, brooding, melancholic look which, years later, he recognised as something of his own, flesh, blood and bone, in his imagination, spattering their enclosure: whereat, whereas, wherefore, where born? what circumstance? what formative agenda? body tuned to a new awareness, he prospecting a way ahead, disarmingly engaged by the one behind, shaped not by events but speculation.

  Alex had drawn a figure astride a bomb, descending at an angle; similarly, Beth had drawn a child being stoned on its way to school, the stoners anonymous, stick-like figures, the child, female, vividly in colour. Anna had drawn a garden, as ever: muted, pallid, pastel, mild. He who had recently lectured on della Francesca, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Uccello, Signorelli (Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Cimabue), who had stood for hours – days, in his youth – in front of the San Francesca, Arezzo frescoes, currently obliged to comment on his own affliction, was reminded that art, aesthetics (he had produced another abstract) were not required: references to Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby by Melissa, Alex’s misfortune, on the other hand, not hard to guess, nor Beth’s Semitic exercise, Anna a wraith, the frailest of creatures, likening her three flower-beds, when invited by Melissa, to a tapestry or curtain, then, prompted more vigorously (‘realistically’) by the therapist – ‘You have attempted to kill yourself three times, Anna’ – responding, kindly, gently, discreetly, ‘I don’t see that at all.’

  Dothiepin, in his case, plus thioridazine for otherwise unmanageable moments, fear purporting to be terror acquiring the upper hand. Meanwhile, in St Albans, the first Anglicised Roman martyr, he, eighteen or so centuries later, sent away with Paul, by mother, father – Uncle Joseph alone demurring (‘they’ll both be safe enough with us’): rugby, cricket, athletics: idiosyncratic buildings which, five decades later, still littered his dreams: collieries with their triangulated heaps, the concertinaed roofs of factories, the rectangular silhouette of mills, the single stems of industrial chimneys, the effulgence of smoke, steam, the lowering clouds swept by and away by the prevailing westerly winds, the gentler, eastern incline of the Pennine escarpment: nosce teipsum: the inference of self-division, ‘thy’ in one place, ‘self’ in another – leading to an impulse to bring the two together, a process, in this instant, conducted by Melissa: ‘we are not here to hide’ (what we know is there), an interval of painting followed by another of analysis, Alex, on this occasion, summoned to account (‘What are you drawing there, Alex?’), ‘A feeling of falling without stop,’ his Scottish accent still lyrically engaged. ‘Plus the certainty of extinction.’

  ‘Is there no escape?’

  ‘None.’

  Not Melissa but the rest dumbfounded: no exit, implied, the other end? the unspoken, communal enquiry, Alex’s pictorial suicide note pinned, oppressively, before them to the inside of the door.

  ‘I’ve had enough of suffering. I want to rest,’ Anna’s gentle eyes turned courteously in their direction.

  ‘We are here for support through awareness,’ Melissa said.

  ‘You could say Alex’s only recourse is to blow his brains out,’ Beth responded.

  ‘Or, his having expressed it, to feel free of it,’ Melissa said.

  ‘I’ve had enough of suffering,’ Anna’s continued rejoinder.

  While he, Maddox, as on previous occasions, with no specific image in mind, had painted, in bright colours – pink, red, blue, juxtaposed against grey – another abstract.

  ‘I see lumps of meat, hanging in a butcher’s shop,’ Melissa said, Maddox not inclined to disagree.

  ‘Having identified a subject it becomes something you can deal with,’ Melissa insisted. ‘Assessing its relevance, or otherwise, puts you in control,’ her attention reverting to the figure astride the descending bomb. ‘Is that your final statement, Alex?’ the tortured eyes, the tortured smile, the tortured nose and ears and brow, the tortured, supplicating, bereft expression which, refracted through an overlying look of deprecation, characterised them all

  malum in se

  all these women, two statutory men, Simone’s endorsement of the same, her sole reservation ‘cerebral awareness not your line’, a lifetime, however, of the same, ‘visceral engagement’ (presumably with her) ‘your only way out’, something he, for his part, endorsed in her

  reductio ad absurdum

  glancing at her watch, Melissa standing. ‘We’ll return to these next week. Judith’s contribution,’ a dormitory of figures lying comatose: dead? asleep? ‘I’m particularly keen to get to,’ adding, ‘Put out the lights, the last one to leave,’ neon strips supplementing the light from the windows, her audience, eyes turning from the paintings on the back of the door to the gap left by the therapist’s departure, their feelings, reactions, thoughts, reflections – aspirations, even – terminally suspended, they returning, a bedraggled line, to the reception room, the room itself prepared for lunch.

  Standing in a queue: the assiduity of the staff, the assiduity of the patients. After eating, they retired to the chairs – newspapers, magazines – and, as the clock on the wall struck two, rose, with varying degrees of alacrity, and returned along the corridor, past the art room, to a smaller room at the opposite end, the charge-nurse, Richard, already there, alert, straight-backed (formalised, his posture, despite the informality of his appearance), his hands cupped upwards – a meditative gesture – in his lap, Stephanie, middle-aged, grey hair cropped short, dark eyes inclined enquiringly towards each entering figure: dark skirt, a high-necked jersey, a fleshless, harrowed, haunted face enlivened only by the light reflected from her glasses, she facing Richard across a by now familiar circle of, in this instance, metal-framed chairs. ‘The silent hour,’ Beth had said, having, on previous occasions, declined to speak, ‘specifically to this character here,’ indicating Stephanie, beside whom, nevertheless, she always sat, their elbows almost touching. ‘Who is using,’ she’d expand each week, ‘everything we say for her PhD.’

  ‘A bit late for her PhD,’ Maddox (invariably) responded, gallantly inclined, pace Simone, towards the austere, dispassionate presence of the psychotherapist, her benignity warily concealed beneath the remoteness of her gaze.

  ‘She’s not having my insights for nothing,’ Beth said.

  ‘In which case, what’s the point in coming?’ Alex enquired.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about personal matters,’ Anna said, a distraught expression, subdued over lunch, reignited.

  ‘What are personal matters?’ Ida, the working-class virago, enquired.

  ‘Family matters,’ Anna said, her walking-stick beside her, seated uncomfortably in the metal-framed chair.

  ‘We all have family matters,’ Judith said. ‘We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t,’ she went on. ‘So what’s the problem?’