‘I’m not talking,’ Anna said, smiling, a courteous expression of withdrawal, bowing her head.

  ‘So what’s the point in coming?’ Alex enquired again, face furrowed, starkly, his hairline descending towards his brows: doubt, perturbation, confusion: the nakedness they each unwittingly revealed.

  ‘The rest of us can talk, in that case,’ Maddox said, Richard and Stephanie significantly silent.

  Formality and intimacy inextricably combined. Had he earned, was he earning, the right to ignore what anyone else might think? enough time gone to make concealment irrelevant, he concluded, the ‘I’ he was engaged with here at last, the responsibility – examining the other faces – devolved to him, this, in reality, the end of the line, not a way forward or back, merely – specifically – a circle of chairs, he examining his reflection alongside Stephanie’s in the window: the severity of the therapist’s expression, the bulbous projection of her nose, a bracing of her lips suggesting an underlying tension: the vista of the garden beyond, he, bowed on his chair, white-haired, framing his reflection against the flower-beds outside, his final glance at Anna, cowed, since her admission, rather than sitting: everything relevant, revealing, connected, as Melissa, earlier, had been keen to point out, once-lived-a-life accounts seeking a refuge, an explanation, requesting a purpose – he returning his stare across the room, Judith, finally, driven into speech, a slow reddening, conspicuous, of brow and cheek – accentuated by the whiteness of her hair: belligerence stored up from her past, her having missed out on Beth’s, Ida’s, Anna’s Holocaustian accreditation, familial insults from half a century before, less than casually intended, obsessively recalled, venomously expanded, the intolerable isolation incurred by subsequent widowhood, the distance of her children: the horror of everything, ‘everything!’, coming to an end.

  The fissures in Alex’s face, the shadows beneath Beth’s eyes, the declivities in Anna’s cheeks, the ascending scale of self-deprecation, animadversion, the oppressiveness of houses, streets (sky: stars: the immutability of nature, the variety of custom no longer a distraction), an account, a summation, he concluded, not drawing them together, driving them, rather, further and further apart.

  From his earliest days a sense of exclusion: something suggested by his father’s cars, their elegant bonnets, mudguards, wheels – pain, in this context, a prerequisite of pleasure: what he had been searching for all his life, his occupation recognised from the start as ‘observer’: the scent of cars, the intoxicating, quaintly animal, certainly exclusive odour of woodwork and leather, metal and oil, petrol and rubber, the infiltrating smell of the engine exhaust: his earliest memory of sitting beside his uncle Joseph, his father’s exotic, macaronic brother, to be driven along an unpaved lane at the back of the house – circling his father’s premises, the dipping and turning of the bonnet against the rutted surface: a sensation of fluidity, motion, lucidity, light, the constant realignment of shape against shape, a frame – the windscreen – transposed, in the end, to art, to line and colour, to Cimabue’s iconographic glow.

  As with Melissa, once the hour was up, Richard and Stephanie rose, the group – startlingly – abandoned, they, left to their own devices, finding their way back to the reception room: tea, biscuits, a desultory conversation – anomalous after the comparative silence, the resistance, the waywardness of the previous hour. Obtuseness: a sea-change in those for whom the ocean never rolled.

  Taxi-cabs for the infirm, the drivers’ bulky figures silhouetted against the outer door.

  3

  It was his habit, on these occasions, returning up the hill to Simone’s, to buy supper in the village, preparing it for when, exhilarated or exhausted, she came up from her room: a pause on the way to check the e-mail, the faxes, the answering machine. Sometimes, however, if she were ‘charged’ (a successful encounter with her final client, customer, patient, analysand) she’d come up directly and embrace him: the fragrance of her hair – even after hours in the room below (smoking in the building not allowed).

  Today he could hear her talking in the hall, evidently to Mrs Beaumont, who hadn’t been in her room when he’d arrived – to realise, in fact, she was speaking on the phone, her voice peremptory, focused, sharp.

  ‘Who was that?’ he enquired when she finally appeared, flushed, offering him her mouth, a brief cessation, or so it seemed, of breathing. ‘An assessment I’ve been waiting for,’ she already in the other room, picking up the phone, having recognised the voice on the answering machine.

  Finally, free, they sat at the table he’d prepared in the sitting-room, by one of the two windows, looking onto the alley-like street, the upper part of the window of the artist’s studio directly opposite. Occasionally, when the weather was fine, they ate on the roof, enclosed by plants and overlooked by attic windows, ‘What sort of day?’ a mutual enquiry, she disinclined to talk about her clients unless and until persuaded, a reluctance which, in recent weeks, had been decreasing, provoked invariably, over this interval, by questions recalling their past: Dennis, a theatre director (‘schizoid, like many of his profession’), Ruebeck (Claire), an actress only ‘fulfilled’ in front of a camera and, more fragmentally, on stage (‘what do I do with the rest of my time?’) ‘entertaining reality’, for her, diminishing all the while. And Maddox: what did he come up with? familiar, his account of Semitic grief, Celtic nightmare (‘Alex reducing himself to the obscurity of a Scotch mist’). In this instance, however, face to face, he was aware of her fatigue: the ringing of the phone below, the varying voices on the answering machine: male, female, predominantly male, she finally turning the volume down. Popularity, accessibility, put her under stress as well as, paradoxically, reassuring her, her relative silence on this occasion indicating a subject she was disinclined to talk about.

  Much in both their lives was hypothetical, his principal thesis which, like she with much of her work, in regard to him, he kept from her, focused on his self-named, long-standing and much abused ‘New Philistinism’ agenda – he suspended in a curious position for an academic, as a polemicist, a hack (an agitator, at extremes) when, in reality, at this stage, all he had wanted was a quiet life: articles for the Critical Review, the Atlantic Quarterly (he not admired in the United States), the arts pages of the broadsheets, the arts pages of the weekly magazines: propositions, aversions, a preternatural disinclination to take anything for granted, an inability not to provoke, qualities of character, of native disposition extended in correspondence columns over several weeks, art subsumed by mechanical procedures his unvarying line – ‘The Mercantile Aesthetic’ another of his themes – that which had dominated the visual arts in the second half of the century, specifically, in the Anglo-Saxon ‘mind’.

  He was provocative, contentious, challenging: he was also, by any as well as recent reckoning, nuts: if only his enemies could see him – life-class, on the one hand, psychiatric day clinic, on the other: art and lunacy ineffably combined.

  He’d credited himself, as he’d grown older, with a sensibility enhanced by common sense; almost, conceivably, by a common touch, a quality he’d associated with his experience – his earliest experience – of cars: a particular car: its shape, its colour, its sheen, an aphrodisiacal, or so it had seemed, aroma – a cultural aroma, he’d finally decided, of a highly exclusive kind.

  Machines, however, were one thing, aesthetics another, he having crossed the gap between (‘Product and Sensibility’, another of his projects), an elderly creature, his skin, like his hair, his bones, his muscle – his sexuality – in terminal decline (impotence, the threat of, waiting in the wings). And then, of course, his mind: something elusive there, a presence urging him on, at one time, to good things – now, the same, to something significantly not: on the one hand, suspicion, on the other, humiliation, his weapon against complacency, subdued by as well as subject to something even worse, women in extremis his numerically superior companions, a few male eccentrics, not unlike himself, thrown in, each alternately galvanised and denatured by a need, an appetite, a hunger, a stimulus they could scarcely understand: he no longer called the shots (made legitimate demands), an image memorably re-occurring in many of his dreams that of a ship, unaware of its destination but convinced it had one, slowly going down.

  They transferred from their chairs at the table to the couch facing the television, his arm around her shoulder: war, starvation, ruin, the retrieval, from a sewer, of an endearingly stranded dog: obsolescence, inferred, of everything, not excluding themselves, movement requiring continuity, continuity requiring engagement, engagement presupposing if not synonymous with death (make sure you’re not caught out).

  ‘More cells than stars in the universe,’ he said, for no reason he could think of referring to the brain.

  ‘All stars in the universe, by definition, haven’t been and never will be accounted for,’ she said.

  The set turned off, she stretched out on the couch, her feet propped across his thighs, evening light, at the windows, shadowing the woodwork, the grid-like configuration of the fireplace, its flames, amongst the simulated coal, fed, he reflected, from a subterranean duct beneath the North Sea.

  Hypothetical: her interest in himself, someone whom she knew little if anything about, he, she’d nevertheless insisted, an indispensable presence, one from within which he was gazing (rapturously) at her now, at the fireplace, at the cat which, roused from the hearthrug, was now settling in her lap. His estimation (in her view, his imagining) of himself – this objectively realised presence – was practically nil, below a certain perceivable level a token effort to remain afloat alone attracting his attention. That, he concluded, he could see and recognise (the view of himself measured exclusively by displacement): recognition, too, amongst his peers, something, also, to take into account – dominant amongst them, of course, Simone: arbiter, agent, co-respondent – responding to what, for the most part, he offered as himself, someone going if not already crazy, ‘him’ and ‘self’ divided in a way which, clearly, ‘her’ and ‘self’ were not, his estimation (of how much he could see and recognise of all this) all he had to go on: ‘Stigma and Aesthetics’, a seminal essay (Art Monthly), ‘Post-Victorianism in Anglo-Saxon Art’ a more laboured repetition.

  Into this confabulation he had introduced Simone: a conflagration (up a sidestreet) she knew little if anything about, he having decided long ago man not manner seductively her style, ‘Form as Content’ another of his less mind- than career-bending contributions, ‘Plasticity as Style: Lundquist to Auerbach’ another.

  How much, or, conversely, what did he know of her (she peripheral to his vision at this point)? Did he imagine, had he imagined, was he about to imagine there was another dimension to her waiting to be exposed – unravelled, examined: yielded to, absorbed? ‘Style as Content’, plus, ‘The Demon of Novelty in the Arts’, updating Wyndham Lewis, the upper half of the first page taken up with tabloidesque pronouncements: ‘The Gratuitous Imperative: Twentieth-Century American Painting’ another of his ‘stingers’ as Devonshire, the broadsheet’s arts editor he worked most closely with, invariably described them: ‘Philistinism and Commodity: the present seen’.

  He was coming, had come, to the point of making amends, a will to set things right – if only to discover what the right, in his case – his unique and much troubled case – might be: the vivacity which, even now, with Simone, showed through after a day in the room below: not words, in her case, but people, insights, perceptions, suspicions, speculations, entrancingly described. Once her reluctance had been overcome he cherished listening to her accounts of lives endured, confiscated, submitted to at a point where, not unlike his own, facility and meaning, expression and accountability had come to an end: the chimera that, in his case, sensation had become: her face, her brushed-back hair, the luminosity of her eyes as she re-lived in her descriptions these inward encounters: the inquisitive and acquisitive nose, the childlike candour.

  ‘Redeemed’: the word came to him – at an angle, he half turned to gaze at the fire, she a child of grace (of light), he listening to her voice, its interrogative tone, elevating – liberating – statement into query: her self-possession, autonomy, belief. Where should she begin but with the news they had been watching? so many of her therapees rocking to a momentum begun before their time: out-of-the-world encounters, end-of-the-world decline – he glancing sideways: the receding light, the silhouette of her face against the window, the corners of her mouth turned down, still visible, in a gentle, wry, self-deprecating smile: the presence within of an otherwise invisible observer, dispassionate, suspended, deftly owned, he liking, above all, her self-sufficiency, even as it alarmed him. What he was clinging to might, at any moment, move away, yet here she was, her ankles in his lap, her feet twisting and turning as she described her day’s encounters, tied in, as he was, to the dexterity, the clarity, the alacrity, finally the elusiveness (the transcendence) of her thoughts.

  Everything in a moment might be removed; her authority undermined his own, he on his knees, if not prostrated, praying for compliance, acceptance, recognition, something other than defeat, requesting understanding by and of something other than himself – identifying, listening to her voice, a collateral built up from other people’s lives, a collateral extending, validating her own (he, crouched beneath the table, grateful for the crumbs).

  Credo of his time

  the subtleties of his situation allowed him to complain.

  Later, in the cabin-like room beneath the roof, they went to bed: intimacy, containment (security, style), the window, its sill level with the bed, looking onto the roofs of the houses lower down the slope. Invariably, enclosed like this, he slept deeply, contentedly, the cat between them, in contrast to the broken sleep when he slept on his own, even her snores a reassurance, the cat, at an early hour, vacating the bed, leaving a space into which either of them might roll: the sound of her breathing, her sighs, her groans, the helplessness, the candour, the intimacy of a life attached to his own, his dreams on these occasions invariably occurring in the room in which they were lying, he struggling, as he was, to find a line, something he might cling to (Ariadne, inevitably, came to mind), he wondering if she didn’t pity him, something less than oddity in his appeal; or whether she had glimpsed, identified, even, something unlike anything she had glimpsed before: three husbands an immediate line, he’d imagined, to disenchantment – sudden, unequivocal (remorseless, he suspected, too), she subject to sudden urges, like the cessation of their appointments, pursuing a divergent course to his own, one which took her, had taken her, amicably, for the most part, from one husband to another, each male sensibility absorbed by its successor, an ascending scale of enhancement reaching, conclusively – or so he hoped – himself: art as polemic, involvement, even prank, she having stayed clear, previously, in her own work of practitioners, those clients with paint-stained fingers, cluttered rooms, messy quarters, studios dirtier than a factory floor, preferring, as in his case, combatants of another sort, belligerents more akin in appearance, manners, thought and purpose, to herself: she was ‘for’ observation, taking apart, examination, then reassembly.

  He, him, it, he was blind to: could no longer see the shape, the outline – the content, even – she had made for (and had taken into bed), he, for his part, prepared at a moment’s notice to bring what couldn’t be recorded to an end: the trauma of the tube train driver, the not dissimilar of the watching crowd, seconds only, as far as he was aware, between sentencing and execution: intuition, instinct, something equally spontaneous and as seemingly unknown, had drawn him back – thrown him back: that intervening second of hesitation precipitating him too late at the edge of the track: could such intervention, for instance, be relied on, the Demon King a subliminal, ever-watchful, seditious, equally spontaneous presence?

  On the other hand, only by touch could he sense the delicacy of Simone’s approach, what she was encountering foreign to himself, a liability, for one thing, not to be relied on, a composition of effects, defects – presences of varying and often contradictory natures, evidenced by his expression, specifically his eyes, the only part of his ‘self’ that reached the surface, he in the hands of a creator he had, at one time, mistakenly, assumed to be precisely that same self. No such authority existed: he clung to images of his mother, his father, his uncle, his brother, his sister; to recollections of the past – and not always of his own – to memories of his school, the games he’d played, the texts he’d learnt – more vivid than anything between – and, most potently, and strangely, weirdly, even, to the image of a car, a vehicle invariably in motion, the movement of the road ahead, object and subject ineluctably one: ‘this is my construct in which I am well pleased’, a direct line, or so it had seemed, to his creator, an emanation from outside as well as, more profoundly, from within himself, machinery and art aesthetically combined.

  In the morning he left, she dealing with her post, her figure bowed over the desk in the room used by Mrs Beaumont, reading, as she did all her messages, from a standing position, her first appointment mounting the stone steps to her street – a figure – tall, cadaverous, a briefcase in one hand, a portable telephone in the other – he’d nicknamed ‘Doctor Death’. ‘Aids?’ he’d enquired, coldly, on a previous occasion, she responding, equally coldly, ‘Far from it,’ refusing to further explain, despite his curiosity (masking his dislike: a subliminal suspicion of all her male patients, if, more conspicuously, of this one). Now, habitually, whenever he encountered this figure in the street, he acknowledged it with a querying nod, the same response, more minimally expressed, effortlessly returned, the figure moving on.

  Earlier – no appointments to interrupt her breakfast – he had asked her again, ‘Is anything the matter? Is anything troubling you you’d like me to know?’ she responding, ‘Not a thing,’ an immediacy of reply which, rather than dissipating, confirmed his suspicion, a shadow of some sort, almost visible, passing between them. Was it him? he reflected as he walked away, or her? braced by the morning traffic descending the hill at little more than walking pace, an unusual feeling absorbing him that things, despite his previous unease, were moving his way – disappointed only when, beyond Chalk Farm, approaching Camden Town, he reached his home and was suddenly reminded he was returning to confinement (isolation, if not worse), no life-class or peer group to distract him, the process of renewal, of revival, if such it was, to be continued on his own.