Maybe it was too late to change more than his appearance (Simone’s occasional, if regular insistence he smarten up), his principal energies, like his principal interests, now curtailed. The introductory, formal examination (a professional exercise) – Simone’s – had been abandoned in favour of something more intrinsic; replaced, in that sense, by something more dramatic – reprehensible, professionally, he assumed – Simone herself, however, sharing no similar unease, if anything approving his ‘egalitarian’ line: the democracy of the National Health Service: no more private sessions with anyone; the one-day-a-week clinic, supervised by Kavanagh. It was as if she had recognised (and responded to, against her current practice) the virtues of a system, the perversities, anomalies, inconsistencies and incompetence of which, characterising her earlier career (her first husband had been a GP), she had derided when they’d first ‘got together’.

  She had seen and acknowledged, that is, the virtues of ‘nature’ taking its course, the facilities available to him for guidance (recovery, illumination) and supervision no different from those available to anyone else. Here he was slotted into what, she concurring, he had described as a ‘universal’ system (over-burdened, under-funded) while the optimal agent of recovery was, some nights – she liked ‘slumming’ in Chalk Farm – in his home: she, her it. Initially, he’d thought himself sufficiently advanced – adept, proficient, self-aware, intelligent, perceptive – to examine and explore what was, after all, a not uncommon medical condition, focusing, in the process, on what, presumably, had eluded him in the past – largely, he suspected, because of the pace of his earlier life: too busy, too constant, too inclined, desirably so, it had seemed at the time, to look forward rather than in.

  Even now, what was there to recognise and examine in him that hadn’t been recognised in so many before – Judith, Beth, Alex, Anna, to name but a few? a realisation that, in any final summation, life was scarcely worth the living (Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello notwithstanding), the preponderance of pain – in this instance a mental phenomenon, hard to describe as well as to grasp – over what might have been described as the benignity, even the grace and resourcefulness of human nature, too (painfully) apparent. The unpremeditated leap at the line: the sum, otherwise, scarcely added up: he was there, here was it, the answer still in his head, a head over which he’d had little control, an inconclusive, mutatory device focused primarily on pleasure, hunger once appeased, pleasure an impulse as exhaustible as any other. Apart from that he was – had been – obliged to subscribe to a reality in which he no longer believed (he an indissoluble element of it: no meaning, as no end), fortuity, he’d concluded – even with Simone – governing all, ‘significance’ as gratuitous as everything else.

  What did Simone mean by abandoning him to a regime she had previously, if not despised, dismissed as hostile, at best complementary to much of what she did herself? Abandoning him, in effect, to a course of treatment which would set them even further apart. Retirement (redundancy) had played a part in, if not been the start of his decline; previous to that his life, by any normal measure, had been both sustainable and pleasant. Succeeding Viklund at the Drayburgh had provided a base from which his censuring of the art of the last half of the previous century had been, in his view, a legitimate and inevitable advance, a Ruskinesque brief he’d been delighted to take up – and (if no longer a judge in the matter) vigorously to extend.

  He visited Viklund from time to time, invariably at the great man’s invitation, a summons he rarely if ever declined, and which, occasionally, he even prompted with a card or a letter: a familiar and, to Maddox, reassuring figure, small, slight, with a disproportionately prominent head, blue eyes gazing out – at least, in his direction – with an invariably benevolent expression, the hair, silvery, dense, thrust backwards and upwards to create – reassuringly to Maddox – the impression of someone moving at speed, the shoulders supporting this unusually dominant head alarmingly thin, the arms similarly fragile and ending, disappointingly, Maddox always thought, in curiously blunt, short-fingered hands, reminiscent of a child’s, a perverse denial, or so he felt, of the eminently practical nature not only of Viklund’s commentaries on the manner and content of trecento and quattrocento Florentine art but – inevitably linked with the same – life: Viklund’s legendary post-war achievements from which Maddox had had great difficulty in disinterring – disentangling – his own pronouncements.

  A post-war regenerator of pre- and early Renaissance art – a written-out period at the time – Viklund’s texts, originating, many of them, from his earlier life in Rome, had blocked the way, initially, to Maddox’s own advancement. Only recently had many of them been set aside (abused, disregarded) to be replaced by his own – a continuing process as his successors, in turn, set about his, empiricism (‘social expressiveness’) replacing aestheticism, grandeur, style.

  Brought up in Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, Rome and Paris, his father a Swedish diplomat (and humorously alleged ‘spy’) at the ‘heart of darkness’ throughout the Second World War, Viklund’s own accounts of this period in Rome and later in Paris, which had witnessed the beginning of his ‘Renaissance’ career, were uncharacteristically fragmentary, perversely obscure. Unlike Berenson, he had acquired little wealth from his scholarship, largely, Maddox concluded, because he hadn’t needed to, his grandparents Swedish industrialists whose legacy, even now, stretched across Western Europe and the United States, Viklund, as far as Maddox understood, a significant, if reluctant beneficiary. An indifference to personal wealth was characterised by an indifference to carrying cash, something which, in the past, had cost Maddox dear: ‘a scholar millionaire, if of an unusual kind’, he invariably described him to anyone requiring a synoptic description of his friend, someone whose character, like his reputation, he had long ago abandoned more thoroughly explaining. His house, overlooking Regent’s Park, was exclusively his wife’s creation. ‘A lease, not a freehold,’ he would explain, dismissing the building with a wave of his hand, its size, its scale, its (seemingly) superfluous rooms (‘I was brought up in anonymous interiors and don’t really know anything better: certainly don’t feel at ease with anything else’), on one occasion only, in Maddox’s experience, revealing any concern about his situation, looking onto the eastern flank of the park, and, referring to the recent removal of several diseased elms, remarking disconsolately, ‘It looks more like Clapham Common, don’t you think?’ turning Maddox aside to show him a recently purchased Matthew Smith (‘Ilse likes it: I had no choice,’ referring to his wife. ‘I couldn’t afford a Matisse, of course. We have to make do with this’), a curious insensitivity to pre- and post-Second World War art (‘I leave it up to you’) conspicuous in his, or Ilse’s – Maddox was never sure which – choice of pictures to hang around the house, a choice, if it were exclusively Ilse’s, he was too proud and too protective, other than on this one occasion, to own up to. Of several William Nicholsons, no hint of the son Ben’s, he would remark, ‘A touch of Velázquez, don’t you think, certainly Ribero, or would you say Murillo?’ quickly passing him by the landscapes with the same mischievous expression – Norfolk, the South Downs, the south coast – the still-lifes and occasional portraits (‘fortunately, no one we know’), Nicholson numerically the most prominent of the artists scattered about the house, his not infrequent remark whenever he opened the door to Maddox, ‘Welcome to the home of a very poor collector,’ his stress on the word ‘poor’ never satisfactorily defined.

  Now, returning from Simone’s, he examined his mail (bills only) and, reminded by a note he’d left purposely lying on the floor in the hall, set off again, in the same southerly direction.

  Turning west, to his right, at Camden Town, at the top of Parkway he turned south again along the eastern façade of Nash houses overlooking the park, approaching the door of one which, with another, stood isolated from the terrace. The ringing of the bell aroused the barking of Ilse’s dog, the animal evidently ushered into a room, a door closing, before the outer door was pulled back by Viklund himself.

  Dressed, as usual, in a formal grey suit, white shirt and diagonally striped tie – his only affectation, his membership of a club – a formality from which he rarely departed (‘life, in every sense, is a business, don’t you think?’), he opened the door wider as if to facilitate the entry of not one but several figures, calling, seemingly, into the road behind, ‘Come in, my dear friend!’ his accent, part Nordic, part Mediterranean, melodious, half lilting, pitched between enquiry and exposition. ‘How are you today? Looking better. Much. Much improved since the last time,’ gazing directly into his face before, disarmingly, turning aside to indicate the way down the hall, the door closing behind Maddox’s back. Passing between several Nicholsons – Sussex Downs, the south coast: Lulworth Cove – he entered the principal room at the front of the house, its three tall windows looking not onto the park but onto the approach road which gave access to the terrace.

  Somewhere in the house a female voice was singing and moments later a young woman in a white overall entered, carrying a tray of coffee and biscuits. ‘Loreen, meet Matthew,’ informally, from Viklund, ‘our latest acquisition from Hong Kong,’ the girl laughing, and adding, ‘Tel Aviv!’

  ‘And how many young women in Tel Aviv are called Loreen, I wonder?’ Viklund enquired.

  ‘My grandmother is called Loreen,’ the young woman responded, her laughter, after she’d closed the door, coming from the hall outside.

  ‘And how are you, in fact?’ Viklund asked, offering Maddox the coffee, the biscuits – waiting for him to sit down, taking his own seat by the marble-fasciaed fireplace with a sigh.

  ‘I’m well,’ Maddox said, seated, formally, some distance across the room, its furniture spaciously divided. ‘I’m relying exclusively on pills, psychotherapy abandoned.’

  ‘Oh, pills,’ Viklund said. He held up his hand, the curiously gnarled stump, or so it seemed, protruding from the sleeve of his jacket. ‘I’ve any amount of those,’ the vividly, companionably animated face turned in his direction. ‘Swap you some, if you like. Mine are red and green. How about yours?’ adding, ‘Most of them, otherwise I’ll throw them away. Don’t tell Ilse,’ shading his eyes to examine Maddox once again, amused by the formality of the furniture that obliged them to sit so far apart. ‘You’re right,’ he concluded, ‘you’re looking much better. Suicide no longer, I assume, in mind.’

  ‘It never was,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly!’ the telephone ringing in another room. ‘Not long to go, in any case. Nevertheless,’ he raised his hand again, ‘the trip’s been worth it. We can talk candidly? No need for circumlocution?’ Lowering his hand, he went on, ‘I can leave the rest, of course, to you. Something of which we never wished to take advantage, namely,’ smiling, ‘how to deconstruct my past and – how should I describe it? – bring it into the present.’

  ‘Biography,’ Maddox said, ‘is not my line,’ a suggestion of Viklund’s made on several occasions, the older man anxious that Maddox, a favoured pupil and his successor, might take up the challenge of, as the older man invariably put it, ‘renegotiating my work’.

  ‘I get so many requests for autobiography and reassessment, even after so many years refusing. You, on the other hand, have your ear closer to the ground. Not, for instance, like living here,’ gesturing round, ‘where I hear nothing of relevance, close to the Drayburgh though we be. Halfway to paradise, I call it. Not a good place to write from. The other half, I trust, of course, to be travelled rather faster. It’s ages, Matt, since I wrote anything at all. What say?’ urgency, for the first time, in his manner. ‘You write so well. My subjects, which I’ve always been glad, relieved, to be precise, to leave to you. Francesca, Masaccio, I almost see as my children. I do see as my children, if in the hands of others. Yours, I hardly need to say, the safest of all. Not much space, perhaps, to manoeuvre. Here, however,’ he stretched out his arms, ‘all the space you require. Viklund in remiss, Viklund as error.’

  It was, unmistakably, Maddox thought, a mark of senility – of self-preoccupation, a reversal, in many respects, of his previous nature – he was witnessing in his old friend now, a process not dissimilar to that which recently he recognised as proceeding, if at an earlier stage, and at a slower pace, within himself.

  ‘Historicism, after all, is fiction, and what could be more fictional,’ Viklund went on, ‘than living like this?’ a quizzical, blue-eyed expression, courteously presented, the lips framing to a smile, anticipating Maddox’s response. ‘If I wasn’t so badgered,’ he added, ‘I wouldn’t ask,’ raising his hand to indicate a revision of that thought. ‘I wouldn’t suggest,’ he amended. ‘Others, I’m only too aware, are anxious to get their hands on it. My work. The moment I have gone.’

  ‘Attendance at a psychiatric day-hospital, for the older person – older than whom, or what? I fruitlessly enquire – is hardly a recommendation, even for fiction, if it is to be that,’ Maddox said.

  Having, earlier, taken a seat which favoured Viklund’s left ear, he virtually deaf on the other side, he was sitting not only some distance from his friend – a ‘psychological’ explanation for that, too, he reflected – but diagonally facing him. Friendship between them, however, had never been closer, even if it still required, as in the past, discretion – a wilful suspension of obscurer desires – on both their parts: they were – always had been, after all – sparring for the same position – one from which Viklund, it appeared, was now formally withdrawing: a new stage in their relationship

  ‘To me it’s common sense,’ his friend responded. ‘It’s the ones who aren’t attending, like myself, I’m most worried about. You’ve stolen a march on all of us. As usual, Matt. Even your psychoanalytical friend recognised that. She responded to the man not the patient. A degree of common sense in her as well. I envy her, someone who didn’t know you, coming so swiftly to that conclusion.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Let’s face it, Matt, between the two of us there’s a great deal of interpretation still at stake. We say a great deal about ourselves and, hopefully, our times, messages we assume we’ve fathomed, one way or another, and which neither of us, retrospectively, would like to see disowned, abused or, even worse, ignored. All this,’ he gestured round, ‘passes so quickly. Here today and much, if not all of it, gone tomorrow. What say either of us will have another chance? Posterity, as far as I can see it, is the only thing that counts. At this stage. I’d even say for both of us.’

  Maddox was examining the frail figure of his friend as he turned away, too grieved, or perplexed, or perhaps simply confused to carry on. Viklund’s alertness was unusual for this time of the day, he notoriously a ‘night person’, known often to go to bed at dawn and sleep all day, embroiled on these occasions in his earliest and never abandoned passions, a dedication which Maddox had, in the past, imitated to his cost, resorting, finally, to a daytime routine which, to this degree, measured the difference in commitment, concentration, penetration between the two of them.

  A tenacious, at times predatory nature, Viklund’s, the eyes curiously lightless on these occasions of obsessive preoccupation – or, as now, unusual self-preoccupation – indicating the intensity, almost dreamlike, of his inward reflection. It was as if, in these bouts of concentration, Viklund took his subjects into a cave – re-emerging, blinking in the light, to disseminate his conclusions as to their nature to an invariably receptive and, in this instance, certainly appreciative guest.

  ‘The exchange now, of course,’ his friend went on, ‘is more relevant. More sexual, for one thing. Between you and your therapist. It is, to that extent, I’d say, a step forward. One both she and you, I assume, felt obliged to make. To do what? Move forward in the only way you recognised.’ Smiling, he added, ‘A situation as intimate as that could, in any case, scarcely be expressed otherwise. Isn’t the nature of it sexual to start with? No new theories, I take it, on the evolution of the motor-car?’ a calculated provocation, preceded by flattery, intended, Maddox reflected, to soften him up. They were back, he concluded, on common ground.

  At one time he’d been considered not merely Viklund’s successor at the Drayburgh but his supplanter, his victor, Viklund’s reputation, at the time of Maddox taking up the vacated post, then at its height, The Roots of the Renaissance (a title disclaiming exclusivity), a nevertheless far-reaching search through Greek as well as Italian art, an unprecedented post-war success, paralleled, as it was – a subsequently realised necessary ingredient – by a serialised television commentary, a medium for which, until then, Viklund had had outspoken contempt. ‘Sup with the devil at least once in your life, don’t you think?’ exposition and enquiry blended, as usual, into one, adding, slyly, ‘Though not the first time,’ Maddox concluding, on this occasion, his friend had sensed his eventual, if not imminent decline – responding, as a result, in the only way he’d thought available: popularisation (before it’s too late), encapsulation (just in time). ‘Life, after all, is a business, wouldn’t you say?’

  Maddox’s own position at the Drayburgh had been one of little strategic significance, other than – though not to be despised – as a platform from which to extend his influence, less as interpreter than critic. ‘Ease of access to the next generation not something to be sneezed at,’ Viklund had told him on his own departure. ‘It’s amazing how quickly juvenilia comes to the fore, first to be recognised and then accepted. Increasingly quickly,’ he’d gone on, ‘to the point where, if you don’t keep abreast, it becomes too late to turn round.’