Much of Viklund’s time, after moving to the Royal College, he had spent abroad, a prerequisite he’d negotiated before his appointment: visiting professorships in the United States, lecture tours in the Far East (‘Ilse’s very fond of Japan,’ wryly. ‘Have I mentioned her buddhist inclination? – Much enthusiasm in places where you’d least expect it, though I’m not entirely convinced the Japanese are focusing their interests elsewhere’).

  In the years previous to his appointment to the Royal College, he had been generously licensed by Pemberton to pursue his interests overseas. ‘After all, the first two or three decades of my life were spent in a diplomatic corral: not only in the blood, I’d say, but the central nervous system. It advertises the Drayburgh as much as our Professor. Or, rather, it advertises our Professor as much as the Drayburgh: not much to choose between the two, as far as Felix is concerned. I’m convinced he believes the college will disappear into the ground the moment he retires,’ Pemberton offering Maddox, on his succession, a not dissimilar facility: ‘The terms are barely eight weeks long: half the year to pursue your own enthusiasms, as long as our name comes to the fore,’ Pemberton dismayed by the parochialism, at that time, of British art, anxious for ‘influences’ from overseas (many foreign students on the register), particularly American (an alarming progressive in this respect). ‘France, Italy, Spain, Germany, where you might reasonably have looked for a guide, I despair of. The war, in that respect, too, has a great deal to answer for,’ directing Maddox’s attention to appropriate figures at the British as well as the Arts Council. ‘Get in with the government. They never know what to do until you tell them. And often, of course, not even then. Can’t do any harm. Look at Daniel. He milks them by the hour. He’s milked them white for years. He has – he won’t mind me mentioning this – more connections than a fireman’s hose. His father was allegedly an agent for the CIA,’ Maddox’s own reflections, at this point, returning to Viklund’s sepulchral figure seated before him, focused on his friend’s curious Christian name, recalling that recently his attention had been drawn to the presence of the Danish Church – Den Danske Kirke, announced outside – along the road which, he’d been startled to discover, Viklund and Ilse attended each Sunday: ‘a devotional couple’, Donaldson, his co-critic on his Sunday broadsheet, had facetiously described them.

  ‘You haven’t, I take it, got yourself a computer?’ Viklund enquired.

  He shook his head. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘I have one in the study.’ He pointed overhead, a room, devoted to his interests, at the top of the house. ‘You can have that, if you like. I can’t get it to work. When it did, as the result of a visit from a technician from the College, I managed to disable it in a matter of seconds. Without it, I’m afraid, you – we – haven’t a chance. Pen and ink are less than Third World stratagems now,’ smiling at Maddox, small, irregular, yellowish teeth suggesting, within the narrow configuration of his lips, a degree of impishness which the eyes themselves denied: a ‘divided’ face, Maddox had always thought, mischievousness, in Viklund, carelessly obscured, charm, of an equally casual nature, to the fore in appearance as well as expression.

  What was it that Viklund had identified in those pre- and early Renaissance figures which had rarely been remarked upon before? A graphic distinction (a graphic vitality) as if, in Viklund’s phrase, they had ‘gone behind the back of God’, reality displacing iconography, a mutatory phenomenon (yet another) identified and singularly promoted: an event – as spontaneous and as seemingly miraculous as the summary arrival of a saviour – around which Maddox had focused much of his own endeavours, ‘liberating consciousness from nature’, his own ambivalent phrase, ‘like fruit from trees’, technology another of his wonders: ‘the propagation of the species by other means’: a ‘false fruit’, in his estimation, requiring ‘separation, distinction, alienation, the sublimation of the ends by the means’, a process to be ‘arrested’ and, as a result of his own (momentous) intrusion, reversed.

  ‘Writing letters, I’m afraid, is all I’m fit for. And those I dictate,’ Viklund went on. ‘Ideally they should be sent by e-mail. Occasionally I do it. Not from here. The College. They still look with favour on a poor old man. Resources minimal. Message delivered, but I’m not deceived. Which is where you come in, do you think?’

  ‘Perhaps there’s much to be said for redirecting communication away from machinery, even if it is to a bottle of ink and a pen,’ Maddox said, wondering, as he spoke, what might be the purpose of his visit, other than to receive the by now familiar invitation to ‘renegotiate’ what Viklund was inclined to call his ‘misspent’ life: to readdress (to ‘revisit’) it in terms that a present generation, ‘far removed from mine’, might understand. ‘I can no longer make any sense of it, or them.’

  Something of the grandeur of the room was affecting his senses, a not uncommon experience when visiting the house: a feeling of being airily suspended, some distance from the floor, taken up into a space immediately below the cavernous ceiling with its stuccoed surrounds depicting birds, animals, foliage – exclusivity (again) involved, something which his own accommodation, and thereby his life, he assumed, could neither suggest nor, if suggest, sustain: a sensation indistinguishable from the aura of Viklund himself, so much an element of the place, inseparable from it (he had lived here for over thirty years), as if, confusingly, he had produced it, or it had produced him.

  ‘Maybe the incident at the tube station, Matt – a place, incidentally, I’ve avoided since your experience there: I’m quite prepared to believe, I must tell you, in “other” forces – was less a prospective than a retrospective event. Drawing a line beneath, literally and metaphorically, before moving on. In a sense, in that respect, an artistic decision. “If I do this what will it mean?” Or don’t you agree? Am I being presumptuous?’

  ‘A fresh start promoted,’ Maddox said, ‘by a threatened end.’

  The incident, after all, had been a defeat, a grievous defeat – almost a lifetime’s defeat and submission – for both of them, so embedded was Viklund’s life in his, and his in his friend’s.

  ‘The spontaneity with which you drew back shows you had no intention of completing the exercise. The one, in other words, could not be had without the other. Debit here, credit there. Sum added up, in an instant, in favour of the latter. I take it,’ he waved his hand again, ‘we can talk about these things. It’s not off limits?’

  He waited while Maddox shook his head.

  ‘I’m much interested in the subject, as you’re aware,’ he went on. ‘Not in your death, of course, nor mine, but in death as a cessation of sensory perception, of a totality of experience as we’ve come to know it. The knowing, too, part of the same. In front of a tube train, for instance, an almost popular form of execution, though a selfish one since it vicariously involves other people. Disregarding the effect on the driver.’

  He was forcing these sentences home, Maddox observed, watching, though not waiting for his reaction.

  ‘But conducted, let’s say, in the privacy of one’s room. In bed, for instance, if medication is involved, or in the bathroom if something messier. The latter, too, of course, involves someone else. Nevertheless, the cessation of sensation is what I’m constantly drawn to. The peculiar counter-imperative which nature insists on, glorifying the senses, on the one hand, on the other, discarding them completely. What, I wonder, does that reversal mean? What, for instance, does your therapist mean by abandoning her discipline, and thereby, presumably, though offering an alternative, in the form of a colleague, returning you to the situation from which you were hoping to progress?’

  ‘She’s conducting what, I presume, is her therapy by other means. Something more tangible,’ he said, ‘more certain, conceivably,’ he added, facetiously, ‘more productive.’

  ‘So we’re still in a therapeutic situation?’ Viklund said, turning in his chair to regard him directly.

  ‘To that degree, I assume I am,’ he said. ‘But, then, no more than you and I are, sitting here,’ he went on, ‘discussing this.’

  ‘She can see in it something for her, but how do you perceive it. Is everything a therapeutic exercise?’ He placed his hands – his strange, stubby, impractical hands – beneath his chin, lowering his mouth towards them. ‘Do you want to go on living?’

  ‘I do,’ Maddox said, wondering if this was the purpose of his visit: to decide, once and for all. ‘By doing nothing,’ he went on, ‘we simply hang around. The only choice we have is to preempt what, at our age, is increasingly apparent, or simply to let matters take their course. Having confronted the former, I’ve settled for the latter, with, in this instance, a witness in tow. Whether she’d like to be described in those terms I’m not sure,’ he concluded.

  ‘I suspect she wouldn’t.’ He smiled: the small, neat, mischievous teeth again. ‘She, of all people, must be aware of the degree of perversity in everything, self-interest not excluded. After all,’ releasing his hands to spread them out on either side, ‘what are we here for if not to be stimulated by something? We have art, of a certain kind, she, presumably, has people. And you. Her latest, how should we put it, post-doctorial exercise?’ He laughed, looking to Maddox to join in. ‘Another biscuit? More coffee?’

  Maddox got up and crossed to the table beside Viklund’s chair: a convivial, mercurial, confrontational nature, ironic – derisive – self-amused: he wondered how much of his own was reflected in the other man, or – not for the first time – whether it was the absence of any similarities which drew them together. After all, Viklund had the habit – had always had the habit – of expressing aloud what he, Maddox, at any moment might be thinking, an engaging and at times startling facility which, while warming him to the man, had also had the effect of thrusting them apart.

  He poured more coffee into their respective cups, took another biscuit, and returned across the room.

  A formalised informality (again): one which had characterised their relationship from the start when, after the interview with Pemberton, Viklund and the Registrar of the Drayburgh, together with several anonymous figures who rarely spoke, Viklund had rung to tell him, ‘unofficially’, he’d been appointed to his own soon-to-be-vacated chair, something, he’d said, which he’d like to ‘nail down: the post not the object’ (laughing at the reference), the Registrar, he’d confided, not altogether sure. ‘He was for someone older, and less contentious, but Felix, of course, was on our side. Registrars are obliged to be nothing else but prudent. The only ones at the Drayburgh who are,’ laughing again, a light, derisory sound. ‘If they don’t confirm it in the next few days let me know,’ less, at that time, a spiritual than a paternal presence, one which subsequently he was quick to outgrow, the preoccupation with death a recent speculation. To someone so attached to sensibility, to the formulation and re-formulation of what he invariably described as ‘primary vision’ – that prospective expedition behind what he had imagined to be the ‘nature’ of God – it was of final importance to understand the experience of all that ending. ‘Call me Daniel, this is Felix,’ Viklund had said, familiarly, since they all knew one another, at the beginning of the interview, adding, ‘And this is Johnny,’ indicating the small, bespectacled figure of the Registrar, ‘whom you also know,’ regarding him with the impish smile which accompanied most, if not all, of his more contentious statements. ‘Trouble-makers I like,’ he’d said on another occasion. ‘Which is why we hired you. This man, I thought, will be nothing but that. So here you are, toeing the line, living up to expectations.’

  When describing – ‘confessing’ – to Viklund his experience on the tube station platform, his friend had responded, ‘That is a behind your God experience, wouldn’t you say? seeing how far you might push it. And seeing how far,’ he’d added, ‘you might be pushed back. A terminologist’s gamble, wouldn’t you say? “Means without ends” your castigation of your times, if not of mine. What a field-day the mechanics you despise would have had if your Demon King, as you call him, or it, had succeeded. I hope you’ll go to church on the strength of that and say something, however mild, “Where do we go from here?” for example.’

  ‘Apart from what you describe as your peer support, and the orthodoxy of taking pills, you’re on your own, I take it?’ Viklund went on.

  His personal injury: his personal grief: he had no such injury to show: everything was perfect, commendable – yet here he was, disabled by something he knew nothing about: his father, his mother, his uncle, his brother, his sister – himself: innocent. All of them.

  ‘There’s Simone, my principal collateral where well-being, or even survival, is concerned,’ he said.

  He waited for Viklund to respond: perhaps he’d brought this problem specifically to his friend to resolve, not merely to articulate what he suspected might be in his, Maddox’s, mind, but to persuade him – to convince him of the need, the inevitability, even, of moving ahead, of moving behind him, ‘to see what I can’t see,’ he reflected, ‘even while I speak.’

  ‘No doubt she thought you’d had enough of exposition. After all, half a lifetime is quite enough. I take it you did have a life before you came across Cimabue?’

  Another reference to one of Maddox’s celebrated tracts: art as containment, the stricture of the medium, the tyranny of form: whereas all the while, he, it, they were responsive – should have been responsive – to content, form dictated by style, style by convention, convention by dictat: dictat determined by apprehension, fear of God preceding love of man.

  Viklund, while he waited for an answer, glanced away, his head turning in the direction of the nude suspended over the large, caryatid-decorated marble fireplace (the latter ‘an idea of the previous lease-holder, I’m afraid,’ Viklund had explained its presence): a diagonal of cream-coloured paint crossed a green and alizarin background: his compromised Matthew Smith. ‘Mediterranean eye, or would you say a calciferous Nordic one?’ Viklund had enquired at the time: the strange antinomies in Viklund’s nature: somewhere upstairs a Clausen, in addition to further Nicholsons, a Tissot (loaned for exhibitions: ‘another Franconian source’), paintings which, even if his wife’s taste, suggested something obscure, self-contradictory, if not consistently perverse in Viklund’s nature.

  His friend and former colleague had had no children, professing earlier in life he had had no time for them: ‘And then, of course, it got too late,’ a succession of dogs, some of bizarre appearance, taking what might otherwise have been their place, largely, Maddox assumed, as with the paintings, at the suggestion of his wife. The same indifference, regarding children, he’d shown to Maddox’s excursions into reviewing, the revisionist ‘The Demon of Novelty in the Arts’ attracting the enquiry, ‘Can indifference increase in intensity, do you think, or am I merely confirming my worst suspicions?’ adding, on another occasion, ‘I have no eye for contemporary detail. It is detail, I take it?’ expanding into, with regard to this particular publication, ‘Anglo-Saxon art without an Anglo or a Saxon in sight. The best painters in Britain appear to be foreign. What would you Anglicans produce if you were to try?’ division of taste and absence of children not alone in separating them. Viklund’s wartime activities, occasionally hinted at but never revealed, a separate source of obfuscation: the peculiar trips from Rome to Stockholm during the Second World War, from Stockholm to Berlin, then back to Rome, mentioned in the context of matters other than war (‘family business: we had so much of it’ a familiar line); further trips from Rome to Lisbon, to London, and back again, Viklund’s parents’ house in the via Campagna a meeting-place for Axis, neutral and Vatican ‘celebrities’ (‘even the Pope’), ‘les ingénus’ who had ‘nowhere else to go’, the ‘civilising arena we managed to sustain’ where paintings and drawings and sculptures were allegedly exchanged (‘in the interests of preservation – including self-preservation: everything, and everyone, was black market in those days. What else might you expect?’), the ‘market’ Viklund père controlled (‘someone had to do it: who better?’).

  Matthew Smith, Nicholson, Tissot, Clausen, Sargent (a late addition in the bedroom), plus several looming, patrician Chinese screens, Matisse-like configurations in black, red and gold, he was openly possessive of (‘a touch of Simone – not your Simone – Martini, do you think?’) attested to a peculiar parochialism which he was content to live with, a disguise, a testimony to his devotion to Ilse, or to a ‘blankness’, as he had once described it, ‘in the centre of the eye: I see so much, and more strongly, at the edges. That’s why the history as opposed to the practice. I see a long way sideways, but never very much, I’m afraid, ahead,’ a testimony to a taste that had been Anglicised: rumoured purchases, earlier, of Matisses and Picassos, Legers and Vuillards, quickly sold on. Once, briefly, a Braque had appeared on his wall – in his dining-room – but had quickly disappeared: ‘I was hanging it for a friend. He brought his client here and sold it. An appropriate setting, the baroque? I refused his offer of commission,’ a taste which, Maddox suspected, was intended to mislead, as if, in a corner of his life, not least his domestic one, he had wished to escape from the grandeur, the austerity, the mathematics, even – the monumentality – of his trecento and quattrocento idols – escape, that is, into something inconsequential, consciously evasive, taking on ‘native cover’. ‘A philistine at heart,’ he had protested when Maddox first enquired about the paintings which, at regular intervals, began to appear on his walls, he not sure he had heard the aspirate preceding the final word. ‘Art, after all, is commerce first, and commerce last – who owns what – and commerce, as we know, is invariably unfair in that value is vagariously determined. That’s where you and I come in, the two of us, wouldn’t you say, ingenious fellows?’ a remark, or aside – presumably the latter – intended, Maddox suspected, to put him and others off the scent.