‘Daniel is a very secretive fellow, for all his charm,’ he had said when first describing him to Charlotte. ‘No wonder the suggestion he and his father were dealers and agents during and immediately after the Second World War. There’s much there to be written up,’ providing room, this process of dissimulation, for Viklund to manoeuvre, deploy and despatch his more radical ideas – his early discrediting of the authenticity of the Giotto St Francis Assisi frescoes, the turbulence from which had never subsided throughout his professional (‘I wouldn’t call it vocational’) life, Rome not Florence the source, if not co-agent of naturalism’s demystifying drive.

  Attempts to pin down his friend to his wartime past, a source of fascination to Maddox, invariably prompted the same discursive reaction: how old had he been at the time of the German occupation of Paris, similarly of Rome, he professing to have known Eluard, Sartre, Queneau, Camus, and both the underground and the collaborationist press, carrying messages (for whom?) on several occasions: texts of declarations as well as warnings (to whom?). He had had a friend (‘a fellow enthusiast’) and acquaintances in the SS; as a neutral he had relative freedom to travel: he was watched (by whom?): ‘Whereas you, old fellow, were an evacuee of an entirely different sort. Where was this industrial town of yours? And wasn’t your brother too young to be leaving home?’

  He saw, too, in Viklund, reflections not only of his father – the subscription to an (obscure) ideal, to a ‘notion’ of ‘experience’ (a phenomenological event) – but of his uncle Joseph, a man who, in Maddox’s youth, had dominated his life more than his father (or mother): a ‘macaroni’ – a name he lived up to, an habitual performer, given to Homburgs, in a town of bowlers and trilbys and flat caps – cigars, silk cravats, suits made by ‘a tailor in town’: flared trousers, unusually so, waistcoats of variegated colours (almost luminous in the dark), an uncle who sold cars, cigar in hand, while his father merely serviced and admired. ‘Your dad’s the craftsman, I the connoisseur,’ his uncle had announced on the memorable first occasion he had driven Maddox into town and taken him to the theatre, introducing him – ‘My genius nephew, Matthew. Watch his progress’: a world of bars, lights, declamatory people, a curious parody, he discovered later, of something substantial – subtler, intenser – which Viklund had been the first to bring to his notice, a celebratory flourish which deepened into a final, agonised, silent gaze: man in nature as well as isolated from it, ‘consciousness’ a gift which both elevated and maimed, illumined and injured: Donatello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, and particularly Giotto, despite the Assisi reservation, the ‘move behind God’, expulsion into reality, the irreversible decline, the irrepressible defeat: the flinging (of something) at the tube station line frozen – suspended – in a permanent image – ‘Mad Ox’ trailing in his mentor’s wake, the man who, he’d lately discovered, weekly attended with his wife the nearby Danish Church, Maddox responding to something undeclared in all his pronouncements: something Viklund had witnessed and clarified exclusively himself.

  ‘Psychology, I take it, in that case, is out?’ Viklund had said, returning his attention to the room. ‘Has she, I wonder, any interest in art?’ He gestured to the nude above the mantelpiece: art as parody, the gesture said: ‘A bit like opening a Woolworths in Buckingham Palace,’ he’d observed, once, to several guests admiring it, subterfuge, disguise, very much to his taste.

  ‘Not even that.’ Maddox gestured back.

  ‘What on earth do you talk about?’

  ‘Everything,’ he said, ‘other than that.’

  ‘Probably,’ Viklund said, ‘a good sign. It’s time you turned a new corner.’ Pausing, he added, ‘Younger or older?’

  ‘Younger.’

  ‘By how much?’

  ‘Eight years.’

  ‘A lot at my age, but scarcely anything at yours. You are, after all,’ with a smile, the mischievous teeth on display, ‘still a handsome fellow. I imagine the women at your art class scramble to get their easels – or is it their donkeys? – next to yours.’

  ‘Three times married,’ Maddox said, anxious to provoke him.

  ‘There you have me. Once, as you are aware, was always, and, I assume, will continue to be enough for me. Unless Ilse has other ideas. As it is,’ he waved his arm again, ‘both of us are out of fashion. Everyone, these days, gets in on the act: intellectuals, students, social workers, policemen, “art-like” the sole criterion now. Appearance, not substance, facetiousness in lieu of wit, “Anyone can do it”. Donaldson, your colleague, in place of you.’ Turning in his chair, once more, to face him, he added, ‘I’m still looking to you to reverse the decline. When you’re better, not now,’ continuing, as if this were part of the process, ‘Bring her along. I’d like to meet her. She can explain her science. I’ve always thought it adjacent to ours. If either is a science. It might also illuminate what she sees in you. I don’t want her to place you on a lower level of appreciation than, let’s say, the one, long ago, I placed you on myself. Would you say,’ he smiled, ‘there’s something paternalistic in her choice of men?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware they were all, roughly, the same age as herself.’

  ‘Did she leave them? Or they her?’

  ‘She them. She’ll leave me, too, I assume, when the appropriate moment comes.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ Viklund said, turning to look at the foliage outside the window, a lack of animation showing for the first time, ‘she may have found what was lacking in the others,’ glancing back at Maddox to add, ‘Bring her,’ Maddox’s attention distracted by the barking of the dog, the scampering of its claws on a wooden floor followed by the closing of a door.

  A doorbell rang: voices came from the hall, then, as a further door was closed, faded. ‘I won’t be able to make much of her, of course. Not sight, so much as judgement failing. I find myself, as no doubt you’ve observed, coming out with things I would never have considered mentioning before. She, on the other hand, might make something of me. It might help you,’ he went on, smiling, ‘in your research.’ His look wavered in Maddox’s direction. ‘It’s all,’ he continued, ‘a question of procedure. Something we’ve omitted to consider until now,’ his look shifting to the window, abstracted.

  More guardian than parent, Maddox reflected, seeing his former mentor in terms of a past which obscured more than it revealed, a past, in effect, he could scarcely imagine, invoking the presence of someone who had moved through so many stages of development that what was, or might have been, there at the beginning was no longer apparent: transcendence rather than transformation, someone continuously travelling beyond – obscurity prefacing obscurity, a process he’d long thought of as being involved in himself: an enigma, a mountebank, conceivably, even a criminal: those wartime packages associated with a process Viklund had described as ‘saving art’, objects rather than pronouncements.

  No wonder he had counted on trecento and quattrocento speculations, and what he had uncovered there, to ‘save’ him from the ‘mercantile aspirations of my background’: a salvationary process achieving its fulfilment, legitimately, it must now have seemed, in his weekly attendance at the church along the road. ‘A time of truth, a time of renewal,’ his one-time observation on his immediate, post-war career – ‘an apostle of an even higher truth than that’ had been, at the time, Maddox’s own reaction: a servant to higher things placed fortuitously in a position to which no one else could respond: an exclusivity of means to achieve an equally exclusive end: he ‘who went before to prepare a way’ leading, as it had happened, from the camps, from aerial bombing, from nuclear fusion to a world removed from all these things when ‘time’ – the time prefacing these disasters – began.

  What, on the other hand, Maddox reflected, lay behind his own exterior? the face that ran up from the pugnacious chin: the muscular throat, the rudimentary, naïve, expectant eyes – eyes which, whenever he caught a glimpse of them, ‘betrayed everything’ (Simone’s phrase), he not at all sure what, in this context, she was suggesting, a preoccupation, he’d concluded, with extremes, flaws, a perception of things no longer sound, no longer reliable, dominating his life.

  The privilege, he reflected, of sitting here, the identification with, the empathy he felt for this elusive, older man, something he had felt from the beginning, someone with whom he had little if anything, materially, in common, both of them seeing one another, engagingly, as opposites, by temperament, by nature, yet focused, reassuringly, on a similar if not identical goal.

  Or, perhaps, it was that Viklund was feeling his isolation more intensely: saw it vividly confirmed in his friend and former colleague, seizing on Maddox as someone whom he might ‘charge’, or change, servant to his servant, if, at first, deferential, a justifier of his ways.

  Less isolated, in some respects, the older man, than facing a situation in which art, and everything associated with it, could play little if any part, at least, in which the ‘ethic’ identified with it – impersonal, extreme, inclusive – took him beyond what, in the past, he would have described as his ‘reckoning’, life as art becoming merely life as something (anything) else, two contrary distinctions which, though divided, represented a single faith: a fidelity to ‘space’, instinct and reason mellifluously combined, an effulgence of the spirit cohesively aroused.

  What Maddox – what Viklund, he imagined – had considered as most relevant to their relationship were those companionable silences which had characterised their first meetings – initially in the corridors of the Drayburgh but subsequently more often in Pemberton’s office, Pemberton absent, they alone, he and Viklund, theoreticians in a place of practitioners, and set, as a result, conspiratorially apart.

  It was, notoriously, from Pemberton’s own disciplines as a painter – observation of the object, rigorously adhered to – that Viklund had extrapolated much in his study of della Francesca (Mathematics and Muse). Over the previous few months, on his walks to and from Simone’s house, he had, on several occasions, met the retired Principal of the Drayburgh, Pemberton, singularly unaged, using a studio in a friend’s house off the High Street and living in a flat around the corner: a tall, avuncular, bearded figure, cast more in a Romany role than an academician’s, the genial source of many seemingly irreconcilable pronouncements (following Viklund’s amply misunderstood example): ‘measurement as feeling’, ‘mathematics as intuition’, a cornucopia of contradictions which sought and occasionally achieved their resolution in his meticulously constructed figures, landscapes and still-lifes, a man who, with his devotion to Courbet and his dislike of Cézanne (‘the source of all our problems’), represented to Maddox a past which, for all but Pemberton and, to some extent, Viklund, had ceased to exist: a retrospective sentiment which, despite his vulnerability to it (certainty, of a sort), despite being, at this moment, seated in Viklund’s house, he was hoping to discard (intending to disown).

  It was the hands, he thought, which gave Viklund away: impractical, small, he often allowing them to retreat into the sleeves of his jacket, a habit which, on standing, gave him a misleading air of helplessness (how many, in the past, had fallen for that) and which the frailty of his body inevitably confirmed: something, too, which turned him away from life to its representation, as if translation were the only thing to count. ‘The gap in the fence’ was how, previously, he had referred to this late illumination in his life, ‘an appetite for faith’, another designation, occasionally accompanied by, ‘which may possibly be replaced’.

  And where – and what – was Maddox in relation to all this? ‘Maddy’, to his friends, ‘Mad Ox’ at school, ‘Maddox Major’, alternately ‘Maddox Primus’ to his teachers, ‘Oxey’, at the Courtauld, he something of an enthusiast in all things, an ‘idealism’ he thought he had acquired from his father, an entrepreneurial zeal (quickly discomfited), recklessness associated with it, responding to Viklund’s art as something other than chance with something of a zealot’s passion. Only later had ‘philosophy’ taken over, a rancour which, belatedly, he’d come to recognise, had been creeping up on him throughout his life: a premonition, at first, then something not unlike a seizure, a Demon-designated lurch, a vividly resisted near disaster, an ‘exercise in execution’, so described to Simone in one of their first exchanges, she, curiously, never querying, ‘Why?’

  Perhaps – he’d long suspected it to be the case – he was neither sufficiently mature nor advanced to reflect on what might have happened; or even, he concluded, on what might be happening now, exclusion rather than inclusion his principal, late-life passion, a fevered process of subtraction, effect attended to, rather than cause, something he could associate with ‘time’ (what little left of it, ‘space’ another factor) and which precluded something as abstruse, or as precise, as ‘recognition’ (of himself, to start with) – anxious, however, in this instance, to define something in the presence of the other man: a cathartic thrust towards the line, a soundless interjection, self-violation of one sort or another, an unexamined life, in this sense, not worth living, an examined one leading him, however, to the same conclusion.

  On the other hand (again), what did he know of Viklund, a man he cherished and admired, and involuntarily looked up to? a slight, cadaverous figure (he in, he estimated, his eighty-seventh year), a residue of something once substantial, the curiously insensitive ‘normal’ hands, the inquisitive features (not unlike Simone’s), the protruding cheekbones, the galvanic eyes, self-amused – corrosive, too – as if, beyond his achievements, he had glimpsed something which reduced his best endeavours – his resourcefulness, his playfulness (his insights, his pronouncements – his suggestion, at one time outrageous, that Cavallini (‘the unknown’) was the author of the Assisi St Francis frescoes) – to ‘inadvertencies’ (his description).

  ‘A certain pleasure in disowning what others see as your achievements.’ He suddenly intruded into Maddox’s thoughts, a not infrequent feature of their conversations, as if their minds, in these exchanges, were mesmerically one. ‘Arrogance to do so, yet …’ a hand held in the air. ‘Bent, as we are, on a similar, if not identical venture. What does it matter if we leave nothing behind? As if faith in something unimaginable has replaced a faith in something we thought we had perceived,’ glancing across at Maddox to add, smiling, ‘Bent on a mission which doesn’t amount to what your American adversaries – mine, too, at one time: I should never have mentioned Cavallini, and Santa Cecilia, Trastevere, left Giotto and Assisi quite alone – would have called, in reference to your own reflections on postwar American painting, a hill of beans.’

  Himself, set, in silhouette, he imagined, against the profile of the other man: appearances, he concluded, no longer mattered, that evocation of himself – the boldness of the head not quite outmatching that of Viklund’s – the whiteness of the thinning hair, the sombre sense of introspection, the eyes, capable (still) of lightening in the presence of Simone, his sons. Who else? His brother, his sister – Viklund: his friend’s less a rake’s or a pilgrim’s than a mere itinerant’s progress: not to perdition, but something more elusive, as if Viklund were prompting him to a recognition of something intrinsic in his nature which he himself had yet to identify, let alone respond to.

  Raising his head, Viklund looked up at the stuccoed ceiling, the plasterwork birds, leaves, flowers, animals, the whirls and volutes, a forested menagerie suspended in friezes, reliefs, and the ornate central ‘rose’ surrounding a chandelier. ‘The unspoken question of earlier conviction brought into the open. All we – I – can do is stare, unable to describe, analyse, decipher. What does it all add up to?’

  Maddox, too, was gazing up, his attention distracted: the corpse he was carrying – which Viklund, for all his graciousness, his mischievousness, his charm, was carrying too, if not had almost become: the vehicle, the harness in place, which would carry him on to where the event would finally occur, this material burden his sole credential (his spiritual signature hopefully in place: to be evaluated by whom? Evaluated by Maddox, if he could find the time, the inclination, the reason).

  Pemberton, too, on those aimless encounters in Rosslyn Hill, in the High Street, in Heath Street, the avuncularity of the taller, bearded man, away from the Drayburgh, his lifetime’s domain (the longest-serving incumbent of the professorial post), seemingly an affectation: the rumour of breakdown following his deferred retirement (echo of his own predicament): the first occasion in the former Principal’s life when he had had the opportunity to paint without disturbance, to catch up with Courbet, overtake Degas, the weighty tonality of his carefully constructed, relatively colourless pictures: Pemberton, too, had felt the lurch towards the line, a resolution, involuntarily extracted, viciously expressed – inexcusable, unwarranted, undesired – the signature on yet another failed attempt, an irretrievable commitment to something other than himself.

  Love!

  His heart, or something approximating to it, vibrating in his chest: echoes, he reflected, of wartime bombing: the accelerating screech of a metal object descending a metal chute: a fear-ridden allegiance to something other than himself, a systematic reappraisal, Simone, in this sudden recollection, convener and subject in one: a marker to where he was at present.

  Love!

  Viklund’s voice across the room was suggesting he sit closer. Removing his teacup from the arm of the chair, Maddox drew forward, the pile of the carpet resisting. ‘I have difficulty hearing, even on my good side. So much have I missed. Not that it’s any matter. We know each other too well,’ adding, ‘Don’t you think?’ Regent’s Park, the Nash terraces, Hampstead, Maddox’s modest refuge in the declivity between. Beneath him, too, at home, the rumble of the tube.

  There was his purpose, too, in ringing up Viklund several days before to make the appointment to see him, Viklund out at the time, Maddox speaking to Ilse, the dainty, bird-like creature Viklund had married over fifty years before (‘another souvenir from Stockholm’), attempting to decipher from her still Nordic-inflected accent how enthusiastically or otherwise he might be welcomed, surprised by the warmth (she, since his ‘incident’, apprehensive of his influence on Viklund), by the vivacity, the flirtatiousness on this occasion: ‘Dan will be so disappointed to have missed you. He sees you as someone of increasing significance in his life,’ adding, ‘Well, we both do,’ with something of a laugh. ‘You see what it’s like, my dear, to be not merely old but very.’