As It Happened Read online

  In Kosova she might not have reckoned with this, stripped of dignity in one place to be stripped of it again in another – Maddox, in his solitariness, calling less to a maker, less to her, less to her silent, solemn, sultry husband – dark-faced, dark-eyed, expressionless – than to a reciprocal stillness within himself, a stillness, in this instance, emanating from the room, a place of exclusion which, in his mind, paradoxically, included everything.

  The mores of a life-room which no one, not rightfully there, could enter without Neil calling, ‘Would you wait outside,’ less question than injunction.

  ‘Rest,’ he said, the observers sighing, Alexis stretching, Genius, groaning, watching the novel movements of that head and body, motionless for the past quarter of an hour, his features arrested in revisionist thought, charcoaled sheets around his booted feet, bellowing from his outstretched throat, his arms flung up above his head: the room as view of something other than a studio – Maddox standing, too, reflectiveness abandoned, the majority of the women drifting out, Genius remaining, examining the floor, finally glancing up at Maddox, he, having stretched, re-seating himself sideways on his donkey.

  ‘Coffee?’ a sheet in one hand, Genius, his hair pulled back by the other.

  ‘It keeps me awake at night.’

  ‘Long time between then and now.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Maddox said, ‘enough.’

  ‘Too many changes.’ Genius gestured round. ‘Keeps shifting the model. Doesn’t want any of us to draw. Talks all the time of essence,’ adding, ‘No sooner get going with one than you have to start another,’ glancing down at Maddox’s final effort. ‘Isn’t he a t’ai chi enthusiast?’ his head turning upwards, blue eyes examining the ceiling, a look, Maddox surmised, which had gazed over oceans, deserts: ‘The specious end-game we’re all playing,’ the weathered skin (reptilian past). ‘Odd, at our age,’ returning to his drawings. ‘Get anything out of coming here?’

  ‘A lot.’ Surmise, or lying, he couldn’t tell.

  ‘Really?’ The reptilian eyes looked up. ‘Seems a terrible waste of time to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Museums full of the stuff. Too much to exhibit, yet here we are, producing more. Might call it affectation,’ gesturing round.

  ‘Where the t’ai chi comes in,’ he said. ‘Not what, but how.’

  ‘Say?’ One studded boot placed firmly on his drawings, pushing them away as if a mat. ‘Public school prole, I call him,’ gesturing to the landing, the stairs, the canteen, adding, ‘Our instructor. Affectation to do as much with life as art. What I’m looking for, on the other hand,’ head lowered, ‘is engagement. If I die this minute I would die involved,’ scrubbing his boot over the drawings again. ‘Not drawing on, drawing in. Get it?’ his hand, his heavy, muscular hand, the forearm visible beneath his tropical sleeve, pushing at the air as if at a solid object. ‘Out of the particular into … not the divine. Nor hell. Something amoral. Aseitic,’ he concluded, ‘as the philosopher might have it.’

  ‘Which means?’ Maddox said. (‘Ascetic’, he was reckoning.)

  ‘Independent. Self-supporting. Not to be glimpsed in this place. The ladies, on the other hand,’ he paused, ‘are nice. Aseitic, if you like. We labour,’ he suddenly expanded, ‘they exist,’ moments later, without adding anything further, moving to the door, his boots, seconds after that, pounding on the stairs.

  Sobriety, verging on unease, the object of Maddox’s morning, so much having preceded him until this moment – a moment (glancing at Rachel’s drawing above his head) when it felt as if he were about to reinvent himself.

  2

  Returning from the Centre exhausted: adulthood in doubt: wife re-married, children gone: after the day’s distraction, nemesis avoided, drying the pots in the sink in the kitchen at the back of the house, glad, at least, of a further distraction, waiting for Simone to ring: due home from Vienna (one conference too many), her voice with its light (infectious) interrogative tone: one of nature’s enquirers: why and how and when – the where excluded – a further perspective suddenly revealed, the ghost of his successor, prospectively, always on his mind: somewhere, anywhere, everywhere: to be announced when least expected, the model (that day) a catalyst, he thought, in that respect, less object than subject for reflection, recently matured, her body, no signs of pregnancy visible upon it; evidence, rather, of bounty, richness – ‘essence’, which Genius and the t’ai chi Neil so much went on about; that strange divergence from their own physique, mysterious, elusive, a resonance which transfigured, rounded, contained – plausible: different from that attachment between his legs, speaking of loss, dismemberment, being wrenched apart, anxious for reconnection, no wholeness associated with it. Old enough to be her father, his thankfulness for what she serenely expressed: a seraphic expression, guilelessness not that of an equivalent man, or her husband.

  Conscious of pieces of paper lying around the house, on table, chairs, cupboards, shelves, the floor, on which inscribed

  unconsciousness disharmony: sing for a living

  ask Simone the meaning of intent

  are anxiety attacks due to missing letters in the DNA; if so, where learnt experience?

  are the accretions (epigenetics) recently discovered on genes the beginning of a causal theory of behaviour?

  is space matter; if so, to whom?

  still in the foothills: make everything plain

  transitoriness a permanence of its own

  which was why he looked at her more than at his drawing, to the delight of Neil, the jeaned instructor (slow motion: quick awareness) who conceived the perfect drawing: eight hours of concentration with nothing at the end to show for it, beholder and beholden one

  brutum fulmen

  her Balkan mind crossing a frontier few had known was there, extant in ways no amount of drawing, even less, photography or filming, could record, a rapture commemorated by her body, its disregard for what they, on sheets of paper, were actively pursuing

  carbonating her

  standing at the kitchen table (a narrow projection, the kitchen, from the back of the house), adding ‘a resonance which is shared by the stillness of your husband and your child, waiting for this mundanity to come to an end,’ his house, he had to face it, almost a wreck, subsidence evident in its outer as well as inner walls, an alarming or, in any other circumstances, would-be-alarming tilt to the windows, the building held together by those on either side. ‘Good job it’s in the middle of the terrace and not,’ he had told Simone, ‘at the end, otherwise,’ he’d gone on, ‘it would have fallen off,’ the ‘falling off’ a condition he recognised as his own – away, from, down – propped up by circumstance, chance – the ‘charge’ (the ‘chance’) Simone had mentioned, the residue of a life which, but for her, he had abandoned (left intriguingly at the side of the road to be picked up by anyone who happened to be passing: she as it turned out)

  beyond his reach, these speculations, other than as something embodied in Alexis’s untroubled gaze, the trance she went into before their eyes, a spiritual residuum.

  A sidestreet, in his own case, off the Chalk Farm Road: terraces one hundred and fifty years old, once strawberry fields approached, from the east, by a footpath crossing the River Fleet at Kentish Town, subsequently encroached upon, the river covered, by Victorian dwellings, associations unknown to him until recently, which absorbed him more and more, not least the tube line which ran through the London Clay directly beneath his feet.

  Above the narrow rear extension, the bathroom, the main body of the house comprised of a single through-room on the ground floor, opening directly on to the kitchen, and two bedrooms on the floor above, a double one at the front, a single one at the rear, the furniture sparse, a post-marital requirement minimally expressed: drawers, a wardrobe, in the upper rooms and, in the loft, entered through a trap-door on the landing, the bric-à-brac he had stored there in a number of cardboard boxes.

  Somewhere, in one of the boxes, were the photogra
phs of his children, three infants (mainly) whom in most instances he was no longer able to differentiate, one from the other: the maternally expressive mother, the paternally apprehensive father, a source of fascination, the former, to her (second) husband Gerry, a peripatetic entrepreneur moving from company to company as executive bagman: good old G! (Brady: publicist and mesmeric raconteur).

  A photograph of his children in their maturity he had by the bed: three men of strangely variable build, Charlie, like his mother, tall and slim, the eldest; Steven, the youngest, slightly built, neither like Charlotte nor himself, and Joseph, a broad, expansive figure who represented something of Maddox in nature and build, a formalised aloofness characterising their expressions, misleadingly, in this one photograph, creatures of Maddox’s own inventory: he had taken the picture, the occasion the announcement of his and Charlotte’s separation, paternity, however, despite their parents’ negative example, common to them all, offspring, he’d been delighted to see, eschewing complexity and self-division, beholden to their mother for composure, fair-mindedness, familial restraint (bearers of grace).

  Charlotte, with some misgivings, had left him: he was getting old; so was she, it adding to her attractions. His expectations of anything better had been judiciously withdrawn, hers focused on excitation (companionability, curiosity, warmth), he, as it turned out, travelling in the opposite direction, a reductive if not, on reflection, annihilating process, she a volitional creature, he, he’d concluded – they’d both concluded – not: Ariadne winding up her string, leaving him deeper in than ever

  a sinner: his disgrace

  grateful, nevertheless, to Gerry, the avuncular MD, for providing her – providing all of them – with a life which otherwise they couldn’t afford.

  The white walls (of his residence) were now a uniform grey, embellished with darker patches: the marks of his grandchildren’s hands on the stairs, a reminder, the infrequency of the visits, he was reluctant to remove: less house than alcove, quartered into use – distracted, at that moment, by voices, the crashing of a door, the sliding up and down of a window, audible through the party-wall: Berenice, known familiarly as Berry to her numerous callers, a voice as penetrative as a rock-drill, its harshness interspersed at intervals with the interrogative, ‘Right?’, a punctuative exhalation as potent as a shell expelled from the barrel of a gun – his neighbours on the other side, the Connollys, he a minister at the local Presbyterian church, relatively silent (hymn-singing, occasionally – with which, through the party-wall, he often joined in – on Mrs Connolly’s Wednesday evenings), Sundays a popular day for addicts at Berenice’s front door, marshalled in and out by Isaiah, her definitively non-Christian Afro-Caribbean minder, the poker-work wood panel beside the front door, below a snarling Dobermann head, inscribed ‘I can get to the gate in five seconds. Can you?’ putting no one off, as far as he was aware: the nightly recital of benefit and credit card fraud, fencing, the itinerary of Berenice’s more sporadic (now she was ageing) intimate engagements often accompanying Maddox’s reflections as he fell asleep.

  He was missing Simone, night closing in: slim, high-bosomed, past her prime (in reality, coming into it): the high forehead, the dark hair, the fangs of grey on either side drawn back from carefully – erotically, magnetically – mascaraed and pencilled-in brown eyes (great care in preparing and laying on her make-up): an inquisitive, searching nature – given over, in maturity, to declamation: no children, despite three marriages. Having gone to her as a ‘client’ – recommended, ironically, by Charlotte, on the recommendation, in turn, of Gerry, several of whose employees had allegedly benefited from her ‘work’ – he’d come away, after several months, as something else entirely, she announcing an involvement at ‘something other than a clinical level’, a curious innocence, amounting to naïvety, having, in his view, characterised their encounters, one which, he imagined, rendered her immune to the potential depravity, despair, cynicism not only of him but of all her clients: something he’d belatedly, perhaps confusingly, recognised as ‘faith’, though in what, and to what purpose, even now, he had no idea, associating this with the ‘grace’ he thought he’d recognised that day in the Kosovan model.

  Re-tracking his career in the dark: the prodigal essayist, one year out of the Courtauld (there as postgraduate, via Wadham), a junior curator at twenty-six (at a highly competitive time), a senior one at thirty, the Raybourne Professor of Art History at the Drayburgh School of Fine Art, succeeding Viklund who’d moved over to a similar but more remunerative post at the Royal College, inertia (and hack-work, ironically) at this point, coming in: lassitude, or indifference, or a liking for the atmosphere of the Drayburgh (its activities confined exclusively to fine, as opposed to applied art), together with the character of Pemberton, the unprecedentedly long-term, avuncular Principal, the college off the Euston Road, in any case, more accessible to his north London address than, should he have followed Viklund on the older man’s retirement, as many had imagined he would, South Kensington and the Cromwell Road? Tendentiousness, speciousness: a vocabulary he was inclined to favour retrospectively in assessing his career, having focused his attention, at that time, on his sons, the ‘familial triptych’ he’d assembled with Charlotte: their beauty, their grace (again): their divinity, even, drawn on, once more, to what he thought he’d recognised that day in the Kosovan model.

  Night, on the single bed in the back room, where he slept when not in the front room with Simone: away from the sound of Berenice’s activities through the party-wall, the window open to the tiny backyard below, alive with birdsong, the evening light still strong. Aircraft lumbered up from Heathrow. Hers would have landed, he assumed, he disinclined to go and meet her amidst her colleagues, convinced, for one thing, his successor was amongst them, his insecurities in this area so entrenched that, exhausted by a day of speculation (observation: self-expression) he couldn’t rest. She would ring him once home: even, on one occasion, had rung him on arrival, anxious to reassure him that ‘nothing had changed’, her interest, at such moments of return, directed normally to her faxes, her e-mail, her answering machine, her collected calls on her mobile (no similar machinery, he reflected, at his end of the line): the slim, upright, recalcitrant figure, addicted to clothes, high heels, the paraphernalia, it invariably seemed to him, of an earlier existence: a charmed and constantly changing nature, commandeering his weaknesses, his strengths – his hopes (his remaining aspirations). Why so enamoured? he plaintively enquired: the fervour of his – and her – ‘conversion’, as she described it, he, one moment, sitting in her consulting-room on the ground floor of her house, the next, scarcely three months later, ascending the stairs to her living-quarters overhead: a further ascent to her roof garden: the plants, the air, the insects, the flowers (winter turning into spring), the view over the surrounding roofs to the West End, the smear, like a trail of smoke, of the North Downs in the distance: in the opposite direction, above the intervening roofs, the sky above the St Albans hills. It had – the word came spontaneously to mind – felt like home: the intimacy of the wood-panelled sitting-room below and, not long after that, the greater intimacy of her wood-panelled bedroom, occupied almost exclusively by the double bed: the fragrance of the sheets, the covers, the pillows.

  Amidst her machines – her telephone rarely stopped ringing – her cellular containment amongst the skylights, gardens and chimneys, he identified a solitariness to match his own, he disengaged from her as a client, an echo (a facsimile) of those figures who came up the eroded stone steps to her door, attracted less to a favoured-by-nature mentalist than explicitly to a healer, he, from such speculation, evoking an image of someone alarmingly beyond his reach.

  What, conversely, in him, appealed to her: to the extent of diverting her, uniquely, from a lifetime’s practice? An emeritus professor, to boot, with, currently, a singularly discredited background. Previously, the discursiveness as well as the dynamic of his life had been focused on a process which turned animal, vegeta
ble and mineral matter into something, at the least, elusive, at the best, transcendent. He had, to this degree, set his signature on the past, a challenge to be superseded, if not by his own interpretations, by those of others. Atrophied by the process, he had reached the point where, in arresting history, he had arrested himself: writing in the notebook beside his bed, his head bowed, his body arced to the light still coming from the window …

  ‘What is her attraction?’ Charlotte had enquired – on the phone, having heard of the outcome of their encounters (engineered by her, he had begun to suspect, a prank, conceivably, on both their parts, he tossed helplessly between them). On the whole it had been too early, too unexpected, too sudden, too unlikely, to warrant hers or Gerry’s (or their sons’) intrusion: he and Simone had behaved like children, a regression to hitherto undiscovered, certainly unconsidered parts of their previous lives, a regression of which they were instantly aware, fear, of an inexplicable nature, having, ironically, in him, in the first instance, brought them together. ‘Like all men,’ he might have said by way of explanation of his attraction to a woman whose attractiveness, to him, was both alarming and profound. ‘My only regret,’ he’d told all of them, ‘is it’s too late for us to have children.’

  The darkening sky outside, the lights appearing in the windows: rarely did anyone draw a curtain, the intimacy of the yards proscribing it. On the floor, by the bed, was one of the drawings he’d been preoccupied with throughout the day, the fragmentary outcome of several hours of observation: whatever had been achieved had been absorbed, the model an embodiment of something he had unknowingly been preoccupied by throughout his life

  death around the corner: an aversion to signalling left or right

  the language of an earlier discipline had found a muse

  long after he might have expected it …

  The phone rang, the window still open, the room dark. He must have fallen asleep, lighted transparencies, the other windows along the backs.