As It Happened, page 23
Maddox, too, looked out to the street, little more than a cul-de-sac, centrally approached by the flight of stone steps leading up from Heath Street: whoever had been passing had gone.
‘I feel quite capable of handling it,’ she added.
‘All I need is for you to tell me the best way I can help,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I shall,’ turning to her food, finally, and beginning to eat.
Later, when he left, she said, ‘I don’t like you going home alone. You hear of so much trouble nowadays, particularly around your place,’ he, embracing her, responding, ‘It’s only as dangerous as it always was. Neither of us should get uneasy,’ wondering, however, as he descended the steps to Heath Street, whether he was being watched, glancing at the figures descending with him from the neighbouring public house, as well as those coming up from below, dismissing the thought once he’d reached the tube station entrance and, the evening being fine, deciding to walk.
The reality was, if Taylor were ‘consistent’, à la Laycock, with his circumstances, then so was he: an imperative of self-destruction in both their cases, unless the anomalies thrown up by science – those lately discovered chemical accretions which had as much effect on function as the genes themselves – were nevertheless consistent with their environment in which a universal mutatory process was underway, of which few – or even any, other than Taylor and himself – were aware.
The cafés and restaurants were full in the High Street, chairs and tables spilling out on the pavements; similarly, in Belsize Park. Further down the hill, however, the streets were comparatively empty. Where the road dipped down to Chalk Farm he glimpsed the floodlit dome of St Paul’s in the distance: it could all, conversely, this scenario, be part of his dilemma: he and Taylor were nuts, his illness no different from that characterising several, if not all, of those members of his ‘support’ group: poor Beth, and Judith, Ida, Anna, Alex, Sally, geriatricity in action, age alone engulfing what rational qualities he had left, nervous exhaustion inseparable from physical decline.
Once he was in the house he rang her to say he was back: the darkness of the streets, the last walk along a level stretch of pavement, past the lit windows of cafés and pubs, his mind, he realised, no longer calm, if anything, in something of a fever, reactions (in his case) identified with causes, causes misinterpreted as effects, a paradoxically ordered sense of disorder, he inclined to ring her back, to talk over again what might be happening, what had happened, what might well happen (his imagination on the loose again), Laycock’s theories of indifferentiation – separating effects, in effect, from causes (the ‘Viennese Syndrome’ wherein effects were diagnosed as causes) – notwithstanding, a subliminal absorption by (invisible) adjacent forces mirrored in – paralleled by – a mutatory activity in the brain, Taylor and Laycock, in this context, a concatenation of thought and feeling – a conclusion which took him, confusedly, to bed, he missing her, he now realised, acutely (could she trust him, at this moment, not to regress?), the events of the day, he further reflected, coming to a head: the darkening room, the view of the houses opposite, the windows alight beyond his own uncurtained one – absorbed by a sensation corresponding to that which had gripped him earlier that day in the presence of Taylor, a negative element projected by each of them, indistinguishable from the physical sensation experienced on the tube station platform (not three hundred yards from where he was lying), a hand, its individual fingers configurated around his body, projecting him, without warning, towards the line.
9
Doctor Kavanagh was a small, muscular, broadly built man, perhaps in his early forties, with blond, receding, short-cropped hair, and – surprisingly, considering his patients – an incredulous, accessible, ingenuous smile: ‘now that’s a strange thing to say/do’, his expression conveyed in response to the complaints, the terror, the resignation, the appetite for death, he encountered amongst the majority of his ‘clients’, as he preferred to call them, the accounts of decay, decline, disablement, senility an increasing, or so it seemed, mystery to him, the strange foreshortening of everything, for instance, connected with the senses, the awareness of mortality which preoccupied everyone who came to see him, his office a bare, fastidiously undecorated interior, echoing a not dissimilar disinclination to face nature’s, and specifically humanity’s inevitable end: a suggestion that life, once begun, could be reasonably expected to go on for ever, certainly with the doctor’s advice and assistance, Maddox, on this occasion, summoned in at lunchtime from his group, one of those whom the good doctor was more than anxious to turn in this promising direction.
He had, in his youth, he had told Maddox, been a boxer (‘a facility for getting hit more frequently than I was hitting others’) at medical school (‘a dying sport, in more ways than one’), and gymnast (‘never any great standard in this country, either’), and had collected paintings (‘mainly, if not exclusively, artists you’ve never heard of, nor are likely to’), an enthusiast, at heart, for obscure pursuits, lunacy amongst the elderly undoubtedly the most significant.
Maddox liked him: in one sense, he believed he must have loved him: faith, devotion, an indefatigable belief in the prolongation of human excitation had, in Maddox’s view, to be met by an equivalent, unambiguous response.
Wearing a cardigan and corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt (an informality of dress he shared with the charge-nurse, Richard), seated only inches away from Maddox, he exuded an air of fraternal, almost physical companionability: if death were in the room he would only have to be informed and, in a matter of seconds, he would have thrown it out (no boxer and gymnast for nothing: even obscure paintings would play their part): ‘Tell me,’ his look implored. ‘I’m here to do whatever you ask,’ Maddox aware of the apologetic tone with which he described his symptoms – dragging them behind him, deferentially, through the door – not least the more alarming ones. Kavanagh, he knew from previous encounters, held out the possibility of his getting younger by the hour: come in feeling sixty-nine, go out feeling forty-five, eyes brighter, limbs lighter, spirits higher, brain alert, mortality in abeyance, if not dispensed with – as quickly, as swiftly, with Kavanagh’s assistance, as he might have removed his coat. What, previously, might have been measured in terms of regression, were, in reality, indications of progress: the delaying hand in the air, the quizzical look, the smile which greeted any mention of decline (‘surely,’ the look inferred, ‘you must have been mistaken’).
‘I’ve a feeling,’ Maddox said, coming directly to the point, indicating he would brook no dissension, ‘I’m getting nuttier. I’m concocting a rationale which includes both the best and the worst in human nature with the intention of showing that perversity and altruism are not involved, that action and thought are consistent with context, context defined in terms of the circumstances in which each individual finds him- or herself. To this end, chance has led me to a man I knew several years ago who has committed an unpardonable crime. With him, too, I am looking for the same consistency,’ pausing to watch Kavanagh’s perplexed (confounded) expression, wondering – having no experience of such an event – if this was what happened to someone like the good doctor when, in a boxing-match, his opponent threw a left – a vigorous, idiosyncratic, explosive left – instead of an expected – a singularly signalled – right.
‘Laycock’s theory,’ Kavanagh said, suddenly. ‘I read up on him as a student. We don’t exist except in terms of, or as a projection of, the specifics and generalities by which we are surrounded. Laycock, if I remember, having a job with geniuses, the explanation thereof. If one could be produced, in Moscow, say – he was very fond of Tolstoy, a Laycockian to the core – “kings are history’s slaves” – why aren’t all Muscovites geniuses too? A problem he got round with his theory of exception. I liked it. “Exclusivity of circumstance”. Einstein, of course, another problem. Along with Freud, or, as he referred to him, Fraud. “Nature’s own”. Anticipating, in the process, much of subsequent genetic theory. A bit like a tag of wool, I always thought, hanging from a jumper. Attempt to pull it out and the whole of the garment comes apart.’
He was smiling: optimistic, alert, incorrigibly charming: another shadow dispelled (another chimera disposed of).
All the time, however, he, Maddox, was thinking of Simone: should he mention her (and her present predicament)? And Taylor: should he expand on that? the two of them, he and Simone, not least in his dreams, hopelessly combined, an androgynous couple. Something of a more reassuring response was that he, Maddox, Mad Ox, was taking leave of his senses, or, more pertinently, accurately, they were taking leave of him (going elsewhere, destination to be announced), the ‘he’ in this equation an entity which had been evolving, surreptitiously, behind his back, throughout his life, an insidious, indescribable, demonic creation, there all the time, now sensationally, frighteningly, wickedly revealed, Maddox, in all his absurdity – his cruelties, his perversions, his distortions, above all, his affectations – exposed like a rock by an outgoing tide.
‘I can’t work out whether it’s a rationale based on evidence, or pathology,’ he said, ‘in another form,’ Kavanagh no longer examining him with a smile but a frown. The sound of the physiotherapist came from the hall outside where the day’s group were being lightly loosened up after lunch: ‘Don’t let digestion turn to fat. Bend forward, and back. To your left, to your right. Keep the shoulders straight, Anna,’ they seated in a circle in the upholstered, wooden-armed chairs, digestion undoubtedly the least of their problems (the wool unravelling in his mind, destroying his own original design).
Continually he was putting himself in a corner, pinned in, on this occasion, with Simone, who, he suspected, he had wilfully manoeuvred beside him. What part had he played in her seduction of him? consciously, demurely, helplessly, even, she drawn in by his ‘circumstance’ (open to advances, propositions, suggestions), Doctor Death, the physiognomy as well as figure, becoming indistinguishable from the otherwise sharply contrasted figure of Taylor (death, in both instances, though no similarity, in reality, at all): the last glimpse of his former student hesitating at the interview-room door – Maddox glancing up, at this point, at Kavanagh, looking for a lead, the corduroys, the open-necked khaki shirt (a military association somewhere), the sleeves of the cardigan drawn up, his wrists and forearms bare (a physical engagement with his perpetual opponent): the strange things his patients, his declining patients, came up with, their mental and physical deterioration, unavoidable in any other circumstance, encouragingly ignored. ‘A preoccupation with ideas is inevitable,’ Kavanagh said, ‘considering your background. I should,’ he continued, ‘let them run. You can always invalidate them,’ he added, ‘if they don’t stand up,’ pausing before enquiring, ‘Do you find them disturbing or constructive?’
‘They appear to have their own momentum,’ he said. ‘As if the last gesture anyone can make is to find a reason for having done what they have done. If not,’ he went on, ‘for everything,’ gazing at Kavanagh’s eager, open face as if there he might find an answer. ‘Maybe I should draw back. Be more reluctant to go with it. It can’t,’ he went on, ‘be the medication. I never had this reaction to dothiepin earlier. I take it I’m on the maximum dose?’ Kavanagh watching him acutely. Am I, or am I not, he reflected, going mad? Why had Simone been so prompt in allowing him to go the previous evening?
What did madness consist of? a reasonable expectation abandoned, a predisposition to take neither yes nor no for an answer. He was, he reflected, overturning his life (in order to see, for the first time, what lay underneath: the analogy with a car immediately apparent): hoisted up on a ramp, a hallucinatory experience in the context of a room devoid of decoration, its functional chairs, its functional table, their two chairs confronting one another, a room, curiously, if more compact and of more recent construction, not unlike the one in which he’d visited Taylor, and, before that, in which he’d taken tutorials at the Drayburgh.
‘Loss is gain’, ‘Man cometh by death’, two songs he might have sung, the freedom Laycock approved of (exercised, promoted), the ‘freedom’ of being ‘in relation’ (any number of sources), a romantic extrapolation of a freedom he could, otherwise, have only dreamt about – and one which Laycock more thoroughly examined: a Christianic affiliation with something, someone, he had, previously, only heard rumours about, beyond neighbourliness, beyond a stranger’s Samaritanic identification (with the lost, the dying, the inept, the ruined, the hopelessly depraved): here was Maddox, as Simone had suggested, with an answer (to everything, parenthesis included).
No wonder Kavanagh was looking surprised: not many metaphysically inclined geriatrics in Holm House to distract him from his much-admired day clinic, Maddox, as on previous occasions, at school, at college, now here, a much-laboured exception, Mad Ox, of the genus Bos, not named as such for nothing – munching his way into the formalised masses, from there chewing his way back out again, in the hope of returning to a previously abandoned central role: art as murder, or some such thing, killing, a final conceptual marker (the end of contemporary art as we know it): truth-to-nature-Taylor, TTNT, for short.
‘Since it appears to have sprung up spontaneously I feel obliged to pursue it,’ he said. ‘It may even be a sign of recovery,’ the look of relief on Kavanagh’s face, ‘life’ convened in all its positive phases. ‘To your left, Alex,’ from the hall outside. ‘To your right, Judith.’ ‘Libido, too, is very low, if not, at most times, absent. I wonder if I should have a pill.’
‘Later, probably,’ Kavanagh said. ‘It could be the dothiepin’s side-effects. Once you’re stabilised I can forward you to an appropriate clinic,’ glancing up from the file on his knee in which, suddenly, he’d started to write, to enquire, the first overt sign of curiosity he’d shown, ‘Is it a problem at present?’
‘I get an erection and occasionally can’t sustain it,’ Maddox said, wondering how relevant this might be.
‘It’s certainly not ageing,’ Kavanagh said, disinclined to concede deterioration in anything. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a normal sex life, no reason why you shouldn’t return to what you might call your normal state of abnormality,’ smiling, instructions, outside the room, continuing, ‘You’re not trying, Beth. You’ll have to put more into it. These soporific afternoons we won’t allow,’ Kavanagh, unaware, seemingly, of the relevance of the commentary, writing once more in his file.
Maddox turned his gaze to the window: a flower-bed in a lawn, beyond which rose the trees in the back gardens of the houses opposite: Edwardian and post-Edwardian structures – his own sense of confusion increased by what he could only interpret as Kavanagh’s disinclination to acknowledge defeat (a doughty boxer, in his youth, he assumed), or further discuss Laycock’s relevance to his current situation: nothing as bad as it seemed, the approach of death coinciding with nature’s euthanasia (a decrease of facility in perceiving what, precisely, was going on) not something Kavanagh, for the life of him, and others, would endorse, inimical to his vocational way of thinking.
It was, after all, a century of unprecedented disaster, progress from equated, confusingly, with progress to, regression to with regression from, itemised, the confusion, in two global wars and an unprecedented number of smaller ones, tuned, the whole of them, to a Tayloresque conclusion.
From the particular to the universal, in this instance, and back again, in scrupulously recorded stages, philosophy as action – recording two children lying in their beds (nine and eleven), doped before he killed them, and one wife, half doped in the bedroom where she’d struggled with him before being knifed repeatedly in the chest (the back, the sides, the head, the neck, the flailing arms and legs), Taylor, a blood-streaked figure, making an attempt to hang himself (of this will I dispose: it has all gone wrong: it is all revoked: I alone can see it, I alone am it), the banister rail to which he had attached the rope breaking, the bursting-in of the police summoned by a neighbour (the wife’s screams shattering the silence of the crescent: no one quite the same after that: Taylor’s rock in the pool projecting further than he might have assumed). All this a paraphrase, not thought about, prematurely dismissed, in Maddox’s mind, as so much else: Laycock’s precept of ‘civility’ (that which thou dost to me I do to thee); that which engineered cohesion, responsiveness, the relationship between ‘concept’ and ‘perception’, between the individual and the congruities he or she collated, consciously or otherwise, to make up what s/he knew as ‘themselves’: the ‘motor-mode’ of civil existence (another analogy Maddox had been responsive to), life, in short, as only a lunatic would know it, a rationalist, a voyeur (Laycock ‘explaining’ Hitler at the time: Thesis and Antithesis his seminal work of 1940).
Now he was talking Kavanagh’s language: that things were improving: libido, even, might soon be on the way: Simone didn’t mind: there were more than two ways, he was about to tell Kavanagh, to pluck a goose, to cook a gander, to fuck a femme fatale, which, in Simone’s case, left little to be desired: tongue, mouth, finger: a return to his earliest sexual achievements: dexterity (imagination, exercise): he was on the threshold – the edge – of fulfilling a dream (Laycock’s, too) containing (constraining) the diversity of human experience within a single rationale, empiricism deployed to a previously undetermined end: his personal experience – his knowledge, in this instance, of the development within and without of a particular man, seeing Taylor as a ‘construct’: an extrapolation extended to include the whole of his experience – the whole of what, in reality, Maddox considered to be a parallel existence, namely, himself.
