As it happened, p.19
As It Happened, page 19
Then, later, came the letter, followed, when he responded, by a warrant licensing one visit, their peculiar confrontation in something not unlike a cattle stall, his friend’s familiar features coarsened, as if, internally, the mind behind them had been torn apart, a leering, savage, reproachful stare, that of an animal pinioned in a cage, replacing the helpless, hapless, engaging fecklessness of the former Quinians youth, the cigarettes, the absence of, a seemingly considered provocation. Everyone, evidently, was a criminal, living, one way or another, off others, he, his friend, more honest than most: ‘You haven’t painted the fucking pictures, you just make money from writing about the fuckers who have,’ Major-Minor minor no longer, having written to him via the newspaper in which his first reviews had appeared, he, Maddox, surprised that such a publication should have been available in prison. ‘I steal from the insurers, not individuals,’ Maddox’s incredulous, ‘But who do the insurers charge for the thefts? Me and the rest of the community,’ adding, ‘You cunt,’ to reinforce his declaration.
He’d felt sorry for, finally pained by, his friend’s delinquency, unable, he decided, to challenge it further on a subsequent visit (‘No one else wants to come. My wife’s sold our flat and all my possessions and pissed off to Spain’), he handing over a permissible carton of cigarettes, listening, grieved, to further justifications of his friend’s decline (‘more honest than most’), his friend’s anger reignited when Maddox announced the name of the psychiatrist he had, after a great deal of enquiry, discovered: ‘He’s bent, for fuck’s sake. Every court in the fucking country knows him. He’ll get me years on not off,’ adding, to reciprocate Maddox’s previous reproach, ‘you cunt.’
By request, he had met his friend at the prison gates on the day, years later, of his release, a considerably reduced figure dressed in a dishevelled suit on a winter morning. Rain was falling. He’d bought him a meal and, on request, had given him money, finally a cheque: ‘I could change this easily to make it a hundred.’ ‘Why don’t you?’ he’d responded, ‘there’s less than fifty in the account.’ He had had two further, summary encounters with his former chum before he had once again disappeared, only the memory, of something uncompleted, unresolved, removed, remaining, a legacy which, subliminally, he suspected, he carried over into his meeting with Taylor.
Perhaps because of the severity of the sentence, and the conditions under which Taylor was now held, he was shown, after a great deal of scrutiny – electronic and otherwise – into a featureless room furnished with two canvas-seated chairs on either side of a plastic table, a uniformed figure remaining inside the door. Taylor, whom he didn’t recognise, had entered in his shirtsleeves, his collar open, a pale, curiously bloated figure with prematurely greying hair, taking his seat on one side of the table without glancing at Maddox at all.
It was as if he were waiting to be assessed, a vestige here of the Taylor he’d known, but so recessive that he, too, sat in silence, his defences, his prospective defences, disarmed.
His former student had been of a stocky, broad, almost round-shouldered build, exuding a sense of physical strength (stoicism, even), an archetypal, to Maddox’s then tutorial mind, farm-labourer (he gave evidence of having worked as such), a rural mechanic of some sort: a figure resonant of an assured, two-footed emplacement on the earth (conspicuous amongst the aesthetes who dominated the Drayburgh at that time, Donaldson later to be included), stolid, truculent, fresh-faced, his cheeks shiny, his full lips red, the eyes filled with a stark, unquestioning fervour: something provincial, if not parochial, evoking the sense of an enclosed community, belligerently indisposed, if for good reason, to the world outside, unmannered, reluctant to be approached directly, brusque, suspicious, recalcitrant – other than in a response to painting, an elemental, if not devotional exercise (the one window opening, Maddox had reflected at the time, on an otherwise dark enclosure): passionate, injured, curiously modest, warm.
Maddox, distracted by the morose figure by whom he was confronted, glanced up at the uniformed figure inside the door, he, too, without a jacket, his shirted arms folded across his chest, a protuberant gut – and was conscious of the similarity to Taylor’s own appearance, dark trousers, white shirt, as if one were a parody of the other, each involved in an overt if conspiratorial alliance. His immediate response, if unexpressed, had been to suggest he’d been brought the wrong prisoner, Taylor, a relatively common name: how many were there in the prison: how long would it take to sift the right one out?
The silence, which he wasn’t disinclined to let continue, was broken by a door clanging in the corridor outside, followed by the sound of voices. ‘That one’s occupied’: the retreating sound of footsteps on a stone-flagged floor.
‘I didn’t know if you smoked,’ Maddox said, reminded of his previous experience of a first-time visit. ‘I brought some cigarettes which I’ve been asked to leave outside.’
Taylor raised his head, his eyes, dark-rimmed, flickering in Maddox’s direction, taking him in, swiftly, then glancing away.
‘Are we allowed to shake hands?’
Taylor didn’t answer: neither did the warder respond, his gaze, abstracted yet nevertheless alert, fixed on the cream-painted brick wall behind Maddox’s back.
Drawing up his chair, Maddox placed his arms companionably on the table, Taylor, for his part, sitting with his chair pushed back. His hair, previously dark and thick, was now thinning, with flashes of white at the temples. The sensitised, almost parochial look had vanished, something pained, hesitant, unreflective taking its place. The previously sturdy, ingenuous features, too, had gone, the nose alone, curiously, retaining the sensitivity of the student of fifteen years before: the experience of wife, children, job – disillusionment and terror, too, Maddox assumed – had produced a thickening of the brow, the cheeks, the chin, a dark, vertical line, like an incision, dividing the shifty, hesitant, averted eyes. It was as if Taylor were signalling he wished he hadn’t come. As it was, he’d been prepared not only for a more confrontational encounter but a more explicit one, something of a more spirited nature, a vestige of what had passed contentiously between them as student and tutor. Rather than diminished by what had happened, Taylor appeared to be enlarged, if not enhanced, almost, Maddox reflected, complacently so, as though the recent past had returned him to the way things were, or ought to have been, he back with the people, and in the place, where he truly belonged, and from which the Drayburgh had unfortunately divided him. A childlike submissiveness pinned him to the chair, his hands, fisted, thrust in his armpits, an image of resistance and self-enclosure. At any moment Maddox expected him to enquire of his wife and children, specifically of Rebecca, as though she and he, Maddox, were the cause of his current discomfort, Maddox increasingly aware of his own actions, splaying his fingers, unaccountably, on the table before him, as if to indicate to Taylor he had nothing to hide. What curious behaviour for both of us, he thought, concluding at the same time it was up to him to break the pattern (a residual tutor’s role). The enormity of what had happened, placing Taylor beyond humanity, or so it seemed, stood between them like an invisible wall. What am I feeling? he asked himself. What sensation do I associate with this unusual encounter? Is it me he wished to see or someone else? conscious of the warranty that had brought him here: his own attempt to kill himself. In no time at all, he reflected, the meeting would be over and nothing would have been said.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he said, recalling a similar (disastrous) offer made to his Quinians friend.
Taylor shook his head, the first direct acknowledgement he’d given, the gesture not unlike that of someone flicking hair or water out of their eyes, a degree of containment, exasperation, irritation. Feelings of a more dynamic nature were being entertained behind that dark, recessive gaze, inflaming, discomforting, vengeful.
‘Have you kept any other contact with the Drayburgh?’ he enquired, prompting Taylor, reminding him that the invitation for the visit had come from him. They’d sat in a not dissimilar room – smaller but almost equally spartan – on many occasions in the past: the tutor room next to the sculpture studios in the basement of the Drayburgh – discussing, he recalled, Taylor’s essays on his then favoured theme, the return to naturalism – ‘poetic naturalism’ – from the iconographic formalities of the earlier half of the century, likening it to the emergence of the same in Florentine trecento painting: something of a precocious analogy but curiously – dismayingly – dated now. Yet something echoed, if in reverse, in Taylor’s own emergence from provincial life into the vitality of London. Life was first lived, and then endured, had been implicit in much of Taylor’s attitude at that time, allied to a voracious appetite to survive. So much of his past, if revoked (‘I don’t want it’), was only to be introduced at his discretion: marriage, children – the Drayburgh: his enquiry was met by the same dismissive flick of the head.
‘Would you like me to stay?’ Maddox concluding he’d leave the cigarettes and go, a relief to both of them, he imagined.
The warder’s eyes came down to scrutinise, with interest, the back of Taylor’s head, and then, momentarily, examined Maddox’s enquiring expression.
‘Is there anything I can get you?’ he asked again. ‘A book. Paints. Pencils. Paper. Ink,’ and then, more forcefully, ‘Is there anything you’d like to talk about?’ the Florentine revolution compromised by recent Roman discoveries passing briefly through his mind.
‘Rebecca talked about you,’ Taylor said, turning his head to meet Maddox’s gaze as if he, Maddox, were the prisoner – a peculiar, penetrative insight – and he the visitor.
‘They were formative times for us all,’ Maddox said.
Removing his hands from his armpits, Taylor lowered them to the table: cupped, they lay there like offerings, or potential containers, a curious sense of displacement, of removal, almost of disowning (there they are, here I am: they have nothing to do with me), Maddox recalling, with a shock, they were the instruments of something which might no longer be mentioned. The nails, he observed, were black, as if he had been digging, scraping, excavating earth: a subterranean sensation caused the hair at the back of his neck to stiffen.
‘It’s true. You had a great influence on all of us,’ Taylor said, lightly, derisively, disowning the claim as swiftly as he presented it.
‘And you on me,’ Maddox said, unwilling to let the challenge pass.
‘How was that?’ The recessed, dark-rimmed eyes were starkly alert. He should be pleased I’m even speaking to him, Maddox thought, withdrawing the speculation the instant he was aware of it.
‘Invariably you learn as much, if not more, from your students as they do, ideally,’ he said, ‘from you. No doubt you found that, too, as a teacher.’
‘To take advantage of it, though, is reprehensible,’ Taylor swiftly responded.
‘So it is.’
It was as if he were seeing Taylor from a distance; or, as if the once familiar but now foreign figure were retreating across the room, beyond the wall, beyond the prison, to a place he, Maddox, didn’t know, a curious displacement of the present occurring, as if neither of them were confined by or in the room at all.
Yet there it was: a presence of colossal, almost superhuman proportions, Maddox aware of the likeness of this sensation to that which he associated with the tube station platform: fear, of a similar nature, gripped the centre of his body, as if once again he were enclosed by the fingers of a gigantic hand, aware of a surge of anger, even triumph – ascendancy of some sort – in Taylor’s eyes as he examined him more keenly, threateningly, across the table.
‘If there’s something you’d specifically like to say I’d prefer you to come out with it,’ Maddox said, sinking under the look, returning, bleakly, he assumed, to his role of tutor – adviser, outside agent, a representative of an authority that exceeded himself, holding Taylor’s gaze, his own hands, he noticed, spread-eagled more firmly across the surface of the table, bracing himself for an assault, of a physical nature, from the other side.
‘I’m in the medical wing,’ Taylor said, inconsequentially, withdrawing. ‘Somewhat better than a cell. Particularly if you have to share.’
‘Is there anything you need?’ he asked again. ‘Anything,’ he went on, ‘you’d like to tell me?’
‘I don’t smoke,’ Taylor said, capitulation, of some sort, taking place. ‘I could swap them. Screws allowing.’ Turning his head, half smiling, he indicated the figure at the door: if anything, its attention had grown more acute. Conceivably, Maddox reflected, Taylor was feinting before he struck again: a not unexpected sense of desolation appeared to grip them both. ‘Probably,’ he suddenly went on, ‘it was not a good idea asking you to come.’
‘You must have had something in mind,’ he said.
‘Persona non grata, I should think, wondering if the persona and the grata were still in place.’
‘Evidently so,’ Maddox said, relieved at the invitation.
‘I gave up painting years ago.’ Taylor paused. ‘I followed your writing. Rebecca didn’t. Follow it.
‘Why not?’
‘She didn’t like you.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said.
He waited, too.
‘Could have cost you your job.’
‘It could.’
‘Screwing students.’ Taylor smiled, eerily: his teeth, conspicuously white at one time, were discoloured. The whites of the eyes, too, were reddened: no doubt against his wishes he’d been sedated. His smile, moments later, turned into a grimace. ‘You old enough to be her father.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Nowadays of no account.’
‘That’s true also,’ he responded.
‘You went on, of course, all right.’
‘I did.’ He was about to add, ‘and so did she,’ but swiftly amended, ‘She was capable of making her own decision.’
It was, he realised, a bold intrusion: looking up at the warder he recognised someone vividly, antagonistically alert: someone, he assumed, indisposed to both of them. He regretted Taylor, his back to him, couldn’t see the reaction.
‘Capable, but not necessarily in a position to do so,’ Taylor said, calm suddenly, articulate.
‘And,’ Maddox went on, recklessly, ‘you didn’t have to marry her.’
Taylor considered this: ‘marry’ and ‘murder’, phonetically, were not that far apart: at any moment, alarmed by his stillness, the sudden evenness of expression, Maddox imagined him leaning across the table, dislodging it, grasping his throat: no reason to hold back. I am not responsible for this situation, he reflected.
‘She married me. I didn’t marry her,’ Taylor finally responded, the evenness of tone remaining.
‘She asked you to?’ he said, the heat at the back of his neck increasing. Was Taylor implying she was pregnant? That the first of her children was his? The absurdity of this caused him to tighten his pressure on the table, endeavouring, or so it felt, to force its surface down.
The dates of the child, he recalled, didn’t match.
‘It was her decision,’ Taylor said. ‘I went along with it. We didn’t have to, but she thought we should. As you probably remember, she was determined if not impetuous by nature.’
‘Yes.’ He waited, Taylor still examining him, aloofly, across the table.
‘In reality,’ Taylor went on, ‘I’m not really here.’
Maddox waited again.
‘What you see here I call P.G.’
‘P.G.?’
‘Putative Ghost.’ A coarsened expression crossed Taylor’s face, calculated, Maddox reflected, consciously presented. ‘I’m watched continuously.’ He indicated, without turning, the warder behind his back.
For his part, the warder stirred, shifting the weight on his feet: the whiteness of his shirt, the darkness of the tie, the neat line of the sleeve above the elbow: a young, dispassionate, bony face, the forehead and the cheeks prominent, the eyes alert, the previously abstract look displaced by one of enquiry, the mouth, thin-lipped, arrested in a grimace.
‘Giotto I pray to each night. God. Something along those lines. Two G’s. A freakshow here, otherwise. One I have to attend to. Inattention not allowed. There’s a lot I’d like to ask.’
The request came suddenly and, rather than responding, Maddox waited. He was reflecting much himself, not on Taylor, his current or his previous relationship with him, but on the peculiar way he himself had abandoned his life, or endeavoured to do so, here as good a place as any to discover how far, to this extent, he had succeeded, not so much Taylor as the place itself a marker. A feeling of disillusionment, pronounced on his arrival, had strengthened: it only needed a signal from the warder for his own confinement to be confirmed: so much had he done to deserve it, so much was he doing to add to that conviction. No longer could he see any reason why he shouldn’t be locked up as well.
‘She focused much of her life on you. A prescient signal, I told her.’ Taylor’s calmness of voice remained: he was invoking something of the mood, the tone, of their tutorials and might well have been reading notes he’d already made. ‘He has his wife, his sons. He has his acclaim. I did much, at that time, to defend you. There was much of value, I told her, to preserve. He has done much for me as well, I said. Those eyes. Have you ever seen such eyes? The eyes of Saint Peter betraying Jesus.’
The warder was examining the back of Taylor’s head: raising his arm, he glanced at his watch: some, if not much of this, his manner suggested, he had heard before.
‘The living dead,’ Taylor went on. ‘Which is where we are at present.’ His cupped hands now he held together, the grimy nails conspicuous. ‘For which offence, you might say, to make redress, he was crucified upside down. One up on Christ! If his crucifixion was one to write home about, what about poor Pete? See how far we’ve come! One up, too, you might say, on Jehovah.’
