The Great Concert of the Night

OCTOBER

In Regent Street I am struck by a powerful scent – someone in the crowd is wearing a perfume that Imogen sometimes wore. The smell is that of snuffed candles. ‘Odour of Sanctity’, she called it. No specific memory ensues. The momentary transit of a ghost; a spectre of aromatic air.

Online, a recent interview with Antoine Vermeiren; he goes to some length to ensure that his interviewer properly appreciates the philosophical heft of his work. We must understand that our words for ‘theory’ and ‘theorem’ are rooted in the ancient Greek theoría, meaning ‘contemplation, speculation, beholding, spectacle’. And theoría is related to thea, ‘a view, an act of seeing’, from which the modern ‘theatre’ is derived. The first theorists, he maintains, were those who undertook journeys – arduous and perilous journeys, often – to witness an event or spectacle in honour of the gods. Vermeiren’s scholarship is plausible. He adduces an unnamed text by Aristotle, a work that survives only in fragmentary form. ‘We go to the Olympian festival for the sake of the spectacle, even if nothing more should come of it’, he says that Aristotle writes. And: ‘We go to theorise at the festival of Dionysus.’

It seems that the aristocratic class played little or no part in the Bacchic Mysteries of pre-Imperial Rome. The orgiasts, I have read, were commoners, even slaves. We know little about the form of these Bacchic rites, but it is said that initiates were obliged to undergo terrifying ordeals. In 186 BC the Roman authorities outlawed the cult; when revived by Julius Caesar, the Bacchic Mysteries took a tamer form. The original Mysteries were vulgar and bestial. Much of the flesh on display at the maison de maître, however, was prosperous; tanned, toned. An opera audience stripped bare.

At the maison de maître there was a lithe young woman whose breasts had been augmented surgically, but tastefully. The breasts were keenly molested, but what made her particularly attractive to many, I suspect, were the noises. Her yelps and howls seemed to gratify her partners. At climax, she vented a geyser of obscenities; the climaxes were frequent. She thrashed and flailed; she drummed her heels and screamed. Her pleasure seemed to depend largely upon the mirrors: she watched as if enthralled by her own wildness. Her hair was loose – thick curls, the colour of brass, that reached halfway to her waist; a Pre-Raphaelite maenad.

Antoine Vermeiren was thinking about a comedy based on the myth of Orpheus, he told Imogen, during what might have been their last conversation. Orpheus would be an uxorious middle-aged man, a ballad-singer, mourning for the wife he had lost, through his own stupidity. After years of moping, he would put himself out in the world again. He would become a party animal, or pretend that he had become one. A gang of highly sexed young women would tear him apart, perhaps not metaphorically.

A provocative writer argues that the notorious Messalina, wife of the emperor Claudius, was reviled by her contemporaries not for her promiscuity but because she fell in love. The man in question was not her husband: he was the senator Caius Silius, described by Tacitus as the most beautiful young man in Rome. On August 23rd, 48 AD, the day of Messalina’s death, she attended a bacchanal in celebration of the wine harvest; she was attired as Ariadne; Caius Silius – with whom, it was alleged, she had entered into a marriage contract, having renounced her husband – played the part of Bacchus, the lord of the orgy. Claudius, on hearing of this outrage, ordered the murder of his wife. Messalina’s unforgiveable crime, this writer maintains, was that she had abased herself in loving Caius Silius. A Roman matron owed devotion to her household, and to nothing else; the submission of love was a dereliction of duty, a more grievous offence than mere fornication. This writer refers to the wayward Messalina as an ‘adolescent’. At her death, he states, she was twenty years old. Other sources make her a decade older. Some of these sources, however, might themselves be unreliable. Much of what we know, or think we know, of Messalina’s depravity comes from chroniclers such as Tacitus, Suetonius and Juvenal, who were not her contemporaries. The legend of Messalina is largely a posthumous creation, disseminated by people whose motives were at least in part political. But Pliny the Elder, to whom we owe the story that the insatiable young empress, in competition with a prostitute, once bedded twenty-five men in succession, is perhaps a more dependable witness; he was born just a few years later than Messalina.

Said the exquisite Guillaume to Imogen: ‘It is only with you that I know who I am.’ He was offering himself to Imogen ‘without condition’, he announced. Such self-repudiation was ‘what love demanded’. The declaration took place in a location he had chosen with care: a superb restaurant, deeply rural, recently opened and thus known only to the few, for now. As befitted the occasion, he ordered an extravagant bottle, a Clos Saint-Jacques. Everything was at Guillaume’s expense: the meal and the room at the idyllic hotel, which he had reserved as a surprise. A deep wound was being inflicted on his bank account; the symbolic significance of the gesture was understood. Just as he was renouncing his cash, he would renounce his freedom. In the expectation, of course, that Imogen would renounce hers.

Surveying the orgiasts from the gallery of the maison de maître, a man of my age, of louche demeanour, turned to me and remarked, as if addressing a fellow connoisseur in the presence of some stupendous but troubling work of art: ‘C’est sublime.’ Perhaps there was some truth here, despite the posturing. The beautiful is purely pleasurable, according to Schopenhauer, whereas the sublime gives rise to a mingling of pleasure and pain. The sublime is resistant to contemplation. In Schopenhauer, there are gradations of the sublime. At the weaker end of the spectrum might be the sight of sunlight on a barren mass of boulders; there is no danger, but the scene establishes a hostile relationship to the will of the observer. Sublimity increases with the threat of destruction. A vast desert, in which the observer would certainly die, is more sublime than the boulders, but to be exposed to a storm in the mountains, amid lightning and torrents and rockfalls, is more sublime still. Only the infinite extent of the universe exceeds it.

For a moment, at the maison de maître, I could imagine seeing myself from across the room: a bogus anthropologist, making observations. I imagined how it would be if my employers were to learn of this: the disgrace, the shame, though I did not feel ashamed at that moment. What would I say? ‘An error of judgement. A lapse. That is not who I am.’ But a photograph would prove the contrary. If that’s not you, who else might it be?

Imogen wished that she had been able to make films of the kind that Robert Bresson had made: films that had the sadness one finds in a town, in a landscape or a house, rather than the beauty or sadness one finds in a photo of a town, a landscape or a house, as Bresson himself had put it.

An ancestor of Adeline’s had been clerk of the kitchen in a bishop’s household, and the blood-red roses in the bishop’s garden had thrived, it was said, because they had been planted in soil that had been mixed with earth from the grave of a saint; a portion of that soil had later been carried to the Hewitt house – hence the splendour of its rose garden. Imogen was standing beside me when I showed the group the pastel portrait of Adeline with her blood-red roses. I would have talked about the church commissioner who called on the Hewitts, demanding proof that they had destroyed their ‘images’. The commissioner was shown a garden wall into which the fragments of a broken sculpture of Saint Margaret of Antioch had been incorporated. What the commissioner didn’t know was that the head of Saint Margaret was in effect a door – in the cavity behind it, the family had stowed a reliquary and other forbidden items. This, I might have suggested, could serve as metaphor for the family’s resistance to the new church: outwardly, they observed the new rite; in private, they remained faithful to the old ways. For five years, they had given sanctuary to a relative who had been expelled from her convent; she had lived in the space beneath the roof, the solitary occupant of the Hewitts’ clandestine nunnery. The Hewitt house was in the vicinity of Redruth, which I will pass on my way to William and Jenna; but not a stone of the house remains.

The screaming of foxes wakes me, and what comes to mind is another night, with Imogen, in the garden of her house. ‘Listen,’ she said, pressing my arm to make me stop. We heard foxes, and a conversation of tawny owls, far off. ‘Male’, she said, pointing left, after the first call and reply; ‘female’, pointing right, like a conductor. Leaves hissed in the breeze. I can picture the scene: the moon cross-hatched in the branches; the low dust-coloured clouds. ‘The concert of the night,’ she murmured, as we listened. Walking back to the house, slowly, she told me about Arianne, who had left Paris, and almost everything of her former life, to live alone in the Pyrenees. Few were invited to her mountain cottage. Imogen visited her, after the first operation. The retreat was embedded in huge silence; the whistle of a marmot might be the only sound for an hour. Griffon vultures patrolled the air. Imogen talked to Arianne about sky burials. The idea of being ‘strewn about the mountains’ appealed to her, but only for as long as she was with Arianne, she said. The tranquillity of the mountains had taken possession of her for a while. She imagined that people had once gained a comparable benefit from hermits; they caught contentment off them, which may or may not have lasted. ‘But this is where I have to end,’ she said, and pressed my arm again.

The door is opened by William. As on the day of his departure from my house, an embrace rather than a handshake is what the situation demands. With a hand on my shoulder, he guides me to the living room, where Jenna and Tilly await. Jenna stands as I enter the room. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she says, giving me a hand that is cool and small; it’s as though I were William’s employer and she needs to make a good impression. Tilly, sitting on the floor, regards me uncertainly, but her smile, when her mother introduces me as William’s friend, is bold and delightful, as William had said.

And Jenna is indeed pale, but not unusually so; her hair is dark and long, her mouth small, certainly; and her nose could be described as narrow and straight. For some reason William has omitted to mention her voice: it’s deep, with a throaty and grainy quality, and lovely.

Jenna had thought she would cook stargazy pie in my honour. People use all sorts of fish for it, but Jenna’s family always observes the classic recipe. The heads of the pilchards are left sticking out through the crust, he warns me. ‘Like they’re gazing at the stars. It’s kind of grim.’

‘It’s so the oil can flow back in,’ Jenna explains. She tells me the tale of the pie’s creation, in celebration of the courage of Tom Bawcock, the fisherman who went out in a terrible December storm and came back with enough fish to feed the entire village.

‘And who never existed,’ William interrupts, teasing.

‘Maybe, or maybe not,’ she says, with loving disdain.

The fish are local. William tells me about the revival of pilchard fishing in Newlyn, thanks to Nutty Noah. They catch them the old way, using ring nets, at night, when the fish come up to feed. ‘It’s madness,’ he says. ‘They can pull in four tonnes in an hour.’

‘You’d think he’d been at sea all his life,’ says Jenna. ‘Instead of two days.’

‘More than that,’ William corrects her. ‘Four at least, my lover,’ he says. The sudden Cornish accent gets a laugh from Tilly; it is soon apparent that William can get a laugh from Tilly whenever he chooses.

At the table, at William’s urging, Jenna tells me stories of her family. She ranges through the generations: the great-aunt who’d had six sons in a row, then six daughters, then three more boys; the great-uncle whose voice was the loudest anyone had ever heard; the relative who had come through many years of deep-sea fishing unscathed, give or take a fracture or two, only to drown, drunk, in the bath. While she talks, William looks at her with admiration, as if the stories were of her own invention, and mostly new to him. She is persuaded by William to produce her phone, on which the course of their relationship is charted in a hundred pictures.

At eleven, Jenna begins to yawn. She apologises: it has been a long day, and she has an early start in the morning. We look out of the window at the lights on the hill. In summer, she tells me, every house is lit up at night; in the dead of winter, they are nearly all dark. She often works for Londoners in the holiday months. ‘Some of them, you wonder why they have children. But they pay good money,’ she says.

‘Not all of them,’ says William, putting his arm around her.

Jenna gives me a hug. She hopes to meet me again.

‘I’m sure you will,’ I answer.

‘Oh, you will, definitely,’ says William.

As soon as Jenna has left us, William asks, as if a lot depends on the answer: ‘So? What do you think?’

‘She’s terrific,’ I tell him, candidly.

He looks towards the window. ‘OK,’ he murmurs, and for a moment, despite what I’ve seen of them together, I think he’s about to tell me that he is having doubts. But what he says is: ‘In that case I’m going to give her the bended knee routine. If she says Yes, you’re the best man. Or the best I can manage.’

In one of her letters Adeline makes reference to an ancestor, John Hewitt, who died at Clyst Heath. His throat was cut by a German Lanzknecht. On August 5th, 1549, nine hundred Cornish prisoners were killed in this way at Clyst Heath, by order of Lord William Grey, who had one thousand German mercenaries under his command. Grey and his Germans were fighting the Catholic insurrectionists of Cornwall alongside the king’s troops. The king’s chronicler, John Hayward, recorded that the nine hundred prisoners were bound and gagged before their throats were slit, and that the slaughter lasted a mere ten minutes. On hearing of the atrocity, an army of two thousand Cornishmen advanced on Clyst Heath. Nearly all of them died there, in the bloodiest day of the Prayer Book Rebellion, an uprising that cost the lives of ten percent of the population of Cornwall, by some estimates. Speaking of the battle of Clyst Heath, Lord Grey stated that he had never ‘taken part in such a murderous fray’. Two years earlier, he had led the massacre at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh, the last pitched battle between Scottish and English armies. Unlike at Pinkie Cleugh, there is no memorial at Clyst Heath. A rugby pitch marks the place where the nine hundred were executed.

A lustrous early morning in the park; windless; cloudless; cool. Long shadows of the trees on the pale gold grass. A sense of pause; the withdrawal of autumn is under way. Sitting on the bench, I recalled taking Imogen onto the terrace, in the wheelchair. The sun was still touching the hill; washes of mist lay in the hollows. She said something, so quietly that I did not hear her clearly. Smiling, her face in the light, she repeated: ‘One more day.’ She said it as if life were an addiction that she lacked the strength to overcome. She took off a glove to hold my hand; her skin was as cold as tap water.

A scene to which intense happiness is attached, like a label: in Cornwall, above a cove. The spray was being thrown up to the cliff tops; from time to time it touched our faces; the water boomed and seethed on the rocks below. Huge ribbons of foam a long way from the shore. The sea in flux everywhere. A sumptuous sunset. Vast clouds filled the sky – an endless troop of them approaching over the sea, mighty turmoils of white and pink above the roseate water. I see Imogen in her big Aran sweater; her hair disarrayed. We sat for an hour or so, and barely said a word.

The date of Imogen’s birth. Every year, unless work made it impossible, she came home for her birthday. It was an observance that she felt obliged to maintain, and not just for her mother, she told me. At a break in the rain, in the late afternoon, we went outside. Above the hills, the sky was a mess of steel and iron colours, but the water on the paving stones was like a golden paint. Bright water dripped around us as we walked through the pergola. One of the horses was at the fence; a thin steam rose from its back. She stroked its muzzle and pressed her face to its neck, savouring the smell of the animal. Hans was the horse’s name; he was Imogen’s favourite; at times, when Hans raised his head into the sunlight, it was possible to believe that contented-seeming Hans had a consciousness of his contentment. At some point before we returned to the house, we talked about birthdays, about the religions that acknowledge no anniversaries. Imogen had worked with someone who had told her about an ex-boyfriend whose mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, though appalled by the idea of birthday parties, had spent a fortune on her daughter’s wedding; soon after the wedding, the ex-boyfriend had abandoned the Witnesses, and was consequently disowned by his family. When we celebrate an anniversary, Imogen remarked, we are like people standing together in the middle of a river, holding hands to brace ourselves against the current. Now I throw another page into the water.

From the terrace, with Imogen’s mother, I watched Imogen and her brother, walking towards the paddock; he gestured grandly; plans were being explicated. Jonathan was a strategist, I was told; a young man who was prepared to embrace change, whenever change was necessary, as it now was. And Helen was invaluable too. ‘Invaluable’ was the adjective that Imogen’s mother used. The profundity of Helen’s pedigree had already been impressed upon me. ‘Her people have been here since Stonehenge was new,’ Imogen had joked. In addition to being handsome and well-finished and infinitely English, Helen had proved to be an astute businesswoman; she had negotiated effectively with various buyers for their produce, Imogen’s mother told me. The estate was in safe hands with Jonathan and his wife, I was assured. ‘Imogen has been swimming against the current all her life,’ her mother said. ‘But one cannot do that forever.’ It seemed that I had some potential as a sensible influence, an antidote to the wilfulness that had been characteristic of Imogen since childhood. My appreciation of the house and of its history might help to weaken Imogen’s resistance, she seemed to imply. There was something in the way that Imogen attended to her brother, as he swept an arm across the scene, that seemed to indicate that a change had begun, her mother thought. ‘One day she will come back,’ she stated.

Returning to the living room, to find me studying the portrait of her mother, Imogen’s mother remarked: ‘Imogen always detested that picture.’ We considered the painting of Éloïse. The grandmother’s hair, fiercely wrought, was framed by the splendid autumnal foliage of the garden in Meudon; the texture of the hair was indistinguishable from the texture of the leaves; her fingers, flatteringly elongated, seemed to have no bones; her face had little more definition than a pillow. She was extremely proud of her hands, Imogen told me; she treated them every morning and every night with an esoteric unguent derived from Madagascan vanilla orchids. They were aristocratic hands: she had reason to believe that her bloodline flowed back to an unnamed mistress of the duke of somewhere or other, a duke for whose existence, according to Imogen’s father, there was nothing in the way of proof, of any kind. ‘Le Duc de Mirage’, her father called this elusive ancestor. Like her father, Imogen found it hard to love Éloïse. And Éloïse, for her part, found it hard to love the grandchildren. She seemed to care most deeply for her clothes (as Imogen remembered her, she would dress for the family visitations as a normal person would dress for an evening at the opera), her garden, her dogs – she always had a Bichon Frise or two – and the memory of her husband, Michael, the brilliant diplomat and debonair Englishman, whom she had met in Paris after the liberation and promptly married. Imogen’s father, though treated with respect, was conscious that Michael had set a standard that he could never match. No man could ever match the élan of Michael. He had been killed in a road accident, aged fifty-one, and Éloïse had vowed never to remarry. It was genuinely a vow. She had taken a decision, and Éloïse never went back on a decision that she had made, as she often reminded her family. It was one of her principles. To remarry would have been to traduce the peerless Michael. For the rest of her life she would be an exemplar of noble widowhood. Two or three times a year her family were welcomed – ‘perhaps not the right word’, said Imogen – to her splendid house. It was necessary for the family to go to Éloïse, because Éloïse would never leave Paris. This seemed to be another point of principle. She conducted herself, Imogen said, like an actress who had abruptly, in her prime, abandoned her profession and withdrawn from the public gaze. What she did with her days was a mystery. As far as her granddaughter could tell, her principal occupation, other than inspecting the gardener’s work, was browsing the innumerable fashion magazines to which she subscribed. Reference was sometimes made to her visitors, who were understood to be women of leisure and a certain distinction, but none of these visitors were ever seen, or had names that Imogen could recall. The garden was vast. Play was permitted in a small and precisely delineated zone of greenery and in one room of the house, a room that was almost devoid of furniture and never warm, even in the height of summer. The whole house was chilly, as Imogen remembered it; the air was like the air in the depths of a cave.

The creator of the portrait, Imogen’s mother explained, had been a long-standing friend of her mother’s gardener, who had one day asked if his friend Gaston, a ‘successful painter’, might be permitted to work for a few hours amid the wonderful flowerbeds. Permission was granted, subject to stringent conditions, and Gaston duly arrived one August afternoon. The garden delighted him, as did the dogs: he confessed to being ‘enamoured’ of the Bichon Frise. Further ingratiation was achieved by presenting Éloïse with a sketch of her pets. ‘My mother was unaccountably charmed,’ said Imogen’s mother. The dogs were brought to Gaston, for more thorough scrutiny. A double dog portrait was the upshot. ‘A frightful thing,’ she told me. But Éloise, when she looked at this painting, seemed not to see the maladroit brushwork – she saw only the images of her beloved dogs. Then came the portrait of Éloise herself. ‘My father had died, bear in mind,’ Imogen’s mother confided. ‘For some unfathomable reason, it was only when the portrait was finished that it occurred to my mother that this man might have something else in mind.’ She laughed. ‘What’s so amusing,’ she said, ‘is that he was not merely a mediocre painter: he was a comprehensively unattractive specimen. A tiny man, with green teeth and puny legs. And absurd hair. Like a bird’s nest soaked in oil. Whereas my mother was a fine-looking woman. Not that one would know it,’ she said, waving her cigarette at the picture. ‘Imogen was rather like her, in some ways,’ she remarked, in a tone of conclusion.

‘Oh yes?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, and that was all.

A strange dream, in which I confessed everything to Val. We were at her house. Val and I had withdrawn to the bathroom, because every guest was obliged to confess to her in the bathroom; it was a condition of the invitation. Val held my head between her hands, as if it were a pot that was filled to the brim with water. Her hands shook with the effort of holding it. The explanation was obvious, she said: I took pleasure in my humiliation. Waking, I gave some thought to the proposition. Dreams, however ridiculous, often have the power of truth, if only for a moment. But no humiliation was intended by Imogen, and none experienced. Some anguish, yes; but no humiliation.

Queuing in the post office, I noticed, at the counter, the pretty white dog – Bianca. I recognised the dog first; her owner’s hair was hidden under a soft woollen hat, midnight blue. The coat, of matching colour, was somewhat longer than the red coat; its length directed attention towards the elegant shoes. Turning from the counter, she noticed that I was in the queue, and smiled. As she exited, we both mimed ‘Hello’.

Imogen had fallen asleep, I thought, but then she spoke: she had just seen, with wonderful precision, a downpour in Cornwall. The rain had been so heavy that we’d had to stop the car, by a phone box. The red of the phone box was the only colour within the rain. Then, in the direction we were facing, the sun came out, and for a minute we were in the midst of brightly glowing water, through which we could see nothing. The deluge did not fade out: it ceased in a matter of seconds, like a badly executed special effect. A boy in a blue anorak was revealed, standing on the other side of the road, looking up at the sky, laughing, incredulous; his shoes disappeared into water as he stepped off the kerb.

‘But where was that?’ Imogen asked.

I recalled a downpour that had made the car tremble. I remembered the sudden sunlight before the rain had stopped, but no phone box nor any boy. ‘Near Zennor,’ I answered.

In the last weeks, drowsing, she often experienced scenes of similar intensity. Sometimes, I think, they were more dream than memory, though they had an aura of recollection. Without opening her eyes, she described an evening that had returned to her: a long walk after a meal, in a small town; a river; a busker by a spotlit building. We had strolled along a street of shops in which none of the streetlights were working. ‘Do you remember? Where was that?’ she asked, looking at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Am I definitely there?’

She closed her eyes again; she clenched her eyelids. ‘I’m not even sure I’m there,’ she said.

In the park, passing the bench where I sometimes sat with William, where Imogen and I sometimes sat with him, I remember the day he talked about the sound that a mass of small leaves made in the wind. It gave him a ‘great contentment’, he said. He told me that for a couple of years, when he was at primary school, he had lived near a canal, and on the edge of this canal there was a tree that he used to climb. In the wind, this tree made a sound ‘like an avalanche of sand’, he said. On blustery days he would often lie below the tree, relishing the sound it made. He was happier then than he had ever been since, he thought. What was it that happened in our heads when we remembered a sound, he wondered. ‘The memory of a sound isn’t really a sound, is it?’ he said. ‘You’re not actually hearing anything.’

On a Sunday morning, hearing bells from over the hill, Imogen said to me that the best of her childhood was in that sound. On Sundays at home, in this room, reading, she had been happy, and her happiness was at its fullest when the bells were ringing. If she were allowed only one recording on her desert island, it would be the sound of those Sunday mornings. Many times she had walked with her father to the crest of the hill, just to listen to the bells, she told me. Once she had seen tears in his eyes. She had tried to believe that this was because he too was moved deeply by the wonderful sound.

‘Thank you for escorting me to the edge,’ Imogen said one morning. She looked at our hands, and smiled. ‘One body fewer. It doesn’t matter. I can say that. It seems to be what I feel.’ But she was not sure that she was prepared. Rather, a mood had settled on her, like black snow, she said. Her laugh was a retching cough.

The sunlight drenched the blossom of the apple trees. It was so beautiful, it was like dying, said William. Imogen asked him what he meant. ‘Everything is energy,’ he answered, as if this were something that many people knew. ‘Everything is frequencies. That’s what all of this is,’ he said, circling a hand above his head. The hand went round and round; he had been drinking. The whiteness of the blossom was frequency made visible. The blossom would not last long, but its energy would last forever, he said. Some of the energy of the tree had penetrated his brain; it was so powerful that it had wiped out all of his thoughts. That is why it was like dying. ‘I see,’ I said; he sensed that I was uneasy with him, whereas Imogen was not.

Some Roman tombstones have holes drilled into them; to honour the occupant of the tomb, and to provide nourishment in the afterlife, relatives would pour water, wine and honey into the hole, so that the liquid could flow through the stone and onto the ashes. But we should be wary of attributing to all Romans a set belief on the subject of the afterlife, Francesca warned. Some believed in ghosts and spirits, and others did not. Among the latter, there would have been many who nonetheless maintained the traditions by which the dead were kept alive. She told us about a Roman tombstone that is inscribed with a text addressed to the person who has stopped to read it. There is no life beyond the tomb, the text tells the reader; the dead are dust and ashes, and wine poured into the grave will make mud of the remains, nothing more.

‘Inspirational stuff,’ said Imogen, reading of the last hours of the life of Cato the Younger, as recounted by Plutarch. Then the sword being brought in by a little boy, Cato took it, drew it out, and looked at it; and when he saw the point was good, ‘Now,’ said he, ‘I am master of myself’; and laying down the sword, he took his book again, which, it is related, he read twice over. Later that night, he took his sword, and stabbed it into his breast.

Imogen discovered, in a box of miscellaneous old photographs, a small picture of a young woman sitting at the library table, on which a chess board had been set. From the young woman’s dress, and certain details of the room, it seemed that the picture dated from around 1920. She was smiling, apparently at something that was happening to her left. Her expression suggested an attractive and clever character. Most of the chess pieces had been removed from the board. Imogen liked to think that a male opponent had just conceded defeat. The fairness of the young woman’s hair and the clarity of her eyes gave young Imogen the idea that she was German. Matilde, she named her, because neither her mother nor her father had any idea who the young woman might really have been. Nobody knew who she was. For some time, this was wonderful. Matilde was a woman of mystery. Her name was Matilde in the way that a painting of a beautiful unknown woman might be given a name: Flora, Venus, The Veiled Woman. When she was sent to school, Imogen took the photograph of Matilde with her. The meaning of the image began to change. Matilde had been brilliant and beautiful; she had visited the house, and sat at the table at which Imogen had so often sat. Now nobody at home knew anything about her. Somewhere her body was lying in the earth. Her gravestone was perhaps no longer meaningful to anybody. Only this image remained, an image to which any woman’s name could be attached.

When the dead were believed to be in Purgatory, they received the charity of the living, and they cared for the living in return. The dead were close. But with the revision of The Book of Common Prayer in 1552, the dead were banished to an infinite distance. The burial service would now take place at the graveside, not in the church; in place of prayers of commendation and committal, there was to be just one reference to the deceased, who had been delivered, thanks be to God, from the ‘myseryes of this sinneful world’. Now the dead were in a world that had no contact with our own; even prayers could not reach them.

Beatrice at the piano, playing a Chopin prelude for her husband. The music is not dubbed – this is Imogen playing. Inaccuracies and hesitations have been left uncorrected; they impart authenticity. She played the same prelude for me, on the family’s old Broadwood. ‘If she had studied harder,’ her mother confided, ‘she would have been better than me. Much better.’ Imogen persuaded her to play for us. I was to take it as a sign of her approval that she consented to be persuaded, Imogen told me. The little waltz that her mother played was by someone whose name I did not know – a trivial piece, she said, opening the score. No notes were fluffed; the tempo was perfectly even; the movement of her hands was economical, undemonstrative. It was almost as though playing the piano were an exercise in comportment. One would not have been inclined to dance to the waltz that Imogen’s mother played, error-free though it was. ‘I am not truly musical,’ she said, as though admitting that the colour of her hair was not natural. Imogen, on the other hand, was ‘deeply musical’. This was an opinion with which her daughter disagreed: she liked to play, but had reached the limit of her competence at the age of fourteen, she insisted. But there was a pulse in her playing, and there is a pulse in the music that Beatrice makes; it has spontaneity; life. I watch Beatrice at the piano: this is Imogen, as she was. She is lovely, and there is a terrible pathos in this lovely image. In adoration Julius Preston watches his wife. Candlelight glows on her face; it glows on her hands, which are raised in mid-bar, as Beatrice stops and scowls at the page of music.

Inevitably, the thought is present: the character will always be this age, but the actress is no longer young. Some might know that this actress, who is young in this film, is no longer living. Imogen could not watch any of her films with me. ‘It would be like reading my own obituary,’ she said.

William’s mother has informed him that it is completely out of the question for her to attend the wedding without her husband, as William had suggested she might; therefore she will not be present. His father has sent his best wishes, by text; he hopes his son has ‘better luck’ than he had. So I will be in loco parentis too. The speech is proving to be difficult – how to balance best-man jocularity and quasi-parental pride? Some explanation of how we had come to know each other might be expected, but the specifics of our case do not seem appropriate to the occasion. He was my lodger – that will suffice, with vague references to our prior acquaintance. As an anecdote: watching the trawlermen on TV. William heckling the clueless first-timer: ‘I could do better than that,’ he shouted. And he did do better: he managed more than one trip, and was even more seasick than the lad on TV. Pause for laughter, or mild amusement. Some might like the slapstick of William failing to take the wind direction into account before vomiting. Were I of William’s age, I would be expected to provide at least one such item. Light embarrassment of the groom is conventional. The coda is the easy part – the joy of Tilly.