The Great Concert of the Night

FEBRUARY

Today, nobody came to the Sanderson-Perceval Museum. Not one person.

On our first evening, Imogen told me about the body double: ‘Antoine needed someone who was comfortable with the close-up,’ she told me. ‘A specialist.’ We had drawn the attention of the couple at the table nearest to ours. They were sixtyish, and exuded a miasma of ineradicable boredom. At the word ‘porn’, they turned their heads in unison, abruptly, as if struck in the same instant by a waft of ammonia. The woman maintained a five-second glare.

‘Likewise with the male member,’ Imogen continued, ignoring the scrutiny. ‘The erection was a guest appearance. A tricky problem for continuity, but I think it was managed well. Could you tell?’

‘I could not. But I had assumed,’ I said.

The director had intended to use a prosthesis, Imogen explained. Instead of penetration there would have been some modest hip-thrusting; the customary decorous routine. ‘But the replica just didn’t have the screen presence. No charisma.’

At which point the woman set down her knife and fork decisively; her face took aim.

Imogen turned to face her and said, in a shopworker’s tone of brisk courtesy: ‘Can I help you, madam?’

‘Yes,’ replied the woman. ‘Could you please keep your voice down?’

‘I don’t believe I’m talking loudly. On the contrary. Am I talking loudly?’ Imogen asked me.

‘I don’t think so,’ I answered.

‘We can hear you very clearly,’ the woman told her.

‘Then perhaps you shouldn’t be trying so hard.’

The husband, a man of smooth and copious jowls, now intervened. ‘You are causing offence,’ he stated. He pronounced like a magistrate.

Imogen, undaunted, surveyed the room. Nobody else was sitting within ten feet of us, and nobody was paying any attention to our corner. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

‘Yes, you are,’ said woman.

‘What precisely is it that has displeased you?’

‘You know perfectly well.’

‘Was it the silicon dick? Surely not. I thought the dick was funny. But I can see that you are not amused,’ said Imogen, assuming an expression of some gravity.

‘You are a very rude person,’ the woman told her.

‘We cannot all be blessed with charm such as yours, I’m afraid.’

From a face that had begun to pucker with disgust, the man emitted the sound of a punctured ball. His wife said: ‘You are spoiling our evening.’

‘And you seemed to be having such fun. I do apologise,’ Imogen replied. Turning to me, she smiled and said, brightly: ‘Coffee?’ It was as if the complainants had vanished.

But I could not so easily disregard our neighbours; they were listening. I suggested that we call for the bill.

‘Really?’ she protested, exaggerating the disappointment. ‘I could talk to you about my family. Or you could tell me about yours. I think that would be inoffensive enough,’ she said, raising her voice.

Ten minutes later we were leaving. She leaned towards the woman and said to her, in a gossipy girlish whisper: ‘We’re just getting to know each other. It’s going well, I think.’ Then she smiled at the husband, as if he and his wife had been in our company all evening, to everyone’s delight. ‘It’s been a pleasure,’ she said.

Some time after Imogen’s departure, Samantha at last remarked: ‘Very nice, but not really your type, was she?’ The phrase would not have irked as it did, had I not heard it as an echo of Val; types and archetypes were coins of Val’s currency.

My liaisons prior to our marriage were not numerous – just three of significance. No common denominators other than femaleness were immediately apparent, I might have pointed out. Instead, all I said was: ‘What might my type be?’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Samantha. ‘She was a bit more… well…’

‘Extravagant?’ I suggested, attempting a tone of simple curiosity.

‘Maybe.’

‘Posh?’

‘Posher than anyone I know, certainly.’

The big house had been a major element of Imogen’s appeal, I confessed.

‘There’s no need to be so defensive.’

I denied that I was being defensive; then apologised.

It was evident that I was still very fond of Imogen, Samantha observed.

We were still good friends, I said.

Samantha commended me for this. It was to my credit that I had remained on good terms both with Imogen and with herself. Val’s ex-husband was more typical of the way men behave. Though he was the guilty party, he had not reacted well to Val’s new relationship. It was as though his ex-wife had announced that she was carrying a disease that their son might contract.

We were talking about La Châtelaine, and Imogen said: ‘Tell me I was wonderful.’

‘You were wonderful,’ I confirmed.

‘Do you mean it?’ she said, pleadingly.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Oh, thank you,’ she sighed. ‘We actors are insecure people, you know. Terribly terribly insecure,’ she said, in the fluttering voice of an over-delicate creature.

A startling item in today’s paper, apropos of Wellbutrin, a drug often prescribed, we are told, to treat depression caused by the loss of a loved one: ‘the American Psychiatric Association has ruled that to be unhappy for more than two weeks after the death of another human being can be considered a mental illness.’ Can this be true? Apparently so.

Another source: ‘The APA is proposing that anyone who can’t conclude their grief and mourning within two weeks could be liable for a diagnosis.’ Previously, it appears, the threshold of unhealthy grief was deemed to be two months.

Benoît, Imogen told me, had not been entirely happy about her involvement in Les tendres plaintes; he was even less enthusiastic about La Châtelaine. Student theatricals were one thing, but this was of another order. This was not recreational make-believe. The nudity unsettled him; as did Antoine Vermeiren, whom he had disliked on first sight – ‘pretentious’ was the word that Benoît had used. In fact, Imogen said, Benoît was perturbed by the very idea of her acting. He was disturbed that she could find it so easy to dissemble. ‘I had mortgaged myself’ – this is what he thought, she told me. The world in which Benoît worked, the world of economics, was as far as could be imagined from the world of falsity in which she had chosen to enlist. When she and Benoît had met, she had been working as a translator; she was thus engaged in a milieu that bordered on the academic. It disappointed him that she had defected. What Benoît needed, ultimately, was someone of an intelligence that was more congruent with his – an intelligence such as that possessed by Jennifer, with whom he began a relationship within a month of his separation from Imogen. Jennifer was a brilliant anthropologist, and had the physique of a ballerina, and was English. For Benoît, English women were ‘sublime’. They possessed a sensuality so profound that it was often invisible on the surface – though in Jennifer’s case the surface was exceptionally alluring. ‘Creatures of the night,’ was how he characterised the English women of his imagination. When he had met Imogen, he had not known – as I had not known, until now – that she was not a thoroughbred English woman. ‘Not quite as good as the full English,’ Imogen mock-sighed. Benoît and Jennifer were married now. Benoît, on the cusp of forty when he and Imogen had parted, had needed to be married, she told me; I understood from this that Imogen did not need to be married.

We were in the Luxembourg gardens, on a bench at the Medici fountain, when Imogen told me that she was beginning to think that she would have to come back to England for the end. It was late afternoon; the air was warm in the shade of the plane trees; the reflection of the leaves put a pale green glaze on the water; a picturesque enclave of stage-managed nature. She had developed a craving for the fields of the homeland, said Imogen, as if confessing that her politics had undergone a rightward shift. ‘I’ve come over all pastoral,’ she said. We had been walking for a couple of hours, and she was tired; she lay on the bench, with her bag as a pillow, against my leg. ‘I could see you more often,’ she said. Every week, on the phone, her mother had asked her – almost ordered her, on occasion – to come back. Her mother was fully aware, of course, that palliative care of the highest quality was available in Paris, but it was available in England too, and she would ensure that Imogen received it. Leaving aside all medical considerations, returning to the family home was simply the right thing to do: it would be an acceptance of the correct and natural order of things. (The years of boarding school, it seemed, had been but a negligible interlude in the family narrative.) Imogen would not want it to be thought that she had undergone a deathbed conversion, but recently, she confessed, she had experienced something like a craving for the view from the window of the room that had been hers. The excitement of the city had become something she appreciated primarily in the abstract; the traffic had become a drone, like tinnitus. She wanted to open her window and hear the silence of the garden.

Within an hour of meeting me, Imogen’s brother told me that London didn’t suit her. London was a terrible place, thought Jonathan. All big cities were terrible places. ‘Factory farms,’ he called them. Imogen was a country girl at heart, but for some reason she was forever trying to prove the contrary. ‘She’s always been a tremendously argumentative girl,’ he said. ‘Sometimes just for the sake of it.’ That had not been my experience, I answered. ‘Just wait,’ he said. When Imogen was at Oxford, he told me, he and his parents had driven up to see her in Measure for Measure, and he had been terrifically impressed. The scene at the end, when the Duke proposes marriage and Imogen’s character says nothing – it was incredibly powerful. ‘Imo did this extraordinary bit of acting. It was all in the face. So many different things going on in her mind, you could tell. Amazing. Unforgettable.’ Much of the play had gone over his head, he admitted, but Imogen had been so well suited to the character she had played, because she was a clever and feisty girl too. ‘I was just saying that you’re much smarter than me,’ he said, as Imogen came into the room. Later, he said, he would show me the skirting board into which, when Imo was twelve years old, she had scratched some words in an alphabet that she had invented, which had letters that produced sounds that did not exist in English or in French. She had devised new names for birds and trees and all sorts of things that they would see on the long walks – the ‘forced marches’ – that she and Jonathan would undertake on Sundays in summer. Young Imo was a prodigy of invention, Jonathan told me. It was a waste of her brain to be spouting other people’s words, however talented she might be as an actress. He admired what she had achieved, but she should be a writer instead of an actor, and she should not be living in London. He wondered if I might be recruited into his campaign to bring his sister back to the good air and greenery of the native soil. ‘It will require great patience and perseverance, but we must prevail,’ he declared, overacting the soldierly resolve, for Imogen’s entertainment.

‘I won’t make five years,’ she said to me, after the first operation, as if she had been told this as a fact, and were already reconciled to it. But she called me again, later that day, in panic.

Sold yesterday at auction in London, to an anonymous private buyer, for a modest sum: The Consultation, c. 1690, the work of an anonymous pupil of Jan van Mieris, eldest son of the celebrated Frans van Mieris the Elder of Leiden. Removed from the public gaze, the painting has been diminished; it has become a possession again. Also sold: the glass jellyfish – a fine example of the work of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka; our copy of William Hunter’s Anatomia uteri humani gravidi; and René Laennec’s Traité de l’auscultation mediate, in which the stethoscope, Laennec’s invention, was first described.

Though many curators have admitted to considering such sales in recent months, the Museum Association deems our deaccessions to be unethical, and accordingly has barred the council’s museum service from MA membership. But the roof might now be repaired.

Seven or eight people presented themselves for the tour: Imogen the youngest by three decades at least. We would have started at The Consultation. Had it been displayed in a major gallery, The Consultation would not have been conspicuous, but it was the most accomplished painting in the Sanderson-Perceval collection. The gleam of the knives was expertly simulated, and differentiated from the gleam of the pewter jug; likewise the various textures of the maidservant’s dimpled hand, the waxen face of the worried young man, his leather gloves, the dead skin of the chicken on the table, the fabrics. Skill was evident in the glow of the candlelit water, wine and urine. The picture was almost certainly painted in Rome, where Jan van Mieris spent his final years. He died in 1690, at the age of twenty-nine, having been in poor health for much of his life; he might be the patient in this picture, I told the group. Imogen took a step closer, to peer at the pallid young patient.

The Consultation was acquired in 1840 by John Perceval, I would have continued. His ancestor, Richard Perceval, the founder of the Perceval dynasty of physicians, was renowned for the uncommon speed with which he removed kidney stones. The museum has no image of the expeditious Dr Perceval, but it does have an illustration of the procedure as it would have been conducted at the time. I indicated the print that shows a supine man, with legs splayed and feet hoisted by two burly men, stoically accepting the insertion of the rod.

Walking through town, one day before the end of shooting, Imogen apologised for talking too much. ‘But you’re a top-class listener,’ she said. ‘You’d have made a good doctor, in the eighteenth century.’ And she reminded me that, in the course of the tour, I had explained that a physician at that time would have been a listener above all: the patient would relate the story of his or her illness, and on the basis of this story the doctor would pronounce his judgement. Diagnosis by letter was not unusual, I had told the group, pointing out the letter written to Cornelius Perceval by a grateful patient whom Perceval had never actually met. ‘See – I was paying attention,’ said Imogen; then the kiss.

I have not a single line of Imogen’s handwriting. Any day, at the museum, I can examine the letters of Adeline Hewitt and Charles Perceval; I can enjoy that residue of their intimacy. Every handwritten word is intimate: the ink is an immediate trace of the thinking mind, and of the writer’s body. Before long, pens will be employed solely for signatures, if at all.

My grandfather’s pen. ‘Moss-Agate’ the gorgeous mottled green and brown is called, and the material is celluloid, a lovely liquid word, so pleasing to pronounce, I thought as a child. It was from my grandfather that I first heard it, I believe. The beautiful instrument was the first plastic pen to be made by the Waterman company; the plastic feels and looks like a valuable substance. The Waterman name, cut into the barrel, has been blurred by my grandfather’s fingers. I remember seeing the pen in the room in which my grandfather had died. The pillows were still on the bed; the upper one was shaped like a bowl, as if cradling the head of his ghost. The marks of his teeth were on the mouthpiece of the pipe that lay on the dressing table.

An incident, after work. For a few seconds I did not recognise the man who crossed the street from North Parade, calling my name. The beard, profuse and ungroomed, was a disguise; then the features of William’s face became discernible. He ran through traffic to reach me, maintaining the smile throughout, as if this encounter were an extraordinary stroke of good luck.

‘Great to see you again,’ he said. The handshake was forceful.

‘How are you?’ I asked. I would estimate that he was around thirty pounds heavier than when I’d last seen him; an encouraging sign. And his sweatshirt, though not new, was clean, as were the jeans.

‘I’m back,’ said William, taking a step back and raising his hands like a man accepting applause. ‘Older. Wiser. Hairier.’

‘So where have you been?’ I asked.

‘Where haven’t I been?’ said William. The full answer lasted for ten minutes, with no pause long enough to permit anything other than an expression of continued interest. With the van-owning friend he had travelled slowly along the south coast as far as Hastings, where they’d stayed for a while, renting a couple of rooms for as long as the work held out, then they’d cut up through East Anglia, which was a dead loss, before heading west into the Midlands, where the companions had fallen out irretrievably, after many disagreements. William had stayed in Birmingham for a year, fitting tyres mostly, then moved northwards, through Sheffield and Leeds and across to Manchester and Liverpool, then back to Leeds and up as far as Newcastle. He’d been a removals man, a labourer, a warehouseman, a courier, a house painter, a street sweeper and God knows what else. He’d worked in recycling centres and in some of the nation’s nastiest fast-food outlets. ‘Nothing you’d want to make a career out of,’ as he said. At one point he’d had the idea that some sort of reconciliation with his mother might be possible. He lasted less than a fortnight in the spare room. Talking to his stepfather was like standing in front of a freezer with its door open.

Later, when he’d been shovelling asphalt with a lad whose father had recently died, he’d thought he might attempt to make contact with his real father. He had found him without too much difficulty. That too was a disaster. No details given. ‘A self-pitying slob,’ was William’s verdict. Things went ‘downhill a bit’ after William had walked out of the shambles that his father called home. He’d ended up on the streets. Standing on Hungerford Bridge at two in the morning, he had considered whether drowning might be the answer. Instead he asked himself: ‘Where have I been happiest?’ And the answer was that he had been happiest here, he told me. ‘So here I am,’ he said, ‘and here you are.’ Then he added, perhaps observing a reaction: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to camp on your doorstep.’ He asked me for the time; he had to meet someone who might need a hand with some houseclearing. Patting me on the arm, as if in encouragement, he apologised for having to leave. ‘See you around,’ he said, and away he hurried.

The first encounter with William; or what I can reconstruct of it. We were sitting outside, near the abbey; Imogen had come down for the weekend. She glanced over my shoulder several times: a young man, twentyish, was standing a few yards behind me, importuning the people at the adjacent table; it appeared that none of them had offered him any money; he was asking them to reconsider, to no effect. Though the hair was a mess, he was not the most plausible of desperate cases: he looked more like an odd-job man than someone who was sleeping rough. ‘OK,’ I heard him say, conceding failure. ‘You all have a nice afternoon.’

As he approached us, Imogen seemed to be thinking what I had been thinking – that this person might not be genuine. But she said to him: ‘Would you like a coffee?’

A sticking plaster was attached to his brow, touching the hairline; he pressed a thumb onto it, as if to focus his thinking.

‘Sit down,’ Imogen said, indicating the seat next to mine.

He gave me a permission-seeking half-smile. I pulled the chair out for him.

‘Are you hungry?’ Imogen asked, sliding the menu card across the table.

His expression was that of a man who suspects he does not fully understand the situation in which he finds himself. ‘No cash,’ he said, pressing the plaster again. When he lifted his finger, the disc of blood in the centre of the plaster had widened.

‘Have what you like,’ Imogen told him.

He would just have a coffee, he said.

‘If you’re hungry, choose something,’ said Imogen. ‘Are you hungry?’

He glanced at me, for guidance. ‘I recommend the chocolate cake,’ I said, pointing to my plate.

A waitress had arrived; her gaze registered the unkempt young man, then she smiled at Imogen; her smile was like a puppet’s. Imogen ordered another coffee for herself, and directed the waitress to our guest, who ordered a cake as well.

‘Very nice of you,’ he said. The finger went back onto the plaster, pressing hard.

‘Let’s have a look,’ said Imogen. Obediently he lifted an edge, revealing a cluster of sutures. She offered a tissue, which he took with a trembling hand. ‘You need to change that dressing,’ she told him.

‘This’ll be fine,’ he said, tapping his fingers on the tissue.

There was a pharmacy in the row of shops on the opposite side of the street. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ said Imogen.

He watched her cross the road; a man beguiled. In her absence, it was agreed that she was a very kind person. That was more or less the substance of our conversation. His coffee and slice of cake were deposited by the waitress. The cake was consumed in a matter of seconds, before Imogen returned.

‘How did it happen?’ she asked, applying a new dressing.

He murmured his reply, as though responding to a question from a nurse in A&E. There had been a bit of bother at the place where he’d been living.

‘Where’s that?’ she asked, in nurse-like mode, removing some specks of dried blood with the tissue.

He named a street. It was a squat; a defunct office building.

‘And what’s your name?’

‘William,’ he answered.

‘Imogen, and David,’ she said, giving him a hand to shake; he wiped his hand on his chest first. ‘Would you like anything else?’ she asked.

‘No, thank you,’ said William. He took a sip from his empty cup; he was worried that in return for this charity he would have to submit to questioning.

‘You sure?’ she asked.

‘Sure, thank you,’ he answered, nodding too much.

‘OK,’ she said; from her smile he understood that there would be no interrogation; he could leave.

‘That was very nice, thank you,’ said William.

‘Our pleasure,’ she said, and she handed him the pack of sticking plasters.

‘Really?’ he asked, as though this generosity were extreme. On leaving us, he bowed to her, with a hand over his heart.

Watched Jumièges last night. I remember speaking to Imogen about it; Franck Boudet had called her, to talk about the script. One of the crew on Maintenant had told Franck a story about his family, a story that was now becoming Franck’s screenplay. The man’s sister was the model for the character that Franck was hoping Imogen would play. Every week she visited their father with their mother; she was much closer to both parents than was the teller of the story. The father’s health was poor: his mind was falling apart; a stroke – the most severe of a series – had rendered his speech incoherent and indistinct. He was confused, and often perplexed as to where he was and how he had come to be there. But one afternoon he seemed to wish to communicate something. His daughter was showing him again, on a map, the location of the village where her husband had been born. Her father’s gaze slid around the map, apparently seeing nothing but a web of coloured lines, but then his eyes became focused, as though he had suddenly seen something that made sense to him. He became agitated, and more agitated with the effort of making himself understood. His finger quivered above the map, pointing to Jumièges; eventually it was established that he wanted to go there. Jumièges was located more than a hundred kilometres from where he had been born and had always lived. When his wife asked him why he wanted to visit it, she received no intelligible answer. Before the next visit he would have forgotten all about Jumièges, she was sure.

But he did not forget. He was like a child demanding a treat that had been promised to him. They went to Jumièges. The expedition was difficult; it was also unwise, his carers argued. But the old man would not relinquish the idea, and it was unlikely that he would live much longer. This might be his last request. So arrangements were made; a nurse travelled with the family. At Jumièges, the dying man managed to make it known that it was the river, not the great abbey, that he wished to see. They came to Rue du Perrey, and there he became calm. His daughter turned the wheelchair to face the direction her father seemed to be indicating. Some small cliffs, some trees, the ferry, the green-brown meander of the Seine – it was not a memorable vista. But at the sight of this scene the old man started to smile. In recent years, he had rarely smiled. The smile dwindled; then he was crying. ‘When were you here?’ his daughter asked. There was no answer. When she asked again he became angry. He wanted everyone to be quiet. He did not appear to notice that his wife was upset. Her own memory was becoming insecure, but she knew for a fact that she had never been to Jumièges with her husband. She would never know what memory was being revived at that place, by that ordinary view.

The actress playing the daughter is adequate, but Imogen would have been better. The long look that this actress gives the father, at the river, is simply sad; Imogen’s gaze, as I imagine it, would have made us understand that she is not only seeing what her father has become – she is seeing the man that he once was, and the woman that she used to be.

After Imogen’s departure, whenever I encountered William I did not linger; there was pressing business elsewhere, I would pretend. Finally he remarked that he had not seen her for a while. ‘She’s in Paris,’ I answered.

‘When’s she coming back?’ asked William.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, neutrally. Imogen had grown tired of London, I told him; she wanted to live in Paris for a while. I told him about her family’s connection to Paris, of which he had known nothing.

Looking down the street, he said, gravely: ‘That’s a blow.’ It was as if this development might necessitate some revision of his plans.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘We’re friends. We talk.’

‘That’s good,’ said William, still considering.

Imogen was about to start work on a new film, I told him. ‘My Friend Claire. She’s Claire. Top billing.’

‘Of course,’ said William. Then he looked at me, his companion in loss, and said: ‘She was lovely.’ The stress was strangely on the second word, I remember.

‘Indeed.’

It had been like having a part-time sister, he said; a bigger and more sensible sister. More words were exchanged in Imogen’s praise. When I gave him money, it felt as though I were honouring the terms of a contract.

From the adjoining room I heard Marcus, giving instructions. The physician’s murmuring was followed by a brief response from Beatrice. Again the physician spoke; though I stood by the door, I could not discern the words. Then silence. A minute later, a high gasp. A physicianassisted paroxysm had been enacted. Charles Perceval was known to have administered this treatment to some of his patients. The inference was confirmed by Imogen’s glance when she emerged from the room – a mock-sly smile, with startled eyes, as if she had been caught up in some mischief, not unwillingly.

In the first draft of Devotion, Beatrice’s sister, an ostentatiously devout young woman, was the hysterical patient whom Julius had been asked to attend, thereby bringing about his meeting with Beatrice. Considerations of cost had brought about the merging of the two characters, but this revision had improved the film, Marcus told me. It had brought the film’s central concerns – ‘obsession, madness, reason and faith’ – more sharply into focus. The lard-coloured doll lay in his lap, swaddled in a towel, its single eye turned towards me. He offered to donate it to the museum, for room seven, but it was not in good condition by the time they had finished with it.

Though she had found the story ‘a bit silly’, Samantha assured me that she had enjoyed Devotion, especially Imogen’s performance. ‘She really has something,’ Samantha said, congratulating me on my good fortune. Val concurred. Imogen was ‘the best thing about it’, Val told me. But Imogen had deserved a better film, she thought. Aspects of Devotion had troubled Val. The scene in which we are shown Beatrice after the wedding, preparing for bed, for example. Why, she wondered, was it necessary for us to see her naked, even if only for a second or two? Why do we not see her husband undressed? Why always the woman? Some observations were made on the topic of objectification.

Perhaps, I suggested, this had been what Devotion had been about, to some extent.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Val. But she was inclined to think that the good intentions were something of an alibi. Not that she was accusing Imogen of any such thing; the fault was the director’s. ‘It annoys me,’ she said, in case I had not noticed. We were at the customary café, which had a rack of newspapers and magazines for the customers’ use. Taking a magazine, Val searched for evidence. It was easily found. ‘This sort of thing,’ she said, displaying pictures of a woman on a yacht. She too was an actress, and not one whose reputation was dependent upon the excellence of her body, as far as I knew, but here she presented herself in a bikini, in scenes of ersatz spontaneity: sipping a drink through a straw; shielding her eyes from the sun to gaze out to sea; laughing with a male companion. One picture was honestly posed – a coy topless shot, from the back, revealing nothing more than the undercurve of a breast. ‘This is what gets me,’ said Val. ‘The collusion. It gets me down.’

First impression of Val: the lack of embarrassment was remarkable. We had met to ‘clear the air’, on neutral territory – the café that became our favoured venue. Val’s eyes compelled attention, and her posture was exemplary. Much work had gone into the maintenance of the hair’s lush dishevelment; the same was true, I felt, of the air of well-being. Sauntering stride, beneficent smile, slow-blinking eyes – it all advertised the deep inner harmony that she had managed to achieve. I found the performance too studied. But for Samantha the attraction had been powerful and immediate: the conduct of Val’s son’s had become disruptive; she was called to the school to discuss the situation; and in the course of the third or fourth discussion a moment of ignition occurred. I could not understand it.

Crossing the park this evening, I heard a harmonica. The sequence of sounds was simple and not unpleasant, if not quite a tune; the improvisation of someone who could not really play. It was William. ‘Another skill I picked up on my travels,’ he told me. ‘Hear how sad I am,’ he said, and produced a mournful fading slide of notes. He was wearing exactly the same clothes as when I saw him before; they had not been washed in the interim. The house-clearing job was for one day only; since then, nothing. I asked him if he were staying at the Melville Street hostel. The notion appalled him. ‘You get some desperate characters there,’ he said, ‘and I’m not desperate.’ For now, he’s at a friend’s place. It’ll do for a day or two, but there’s not a good atmosphere, because the friend has some dodgy mates. One of them is a dealer; a ‘cold-eyed bastard’, said William. He had a lot to say about the cold-eyed bastard.

It was not so much a conversation as an attended monologue. I could not speak to William as easily as Imogen could. This was what I was thinking when he asked abruptly: ‘And what about Imogen? You still in touch with her?’

I told him what had happened.

William looked at me as though at a picture that had suddenly gone out of focus, and said nothing. He turned away and stared into the ground. ‘That’s terrible,’ he whispered. Grimacing, he scrubbed at his face as if to ease an exasperating itch.

We talked about Imogen, briefly.

‘It’s unbelievable,’ he murmured. ‘I really liked her.’

‘So did I,’ I said.

Still gazing into the ground, he put a hand on my arm, gingerly, like a blind man ascertaining the location of a rail.

‘Why have you been hiding her from us?’ asked Emma, slighted, after Francesca had reported that my attachment to the actress was somewhat stronger than had been supposed, and that she was a charming and unpretentious person. Imogen was in the midst of preparations for Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, which gave some plausibility to my excuse – that her schedule made it difficult to make plans. The explanation was accepted, provisionally. Emma believed that she knew the reason for my evasiveness. She had not seen La Châtelaine or Devotion, but from what she had found out she could understand why I might not feel comfortable with the idea of introducing Imogen. But Emma wanted me to know that she was rather more broad-minded than she imagined I imagined her to be – no less broad-minded, in fact, than her daughter. ‘She’s intrigued,’ Francesca told me.

The date of the visit was agreed many weeks in advance; when the day came, Imogen’s mood was beginning to darken, but she was well enough, she assured me. On another day, she would have answered more expansively the questions that Emma and Nicholas had for her. They had many questions about the business of film-making; they talked to her as if she were some sort of explorer. That evening, Imogen’s manner was polite, patient, modest, self-deprecating. They had expected someone more voluble, I am sure; more vivid; perhaps more glamorous. Nobody looking at pictures of the group around the table would have guessed her profession, said Emma, when she phoned the following day. This was by way of praise. The reticence had been something of a surprise, Emma confessed, but she understood why I would be attracted to her. Some people, without really doing anything, manage to transmit a certain charge, Emma said. ‘Charismatic, isn’t she?’ she said. She talked about ‘still waters’, and surmised that Imogen might be easily bored. ‘I think we bored her, a bit,’ she said, not as a complaint. That was not so, I assured her, though there were times when Imogen was bored by herself. But there was never to be another visit.

Walking home, I am startled by a laugh from a young woman. The sound is exactly the delighted laugh that Imogen produced for the scene in which Julius does the sleight-of-hand trick, seeming to make his fiancée’s handkerchief disappear. A dozen takes were required, because the handkerchief would not fly as Marcus Colhoun wanted it to. At each take Imogen’s laugh was a perfect expression of spontaneous delight. Afterwards, Marcus remarked that it was easier to fake an orgasm than to do what Imogen had done. To make herself laugh, she told Marcus, she brought to mind an incident from her childhood: her brother being chased by a demented duck. The mirth of Beatrice is indistinguishable from genuine mirth. And her laugh is not at all like the sinister laughter of Agamédé, or the soft laughter of the elegant Claire, or the laughter of young Caroline, all of which were quite different from Imogen’s.

Imogen started to rub her brow. After two or three slow strokes she began to rub quickly, scowling, as if trying to remove an ink-stain from her skin. Then she lowered her hand and looked right at me, fearfully. ‘I can’t remember anything,’ she said. ‘I can’t think.’

‘But that’s not true,’ I said. ‘You’re talking to me. So you are thinking.’

‘Words are coming out,’ she corrected me.

‘Words are coming out in order, in sentences.’

Her mind, she told me, speaking very quietly, was like a lake of black water. For most of the time the water was calm, but every now and then a breeze would rush over it and some foam would appear on the surface. That’s what her thoughts were – foam on black water.

On the worst days, her mind was swarming with ‘pieces of sentences’. From these fragments, sometimes, an item of sense, or half-sense, would materialise. These moments, she said, were like ‘birds flying out of fog’.

Agamédé and the guileless Nicolas Guignon, in a chamber to which she has led him, examine a painting in which a roguish-looking man, in pink satin breeches, is playing a guitar for an audience of richly attired young adults, who recline on the grass of a romantic garden, amid roses, urns and statuary. After some discussion of the picture, Nicolas Guignon confesses to Agamédé that he has lost his heart to Delphine, his pupil, the youngest daughter of the Count. He needs to speak of the accomplishment and beauty of Delphine; Agamédé allows him to. He has much to say about his philosophy of love. Sitting beside him, Agamédé listens. Then she takes his hand, as a mother would. Her demeanour becomes grave. Transfixing him with her gaze, Agamédé says to him: ‘But I have found that love, Nicolas, is too often a thing of the imagination. A man imagines the woman he thinks he sees, and imagines that he loves her.’ So few people can bear to be alone, she tells him. ‘This weakness is the cause of what they take to be love.’ Belying their meaning, the words are spoken in tones of great tenderness. The young man is weakened by the scrutiny of Agamédé, by her voice, by her bewitching hauteur, the delicious glaze of her skin, the penumbra of candlelight in her hair. He pretends to be considering what she has said, but already he is losing his heart for a second time, or so he believes.

‘Nothing really dies,’ William states. We are sitting in the park; he clamps his hands on his knees and sweeps his gaze over the town. It makes no sense to talk about death because every human being is a field of energy, and every thought is an electrical event, he explains. Energy can never be destroyed. So it follows that we can never disappear. Radio waves play some part in the argument, as do sunlight and cosmic radiation. ‘We are information,’ he says. ‘That’s what we are.’ The monologue is punctuated by variants of this idea. ‘Information can never be lost. That’s a basic law,’ he tells me. He tells me about black holes. ‘You think black holes are these whirlpools in space, right? Cosmic plugholes,’ he proposes. Eventually everything will be sucked into them and lost forever – that’s what we think. But this isn’t right, says William. Scientists have a new idea about what will happen. Information will stream towards the black holes and be held there, on the edge, instead of plummeting into the abyss. In time, all the black holes will come together. And you could say that the result will be God. ‘All the information that there has ever been – that’s God. And we will be part of it. We will become part of God,’ he explains, with every appearance of rationality. His manner is that of a physicist rather than an evangelist. ‘I know you’re not sure about this,’ he says. ‘These things are difficult to understand.’

In London, at night, we saw a couple admiring the spectacle of luxury that had been staged in the window of a furniture shop: tables that cost as much as cars; carpets created by picturesque craftspeople in picturesque villages. In the next doorway a hand was held out. The gaze of the window-shoppers slid over the human object; the act of semi-blindness might have been determined by shame, or embarrassment, or a belief that the beggar is there by choice, or is not truly destitute. Reasons can always be found. Not a rare occurrence; we have all done it. ‘I am not seen, therefore I do not exist,’ Imogen remarked, on Oxford Street.