The Great Concert of the Night

APRIL

Grand Parade: William on a bench, with his head resting against the stone balustrade. At first I thought he was asleep, but then a group of students walked past him and he sat up to speak to them. One of the students, acting as spokesman, turned a pocket of his jeans inside out. William smiled and put a finger to an eyebrow by way of salute. He wiped his face with his palms and leaned back.

Only when I sat down did he open his eyes. ‘Well, hello there,’ he said, in an approximately American accent. A clot of ketchup hung in his beard. He closed his eyes; he was worn out, not drunk. And he had lost a tooth. ‘You’re looking well,’ he said, and laughed.

At this point, although he was in a bad way, I had no intention other than to give him a modest amount of cash, as usual.

‘What happened to the tooth?’ I asked.

‘Came loose, pulled it out,’ he answered. ‘Saved myself a fortune.’

People were walking past us all the time. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll have ask you to move on in a minute. No offence. But if they see me talking to you, they think I’ve got some sort of social life. Got to be on your own to maximise the sympathy. Or have a nice dog.’ He turned to look at me. ‘Maybe I should invest in something fluffy. What do you think?’

I asked him where he’d been sleeping. He’d been in another squat, he told me, but a developer had sent some heavies round, and now the place was boarded up. ‘So where will you be tonight?’ I asked.

‘Give us a hundred quid and I’ll try the Holiday Inn,’ he answered.

As though it were of no consequence, William said he was thinking of doing something that would get him put away. ‘Just for a few months,’ he said. ‘Decent accommodation, edible food. Companions not always top-drawer, but beggars can’t be choosers, can they?’ It would be easy enough to do, he assured me. ‘Walk into a corner shop, put a hand in the till. Piss on a policeman. The possibilities are endless.’

I am content with my life. I have no need of company. But I found myself saying to William, as if speaking a line that had been prompted by another voice: ‘You could stay at my place.’

Slowly he turned his head to look at me; the look was almost a glare. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said.

‘There’s a spare room.’

He studied my face, as if reading a text that was written in a foreign language, of which a few words seemed similar to English. ‘You serious?’ he said.

I assured him that I was.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘There’s nothing to get.’

William considered the pavement for some time. ‘A bed for the night – that’s a tempting offer,’ he said.

Detached from myself, hearing something like ‘In this scene, I play a charitable man,’ I said to him: ‘A bed for as long as you need.’

‘I can’t afford it,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to pay,’ I told him.

‘I mean, I can’t afford anything. Rent, food—’

I repeated: ‘You don’t have to pay.’ I would give him a room for as long as it took him to find work and a place to live.

‘That could take some time,’ he pointed out.

‘I appreciate that,’ I said.

William scrutinised my face. ‘You can trust me,’ he said. ‘I’m a straight bloke.’

We shook hands, and then we walked across town together, discussing the house rules.

I was destined to my profession, Emma has often said. My brain is like a museum; images occupy my memory as exhibits occupy their display cases, she thinks. But ten minutes ago, summoned by no stimulus of which I was aware, a scene re-presented itself to me: the Bristol shot tower, its concrete bleached in the sunlight, against a blackening sky. Imogen smiled as I explained the shot-making process. I cannot see her face, though I know that she smiled, and made a joke about the deluge of information. Rain was soon falling, heavily. And this, it seems, is all that remains of that afternoon; everything else is lost. Perhaps at some point in the future another fragment of that day will appear, of its own accord, and I will not recognise the source.

Portions of fabric that had been in contact with the remains of saints were deemed to have absorbed something of their holy aura. These scraps, known as brandea, were venerated as relics. Pilgrims could manufacture their own brandea by rubbing a piece of cloth against a saint’s tomb, or by various other modes of transfer. A flask of holy water, filled at a shrine, was credited with healing properties. Likewise dust brought back from the Holy Land. Saint Aidan, I have read, took his least breath while leaning against a buttress in the church of Lindisfarne. Splinters from this buttress, by virtue of its contact with the saint, became healing relics, as did scraps from the stake on which the severed head of the Christian king Oswald had been displayed. These splinters could be dipped in water to make a medicine; a sort of sanctified tea.

(A connection here: the piece of clothing worn by the loved one, and kept by the lover for many years, in her absence; not for the sake of any specific memory, but because something of her presence inheres in it. This scarf, for instance. Its colour, blue-grey, is one of Imogen’s attributes.)

There was a colour that Imogen had particularly liked since she was a small girl, she told me; or rather, a particular embodiment of that colour – a deep reddish brown, with a certain kind of metallic lustre. Whenever she saw it, which happened infrequently, she had a moment of happiness, no matter what her mood before that instant. She recalled asking herself one day, having just seen a car of that colour: ‘Why does it make me happy?’ Was it connected with some incident that she had forgotten? Over and over again she asked herself: ‘Why does that colour make me so happy?’ And then, she said, she had found herself in a ‘labyrinth’. She could remember this moment precisely: she was fourteen, it was spring, and she was looking out of the dorm window. She had suddenly realised that she was repeating the question mechanically; her mind was functioning ‘like a questioning machine’. Then it occurred to her that her mind was not like a questioning machine – a questioning machine was in fact what it was. The question about the colour and her happiness had been caused by a spark inside her head. And this realisation – that the question was a product of that spark, and that the spark had nothing to do with herself – was in turn the product of a spark, as was this thought, and this one, and so on and so on and so on. ‘Imogen sometimes seems to be less than wholeheartedly among us,’ her headmistress once remarked.

When she was a child, she had wondered what it meant to ‘make love’; as a young woman, she had come to realise that people very often ‘make love’, in the sense that love, or what people take to be love, is frequently nothing more than a by-product of sex. And we do not achieve spiritual union through the act of love, even when the other person is someone with whom we are in love, she understood. On the contrary: at the supposed moment of fusion each individual is more alone than ever. I think of what I saw at the maison de maître: the clashing bodies; everyone engulfed in their own pleasure.

For a long time Marguerite has wanted to visit New York with her husband, and now at last, after several postponements, they are in that thrilling city together. It is everything that they expected it to be. They have seen the sights that they had wanted so much to see – the Met, Ellis Island, Central Park, the Whitney, et cetera, et cetera. They have eaten at some excellent restaurants. The weather – it is early autumn – could not be better. It is unlikely that they will return to New York; a year from now, Marguerite may no longer be alive. So they must make the most of every hour. But the demand is self-defeating: this experience is too burdened with significance to be enjoyable. They stand at the window of their hotel bedroom, looking towards the river. Philippe stands behind Marguerite, with his arms around her; she places her hands on his; they love each other, still, after so many years. The situation is ridiculous, she remarks. They must not allow themselves to be tyrannised by circumstance. New York is New York, after all. ‘And besides, everyone is always dying,’ says Marguerite. Her husband kisses her hair. Below them, the traffic flows down the avenue; the red lights flow like bright lava. When Philippe goes to the bathroom to take a shower, Marguerite stays at the window. With a finger she traces the scar, which is Imogen’s.

At Samantha’s school, a colleague had been sacked after the discovery of his affair with a pupil. Everybody had been surprised, Samantha told me, because the teacher in question was an unassuming and rather buttoned-up sort of character. On the other hand, he was in his late forties, and divorced, and the girl was attractive.

‘Speaking as a buttoned-up sort—,’ I began.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Samantha interrupted. ‘And Imogen was not seventeen.’

‘She was not,’ I conceded.

She gave me a long look, then asked: ‘So how is she?’

For a moment I thought I would lie. But I answered: ‘Not good. Not good at all.’ I told her what was happening.

Samantha cried, and put a hand on mine. For an hour we talked; for that hour we were almost remarried.

Imogen’s mother phoned on the Thursday night, to tell me that Saturday would be the end. When I arrived, Imogen was asleep; the rain on the glass was even louder than her breathing. Her face was the colour of bone; her head lay on the thin web of her hair. She stirred, and her mother whispered: ‘David is here.’ With a movement only of her eyes, she looked at me. A smile formed slowly. ‘Hello,’ she said. She turned a hand towards me; it felt as fragile as a fern. Clenching her eyelids, she said: ‘This is horrible, isn’t it?’ The rain became quieter, but did not stop. She slept again. The dawn light began to seep into the room, insipid and ghastly. When Imogen awoke, she moved her head, slightly, to see the lightening sky. She spoke my name; it came out of her mouth as a sigh. She looked at me, through the death-mask of her face. It was a long look, and strong, as if, after great hardships, the end of an expedition had been achieved, and we were seeing together the fabled ruins; the effort had cost us everything, but we had succeeded, just the two of us. ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Versa,’ she answered. I held her hand. Her eyelids convulsed and her mouth opened, in astonishment at the pain. Then she said, quietly: ‘That’s enough. Close the door.’ Her mother and Jonathan were at the window, looking out, side by side. At that phrase – ‘Close the door’ – her mother turned, as if this were the signal to commence the procedure. She moved to my side and put her hand under my elbow to remove me, with the greatest gentleness. She walked to the door with me, and stepped out. Facing me, she clenched her jaw to stop the trembling, and drew a breath, and embraced me, quickly, sharply. She said nothing, and went back to her daughter. She closed the door softly, as one would close the door of a sleeping infant’s room.

Five cigarettes a day was Imogen’s mother’s allowance to herself; on the basis of something she alleged that Christiaan Barnard had once said, she had decided that this number was well below the threshold of safety. ‘I have a very strong heart. And it’s my only vice,’ she informed me, after the meal. Dissuasion was futile. Having recovered once from cancer, she now regarded herself as indestructible, Imogen said. We were in bed, in the room that had been prepared for me; Imogen’s male companions were always given a room at three or four doors’ remove from hers. Her mother had received me graciously, but I had no matrimonial potential: I was her daughter’s latest whim – not uninteresting, but certainly of no durability. When Imogen was talking about Devotion her mother’s gaze, at times, suggested that what she was hearing was an account of an extended holiday, rather than of her daughter’s professional life; she was waiting for her real life to begin.

Once, I now remember, I was with Samantha and Val when a young man approached us. The day was mild, but he was wearing a heavy jacket and a pullover; the jacket, once pale blue, was black with grease, as were his jeans; his hair was a rank fur. He cupped a hand and held it towards Val and Samantha; as I recall, he said nothing; he had given his speech to half a dozen tables, and it had made no difference. Val dug into her bag and fiddled in it. She dropped the coin into the grimy hand like a pill into water. I was no better: my donation was larger but not large, and I passed it over with a cringing smile of compassion, eyes averted.

‘Poor boy,’ said Val, when he had gone. We issued a collective sigh. ‘But what can you do?’ she asked the air. We agreed that there was nothing to be done.

He crossed to the other side of the road, where a young woman was waiting for him. Lard-coloured flesh showed through holes in her jeans; her dreadlocks were like lengths of rusted wire wool. She was tiny, and was shivering.

This must have some bearing on the offer to William.

It is utter insanity to take in this person as a lodger, Emma tells me. I know virtually nothing about him. ‘He could be a thief. He could be dangerous. For all you know, he has mental problems.’ Most of the people who are sleeping rough have serious mental problems, she states. I don’t think William is dangerous, I answer; but just to be on the safe side I could ask him. ‘He’s upstairs at the moment,’ I tell her. ‘Probably helping himself to my socks.’ Emma snaps: ‘Don’t try to be funny, David.’ She instructs me to tell him that he can stay for a specific period of time and not a day longer; I should draw up a contract, right away. Not once does she use William’s name. ‘For an intelligent man, you can really be an idiot,’ she concludes.

While helping with the preparation for the meal – if there’s one thing he’s learned over the past few years, he says, it’s how to peel vegetables quickly – William asks if any of Imogen’s films are in my collection. I take out Les tendres plaintes and Mon amie Claire, the only ones I could watch in company. We manage ten minutes of Les tendres plaintes – ‘This guy is a total arsehole,’ William pronounces – before fast-forwarding to the scenes in which Imogen appears. There’s too much talking, and the sound of the harpsichord is a horrible noise. ‘What’s the point of playing it?’ William wonders; it’s like using candles instead of lightbulbs, or writing with a goose quill instead of using a laptop. With Mon amie Claire he has a little more patience, principally because there is considerably more of Imogen in it. He watches her episodes closely, as if learning from a classroom video. ‘She’s brilliant,’ he tells me. Once Claire has left the film, we abandon it.

On first viewing, Mon amie Claire did not greatly engage me either, and I have watched the film from beginning to end only once since then. But I have watched one scene many times. Danielle has taken Claire to the best restaurant in town. The decor is counterfeit Belle Époque, with huge mirrors and lots of gilt-effect mouldings and mahogany-coloured woodwork and scarlet plush. The menus are bound in thick leather, like precious manuscripts. Before sitting down, Claire notices the threadbare fabric of her seat. Almost fifteen years have passed since Danielle spent a summer month with Claire’s family in London. For Danielle, the reunion is going well, though life has dealt her friend a considerably better hand than the one she herself has been given to play with. By the time the two women reach the restaurant, we know about the success of Claire’s business. We have seen pictures of the photogenic kids and husband, and the enviable house. Danielle has been less lucky. She believes that life is chiefly a matter of luck; we understand that Claire has already diagnosed this as one of Danielle’s limitations. Promotions that should have been Danielle’s have been awarded to less deserving candidates. Her daughters are uncontrollable. Her health is less than excellent. (We have observed that the exercise machine in the garage has done little service.) Her husband, Michel, a decent man, has become dull. In the bedroom nothing much is happening any more, as Danielle confided within an hour of her friend’s arrival. But Michel is a reliable man, she says, unaware, of course, that Michel has taken an immediate fancy to the svelte and successful Claire. While studying the menu, Danielle relates Michel’s latest setback at the workplace. The waiter arrives; at Danielle’s request, he explicates some of the menu’s more ambitious dishes. While Danielle interrogates him about the wines, Claire looks out of the window. Night is falling on the charmless street. A woman walks slowly past, with a fat dog on a sequinned lead. Claire’s reflection is sketched lightly on the glass. This is the moment – the ten seconds in which Claire gazes out of the window of this mediocre restaurant. We see that she is bored, and wishes that she were elsewhere; we see her guilt at finding Danielle so tiresome; we see compassion for hopeless Danielle, and an instant of self-questioning; and we know that she will not abandon her erstwhile friend – she will do something for her; she will rescue her from her grubby little husband. ‘Let’s have the Savennières,’ Claire interrupts, having – we realise – heard every word of Danielle’s conversation with the waiter, despite seeming to be lost in thought.

Life is always preferable to the only alternative that’s on offer, Imogen’s brother stated, and his wife concurred. Helen told Imogen about something she had read, somewhere. A journalist had interviewed people who had jumped from a height, intending to die, but had survived the fall. They all said the same thing: that at the moment of letting go they had known that they had made a terrible mistake, a mistake that they would never be able to correct. Death had seemed so enticing, but now they were overwhelmed by the horror of it; for those few seconds, they were in hell; life was everything, they suddenly understood. This was true of every one of them. They were all so grateful to have survived, Helen told her sister-in-law, taking hold of her hand. But the situation was not quite the same as that of Helen’s reprieved suicides, Imogen explained: she was already on the brink of the pit. It was more than possible that her experience might prove to be the opposite: the last few minutes might be the most wonderful of her life.

‘I don’t lie,’ Imogen once said to me, in the course of an argument in which Vermeiren featured. Not as a boast but as a statement of a principle, just as one might say: ‘I don’t eat meat.’

Our last visit to the Louvre – a cool day; the air lightly grained with mist. Finding it cold, Imogen wore the black coat and the red cashmere scarf that I had bought for her. She was tired before we arrived; before deciding to go in, we sat in the gardens for a while. Never again would we do this, we knew. We did not go far into the museum. I remember looking at a bronze mirror, Etruscan; the Judgement of Paris was incised on the back of it. The mirror was barely more reflective than the floor. Even when new, it could have given only a shadowy image, one would think; it must have removed all colour from what was shown to it. In the world from which the bronze mirror had come, most people would have had no clear image of themselves, as Imogen remarked. No wonder Narcissus had been so bewitched by what he saw in the pool. A world without reflections would suit her quite well, Imogen said. Some days, when confronting her face in the mirror, she had the feeling that she was looking out through a stranger’s skin, or through a face on which a make-up artist had worked for hours.

On last night’s shift, William reports, he was paired with a Polish girl called Magda. The first sight of her gave him a bit of a turn, because for a moment he thought she was someone he had seen before, when he was in London, working as a labourer. Almost every morning, for the best part of a month, he would see this woman as he walked to the building site. She used to sit in the window of a café that he went past. She was well dressed and slim and nice-looking: trouser suit; long straight dark hair, pale skin, straight nose, small mouth. But what had really struck him about her was the way she often stared into her coffee, as if it were a crystal ball. He sensed her character. ‘Sad but hopeful, and clever,’ he says. He would have liked to talk to her, but that was never going to happen. Once, however, he passed her in the street at the end of the day, and they exchanged a glance, a glance that was ‘like a message’. It amazed him that she had been aware of his existence, though on a few occasions she had been looking out onto the street when he walked by. Then one morning, in the middle of the week, she was not there; the next day, too, she was absent; she never came back. But he had come to think that he would see her again one day, or that the glance had been telling him that something significant would soon happen, something in which she would be in some way involved. And when he first saw the pale and slim and black-haired Magda, a young woman who might have been the London woman’s sister or cousin, he wondered, for an instant, if this meeting might be a fulfilment of that meaningful glance. Was this the destined moment? The idea was dead within a few minutes. Magda had no interest in any conversation. Making the toilets as clean as new dinner plates was all she was interested in – that, and getting a better-paid lousy job as soon as possible.

In their configurations, certain scenes in Chambre 32 are the same as some scenes at the maison de maître: the man and woman, coupling; the witness. The woman, Roberte, is Imogen; she returns the gaze of the witness, her husband, who loves her, and whom she loves; the gaze has duration, and complexity. The gaze that Roberte directs at the camera, her husband’s proxy, in the bedroom of the Hôtel Saint-Étienne, is similar to the gaze that I received at the maison de maître. But it is not the same. Roberte is a huntress, a destroyer. At the climax she is still Roberte, the triumphant Roberte.

Roberte on the bed, naked, supine, looks to the side; the point of view changes – suddenly the camera is looking her in the eye. From the quality of her gaze – complicit, affectionate – we understand that its recipient is Pierre, her husband, the owner of the Hotêl Saint-Étienne. Auguste, the favoured guest, enters the frame; also naked, erect, he kneels beside Roberte. He places a hand on a breast; the hand slides over her skin, and as it descends, the viewpoint moves again; we see Roberte’s face in profile, smiling. Her mouth opens, in a silent gasp; she closes her eyes. When her eyes open again, with a surge of excitement, we see what she sees: the small aperture below the painting; the eye. Pierre observes the splendid Roberte in abandonment; perhaps his gratification is enhanced by the pretence that his spying is unobserved, and that a betrayal is happening. The lens moves in on the body of Roberte; its movement signifies arousal. I can watch this scene now, but it is distressing, even if the anguish is less than I felt when the film was new. It has been occluded by a greater anguish. But when I watch Chambre 32 the lesser pain is reawakened; again our relationship fails.

Nothing had inspired her to become an actress, Imogen told me, in the garden of the museum. She was not even sure that it would be true to say that she had ever decided to become an actress – it was something that had happened. ‘My mother will tell you that I’ve always liked showing off,’ she said. ‘But it’s nothing to do with showing off,’ she assured me. ‘I enjoy being different people – that’s what it is. “You must change your life.” You know that line? Well, I change my life on a regular basis. It’s exciting,’ she said, with a shrug.

Thirty-one visitors today.

La Châtelaine: the moment when, in ecstasy, Imogen turns her eyes to the camera, and the candlelight gleams in her tears. Ovid: Adspicies oculos tremulo fulgore micantes / Ut sol saepe refulgent aqua – her eyes glittering with tremulous brightness, as the sun glitters on clear water.

I can find few reviews of La Châtelaine in English. One critic, reporting from a film festival, professes to have enjoyed the film, though he found it self-conscious, and not quite the serious work of art that the director evidently believes he has created. Another writes that some people were claiming that they found the sex scenes boring. ‘All I can say is that nobody was looking bored at the time,’ he writes.

On occasion, in good weather, William slept in a cemetery, he tells me. His favoured berth was a slab that had cracked along its length, down the centre, and had subsided a little, to form a sort of hammock. A mat of ivy covered the marble, making a mattress. Below the stone lay the remains of someone called Amos Deering, born 1823, died 1884, and his wife, Emily, ‘who rejoined him’ in 1897. It was comfortable, William assured me, and he liked the names of the occupants, though not as much as the names of the nearby Cornelius Febland and his wife Tabitha, née Villin. The names created a nice atmosphere, says William; he felt comforted by them; he would recite them like poems. Cemeteries are special places, he says, because of the energy that flows through them. ‘It’s all about lines of force,’ he explains. Burial sites, churches, ancient settlements and monuments – all sorts of significant localities lie along these lines of force. If one were to take a map and draw lines between them, the pattern would be obvious. William has seen such a map, and it was amazing. It was like an X-ray of the land. People have it the wrong way round: they think graveyards grew alongside churches, but in fact the dead were there first. Before there were any churches, villages grew where the lines of force intersect, and that’s where the dead were buried. Obviously the villagers weren’t aware that this was what they were doing. It’s the same with magnetic fields: we can’t feel them, but they have an effect. Stonehenge, Glastonbury, the pyramids – they are all connected. The ancient structures are like transformers for the energies of the earth, says William, spreading his arms as if to receive the rays. In the cemetery where he used to sleep there were some graves that had an obelisk instead of a cross. ‘Those people knew what they were doing,’ he informs me. By raising an obelisk, the creators of those memorials were aligning themselves with the pharaohs, not with Jesus. The Egyptians knew all about energy, says William.

Shortly after the death of his mother, Arthur Perceval was entrusted to the care of one of his father’s cousins, in distant Durham. He was three years old, and he would never again see the house in which he had been born. It is possible that he never saw his father again either. We can only speculate as to why Charles Perceval might have thought that a conclusive severance would have been in the best interests of the boy. In Charles Perceval’s journal there is not a single reference to his son. The archive has no letters in which Arthur is mentioned, other than the one dated November 9th, 1882, sent from Durham, informing his father of Arthur’s death. Having trained as an architect, at the age of twenty-four Arthur Perceval had gone to Rome to study; ten months later, in Ravenna, he shot himself, in circumstances of which we know nothing. Perhaps in killing himself he was also killing the father who had rejected him, Imogen proposed; the father who was to outlive him by almost thirty years.

On hearing more about John Perceval, the father of Charles, Marcus Colhoun gave some thought to the idea of introducing the figure of Julius Preston’s father, or rather the memory of him, and of his work. It was remarkable that, in an age in which puerperal fever was a common cause of death immediately after childbirth, no woman under the care of John Perceval ever died of it. Indeed, it was remarkable that John Perceval should have made this branch of medicine a speciality: obstetricians were not generally held in high regard at that time, and the Royal College of Physicians regarded the delivering of babies as ungentlemanly work. The secret of Perceval’s success was simple, I explained to Marcus: he was in the habit of washing his hands before and after contact with his patients. I told him about the eminent surgeon of that period who worked in a gown that was brown with the blood of his previous operations. And just one year after Queen Victoria had been anaesthetised with chloroform during the birth of Prince Leopold, John Perceval was using chloroform to reduce the ordeal of labour. The pathos of the death of Beatrice would be heightened were the father of her husband to be given the attributes of John Perceval. A terrible irony that she should die in childbirth – but a cheap irony, Marcus Colhoun decided.

‘You should tell my mother about the hand-washing,’ said Imogen. ‘A hygiene-based horror story would be right up her street.’ It was not the pain that had made childbirth so traumatic for her. The pain was not inconsiderable, especially with Imogen. (‘Difficult right from the start, she told me,’ Imogen said.) But she could cope with the pain. Pain was in the mind and could be disregarded, or almost. But she was revolted by the mess of childbirth. It offended her, the filth that her body expelled along with the baby. Imogen wondered sometimes if her mother regarded all sexual contact as an unhygienic mêlée of bacteria and viruses.

In London, on the streets, William came to know someone who had been in prison for fifteen years, for killing a man in a fight. He had become a model prisoner, trusted by prisoners and staff alike. He was a ‘listener’ – someone in whom the others could confide. The person he had killed had once been involved with his sister; he was a pimp; he’d done time for GBH as well. Within a few months the relationship was over. The young woman came home to her brother one evening with a black eye and a cracked tooth. There was a confrontation outside a club, a brawl that was started by the pimp, as the court accepted; it ended with the stabbing. The killer pleaded guilty; he was contrite. But, he told William, he really couldn’t say that he was sorry that this person was dead. Although he had expressed remorse, remorse was not what he felt. He accepted that he had done wrong in putting an end to this individual, however murderable his victim might have been. For society to function, punishment was necessary; this he understood. So when he had said that he was sorry, what he had meant was that he accepted his sentence. And the next time he found himself in a situation that was getting out of hand, he wouldn’t pull out a knife, probably. But that was not because his moral compass had been realigned during his time in prison – it was because he had left his former self behind, which was not quite the same thing. Having been removed from the streets for a few years, he had become somebody who was unlikely ever to do what the earlier version of himself had done.

And William wants me to know that already, having had a roof over his head for less than a month, he has come to feel that he has moved on, as a person. In the past couple of years he’d been a bit close to the edge at times, he admits. For instance, in London one night he’d just snapped when someone in a big car had almost knocked him down at a crossing, when the lights were on red; the driver said something to him, something ‘uncomplimentary to the homeless community’, so William took a coin out of his pocket and scraped it across the doors, then ran like hell. ‘I don’t think I’d do that now,’ he says, as if assuring his probation officer that he is making good progress. ‘Can’t say I regret doing it, though,’ he adds.

For a short-term fix in times of glumness, Val suggests that one might consider acting. Pending a more enduring solution, we can brighten the soul a little by addressing the symptoms of our woe rather than the cause. ‘Make yourself smile for thirty seconds,’ the life-coach urges, ‘and just see what happens to your mood.’ By means of this simple ruse, obstacles can be surmounted, positivity achieved. A virtuous circle is established. Give, and you will receive. Smile, and the whole world smiles with you. ‘Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.’ Sound science underpins her advice, Val informs us, imparting news from the neurological frontline. When one smiles, benign chemicals are released: pain-inhibiting endorphins; dopamine, so important to the brain’s pleasure and reward centres; and, best of all, serotonin, the depression-lifting neurotransmitter. Any smile can do the trick, says Val, but for maximum efficacy she recommends going the whole hog, with the Duchenne smile. Taking its name from the physician Guillaume Duchenne, this is the ne plus ultra of smiles, making use not merely of the zygomaticus major, the muscle that bends the mouth upwards, but also the orbicularis oculi, by which the eyelids are operated. The truly joyful smile is dependent upon the orbicularis oculi. It used to be thought, Val tells us, that whereas the zygomaticus major is subject to voluntary control, the orbicularis oculi is not. This is why fake smiles are ‘mouth-only smiles’. However, researchers have demonstrated that people can, after all, volitionally activate the orbicularis oculi and thereby ‘put on a Duchenne smile’. We are directed to an academic paper, titled ‘The Deliberate Duchenne Smile: Individual Differences in Expressive Control’. It is not clear to me why this research was thought to be necessary. Cinema has hundreds of examples of perfectly simulated Duchenne smiles. At 27:15 in Devotion, for example, or 1:09:19 in Les tendres plaintes.

For a year or more, when she was at school, Imogen would daydream about her island. The image of her island, she told me, came from a book in the school library, in which aerial photographs of the Indian Ocean showed little islands crammed with lush vegetation, set within water as blue as copper sulphate. She imagined living alone in such a place. The trees would bear fruit perpetually; fish would teem in every pool and river; the sun would shine from dawn to dusk. With nobody to speak to, she would soon lose all sense of herself as Imogen. If there were nobody to look at her, she would lose all sense of herself as anybody. No boundary would separate her from the world. She would live in nature as happily as a monkey, she told herself.

William asleep when I get home. At seven he appears. While I cook, he makes sandwiches for himself. Thus a semblance of independence is maintained. He buys his own food and makes a cash contribution, but the money he is paid by the agency would support nobody. Some nights, his labour is not needed; tonight, however, he is required to present himself. He likes to work at night. He enjoys the peacefulness of it, being alone in a brightly lit office, with the city in darkness outside. Sometimes, it’s like being at sea. Even when it’s boring, it’s better than most of the jobs he has done over the past few years. For one thing, it’s not doing damage to his health.

He’s reading a book about the search for alien life, a subject that has been on his mind a lot recently, he tells me. In the small hours of the morning, when he stops for a quick bite, he gazes out at the sky and wonders which of the two possibilities is true: we are alone in the universe; or we are not. He is inclined to think that the conditions that were necessary for life to have developed on earth are so improbable that it’s likelier that we’re alone. Even if this is not the case, he has learned from his book, we might as well be alone, because there’s virtually no chance that we could ever detect any life that might exist in the far depths of space. There’s virtually no chance that any living beings, in any star system, could ever make contact with any other. Scientists have argued that all civilisations have a limited time span of a few thousand years. Ours will be destroyed by climate change; others would expire for other reasons. If that’s the case, there’s no way that contact could be made across distances of millions and millions of light years. Worlds would bloom and die in total isolation. ‘And with that cheery thought,’ says William, ‘I’ll leave you to your evening.’

He goes back upstairs with a plate of sandwiches and a beer. I read in the living room; he reads in the room above. At eleven-thirty he goes to work. In the morning, as I am leaving, we might meet on the street, but sometimes he stops at a café or takes a walk through the park before returning to his room. The walk helps him to sleep. Most days, it is evident that he has not even opened the living-room door during my absence. He is drinking much less than he used to, as he had promised he would. William is the ideal tenant. But his life is in suspension. And I am his gaoler, albeit a well-meaning one. My charity is oppressive.