The Great Concert of the Night

JUNE

Thirty-two visitors.

‘I need to have a rethink,’ says William. ‘I don’t have what it takes for this lark.’ Yesterday he was out in a rough sea. Nothing exceptional for every other member of the crew, but too much for William. For an hour he clung to a stanchion, throwing up. At one point he vomited in the wrong direction and splattered himself from face to waist. The others carried on working through the mayhem. Gary, the hard man, ex-army, was ripping up fish while telling tales of the really bad seas he’d been caught in. Waves as high as houses, in total darkness. In the end, William was sent to his bunk. ‘Disgraced,’ he says, though everyone was laughing about it by the time they came back to port. He had the look of someone who had lost half his blood, and it was a full day before he lost the feeling that everything was still moving. ‘So I’m out,’ he tells me. And the drugs are an issue too. ‘It’s the only way these blokes can do what they do,’ he says, ‘but I don’t want any of that. If I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop.’

On the website of a newspaper that likes to present itself as the champion of deep-rooted British values, we are invited to admire the body of ‘reality TV star Michelle’ as she ‘tops up her tan in Marbella’. More: we should study the ‘perfectly tanned and toned figure’ of eighteen-year-old Zoë, who looks ‘full of body confidence’ in her cute pink bikini. Sylvie ‘flaunts her pert posterior and amazing abs’ in her ‘latest workout snapshots’. A semi-famous actor, a ‘notorious party animal’, is seen departing from a club with two ‘leggy blondes’, who have no names; we should envy him, it appears, but we must deplore the semi-famous actress who is looking ‘the worse for wear’ as she clambers into a limo at two in the morning. We should also regret that a certain TV presenter, 35, seems to be struggling to lose weight after the birth of her first child, a full six months ago.

A birthday present from Francesca – a book about decorated skeletons. ‘Saw this and thought of you,’ she writes. The skeletons reside in various German churches, some of them in resplendent made-to-measure tombs with glass panels for ease of viewing, some behind screens in side chapels, some in storerooms, under piles of surplus seating. When northern Europe was first being menaced by Protestantism, these bones were removed from the Roman catacombs, given saintly names, and dispatched across the Alps to the jeopardised territories, where they were adorned with fabulous costumes and festooned with jewellery. The bedazzled faithful, in adoring the glamorous relics, would thereby be reconnected with the martyrs of the true church; the marvellous skeletons, with amethysts for eyes and ribs wrapped in gold leaf, were harbingers of the glory of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Francesca, on her first visit to the museum: we stood together in the mirrored room, each with a candle, and she made the flame dance around the faces of all the little Francescas who stood in ranks around us. She turned slowly, and the assembled Francescas turned slowly in the foggy glass. ‘My team of ghost girls,’ she said.

I remember the day we met up with Francesca and her boyfriend in Rome; they had arrived the previous day, and we were leaving two days later. Francesca was our guide for the day, a role she occupied with aplomb. We walked down the road from the Campidoglio. Francesca read aloud the inscription on a lintel, first in Latin, then in translation. Nicola, whose house this was, was not unaware that the glory of the world in itself is of no importance. I can see Imogen’s marigold dress. She and Francesca walked ahead, arms linked. The boyfriend, with me, kept glancing at the two women, as though concerned that Francesca might be sharing secrets, or that Imogen might be giving her advice that was contrary to his best interests. At the Bocca della Verità, after Francesca had whispered something to him, he stood before the huge stone face and placed his hand in the mouth, which supposedly would shut like a trap if a lie were to be uttered.

That evening, having noticed a look transmitted by the boyfriend to a young woman at a neighbouring table, Imogen said to me, as we walked back to the hotel: ‘This one is going to break her heart.’

After Imogen’s departure, Emma was inclined to wonder why I had not paused before embarking on an affair that would have been so unlikely to produce a good outcome. For Emma, all decisions should be preceded by careful consideration of outcomes. I was unworldly, in some ways, she told me; my choice of career was evidence enough; a man of my type would have been particularly susceptible to a woman of Imogen’s high voltage. She saw Le Grand Concert de la Nuit but not Chambre 32. Emma was appalled by the idea of Chambre 32. She could never watch it. Why would she? Why would anyone watch such a thing? Imogen, she suggested, was akin to an overpowered sports car that its middle-aged owner regrets buying within the year, after a near-death experience. With Chambre 32 Imogen had gone too far, my sister said; I could only agree.

Sometimes, on days of acute happiness, Imogen would suddenly stop and look around, her elation having reached such a pitch that it compelled her to halt and take note of everything, to embed in her memory every detail of the locality in which the mood of the day was invested. In Rome, walking towards Santa Maria della Vittoria from San Carlino, she stopped; turning, she surveyed the street – the buildings, the road, the sky; she looked to the left and to the right, slowly, two or three times each way; I had walked on. A passing man, misreading Imogen’s frown of concentration as perplexity, crossed the street to ask if she were lost. His dog was kitted out in a tight satin coat, Italian azure, and adorned with the badge of the national football team. For a couple of minutes the man stayed with Imogen, watching the contortions of a vast cloud of starlings.

We were in her room, late at night; the pain had risen. She could not recall the man and his dog. She clamped her brow with a hand, trying to press some memory out. ‘No. Nothing,’ she said. ‘Starlings I remember. Many many starlings.’ She could not remember San Carlino. ‘Describe, please,’ she said. ‘Take me back to Rome.’ I remember the tone – like a happy woman, addressing a friendly bus driver.

In her dark episodes, Imogen’s head was full of remembered phrases. They repeated themselves, dozens of times, and she was powerless against them. Her head felt like ‘a drum full of dirty clothes’, she told me. One day, the phrase ‘Why ever would he do such a thing?’ asserted itself. No meaning could be attributed to it. It was a memory, she knew, but she could not tell whose voice was speaking.

I slept on the floor. In the middle of the night I woke up to see her sitting on the bed, staring at the window. Her eyes were haunted. ‘We would be damned,’ she was hearing, over and over again. This time, she knew the source: these were words she had spoken as Beatrice.

The train came to a standstill between stations, on a raised section of track. Houses backed on to the rail line, and we looked down into an unfurnished ground-floor room. Under a bare light-bulb, a man and a woman were talking, a pace apart, face to face. The dirty glass of the window, struck obliquely by the late sunlight, had a grey cast, which made it seem as though the couple were standing in a deep dusk that was confined to that room. The lightbulb was on. The man had his hands on his hips and the woman’s arms were crossed; they looked like actors in rehearsal, in a scene of disagreement. But then the man moved a hand to the woman’s cheek and left it there; he leaned forward to kiss her. The kiss was gentle and long. I glanced at Imogen; she was smiling and crying. In a fit of impatience, she ground away the tears with the heels of her thumbs. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she apologised.

When I took refuge in the yellow and silver chamber, only one other person was in that room: a man of my age; his chest was pale and doughy; his limbs disproportionately thin. He lolled in an armchair, splay-legged, recovering from his exertions, it appeared. In one hand he held a purple scarf, which lay over his thigh; his penis had shrunk into its nest. As I came in he nodded to me, then he shut his eyes. Subdued and sweet-tempered music was coming from the adjoining hall. ‘Ah, j’adore l’épouse de monsieur Haydn,’ murmured the lolling man; he amused himself immensely. A chaise longue stood in the corner of the room. That was where I sat. I too closed my eyes, to listen. The floor was highly polished parquet. At the sticky sound of skin on varnished wood, I looked towards the door. A woman approached, a large woman; she was wearing a black domino and a belt of small black beads; nothing else. She stood in front of me and smiled; she had a pretty mouth; carmine lipstick; bright and even teeth. Her eyes regarded me as though I were a friend whom she was pleasantly surprised to have encountered here. She stood with her feet almost touching mine. My arms would not have reached around her. Her hips and shoulders were broad, her thighs strong and smooth, her breasts hefty; a fertility figure. She said something that I did not understand, then placed her hands flat on her stomach; her fingers pointed downward, directing my gaze to the naked cleft; a small red stone glittered there, in a fold of glistening skin. Again she spoke; she smiled, with a radiant confidence in her ability to excite desire. Her hands rose to her breasts; the nipples were pierced by tiny silver arrows. I wondered how it would feel to embrace this body, a body unlike any that I had ever touched, but it was an almost theoretical curiosity. She bent down, bringing her face close to mine. ‘Saisir le jour,’ she murmured, as if suggesting a little excursion. A perfume of cherries and champagne came with her breath. I demurred, but with warm thanks. ‘Ah, English,’ she commiserated. As she looked down to my lap, her lips formed a wry pout, as though to say: ‘Your body is not in agreement with you.’ The recuperating man was watching us from the other side of the room. In English he called out, in a voice of some grandeur: ‘The day will not be seized.’ The mighty woman turned to look at him. An amiable exchange ensued. She crossed the room and held out a summoning hand, which he took.

Waiting for Imogen, I sat in the garden of the maison de maître, by the wall of jasmine. People were leaving now. Behind me, many of the windows were open, but barely a sound came out of the house; now and then a cry. The air was placid and warm. An ordeal had been completed. The scene was a pastoral nocturne. The grass sloped down to a stream, where the silhouettes of willows and chestnuts made areas of deeper darkness against the sky. A pallid statue stood in the gloom. Beyond it, another pale shape emerged, rising from the grass by the trees; a woman – a wide streak of hair divided the figure’s back. A second body arose, not to its full height. Kneeling, the second figure pressed its face into the thighs of the first.

There was a second bench, a few yards from mine. Suddenly a woman was there. She wore a dress that was long and white and translucent, and silver sandals. Fortyish. From a shoulder, on a slender silver chain, hung a small silver box, kidney-shaped, from which she took a brace of cigarettes. She offered one to me, without speaking, and I, without speaking, declined. In silence we sat in the fragrant and motionless air of the night. Still the two bodies by the trees were conjoined, face to groin. My companion’s gaze paused on them, and paused on the statue with the same indifference, and on the trees, the moon, and the bandages of cloud above it. With closed mouth, she slowly exhaled. She leaned back, to regard the sky directly overhead. Infinite boredom suffused her face. An hour earlier, I had seen her naked in an upstairs room; her ankles and wrists had been shackled to steel bars; a younger woman stood behind her, holding some sort of electrified wand.

The situation in the grass was changing. The kneeling figure – male, it was now clear – had stood up and was putting on a robe; the woman lay down, and disappeared from view. Leaving the robe untied, the man walked towards the house. Seeming to recognise my companion, he raised a hand, and she reciprocated. He was perhaps a decade older than her, with slicked grey hair. On reaching the bench, he stopped and extended a hand to the woman, as if inviting her to join him for a waltz. Her smile was that of someone who has heard a once-amusing story too often; she stood up, and wished me good evening. The man bowed to me.

A few minutes later, Imogen came out. From the footfall I knew it was Imogen, without turning to see. She slid her hands onto my shoulders and whispered: ‘All right?’

‘Indeed,’ I said.

She stood squarely in front of me, to look steadily, then she put her arms around me.

Might an image, in being written, in being expelled on to a page, be attenuated by this exposure, if not purged completely? Writing as an inoculation? The image: Imogen on the black couch, in the light of a single candle, her arms at her side, motionless; eyes closed; a recumbent tomb-figure. A young man, athletic, came into the room. Looking at me, he gestured towards Imogen, as though inviting me to precede him through a doorway. She turned and held out a hand to me, like a woman who was about to jump; I was invited to annihilate myself with her.

A call from William, barely audible against the noise. He’s walking to Mousehole, he tells me. He has a hangover to walk off. Two miles there, two miles back, but in this wind a mile feels like twice the distance. ‘Listen,’ he says. What I’m hearing, he tells me, is the bushes beside the road, shrieking. The sea looks like a ploughed-up field with snow on it, he says. Ahead of him a woman is walking with a spaniel, and the dog’s ears are horizontal. ‘This is what it’s all about. Feel the energy,’ he yells. Energy is what drew him to the edge of England. It flows through the earth, down to the southernmost point. That’s why England’s southern pole is William’s destiny. Evidence: he has been offered a job. This is the reason for the call – next week, he becomes a driver, delivering for a supermarket. ‘Hours are crap, money’s not great, but what the hell, eh? Turning the corner, my man. Onward and upward.’

The second encounter with William: spotting Imogen from the opposite side of the road, he crossed immediately, jinking through the traffic.

She greeted him on our behalf. It might have been evident that I was not delighted; Imogen was staying for only a few days, and I felt I had rights to her company. She too, I think, would rather not have had the interruption, but she dissembled perfectly. ‘Hello, William,’ she said.

‘Hello Imogen,’ he answered, with bright familiarity, as if this bit of banter were some sort of private joke. ‘All right if I join you? Just for a minute,’ he asked. ‘Today I can pay,’ he added, dredging a palmful of coins from a pocket. ‘Had a good morning,’ he explained. He was carrying a backpack, which he kicked under the chair he had selected, on Imogen’s side of the table. When he sat down, a waft of beer fumes reached me. ‘All clear,’ he said, tapping the scar on his brow.

Imogen commended the neatness of the stitching.

‘And what about you?’ he asked her. ‘What are you up to?’

In the previous week she had been doing a voiceover.

William could not have been more amazed, but immediately the amazement was replaced by reconsideration. ‘That makes sense,’ he told her. ‘You’ve got a nice voice,’ he said. The niceness of the voice, and the nastiness of some other voices, gave him material for a minute or so. I seemed to have become invisible.

The waitress, the same one as before, came to the table, and William ordered a coffee, as casually as a regular. ‘Good name, Imogen,’ he said, reattaching his attention. ‘Never met an Imogen before. Great name.’ He could not recall a David either. He knew a Dave, but he was a Dave, not a David, which was not the same thing at all, he told us, just as William was not the same as Will or Bill or Billy. William had a theory, a theory that experience had validated: that there is an affinity between people who share a name. In giving a certain name to their child, parents were recognising, albeit unconsciously, the qualities that this name represented. Thus the essence of every John was his John-ness, just as everything labelled gold was gold. Davids were dependable, he complimented me, whereas Daves had a tendency to be dodgy. Obviously the parents of almost every Dave originally called the boy David, but when David chose to become Dave he was correcting a mistake that the parents had made. This is not quite how the theory was expressed – William’s explication was less succinct. He was interruption-proof.

A few yards from where we were sitting, a signpost had been knocked out of the perpendicular by a car. Noticing it, William was prompted to recall an interesting fact that the father of a friend, a policeman, had once told him: that it was better to drive into a brick wall than into a tree, because a brick wall will collapse when the car hits it, whereas a tree will spring back, worsening the impact. Years later, William had remembered this advice, and ‘given the choice of a tree or a wall’, he had driven at the latter; and, just as the policeman had said, the wall folded over the car bonnet, causing only minor damage to the driver. ‘But I’m a good driver,’ he wanted us to know, as if we might be looking for a driver to hire. He liked driving, but couldn’t afford his own wheels at the moment. When he had got himself sorted out, he might get a driving job, he said. He wasn’t stupid, he wanted us to know. He had the brains for a ‘proper job’, but he was never going to wear a suit and he wasn’t good at being bossed around. Or he might train to be a plumber, because he had the sort of brain you need for that kind of work, and he was good with his hands. But it wasn’t easy to find someone to take you on, so it was likelier that he’d go for the driving option. Once he had taken his father’s BMW, not strictly with permission, and he’d gone for a drive on the motorway at night. He’d done a hundred miles in an hour. It was an out-of-body experience, he told us. He’d been totally in the zone. It was like watching a video of himself demonstrating how to drive safely on a motorway at a steady one hundred miles an hour. The owner of the car wasn’t his real father, he clarified; glancing at me, he became aware that he was in danger of losing his audience. ‘Another story,’ he said, checking his cup. ‘Now I’ll get out of your way,’ he said, standing.

He seemed not to be expecting anything, but Imogen opened her bag and took out a ten-pound note. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, holding the note in both hands, at arm’s length. ‘Pardon the language. But—’

‘Take it,’ she said.

‘You won’t win,’ I told him.

He folded the note in half and slotted it into a pocket of his bag. ‘This means I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘You know that, right?’ His eyes were watering.

When he had gone, I took issue with Imogen’s generosity. ‘He’ll spend it on drink,’ I objected.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘If that’s what he needs.’

I made some other uncharitable observations.

‘Would you like to be in his place?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure I know what his place is.’

‘Whatever it is, it isn’t one we’d swap for ours.’

Some people of ‘wild imagination’ would be at the maison de maître, Imogen warned me. Was it because I lacked imagination, I asked, that she thought I might benefit from this experience? It was not a question of administering a corrective, Imogen said. And a lack of imagination could be regarded as a strength. This was when Imogen talked about Simone Weil, a writer she admired greatly, she told me, though Simone Weil was as unlike Imogen as it was possible to be. The imagination, Weil maintained, is coercive: it imposes itself upon the real and leads us away from the true. ‘Not to imagine – that’s the supreme faculty’, Imogen paraphrased. One should aim, Weil had written, ‘to obliterate from one’s self one’s point of view’. Imogen was inviting me to observe, to attend. There was no connotation of subservience; on the contrary. ‘I submit myself to your mercy,’ she said, with a gesture of prostration that was not entirely parodic.

A school group this afternoon. One of the teachers, new to the school, recently returned to the area in which he grew up, tells me that he was moved by the display of spar boxes, in particular the box of Lake District minerals. Almost forty years had passed since he last saw that box, and the sight of it brought back to him, suddenly, a memory of being at the museum, aged seven or eight, with his sister, who had convinced him that the cluster of green pyromorphite crystals was in fact a lump of kryptonite, the stone that could vanquish Superman. He had no recollection of room seven, however; it must be assumed that his parents had steered him away from it.

On Alfred Street this afternoon, as a woman passed me, I was struck by an unusual perfume. Violets and something smoky were in the mix, but that was as much as I could distinguish; the scent disappeared in seconds. Even if I were to be handed a bottle of the perfume, however, I would not be capable of separating the elements of the compound. Imogen, however, would have named them immediately, like someone with perfect pitch separating the notes of a complex chord. At Val’s house, one of the guests was wearing an intricate scent. Imogen inhaled a draught of the delicious air, and said to the woman, outright, as if she had been walking with a group of friends and suddenly come upon an amazing view: ‘My God, that is wonderful.’ The woman leaned towards her, to offer a more concentrated dose. Closing her eyes, Imogen began to name the ingredients: bergamot and grapefruit; rose, frankincense and sandalwood; coffee, kiwi, honey. As she named them, I could discern each element. ‘Quite a nose,’ said the woman. A conversation on the topic of perfumes ensued. Val looked on. Almost on first sight, it was clear to me, Val had arrived at a conclusion: this woman is a performer, always. And perhaps, on this occasion, Imogen was a little bolder than usual, for the benefit of Val, a woman who put so much work into her own sincerity.

Agamédé – the scene in which she removes the stopper from the phial of perfume that the Count has given her, a unique perfume composed for Agamédé on his instruction, blending the rarest and most intoxicating extracts. With an expression of great seriousness, like a chemist assessing the result of an experiment, she raises the opened bottle to her nose. Her eyes are overwhelmed by the torpor of surrender; then comes the smile – that drowsy, aroused, arousing smile.

The party at Val’s: a gathering for a select group of thirty or so, belatedly for Samantha’s birthday – some from the yoga group, a couple of colleagues, some from the pottery class, and others whose connection was never clear. Samantha’s social life was much richer now, thanks to Val. We had been invited, I assumed, partly in order that Imogen could be assessed.

A profusion of multi-ethnic snacks and dishes had been arrayed on a table below the alcove that housed the little brass Buddha. We were making our selection when our host appeared beside us. She wanted Imogen to know that she had enjoyed Devotion. In particular, she had loved the costumes; and the childbirth scene was so powerful – ‘unbearable’, even. Samantha joined us, allowing Val to assist a guest who had a question about what she was eating. Then Conrad passed by, with a ‘How’s it going?’ Had Imogen not been there, he would have moved on. We had met before. He found me uninteresting, whereas my former wife was cool, or coolish, by virtue of having walked out of a mainstream marriage to become his mother’s lover. But I was dull; just as he, with the good-bad haircut and the affected slouch and the limited edition T-shirts, was a conceited and pampered adolescent. Beside him stood a huge-eyed wraith of a girl: this was Katrin, of whose prettiness and brilliance we had heard, via Samantha. Katrin mouthed a hello and offered Imogen a hand. Her hand had about as much weight as a playing card. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. About both of you,’ said Imogen, giving Conrad a smile that deflected his gaze. She had remembered which instruments Katrin had mastered, according to Val: guitar, piano, flute, cello, accordion. ‘And you write songs, I hear,’ she said. Katrin looked to Conrad, and Conrad nodded; the shyness was uncharacteristic. ‘Conrad writes the words,’ answered Katrin in a tiny voice. ‘I can’t sing,’ Conrad told Imogen; it was almost disarming, the way he said it – as if the inability to sing were a clinical diagnosis, of no great seriousness, but mildly embarrassing. There was a brief discussion of their tastes in music and the way they worked together, then Imogen said: ‘Would you let me hear something?’ Again Katrin looked to Conrad. ‘You mean, like now?’ he asked. ‘Why not? Who knows when we’ll next see you?’ Imogen pointed out.

Leaving Samantha to circulate, we followed the youngsters to Conrad’s room, at the top of the house. Guitars hung from brackets: a Stratocaster, a Telecaster, a Les Paul, a custom-made Spanish guitar – so many guitars, all of them gifts from the guilty father, now living in California and earning inconceivable quantities of dollars. We listened to a song that they had recorded onto Conrad’s laptop; a beguiling little piece, in the voice of a homesick traveller, with some simple strumming behind Katrin’s voice, which was quiet but true. The second song was a sweetly innocent serenade, in which the singer invited a new arrival in town to come for a walk. ‘Wonderful,’ Imogen pronounced, and Katrin, sitting on the floor, with her arms around her knees, looked abashed. I excused myself to return to Samantha.

‘She’s a hit. Well done,’ said Samantha, with a smile that seemed to imply that I had somehow executed successfully a complex subterfuge. Val, I observed, had taken note that Imogen and the youngsters had not returned downstairs with me. The creatives were bonding. Within moments of their reappearance, Val rejoined us. Katrin and Conrad were so talented, she informed us. With brisk affection, she ruffled her son’s hair, asserting her claim.

When Imogen and I were taking our leave, Conrad and Katrin came over. Katrin, closing her eyes, pressed herself to Imogen; I received a handshake from Conrad. By association with Imogen, I had been transformed in his eyes; and vice versa.

Samantha was glad to hear that I had met Imogen; the new relationship might remove the last deposits of guilt. The betrayal was in her mind much more than it was in mine. Whatever wounds there had been had healed by this time. I was reasonable, but my reasonableness never fully convinced her. On the contrary, she took it to be the manifestation of a deeply buried anger – an analysis with which Val, I am sure, would have concurred. But I was no longer angry; perplexed, but not angry. There was, however, a widening distance between us. She had assumed a manner that was new; a softer self-presentation; it owed something to Val’s brand of serenity.

If a soul is to know itself, it must engage with, or look into, another soul – this from the dialogue of Alcibiades and Socrates, which may or may not have been composed by Plato. ‘One eye looking at another, and at the most perfect part of it, with which it sees, will see itself,’ we read. The soul is visible in the pupil of the eye, in the form of a girl – the word kore means ‘pupil’ or ‘little doll’, I have learned. Kore is also another name for Persephone, whose myth may be read as an allegory of the soul’s imprisonment in the underworld of the flesh. The Eleusinian Mysteries, the most celebrated secret rites of ancient Greece, were dedicated to Demeter and Persephone. The details of the Eleusinian Mysteries are unclear, but it is known that initiates were required to drink kykeon, a blended barley drink which some believe to have had psychotropic effects, caused by the presence in the barley of Claviceps purpurea, the rye ergot fungus.

At the maison de maître, what I saw in Imogen’s gaze: solicitude; gratitude; surrender; blindness and oblivion. The body was satiated, quelled, sacrificed. When she opened her eyes again, she was like a woman waking after surgery. It was like falling back into life, she said.

‘My aim is to enable my clients to focus on the here and now,’ says Val, in this week’s bulletin. It is no easy thing to focus on the here and now, she acknowledges. Our thoughts ‘tend to roam in time and space’. Often they are in the past, reliving a painful memory or a pleasurable one. Often they are in the future, daydreaming or making plans. Sometimes, Val concedes, it is necessary for our thoughts to be somewhere other than where our bodies are. ‘We need to examine and make sense of what has happened to us,’ as she points out. And we need ‘to shine a light onto the path that stretches ahead of us’. And yet, she alleges, many of us spend too much time with our minds focused on some place beyond where we are. In ‘obsessing about the past’, we run the risk of ‘regret-addiction’. Worrying about the years to come, we squander our time in a place that may exist only in our imagination. ‘For much of our lives, we are like people with binoculars pressed to our eyes, oblivious to our surroundings.’

Epicurus to Idomeneus of Lampsacus: ‘I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life.’

Afternoon tea and cakes with my father and Rose, in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which they discovered on their last trip into town; it’s handy for the theatres, and not too expensive, and not too noisy, Rose explains. ‘Phil struggles if there’s a lot of noise,’ she tells me, flittering her fingers around an ear, by way of illustration. For Rose, my father has always been Phil, whereas for my mother he was always the full Philip; ‘a rebranding exercise’, as Emma would have it.

Rose thinks I require pepping up; I need to meet someone. She wants to know why I haven’t signed up for any online agencies. Some of them are really good. The way they analyse your character is amazingly accurate, she tells me; it doesn’t matter what your interests are, they’ll find someone who’s ‘compatible’. A friend of hers – Amy, she says to my father, to ensure that he’s following – found a really lovely man last year; they hit it off right away, and now they are getting married; they both like birdwatching, she says, as if no nut could be harder to crack. ‘I’ll give you the website,’ says Rose, consulting her phone. I promise to investigate.

The phone holds much evidence of the improvements the Rose has made to the garden. Rose’s phone is the latest model; she is as comfortable with the technology as any teenager. And she is a tremendously efficient woman; the garden is impressive. But Eastbourne is the sunniest town in the whole of the UK, so any idiot can make things grow there, she says; the self-deprecation is not feigned. Eastbourne is changing so quickly, she informs me. Property prices were good when they moved there, but now they’ve gone mad. Rose cites examples of the madness of property prices in Eastbourne. Most of the talking is done by Rose, as is increasingly the case. My father’s hearing is worse this year than last. ‘A blessing, in some circumstances,’ he says. They are in town to see a show, a musical. A treat for his birthday. Rose is a big fan of musicals, and Phil has come to love them too. ‘As long as there’s dancing. He really likes the dancing. Isn’t that right, love?’ My father concurs. ‘You get prettier girls in musicals. Good legs,’ he says, and Rose raises an eyebrow, delighted by his incorrigibility.

‘What about you?’ Rose enquiries. ‘What are your plans?’

I tell her that I’d thought I might wander over to the Soane museum.

She smiles. The ageing son is a hopeless case. ‘Don’t forget what I said,’ she says on parting, tapping at an imaginary keyboard.

My father understood the relationship with Imogen: I was going through what many men of my age go through, a low-level crisis exacerbated by the divorce, which had unsettled me more than I cared to acknowledge, he believed, or so Rose has told me. I don’t recall ever discussing the divorce with my father; I kept him apprised of developments, no more than that. He could see what drew me to Imogen: she was nice-looking, and had money. A woman with money is as attractive to a man as a moneyed man is to a woman, despite what people say, he maintained. But social class is a different matter, and with Imogen I had strayed a little too far from my proper territory, even if my territory, like my sister’s, is no longer wholly congruent with his. And actresses are flighty by nature, as everyone knows. As for the idea of having a girlfriend who was often not even in the same country, never mind in the same city – no wonder it didn’t work out. Rose, who is of a more romantic temperament than her husband, as she has often said, sees things slightly differently: actors don’t make good long-term partners, that much is obvious, but they are exciting and unusual people, so it was not surprising that I had taken a chance when the opportunity arose. And for men, it goes without saying, a pretty face goes a long way, Rose observed. Rose has a pretty face, still. For a woman in the latter part of her sixties, she is remarkably pert; she suits her name, though my sister, in the early days, when Rose was barely acceptable, was of the opinion that she was less a rose than a Christmas-tree ball – a bright and shiny void. Some respect, however, had to be given to Rose’s mercantile skills. She had, after all, made a success of her shop, the shop into which our father had walked one day, in search of a birthday gift for his daughter, thinking that an item of leading-edge kitchenware might be just the thing. Fractiously divorced the previous year, Rose was perhaps susceptible to the attractions of a dependable man, and my father was a man of manifest dependability; a man, moreover, who seemed to genuinely appreciate the quality of the merchandise on offer; he was clearly very fond of his daughter too; and a well-preserved specimen into the bargain. Rose, for her part, was a highly personable woman; in the course of the first conversation – on what must, I imagine, have been a slack day at the shop – it was established that she was the owner of the business, that she was freshly single, and that she enjoyed nothing more than cooking. Within a few weeks he had been given proof of Rose’s prowess at the stove. This, my sister was convinced, was the principal explanation for Rose’s success; our father, she thought, had not eaten anything more nutritious than ready-meals since our mother had died. And there was the sex, of course. On the evening of our introduction to Rose, a remark was made from which we were clearly invited to infer that some highly satisfactory sexual activity had been taking place. On subsequent evenings we observed, as intended, significant glances and small smiles. City-breaks were mentioned; Bruges was a preferred destination – very pretty, and much better value for money than Paris, Rose advised. The innuendos were unseemly. But my father seemed happy, and still does.

Even if Rose had not been Rose, even if she had been a woman of our father’s age, rather than one who is less than a full decade older than his daughter, Emma could not have approved. A new wife within a year of the first one’s death – the hastiness was indecent. A longer period of mourning was our mother’s due; for a woman of our mother’s selflessness, a posthumous repayment of four or five years should have been the bare minimum, as Emma sees it. The new relationship signified too urgent a need; a lack of robustness. And then Rose is so unlike our mother. The dissimilarity is such that it has made Emma wonder, at times, about the depth of our father’s attachment to our mother. At what point in the year of being alone, Emma asks herself, had he become someone who could marry a woman like Rose? My sister is often aggrieved on behalf of her mother. Neither of us has any memory of any disagreements between our parents, but our mother’s life was not her own: she was allowed to do nothing except have children, and raise them, and then take a job that must have bored her senseless, typing letters all day. A ‘negative inspiration’ for her daughter, as Emma has put it. When at last our mother stopped working, she began to read books, for the first time since her marriage. Her enthusiasm for the novels of Willa Cather was indicative of previously untapped resources. Too late, she confessed to Emma that she would have loved to travel across America, coast to coast. ‘Dad is like me – not much in the way of imagination,’ said Emma once. ‘Mum was different – or she would have been.’ She doubts whether Rose has read a book of any sort.

From time to time, when Imogen was a girl, her father would reveal some idiosyncrasy of character that might have surprised many of the people who knew him, she told me. In the depths of a wardrobe lurked some dandyish shirts, which for some reason he had not been able to discard; she could not imagine him wearing such things, at any age. He confessed to a liking, not quite extinct, for the music of Charlie Parker. And she remembered being shown a picture of Lord Berners, taking tea at home, with a large white horse standing on the carpet beside him, drinking from a saucer. ‘A chap it would have been fun to know,’ her father commented.

It was possible that her mother had been a source of fun in the years before Imogen was old enough to intuit, from her father’s one memorable use of the word, that he wished their life were in some way different from what it was. Her mother seemed to lack all capacity for frivolity. It was possible, as Imogen came to understand, that her mother was no longer the person she had been when her father had fallen in love with her. Photographs, however, showed little evidence that Charlotte in her early twenties had taken life more easily than she did in later years; she smiled in some of them, but the smile suggested camera-readiness rather than light-heartedness. Still, it was possible that something had been lost in motherhood. She might have cast off the last of her youth, to take on the dignity and seriousness that was required of a woman of her newly acquired standing. If that is what had happened, the thoroughness of her assumption of the role was remarkable. She had grafted herself perfectly onto the tree of the English family. No one could ever have evinced a deeper respect for the ways and the history of the Goughs. ‘The high priestess of etiquette,’ Imogen called her, preparing me for what was in store.

In the library there used to be a photograph that was taken at the house in 1944, on the tennis court. About twenty people were in the picture, some of them dressed for tennis, most not. For years the only points of interest, for Imogen, were that the boy sitting cross-legged at the front was her father, and the woman standing behind him was her grandmother, of whom she remembered little other than that she could sing nicely, kept a retinue of King Charles spaniels, and perfumed herself heavily with rosewater. But one day she asked her father about the woman who stood at the far left. This was Veronica, and she was very much not dressed for tennis. Her dress was a Fortuny silk gown, a thousand-pleated thing that fitted her body like a flow of syrup. Her face was in the shadow of her hand, and the picture was rather grainy, so the photograph did not truly show how gorgeous Veronica had been, her father told her. Even people who could not abide Veronica could not deny that she was a stunner. Her father had met her only two or three times, and never forgot the amazing dress that she was wearing on one of those days. It was ultramarine, and had tiny glass beads on the seam. Corsets could not be worn with such a dress; indeed, he later learned, it was designed to be worn without underwear of any kind. Veronica was a scandalous woman. The young man standing beside her, who at the time was engaged to the young woman on the far right of the picture, was later discovered to have been simultaneously intimate with Veronica, who had come to the party as the companion of another young man (back row, middle) and at one time or another was known to have been involved with at least three more of the men who appeared in the photograph.

At some point the picture was removed from the dresser. Imogen found it, after some searching. We looked at it together. ‘Which were the ones who sinned with Veronica?’ Imogen asked her mother. ‘I have no idea,’ her mother answered, not looking. Neither did she know where Veronica belonged amid the ramifications of the Gough family tree; the connection involved multiple marriages and divorces and was too complicated to be memorised. Veronica was reputed to have had the finest legs in all of London, Imogen’s father had told her. A young man was said to have shot himself for love of her, or in despair at her faithlessness. He had survived, but was badly damaged in mind and body. If one had placed that woman’s lovers end to end, Imogen’s mother commented, they would have spanned Hyde Park.