The Great Concert of the Night

AUGUST

‘How’s the research going?’ Samantha asked, some time after Imogen had left. It was assumed that, in the apparent absence of any new relationship, I would now immerse myself in the Perceval project. A new tangent had opened up, I told her: Cornelius Perceval, it appeared, had been in some way involved with Thomas Beddoes’ experiments with air-based therapies. The story of the Percevals was of no interest to Val; as if the subject were of some intimacy, she disengaged herself. We were sitting outside, and Val cast onto the street her look of benign and mellow wonderment. When I said that I thought the Percevals book would take two or three years to write, Val turned back to me and smiled. In her eyes, for a second, appeared a nuance – the very slightest nuance – of pity. A few years on, still no book. Credit where credit is due.

What has happened, I wonder, to the perpetually walking man? We saw him many times, always walking, always in the same garb, whatever the weather: black boots, black waterproof trousers, black anorak, with the hood pulled up. On his back he carried a large black bag, of the kind used to carry newspapers for delivery; the bag invariably appeared to be full, and he bore the weight of it on a wide webbing strap that ran across his forehead and pressed the hood over his eyes, like a cowl; one could see the strain in his neck; he stooped, and every stride was effortful, as though he were wading into surf. William knew him, and cautioned against engagement. What the man’s story was, he didn’t know, but he had ‘brain issues’, said William. ‘Not right in the head. Not at all right,’ he told us. William had spoken to him twice, which was once more than enough. He had come across him by the Abbey one night, talking to himself as if in conversation with half a dozen people – ‘Like he was walking with an invisible gang’. The man heard voices all the time, it seemed. When William suggested that he might benefit from medical attention, he was rebuffed. There was no point in talking to any ‘expert’, the man had answered, because the voices were real things, not things that he was imagining. If the man ever interrupted one of the voices, it would wait for him to finish and then resume where it had left off. This was proof of the voices’ reality. There were other proofs too. The voices said things that the man knew to be false, for example. Therefore they were independent of him. Sometimes they used words that he would never use himself, or whose meaning he didn’t know.

Only once did we come across the walking man not walking. On a very warm Sunday evening, near the station, he was sitting against a wall. The bag was beside him, but the hood of the anorak was in its customary position, obscuring the top half of his face. He was leaning against the bag, motionless; his hands dangled on his knees. Imogen crossed over to him. As she took out a banknote, he abruptly looked up and swore so fiercely that she stepped quickly back, as if from an animal that had tried to bite. She placed the note on the pavement, near his feet; he kicked it away, then stood up, turning his back; he raised the bag and put the strap across his forehead.

Though upset, Imogen made light of it. ‘A lesson there for Lady Bountiful,’ she said, taking my arm. The man was walking off, projecting great anger in every lurch of his stride.

Emma’s phone, she tells me, can provide her with a report on how well or poorly she slept the night before. She puts it under her mattress when she goes to bed and in the morning it displays a graphic that informs her, for example, that she was restless at 3am. If I were to avail myself of this technological marvel, it would reveal my sleep patterns to me, and thus, perhaps, in ways unexplained, help to combat the insomnia. I explain that I don’t need a phone to reveal my sleep patterns. I know when I’m not asleep, thanks to the bedside clock, at which I find myself staring three or four times per night. ‘One day you’ll join us in the twenty-first century,’ she says.

‘Contact is imminent,’ William calls to tell me. This morning, driving along the seafront, he saw four women and a gang of small kids walking towards him, on the promenade: Wherrytown Suzanne, Tilly’s mother, and a couple of others. There was a queue of traffic at the approach to the junction, so he was moving slowly; as he crept closer to the women, William was sending out the mind-rays – Look up, look up, please look up. Suzanne looked up. She could have looked anywhere, but she looked straight at his van, as if the message had hit its target and she could see the trace of its flight through the air. So he waved, and Suzanne smiled, as he passed them. In his mirror, he saw Suzanne say something to Tilly’s mother, then Tilly’s mother turned her head, in the direction of the van, and they both laughed. It was not a discouraging laugh, says William; very much not.

Today: fifty-seven.

Coming back through the park, I stopped at the stand of sunflowers, recalling how strongly Imogen had disliked them. They always made her think of Village of the Damned, she said, though there are no sunflowers in Village of the Damned. When I had passed them earlier in the afternoon, the flowers had been in sunlight; now they had been in shadow for a couple of hours, and their heads had moved. The face of the largest flower was parallel to the earth. Looking at it, I had the thought that everything in the park had moved in that time. More: a flower is not a thing, the thought continued: what we call a flower is not a fulfilment of what the flower is – it’s a phase in a process, as the seed is a phase and the mulch is a phase. The flower is not a thing but a category. I stared at the drooping sunflower. Everything is always arriving, the thought continued. Now I write: light is withdrawing from the floor and walls; the blood surges into and out of my hand. I add a full stop; an unnatural thing.

An evening at the cinema. Losing interest in the film, I looked across the row: every face attentive, lit by the reflected light of the projected images; a communion of sorts. Here, in the darkened hall of the cinema, we submit to the torrent of the visual. At home, armed with the remote control, we do not submit. Walking back, an acute attack of something like homesickness, remembering conversations with Imogen after seeing a film – no specific conversations; just the fact of them. She would have noted proofs of technique that I had not noticed. The timing of a turn, of a smile; once she was struck by the way an actress had picked up a glass, I recall; I cannot remember which film that was.

Déjà vu: a boy crossing my path on a skateboard; the air at a particular temperature, with a particular strength of breeze; the hue of the sunlight in the upper reaches of the chestnut trees; and then what I think was the trigger – the clatter of a lorry’s tailboard. The sensation of displacement was so strong, my blood pressure seemed to plummet; a one-second dose of vertigo. A moment later, today resumed.

William one morning saw a magpie land on the pavement in front of him. It flustered its wings for a few seconds, before becoming very still, as if to ensure that it had gained his attention. Exactly this thing had happened before, he knew, but the uncanny instant was no sooner felt than lost, leaving no clues. There never are any clues, as William said to me. The moment feels like a repetition, but one can never work out what is being repeated. But in the case of the magpie he could work it out. It was not really an instance of déjà vu. The bird was familiar, William realised, simply because every day was in fact like every other day. He was sick of this place, and the people of the town, for their part, were sick of the sight of him. He had become too familiar. Some gave him money every now and then, but most looked at him and moved on, sometimes with sympathy, as if that might in some way ease his situation. ‘But when did feeling sorry ever help anyone except the one who’s feeling sorry?’ he asked. Resting his head on the back of the bench, he looked into the sky. ‘Nobody round here will give me a job. Not a proper job. They know me. I’m the layabout.’ So he had decided to leave. He’d been talking to someone who had a van, and they were going to drive around, grabbing work where they could – ‘picking fruit, digging holes, whatever’. They would sleep in the van if they had to, and just keep going until the wheels fell off. ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you,’ he said, and gave me a hand to shake. ‘I hope we meet again,’ he said. ‘And if you ever see Imogen, say hello.’ Then William was gone, for a long time.

After a month of silence, Imogen rang, late on a Sunday morning. I can hear her voice: the tentative tone as she said my name. Something was wrong, I knew at once. ‘The curse has struck,’ she said. Loïc was taking care of her, with other friends of whom I knew little more than their names. Her mother would be arriving the day before the operation. ‘She’s been working on my morale,’ Imogen reported. Certain avenues would now be closed, this was true, her mother had conceded. But there were worse things than childlessness, she had pointed out, Imogen told me, laughing. And adoption was always a possibility, her mother added, as if this were a last resort for the tragically desperate.

She could name several people who kept their distance after it had become known that there would be no recovery. Some, who would have described themselves as friends, phoned to declare an intention to visit, and were never heard from again. On the other hand there was Sue, who rang within hours of hearing the news from someone whose agent had also been Imogen’s. A couple of years before we met, Imogen and Sue had been in a production of Twelfth Night: the staging was inane; the director a conceited dolt; the audiences lukewarm. They had spent a great deal of time together, drinking and moaning, but had barely been in contact since then.

Sue arrived on the following Saturday, and was in tears before she had locked the car; she had not been prepared for so severe a decline. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ were her first words, and in that instant of honesty Imogen’s affection for her was reawakened.

There was no need to say anything, Imogen told her; it was enough that she had arrived.

Sue held out her arms, in a way that asked if an embrace would be appropriate. Others had stood back, as though some sort of quarantine were in effect. She held Imogen lightly, and not for too long. It was a warm day; they went into the garden and sat on the bench by the pergola.

In the interim, Sue had widened considerably. In her younger days she had appealed to directors who wanted a cheeky and tomboyish kind of girl; now she was usually the cuddly mum. ‘Pleasant and capable,’ she said. ‘But low on the fuckability scale. My fuckable days are done,’ she proclaimed, slapping her thighs, as if gratified to have finished with the exertions of youth. Hearing what she had said, she flinched at her tactlessness.

Imogen reassured her: the situation should be ignored as much as possible, she said.

‘I talk too much,’ said Sue. ‘I always talk too much. I should be listening.’

‘What can I tell you?’ said Imogen. ‘Here I am. It’s bad, but there’s nothing to be done.’

‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’

‘Not really,’ Imogen answered. ‘I’m glad you’re here. Tell me what you’ve been up to.’

Work had not been plentiful of late, Sue reported. She was up for a TV part, playing a headmistress who turned out to have been fiddling the school’s accounts to pay for her shopping binges. The script was based on a true story. The woman had been coming to work in a Burberry coat, with a Vuitton handbag, but she managed to convince her colleagues that they were high-grade fakes. Even when she took her third exotic holiday of the year, it seems nobody had wondered where the money was coming from. ‘Could be a lot of fun. But not as much fun as your sexy costume drama,’ she said, meaning Le Grand Concert. ‘I loved it.’

They talked about Le Grand Concert, though Imogen felt no connection with it now; it belonged to a different life.

‘You know what happened to Tony?’ Sue asked, alighting on a happy thought. A reminder was needed: Tony was the insufferable director of Twelfth Night. The news was that he had married an Argentinian woman, who had stabbed him in a fit of jealousy. ‘A superficial injury, sadly,’ said Sue. She reminisced about that terrible production, of which her memory was rather more full than Imogen’s. It was a pleasurable distraction, a story. Imogen’s feeling of separation from the past, she told me, felt rather like wisdom; the fabled wisdom of the dying. And when, shortly before leaving, Sue asked if Imogen was angry about what had happened, it was not a lie to answer that anger would be pointless. Disappointment was what Imogen felt, she told her friend; a terribly heavy, at times unbearable disappointment.

‘If I were you, I’d be smashing the furniture,’ said Sue.

‘The stuff in this house is too sturdy for that,’ Imogen answered. ‘And one must think of the heirs.’

Sue’s farewell was frank. ‘I suppose this is the last time we’ll see each other,’ she said.

‘I think so,’ Imogen answered. ‘The funeral doesn’t count. I won’t know if you’re there.’

‘I’ll be there,’ Sue promised; and she was.

Again they embraced. Sue said: ‘I am so glad to have known you.’ Without looking back, she walked down the drive to her car.

For yesterday’s delivery, Wherrytown Suzanne switched her time-slot back to midday, which William took to be another encouraging sign – it seemed possible that she had chosen the lunch period in order to bring about another encounter with Tilly’s mother. And indeed there she was, in the kitchen, ready to lend a hand with the unpacking. ‘But I did not play it well,’ William tells me. The opening gambit was fine, he thought: a casual but friendly ‘Hello Tilly’ for the little girl, who was sitting at the kitchen table, with the other kids, scribbling. It did not surprise the child that he knew her name. He gave her mother a quick smile. ‘Nothing too obvious, nothing heavy,’ he reports. After a remark on the weather, he went back to the van for the rest of the stuff. When he returned, Suzanne had taken one of the children to the bathroom. He was left with Tilly’s mother, who took a bag from him and asked what time his shift had started. Suddenly he felt as embarrassed as a twelve-year-old when the prettiest girl in the class talks to him in a new way. His first delivery had been at seven, he told her; he said something else about his working day. ‘That’s tough,’ she sympathised, and he told her it was OK, that he likes driving. And then he said, with a nod towards the children: ‘But it’s not as much fun as this.’ He heard himself, and was embarrassed. She knew what he was telling her: ‘I like kids. I don’t mind that you’ve got one. I’m a better class of bloke. I’m the caring type.’ She did a half-smile, which was her way of saying that ‘fun’ was not exactly the right word. Then Suzanne came back, so he couldn’t do anything to dig himself out of the hole he’d created. ‘I sounded like I was desperate to clinch a job,’ he tells me. I advised him not to worry; his comment had not been taken in the way he had imagined, I was sure.

Supposed relics of Saint Stephen can be found at some three hundred different shrines, I read. The division and distribution of saintly corpses was permissible because on the Day of Judgement all the extant pieces would be gathered supernaturally, and the flesh restored.

On holiday with Benoît, in Sicily, Imogen went to the catacombs in Palermo. She described to me the ranks of mummified bodies, leaning out of their niches to watch the visitors pass by. Their teeth erupted through skin that had turned into flimsy bark; their mouths made the shapes of screaming and of idiotic laughter; they clasped their desiccated hands, as though in attendance at a funeral. Benoît, horrified, fled back to the street; he had been suffocating. Imogen, though horrified too, remained for an hour; she made herself walk along every corridor, inspecting every face. Better this, she had thought, than tombstones carved with roses and angels, and verbiage about peace and eternal rest. Benoît thought otherwise: the idea of the dead was what mattered, not their bones. The function of the tombstone was to summarise what was important to the living.

On the tombstone of Frederick Montague Gough (1823–94), and his devoted wife, Emilia Edwina née Willoughby (1837–1928), fifteen lines are needed to list the deceased man’s virtues and achievements; of Emilia the stone tells us nothing but that she was a devoted wife and mother, and had enjoyed a long life. Behind Frederick and Emilia stands Imogen’s stone, next to her father’s. Name and years, that is all, as requested; not even ‘Here lies’. Her body, the remnant of her body, Imogen herself, is in the soil below my feet, I told myself; the image was intolerable.

The anniversary visit. ‘Imogen had so many friends, but it is a long time since I heard from any of them,’ says her mother, as we stand on the threshold of the room that had been Imogen’s. The remark is not made to elicit pity; it is the presentation of a fact. ‘Only for us is today unlike any other day of the year,’ she says. The room has been repainted and the bed removed, with most of the furniture. I see nothing that had belonged to Imogen. ‘I couldn’t keep it as it was,’ she says. ‘That would have been morbid.’ Sunlight and Imogen’s absence fill the room.

We go downstairs, to talk in the living room. She brings tea, and we sit on opposite sides of the low walnut table. Her bearing is diplomatic. The depth of the air above and around us impresses itself upon me; our bodies are small objects, in a medium of perfect transparency.

‘Some of my neighbours are better disposed towards me nowadays,’ she tells me. ‘I am the local lady of sorrows.’ The quick smile of irony is reminiscent of her daughter’s. She lifts her teacup, on its saucer; she takes a sip, and replaces it, soundlessly. Her calves, demurely slanted, side by side, form an exemplary shape. ‘Most people are sympathetic. Nearly all,’ she decides, having scanned a mental register of her acquaintances and found among them an exception or two. The vicar is not a friend, she tells me. ‘He admires me, in a way. I have suffered, and that is commendable in itself. But he cannot approve.’ No matter what the judge and jury may have thought, the vicar sees sin. ‘In his eyes, I am a criminal. A suicide takes from God a power that is rightfully his. So the vicar would rather not talk to me.’ The women tend to pity her. Some have pitied her for a long time, she says, because she is a widow, and because her daughter was problematic. ‘But their daughters are so dull,’ her mother sighs. ‘Imogen was not dull. She did things that I wish she had not done, and I’m sure you feel the same way,’ she says, ‘but she was never dull.’ I agree; a rueful smile is called for, and suffices; we are the ones who knew Imogen, her look says; words are superfluous.

She receives invitations quite regularly, albeit not as many as when her husband was alive. ‘People warmed to him more than to me,’ she informs me. ‘He was the warm one and I was the cold, or the cool. That is how we were seen. My manner does not encourage people to approach. I am aware of that. It’s how I am made,’ she says, as though discussing an object of unusual and mildly intriguing design. She finds a way to decline most of the invitations, ‘which is best for all concerned’. Small talk and gossip have never interested her. ‘I am like Immy in that respect, at least,’ she says. Everyone knows that on the whole she prefers her own company, now more than ever. ‘I read a great deal,’ she tells me. ‘Crime novels, mostly. I am not an intellectual person. I watch a great deal of television. Too much. And I interfere with the garden. But I tire easily. Which is to be expected at my age. But since Imogen died, I tire more easily.’

We take a stroll through the garden. She indicates places where alterations have been made since I was last here, and talks about Jonathan’s plan to convert one of the outbuildings into a restaurant. Only local produce will be used; Helen will manage the business. ‘An enterprising couple,’ she remarks. We go as far as the little lake with the yew tree and hellebores and bleeding hearts – the ‘glade of gloom’, as young Imogen named it, she tells me. I admire the glade. I assume that we will now return to the house, and that I will leave soon after, but she produces a small surprise. ‘I am going to walk a little farther,’ she announces, turning to face me. She thanks me for the visit, for my ‘loyalty’. Smiling, she shakes my hand and says: ‘Well, on we go.’ The dismissal has taken thirty seconds. The meaning of the handshake is unmistakeable: There will be no need for you to come here again.

Imogen imagined the ideal final scene: her mother would administer the releasing dose on a Sunday morning, so that the church bells would be the last thing that Imogen would hear. We studied a selection of exit lines, genuine and apocryphal. ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life’ was one that she particularly admired, but she decided to compose her own: ‘No bloody way I’m doing this again,’ she would murmur, as the bells chimed.

Legend has it that Mary Magdalene, having been set adrift in a boat that had neither a rudder nor sails, with her brother Lazarus and their sister Martha and several other followers of Jesus Christ, came ashore on the coast of Gaul at the place where the town of Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer is now situated. Soon after, Mary withdrew to a mountain cave, now known as La Sainte-Baume, where she was to spend her last thirty years in prayer, contemplation and penance. Maximinus, another occupant of the rudderless boat, became the first bishop of Aix. When Mary was near death, angels transported her to Maximinus, in whose arms she died; he interred her body at the place of her death, which became known as Saint-Maximin. Eleven hundred years later, monks in Vézelay claimed to be in possession of her relics, but in 1279 the saint’s remains were discovered in Saint-Maximin by Charles of Salerno. The Magdalene had appeared to him in a vision, telling him that her body would be found in a coffin marked with her name, with a green shoot on her tongue and an amphora of bloody soil from the foot of the cross beside her. The skin of her forehead would be uncorrupted, because Christ had kissed her on the forehead in the garden of Gethsemane. All this was duly discovered, on December 9th, 1279. Construction of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume began soon after.

According to the Golden Legend of Jacobus da Varagine, the Magdalene was a wealthy woman; her family weren’t merely residents of Magdala – they owned the whole town, and a piece of Jerusalem too. That’s why she fell into sin, I told Imogen, as we looked out over the vast garden of the Gough family’s home. Throughout her years of penance, the Magdalene was lifted up by angels, ‘at every hour canonical’, to receive heavenly nourishment. ‘Heavenly nourishment sounds good,’ said Imogen. Eating was no longer a pleasure for her. I continued to read. The figure of Mary Magdalene is a conflation of several different stories; the penitent prostitute is not in the Gospels. And if all the relics of Mary Magdalene were what they were claimed to be, the woman would have had no fewer than two heads and eight arms. The arm in Fécamp, I read, was damaged when Saint Hugh of Lincoln took a bite out of it; one is permitted to ingest the Eucharist, argued Hugh, so why not the flesh of the Magdalene? ‘Please tell me you’re making this up,’ Imogen said.

Saint Theresa: ‘The pain was so sharp that it made me moan many times; and so great was the sweetness caused by this intense pain that I would never wish to lose it… It is no bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it – a great share, indeed.’

That stupendous afternoon in Sainte-Chapelle – standing in the indigo light of the stained glass, Imogen remarked that she imagined that the spectacle of this building might be enough to make some doubters wonder. We were looking at the window that shows the rediscovery of the relics of Christ and their relocation to Paris, carried by the saintly King Louis, in penitential garb. I mentioned Pascal’s wager: if you win, you win an infinite and infinitely happy life; if you lose, you lose nothing.

‘So you then start acting as if you believe in God?’ she asked.

‘Or you could say that you apply the faculty of reason, then start living a Christian life.’

‘In the face of overwhelming evidence that it’s nonsense?’

‘One could argue that the idea of evidence is of no weight. The supreme entity cannot be confined to our categories of thought.’

‘Well, I could manage the acting,’ she said. ‘Repentance is the bit I’d struggle with.’

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the first sect that is known to have made use of images of Christ were the Carpocratians, a Gnostic group that took its name from Carpocrates of Alexandria. The Carpocratians claimed that one of these images of Christ was a portrait created by Pontius Pilate. It seems that they also venerated images of Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle, among others. The earliest account of the Carpocratians appears in the Adversus Haereses of Irenaeus (c.130–202), in which he alleges that they practised sorcery and indulged in licentious behaviour. Clement of Alexandria (c.150–210) similarly accuses the Carpocratians of immorality. At the agapai or love-feasts of the Carpocratians, claims Clement, the participants ‘have intercourse where they will and with whom they will’. Epiphanius of Salamis, writing two hundred years later, repeats the allegation. Carpocrates, he writes, taught his followers ‘to perform every obscenity and every sinful act’. The justification for these orgies, supposedly, was that the Carpocratians believed that in order to ascend to heaven the imprisoned soul must pass through every possible condition of bodily life. It was in order to release the soul from the cycle of reincarnation that they gave themselves up to ‘all those things which we dare not either speak nor hear of’.

William glum: Suzanne has reverted to the mid-morning delivery time; thus no mother of Tilly. He is inclined to take this as an adverse judgement: evidently he did not impress. No reference to the missing friend was made by Suzanne, nor by William. He has to find a way of speaking to her again, with nobody else around, he tells me. Perhaps he should simply come right out with it and ask Suzanne if she could pass on his number. ‘What would you do?’ he asks me. The assumption seems to be that anyone who managed to attract a woman of Imogen’s calibre must know a thing or two about strategy. I counsel patience. He has felt all along, from first sight, that it was going to happen. ‘It will, in its own time,’ I tell him. William considers the advice. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he decides. Two minutes later, he has another idea: next time he has time off in the middle of the day, he could station himself for an hour or two within sight of Suzanne’s flat. Many people would be inclined to describe that as stalking, I advise.

Last year’s visit to Imogen’s mother – fine weather; coffee on the terrace, at the iron table. An elegant old coffee pot, delicate cups, a tiny jug of cream, petits-fours, borne on a black and gold lacquer tray. Seated against the backdrop of the house, she presented a superb appearance. A grey cashmere sweater, roll-neck, was combined with black slacks; on a wrist hung a loose chain-link gold bracelet; the make-up was subtle and perfect – a little enhancement of the lips, lashes and brows, and some high-quality creams for the complexion, I imagined. If ever the fire alarm went off, she’d touch up her hair and lipstick before leaving the building, Imogen once said. In the evening there was some function in the village that she was obliged to attend, she told me. ‘It will be tiresome,’ she said. ‘But one should not withdraw into one’s shell.’ We talked about the responsibilities that came with the house and her position. Then she said, in a tone of instruction: ‘But you know, David, every woman has to be an actress.’ She smiled as if a camera had been pointed at her, and made a small supple-wristed flourish of her hand. For a moment, she resembled her daughter too closely.

For Imogen’s mother, the films of Antoine Vermeiren exemplify traits of French culture with which she had no patience whatever, notably an over-indulgence of artists who seem to believe that they are under some sort of obligation to shock. Her daughter’s attachment to Vermeiren was explicable chiefly as an over-extended protest against the values that her English schooling had for some reason failed to inculcate. In itself, acting was an inappropriate activity for a person of Imogen’s background, though as a semi-Frenchwoman her mother could of course appreciate that cinema was capable of being an art form, albeit an art form of a minor order. Perhaps she would have been able to come to terms with her daughter’s career had she been an actress in the style of Grace Kelly, said Imogen – someone soignée and enigmatic; dressed by Dior; the type of actress who would look perfectly at home in a scene set in an opera house or a Mayfair gallery. It was at the Royal Opera House that her parents had met: Gerald, having stepped out into the street to clear his head of the tedium that had accumulated during the preceding hour, found himself standing in close proximity to Charlotte, who similarly was accompanying her mother that evening. He offered a light for her cigarette; a conversation ensued, in which Gerald, perceiving at once that this attractive young woman was something of a connoisseuse of the ballet, gladly assumed a chiefly receptive role. With little difficulty he evinced a more positive attitude to the evening’s entertainment than he had felt until this moment. She disclosed her place of employment; this too signified refinement. At the next opportunity Gerald paid a visit to the gallery in which Charlotte’s elegance was utilised in a vaguely secretarial capacity. Though possessing no more knowledge of the contemporary visual arts than could reasonably be expected of any young woman of her class and expensive education, she was, as photographs attest, a striking presence. Potential customers liked to look at her; her face, her manner, helped to put them in a spending frame of mind, or at least in a mood to linger, as Gerald did.

Some of what I saw at the maison de maître excited me. This must be confessed. Looking at people whom I did not know – this could be arousing. Watching Imogen, however, there was torment; but also admiration, even wonder at such abandonment. Perhaps I was witnessing a kind of courage, I told myself.

Imogen’s gaze at the maison de maître: as if looking up from the depths of a pit into which she had fallen, and seeing the light of the sky. The same gaze on waking, one morning near the end.

As I’m falling asleep, an idea presents itself: of people preserved on the page, lustreless, like pallid specimens in formaldehyde. The idea expires a moment later. Words do not preserve the person; they are not held in a colourless medium of language. Another image arises: an object calcifying in a stream of mineral-rich water; a bottle becoming encased in stone. In the stream of memory and retelling, the reality of the past is transfigured. The image of the bottle does not satisfy. Better, perhaps, to think of the restoration of a building. Bit by bit, the old fabric is replenished. Stonework is renewed, damaged glass repaired, carvings are recut, rotten timber replaced. In time, little of the original remains; it becomes impossible to tell what is new and what is old. Thus each recollection of a moment, of a conversation, reinforces some part of what is being remembered, and in the process of reinforcement something is replaced. With each retelling, the past becomes more solid and less true. Then, on the brink of sleep, another image – the body-casts at Pompeii. Words take the place of the dead, filling their vacancy, just as plaster poured into the voids within the hardened ash took on the forms of the dead of Pompeii, whom we can almost imagine alive.

William joyful. This afternoon, his day off, he was sitting on the seafront, reading his book, when suddenly he had a strange sensation, as if the pressure of the air had changed. The sound of his pulse had become more prominent than the voices of the passing people and the gulls. He looked up, for an explanation. He saw Tilly first, twenty yards away, running, and then her mother in mock pursuit, ten yards back, making the empty buggy veer from side to side, as if it were out of control. When might such an opportunity come again? William waved, and Tilly’s mother saw him immediately. She raised a hand, but the chase could not be abandoned; they passed him, and it seemed that the wave would be the end of it. But then a swerve, and a call to Tilly, who turned and came to her mother, to take her hand and clamber aboard. They came up to him. ‘How are you today, Tilly?’ William enquired, and by way of answer the little girl showed him her arm, adorned with a bracelet of pink plastic beads, a gift from her mother that morning. William complimented Tilly on her jewellery and footwear. Behind him, an ice-cream van was parked. ‘Would Tilly be allowed—?’ he asked her mother, indicating the van. ‘Yes!’ shouted Tilly; already the child was his ally. Ice cream in hand, Tilly wandered; her eating technique was beguiling – a precise quarter-turn of the cone for every lick. ‘She is very methodical,’ her mother commented, before asking: ‘What are you reading?’ William handed over the book – the mysteries of Stonehenge. The subject appeared to be of interest to her; she read the back cover, then began to flick through the pages. ‘Jenna,’ she said, interrupting the browse to hold out a hand. ‘Not working today?’ she asked. Within a couple of minutes there was something that William had to say. He knew that it might be better not to say it, but the words were inside him and they could not be held down; it was as if he were holding his breath and the only way to get oxygen into his lungs was to get rid of the words. So he told her, ‘completely out of the blue’, that he very much liked the colour of the shirt she was wearing, which he did – it was the colour of thunderclouds. Jenna blinked, and frowned, and looked at him. ‘Are you trying to pick me up?’ she said. ‘No,’ he told her, which was the truth, but it would not be possible, at that moment, to explain why it was true. On some other day, with enough time, it would be possible; but he was afraid, now, that there would be no other day. ‘Really?’ said Jenna. She was looking at him steadily; she might be annoyed; she might not. ‘Really,’ he answered, laying a hand over his heart. And she said, narrowing her eyes, as if about to threaten him: ‘Oh, go on. Give it a go.’

Even after Imogen had gone to Paris, she marked this day, Francesca’s birthday. The year of her departure for Paris, she sent a shirt. It was an amazing colour, Francesca reported – a metallic blue-green, or maybe more a greyish ash blue. Imogen had enclosed a postcard. On the front was a picture by an artist called Nattier, whose penchant for this soft green-blue-grey was such that his name has been given to it. On the postcard, Imogen wrote that the young lady depicted on the other side was known for her ‘great appetite for learning’. The card came from the Louvre, so the painting must have been Nattier’s portrait of Marie Adélaïde, a daughter of Louis XV. Madame Campan refers in her Memoirs to Adélaïde’s ‘immoderate thirst for knowledge’; she refers also to Adélaïde’s bad temper and domineering manner. In the absence of any eligible monarchs or high-born heirs, Marie Adélaïde preferred not to marry. Madame Adélaïde, as she was known, ‘found solace in music’, I have read.

The costume designer for Le Grand Concert de la Nuit made effective use of Nattier’s blue. It’s the colour of Agamédé’s dress, the one on which she is lying when she looks up from the bed and smiles, having seen in the shadows of the coffered ceiling what appears, to us, to be a beetle moving in a hole in the timber. We see a movement that is perhaps a twitching of the beetle’s wings. Slowly the camera zooms into the ceiling, and we see that the beetle is a human eye; the young Guignan. At the third or fourth blink the angle is reversed, to show the coupled bodies: the rough reddened back of the Count; the pale skin of Agamédé’s legs against the blue-green velvet.

Today, the long-awaited call. With great regret, it has been agreed that council funding for the Sanderson-Perceval Museum is an expense that can no longer be justified. ‘In an ideal world we would not countenance such a decision, but we can no longer afford to maintain the cultural resources that we have hitherto provided for the city.’ Closure will not be immediate, however, and might even be prevented. Third parties are being invited to submit plans ‘for the future operation of the museum’. These are hypothetical third parties.

The only photo I have of myself with Imogen is one taken by Francesca, in a restaurant in Rome. She is leaning towards me, with her head resting on my shoulder; there may be an element of parody in the pose, but Imogen’s affection for Francesca is evident in the smile; but my smile could be that of a man who had been in the dentist’s chair only an hour earlier. There is one other image: we appear together in a few dozen frames of Devotion. At 49.25, a servant opens a door for the lady of the house – the most evanescent of cameo roles, my reward for assistance given. Freeze the film at 49.27 and there we are, momentarily, her face and mine in a single image.

Text from William: A lot going on. She’s great, the kid’s great, everything’s great. You have to meet her.