The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  I could not say how many times I have watched this scene. My admiration is some sort of palliative.

  •

  She disliked the “contrived intimacy” of the theatre. “We pretend to be unaware of the audience. And I know what you’re going to say,” she said, raising a finger. “Film is every bit as contrived. That’s true. But it’s a different kind of contrivance.” The camera allowed her to be natural, she said. “The camera sees everything, and I like that. There’s no distance to cross. I don’t have to project myself. But there’s a distance too: because I’m not there for the performance. I’m on a screen, in a big dark room. People are looking at me, but I can’t see them. To the audience it’s enhanced reality. It’s an immersion: the picture is huge, the sounds are loud. But it’s just a screen—they’re staring at a wall. So you’re absorbed in it, but detached. That’s what I like. It’s more true and at the same time more false,” she said.

  I admitted that I had been watching from the window.

  “I know,” she said, making an adjustment to her hair. From an adjoining room her name was called. She curtseyed with prim dignity, in the character of Beatrice.

  •

  Imogen’s mother had fallen a week before one of our visits. Her arm was in a sling, and we watched her as she attacked the roses with secateurs, one-armed, as if to demonstrate to an invisible assessor that the cast was a needless encumbrance. She had been thrown several times, Imogen told me. Once she had ridden home with a broken wrist and two broken ribs. This was when Imogen first spoke about the curse on the family’s women. She had known nothing of her mother’s diagnosis and nothing of the surgery until it was done. When she came home from school at Easter her mother told her about the operation. In her mother’s mind, the cancer had been defeated: the surgeon had removed the tumour, the chemotherapy would deal with any residues, and any further invasion could be repelled by an act of will. There was barely any further discussion. In the morning she spent a little longer in bed than was usual, but she was not visibly ill; she was not visibly anxious. And her mother’s cancer did not return. But other women in the family had died of it, Imogen had later learned. The ordeal was inevitable, she had come to think. She talked about it as others might talk about the debilities of old age.

  •

  The museum enjoins us to be humble: memento mori, it whispers to us. Soon, very soon, your life will be reduced to fragments such as these, a ruin, a miscellany of fragments from which the past can be reconstituted only as a picture in which most of the space is blank.

  •

  A new message on Val’s homepage: “We are living in times of great uncertainty.” Politically, economically, socially, the world “is in a state of flux.” It is not surprising, then, that “dangerously high levels of stress” have become “endemic” to our society. She sees the symptoms of stress everywhere. It is good to know, then, that help is at hand. Under Val’s tutelage, she tells us, we can overcome anxiety, eliminate “fear and resistance,” acquire “resourcefulness and resilience.” We can learn to “grow and change.” Her coaching is a “dynamic and self-generating process in which we work in partnership to harness and develop your skills and capabilities. I will help you to identify who you want to be, and to recognise what is preventing you from achieving self-fulfilment.” She impresses upon us that her approach is not prescriptive. She has been trained in “a wide range of techniques and theories,” and in addition to “mindfulness practices” often makes use of “archetypal psychology and psychosynthesis.” Solutions will differ from one individual to the next. The common denominator is that Val will always bring her full attention to bear upon the client. “My promise: to be wholly present to the person I’m working with.”

  February

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

  •

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

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

  “I could not. But I had assumed,” I said.

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

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

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

  “Yes,” replied the woman. “Could you please keep your voice down?”

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

  “I don’t think so,” I answered.

  “We can hear you very clearly,” the woman told her.

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t be trying so hard.”

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

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

  “Yes, you are,” said the woman.

  “What precisely is it that has displeased you?”

  “You know perfectly well.”

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

  “You are a very rude person,” the woman told her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

  “You know what I mean,” said Samantha. “She was a bit more... well...”

  “Extravagant?” I suggested, attempting a tone of simple curiosity.

  “Maybe.”

  “Posh?”

  “Posher than anyone I know, certainly.”

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

  “There’s no need to be so defensive.”<
br />
  I denied that I was being defensive; then apologised.

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

  We were still good friends, I said.

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

  •

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

  “You were wonderful,” I confirmed.

  “Do you mean it?” she said, pleadingly.

  “Of course,” I said.

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

  •

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

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

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

  •

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