The former husband’s story, on the other hand, has yet to achieve a satisfactory form. No sense of a through-road there, as yet.
•
In her correspondence with Charles, Adeline played the part that was expected of a woman in her position. Again and again she praised her fiancé’s intelligence and denigrated her own. Her husband-to-be was “the quintessence of sympathy,” she wrote, quoting the words of her sister, who similarly revered him. In an episode of self-doubt—an episode that to me seems inauthentic, as if she had felt under an obligation to admit to a transient loss of confidence on the brink of matrimony—Adeline wondered if her “inferior” mind and lack of education might not in time prove burdensome to him.
The letters provide ample evidence that Adeline’s mind was far from inferior. I removed from its file the five-page letter of October 5th, 1854. As Imogen started to read it, I told her what she would find there. I can recite much of this letter from memory. Protestantism is anti-scientific, Adeline proposed, because it places unqualified reliance on the word of the Bible. But the Bible is a book composed by men, and is imperfect for that reason. And the Protestant preacher compounds the error in ruling his flock by means of words. He interprets the words of the Bible on their behalf, immersing them in a “cloud of speech.” The Godhead is “beyond all language,” Adeline proposed. The figure of Christ is the mystery of the divine made visible, and the display of the Host is a truer communication than any sermon. The contemplation of the Cross is “a consideration of evidence.” And is not the practice of the medical sciences a consideration of evidence too?
Furthermore, in its attitude towards sin, in its emphasis on confession and forgiveness, the Catholic Church, Adeline argued, is true to the reality of our lives, and in this respect its doctrines are aligned with the medical sciences, which adhere to “the facts of what we are.” The Mass is a bond of love, and so is the doctor’s mission. She cited the rule of Saint Benedict: “before all things and above all things special care must be taken of the sick or infirm so that they may be served as if they were Christ in person; for He himself had said ‘I was sick and you visited me,’ and ‘what you have done for the least of mine, you have done for me.’” Thus Charles’s father was mistaken in talking of the “mere superstitions” of Catholicism. The Roman church is the church of life, Adeline maintained. It is a living thing, a tree; the Protestant sects are “dead branches, grown too far from the nourishment of the roots.”
Imogen was looking at me. “An obvious question, but I’m going to ask it,” she said. “I take it that you and Adeline are of the same persuasion?”
“Far from it,” I answered.
“Really?”
“Really. Of no persuasion at all.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, as if I had presented a puzzle.
•
The museum: an assemblage of objects removed from the flow of time, protected from the depredations of utility. A nest of objects; a nest is a place in which things are born.
•
We had been talking about La Châtelaine. Imogen asked: “If I’d told you that there had been no stand-in, what would you have thought?”
All I could say was: “I’m not sure.”
“Perhaps you would have liked me less.” She added: “This is not an accusation.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
We had reached the hotel. “Let’s go on for a bit longer,” she said. We were walking a pace apart. With the smile of a friend, she looked at me and said: “But it would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?”
“In some way, I suppose so.”
“The thing is,” she said, looking ahead, “I might have done it without a stand-in. It was discussed.”
A reaction was required of me. “In the interests of realism?” I proposed.
“If you like, yes.”
A woman with a terrier was coming towards us; we stopped to let her pass. When she had gone, we were the only people on the street. We were standing outside a large tall-windowed house; in the living room, a woman was watching TV; upstairs, a man sat at a table, looking into a laptop. The scene is as clear as my first sight of Imogen. As we stood in front of the house, she said that she had read a wonderful line somewhere: anyone observing a “distinguished woman” making love would think that she was either ill or mad. As the woman in the living room reached for the remote control, Imogen moved away, and with a single finger hooked my elbow. “The Greeks got it right,” she said. For them, the body was an “instrument of joy.” With Christianity, sex became a shameful business, with procreation as its only excuse; the body—or rather, the woman’s body—became a form of property. “It’s a long downhill road from Athens to Adeline,” she said.
We were back at her hotel. “Have I surprised you?” she asked, but not, it seemed, in the hope that she had; it was an enquiry as to the nature of my reaction. “Disappointed you?”
“Neither of the above,” I said.
She smiled and gave me a studying look. “I have never cheated on anybody,” she said.
At home, I watched La Châtelaine again. Watching Imogen, I found myself experiencing something like jealousy, so soon.
•
In 1198, before assuming the papacy as Innocent III, Lotario dei Segni wrote in his De contemptu mundi: “Man has been conceived in the desire of the flesh, in the heat of sensual lust...Accordingly, he is destined to become the fuel of the everlasting, eternally painful hellfire.” Even when perpetrated by man and wife, sexual intercourse, Lotario wrote, is infected with “the desire of the flesh, with the heat of lust and with the foul stench of wantonness.” De contemptu mundi gives evidence of its author’s “deep piety and knowledge of men,” the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us.
•
When she was eight years old, Imogen told me, there was a party at her house. The word “party” was perhaps too festive in its connotations. It was a gathering of many adults, on a summer afternoon, with quantities of champagne. The reason for this gathering could no longer be remembered. What she could remember was an incident that she witnessed, towards the end of the afternoon.
The sun was setting; she was playing on the lawn. Among the children was a local girl of whom Imogen was not fond: an aggressive and clumsy child, and a whiner too. Neither was Imogen fond of the girl’s parents: they were as humourless as their daughter. The father’s hair was silver, though his face was not old, and the mother had legs that were as thin as a stork’s. They appeared to dislike each other—to find either of them, said Imogen, all one had to do was go to the corner of the garden that was farthest from where the other was standing.
The game had become boring, and the whining child was getting on Imogen’s nerves. She decided to go indoors. The whiner’s father was ahead of her, on the terrace steps. At the threshold of the house he missed his footing and stumbled; this, Imogen would later understand, was the first time she had seen a severely inebriated man. She followed. In the hall he turned left, towards the dining room, but before Imogen had entered the house she saw him come out of the dining room and cross the hall to the library. She saw him smile, as if an opportunity for mischief had presented itself. The situation was intriguing. On tip-toe she advanced to the centre of the hall, and from there she could see the silver-haired man creeping across the carpet in the direction of the big window that overlooked the garden; he was creeping in the same way that Imogen was. She moved to the doorway and peered in. At the big window stood her mother, looking out at the gathering; she was holding a cigarette in her left hand, at a distance from her face, as though passing it to someone else. It was very strange, Imogen thought, that her mother did not seem to be aware that she was no longer alone; the intruder was almost within touching distance. Then the amazing thing happened. It all happened in the space of two seconds.
Imogen’s mother was wearing a beautiful dress; it was the colour of young cherries, and reached the back of her knees. The girl
saw the man crouch down, take hold of the hem of the dress and quickly lift it, as if whisking a dust sheet from a chair to see what was underneath. He raised it so high that Imogen could see her mother’s knickers. The knickers were pink and startlingly large. Only for an instant were they visible. At the touch of the air on her thighs, her mother swivelled and smacked the man across his face. It was not a lady-like slap. It was a full-force whack with a rigid hand and a long swing of the arm, as if she were smashing a tennis ball back. The noise was tremendous. The man staggered; he put a hand to his jaw as if he feared that something had been broken. That was when he saw Imogen at the doorway. Her mother saw her too, but turned back to the window, and calmly brought the cigarette to her lips. The man pushed past the child, glaring at the floor; one side of his face was now a different colour from the other.
In all the years that followed, her mother never mentioned this outrage. The man and his wife were never seen at the house again.
But one evening, near the end, Imogen fell asleep in the afternoon and when she woke up her mother was there, sitting in the window, turning the pages of a book of wildlife photos. As Imogen looked across the room, at her mother, a question spontaneously came out of her mouth: she asked about the incident with the silver-haired man. Her mother could not remember it; she could not even remember the man in question, she said. Imogen described him in as much detail as was available; she described the scrawny wife and blundering daughter. Her mother now thought she could dimly picture the girl, and her parents, but of an encounter with the father she professed to have no recollection. Episodes that seem important to a child often have no importance for their parents, she explained. Imogen did not believe that she had forgotten it, and knew that her mother knew that she was not believed. It was almost certain, Imogen thought, that the encounter had been what it had seemed to be: the stupid prank of a man who was drunk. Her mother wished it to be forgotten simply because it had been unseemly, and had involved a loss of temper. There was, however, at least one other possibility, the improbability of which did nothing to diminish its persistence. On the contrary: it was so unlikely that the thought of it was impossible to dismiss, like a malicious and uncorrected rumour. But nothing more was said about it.
•
In another of her letters, Adeline tells Charles that his father misunderstands the function of images. “He mistakes signs for idols,” she writes. “We pray through them, not to them,” she says. In Devotion, Beatrice makes the same comparison; the line was a late addition, made after I had shown Imogen this letter. Catholics are polytheists, John Perceval countered, and their saints are “subaltern gods.”
•
For the past couple of days William has been washing cars. You can get away with paying people so little nowadays, he informs me, that a hand-wash is cheaper than a drive-through car wash. He’s making more than he’s been managing to get on the streets recently, but only a bit more. There are better jobs around, he knows. “Better, but still rubbish.” There’s a vacancy he knows about, in the kitchen of a care home. He could do the work, but they want someone with experience, and a proper address. “And you’ve got to be confident, friendly and enthusiastic,” he says. “I could do friendly. At a push.” He’s sleeping on a different sofa this week, in Shaws Way, in the flat of a friend of the friend whose sofa he was using last week. This lad’s girlfriend works as a cleaner, and she suggested to William that he should check out the company’s website, because they were always looking for new people. “So I checked it out,” he tells me, and he starts to laugh. “‘We are seeking enthusiastic and reliable candidates. You will need to be able to demonstrate how you have delivered great customer service and how you meet our excellent standards,’” he recites. “They always want enthusiasm. For fuck’s sake—enthusiasm. Has anyone in the entire history of the universe ever been enthusiastic about shoving a mop around? And references, on headed paper. Where am I supposed to get references from?”
I commiserate, and give him money. I could afford to give him more, of course; much more. But I allow myself to accede to arguments opposed to generosity. William would squander it. Thus I excuse myself.
•
In Adeline’s letter of September 15th, the one in which she wrote “I love you” for the first time, she informs her beloved that her father wonders if Charles’s willingness to abandon the Church of England might not be an expression of his love for Adeline rather than of a newly awakened acceptance of the doctrines of Rome. He holds Charles Perceval’s intelligence in the highest esteem, but is of the opinion that knowledge does not “form the mind”—it only “occupies” it. “Apprehension of the unseen is our foundation,” her father maintained, as I quoted, while Imogen scanned the letter. The Church of England, he argued, was a church of no doctrine; it was a ministry of the state, and its theology was an accident of history. For his part, Charles’s father was for some time of the view that his son had been bewitched by this young woman; how else could one explain his sudden conversion to the “bogus mysteries” and “perfumed ceremonials” of the Roman church?
•
Following Francesca’s lead, I come upon the story of Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. Though he served as secretary to no fewer than seven popes, Bracciolini seems to have had a highly developed taste for earthly pleasures. In the spring of 1416 he visited the spa at Baden, and was much taken by what he found there. In a letter from Baden, he wrote of his delight at having discovered a place where men and women bathed together, in a state of undress. A “school of Epicureans” had been established there, he wrote. “I think this must be the place where the first man was created.” In January of the following year, at an unspecified German monastery, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini made an even more significant discovery: a manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a work of the highest reputation, but lost for centuries. In a monastery; the only known copy.
•
Full-price visitors to the Sanderson-Perceval Museum today: seventeen. Revenue: £85. Reduction of visitor numbers since the introduction of the £5 charge: sixty percent.
•
First evening in Rome. In the park of the Villa Borghese for the approach of dusk. Air warm and motionless; the pine trees standing in shadow, but their branches full of light; grass turned briefly to the colour of coral. To accompany this scene of urban pastoral, the soft drone of traffic, with now and then the call of a horn. A large and handsome dog, such as a shepherd might have employed. A good-looking young woman and a good-looking young man pause at a statue. The climate, the light, the shadows, the trees, the beautiful lovers, arm in arm—from these elements arises a melancholic well-being, a nostalgia with no object, a mood of all-accepting surrender that is nothing but a mood, but sufficient.
•
In Santa Maria Maggiore. Looking up from my guidebook, I noticed a man who was sitting in a chair against one of the columns on the opposite side of the nave—fiftyish, well dressed. He was leaning forward, with his forearms on his thighs and his hands joined, not praying, it seemed, but in thought. His eyes were open and trained on his hands. Tourists passed close to him, incessantly chattering, but he was not distracted. His demeanour was that of someone in contemplation of a problem to which no solution was apparent; there was a heaviness in his gaze, suggestive of guilt; from time to time, the fingers of his right hand closed on his wedding ring and turned it. An obvious deduction. For five minutes or more he sat there, gazing at his hands. When a woman came out of the confessional box he stood up, straightened his tie, and entered. I continued to read the account of Santa Maria Maggiore. It’s an old guidebook; ten pages are devoted to the church. I had time to read all of it before the well-dressed man emerged. Evidently his sins were weighty. At last the curtain was drawn back and he stepped out. He did not look like a man who had been relieved of a burden; he was still unhappy. But he appeared to be a little clearer of mind; there was the possibility of a solution, perhaps. Standing by the chair in which
he had been sitting, he adjusted his cuffs, as though in readiness for an important meeting. He walked down the nave to a pew that was free of tourists; there he sat down and bowed his head.
•
The wreckage of the forum. Over there, the remains of a building that was raised five centuries before Christ; and there, another remnant of the ancient city, built a thousand years later. Columns, steps, walls, stones. The chaos is harmonious; the dusk applies its tone to every stone and brick; nothing dominates; the eye moves through the scene unhindered. The inscriptions, incomprehensible to most of us, are now little more than decorative embellishments. Stopping at one of the arches, I admired the beautiful lettering. Imogen had imagined a performance: hundreds of people deployed around the forum, reading aloud from Virgil, Julius Caesar, Pliny, Plutarch, Catullus, Seneca, et cetera; a cacophony of speeches, letters, memoirs, poems, epitaphs. We, the living, would become the intruders in the city of the dead.
•
An unexpected diversion in the church of San Crisogono—the shrine of the Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, died 1837, beatified 1920. Until today, unknown to me. Having renounced the frivolity of her youth, for almost fifty years Anna Maria was favoured with visions of a “kind of sun” that was crowned with thorns, and through the agency of this sun-like object she was able to see into the future and “the secret of hearts.” She experienced ecstasies, of course, usually while receiving Holy Communion, but also at less exalted moments of the day, such as when doing the laundry. (She was married and had children. “First and foremost, she was a wife, mother and daughter.”) Anna Maria witnessed shipwrecks in distant seas and shared from afar in the sufferings of missionaries in China and Arabia. She observed “the eternal lot of the dead.” Furthermore, “the grace of healing was bestowed upon this humble woman.” Sometimes she healed the sick with the touch of her hand, but often she effected her cures by means of an image of Our Lady, or a relic, or oil from a votive lamp that she kept burning on the altar at which she worshipped at home. An example: a “lady of the princely house of the Albani” was dying of cancer of the womb until Anna prescribed a drop of oil from her lamp; the afflicted lady applied the oil to her skin, and the following night the tumour disappeared. The Blessed Anna Maria Taigi died on June 9th, 1837, and the procession of pilgrims commenced almost immediately, despite the outbreak of cholera that had struck Rome. We are told that the Lord had promised her that the cholera would not strike before her death. As soon as she expired, “the scourge broke out.”
The Great Concert of the Night Page 6
