The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

  Thirty-one visitors today.

  •

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

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

  •

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

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

  •

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

  •

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