The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

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

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

  •

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

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

  July

  William calls, buoyant. Unloading the van this morning, he noticed a woman on the opposite side of the road. At exactly the same moment as he noticed her, she looked across at him. She was getting into a car and she looked over the roof, right at him. The way she blinked made him think that she had recognised him. She had long dark hair, parted in the middle, and her face was very pale. Her nose was distinctive too—narrow and straight. Her mouth was small and pretty. The resemblance to the woman in the London café was uncanny; and she definitely gave him a look. “It was like déjà vu, but more solid than that. You know what I mean?” he says. He didn’t try to talk to her. There wasn’t enough time anyway; they looked at each other, and then she drove off. That was enough. “I’ll be seeing her again,” William promises me.

  •

  Replete with assurances that she would make a most dutiful and faithful wife, most of Adeline’s letters give the impression of having been composed in accordance with rules set out in a manual of letter-writing for young ladies. Their artlessness seems artful. The letter of June 18th, 1854, however, has the freshness of spontaneity. It makes reference to a walk by the river, a walk that seems to have been of great significance in the development of the relationship. A kiss was bestowed. At the close of her letter, Adeline writes: “I fear that the love I feel is beyond my control.” We know, from Charles’s reply, that the letter was written on paper that had been scented with lavender oil. Many of Adeline’s letters were perfumed with lavender or violet oil. After her death, Charles would take the letters from the box in which he kept them, and would breathe the remnant of their scent, I told Imogen. Supporting the letter on her upturned fingertips, as though it were a wafer of glass, she lowered her face to the paper and closed her eyes. If someone were to bottle the perfume of second-hand bookshops, she would buy it, Imogen said.

  •

  We came across William in the park, on a Sunday afternoon. He was lying on the grass, basking, with his feet raised on a backpack. It appeared that he was asleep. It’s probable that I hoped that he was, but just as we reached the part of the path that was closest to where he was lying he suddenly opened his eyes, as if he’d picked up our scent, and looked straight at us. He waved and stood up, hoisting the bag onto his back. The weight of it made him stagger. Still waving, as though he had something to give us, he lumbered up to the path.

  He apologised to Imogen for having talked too much last time. “Tell you the truth,” he said, “I was a bit out of it. Anyway, I just wanted to say sorry. Thank you. I’ll let you get on,” he finished, stepping back.

  We were in no hurry, Imogen told him. There was an unoccupied bench a few yards further up the path. “Let’s sit down for a few minutes,” she suggested. William and I followed her; he looked at me and shrugged, as if to say that the matter was out of his hands.

  The bag, we learned, held everything he owned. A friend had let him sleep in the bath for a couple of nights and now he was going to try Melville Street. Asked about his family, he told us that his mother and her husband had moved to Hull, the husband’s home town, because they could buy a palace in Hull for the price of the dump in Abbey Wood. William would not be going to Hull. “Practically Norway, isn’t it?” he said.

  With Imogen he had a conversation about families. When she told him something about hers, he listened with no apparent resentment, but as if she were from a foreign country. It seemed to impress him that she was unapologetic about her good fortune. Fathers and stepfathers were discussed: his stepfather, a decorator, was an arsehole who expected to be waited on hand and foot; his real father was an arsehole too, but an occasionally interesting arsehole, who played drums with a pub band whenever his motor skills were up to it, which wasn’t often, because of the drink. Nearly all of the conversation was between Imogen and William. The common touch did not come easily to me; I could hear a note of condescension in my tone, whereas in Imogen’s th
ere was none. William wanted to hear more about her family. I relapsed into the background. When I glanced at my watch, William noticed the movement of my hand, though he was looking at Imogen, engrossed. “You have to go,” he said, in rebuke to himself.

  “I do,” I said, and told him where I worked.

  “I know the place,” he said. “Never been there. Free, is it?”

  I regretted that it was no longer free.

  “Pity,” he said.

  Imogen tucked a note into a pocket of his bag.

  “Way too much,” he said, removing it.

  “Take it,” she said.

  He did not resist. “You are one lucky man,” he told me.

  •

  When Imogen took my hand and told me that she might want to choose the day of her death, I saw no self-pity in her gaze. We talked about suicide. “People take it as an affront,” she said. They deplore it as an abdication of responsibility, or a display of ingratitude, a rejection of the greatest of all gifts. It is regarded as an act of desertion: the suicide leaves the living to fight on, in the battle of life from which the coward has fled. “I learned something the other day,” she said, smiling brightly, as though the subject were trivial. Louis XIV had ordered that the corpses of suicides should be dragged through the streets face-down, then hanged or chucked onto a rubbish heap. “I would prefer a more conventional send-off,” she said.

  •

  I have made arrangements to end my life before the impairment of my mind makes any decision impossible, she wrote. These arrangements may require the assistance of a third party. My mother has consented to be that third party, though it is contrary to her wishes. She has consented to my decision out of love for me. I am fully aware of what I am doing. I signed the document, as its witness. Reading it, the following week, Imogen said to me: “I hope I can be the person who wrote this.”

  •

  My sister has joined a book group. I should do likewise, she tells me, because book groups are always packed with women, many of them interesting. Emma’s group is entirely female, and a couple of them are unattached, in their late forties, early fifties. Lots of empty nesters go to book groups, apparently, and many of these empty nesters are newly single. Her two eligibles are examples of the phenomenon: no sooner had their children left home than their marriages fell apart. The women are making up for lost time, says Emma. Their joie de vivre is a rebuke to my lassitude. Even better: one of them is an archaeologist. A pity I don’t live closer. The archaeologist is highly intelligent and “warm.” This is the kind of woman I need to meet, Emma tells me.

  •

  In the park this afternoon: a dark-haired girl, thirteen or fourteen years of age, sitting on the grass, alone; she had no phone, and no book; she simply sat on the grass, gazing across the park, arms crossed. A solemn-looking child. On the basis of almost no evidence, I characterised her as someone who was solitary by choice. Her face bore no resemblance to Imogen’s, but I think what made me halt was a reminder of the photograph of Imogen at that age, sitting on the fence of the paddock, deep in thought, unaware that her brother had aimed the camera at her. On the back of the picture, in pencil: Imo, away with the fairies. Three decades of life were left to her. And suddenly, looking at the solemn girl, I experienced a surge of tenderness, as if the two girls had become the same child. A moment of rich sentimentality, halted when I became aware that I was being observed by a man of my age, who was misunderstanding what he was seeing. A mistake that anyone would have made.

  •

  At the paddock, Imogen recalled an afternoon, in summer, when she was twelve years old. She was standing by the fence when her mother called, and for some reason, at that moment, the three syllables of “Imogen” struck her purely as a sound, like a word of a foreign language. “Imogen,” she realised, was not an inseparable aspect of who she was. It was not like the redness of a strawberry. She let her mother call her three or four times. It was an interesting experience, listening to the syllables as they flew into the air. It was like a special kind of nakedness, she told me, though she was not certain that this image had occurred to her at the time. A day or two later, she had a similar thought about the apple tree. Sitting on a bench that had faced the apple tree towards which we were now strolling, young Imogen had murmured to herself: “Apple tree. Apple tree. Apple tree.” Over and over again she had murmured the words: a meaningless jingle, a pleasant sound that had nothing of the tree in it—“Apple tree. Apple tree. Apple tree. Apple tree. Apple tree.”

  •

  Three people for this afternoon’s guided tour. At the door of the room that had been Adeline’s, I removed the key from my pocket and paused before inserting it into the lock; a touch of suspense. This was where Adeline died, I announced. For the remaining fifty years of his life Charles Perceval had left the room untouched, with the clock set permanently to 1.10 pm, the time of her death. Some changes have been made in the interim, but much of the furniture and many of Adeline’s belongings are still here. Adeline’s wedding dress attracted immediate attention. The veil—an exquisite piece of Burano lace, as delicate as frost—was marvelled at. I pointed out the pastel portrait of Adeline with the blood-red roses, and the locket that contained a loop of her hair. Various items—a set of brushes, a necklace, earrings, books, a cameo—lie on a faux-medieval table, in an arrangement of simulated abandonment. The saint with the dragon, I explained, standing at the print beside the bed, was Saint Margaret of Antioch, who was swallowed by Satan in the form of a dragon, but escaped by bursting out of his stomach, which had been unable to tolerate the cross that Margaret was carrying. Saint Margaret, one of the so-called “helper saints,” was often invoked during labour, as were Saint Barbara and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, whose images are on the opposite wall.

  I remember Imogen in that room. She was the last to leave the portrait; she stared at it as if it were of special significance to her; as though Adeline were an ancestor.

  •

  At the piano, she stopped playing in the middle of a phrase. “This is rubbish,” she said. “It’s Beatrice playing, not me.” She held her hands in front of her face and looked at them as though they had become unrecognisable.

  “It sounded fine to me,” I said, which was true.

  “It was awful,” she said. “Prissy.” Her mood was darkening.

  •

  One night she rang, and told me: “The fog is coming down.” That morning, talking to someone in the street, she had experienced the “slippage” that always preceded a slump: a fraction of a second before speaking, she had heard a pre-echo of the words that she was about to speak. In a day or two, she knew, the “chemical deluge” would begin. She would not allow me to visit. “There would be no pleasure in being with me,” she said. “I have to be alone. For everyone’s sake. But it’ll pass,” she reassured me. For a month I did not see her. Whenever I phoned, her voice was a slow monotone. She could not sleep; when she tried to read, sentences became comprehensible only after three or four attempts, or sometimes not at all. She apologised for not making sense, but she did make sense, though the words came effortfully. “I love you,” she once said, after a long silence, as though she had lost her memory of almost everything except this fact.

  •

  Each role was to an extent an alias, but at times, she said, she felt that her own self was an alias: Imogen Gough was a role, and she had no idea who was playing her. Every time we speak, we assume a character; the words are our costume. “Even with you,” she said, as though admitting an infidelity. It was the nadir of a day. Weeping, she asked: “But why would you want to live with me? I’m nothing.” She was squinting at her reflection in the window of my bedroom, as if trying to make out who was there.

  •

  In the archive we have the journal that Charles Perceval wrote, sporadically, in the years following the death of Adeline. Parts of it are barely recognisable as writing—the script on these pages is like a graphic representation of his misery
. In places it appears that, at some later date, on reading what he had written, he had decided to obliterate his confession: whole paragraphs have been scored over, creating a screen through which only fractions of letters can be read. I showed Imogen such a page. But some passages were clearly written, and eloquent. Charles Perceval describes the horror of the moment in which the lid of the coffin was lowered into place; he watched as Adeline’s face was removed from sight forever. “The light will never fall on her again,” he wrote. At the graveside he gazed down at the coffin, transfixed, as the clods of mud drummed on the wood above her face. That night, whenever he closed his eyes he saw her staring into the darkness, under the earth, a mile from where he lay. Every day, for many weeks, he returned to the grave. He felt that he had been changed into a being without substance; he was a spectre whom people mistook for a living man; he was an entity for whom memory was more real than the world through which he moved. During his watches of the night, the face of dead Adeline would appear. He saw the simper of the decaying lips; the rotted eyelids, like leaf mulch.

  •

  We talked about what had been said at the hospital and what she had read. “I know where this is going,” she said. The day before, in the morning, she had gone out to buy bread. The noises of the street had seemed strange, as if the sound were coming through some sort of membrane, as if she were no longer fully part of the same reality as the traffic. “I’m already fading out,” she said. At about nine o’clock I persuaded her to take a walk. It was a splendid evening—the longest day of the year was a few days away. We did not talk much. The scene was beautiful: turquoise water; golden sky; handsome buildings; shadows thickening underneath the trees. She laughed once, quietly. Then, locking her face into a frown of fortitude, she announced: “In this scene I play a woman who is thinking positively. I contemplate the beauty of my surroundings; the river is a metaphor, as goes without saying.”