The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

  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 l
ast 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 kee
p 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.”