•
For a while Imogen had thought that her dying might bring about a new frankness in the relationship between herself and her mother. She imagined sessions of truth-telling, by which each would attain a fuller understanding of the other; a deepened affection might result. There would be episodes of weeping and embracing. Imogen would reveal the person she had come to believe herself to be. She would endeavour to explain, without apology, the things she had done, or most of them. Perhaps her mother, in return, would explain how life with her husband had come to be something other than the life she had hoped for. She might admit to having ceased to love him. But whenever it seemed that the moment for candour might be presenting itself, Imogen said nothing. She foresaw her mother’s reaction: denial and withdrawal. “I would have hoped not to become a widow so soon,” she might answer, in her door-closing voice, as Imogen characterised the tone with which her mother annulled any conversation that seemed to threaten turbulence. “People talk too much nowadays,” her mother had said once, removing herself from the vicinity of the television. Imogen remembered this, and other declarations of distaste for garrulous people. What, she came to ask herself, would be the benefit of any self-revelation? Did she think her mother’s disapproval would suddenly be converted into its opposite, in response to her daughter’s courage? A tacit truce had maintained the equilibrium of the family; why jeopardise it now, when there would be no time to repair the damage that might result? So, instead of opening themselves to each other, they waited together. There would be no conventional coda to the story, in which long-suppressed issues were at last acknowledged, if not resolved entirely. The silences lengthened at the approach of the last great silence, and the past was allowed to become extinct.
•
In a photograph that had been on display in the library for as long as Imogen could remember, a dozen men stood behind a table on the terrace; her great-grandfather sat at the table with his wife, and three other women who were the wives of two of the men, plus a widowed sister of the great-grandfather’s wife. No jollity was in evidence: everyone seemed to be aware that a rite of commemoration was being conducted. “The self-conscious deceased,” she called them. The young man in uniform, standing between the windows, was a clue to the date, as was the man with the empty sleeve, beside him. The roses in the picture were in bloom. The man in the uniform would die before the flowers did; a shell exploded and his life was finished in a moment as brief as the opening and closing of the camera’s shutter. Nothing of his body was ever found. This was the last picture of him, Imogen had been told. The very tall man, the one whose expression was that of a man glaring defiantly at his firing squad, had also been a soldier; he had been awarded a medal. The man with the illegible face became an MP after the war. A magistrate was in the photo as well.
Imogen’s brother, as a boy, would gaze upon this picture as if to find instruction there, she said; here were represented the English and manly virtues. It was his destiny, gladly accepted, to preserve the house in which were enshrined the values that gave this picture, for him, its potency. He would regard his life as a failure if the house were to pass out of the family. But Jonathan would not fail. The great story would be maintained. The rare breeds, the organic methods, the management of the properties—Jonathan knew what he was doing. “Unlike me,” said Imogen, as we drove towards the house, for my introduction. Her mother had still not abandoned hope that she might one day ensnare a man with some sort of pedigree, she warned me, although the odds were becoming longer with every year. “But a museum director—at least that’s someone who has respect for the past. And the age gap won’t be an issue. It was the same with her and my father. The stability one gets from an older man,” she said, commendingly.
•
Ruminations from Val on the topic of separation—more specifically, the damage to one’s self-esteem that can ensue from the ending of a long-term relationship. She speaks from painful experience. On the eve of her fortieth birthday, her husband announced his departure. She took the rejection badly, she admits: consumed by self-pity and rage, she became caught in “a cycle of negativity.” She felt that she had been judged and found wanting; she had failed “as a person.” A friend suggested that she might benefit from talking to someone who could see the situation from the outside, dispassionately. Initially resistant, Val eventually acceded, having acknowledged that she could not recall her last wholly sober evening. Her therapist, a “wonderful woman,” brought light to the darkness. Through their long conversations, Val came to see that the crisis of separation can be the making of a person; unhappiness could bring about “growth and a new depth of self-awareness”; in refusing to surrender to “self-limiting beliefs,” one might become “newly empowered.” With the help of the inspirational therapist, Val changed her life. “Both personally and professionally,” she remade herself. Through this process of enlightenment, she came to understand that certain aspects of herself were not, after all, intrinsic qualities of her “true self,” but instead were “behaviours” that she had acquired by “emulation.” The worst thing that had ever happened to our author turned out to be the best thing. “Desertion became liberation.” It was as if she had been confined under electric light, but now was living in sunlight, she tells us. But it cannot be denied: the aftermath of separation is often a “hard road.” One must pass through Denial, Anger, Depression, Guilt and Loneliness before Acceptance—or even, if all goes well, Forgiveness—can be achieved. Each of these stages is “crucial to the healing process.”
•
The end of life is nothing more than the point beyond which one ceases to exist, said Imogen. The end is merely a border, yet we think of it as a destination, as if life were a story, with the last day as the conclusion to which everything had been leading. But life is not a journey. The day of her death would be less significant than this one. “This is more important,” she said, turning out her hands to the street. We were at a café in Place Larue. Students passed by, and tourists on their way to the Panthéon; we sat in the sounds of conversation and traffic. “All of this life,” she said, gratified that we were in it. We were a pair of happy particles, active today in this corner of the city, she announced. Starlings rushed over the roofs; she looked up, smiling into the sunlight.
•
“God does not inhabit healthy bodies”—the words of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), polymath abbess of Rupertsberg and Eibingen. Her writings on medicine and science are gathered in Physica and Causae et Curae. Three other volumes—Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum and De operatione Dei—record her mystic visions, which were retrospectively diagnosed by Oliver Sacks as being “indisputably migrainous,” though it has also been proposed that their hallucinatory qualities might be attributable to ergot poisoning. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI named Saint Hildegard as a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church; of the thirty-six saints to have been elevated to that rank, only four are women.
•
Jenna’s family has been in Cornwall for centuries, William reports. The men had all been miners and fishermen until recently—her father was breaking with tradition in becoming an electrician. His grandfather had been a wild man, apparently. Jenna relates that great-grandfather Isaac was said to have thrown a man down a mine shaft because of something he’d done to a young girl. “You’ll love her,” William tells me. “She’s got some amazing stories.” She can show me some hedges, not far from where she lives, that are six thousand years old, says William, understanding the allure that ancient hedges would have for me. We agree a date.
•
From the window of Imogen’s room we watched as her mother walked down the central path. At the sundial she stopped; she put her hands on it, as though taking hold of a lectern, and looked down. She seemed for a moment to be reading the inscription, and considering its meaning: Utere, non numera. Then it appeared that she was only using the sundial for support; her arms were locked onto it, and her shoulders rose and fell with the depth o
f her breathing. She looked up, towards the copse; a minute passed before she moved on.
“I cannot remember ever seeing my mother cry,” Imogen remarked. She remembered her mother taking the call that told her of her own mother’s death. “Je vous remercie,” she said, and replaced the handset precisely, as if it were a piece of antique porcelain. That is all Imogen could remember her saying to the person who had called; she had said very little, Imogen was certain. Imogen and her brother were sitting at the far end of the room. Standing in front of the children, their mother announced: “I have to go to Meudon.” After a pause the explanation was given. She went upstairs. A few minutes later, at Jonathan’s suggestion, Imogen followed, expecting to find her mother in tears. She was not in tears, though she had loved her mother and had spoken to her every week. Already she was packing a suitcase, as if she had been ordered to leave the house forthwith.
And when her husband’s heart failed, without warning, she did her weeping in private. On the day of the funeral she was the perfect image of resolve, of grief turned inward. She was the head of the family, and it was imperative that nobody should see her cry. At the graveside, her face was rigid with dignity, Imogen told me. Even in Imogen’s last days, her mother did not weep. I can see her, holding her daughter’s hand; she looked into Imogen’s face, transferring fortitude from eye to eye. When it was over, I was called back into the room. She kissed Imogen’s brow, then left me with her. Still she was not crying. A minute later, I heard a howl; one long cry of heartbreak and fury, then she screamed Imogen’s name.
•
“We want you with us for as long as possible,” Imogen’s mother told her.
“Even if I’m no longer me?” Imogen asked.
“You will always be you,” she said. But it appeared that she had anticipated this conversation. Leaving aside all questions of feeling, she said, putting an end to one’s life was a difficult business. There were risks. An accelerated death might be more painful than allowing things to run their course.
It would be quicker, Imogen countered. There was no achievement in staying alive as long as possible.
The debate continued into the early hours. A debate is what it was, Imogen told me. There were moments when it was as though it were the case of a hypothetical patient that was being analysed. Of all the roles that Imogen had played, the bravely dying woman was the one that would make her mother proud, Imogen said to me.
When it had been accepted that dissuasion was not possible, there remained the problem of execution. Assistance might be required.
“Of course,” her mother agreed.
Imogen suggested that I might be the one who would do the deed.
Her mother’s response was immediate: “Impossible,” she said. There was nothing to discuss: she had brought Imogen into the world; she had to be the one to help her out of it.
•
Her mother produced a sheet of paper on which the salient facts had been noted; the elegance of her handwriting made the page look like a letter of invitation or thanks. As she had said, there were risks: a chemical death was not a straightforward business. But fifteen grams of Nembutal in concentrated soluble form should provide a peaceful end; phenytoin sodium could be used to increase its potency. It would not be easy to obtain these substances, but it could be done. As for the legal questions: she knew what charges might be brought, and what her defence would be. She had researched the precedents. “Not that the defence is of any relevance,” she said. Because she loved her daughter, she would do what was asked. It was her duty, too. “There is no nobility in suffering,” she said.
•
Her mother confessed that she had gone to the village church and spent an hour on her knees. As she had not been there since her husband’s funeral, she suspected that her prayers weren’t given top priority. She’d imagined a ticket machine, like the one at the supermarket delicatessen counter. “Ticket number 56,000,890,” she said, and they both laughed. Her mother’s laugh, rarely heard, was a brief and light chime; it would have worked well in Restoration comedy, said Imogen.
•
The imprecision of Imogen’s sense of chronology bemused her mother. How was it possible to be able to memorise whole pages of a script, yet be unable to place the events of one’s own life in anything but the most approximate order? There were twenty obscure film directors whose biographies Imogen knew better than she knew the biography of herself. Asked to put a date to a significant family incident at which she had been present, Imogen might be wrong by a year or more. One evening, at the table, her mother mentioned a storm that had brought down some of the chimneys. Imogen remembered that night: the shattered masonry; the flooded garden. It had happened shortly after Benoît’s first visit, she recalled. Her mother corrected her: it had happened after Benoît’s second visit. Corroborating evidence was produced; she made reference to an incident involving Imogen’s father and Benoît and a waterlogged field. Imogen deferred to her mother’s memory of the sequence of events; her mother was always right. For Imogen, her mother said, the past was like the sea—always in motion, impossible to map.
•
Imogen sat in the bay window, with a blanket over her legs; she had fallen asleep. When she woke up, I brought a glass of fresh water. “Thank you, Doctor Perceval,” she said. A widower had written to Charles Perceval, to tell him that his wife, near the end, had said: “It is not unpleasant to die in the care of Doctor Perceval.” I had quoted this line to her in the mirrored room, Imogen reminded me; Adeline’s body had rested in the mirrored room, encircled by candles, I had told her, and Charles had watched over the open coffin for two days. Immersed in grief, unable to be a father, Charles Perceval gave up his son. He shunned society, and ceased to take Communion; for half a century he lived alone. But in time he resumed his medical practice, and became known for the tact with which he eased the dying out of life; in his bag there was always a bottle of ruby-red laudanum.
I held Imogen’s hand; I could feel every bone. The window was open; the sound of a tractor came in with the warm air.
•
It was said of Cornelius Perceval that he dissected a cadaver as skillfully as Bernini had carved marble. I invited inspection of the case of knives; the blades, as could be seen, would still be serviceable. Bottles of calomel stood on a shelf by the pencil portrait of Cornelius Perceval, alongside bottles of quinine and rhubarb compound and laudanum, and a miscellany of other redundant medications. I directed attention to the toxic “blue pill.” Perceval was a liberal prescriber of the blue pill and other doubtful curatives, I told the group. In 1811 he wrote to his son: “I know as well as any man how to discover the disease, but I do not know how to cure it.” He had become a “therapeutic nihilist,” I pronounced. This phrase often makes an impact, and Imogen seemed to make a note of it. We examined the portrait of the irascible Cornelius Perceval. His ire was frequently roused by the arrogance of his wealthy patients. A letter to his wife, on display, complains of his being obliged to enter a gentleman’s house by the servants’ door.
•
Jonathan opened the door, and I saw the body: it was Imogen; it was not Imogen. The body’s indifference to us, to everything, was brutal. Already the lines were disappearing from her brow. Imogen was absent from this flesh, but the body had a monumental presence; a horrible beauty. It was possible to believe, said Jonathan, that she had at last been taken to a place that was full of light and peace.
•
Having made the calls that had to be made, Jonathan came into the library. “Helen not here?” he asked; there seemed to be no urgency to finding her. Helen had gone outside, I told him. Standing at the window, I had watched her walk slowly away from the house, down the central path and through the pergola; she was now out of sight. On the sill stood the photograph of Jonathan and Imogen at the party for his ninth birthday, in feathered headdresses, with streaks of dark paint across their cheekbones. He picked it up and looked at it. “Mother’s back with Imog
en,” he said. “I don’t think she’ll be down for a while.” He apologised for leaving me alone, but he had to go to Helen, he said. Not a sound came from upstairs. The whole house was occupied by death; it had become the house of the dead woman; the air in every room had changed. I picked up another picture: the one of Imogen and her father by the cedar tree in the garden of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. The young woman in the photograph smiled at me; her face bore no resemblance to that of the body that lay in the room above.
•
William told me one afternoon, not sober, that when he was still at school he’d been sent to talk to someone about his drinking. He had liked this woman so much that he’d increased his intake to make sure that he would be sent to talk to her again. “She was posh too,” he said. “Posh and nice.” He’d experienced some unpleasantness that morning; two episodes of abuse, and several nasty looks. “A lot of people use their eyes like weapons,” William said, putting the backs of his hands over his eyelids, with the forefingers pointing out. But eyes and ears are receivers; they are lenses and microphones, wired to the computer-brain. “Input, not output. That’s what I’m all about,” he said.
•
Lunchtime stroll. Almost back at the museum when I became diverted by an altercation between two dogs, one a mud-coloured mongrel of medium build, the other a strange lamb-like creature, slighter than the mongrel, with blueish-white fleecy fur. The barking was what had drawn my attention; only after noting the oddness of the lamb-like dog was I struck by the appearance of its owner, a woman with a sleek bob of silver hair, streaked with dark strands, and a close-fitting knee-length coat, carmine. The pets were reeled in, skittering and barking, while apologies were exchanged. Then the lamb-dog and its owner were coming towards me. She turned to look over the town, presenting a strong profile; I could imagine such a face on an allegorical figure—of Justice, perhaps. Her posture was remarkably upright, and her stride purposeful. The dog was at her side now. Its gait was light—a graceful prance. The woman took a treat from her pocket and lobbed it onto the pavement. As I was about to pass, the dog looked up and, meeting my gaze, sprang at me, not aggressively. “I’m sorry,” said the woman, bending down to scoop the dog towards her. She reproached her pet for its lack of manners; the dog’s name was Bianca. “Nothing to apologise for,” I said, and asked about the breed. “A Bedlington,” was the answer. Having obtained permission, I stroked Bianca. I remarked on the softness of the fur, and the woman said: “I think we’ve met.” She frowned. “I’m sure we have,” she said, and in the next instant she supplied the answer: five or six years ago she and her husband had taken the tour of the museum. “It was fascinating,” she said. Bianca was pulling at the lead. “We must go,” her owner apologised. “She’s a lovely little beast, but she has no patience whatever.” The longest conversation for several days.
The Great Concert of the Night Page 19
