The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  October

  In Regent Street I am struck by a powerful scent—someone in the crowd is wearing a perfume that Imogen sometimes wore. The smell is that of snuffed candles. “Odour of Sanctity,” she called it. No specific memory ensues. The momentary transit of a ghost; a spectre of aromatic air.

  •

  Online, a recent interview with Antoine Vermeiren; he goes to some length to ensure that his interviewer properly appreciates the philosophical heft of his work. We must understand that our words for “theory” and “theorem” are rooted in the ancient Greek theoría, meaning “contemplation, speculation, beholding, spectacle.” And theoría is related to thea, “a view, an act of seeing,” from which the modern “theatre” is derived. The first theorists, he maintains, were those who undertook journeys—arduous and perilous journeys, often—to witness an event or spectacle in honour of the gods. Vermeiren’s scholarship is plausible. He adduces an unnamed text by Aristotle, a work that survives only in fragmentary form. “We go to the Olympian festival for the sake of the spectacle, even if nothing more should come of it,” he says that Aristotle writes. And: “We go to theorise at the festival of Dionysus.”

  •

  It seems that the aristocratic class played little or no part in the Bacchic Mysteries of pre-Imperial Rome. The orgiasts, I have read, were commoners, even slaves. We know little about the form of these Bacchic rites, but it is said that initiates were obliged to undergo terrifying ordeals. In 186 BC the Roman authorities outlawed the cult; when revived by Julius Caesar, the Bacchic Mysteries took a tamer form. The original Mysteries were vulgar and bestial. Much of the flesh on display at the maison de maître, however, was prosperous; tanned, toned. An opera audience stripped bare.

  •

  At the maison de maître there was a lithe young woman whose breasts had been augmented surgically, but tastefully. The breasts were keenly molested, but what made her particularly attractive to many, I suspect, were the noises. Her yelps and howls seemed to gratify her partners. At climax, she vented a geyser of obscenities; the climaxes were frequent. She thrashed and flailed; she drummed her heels and screamed. Her pleasure seemed to depend largely upon the mirrors: she watched as if enthralled by her own wildness. Her hair was loose—thick curls, the colour of brass, that reached halfway to her waist; a Pre-Raphaelite maenad.

  Antoine Vermeiren was thinking about a comedy based on the myth of Orpheus, he told Imogen, during what might have been their last conversation. Orpheus would be an uxorious middle-aged man, a ballad-singer, mourning for the wife he had lost, through his own stupidity. After years of moping, he would put himself out in the world again. He would become a party animal, or pretend that he had become one. A gang of highly sexed young women would tear him apart, perhaps not metaphorically.

  •

  A provocative writer argues that the notorious Messalina, wife of the emperor Claudius, was reviled by her contemporaries not for her promiscuity but because she fell in love. The man in question was not her husband: he was the senator Caius Silius, described by Tacitus as the most beautiful young man in Rome. On August 23rd, 48 AD, the day of Messalina’s death, she attended a bacchanal in celebration of the wine harvest; she was attired as Ariadne; Caius Silius—with whom, it was alleged, she had entered into a marriage contract, having renounced her husband—played the part of Bacchus, the lord of the orgy. Claudius, on hearing of this outrage, ordered the murder of his wife. Messalina’s unforgiveable crime, this writer maintains, was that she had abased herself in loving Caius Silius. A Roman matron owed devotion to her household, and to nothing else; the submission of love was a dereliction of duty, a more grievous offence than mere fornication. This writer refers to the wayward Messalina as an “adolescent.” At her death, he states, she was twenty years old. Other sources make her a decade older. Some of these sources, however, might themselves be unreliable. Much of what we know, or think we know, of Messalina’s depravity comes from chroniclers such as Tacitus, Suetonius and Juvenal, who were not her contemporaries. The legend of Messalina is largely a posthumous creation, disseminated by people whose motives were at least in part political. But Pliny the Elder, to whom we owe the story that the insatiable young empress, in competition with a prostitute, once bedded twenty-five men in succession, is perhaps a more dependable witness; he was born just a few years later than Messalina.

  •

  Said the exquisite Guillaume to Imogen: “It is only with you that I know who I am.” He was offering himself to Imogen “without condition,” he announced. Such self-repudiation was “what love demanded.” The declaration took place in a location he had chosen with care: a superb restaurant, deeply rural, recently opened and thus known only to the few, for now. As befitted the occasion, he ordered an extravagant bottle, a Clos Saint-Jacques. Everything was at Guillaume’s expense: the meal and the room at the idyllic hotel, which he had reserved as a surprise. A deep wound was being inflicted on his bank account; the symbolic significance of the gesture was understood. Just as he was renouncing his cash, he would renounce his freedom. In the expectation, of course, that Imogen would renounce hers.

  •

  Surveying the orgiasts from the gallery of the maison de maître, a man of my age, of louche demeanour, turned to me and remarked, as if addressing a fellow connoisseur in the presence of some stupendous but troubling work of art: “C’est sublime.” Perhaps there was some truth here, despite the posturing. The beautiful is purely pleasurable, according to Schopenhauer, whereas the sublime gives rise to a mingling of pleasure and pain. The sublime is resistant to contemplation. In Schopenhauer, there are gradations of the sublime. At the weaker end of the spectrum might be the sight of sunlight on a barren mass of boulders; there is no danger, but the scene establishes a hostile relationship to the will of the observer. Sublimity increases with the threat of destruction. A vast desert, in which the observer would certainly die, is more sublime than the boulders, but to be exposed to a storm in the mountains, amid lightning and torrents and rockfalls, is more sublime still. Only the infinite extent of the universe exceeds it.

  •

  For a moment, at the maison de maître, I could imagine seeing myself from across the room: a bogus anthropologist, making observations. I imagined how it would be if my employers were to learn of this: the disgrace, the shame, though I did not feel ashamed at that moment. What would I say? “An error of judgement. A lapse. That is not who I am.” But a photograph would prove the contrary. If that’s not you, who else might it be?

  •

  Imogen wished that she had been able to make films of the kind that Robert Bresson had made: films that had the sadness one finds in a town, in a landscape or a house, rather than the beauty or sadness one finds in a photo of a town, a landscape or a house, as Bresson himself had put it.

  •

  An ancestor of Adeline’s had been clerk of the kitchen in a bishop’s household, and the blood-red roses in the bishop’s garden had thrived, it was said, because they had been planted in soil that had been mixed with earth from the grave of a saint; a portion of that soil had later been carried to the Hewitt house—hence the splendour of its rose garden. Imogen was standing beside me when I showed the group the pastel portrait of Adeline with her blood-red roses. I would have talked about the church commissioner who called on the Hewitts, demanding proof that they had destroyed their “images.” The commissioner was shown a garden wall into which the fragments of a broken sculpture of Saint Margaret of Antioch had been incorporated. What the commissioner didn’t know was that the head of Saint Margaret was in effect a door—in the cavity behind it, the family had stowed a reliquary and other forbidden items. This, I might have suggested, could serve as metaphor for the family’s resistance to the new church: outwardly, they observed the new rite; in private, they remained faithful to the old ways. For five years, they had given sanctuary to a relative who had been expelled from her convent; she had lived in the space beneath the roof, the solitary occupant o
f the Hewitts’ clandestine nunnery. The Hewitt house was in the vicinity of Redruth, which I will pass on my way to William and Jenna; but not a stone of the house remains.

  •

  The screaming of foxes wakes me, and what comes to mind is another night, with Imogen, in the garden of her house. “Listen,” she said, pressing my arm to make me stop. We heard foxes, and a conversation of tawny owls, far off. “Male,” she said, pointing left, after the first call and reply; “female,” pointing right, like a conductor. Leaves hissed in the breeze. I can picture the scene: the moon cross-hatched in the branches; the low dust-coloured clouds. “The concert of the night,” she murmured, as we listened. Walking back to the house, slowly, she told me about Arianne, who had left Paris, and almost everything of her former life, to live alone in the Pyrenees. Few were invited to her mountain cottage. Imogen visited her, after the first operation. The retreat was embedded in huge silence; the whistle of a marmot might be the only sound for an hour. Griffon vultures patrolled the air. Imogen talked to Arianne about sky burials. The idea of being “strewn about the mountains” appealed to her, but only for as long as she was with Arianne, she said. The tranquillity of the mountains had taken possession of her for a while. She imagined that people had once gained a comparable benefit from hermits; they caught contentment off them, which may or may not have lasted. “But this is where I have to end,” she said, and pressed my arm again.

  •

  The door is opened by William. As on the day of his departure from my house, an embrace rather than a handshake is what the situation demands. With a hand on my shoulder, he guides me to the living room, where Jenna and Tilly await. Jenna stands as I enter the room. “Pleased to meet you,” she says, giving me a hand that is cool and small; it’s as though I were William’s employer and she needs to make a good impression. Tilly, sitting on the floor, regards me uncertainly, but her smile, when her mother introduces me as William’s friend, is bold and delightful, as William had said.

  And Jenna is indeed pale, but not unusually so; her hair is dark and long, her mouth small, certainly; and her nose could be described as narrow and straight. For some reason William has omitted to mention her voice: it’s deep, with a throaty and grainy quality, and lovely.

  Jenna had thought she would cook stargazy pie in my honour. People use all sorts of fish for it, but Jenna’s family always observes the classic recipe. The heads of the pilchards are left sticking out through the crust, he warns me. “Like they’re gazing at the stars. It’s kind of grim.”

  “It’s so the oil can flow back in,” Jenna explains. She tells me the tale of the pie’s creation, in celebration of the courage of Tom Bawcock, the fisherman who went out in a terrible December storm and came back with enough fish to feed the entire village.

  “And who never existed,” William interrupts, teasing.

  “Maybe, or maybe not,” she says, with loving disdain.

  The fish are local. William tells me about the revival of pilchard fishing in Newlyn, thanks to Nutty Noah. They catch them the old way, using ring nets, at night, when the fish come up to feed. “It’s madness,” he says. “They can pull in four tonnes in an hour.”

  “You’d think he’d been at sea all his life,” says Jenna. “Instead of two days.”

  “More than that,” William corrects her. “Four at least, my lover,” he says. The sudden Cornish accent gets a laugh from Tilly; it is soon apparent that William can get a laugh from Tilly whenever he chooses.

  At the table, at William’s urging, Jenna tells me stories of her family. She ranges through the generations: the great-aunt who’d had six sons in a row, then six daughters, then three more boys; the great-uncle whose voice was the loudest anyone had ever heard; the relative who had come through many years of deep-sea fishing unscathed, give or take a fracture or two, only to drown, drunk, in the bath. While she talks, William looks at her with admiration, as if the stories were of her own invention, and mostly new to him. She is persuaded by William to produce her phone, on which the course of their relationship is charted in a hundred pictures.

  At eleven, Jenna begins to yawn. She apologises: it has been a long day, and she has an early start in the morning. We look out of the window at the lights on the hill. In summer, she tells me, every house is lit up at night; in the dead of winter, they are nearly all dark. She often works for Londoners in the holiday months. “Some of them, you wonder why they have children. But they pay good money,” she says.

  “Not all of them,” says William, putting his arm around her.

  Jenna gives me a hug. She hopes to meet me again.

  “I’m sure you will,” I answer.

  “Oh, you will, definitely,” says William.

  As soon as Jenna has left us, William asks, as if a lot depends on the answer: “So? What do you think?”

  “She’s terrific,” I tell him, candidly.

  He looks towards the window. “OK,” he murmurs, and for a moment, despite what I’ve seen of them together, I think he’s about to tell me that he is having doubts. But what he says is: “In that case I’m going to give her the bended knee routine. If she says Yes, you’re the best man. Or the best I can manage.”

  •

  In one of her letters Adeline makes reference to an ancestor, John Hewitt, who died at Clyst Heath. His throat was cut by a German Lanzknecht. On August 5th, 1549, nine hundred Cornish prisoners were killed in this way at Clyst Heath, by order of Lord William Grey, who had one thousand German mercenaries under his command. Grey and his Germans were fighting the Catholic insurrectionists of Cornwall alongside the king’s troops. The king’s chronicler, John Hayward, recorded that the nine hundred prisoners were bound and gagged before their throats were slit, and that the slaughter lasted a mere ten minutes. On hearing of the atrocity, an army of two thousand Cornishmen advanced on Clyst Heath. Nearly all of them died there, in the bloodiest day of the Prayer Book Rebellion, an uprising that cost the lives of ten percent of the population of Cornwall, by some estimates. Speaking of the battle of Clyst Heath, Lord Grey stated that he had never “taken part in such a murderous fray.” Two years earlier, he had led the massacre at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh, the last pitched battle between Scottish and English armies. Unlike at Pinkie Cleugh, there is no memorial at Clyst Heath. A rugby pitch marks the place where the nine hundred were executed.

  •

  A lustrous early morning in the park; windless; cloudless; cool. Long shadows of the trees on the pale gold grass. A sense of pause; the withdrawal of autumn is under way. Sitting on the bench, I recalled taking Imogen onto the terrace, in the wheelchair. The sun was still touching the hill; washes of mist lay in the hollows. She said something, so quietly that I did not hear her clearly. Smiling, her face in the light, she repeated: “One more day.” She said it as if life were an addiction that she lacked the strength to overcome. She took off a glove to hold my hand; her skin was as cold as tap water.

  •

  A scene to which intense happiness is attached, like a label: in Cornwall, above a cove. The spray was being thrown up to the cliff tops; from time to time it touched our faces; the water boomed and seethed on the rocks below. Huge ribbons of foam a long way from the shore. The sea in flux everywhere. A sumptuous sunset. Vast clouds filled the sky—an endless troop of them approaching over the sea, mighty turmoils of white and pink above the roseate water. I see Imogen in her big Aran sweater; her hair disarrayed. We sat for an hour or so, and barely said a word.

  •

  The date of Imogen’s birth. Every year, unless work made it impossible, she came home for her birthday. It was an observance that she felt obliged to maintain, and not just for her mother, she told me. At a break in the rain, in the late afternoon, we went outside. Above the hills, the sky was a mess of steel and iron colours, but the water on the paving stones was like a golden paint. Bright water dripped around us as we walked through the pergola. One of the horses was at the fence; a thin steam rose from its back. She st
roked its muzzle and pressed her face to its neck, savouring the smell of the animal. Hans was the horse’s name; he was Imogen’s favourite; at times, when Hans raised his head into the sunlight, it was possible to believe that contented-seeming Hans had a consciousness of his contentment. At some point before we returned to the house, we talked about birthdays, about the religions that acknowledge no anniversaries. Imogen had worked with someone who had told her about an ex-boyfriend whose mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, though appalled by the idea of birthday parties, had spent a fortune on her daughter’s wedding; soon after the wedding, the ex-boyfriend had abandoned the Witnesses, and was consequently disowned by his family. When we celebrate an anniversary, Imogen remarked, we are like people standing together in the middle of a river, holding hands to brace ourselves against the current. Now I throw another page into the water.