The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

•

  From the terrace, with Imogen’s mother, I watched Imogen and her brother, walking towards the paddock; he gestured grandly; plans were being explicated. Jonathan was a strategist, I was told; a young man who was prepared to embrace change, whenever change was necessary, as it now was. And Helen was invaluable too. “Invaluable” was the adjective that Imogen’s mother used. The profundity of Helen’s pedigree had already been impressed upon me. “Her people have been here since Stonehenge was new,” Imogen had joked. In addition to being handsome and well-finished and infinitely English, Helen had proved to be an astute businesswoman; she had negotiated effectively with various buyers for their produce, Imogen’s mother told me. The estate was in safe hands with Jonathan and his wife, I was assured. “Imogen has been swimming against the current all her life,” her mother said. “But one cannot do that forever.” It seemed that I had some potential as a sensible influence, an antidote to the wilfulness that had been characteristic of Imogen since childhood. My appreciation of the house and of its history might help to weaken Imogen’s resistance, she seemed to imply. There was something in the way that Imogen attended to her brother, as he swept an arm across the scene, that seemed to indicate that a change had begun, her mother thought. “One day she will come back,” she stated.

  •

  Returning to the living room, to find me studying the portrait of her mother, Imogen’s mother remarked: “Imogen always detested that picture.” We considered the painting of Éloïse. The grandmother’s hair, fiercely wrought, was framed by the splendid autumnal foliage of the garden in Meudon; the texture of the hair was indistinguishable from the texture of the leaves; her fingers, flatteringly elongated, seemed to have no bones; her face had little more definition than a pillow. She was extremely proud of her hands, Imogen told me; she treated them every morning and every night with an esoteric unguent derived from Madagascan vanilla orchids. They were aristocratic hands: she had reason to believe that her bloodline flowed back to an unnamed mistress of the duke of somewhere or other, a duke for whose existence, according to Imogen’s father, there was nothing in the way of proof, of any kind. “Le Duc de Mirage,” her father called this elusive ancestor. Like her father, Imogen found it hard to love Éloïse. And Éloïse, for her part, found it hard to love the grandchildren. She seemed to care most deeply for her clothes (as Imogen remembered her, she would dress for the family visitations as a normal person would dress for an evening at the opera), her garden, her dogs—she always had a Bichon Frise or two—and the memory of her husband, Michael, the brilliant diplomat and debonair Englishman, whom she had met in Paris after the liberation and promptly married. Imogen’s father, though treated with respect, was conscious that Michael had set a standard that he could never match. No man could ever match the élan of Michael. He had been killed in a road accident, aged fifty-one, and Éloïse had vowed never to remarry. It was genuinely a vow. She had taken a decision, and Éloïse never went back on a decision that she had made, as she often reminded her family. It was one of her principles. To remarry would have been to traduce the peerless Michael. For the rest of her life she would be an exemplar of noble widowhood. Two or three times a year her family were welcomed—“perhaps not the right word,” said Imogen—to her splendid house. It was necessary for the family to go to Éloïse, because Éloïse would never leave Paris. This seemed to be another point of principle. She conducted herself, Imogen said, like an actress who had abruptly, in her prime, abandoned her profession and withdrawn from the public gaze. What she did with her days was a mystery. As far as her granddaughter could tell, her principal occupation, other than inspecting the gardener’s work, was browsing the innumerable fashion magazines to which she subscribed. Reference was sometimes made to her visitors, who were understood to be women of leisure and a certain distinction, but none of these visitors were ever seen, or had names that Imogen could recall. The garden was vast. Play was permitted in a small and precisely delineated zone of greenery and in one room of the house, a room that was almost devoid of furniture and never warm, even in the height of summer. The whole house was chilly, as Imogen remembered it; the air was like the air in the depths of a cave.

  The creator of the portrait, Imogen’s mother explained, had been a long-standing friend of her mother’s gardener, who had one day asked if his friend Gaston, a “successful painter,” might be permitted to work for a few hours amid the wonderful flowerbeds. Permission was granted, subject to stringent conditions, and Gaston duly arrived one August afternoon. The garden delighted him, as did the dogs: he confessed to being “enamoured” of the Bichon Frise. Further ingratiation was achieved by presenting Éloïse with a sketch of her pets. “My mother was unaccountably charmed,” said Imogen’s mother. The dogs were brought to Gaston, for more thorough scrutiny. A double dog portrait was the upshot. “A frightful thing,” she told me. But Éloise, when she looked at this painting, seemed not to see the maladroit brushwork—she saw only the images of her beloved dogs. Then came the portrait of Éloise herself. “My father had died, bear in mind,” Imogen’s mother confided. “For some unfathomable reason, it was only when the portrait was finished that it occurred to my mother that this man might have something else in mind.” She laughed. “What’s so amusing,” she said, “is that he was not merely a mediocre painter: he was a comprehensively unattractive specimen. A tiny man, with green teeth and puny legs. And absurd hair. Like a bird’s nest soaked in oil. Whereas my mother was a fine-looking woman. Not that one would know it,” she said, waving her cigarette at the picture. “Imogen was rather like her, in some ways,” she remarked, in a tone of conclusion.

  “Oh yes?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and that was all.

  •

  A strange dream, in which I confessed everything to Val. We were at her house. Val and I had withdrawn to the bathroom, because every guest was obliged to confess to her in the bathroom; it was a condition of the invitation. Val held my head between her hands, as if it were a pot that was filled to the brim with water. Her hands shook with the effort of holding it. The explanation was obvious, she said: I took pleasure in my humiliation. Waking, I gave some thought to the proposition. Dreams, however ridiculous, often have the power of truth, if only for a moment. But no humiliation was intended by Imogen, and none experienced. Some anguish, yes; but no humiliation.

  •

  Queuing in the post office, I noticed, at the counter, the pretty white dog—Bianca. I recognised the dog first; her owner’s hair was hidden under a soft woollen hat, midnight blue. The coat, of matching colour, was somewhat longer than the red coat; its length directed attention towards the elegant shoes. Turning from the counter, she noticed that I was in the queue, and smiled. As she exited, we both mimed “Hello.”

  •

  Imogen had fallen asleep, I thought, but then she spoke: she had just seen, with wonderful precision, a downpour in Cornwall. The rain had been so heavy that we’d had to stop the car, by a phone box. The red of the phone box was the only colour within the rain. Then, in the direction we were facing, the sun came out, and for a minute we were in the midst of brightly glowing water, through which we could see nothing. The deluge did not fade out: it ceased in a matter of seconds, like a badly executed special effect. A boy in a blue anorak was revealed, standing on the other side of the road, looking up at the sky, laughing, incredulous; his shoes disappeared into water as he stepped off the kerb.

  “But where was that?” Imogen asked.

  I recalled a downpour that had made the car tremble. I remembered the sudden sunlight before the rain had stopped, but no phone box nor any boy. “Near Zennor,” I answered.

  In the last weeks, drowsing, she often experienced scenes of similar intensity. Sometimes, I think, they were more dream than memory, though they had an aura of recollection. Without opening her eyes, she described an evening that had returned to her: a long walk after a meal, in a small town; a river; a busker by a spotlit building. We had strolled al
ong a street of shops in which none of the streetlights were working. “Do you remember? Where was that?” she asked, looking at me.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Am I definitely there?”

  She closed her eyes again; she clenched her eyelids. “I’m not even sure I’m there,” she said.

  •

  In the park, passing the bench where I sometimes sat with William, where Imogen and I sometimes sat with him, I remember the day he talked about the sound that a mass of small leaves made in the wind. It gave him a “great contentment,” he said. He told me that for a couple of years, when he was at primary school, he had lived near a canal, and on the edge of this canal there was a tree that he used to climb. In the wind, this tree made a sound “like an avalanche of sand,” he said. On blustery days he would often lie below the tree, relishing the sound it made. He was happier then than he had ever been since, he thought. What was it that happened in our heads when we remembered a sound, he wondered. “The memory of a sound isn’t really a sound, is it?” he said. “You’re not actually hearing anything.”

  •

  On a Sunday morning, hearing bells from over the hill, Imogen said to me that the best of her childhood was in that sound. On Sundays at home, in this room, reading, she had been happy, and her happiness was at its fullest when the bells were ringing. If she were allowed only one recording on her desert island, it would be the sound of those Sunday mornings. Many times she had walked with her father to the crest of the hill, just to listen to the bells, she told me. Once she had seen tears in his eyes. She had tried to believe that this was because he too was moved deeply by the wonderful sound.

  •

  “Thank you for escorting me to the edge,” Imogen said one morning. She looked at our hands, and smiled. “One body fewer. It doesn’t matter. I can say that. It seems to be what I feel.” But she was not sure that she was prepared. Rather, a mood had settled on her, like black snow, she said. Her laugh was a retching cough.

  •

  The sunlight drenched the blossom of the apple trees. It was so beautiful, it was like dying, said William. Imogen asked him what he meant. “Everything is energy,” he answered, as if this were something that many people knew. “Everything is frequencies. That’s what all of this is,” he said, circling a hand above his head. The hand went round and round; he had been drinking. The whiteness of the blossom was frequency made visible. The blossom would not last long, but its energy would last forever, he said. Some of the energy of the tree had penetrated his brain; it was so powerful that it had wiped out all of his thoughts. That is why it was like dying. “I see,” I said; he sensed that I was uneasy with him, whereas Imogen was not.

  •

  Some Roman tombstones have holes drilled into them; to honour the occupant of the tomb, and to provide nourishment in the afterlife, relatives would pour water, wine and honey into the hole, so that the liquid could flow through the stone and onto the ashes. But we should be wary of attributing to all Romans a set belief on the subject of the afterlife, Francesca warned. Some believed in ghosts and spirits, and others did not. Among the latter, there would have been many who nonetheless maintained the traditions by which the dead were kept alive. She told us about a Roman tombstone that is inscribed with a text addressed to the person who has stopped to read it. There is no life beyond the tomb, the text tells the reader; the dead are dust and ashes, and wine poured into the grave will make mud of the remains, nothing more.

  •

  “Inspirational stuff,” said Imogen, reading of the last hours of the life of Cato the Younger, as recounted by Plutarch. Then the sword being brought in by a little boy, Cato took it, drew it out, and looked at it; and when he saw the point was good, “Now,” said he, “I am master of myself”; and laying down the sword, he took his book again, which, it is related, he read twice over. Later that night, he took his sword, and stabbed it into his breast.

  •

  Imogen discovered, in a box of miscellaneous old photographs, a small picture of a young woman sitting at the library table, on which a chess board had been set. From the young woman’s dress, and certain details of the room, it seemed that the picture dated from around 1920. She was smiling, apparently at something that was happening to her left. Her expression suggested an attractive and clever character. Most of the chess pieces had been removed from the board. Imogen liked to think that a male opponent had just conceded defeat. The fairness of the young woman’s hair and the clarity of her eyes gave young Imogen the idea that she was German. Matilde, she named her, because neither her mother nor her father had any idea who the young woman might really have been. Nobody knew who she was. For some time, this was wonderful. Matilde was a woman of mystery. Her name was Matilde in the way that a painting of a beautiful unknown woman might be given a name: Flora, Venus, The Veiled Woman. When she was sent to school, Imogen took the photograph of Matilde with her. The meaning of the image began to change. Matilde had been brilliant and beautiful; she had visited the house, and sat at the table at which Imogen had so often sat. Now nobody at home knew anything about her. Somewhere her body was lying in the earth. Her gravestone was perhaps no longer meaningful to anybody. Only this image remained, an image to which any woman’s name could be attached.

  •

  When the dead were believed to be in Purgatory, they received the charity of the living, and they cared for the living in return. The dead were close. But with the revision of The Book of Common Prayer in 1552, the dead were banished to an infinite distance. The burial service would now take place at the graveside, not in the church; in place of prayers of commendation and committal, there was to be just one reference to the deceased, who had been delivered, thanks be to God, from the “myseryes of this sinneful world.” Now the dead were in a world that had no contact with our own; even prayers could not reach them.

  •

  Beatrice at the piano, playing a Chopin prelude for her husband. The music is not dubbed—this is Imogen playing. Inaccuracies and hesitations have been left uncorrected; they impart authenticity. She played the same prelude for me, on the family’s old Broadwood. “If she had studied harder,” her mother confided, “she would have been better than me. Much better.” Imogen persuaded her to play for us. I was to take it as a sign of her approval that she consented to be persuaded, Imogen told me. The little waltz that her mother played was by someone whose name I did not know—a trivial piece, she said, opening the score. No notes were fluffed; the tempo was perfectly even; the movement of her hands was economical, undemonstrative. It was almost as though playing the piano were an exercise in comportment. One would not have been inclined to dance to the waltz that Imogen’s mother played, error-free though it was. “I am not truly musical,” she said, as though admitting that the colour of her hair was not natural. Imogen, on the other hand, was “deeply musical.” This was an opinion with which her daughter disagreed: she liked to play, but had reached the limit of her competence at the age of fourteen, she insisted. But there was a pulse in her playing, and there is a pulse in the music that Beatrice makes; it has spontaneity; life. I watch Beatrice at the piano: this is Imogen, as she was. She is lovely, and there is a terrible pathos in this lovely image. In adoration Julius Preston watches his wife. Candlelight glows on her face; it glows on her hands, which are raised in mid-bar, as Beatrice stops and scowls at the page of music.

  Inevitably, the thought is present: the character will always be this age, but the actress is no longer young. Some might know that this actress, who is young in this film, is no longer living. Imogen could not watch any of her films with me. “It would be like reading my own obituary,” she said.

  •

  William’s mother has informed him that it is completely out of the question for her to attend the wedding without her husband, as William had suggested she might; therefore she will not be present. His father has sent his best wishes, by text; he hopes his son has “better luck” than he had. So I will be in loco par
entis too. The speech is proving to be difficult—how to balance best-man jocularity and quasi-parental pride? Some explanation of how we had come to know each other might be expected, but the specifics of our case do not seem appropriate to the occasion. He was my lodger—that will suffice, with vague references to our prior acquaintance. As an anecdote: watching the trawlermen on TV. William heckling the clueless first-timer: “I could do better than that,” he shouted. And he did do better: he managed more than one trip, and was even more seasick than the lad on TV. Pause for laughter, or mild amusement. Some might like the slapstick of William failing to take the wind direction into account before vomiting. Were I of William’s age, I would be expected to provide at least one such item. Light embarrassment of the groom is conventional. The coda is the easy part—the joy of Tilly.

  November

  Eighteen visitors; no prospect of any rescue.

  •

  Crossing the road, a young woman walked directly towards me, head down, swiping her phone, oblivious. At the last moment, without looking up, she swerved as I swerved, and we collided. She gave me a scowl and went on her way, still swiping. I watched her until she turned the corner; not once did she look away from the phone. Twenty people, more or less, mostly young, were walking down the street from that corner; ten of them, I’d say, were staring into their phones; several had ear-buds rammed in. Downcast eyes, like prisoners in the exercise yard. But had they looked up, what would they have seen? Advertisements on all sides. Perfect young women, bikini-clad in dazzling Caribbean water, or striding along the streets of immaculate cities, hand-in-hand with perfect young men. With their glorious faces, their resplendent hair, their magnificent dentition, their superlative limbs, the superhumans transform the sweatshop clothes into covetable items. On a billboard, a car gleams in white space, as if it were a masterpiece of sculpture. Gorgeous children laugh in a film-set of a bedroom, under the gaze of their strangely youthful mother. Everywhere, false images; generators of money. I recall a moment with Imogen, on Oxford Street. “All right, Jeremiah,” she said, “we get the point.”