The Great Concert of the Night
Page 25
It was time for me to get back to work, I told her, not making it obvious, I hoped, that I was inclined to remain.
“The museum is closing, I hear,” she said.
I explained the situation.
“Such a pity. As if we need another hotel.” She would visit the museum again before it closed, she assured me. Then she said: “Alexandra.” We shook hands.
•
Reading, I look across the room to the chair in which Imogen used to read. I can picture her, turned to the side, with her legs curled up and a book propped on the arm of the chair, angled into the light of the lamp. I would sit here and she there, on opposite sides of the room, each in a small zone of illumination, and the rest of the room in shadow. The pleasure of reading together—of being solitary together. It was like acting, in a way, she said: we become someone else when we read, and each book changes us, for a while, even if only for as long as we are reading it.
•
To describe Imogen, I could write: five feet eight inches tall; of slender build. Hair: dark and heavy, straight, usually shoulder-length. The eyes, essential to any description of the beloved, were also dark—brown, with a russet tinge. The fine arch of the eyebrows would have to be mentioned. The hands: delicate and long-fingered. I could write about the regularity of her features, the “openness” of her face. Still she cannot be seen. This character named Imogen speaks words that Imogen spoke, but Imogen’s voice cannot be heard. “Imogen pauses; she looks down at her hands, arrested in the act of forming an awkward chord; frowning, she leans forward to scrutinise the notes on the page; she bites her lip; the candlelight glows on her throat.” An ideal Imogen, in the perpetual present of the sentence, where nobody is alive and nobody dead.
Jonathan Buckley is the author of the novels Ghost MacIndoe, So He Takes the Dog, Nostalgia, and several others. He was the 2015 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award. He lives in Hove, England.