The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  Then came a month when Mr. Dobrý was missing from the park. Nobody knew where he had gone. Occasionally he had been absent for a week or two; he never gave warning of his departure, and never said where he had been when he returned. He had never been missing for a whole month. The absence continued, until one evening the friend’s father announced that Mr. Dobrý had died. The story was in the newspaper.

  It turned out that Mr. Dobrý had lived in a tiny flat at the end of a bus route that passed the park. A birth certificate had been found and a sister traced: her name was Edith and she had been born in Sheffield, as had Mr. Dobrý, whose name in fact was Kenneth Tate. Edith had not seen or heard from her brother for forty years; she had not known where he had been living, and knew nothing about his life. The newspaper carried an appeal for information, but nobody ever came forward to say that they had known Mr. Dobrý, under this or any other name.

  How wonderful to have been Mr. Dobrý, Imogen had thought, when her friend told her the story. To have invented such a life and lived it out seemed an enterprise of genius.

  •

  The filming of Devotion began on a July evening. From the dining room I looked out onto the garden, where Julius Preston and the father of Beatrice Moore were in earnest discussion, on the bench by the sundial. Searching for the answer to the conundrum of his daughter, Mr. Moore gazed into the leaves of the beech tree that rose behind the cameraman, who stood a few yards in front of the actors, aiming the lens into their faces. Two paces to the right of the bench stood Marcus Colhoun, nodding approval. At the high point of the garden, in the crook of the wall where the irises grow, Imogen turned the pages of the script. Her skirt was a voluminous thing, with three tiers of flounces, and the pattern was a bold check, in lime green and salmon pink and violet. A paisley shawl covered her shoulders.

  She was splendidly demure. Her neck and wrists were unadorned; her lips pale as paper; her hair, parted strictly down the centre, was gathered into a small tight bun. Imogen closed her eyes as a young woman applied a make-up brush to her cheeks, and when she opened them she noticed that I was at the window. She closed her eyes again and smiled into the sunlight.

  Marcus took her down to the bench, talking urgently, like a coach with an athlete before the start of the race. While cameraman Joe waved a light meter around, the assistant fussed at the folds of the dress. Marcus Colhoun said a few words, then stepped back. Abruptly Imogen became Beatrice Moore. The angles of her head and neck and shoulders changed a little; it was enough for a different character to be delineated. One hand held the ends of the shawl like a clasp; the other lay on the arm of the bench, and was equally still. Not once did she look at Julius Preston; her eyes were directed past him, towards the pool at the foot of the garden. Dr. Preston’s gaze never left Beatrice’s face. Suddenly she stood up, distressed; she walked away, and Julius Preston followed her, up the slope of the lawn, into the sunlight. The camera stalked them and the microphone hovered above their heads, but equipment and crew seemed to be invisible to the actors. The expertise was remarkable. For some reason, this sequence was omitted from the film.

  •

  In Imogen’s exchanges with Marcus Colhoun there was rarely much evidence of the sort of bantering camaraderie one often sees in behind-the-scenes extras. Their conversations—or the ones that I observed—were brief, almost brusque: a few gestures, a few words, as if discussing tactics. Imogen said to me: “He gets straight to the point. And we understand each other.” Later, she told me that she had known immediately that Marcus Colhoun had attended a boarding school. “We’re like Freemasons or ex-cons—we recognise the signs,” she said. It had been like serving a novitiate. Her mother and father had endured the same childhood confinement, and therefore she’d been required to endure it too. “It makes you strong,” her mother had pronounced. Imogen had felt that she was being taught how to stand guard over herself, she told me; few people were to be permitted to pass into the heart of the fortress.

  •

  Sometimes, she told me, it felt necessary to play the part of being an actor. “There are certain expectations,” she said. For example, on occasion she had been prompted to employ the trope of the actor as compulsive observer, always taking note of gestures, idiosyncrasies of speech, behavioural tics. “It’s not wholly untrue,” she said. And people liked to hear about the moment at which one became aware of one’s vocation. “‘For my thirteenth birthday my parents took me to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I was mesmerised. I knew right away that I was going to be an actor.’ That kind of thing.” Mr. Dobrý was a recital piece, she said; like an encore. There were days on which she could believe that Mr. Dobrý had indeed been the start of it.

  •

  Nothing from Samantha since the afternoon on which she gave me the news about Val’s big initiative. Confidentiality is of paramount importance in the world of heavyweight commerce, so the company in question could not be named, but I was to understand that it was a top-tier organisation, and that a considerable fee was involved. Once a week, Val was to travel to the London HQ, there to conduct a two-hour “workshop” and then make herself available for individual consultations. The remit was broad. She would advise on issues relating to relaxation, diet, organisation of the workspace, et cetera, et cetera. Thus comprehensive wellness, a sense of empowerment, would be brought to the open-plan environment. The drones would be convinced of their happiness, and thereby become more effective drones. I commended Val’s enterprise, in a manner that caused irritation. I used the phrase “monetising the wisdom,” I believe.

  “And what have you done recently?” Samantha wanted to know. “You’re stagnating,” she told me. It seemed that I had chosen to go down with the sinking ship. Val’s “positivity” evidently offended me. Did I think that passivity was a virtue in itself? “I think you’re happier living in the past,” Samantha informed me.

  “Aren’t most of us?” I countered.

  “Well, I’m not,” said Samantha.

  •

  The museum does not allow us to reclaim the past—the past is irrecoverable. Hence the museum’s pathos. The exhibits are like stars, small pieces of light from distances that cannot be bridged.

  •

  My first sight of Samantha—more than twenty years ago, the calendar tells me. Twenty-plus years, but I remember the scene with what seems to be great clarity. Jerome called my office—a man had collapsed in the armour room. We had to push through a group of schoolchildren who had been corralled in the adjacent room; Samantha’s party, it turned out. The children were hushed, as if they had narrowly avoided a major accident. In a corner of the armour room, a large man lay on the floor; a jacket had been pushed under his head; his shirt, sky blue and too tight, was blackening with sweat. A woman held his hand as she talked to him. Her face was directly over his, and he was smiling as best he could. His grip was so strong that the woman’s fingers were bunched together, and scarlet at the tips. Her calmness was remarkable; she emanated an aura of competence. Quietly, clearly, slowly, continuously she talked to the stricken man, until the ambulance crew arrived. While she talked, she looked into his eyes. Caritas, the greatest of the virtues. “Yes,” the man said, four or five times; otherwise silent, he yielded to her assurance, to her gaze.

  My love for Samantha was conceived in that moment. We might persuade ourselves that love is something that emerges over time, but in many cases, or most, it is instantaneous. What follows, the “falling in love,” is but verification of what was comprehended in a second. It is a corroboration of the instinct. So many things can be seen in a moment.

  •

  Simone Weil: “We have to erase our faults by attention and not by will.”

  •

  On the third or fourth day of filming, I was in the mirrored room when Imogen came in. A conversation between the newly married couple was about to be filmed there. The fabric of that day’s dress was iridescent bronze, signifying perhaps the fire that had been lit in the soul of Bea
trice. She stopped in front of one of her reflections, to appraise the effect of the dress. “A bold little number, isn’t it? But it does impose a certain decorum,” she said. Extending her arms in a parody of gracefulness, she glided across the room. In the centre she halted. She glanced over her shoulder, looking away from me. I regarded one of her images in the glass, as if studying a picture, and her image looked back at me, without expression. Then the crew arrived.

  •

  At the portrait of Charles Perceval and Adeline I told their story, as I always do. The behaviour of Adeline’s sister, Marie, whose temper seems to have been problematic since puberty, had become unmanageably erratic. “She was frequently hysterical, the father informed the young doctor,” I would have said, before pointing to the row of pessaries; the pessaries invariably provoke a reaction. Misalignment of the uterus was widely held to be the cause of afflictions such as Marie’s, and physicians often fitted one of these devices to correct the irregularity. Charles Perceval refused to consider such an intervention. Hysteria was not a disorder of the womb, he believed; rather it was a disorder of the mind, or not a disorder at all. Instead, he talked to the patient; he offered, I proposed, a secular confessional. The father of Marie Hewitt was reluctant to permit such a conversation to take place in private, but the doctor eventually prevailed. So Charles Perceval talked to Marie, and she, after several consultations, became considerably less troublesome, though she later made a marriage of which they strongly disapproved, and which proved to be profoundly unsatisfactory to Marie herself. She took holy orders at the age of forty, and lived to the age of ninety-six. And her sister married Charles Perceval.

  Then the fatal complication: the Catholicism of the Hewitts, and Charles Perceval’s conversion. His parents, committed to the Church of England, were so dismayed by their son’s betrayal that they refused to attend the wedding. But the faith of the Hewitts was to be implicated in a much graver crisis than this. It became apparent, in the later stages of Adeline’s second pregnancy, that delivery of the child at full term could be extremely injurious to Adeline’s health. Furthermore, it was evident that the foetus was not developing as it should. Something could be done to mitigate the risk to the mother, but at the cost of the unborn child’s life. Here I direct attention to the cranioclast, that terrible instrument. Such a step would of course have been impossible for Adeline and Charles: eternal torture would have been the punishment. The child died within hours of its birth; Adeline four days later.

  The tour is always a performance. Conducting visitors around the museum, I am more voluble than my ordinary self, as I am in writing this. But on this particular day I was delivering more of a performance than usual. By the ten-minute mark, on an ordinary day, I would have finished with Charles Perceval. On the day of Imogen I was behind schedule. I had given information that I normally omitted; I had accentuated the pathos. This, I knew, was attributable to her presence. I was not making an effort to impress—not in the sense of trying to make myself attractive. I did not think that such a thing was possible. Rather, what I wanted to do was to make an impressive presentation, and I wanted to do this because of the quality of her attention. I felt compelled to sustain her engagement.

  •

  At the Sanderson-Perceval Museum, one spends time in a house of some splendour. This is a major part of its appeal: the visitor escapes into a fantasy of luxuriance. It offers, moreover, an experience of the genuine: in a world of proliferating fakes and simulations, the museum is a repository of the authentic. The things that it contains have an enhanced authenticity, it might be said, by virtue of their having endured.

  •

  I watched the tape of La Châtelaine on the day that I received it from Marcus. He had characterised it as “Bresson meets Borowczyk.” At the time I was not sure what this meant. “It looks good,” Joe had said, seeming to imply that it lacked substance. And it does look good, right from the start, where men in belted tunics and stockings appear out of the shadows and pass into the sunlight of a courtyard, a light so bright that they are obliterated by it. At the top of a tower, a crimson and gold flag hangs against a pure blue sky. At the foot of the tower, a groom is at work; the horse’s flank ripples under the brush; the animal’s breathing and the rasp of the bristles are the only sounds. In La Châtelaine there is a great quantity of silence. Conversations are observed from a distance; the actors gesture as if each movement were freighted with meaning. In the bedchamber, the lovers speak in the murmur of people under hypnosis. There are no throes of passion in the lovers’ bed; they touch each other as though their bodies were hollow.

  We see the Châtelaine’s breasts as her lover lying beside her sees them. It was a pleasure to look at this body. The camera keeps close company with the lovers. In adoration of the Châtelaine, the lens loiters on the soft declivity between her shoulder blades; on the pulsing skin of her neck; on her lips; on her thighs. The young man is regarded closely too. Our gaze—the Châtelaine’s gaze—caresses the tightening muscle of an arm, a taut buttock, a curl of hair around an ear. We glimpse a penis, tumescent, twice; and penetration, in close-up—a slow and blatant coupling, of documentary frankness.

  •

  “I’m useless on stage,” Imogen said, as if this were an incontrovertible fact. “And applause is a problem. For me, I mean. You do your turn and you get your reward. I don’t like it.”

  It struck me as reasonable for people to congratulate and thank the performers, I said. And wasn’t applause an honest way to close the evening? The lights go up, the audience claps—the whole thing has been an illusion, and now the show is over.

  She was all in favour of honesty, Imogen said, but she was not cut out to be an entertainer. “That sounds pompous, but it’s how it is,” she said. “You give your performance, and at the end of the evening the comfortable ones give you their approval, if they feel they’ve had their money’s worth. And I’m speaking as a member of the comfortable community. I’m aware of the hypocrisy,” she said, bowing her head to accept the implied reproach.

  •

  “Life consists in the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted,” wrote Marie François Xavier Bichat, chief physician to the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort. His book was published in 1800. Two years later he died, at the age of thirty, after falling down a flight of stairs at the Hôtel-Dieu.

  •

  I watched Les tendres plaintes last night—or skim-watched it, for the scenes in which Imogen appears. I have never cared for the actor who plays Xavier. It is hard to understand why any of these young women would tolerate this prig for more than ten minutes. And the behavioural tics are overdone: the staring eyes, the staccato speech, the peculiar gait. Everything is overdone: the unmanaged hair, the ill-fitting clothes. Xavier has no TV; such is his disdain for the modern world. He manages to rein himself in for the longest scene—with Caroline, at the concert given by his bête noire, Gaston Lasserre, a serial winner of competitions and awards, who just happens to have attended the same conservatoire as Xavier. Perhaps Imogen’s self-restraint obliged him to tone it down a little. Depressed by the brilliance of Gaston, Xavier walks with Caroline to the Métro; he walks at arm’s length from her, head down, like a man who has just received terrible news. “He is better than me,” he complains. “He is very good,” Caroline admits; she cannot lie. “I hate him,” says Xavier; Gaston is handsomer and cooler than Xavier too; he drives an implausibly expensive car. It’s a tough world, Caroline sympathises; it’s unfair that there should be room for so few harpsichordists at the top of the tree. (Les tendres plaintes is a comedy, Antoine Vermeiren maintains; this is the only scene at which I smile.) “Gaston Lasserre is a showman,” Xavier protests. “He is not serious.” We know that Xavier is very serious. He is a scholar as well as a musician; his knowledge of the music of his chosen era is profound. Unfortunately, though, he is not a performer of Gaston Lasserre’s calibre, as he knows. “He loves the applau
se, not the music,” he moans. The whingeing continues all the way to the Métro station, where Xavier informs his girlfriend that he might as well kill himself. There is of course no possibility that Xavier could do any such thing; nevertheless, Caroline dissuades him. “The music needs you,” she tells him. He kisses her on the forehead. “Tonight I have to be on my own,” he says. Caroline watches him as he descends the steps and disappears. Imogen’s face in these four or five seconds is the best thing in the film: we see pity, anger, affection; and her knowledge that their relationship has just been ended.

  •

  We were leaving my office, where I had shown Imogen some of the letters. She preceded me to the door, and as she opened it I felt compelled to tell her that Marcus Colhoun had given me a copy of La Châtelaine.

  Registering no surprise, she glanced over her shoulder to ask: “And you’ve watched it?”

  “I have.”

  “What did you think?”

  My remarks were inane: I had appreciated the pace of it, and the tone; the cinematography was excellent. Blah blah.

  She glanced at me again and said, without innuendo: “There are some nice images.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “The basket of oranges was memorable,” she said, and laughed. Then she stopped at the head of the stairs to suggest that we continue this conversation some other time.

  •

  The final scene of Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort is difficult to watch; it is difficult for anyone to watch. The woman, Marguerite, is in her bedroom, seated in front of a mirror. Motionless, the camera observes her from the far side the room; the distance implies some sort of tact. A window is open; we hear a car passing in the street; after ten seconds, a second car; a child calls out and is answered by another child. The room is bright with sunlight. Calmly, or so it seems, the woman regards the reflection of her face. We hear her exhale, then the camera is abruptly in the place of the mirror, and her face occupies most of the screen. The lens receives Marguerite’s consideration. We last saw her weeping; she is not weeping now; her eyes suggest exhaustion, and vast disappointment. Then, in the space of two or three seconds, the focus of her gaze changes. The eyes widen fractionally; the exhaustion appears to dissipate. Marguerite is no longer looking at what she sees in the glass: she is looking through the glass, at us. Her gaze makes each of us feel that we are being specifically addressed. “Look at me,” says her gaze. Nothing in her face undergoes any alteration; her mouth is relaxed and closed; there is no frown. She blinks, slowly, with composure; that is the only movement. She is not protesting; neither is she requesting pity. The power of her gaze is the power of absolute openness. For a full minute we are not released. Each of us must look at her; we must look into her eyes and return the gaze of this dying woman, until, in an instant, the screen becomes black. For ten seconds the screen is black, then the names scroll up in silence.