The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

  William asleep when I get home. At seven he appears. While I cook, he makes sandwiches for himself. Thus a semblance of independence is maintained. He buys his own food and makes a cash contribution, but the money he is paid by the agency would support nobody. Some nights, his labour is not needed; tonight, however, he is required to present himself. He likes to work at night. He enjoys the peacefulness of it, being alone in a brightly lit office, with the city in darkness outside. Sometimes, it’s like being at sea. Even when it’s boring, it’s better than most of the jobs he has done over the past few years. For one thing, it’s not doing damage to his health.

  He’s reading a book about the search for alien life, a subject that has been on his mind a lot recently, he tells me. In the small hours of the morning, when he stops for a quick bite, he gazes out at the sky and wonders which of the two possibilities is true: we are alone in the universe; or we are not. He is inclined to think that the conditions that were necessary for life to have developed on earth are so improbable that it’s likelier that we’re alone. Even if this is not the case, he has learned from his book, we might as well be alone, because there’s virtually no chance that we could ever detect any life that might exist in the far depths of space. There’s virtually no chance that any living beings, in any star system, could ever make contact with any other. Scientists have argued that all civilisations have a limited time span of a few thousand years. Ours will be destroyed by climate change; others would expire for other reasons. If that’s the case, there’s no way that contact could be made across distances of millions and millions of light years. Worlds would bloom and die in total isolation. “And with that cheery thought,” says William, “I’ll leave you to your evening.”

  He goes back upstairs with a plate of sandwiches and a beer. I read in the living room; he reads in the room above. At eleven-thirty he goes to work. In the morning, as I am leaving, we might meet on the street, but sometimes he stops at a café or takes a walk through the park before returning to his room. The walk helps him to sleep. Most days, it is evident that he has not even opened the living-room door during my absence. He is drinking much less than he used to, as he had promised he would. William is the ideal tenant. But his life is in suspension. And I am his gaoler, albeit a well-meaning one. My charity is oppressive.

  May

  Benoît had wanted to be present on the set of La Châtelaine; he was uneasy about what the film seemed to be becoming. Imogen conveyed the request to Antoine Vermeiren. “The idea is ridiculous,” he said. “Would Benoît allow me to look over his shoulder while he’s doing his work? No. It would absurd.” But in Paris, talking about Chambre 32, Imogen said to me, as we were walking over the Pont de la Tournelle: “I would have been happy for you to be there.” It became a long walk. “This could be the end of a beautiful friendship,” she said, before telling me about the maison de maître. At the conclusion she kissed me. It was not a kiss to restart an affair; it was more a kiss of alliance.

  •

  “It’s not about happiness,” she said, of the maison de maître. “I don’t go there to be made happy.”

  •

  Last night, a documentary about life in Cornwall’s fishing ports: decline, hardship, resilience; resentment of fishing quotas and bureaucrats and second-homers; all as one would expect. One surprising episode: a young man from the West Midlands, whose sole experience of life at sea has been a return trip on the Dover to Calais ferry, is taken on as a crew member, for a two-day trial. He discloses to the camera that he’s really a singer-songwriter, but hasn’t been getting the breaks. “That’s how desperate we are,” says the captain. The boat is barely out of sight of the harbour when the new recruit begins to turn green. By the time the nets are being dropped, he’s curled up on his mattress with a bucket. Having half-recovered, he takes his place at the gutting trough. The slurry of fish guts provokes another fit of vomiting. “He’s absolutely bloody useless,” William heckles. “I’d give it more of a go than that twazzock.” At a gorgeous shot of the sunrise—rich orange light seeping over the sea, under a lid of graphite-coloured cloud—William expresses an interest. In the course of the next hour, the notion gathers power. They don’t need a CV or qualifications, William points out. He is stagnating here; the sea and the wild terrain of Cornwall could be exactly what he needs. It stands to reason, given the shape of the country, that there should be a concentration of energies in the southwestern peninsula. The stone circles of Dartmoor are proof. We talk about the places in Cornwall that I saw with Imogen. By midnight, a decision has been reached. As if disinterested, I urge caution.

  •

  Visitors to the Sanderson-Perceval today: nineteen. But two weddings next month, and a magazine photoshoot. All possibilities for revenue generation are being explored.

  •

  “The sun is the eye of god,” says the Count to Nicolas Guignon, who will be dead, at the hands of the Count’s myrmidon, before the sun rises. Midnight has already struck. The concert of the night is in its third hour. Torches burn along the length of the path on which the Count and the young man are walking. “The judging eye of the sun cannot see us,” says the Count, smiling pleasantly. Guignon imagines that the Count is alluding to his relationship with Agamédé, who is known to be the Count’s mistress. We hear a Boccherini quintet. The musicians are playing in the belvedere that now comes into sight. It is a large and elegant structure, with ten white columns supporting a tent-like roof of patinated copper. Black muslin has been hung between the columns. The candles that have been set around the music stands are visible from outside as patches of dark gold on the black fabric. We see Agamédé now: she stands beside a stone cornucopia, alone, listening to the music. She closes her eyes at the sweetness of it. The light of a flame gilds her face and throat; it shimmers on the grey-blue satin of her dress. Agamédé is as lovely as a woman in a Watteau fête galante. In the shadows of a bower, Guignon admires her as she listens. Her beautiful solitude fascinates him.

  •

  The Count, seated with Agamédé in an alcove of the garden, within sight of the belvedere, closes his eyes and takes her hand, overcome by the voluptuous melancholy of the music. He envies these servants of Euterpe, he tells her, taking her hand. He has composed some simple pieces, but his talent is negligible. “I would give everything to be another Couperin,” he tells her. “Everything,” he sighs. His hand trembles. He has just recovered from a fever, from which, at its zenith, it had seemed that he might die. At times he had felt that his body was losing its substance in the furnace of the illness, he tells Agamédé. The boundary between his body and the material of his surroundings had been dissolved; his flesh had become indistinguishable from the air that flowed into and out of his body—indeed, from everything. He hopes that the hour of his death will be even more exquisitely pleasurable. “The highest bliss at the ultimate moment. Our final reward,” he murmurs. “Until then, we have music,” he says, putting a gallant kiss on Agamédé’s hand.

  •

  Nicolas Guignon opens his eyes and sees painted beams above him; he has been brought to the music room; we see that he knows where he is. Hearing footsteps, he tries to turn his head, but the muscles of his neck have lost all strength. Now the face of the Count, his patron, appears in front of the ceiling, smiling. But the Count does not speak, and Guignon cannot; his tongue barely stirs in his mouth; it is like an anemone in a tiny pool. His face is greasy and as pale as the candles that have been placed around him. The Count smiles; he wipes a finger across the young man’s brow, firmly, as if removing a mark from the veneer of a table. With distaste, he inspects the fingertip. Guignon’s eyes strain to ask a question that the Count does not answer. “My physician will attend to you,” says the Count. “Do not be afraid,” he says; his voice is strangely muffled; it seems to be issuing from behind a mask. We hear footsteps: hard heels on wood. A bag is set down on the floor, close to the couch on which Guignon is lying; we hear a jangle of metal
instruments. Were he able to move, just to angle his face an inch or two to the side, he would recognise the black-cloaked man who is kneeling at the feet of the Count, opening the bag: he is the gardener. The knife that the gardener takes from the bag is like a little sword, with a flat and gleaming blade, sharpened along both edges. From beneath the couch, he pulls out a porcelain bowl. Guignon’s hand, taken gently by the false physician, offers no more resistance than a slab of fat. Thick fingers, stained grey by the soil in which they have worked for many years, stroke the inner surface of Guignon’s forearm. The blade is placed athwart the excited vein. The incision will remove the poison, the Count tells the stricken young man. Brick-coloured blood begins to flow down the bright white curve of the bowl. The blood deepens quickly. We hear the shuddering of Guignon’s breath. The Count takes his victim’s other hand, as if to comfort him. From the musicians’ balcony, Agamédé observes the murder. Her face has the composure of death, yet tears are streaking from her eyes; she is a weeping statue. For fully ten seconds the camera presents Imogen’s face, impassive, weeping from unblinking eyes.

  •

  There has never been an audit of the Sanderson-Perceval collection. Only I know exactly what is in the storerooms. I could sell a dozen items, and the loss would not be detected. A walnut box contains miscellaneous coins of various dates and nations, none in mint condition, none rare. Another box holds an array of magic lantern slides, showing scenes from Puss in Boots and Cinderella; some scenes are missing, and many of the slides are cracked. Under a dust sheet lies a broken longcase clock. There are faulty microscopes, globes of various types of marble, some chipped porcelain, mould-damaged books, tarnished surgical equipment, knick-knacks garnered from various corners of Europe. For as long as we retain these objects, nobody is going to see them.

  For anything of any age, however, there is always a collector. It would be easy to find a buyer for A Padstow Schooner. Showing a flat little ship lying on a sea like a ruffled carpet, the picture was displayed as a painting by Alfred Wallis until a connoisseur of Wallis’s untutored art informed us that we were in possession of a fake. The picture is faux-naïf, not naïf. Irrespective of its authorship, someone would buy it. Fake Wallises have sold at auction, albeit for a fraction of what a genuine article would fetch. Perhaps one day our fake would resurface, in Wallis’s name, adorned with bogus provenance. Such things have happened.

  Sometimes, after a glass or two, I have pictured myself dropping a cash-stuffed envelope into the letterbox of the Melville Street hostel, under cover of darkness. The self-satisfaction of charitable action, anonymously executed.

  •

  The false Wallis was acquired by Manfred Sanderson, the last of the line, the man who bequeathed the house and its contents to the city. Manfred’s brothers, Frederick and Albert, were both gassed at St. Julien. This is where the guided tour always ends: at a photograph taken in the Royal Crescent in June 1914, with Benjamin Sanderson at the wheel of his Star Torpedo tourer; Manfred occupies the seat beside him; behind them sit Frederick and Albert, who would be dead within the year. It is difficult to see this picture for what it was—a simple snapshot of an afternoon’s outing. Knowing the denouement, one imposes a shadow of death, of fate.

  •

  Did Antoine Vermeiren, I pretended to wonder, give himself the role of Pierre as a cost-cutting measure? Or was it that he regarded himself as a competent actor, despite all the evidence to the contrary? Vermeiren/Pierre is the most natural person in the film and therefore, in this context, the most false; in some scenes, it as if he has wandered out of a documentary and into a film of a quite different kind. At times, Vermeiren/Pierre seems to be suffering from a constriction of the throat. The proximity of the camera appears to embarrass him; he blinks like a pale-eyed man in strong sunlight. Sometimes he seems to be listening to a prompt, through an earpiece. There was no earpiece, Imogen told me, and money had not been a factor. It had been a risk, to cast himself in the role, but she thought that the risk had paid off—or so she said. There were moments at which one might suspect that this was not a professional actor, she conceded, but these did not detract from the film. In fact, she asked me to believe, Vermeiren’s lack of professionalism was a positive quality. His awkwardness augmented the strangeness of the film; there was something uncanny about certain scenes, as if Pierre were in the midst of a lucid dream. And it had not been Antoine’s intention that we should surrender to the drama of the film, Imogen argued; we should think of him as a puppet-master who has made sure that his hands can be seen. This argument was ingenious, but weak; I accused her of not believing what she was saying. An idea had fastened itself to me: that Antoine Vermeiren had been her lover. We argued, and I left. We would have one more night together.

  •

  “I detest pornography,” proclaimed Antoine Vermeiren. Pornography is anti-erotic; it is a manifestation of the “despair of the impotent,” a symptom of “our diseased social structures.” Actors in hardcore films have reduced themselves to the role of components in the money-manufacturing machine, he stated, though he was at pains to point out that he would never condemn those women who, having been brutalised by lovers or husbands or poverty, decide to submit to this degradation. In such contexts, one must take care in using the concept of assent, he pronounced.

  It was alleged that Vermeiren had promised roles to two young actresses in return for sexual favours. He did not deny that certain sex acts had been proposed, but contended that the young women had misunderstood or misrepresented his auditioning process. The acts that they had been encouraged to perform would have been crucial to certain scenes in his film. It would have been remiss of him, he maintained, not to determine beforehand whether or not these aspiring young artists possessed the requisite boldness of character.

  Vermeiren often praised Imogen’s boldness; her courage. She was courageous in Le Grand Concert de la Nuit and even more courageous in Chambre 32. When the first allegations against Vermeiren became public, she and I argued. There were reasons to doubt the word of the actresses, Imogen told me. And for some people, Antoine’s “persona” was a little too combative, a little too “pungent,” she conceded. Coercion, however, was anathema to him. Film is always a collaborative art form, said Imogen, and Antoine Vermeiren’s films were more collaborative than most; “mutual respect and trust” were fundamental to his way of working.

  •

  A Saturday evening, mild; Imogen had met me at the station, and we had decided to walk to Soho, to eat there. The conversation became difficult as we reached Portman Square. We were waiting for a gap in the traffic when she said: “Antoine phoned this morning.” Her voice was like that of a doctor, preparing her patient for ambiguous test results. What Vermeiren had in mind was something that had developed out of the Bataille project. Slipping a hand around my elbow, she told me what he was proposing: the sex would not be faked. It would, however, only be a performance, she assured me. She asked: “How would it be if you didn’t know me? What would you think of the actress then?” My mind at that moment lacked the equilibrium necessary for the consideration of this hypothetical situation. “But I do know you,” was all I could answer. “It would be an act, that’s all,” she repeated. “Do you doubt that I love you?” she asked. We chose a noisy restaurant in Chinatown, perhaps because it would not be possible to have a conversation there. “It’ll probably never happen,” she said. If it did, I eventually told her, I would try to accept it. I would fail to accept it, I knew.

  •

  “You have to find the character within yourself, ” Imogen had once said, in an interview. It was merely one of those things that actors say, she told me—as a writer might say that everything she writes is fundamentally autobiographical. She had become Roberte—the cold and manipulative Roberte—so easily, it seemed; she had discovered her—uncovered her—not created her. When the hapless Auguste, on his last night in Vézelay, implores her to read the confession that he has written for her, I recognised
the immovable composure, the light but decisive pressure of the lips, the slow fall and rise of the eyelids. The abrupt withdrawal that was signified by Roberte’s eyes—I had seen it before, when we had argued. In the memory of those arguments I seemed to be observing Roberte, or a version of Roberte that was not yet fully achieved. The way Roberte narrowed her eyes and turned away, without speaking—that was Imogen. The controlled evenness of Roberte’s voice, when her anger was at its highest pitch—in our last argument, Imogen’s voice had taken on that tone, that timbre. It was like remembering a rehearsal. I hated Roberte in part because she had changed Imogen, or changed the Imogen that I saw.

  •

  When I recall our final evening, I remember a person who is myself, but not quite in character. I talked to Imogen as if I were her father. I remember using words such as “prurient” and “meretricious.” I delivered a judgement: “You are making a mistake.” Then her laugh, like the incredulous laughter of Roberte. Now, if I watch Roberte, the art of Imogen’s performance is more apparent than it was. But I hardly ever watch Roberte. I will never find any merit in Chambre 32.

  •

  An American psychologist has identified no fewer than six subtypes of a psychological condition known to believers as Histrionic Personality Disorder. The “theatrical” subtype is said to be “mannered” and “affected,” and to “simulate desirable or dramatic poses.” Moreover, the character of the “theatrical” HPD subtype is often “synthesized,” I read. There is a caveat: “Any individual histrionic may exhibit none or any of the following traits.” This is what it says—may exhibit none or any. Furthermore: “Because the criteria are subjective, some people may be wrongly diagnosed.” It comes as no surprise to read that HPD is also known as “hysterical personality” and that “this personality is seen more often in women than in men.”