The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  He seemed not to be expecting anything, but Imogen opened her bag and took out a ten-pound note. “Fuck me,” he said, holding the note in both hands, at arm’s length. “Pardon the language. But—”

  “Take it,” she said.

  “You won’t win,” I told him.

  He folded the note in half and slotted it into a pocket of his bag. “This means I’ll be back,” he said. “You know that, right?” His eyes were watering.

  When he had gone, I took issue with Imogen’s generosity. “He’ll spend it on drink,” I objected.

  “Maybe,” she said. “If that’s what he needs.”

  I made some other uncharitable observations.

  “Would you like to be in his place?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure I know what his place is.”

  “Whatever it is, it isn’t one we’d swap for ours.”

  •

  Some people of “wild imagination” would be at the maison de maître, Imogen warned me. Was it because I lacked imagination, I asked, that she thought I might benefit from this experience? It was not a question of administering a corrective, Imogen said. And a lack of imagination could be regarded as a strength. This was when Imogen talked about Simone Weil, a writer she admired greatly, she told me, though Simone Weil was as unlike Imogen as it was possible to be. The imagination, Weil maintained, is coercive: it imposes itself upon the real and leads us away from the true. “Not to imagine—that’s the supreme faculty,” Imogen paraphrased. One should aim, Weil had written, “to obliterate from one’s self one’s point of view.” Imogen was inviting me to observe, to attend. There was no connotation of subservience; on the contrary. “I submit myself to your mercy,” she said, with a gesture of prostration that was not entirely parodic.

  •

  A school group this afternoon. One of the teachers, new to the school, recently returned to the area in which he grew up, tells me that he was moved by the display of spar boxes, in particular the box of Lake District minerals. Almost forty years had passed since he last saw that box, and the sight of it brought back to him, suddenly, a memory of being at the museum, aged seven or eight, with his sister, who had convinced him that the cluster of green pyromorphite crystals was in fact a lump of kryptonite, the stone that could vanquish Superman. He had no recollection of room seven, however; it must be assumed that his parents had steered him away from it.

  •

  On Alfred Street this afternoon, as a woman passed me, I was struck by an unusual perfume. Violets and something smoky were in the mix, but that was as much as I could distinguish; the scent disappeared in seconds. Even if I were to be handed a bottle of the perfume, however, I would not be capable of separating the elements of the compound. Imogen, however, would have named them immediately, like someone with perfect pitch separating the notes of a complex chord. At Val’s house, one of the guests was wearing an intricate scent. Imogen inhaled a draught of the delicious air, and said to the woman, outright, as if she had been walking with a group of friends and suddenly come upon an amazing view: “My God, that is wonderful.” The woman leaned towards her, to offer a more concentrated dose. Closing her eyes, Imogen began to name the ingredients: bergamot and grapefruit; rose, frankincense and sandal­wood; coffee, kiwi, honey. As she named them, I could discern each element. “Quite a nose,” said the woman. A conversation on the topic of perfumes ensued. Val looked on. Almost on first sight, it was clear to me, Val had arrived at a conclusion: this woman is a performer, always. And perhaps, on this occasion, Imogen was a little bolder than usual, for the benefit of Val, a woman who put so much work into her own sincerity.

  •

  Agamédé—the scene in which she removes the stopper from the phial of perfume that the Count has given her, a unique perfume composed for Agamédé on his instruction, blending the rarest and most intoxicating extracts. With an expression of great seriousness, like a chemist assessing the result of an experiment, she raises the opened bottle to her nose. Her eyes are overwhelmed by the torpor of surrender; then comes the smile—that drowsy, aroused, arousing smile.

  •

  The party at Val’s: a gathering for a select group of thirty or so, belatedly for Samantha’s birthday—some from the yoga group, a couple of colleagues, some from the pottery class, and others whose connection was never clear. Samantha’s social life was much richer now, thanks to Val. We had been invited, I assumed, partly in order that Imogen could be assessed.

  A profusion of multi-ethnic snacks and dishes had been arrayed on a table below the alcove that housed the little brass Buddha. We were making our selection when our host appeared beside us. She wanted Imogen to know that she had enjoyed Devotion. In particular, she had loved the costumes; and the childbirth scene was so powerful—“unbearable,” even. Samantha joined us, allowing Val to assist a guest who had a question about what she was eating. Then Conrad passed by, with a “How’s it going?” Had Imogen not been there, he would have moved on. We had met before. He found me uninteresting, whereas my former wife was cool, or coolish, by virtue of having walked out of a mainstream marriage to become his mother’s lover. But I was dull; just as he, with the good-bad haircut and the affected slouch and the limited edition T-shirts, was a conceited and pampered adolescent. Beside him stood a huge-eyed wraith of a girl: this was Katrin, of whose prettiness and brilliance we had heard, via Samantha. Katrin mouthed a hello and offered Imogen a hand. Her hand had about as much weight as a playing card. “I’ve heard a lot about you. About both of you,” said Imogen, giving Conrad a smile that deflected his gaze. She had remembered which instruments Katrin had mastered, according to Val: guitar, piano, flute, cello, accordion. “And you write songs, I hear,” she said. Katrin looked to Conrad, and Conrad nodded; the shyness was uncharacteristic. “Conrad writes the words,” answered Katrin in a tiny voice. “I can’t sing,” Conrad told Imogen; it was almost disarming, the way he said it—as if the inability to sing were a clinical diagnosis, of no great seriousness, but mildly embarrassing. There was a brief discussion of their tastes in music and the way they worked together, then Imogen said: “Would you let me hear something?” Again Katrin looked to Conrad. “You mean, like now?” he asked. “Why not? Who knows when we’ll next see you?” Imogen pointed out.

  Leaving Samantha to circulate, we followed the youngsters to Conrad’s room, at the top of the house. Guitars hung from brackets: a Stratocaster, a Telecaster, a Les Paul, a custom-made Spanish guitar—so many guitars, all of them gifts from the guilty father, now living in California and earning inconceivable quantities of dollars. We listened to a song that they had recorded onto Conrad’s laptop; a beguiling little piece, in the voice of a homesick traveller, with some simple strumming behind Katrin’s voice, which was quiet but true. The second song was a sweetly innocent serenade, in which the singer invited a new arrival in town to come for a walk. “Wonderful,” Imogen pronounced, and Katrin, sitting on the floor, with her arms around her knees, looked abashed. I excused myself to return to Samantha.

  “She’s a hit. Well done,” said Samantha, with a smile that seemed to imply that I had somehow executed successfully a complex subterfuge. Val, I observed, had taken note that Imogen and the youngsters had not returned downstairs with me. The creatives were bonding. Within moments of their reappearance, Val rejoined us. Katrin and Conrad were so talented, she informed us. With brisk affection, she ruffled her son’s hair, asserting her claim.

  When Imogen and I were taking our leave, Conrad and Katrin came over. Katrin, closing her eyes, pressed herself to Imogen; I received a handshake from Conrad. By association with Imogen, I had been transformed in his eyes; and vice versa.

  •

  Samantha was glad to hear that I had met Imogen; the new relationship might remove the last deposits of guilt. The betrayal was in her mind much more than it was in mine. Whatever wounds there had been had healed by this time. I was reasonable, but my reasonableness never fully convinced her. On the contrary, she took it to be
the manifestation of a deeply buried anger—an analysis with which Val, I am sure, would have concurred. But I was no longer angry; perplexed, but not angry. There was, however, a widening distance between us. She had assumed a manner that was new; a softer self-presentation; it owed something to Val’s brand of serenity.

  •

  If a soul is to know itself, it must engage with, or look into, another soul—this from the dialogue of Alcibiades and Socrates, which may or may not have been composed by Plato. “One eye looking at another, and at the most perfect part of it, with which it sees, will see itself,” we read. The soul is visible in the pupil of the eye, in the form of a girl—the word kore means “pupil” or “little doll,” I have learned. Kore is also another name for Persephone, whose myth may be read as an allegory of the soul’s imprisonment in the underworld of the flesh. The Eleusinian Mysteries, the most celebrated secret rites of ancient Greece, were dedicated to Demeter and Persephone. The details of the Eleusinian Mysteries are unclear, but it is known that initiates were required to drink kykeon, a blended barley drink which some believe to have had psychotropic effects, caused by the presence in the barley of Claviceps purpurea, the rye ergot fungus.

  •

  At the maison de maître, what I saw in Imogen’s gaze: solicitude; gratitude; surrender; blindness and oblivion. The body was satiated, quelled, sacrificed. When she opened her eyes again, she was like a woman waking after surgery. It was like falling back into life, she said.

  •

  “My aim is to enable my clients to focus on the here and now,” says Val, in this week’s bulletin. It is no easy thing to focus on the here and now, she acknowledges. Our thoughts “tend to roam in time and space.” Often they are in the past, reliving a painful memory or a pleasurable one. Often they are in the future, daydreaming or making plans. Sometimes, Val concedes, it is necessary for our thoughts to be somewhere other than where our bodies are. “We need to examine and make sense of what has happened to us,” as she points out. And we need “to shine a light onto the path that stretches ahead of us.” And yet, she alleges, many of us spend too much time with our minds focused on some place beyond where we are. In “obsessing about the past,” we run the risk of “regret-addiction.” Worrying about the years to come, we squander our time in a place that may exist only in our imagination. “For much of our lives, we are like people with binoculars pressed to our eyes, oblivious to our surroundings.”

  •

  Epicurus to Idomeneus of Lampsacus: “I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life.”

  •

  Afternoon tea and cakes with my father and Rose, in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which they discovered on their last trip into town; it’s handy for the theatres, and not too expensive, and not too noisy, Rose explains. “Phil struggles if there’s a lot of noise,” she tells me, flittering her fingers around an ear, by way of illustration. For Rose, my father has always been Phil, whereas for my mother he was always the full Philip; “a rebranding exercise,” as Emma would have it.

  Rose thinks I require pepping up; I need to meet someone. She wants to know why I haven’t signed up for any online agencies. Some of them are really good. The way they analyse your character is amazingly accurate, she tells me; it doesn’t matter what your interests are, they’ll find someone who’s “compatible.” A friend of hers—Amy, she says to my father, to ensure that he’s following—found a really lovely man last year; they hit it off right away, and now they are getting married; they both like birdwatching, she says, as if no nut could be harder to crack. “I’ll give you the website,” says Rose, consulting her phone. I promise to investigate.

  The phone holds much evidence of the improvements that Rose has made to the garden. Rose’s phone is the latest model; she is as comfortable with the technology as any teenager. And she is a tremendously efficient woman; the garden is impressive. But Eastbourne is the sunniest town in the whole of the UK, so any idiot can make things grow there, she says; the self-deprecation is not feigned. Eastbourne is changing so quickly, she informs me. Property prices were good when they moved there, but now they’ve gone mad. Rose cites examples of the madness of property prices in Eastbourne. Most of the talking is done by Rose, as is increasingly the case. My father’s hearing is worse this year than last. “A blessing, in some circumstances,” he says. They are in town to see a show, a musical. A treat for his birthday. Rose is a big fan of musicals, and Phil has come to love them too. “As long as there’s dancing. He really likes the dancing. Isn’t that right, love?” My father concurs. “You get prettier girls in musicals. Good legs,” he says, and Rose raises an eyebrow, delighted by his incorrigibility.

  “What about you?” Rose enquiries. “What are your plans?”

  I tell her that I’d thought I might wander over to the Soane museum.

  She smiles. The ageing son is a hopeless case. “Don’t forget what I said,” she says on parting, tapping at an imaginary keyboard.

  •

  My father understood the relationship with Imogen: I was going through what many men of my age go through, a low-level crisis exacerbated by the divorce, which had unsettled me more than I cared to acknowledge, he believed, or so Rose has told me. I don’t recall ever discussing the divorce with my father; I kept him apprised of developments, no more than that. He could see what drew me to Imogen: she was nice-looking, and had money. A woman with money is as attractive to a man as a moneyed man is to a woman, despite what people say, he maintained. But social class is a different matter, and with Imogen I had strayed a little too far from my proper territory, even if my territory, like my sister’s, is no longer wholly congruent with his. And actresses are flighty by nature, as everyone knows. As for the idea of having a girlfriend who was often not even in the same country, never mind in the same city—no wonder it didn’t work out. Rose, who is of a more romantic temperament than her husband, as she has often said, sees things slightly differently: actors don’t make good long-term partners, that much is obvious, but they are exciting and unusual people, so it was not surprising that I had taken a chance when the opportunity arose. And for men, it goes without saying, a pretty face goes a long way, Rose observed. Rose has a pretty face, still. For a woman in the latter part of her sixties, she is remarkably pert; she suits her name, though my sister, in the early days, when Rose was barely acceptable, was of the opinion that she was less a rose than a Christmas-tree ball—a bright and shiny void. Some respect, however, had to be given to Rose’s mercantile skills. She had, after all, made a success of her shop, the shop into which our father had walked one day, in search of a birthday gift for his daughter, thinking that an item of leading-edge kitchenware might be just the thing. Fractiously divorced the previous year, Rose was perhaps susceptible to the attractions of a dependable man, and my father was a man of manifest dependability; a man, moreover, who seemed to genuinely appreciate the quality of the merchandise on offer; he was clearly very fond of his daughter too; and a well-preserved specimen into the bargain. Rose, for her part, was a highly personable woman; in the course of the first conversation—on what must, I imagine, have been a slack day at the shop—it was established that she was the owner of the business, that she was freshly single, and that she enjoyed nothing more than cooking. Within a few weeks he had been given proof of Rose’s prowess at the stove. This, my sister was convinced, was the principal explanation for Rose’s success; our father, she thought, had not eaten anything more nutritious than ready-meals since our mother had died. And there was the sex, of course. On the evening of our introduction to Rose, a remark was made from which we were clearly invited to infer that some highly satisfactory sexual activity had been taking place. On subsequent evenings we observed, as intended, significant glances and small smiles. City-breaks were mentioned; Bruges was a preferred destination—very pretty, and much better value for money than Paris, Rose advised. The innuendos were unseemly. But my father seemed happy,
and still does.

  •

  Even if Rose had not been Rose, even if she had been a woman of our father’s age, rather than one who is less than a full decade older than his daughter, Emma could not have approved. A new wife within a year of the first one’s death—the hastiness was indecent. A longer period of mourning was our mother’s due; for a woman of our mother’s selflessness, a posthumous repayment of four or five years should have been the bare minimum, as Emma sees it. The new relationship signified too urgent a need; a lack of robustness. And then Rose is so unlike our mother. The dissimilarity is such that it has made Emma wonder, at times, about the depth of our father’s attachment to our mother. At what point in the year of being alone, Emma asks herself, had he become someone who could marry a woman like Rose? My sister is often aggrieved on behalf of her mother. Neither of us has any memory of any disagreements between our parents, but our mother’s life was not her own: she was allowed to do nothing except have children, and raise them, and then take a job that must have bored her senseless, typing letters all day. A “negative inspiration” for her daughter, as Emma has put it. When at last our mother stopped working, she began to read books, for the first time since her marriage. Her enthusiasm for the novels of Willa Cather was indicative of previously untapped resources. Too late, she confessed to Emma that she would have loved to travel across America, coast to coast. “Dad is like me—not much in the way of imagination,” said Emma once. “Mum was different—or she would have been.” She doubts whether Rose has read a book of any sort.