Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

The date of the visit was agreed many weeks in advance; when the day came, Imogen’s mood was beginning to darken, but she was well enough, she assured me. On another day, she would have answered more expansively the questions that Emma and Nicholas had for her. They had many questions about the business of film-making; they talked to her as if she were some sort of explorer. That evening, Imogen’s manner was polite, patient, modest, self-deprecating. They had expected someone more voluble, I am sure; more vivid; perhaps more glamorous. Nobody looking at pictures of the group around the table would have guessed her profession, said Emma, when she phoned the following day. This was by way of praise. The reticence had been something of a surprise, Emma confessed, but she understood why I would be attracted to her. Some people, without really doing anything, manage to transmit a certain charge, Emma said. ‘Charismatic, isn’t she?’ she said. She talked about ‘still waters’, and surmised that Imogen might be easily bored. ‘I think we bored her, a bit,’ she said, not as a complaint. That was not so, I assured her, though there were times when Imogen was bored by herself. But there was never to be another visit.

Walking home, I am startled by a laugh from a young woman. The sound is exactly the delighted laugh that Imogen produced for the scene in which Julius does the sleight-of-hand trick, seeming to make his fiancée’s handkerchief disappear. A dozen takes were required, because the handkerchief would not fly as Marcus Colhoun wanted it to. At each take Imogen’s laugh was a perfect expression of spontaneous delight. Afterwards, Marcus remarked that it was easier to fake an orgasm than to do what Imogen had done. To make herself laugh, she told Marcus, she brought to mind an incident from her childhood: her brother being chased by a demented duck. The mirth of Beatrice is indistinguishable from genuine mirth. And her laugh is not at all like the sinister laughter of Agamédé, or the soft laughter of the elegant Claire, or the laughter of young Caroline, all of which were quite different from Imogen’s.

Imogen started to rub her brow. After two or three slow strokes she began to rub quickly, scowling, as if trying to remove an ink-stain from her skin. Then she lowered her hand and looked right at me, fearfully. ‘I can’t remember anything,’ she said. ‘I can’t think.’

‘But that’s not true,’ I said. ‘You’re talking to me. So you are thinking.’

‘Words are coming out,’ she corrected me.

‘Words are coming out in order, in sentences.’

Her mind, she told me, speaking very quietly, was like a lake of black water. For most of the time the water was calm, but every now and then a breeze would rush over it and some foam would appear on the surface. That’s what her thoughts were – foam on black water.

On the worst days, her mind was swarming with ‘pieces of sentences’. From these fragments, sometimes, an item of sense, or half-sense, would materialise. These moments, she said, were like ‘birds flying out of fog’.

Agamédé and the guileless Nicolas Guignon, in a chamber to which she has led him, examine a painting in which a roguish-looking man, in pink satin breeches, is playing a guitar for an audience of richly attired young adults, who recline on the grass of a romantic garden, amid roses, urns and statuary. After some discussion of the picture, Nicolas Guignon confesses to Agamédé that he has lost his heart to Delphine, his pupil, the youngest daughter of the Count. He needs to speak of the accomplishment and beauty of Delphine; Agamédé allows him to. He has much to say about his philosophy of love. Sitting beside him, Agamédé listens. Then she takes his hand, as a mother would. Her demeanour becomes grave. Transfixing him with her gaze, Agamédé says to him: ‘But I have found that love, Nicolas, is too often a thing of the imagination. A man imagines the woman he thinks he sees, and imagines that he loves her.’ So few people can bear to be alone, she tells him. ‘This weakness is the cause of what they take to be love.’ Belying their meaning, the words are spoken in tones of great tenderness. The young man is weakened by the scrutiny of Agamédé, by her voice, by her bewitching hauteur, the delicious glaze of her skin, the penumbra of candlelight in her hair. He pretends to be considering what she has said, but already he is losing his heart for a second time, or so he believes.

‘Nothing really dies,’ William states. We are sitting in the park; he clamps his hands on his knees and sweeps his gaze over the town. It makes no sense to talk about death because every human being is a field of energy, and every thought is an electrical event, he explains. Energy can never be destroyed. So it follows that we can never disappear. Radio waves play some part in the argument, as do sunlight and cosmic radiation. ‘We are information,’ he says. ‘That’s what we are.’ The monologue is punctuated by variants of this idea. ‘Information can never be lost. That’s a basic law,’ he tells me. He tells me about black holes. ‘You think black holes are these whirlpools in space, right? Cosmic plugholes,’ he proposes. Eventually everything will be sucked into them and lost forever – that’s what we think. But this isn’t right, says William. Scientists have a new idea about what will happen. Information will stream towards the black holes and be held there, on the edge, instead of plummeting into the abyss. In time, all the black holes will come together. And you could say that the result will be God. ‘All the information that there has ever been – that’s God. And we will be part of it. We will become part of God,’ he explains, with every appearance of rationality. His manner is that of a physicist rather than an evangelist. ‘I know you’re not sure about this,’ he says. ‘These things are difficult to understand.’

In London, at night, we saw a couple admiring the spectacle of luxury that had been staged in the window of a furniture shop: tables that cost as much as cars; carpets created by picturesque craftspeople in picturesque villages. In the next doorway a hand was held out. The gaze of the window-shoppers slid over the human object; the act of semi-blindness might have been determined by shame, or embarrassment, or a belief that the beggar is there by choice, or is not truly destitute. Reasons can always be found. Not a rare occurrence; we have all done it. ‘I am not seen, therefore I do not exist,’ Imogen remarked, on Oxford Street.

Online, a Q&A session with Antoine Vermeiren, recorded in Paris after the release of Le Grand Concert de la Nuit ; intermittently subtitled. The attire is smart, and slightly dandyish: sugar-white shirt; a black suit of self-evidently expensive fabric; similarly fine footwear. The one exception to the monochrome scheme is the hosiery: violet socks. The other extravagance is the hair: a thick sweep of striated grey, just short of collar-length. For every question he has several hundred words; the voice is drowsily low-decibel; as he speaks, his left hand describes curlicues in the air, mimicking the turns of his thinking; it holds a cigarette, which is deployed with easy technique, like a miniature baton. The right hand is for raking the hair. Before each answer, the hair is raked or a cigarette sipped.