Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

‘I’m OK,’ I answer.

‘That’s good.’

In parting, I send my best wishes to Val. This is accepted wryly, with no words. Anyone passing within earshot would have mistaken us for ex-colleagues, at best.

Wherever he goes, William tells me, a CCTV camera is pointing at him. It’s like being an animal in a zoo. It’s worse than that, because the cameras make him feel bad about being himself, whereas a monkey cannot feel bad about being a monkey. It is like being accused all the time, says William. He has done nothing wrong, but the cameras make him feel that he has. In every corner of the town he is being judged and found guilty.

A woman of my age, emerging from room seven with the expression of someone who has just been grievously insulted, tells me that the warning notice should be more strongly worded. ‘There are some horrible things in there,’ she says: the dissected baby, for instance; the syphilitic head. Children could be given nightmares, she tells me. Later in the afternoon, shrieks of delighted disgust from a boy and girl in room seven; aged ten and twelve, I estimate. ‘Is that football thing real?’ the boy asks me. He points to the twenty-five pound ovarian cyst. ‘It’s real,’ I answer. ‘What about that?’ asks the girl, indicating the placenta in which repose the fractured bones of a foetus that was killed by its sibling in the womb. ‘That too,’ I tell her. ‘Sick,’ says the boy, and they go back for another close look.

I remember when Samantha first used the word ‘narrative’ in talking about herself. It was a word for which Val had developed a penchant. Val’s mission was to help people to ‘take ownership’ of their ‘personal narratives’. And now Samantha had come to understand her own story with a new clarity. While sorting through some boxes that she had brought away from her mother’s house, she had come upon a wallet of photographs. The photographs were miscellaneous in subject and in age. One made her linger: a picture of herself, at fourteen, with friends in what appeared to be a park. In the middle was Barbara, the beautiful one; to Barbara’s left, madcap Janet; to Barbara’s right, Gillian, the high-flyer, who eventually went to Oxford to study law, and forsook her old friends entirely; and beside Gillian, Samantha. She had forgotten how she had once felt about Gillian; looking at the photo, at the smile and the sidelong glance, it was so obvious, said Samantha. And before Gillian, she now remembered, there had been someone else, a delicate but regal girl, two years above her, whose elegant walk – as though she were following an invisible and extremely narrow path – Samantha had tried to emulate.

Imogen, at the age of fourteen, had been enthralled by an older girl called Hulda, a glorious blonde Amazon who threw the javelin as if intending to kill. Such adorations are commonplace, as Imogen said. Remembering Hulda, she felt no embarrassment at the infatuation; she felt nothing, because the smitten Imogen existed only as a source of memories. But for Samantha, there was a lesson to be learned from the past. She saw that she had allowed herself to be diverted from the right road. The manifold forces of conventionality – overt and covert – had prevailed over her, and consequently she had become someone who was not truly herself. Gillian had been directing her towards a road that she had not taken, and the years of marriage had been a diversion. Not that she regretted those years, I was to understand. But thanks to Val, Samantha’s narrative had at last come to make sense.

The former husband’s story, on the other hand, has yet to achieve a satisfactory form. No sense of a through-road there, as yet.

In her correspondence with Charles, Adeline played the part that was expected of a woman in her position. Again and again she praised her fiancé’s intelligence and denigrated her own. Her husband-to-be was ‘the quintessence of sympathy’, she wrote, quoting the words of her sister, who similarly revered him. In an episode of self-doubt – an episode that to me seems inauthentic, as if she had felt under an obligation to admit to a transient loss of confidence on the brink of matrimony – Adeline wondered if her ‘inferior’ mind and lack of education might not in time prove burdensome to him.

The letters provide ample evidence that Adeline’s mind was far from inferior. I removed from its file the five-page letter of October 5th, 1854. As Imogen started to read it, I told her what she would find there. I can recite much of this letter from memory. Protestantism is anti-scientific, Adeline proposed, because it places unqualified reliance on the word of the Bible. But the Bible is a book composed by men, and is imperfect for that reason. And the Protestant preacher compounds the error in ruling his flock by means of words. He interprets the words of the Bible on their behalf, immersing them in a ‘cloud of speech’. The Godhead is ‘beyond all language’, Adeline proposed. The figure of Christ is the mystery of the divine made visible, and the display of the Host is a truer communication than any sermon. The contemplation of the Cross is ‘a consideration of evidence’. And is not the practice of the medical sciences a consideration of evidence too?

Furthermore, in its attitude towards sin, in its emphasis on confession and forgiveness, the Catholic Church, Adeline argued, is true to the reality of our lives, and in this respect its doctrines are aligned with the medical sciences, which adhere to ‘the facts of what we are’. The Mass is a bond of love, and so is the doctor’s mission. She cited the rule of Saint Benedict: ‘before all things and above all things special care must be taken of the sick or infirm so that they may be served as if they were Christ in person; for He himself had said “I was sick and you visited me,” and “what you have done for the least of mine, you have done for me.”’ Thus Charles’s father was mistaken in talking of the ‘mere superstitions’ of Catholicism. The Roman church is the church of life, Adeline maintained. It is a living thing, a tree; the Protestant sects are ‘dead branches, grown too far from the nourishment of the roots’.

Imogen was looking at me. ‘An obvious question, but I’m going to ask it,’ she said. ‘I take it that you and Adeline are of the same persuasion?’

‘Far from it,’ I answered.

‘Really?’

‘Really. Of no persuasion at all.’

She narrowed her eyes at me, as if I had presented a puzzle.

The museum: an assemblage of objects removed from the flow of time, protected from the depredations of utility. A nest of objects; a nest is a place in which things are born.

We had been talking about La Châtelaine. Imogen asked: ‘If I’d told you that there had been no stand-in, what would you have thought?’

All I could say was: ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Perhaps you would have liked me less.’ She added: ‘This is not an accusation.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

We had reached the hotel. ‘Let’s go on for a bit longer,’ she said. We were walking a pace apart. With the smile of a friend, she looked at me and said: ‘But it would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?’