Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

‘In some way, I suppose so.’

‘The thing is,’ she said, looking ahead, ‘I might have done it without a stand-in. It was discussed.’

A reaction was required of me. ‘In the interests of realism?’ I proposed.

‘If you like, yes.’

A woman with a terrier was coming towards us; we stopped to let her pass. When she had gone, we were the only people on the street. We were standing outside a large tall-windowed house; in the living room, a woman was watching TV; upstairs, a man sat at a table, looking into a laptop. The scene is as clear as my first sight of Imogen. As we stood in front of the house, she said that she had read a wonderful line somewhere: anyone observing a ‘distinguished woman’ making love would think that she was either ill or mad. As the woman in the living room reached for the remote control, Imogen moved away, and with a single finger hooked my elbow. ‘The Greeks got it right,’ she said. For them, the body was an ‘instrument of joy’. With Christianity, sex became a shameful business, with procreation as its only excuse; the body – or rather, the woman’s body – became a form of property. ‘It’s a long downhill road from Athens to Adeline,’ she said.

We were back at her hotel. ‘Have I surprised you?’ she asked, but not, it seemed, in the hope that she had; it was an enquiry as to the nature of my reaction. ‘Disappointed you?’

‘Neither of the above,’ I said.

She smiled and gave me a studying look. ‘I have never cheated on anybody,’ she said.

At home, I watched La Châtelaine again. Watching Imogen, I found myself experiencing something like jealousy, so soon.

In 1198, before assuming the papacy as Innocent III, Lotario dei Segni wrote in his De contemptu mundi : ‘Man has been conceived in the desire of the flesh, in the heat of sensual lust… Accordingly, he is destined to become the fuel of the everlasting, eternally painful hellfire.’ Even when perpetrated by man and wife, sexual intercourse, Lotario wrote, is infected with ‘the desire of the flesh, with the heat of lust and with the foul stench of wantonness.’ De contemptu mundi gives evidence of its author’s ‘deep piety and knowledge of men’, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us.

When she was eight years old, Imogen told me, there was a party at her house. The word ‘party’ was perhaps too festive in its connotations. It was a gathering of many adults, on a summer afternoon, with quantities of champagne. The reason for this gathering could no longer be remembered. What she could remember was an incident that she witnessed, towards the end of the afternoon.

The sun was setting; she was playing on the lawn. Among the children was a local girl of whom Imogen was not fond: an aggressive and clumsy child, and a whiner too. Neither was Imogen fond of the girl’s parents: they were as humourless as their daughter. The father’s hair was silver, though his face was not old, and the mother had legs that were as thin as a stork’s. They appeared to dislike each other – to find either of them, said Imogen, all one had to do was go to the corner of the garden that was farthest from where the other was standing.

The game had become boring, and the whining child was getting on Imogen’s nerves. She decided to go indoors. The whiner’s father was ahead of her, on the terrace steps. At the threshold of the house he missed his footing and stumbled; this, Imogen would later understand, was the first time she had seen a severely inebriated man. She followed. In the hall he turned left, towards the dining room, but before Imogen had entered the house she saw him come out of the dining room and cross the hall to the library. She saw him smile, as if an opportunity for mischief had presented itself. The situation was intriguing. On tip-toe she advanced to the centre of the hall, and from there she could see the silver-haired man creeping across the carpet in the direction of the big window that overlooked the garden; he was creeping in the same way that Imogen was. She moved to the doorway and peered in. At the big window stood her mother, looking out at the gathering; she was holding a cigarette in her left hand, at a distance from her face, as though passing it to someone else. It was very strange, Imogen thought, that her mother did not seem to be aware that she was no longer alone; the intruder was almost within touching distance. Then the amazing thing happened. It all happened in the space of two seconds.

Imogen’s mother was wearing a beautiful dress; it was the colour of young cherries, and reached the back of her knees. The girl saw the man crouch down, take hold of the hem of the dress and quickly lift it, as if whisking a dust sheet from a chair to see what was underneath. He raised it so high that Imogen could see her mother’s knickers. The knickers were pink and startlingly large. Only for an instant were they visible. At the touch of the air on her thighs, her mother swivelled and smacked the man across his face. It was not a lady-like slap. It was a full-force whack with a rigid hand and a long swing of the arm, as if she were smashing a tennis ball back. The noise was tremendous. The man staggered; he put a hand to his jaw as if he feared that something had been broken. That was when he saw Imogen at the doorway. Her mother saw her too, but turned back to the window, and calmly brought the cigarette to her lips. The man pushed past the child, glaring at the floor; one side of his face was now a different colour from the other.

In all the years that followed, her mother never mentioned this outrage. The man and his wife were never seen at the house again.

But one evening, near the end, Imogen fell asleep in the afternoon and when she woke up her mother was there, sitting in the window, turning the pages of a book of wildlife photos. As Imogen looked across the room, at her mother, a question spontaneously came out of her mouth: she asked about the incident with the silver-haired man. Her mother could not remember it; she could not even remember the man in question, she said. Imogen described him in as much detail as was available; she described the scrawny wife and blundering daughter. Her mother now thought she could dimly picture the girl, and her parents, but of an encounter with the father she professed to have no recollection. Episodes that seem important to a child often have no importance for their parents, she explained. Imogen did not believe that she had forgotten it, and knew that her mother knew that she was not believed. It was almost certain, Imogen thought, that the encounter had been what it had seemed to be: the stupid prank of a man who was drunk. Her mother wished it to be forgotten simply because it had been unseemly, and had involved a loss of temper. There was, however, at least one other possibility, the improbability of which did nothing to diminish its persistence. On the contrary: it was so unlikely that the thought of it was impossible to dismiss, like a malicious and uncorrected rumour. But nothing more was said about it.

In another of her letters, Adeline tells Charles that his father misunderstands the function of images. ‘He mistakes signs for idols,’ she writes. ‘We pray through them, not to them,’ she says. In Devotion, Beatrice makes the same comparison; the line was a late addition, made after I had shown Imogen this letter. Catholics are polytheists, John Perceval countered, and their saints are ‘subaltern gods’.