Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

As though it were of no consequence, William said he was thinking of doing something that would get him put away. ‘Just for a few months,’ he said. ‘Decent accommodation, edible food. Companions not always top-drawer, but beggars can’t be choosers, can they?’ It would be easy enough to do, he assured me. ‘Walk into a corner shop, put a hand in the till. Piss on a policeman. The possibilities are endless.’

I am content with my life. I have no need of company. But I found myself saying to William, as if speaking a line that had been prompted by another voice: ‘You could stay at my place.’

Slowly he turned his head to look at me; the look was almost a glare. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said.

‘There’s a spare room.’

He studied my face, as if reading a text that was written in a foreign language, of which a few words seemed similar to English. ‘You serious?’ he said.

I assured him that I was.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘There’s nothing to get.’

William considered the pavement for some time. ‘A bed for the night – that’s a tempting offer,’ he said.

Detached from myself, hearing something like ‘In this scene, I play a charitable man,’ I said to him: ‘A bed for as long as you need.’

‘I can’t afford it,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to pay,’ I told him.

‘I mean, I can’t afford anything. Rent, food—’

I repeated: ‘You don’t have to pay.’ I would give him a room for as long as it took him to find work and a place to live.

‘That could take some time,’ he pointed out.

‘I appreciate that,’ I said.

William scrutinised my face. ‘You can trust me,’ he said. ‘I’m a straight bloke.’

We shook hands, and then we walked across town together, discussing the house rules.

I was destined to my profession, Emma has often said. My brain is like a museum; images occupy my memory as exhibits occupy their display cases, she thinks. But ten minutes ago, summoned by no stimulus of which I was aware, a scene re-presented itself to me: the Bristol shot tower, its concrete bleached in the sunlight, against a blackening sky. Imogen smiled as I explained the shot-making process. I cannot see her face, though I know that she smiled, and made a joke about the deluge of information. Rain was soon falling, heavily. And this, it seems, is all that remains of that afternoon; everything else is lost. Perhaps at some point in the future another fragment of that day will appear, of its own accord, and I will not recognise the source.

Portions of fabric that had been in contact with the remains of saints were deemed to have absorbed something of their holy aura. These scraps, known as brandea, were venerated as relics. Pilgrims could manufacture their own brandea by rubbing a piece of cloth against a saint’s tomb, or by various other modes of transfer. A flask of holy water, filled at a shrine, was credited with healing properties. Likewise dust brought back from the Holy Land. Saint Aidan, I have read, took his least breath while leaning against a buttress in the church of Lindisfarne. Splinters from this buttress, by virtue of its contact with the saint, became healing relics, as did scraps from the stake on which the severed head of the Christian king Oswald had been displayed. These splinters could be dipped in water to make a medicine; a sort of sanctified tea.

(A connection here: the piece of clothing worn by the loved one, and kept by the lover for many years, in her absence; not for the sake of any specific memory, but because something of her presence inheres in it. This scarf, for instance. Its colour, blue-grey, is one of Imogen’s attributes.)

There was a colour that Imogen had particularly liked since she was a small girl, she told me; or rather, a particular embodiment of that colour – a deep reddish brown, with a certain kind of metallic lustre. Whenever she saw it, which happened infrequently, she had a moment of happiness, no matter what her mood before that instant. She recalled asking herself one day, having just seen a car of that colour: ‘Why does it make me happy?’ Was it connected with some incident that she had forgotten? Over and over again she asked herself: ‘Why does that colour make me so happy?’ And then, she said, she had found herself in a ‘labyrinth’. She could remember this moment precisely: she was fourteen, it was spring, and she was looking out of the dorm window. She had suddenly realised that she was repeating the question mechanically; her mind was functioning ‘like a questioning machine’. Then it occurred to her that her mind was not like a questioning machine – a questioning machine was in fact what it was. The question about the colour and her happiness had been caused by a spark inside her head. And this realisation – that the question was a product of that spark, and that the spark had nothing to do with herself – was in turn the product of a spark, as was this thought, and this one, and so on and so on and so on. ‘Imogen sometimes seems to be less than wholeheartedly among us,’ her headmistress once remarked.

When she was a child, she had wondered what it meant to ‘make love’; as a young woman, she had come to realise that people very often ‘make love’, in the sense that love, or what people take to be love, is frequently nothing more than a by-product of sex. And we do not achieve spiritual union through the act of love, even when the other person is someone with whom we are in love, she understood. On the contrary: at the supposed moment of fusion each individual is more alone than ever. I think of what I saw at the maison de maître : the clashing bodies; everyone engulfed in their own pleasure.

For a long time Marguerite has wanted to visit New York with her husband, and now at last, after several postponements, they are in that thrilling city together. It is everything that they expected it to be. They have seen the sights that they had wanted so much to see – the Met, Ellis Island, Central Park, the Whitney, et cetera, et cetera. They have eaten at some excellent restaurants. The weather – it is early autumn – could not be better. It is unlikely that they will return to New York; a year from now, Marguerite may no longer be alive. So they must make the most of every hour. But the demand is self-defeating: this experience is too burdened with significance to be enjoyable. They stand at the window of their hotel bedroom, looking towards the river. Philippe stands behind Marguerite, with his arms around her; she places her hands on his; they love each other, still, after so many years. The situation is ridiculous, she remarks. They must not allow themselves to be tyrannised by circumstance. New York is New York, after all. ‘And besides, everyone is always dying,’ says Marguerite. Her husband kisses her hair. Below them, the traffic flows down the avenue; the red lights flow like bright lava. When Philippe goes to the bathroom to take a shower, Marguerite stays at the window. With a finger she traces the scar, which is Imogen’s.

At Samantha’s school, a colleague had been sacked after the discovery of his affair with a pupil. Everybody had been surprised, Samantha told me, because the teacher in question was an unassuming and rather buttoned-up sort of character. On the other hand, he was in his late forties, and divorced, and the girl was attractive.