Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

Life is always preferable to the only alternative that’s on offer, Imogen’s brother stated, and his wife concurred. Helen told Imogen about something she had read, somewhere. A journalist had interviewed people who had jumped from a height, intending to die, but had survived the fall. They all said the same thing: that at the moment of letting go they had known that they had made a terrible mistake, a mistake that they would never be able to correct. Death had seemed so enticing, but now they were overwhelmed by the horror of it; for those few seconds, they were in hell; life was everything, they suddenly understood. This was true of every one of them. They were all so grateful to have survived, Helen told her sister-in-law, taking hold of her hand. But the situation was not quite the same as that of Helen’s reprieved suicides, Imogen explained: she was already on the brink of the pit. It was more than possible that her experience might prove to be the opposite: the last few minutes might be the most wonderful of her life.

‘I don’t lie,’ Imogen once said to me, in the course of an argument in which Vermeiren featured. Not as a boast but as a statement of a principle, just as one might say: ‘I don’t eat meat.’

Our last visit to the Louvre – a cool day; the air lightly grained with mist. Finding it cold, Imogen wore the black coat and the red cashmere scarf that I had bought for her. She was tired before we arrived; before deciding to go in, we sat in the gardens for a while. Never again would we do this, we knew. We did not go far into the museum. I remember looking at a bronze mirror, Etruscan; the Judgement of Paris was incised on the back of it. The mirror was barely more reflective than the floor. Even when new, it could have given only a shadowy image, one would think; it must have removed all colour from what was shown to it. In the world from which the bronze mirror had come, most people would have had no clear image of themselves, as Imogen remarked. No wonder Narcissus had been so bewitched by what he saw in the pool. A world without reflections would suit her quite well, Imogen said. Some days, when confronting her face in the mirror, she had the feeling that she was looking out through a stranger’s skin, or through a face on which a make-up artist had worked for hours.

On last night’s shift, William reports, he was paired with a Polish girl called Magda. The first sight of her gave him a bit of a turn, because for a moment he thought she was someone he had seen before, when he was in London, working as a labourer. Almost every morning, for the best part of a month, he would see this woman as he walked to the building site. She used to sit in the window of a café that he went past. She was well dressed and slim and nice-looking: trouser suit; long straight dark hair, pale skin, straight nose, small mouth. But what had really struck him about her was the way she often stared into her coffee, as if it were a crystal ball. He sensed her character. ‘Sad but hopeful, and clever,’ he says. He would have liked to talk to her, but that was never going to happen. Once, however, he passed her in the street at the end of the day, and they exchanged a glance, a glance that was ‘like a message’. It amazed him that she had been aware of his existence, though on a few occasions she had been looking out onto the street when he walked by. Then one morning, in the middle of the week, she was not there; the next day, too, she was absent; she never came back. But he had come to think that he would see her again one day, or that the glance had been telling him that something significant would soon happen, something in which she would be in some way involved. And when he first saw the pale and slim and black-haired Magda, a young woman who might have been the London woman’s sister or cousin, he wondered, for an instant, if this meeting might be a fulfilment of that meaningful glance. Was this the destined moment? The idea was dead within a few minutes. Magda had no interest in any conversation. Making the toilets as clean as new dinner plates was all she was interested in – that, and getting a better-paid lousy job as soon as possible.

In their configurations, certain scenes in Chambre 32 are the same as some scenes at the maison de maître : the man and woman, coupling; the witness. The woman, Roberte, is Imogen; she returns the gaze of the witness, her husband, who loves her, and whom she loves; the gaze has duration, and complexity. The gaze that Roberte directs at the camera, her husband’s proxy, in the bedroom of the Hôtel Saint-Étienne, is similar to the gaze that I received at the maison de maître . But it is not the same. Roberte is a huntress, a destroyer. At the climax she is still Roberte, the triumphant Roberte.

Roberte on the bed, naked, supine, looks to the side; the point of view changes – suddenly the camera is looking her in the eye. From the quality of her gaze – complicit, affectionate – we understand that its recipient is Pierre, her husband, the owner of the Hotêl Saint-Étienne. Auguste, the favoured guest, enters the frame; also naked, erect, he kneels beside Roberte. He places a hand on a breast; the hand slides over her skin, and as it descends, the viewpoint moves again; we see Roberte’s face in profile, smiling. Her mouth opens, in a silent gasp; she closes her eyes. When her eyes open again, with a surge of excitement, we see what she sees: the small aperture below the painting; the eye. Pierre observes the splendid Roberte in abandonment; perhaps his gratification is enhanced by the pretence that his spying is unobserved, and that a betrayal is happening. The lens moves in on the body of Roberte; its movement signifies arousal. I can watch this scene now, but it is distressing, even if the anguish is less than I felt when the film was new. It has been occluded by a greater anguish. But when I watch Chambre 32 the lesser pain is reawakened; again our relationship fails.

Nothing had inspired her to become an actress, Imogen told me, in the garden of the museum. She was not even sure that it would be true to say that she had ever decided to become an actress – it was something that had happened. ‘My mother will tell you that I’ve always liked showing off,’ she said. ‘But it’s nothing to do with showing off,’ she assured me. ‘I enjoy being different people – that’s what it is. “You must change your life.” You know that line? Well, I change my life on a regular basis. It’s exciting,’ she said, with a shrug.

Thirty-one visitors today.

La Châtelaine : the moment when, in ecstasy, Imogen turns her eyes to the camera, and the candlelight gleams in her tears. Ovid: Adspicies oculos tremulo fulgore micantes / Ut sol saepe refulgent aqua – her eyes glittering with tremulous brightness, as the sun glitters on clear water.