Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

I can find few reviews of La Châtelaine in English. One critic, reporting from a film festival, professes to have enjoyed the film, though he found it self-conscious, and not quite the serious work of art that the director evidently believes he has created. Another writes that some people were claiming that they found the sex scenes boring. ‘All I can say is that nobody was looking bored at the time,’ he writes.

On occasion, in good weather, William slept in a cemetery, he tells me. His favoured berth was a slab that had cracked along its length, down the centre, and had subsided a little, to form a sort of hammock. A mat of ivy covered the marble, making a mattress. Below the stone lay the remains of someone called Amos Deering, born 1823, died 1884, and his wife, Emily, ‘who rejoined him’ in 1897. It was comfortable, William assured me, and he liked the names of the occupants, though not as much as the names of the nearby Cornelius Febland and his wife Tabitha, née Villin. The names created a nice atmosphere, says William; he felt comforted by them; he would recite them like poems. Cemeteries are special places, he says, because of the energy that flows through them. ‘It’s all about lines of force,’ he explains. Burial sites, churches, ancient settlements and monuments – all sorts of significant localities lie along these lines of force. If one were to take a map and draw lines between them, the pattern would be obvious. William has seen such a map, and it was amazing. It was like an X-ray of the land. People have it the wrong way round: they think graveyards grew alongside churches, but in fact the dead were there first. Before there were any churches, villages grew where the lines of force intersect, and that’s where the dead were buried. Obviously the villagers weren’t aware that this was what they were doing. It’s the same with magnetic fields: we can’t feel them, but they have an effect. Stonehenge, Glastonbury, the pyramids – they are all connected. The ancient structures are like transformers for the energies of the earth, says William, spreading his arms as if to receive the rays. In the cemetery where he used to sleep there were some graves that had an obelisk instead of a cross. ‘Those people knew what they were doing,’ he informs me. By raising an obelisk, the creators of those memorials were aligning themselves with the pharaohs, not with Jesus. The Egyptians knew all about energy, says William.

Shortly after the death of his mother, Arthur Perceval was entrusted to the care of one of his father’s cousins, in distant Durham. He was three years old, and he would never again see the house in which he had been born. It is possible that he never saw his father again either. We can only speculate as to why Charles Perceval might have thought that a conclusive severance would have been in the best interests of the boy. In Charles Perceval’s journal there is not a single reference to his son. The archive has no letters in which Arthur is mentioned, other than the one dated November 9th, 1882, sent from Durham, informing his father of Arthur’s death. Having trained as an architect, at the age of twenty-four Arthur Perceval had gone to Rome to study; ten months later, in Ravenna, he shot himself, in circumstances of which we know nothing. Perhaps in killing himself he was also killing the father who had rejected him, Imogen proposed; the father who was to outlive him by almost thirty years.

On hearing more about John Perceval, the father of Charles, Marcus Colhoun gave some thought to the idea of introducing the figure of Julius Preston’s father, or rather the memory of him, and of his work. It was remarkable that, in an age in which puerperal fever was a common cause of death immediately after childbirth, no woman under the care of John Perceval ever died of it. Indeed, it was remarkable that John Perceval should have made this branch of medicine a speciality: obstetricians were not generally held in high regard at that time, and the Royal College of Physicians regarded the delivering of babies as ungentlemanly work. The secret of Perceval’s success was simple, I explained to Marcus: he was in the habit of washing his hands before and after contact with his patients. I told him about the eminent surgeon of that period who worked in a gown that was brown with the blood of his previous operations. And just one year after Queen Victoria had been anaesthetised with chloroform during the birth of Prince Leopold, John Perceval was using chloroform to reduce the ordeal of labour. The pathos of the death of Beatrice would be heightened were the father of her husband to be given the attributes of John Perceval. A terrible irony that she should die in childbirth – but a cheap irony, Marcus Colhoun decided.

‘You should tell my mother about the hand-washing,’ said Imogen. ‘A hygiene-based horror story would be right up her street.’ It was not the pain that had made childbirth so traumatic for her. The pain was not inconsiderable, especially with Imogen. (‘Difficult right from the start, she told me,’ Imogen said.) But she could cope with the pain. Pain was in the mind and could be disregarded, or almost. But she was revolted by the mess of childbirth. It offended her, the filth that her body expelled along with the baby. Imogen wondered sometimes if her mother regarded all sexual contact as an unhygienic mêlée of bacteria and viruses.

In London, on the streets, William came to know someone who had been in prison for fifteen years, for killing a man in a fight. He had become a model prisoner, trusted by prisoners and staff alike. He was a ‘listener’ – someone in whom the others could confide. The person he had killed had once been involved with his sister; he was a pimp; he’d done time for GBH as well. Within a few months the relationship was over. The young woman came home to her brother one evening with a black eye and a cracked tooth. There was a confrontation outside a club, a brawl that was started by the pimp, as the court accepted; it ended with the stabbing. The killer pleaded guilty; he was contrite. But, he told William, he really couldn’t say that he was sorry that this person was dead. Although he had expressed remorse, remorse was not what he felt. He accepted that he had done wrong in putting an end to this individual, however murderable his victim might have been. For society to function, punishment was necessary; this he understood. So when he had said that he was sorry, what he had meant was that he accepted his sentence. And the next time he found himself in a situation that was getting out of hand, he wouldn’t pull out a knife, probably. But that was not because his moral compass had been realigned during his time in prison – it was because he had left his former self behind, which was not quite the same thing. Having been removed from the streets for a few years, he had become somebody who was unlikely ever to do what the earlier version of himself had done.

And William wants me to know that already, having had a roof over his head for less than a month, he has come to feel that he has moved on, as a person. In the past couple of years he’d been a bit close to the edge at times, he admits. For instance, in London one night he’d just snapped when someone in a big car had almost knocked him down at a crossing, when the lights were on red; the driver said something to him, something ‘uncomplimentary to the homeless community’, so William took a coin out of his pocket and scraped it across the doors, then ran like hell. ‘I don’t think I’d do that now,’ he says, as if assuring his probation officer that he is making good progress. ‘Can’t say I regret doing it, though,’ he adds.