Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

For a short-term fix in times of glumness, Val suggests that one might consider acting. Pending a more enduring solution, we can brighten the soul a little by addressing the symptoms of our woe rather than the cause. ‘Make yourself smile for thirty seconds,’ the life-coach urges, ‘and just see what happens to your mood.’ By means of this simple ruse, obstacles can be surmounted, positivity achieved. A virtuous circle is established. Give, and you will receive. Smile, and the whole world smiles with you. ‘Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.’ Sound science underpins her advice, Val informs us, imparting news from the neurological frontline. When one smiles, benign chemicals are released: pain-inhibiting endorphins; dopamine, so important to the brain’s pleasure and reward centres; and, best of all, serotonin, the depression-lifting neurotransmitter. Any smile can do the trick, says Val, but for maximum efficacy she recommends going the whole hog, with the Duchenne smile. Taking its name from the physician Guillaume Duchenne, this is the ne plus ultra of smiles, making use not merely of the zygomaticus major, the muscle that bends the mouth upwards, but also the orbicularis oculi, by which the eyelids are operated. The truly joyful smile is dependent upon the orbicularis oculi. It used to be thought, Val tells us, that whereas the zygomaticus major is subject to voluntary control, the orbicularis oculi is not. This is why fake smiles are ‘mouth-only smiles’. However, researchers have demonstrated that people can, after all, volitionally activate the orbicularis oculi and thereby ‘put on a Duchenne smile’. We are directed to an academic paper, titled ‘The Deliberate Duchenne Smile: Individual Differences in Expressive Control’. It is not clear to me why this research was thought to be necessary. Cinema has hundreds of examples of perfectly simulated Duchenne smiles. At 27:15 in Devotion, for example, or 1:09:19 in Les tendres plaintes.

For a year or more, when she was at school, Imogen would daydream about her island. The image of her island, she told me, came from a book in the school library, in which aerial photographs of the Indian Ocean showed little islands crammed with lush vegetation, set within water as blue as copper sulphate. She imagined living alone in such a place. The trees would bear fruit perpetually; fish would teem in every pool and river; the sun would shine from dawn to dusk. With nobody to speak to, she would soon lose all sense of herself as Imogen. If there were nobody to look at her, she would lose all sense of herself as anybody. No boundary would separate her from the world. She would live in nature as happily as a monkey, she told herself.

William asleep when I get home. At seven he appears. While I cook, he makes sandwiches for himself. Thus a semblance of independence is maintained. He buys his own food and makes a cash contribution, but the money he is paid by the agency would support nobody. Some nights, his labour is not needed; tonight, however, he is required to present himself. He likes to work at night. He enjoys the peacefulness of it, being alone in a brightly lit office, with the city in darkness outside. Sometimes, it’s like being at sea. Even when it’s boring, it’s better than most of the jobs he has done over the past few years. For one thing, it’s not doing damage to his health.

He’s reading a book about the search for alien life, a subject that has been on his mind a lot recently, he tells me. In the small hours of the morning, when he stops for a quick bite, he gazes out at the sky and wonders which of the two possibilities is true: we are alone in the universe; or we are not. He is inclined to think that the conditions that were necessary for life to have developed on earth are so improbable that it’s likelier that we’re alone. Even if this is not the case, he has learned from his book, we might as well be alone, because there’s virtually no chance that we could ever detect any life that might exist in the far depths of space. There’s virtually no chance that any living beings, in any star system, could ever make contact with any other. Scientists have argued that all civilisations have a limited time span of a few thousand years. Ours will be destroyed by climate change; others would expire for other reasons. If that’s the case, there’s no way that contact could be made across distances of millions and millions of light years. Worlds would bloom and die in total isolation. ‘And with that cheery thought,’ says William, ‘I’ll leave you to your evening.’

He goes back upstairs with a plate of sandwiches and a beer. I read in the living room; he reads in the room above. At eleven-thirty he goes to work. In the morning, as I am leaving, we might meet on the street, but sometimes he stops at a café or takes a walk through the park before returning to his room. The walk helps him to sleep. Most days, it is evident that he has not even opened the living-room door during my absence. He is drinking much less than he used to, as he had promised he would. William is the ideal tenant. But his life is in suspension. And I am his gaoler, albeit a well-meaning one. My charity is oppressive.

Benoît had wanted to be present on the set of La Châtelaine ; he was uneasy about what the film seemed to be becoming. Imogen conveyed the request to Antoine Vermeiren. ‘The idea is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Would Benoît allow me to look over his shoulder while he’s doing his work? No. It would absurd.’ But in Paris, talking about Chambre 32, Imogen said to me, as we were walking over the Pont de le Tournelle: ‘I would have been happy for you to be there.’ It became a long walk. ‘This could be the end of a beautiful friendship,’ she said, before telling me about the maison de maître. At the conclusion she kissed me. It was not a kiss to restart an affair; it was more a kiss of alliance.

‘It’s not about happiness,’ she said, of the maison de maître. ‘I don’t go there to be made happy.’

Last night, a documentary about life in Cornwall’s fishing ports: decline, hardship, resilience; resentment of fishing quotas and bureaucrats and second-homers; all as one would expect. One surprising episode: a young man from the West Midlands, whose sole experience of life at sea has been a return trip on the Dover to Calais ferry, is taken on as a crew member, for a two-day trial. He discloses to the camera that he’s really a singer-songwriter, but hasn’t been getting the breaks. ‘That’s how desperate we are,’ says the captain. The boat is barely out of sight of the harbour when the new recruit begins to turn green. By the time the nets are being dropped, he’s curled up on his mattress with a bucket. Having half-recovered, he takes his place at the gutting trough. The slurry of fish guts provokes another fit of vomiting. ‘He’s absolutely bloody useless,’ William heckles. ‘I’d give it more of a go than that twazzock.’ At a gorgeous shot of the sunrise – rich orange light seeping over the sea, under a lid of graphite-coloured cloud – William expresses an interest. In the course of the next hour, the notion gathers power. They don’t need a CV or qualifications, William points out. He is stagnating here; the sea and the wild terrain of Cornwall could be exactly what he needs. It stands to reason, given the shape of the country, that there should be a concentration of energies in the southwestern peninsula. The stone circles of Dartmoor are proof. We talk about the places in Cornwall that I saw with Imogen. By midnight, a decision has been reached. As if disinterested, I urge caution.