Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

Visitors to the Sanderson-Perceval today: nineteen. But two weddings next month, and a magazine photoshoot. All possibilities for revenue generation are being explored.

‘The sun is the eye of god,’ says the Count to Nicolas Guignon, who will be dead, at the hands of the Count’s myrmidon, before the sun rises. Midnight has already struck. The concert of the night is in its third hour. Torches burn along the length of the path on which the Count and the young man are walking. ‘The judging eye of the sun cannot see us,’ says the Count, smiling pleasantly. Guignon imagines that the Count is alluding to his relationship with Agamédé, who is known to be the Count’s mistress. We hear a Boccherini quintet. The musicians are playing in the belvedere that now comes into sight. It is a large and elegant structure, with ten white columns supporting a tent-like roof of patinated copper. Black muslin has been hung between the columns. The candles that have been set around the music stands are visible from outside as patches of dark gold on the black fabric. We see Agamédé now: she stands beside a stone cornucopia, alone, listening to the music. She closes her eyes at the sweetness of it. The light of a flame gilds her face and throat; it shimmers on the grey-blue satin of her dress. Agamédé is as lovely as a woman in a Watteau fête galante. In the shadows of a bower, Guignon admires her as she listens. Her beautiful solitude fascinates him.

The Count, seated with Agamédé in an alcove of the garden, within sight of the belvedere, closes his eyes and takes her hand, overcome by the voluptuous melancholy of the music. He envies these servants of Euterpe, he tells her, taking her hand. He has composed some simple pieces, but his talent is negligible. ‘I would give everything to be another Couperin,’ he tells her. ‘Everything,’ he sighs. His hand trembles. He has just recovered from a fever, from which, at its zenith, it had seemed that he might die. At times he had felt that his body was losing its substance in the furnace of the illness, he tells Agamédé. The boundary between his body and the material of his surroundings had been dissolved; his flesh had become indistinguishable from the air that flowed into and out of his body – indeed, from everything. He hopes that the hour of his death will be even more exquisitely pleasurable. ‘The highest bliss at the ultimate moment. Our final reward,’ he murmurs. ‘Until then, we have music,’ he says, putting a gallant kiss on Agamédé’s hand.

Nicolas Guignon opens his eyes and sees painted beams above him; he has been brought to the music room; we see that he knows where he is. Hearing footsteps, he tries to turn his head, but the muscles of his neck have lost all strength. Now the face of the Count, his patron, appears in front of the ceiling, smiling. But the Count does not speak, and Guignon cannot; his tongue barely stirs in his mouth; it is like an anemone in a tiny pool. His face is greasy and as pale as the candles that have been placed around him. The Count smiles; he wipes a finger across the young man’s brow, firmly, as if removing a mark from the veneer of a table. With distaste, he inspects the fingertip. Guignon’s eyes strain to ask a question that the Count does not answer. ‘My physician will attend to you,’ says the Count. ‘Do not be afraid,’ he says; his voice is strangely muffled; it seems to be issuing from behind a mask. We hear footsteps: hard heels on wood. A bag is set down on the floor, close to the couch on which Guignon is lying; we hear a jangle of metal instruments. Were he able to move, just to angle his face an inch or two to the side, he would recognise the black-cloaked man who is kneeling at the feet of the Count, opening the bag: he is the gardener. The knife that the gardener takes from the bag is like a little sword, with a flat and gleaming blade, sharpened along both edges. From beneath the couch, he pulls out a porcelain bowl. Guignon’s hand, taken gently by the false physician, offers no more resistance than a slab of fat. Thick fingers, stained grey by the soil in which they have worked for many years, stroke the inner surface of Guignon’s forearm. The blade is placed athwart the excited vein. The incision will remove the poison, the Count tells the stricken young man. Brickcoloured blood begins to flow down the bright white curve of the bowl. The blood deepens quickly. We hear the shuddering of Guignon’s breath. The Count takes his victim’s other hand, as if to comfort him. From the musicians’ balcony, Agamédé observes the murder. Her face has the composure of death, yet tears are streaking from her eyes; she is a weeping statue. For fully ten seconds the camera presents Imogen’s face, impassive, weeping from unblinking eyes.

There has never been an audit of the Sanderson-Perceval collection. Only I know exactly what is in the storerooms. I could sell a dozen items, and the loss would not be detected. A walnut box contains miscellaneous coins of various dates and nations, none in mint condition, none rare. Another box holds an array of magic lantern slides, showing scenes from Puss in Boots and Cinderella; some scenes are missing, and many of the slides are cracked. Under a dust sheet lies a broken longcase clock. There are faulty microscopes, globes of various types of marble, some chipped porcelain, mould-damaged books, tarnished surgical equipment, knick-knacks garnered from various corners of Europe. For as long as we retain these objects, nobody is going to see them.

For anything of any age, however, there is always a collector. It would be easy to find a buyer for A Padstow Schooner. Showing a flat little ship lying on a sea like a ruffled carpet, the picture was displayed as a painting by Alfred Wallis until a connoisseur of Wallis’s untutored art informed us that we were in possession of a fake. The picture is faux-naïf, not naïf. Irrespective of its authorship, someone would buy it. Fake Wallises have sold at auction, albeit for a fraction of what a genuine article would fetch. Perhaps one day our fake would resurface, in Wallis’s name, adorned with bogus provenance. Such things have happened.

Sometimes, after a glass or two, I have pictured myself dropping a cash-stuffed envelope into the letterbox of the Melville Street hostel, under cover of darkness. The self-satisfaction of charitable action, anonymously executed.

The false Wallis was acquired by Manfred Sanderson, the last of the line, the man who bequeathed the house and its contents to the city. Manfred’s brothers, Frederick and Albert, were both gassed at St Julien. This is where the guided tour always ends: at a photograph taken in the Royal Crescent in June 1914, with Benjamin Sanderson at the wheel of his Star Torpedo tourer; Manfred occupies the seat beside him; behind them sit Frederick and Albert, who would be dead within the year. It is difficult to see this picture for what it was – a simple snapshot of an afternoon’s outing. Knowing the denouement, one imposes a shadow of death, of fate.

Did Antoine Vermeiren, I pretended to wonder, give himself the role of Pierre as a cost-cutting measure? Or was it that he regarded himself as a competent actor, despite all the evidence to the contrary? Vermeiren/Pierre is the most natural person in the film and therefore, in this context, the most false; in some scenes, it as if he has wandered out of a documentary and into a film of a quite different kind. At times, Vermeiren/Pierre seems to be suffering from a constriction of the throat. The proximity of the camera appears to embarrass him; he blinks like a pale-eyed man in strong sunlight. Sometimes he seems to be listening to a prompt, through an earpiece. There was no earpiece, Imogen told me, and money had not been a factor. It had been a risk, to cast himself in the role, but she thought that the risk had paid off – or so she said. There were moments at which one might suspect that this was not a professional actor, she conceded, but these did not detract from the film. In fact, she asked me to believe, Vermeiren’s lack of professionalism was a positive quality. His awkwardness augmented the strangeness of the film; there was something uncanny about certain scenes, as if Pierre were in the midst of a lucid dream. And it had not been Antoine’s intention that we should surrender to the drama of the film, Imogen argued; we should think of him as a puppet-master who has made sure that his hands can be seen. This argument was ingenious, but weak; I accused her of not believing what she was saying. An idea had fastened itself to me: that Antoine Vermeiren had been her lover. We argued, and I left. We would have one more night together.