Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

‘And what have you done recently?’ Samantha wanted to know. ‘You’re stagnating,’ she told me. It seemed that I had chosen to go down with the sinking ship. Val’s ‘positivity’ evidently offended me. Did I think that passivity was a virtue in itself? ‘I think you’re happier living in the past,’ Samantha informed me.

‘Aren’t most of us?’ I countered.

‘Well, I’m not,’ said Samantha.

The museum does not allow us to reclaim the past – the past is irrecoverable. Hence the museum’s pathos. The exhibits are like stars, small pieces of light from distances that cannot be bridged.

My first sight of Samantha – more than twenty years ago, the calendar tells me. Twenty-plus years, but I remember the scene with what seems to be great clarity. Jerome called my office – a man had collapsed in the armour room. We had to push through a group of schoolchildren who had been corralled in the adjacent room; Samantha’s party, it turned out. The children were hushed, as if they had narrowly avoided a major accident. In a corner of the armour room, a large man lay on the floor; a jacket had been pushed under his head; his shirt, sky blue and too tight, was blackening with sweat. A woman held his hand as she talked to him. Her face was directly over his, and he was smiling as best he could. His grip was so strong that the woman’s fingers were bunched together, and scarlet at the tips. Her calmness was remarkable; she emanated an aura of competence. Quietly, clearly, slowly, continuously she talked to the stricken man, until the ambulance crew arrived. While she talked, she looked into his eyes. Caritas, the greatest of the virtues. ‘Yes,’ the man said, four or five times; otherwise silent, he yielded to her assurance, to her gaze.

My love for Samantha was conceived in that moment. We might persuade ourselves that love is something that emerges over time, but in many cases, or most, it is instantaneous. What follows, the ‘falling in love’, is but verification of what was comprehended in a second. It is a corroboration of the instinct. So many things can be seen in a moment.

Simone Weil: ‘We have to erase our faults by attention and not by will.’

On the third or fourth day of filming, I was in the mirrored room when Imogen came in. A conversation between the newly married couple was about to be filmed there. The fabric of that day’s dress was iridescent bronze, signifying perhaps the fire that had been lit in the soul of Beatrice. She stopped in front of one of her reflections, to appraise the effect of the dress. ‘A bold little number, isn’t it? But it does impose a certain decorum,’ she said. Extending her arms in a parody of gracefulness, she glided across the room. In the centre she halted. She glanced over her shoulder, looking away from me. I regarded one of her images in the glass, as if studying a picture, and her image looked back at me, without expression. Then the crew arrived.

At the portrait of Charles Perceval and Adeline I told their story, as I always do. The behaviour of Adeline’s sister, Marie, whose temper seems to have been problematic since puberty, had become unmanageably erratic. ‘She was frequently hysterical, the father informed the young doctor,’ I would have said, before pointing to the row of pessaries; the pessaries invariably provoke a reaction. Misalignment of the uterus was widely held to be the cause of afflictions such as Marie’s, and physicians often fitted one of these devices to correct the irregularity. Charles Perceval refused to consider such an intervention. Hysteria was not a disorder of the womb, he believed; rather it was a disorder of the mind, or not a disorder at all. Instead, he talked to the patient; he offered, I proposed, a secular confessional. The father of Marie Hewitt was reluctant to permit such a conversation to take place in private, but the doctor eventually prevailed. So Charles Perceval talked to Marie, and she, after several consultations, became considerably less troublesome, though she later made a marriage of which they strongly disapproved, and which proved to be profoundly unsatisfactory to Marie herself. She took holy orders at the age of forty, and lived to the age of ninety-six. And her sister married Charles Perceval.

Then the fatal complication: the Catholicism of the Hewitts, and Charles Perceval’s conversion. His parents, committed to the Church of England, were so dismayed by their son’s betrayal that they refused to attend the wedding. But the faith of the Hewitts was to be implicated in a much graver crisis than this. It became apparent, in the later stages of Adeline’s second pregnancy, that delivery of the child at full term could be extremely injurious to Adeline’s health. Furthermore, it was evident that the foetus was not developing as it should. Something could be done to mitigate the risk to the mother, but at the cost of the unborn child’s life. Here I direct attention to the cranioclast, that terrible instrument. Such a step would of course have been impossible for Adeline and Charles: eternal torture would have been the punishment. The child died within hours of its birth; Adeline four days later.

The tour is always a performance. Conducting visitors around the museum, I am more voluble than my ordinary self, as I am in writing this. But on this particular day I was delivering more of a performance than usual. By the ten-minute mark, on an ordinary day, I would have finished with Charles Perceval. On the day of Imogen I was behind schedule. I had given information that I normally omitted; I had accentuated the pathos. This, I knew, was attributable to her presence. I was not making an effort to impress – not in the sense of trying to make myself attractive. I did not think that such a thing was possible. Rather, what I wanted to do was to make an impressive presentation, and I wanted to do this because of the quality of her attention. I felt compelled to sustain her engagement.

At the Sanderson-Perceval Museum, one spends time in a house of some splendour. This is a major part of its appeal: the visitor escapes into a fantasy of luxuriance. It offers, moreover, an experience of the genuine: in a world of proliferating fakes and simulations, the museum is a repository of the authentic. The things that it contains have an enhanced authenticity, it might be said, by virtue of their having endured.

I watched the tape of La Châtelaine on the day that I received it from Marcus. He had characterised it as ‘Bresson meets Borowczyk’. At the time I was not sure what this meant. ‘It looks good,’ Joe had said, seeming to imply that it lacked substance. And it does look good, right from the start, where men in belted tunics and stockings appear out of the shadows and pass into the sunlight of a courtyard, a light so bright that they are obliterated by it. At the top of a tower, a crimson and gold flag hangs against a pure blue sky. At the foot of the tower, a groom is at work; the horse’s flank ripples under the brush; the animal’s breathing and the rasp of the bristles are the only sounds. In La Châtelaine there is a great quantity of silence. Conversations are observed from a distance; the actors gesture as if each movement were freighted with meaning. In the bedchamber, the lovers speak in the murmur of people under hypnosis. There are no throes of passion in the lovers’ bed; they touch each other as though their bodies were hollow.