Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

We were still good friends, I said.

Samantha commended me for this. It was to my credit that I had remained on good terms both with Imogen and with herself. Val’s ex-husband was more typical of the way men behave. Though he was the guilty party, he had not reacted well to Val’s new relationship. It was as though his ex-wife had announced that she was carrying a disease that their son might contract.

We were talking about La Châtelaine, and Imogen said: ‘Tell me I was wonderful.’

‘You were wonderful,’ I confirmed.

‘Do you mean it?’ she said, pleadingly.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Oh, thank you,’ she sighed. ‘We actors are insecure people, you know. Terribly terribly insecure,’ she said, in the fluttering voice of an over-delicate creature.

A startling item in today’s paper, apropos of Wellbutrin, a drug often prescribed, we are told, to treat depression caused by the loss of a loved one: ‘the American Psychiatric Association has ruled that to be unhappy for more than two weeks after the death of another human being can be considered a mental illness.’ Can this be true? Apparently so.

Another source: ‘The APA is proposing that anyone who can’t conclude their grief and mourning within two weeks could be liable for a diagnosis.’ Previously, it appears, the threshold of unhealthy grief was deemed to be two months.

Benoît, Imogen told me, had not been entirely happy about her involvement in Les tendres plaintes; he was even less enthusiastic about La Châtelaine. Student theatricals were one thing, but this was of another order. This was not recreational make-believe. The nudity unsettled him; as did Antoine Vermeiren, whom he had disliked on first sight – ‘pretentious’ was the word that Benoît had used. In fact, Imogen said, Benoît was perturbed by the very idea of her acting. He was disturbed that she could find it so easy to dissemble. ‘I had mortgaged myself’ – this is what he thought, she told me. The world in which Benoît worked, the world of economics, was as far as could be imagined from the world of falsity in which she had chosen to enlist. When she and Benoît had met, she had been working as a translator; she was thus engaged in a milieu that bordered on the academic. It disappointed him that she had defected. What Benoît needed, ultimately, was someone of an intelligence that was more congruent with his – an intelligence such as that possessed by Jennifer, with whom he began a relationship within a month of his separation from Imogen. Jennifer was a brilliant anthropologist, and had the physique of a ballerina, and was English. For Benoît, English women were ‘sublime’. They possessed a sensuality so profound that it was often invisible on the surface – though in Jennifer’s case the surface was exceptionally alluring. ‘Creatures of the night,’ was how he characterised the English women of his imagination. When he had met Imogen, he had not known – as I had not known, until now – that she was not a thoroughbred English woman. ‘Not quite as good as the full English,’ Imogen mock-sighed. Benoît and Jennifer were married now. Benoît, on the cusp of forty when he and Imogen had parted, had needed to be married, she told me; I understood from this that Imogen did not need to be married.

We were in the Luxembourg gardens, on a bench at the Medici fountain, when Imogen told me that she was beginning to think that she would have to come back to England for the end. It was late afternoon; the air was warm in the shade of the plane trees; the reflection of the leaves put a pale green glaze on the water; a picturesque enclave of stage-managed nature. She had developed a craving for the fields of the homeland, said Imogen, as if confessing that her politics had undergone a rightward shift. ‘I’ve come over all pastoral,’ she said. We had been walking for a couple of hours, and she was tired; she lay on the bench, with her bag as a pillow, against my leg. ‘I could see you more often,’ she said. Every week, on the phone, her mother had asked her – almost ordered her, on occasion – to come back. Her mother was fully aware, of course, that palliative care of the highest quality was available in Paris, but it was available in England too, and she would ensure that Imogen received it. Leaving aside all medical considerations, returning to the family home was simply the right thing to do: it would be an acceptance of the correct and natural order of things. (The years of boarding school, it seemed, had been but a negligible interlude in the family narrative.) Imogen would not want it to be thought that she had undergone a deathbed conversion, but recently, she confessed, she had experienced something like a craving for the view from the window of the room that had been hers. The excitement of the city had become something she appreciated primarily in the abstract; the traffic had become a drone, like tinnitus. She wanted to open her window and hear the silence of the garden.

Within an hour of meeting me, Imogen’s brother told me that London didn’t suit her. London was a terrible place, thought Jonathan. All big cities were terrible places. ‘Factory farms,’ he called them. Imogen was a country girl at heart, but for some reason she was forever trying to prove the contrary. ‘She’s always been a tremendously argumentative girl,’ he said. ‘Sometimes just for the sake of it.’ That had not been my experience, I answered. ‘Just wait,’ he said. When Imogen was at Oxford, he told me, he and his parents had driven up to see her in Measure for Measure, and he had been terrifically impressed. The scene at the end, when the Duke proposes marriage and Imogen’s character says nothing – it was incredibly powerful. ‘Imo did this extraordinary bit of acting. It was all in the face. So many different things going on in her mind, you could tell. Amazing. Unforgettable.’ Much of the play had gone over his head, he admitted, but Imogen had been so well suited to the character she had played, because she was a clever and feisty girl too. ‘I was just saying that you’re much smarter than me,’ he said, as Imogen came into the room. Later, he said, he would show me the skirting board into which, when Imo was twelve years old, she had scratched some words in an alphabet that she had invented, which had letters that produced sounds that did not exist in English or in French. She had devised new names for birds and trees and all sorts of things that they would see on the long walks – the ‘forced marches’ – that she and Jonathan would undertake on Sundays in summer. Young Imo was a prodigy of invention, Jonathan told me. It was a waste of her brain to be spouting other people’s words, however talented she might be as an actress. He admired what she had achieved, but she should be a writer instead of an actor, and she should not be living in London. He wondered if I might be recruited into his campaign to bring his sister back to the good air and greenery of the native soil. ‘It will require great patience and perseverance, but we must prevail,’ he declared, overacting the soldierly resolve, for Imogen’s entertainment.

‘I won’t make five years,’ she said to me, after the first operation, as if she had been told this as a fact, and were already reconciled to it. But she called me again, later that day, in panic.