His next film, he announces, will be based on the life – the outrageous life – of Georges Bataille. A script has been written. He has much to say about Georges Bataille, about the ‘reversal of values’, the ‘profound affinity between erotic pleasure and religious exaltation’, et cetera. The accusations that were made against Vermeiren, a few months later, no doubt played some part in the annulment of that particular project.
Pierre/Vermeiren walks down the main street of Vézelay, so self-consciously that he appears to be suffering the after-effects of cramp; his hands hang like lumps of chicken meat. And the ghastly smile that he does: intended to suggest a deep and dark and illusion-free mind, but more suggestive of toothache. Vermeiren believes, I suspect, that his creativity transcends any considerations of mere technical competence. He can no more act than I can.
Francesca tells me that I should pack a copy of Lucretius for my Roman holiday. I will like him, she promises. How could one not admire a man who, writing in the century that preceded the arrival of Christianity, argued that the gods neither created us nor have any interest in what we’re up to? Why would any deity create a species as vulnerable as humans and then confine them to this inhospitable lump of rock and water? Why bother? Do the gods crave amusement? No – they reside in a place of infinite tranquillity, and have nothing to do with the world in which we live. They do not punish us and they do not reward us. Nature is the ruling force of our world.
As did many of his coevals in the medical profession, Samuel Vickery believed that one could read in the contours of the skull the character of the mind within. The head-bones of criminals were not of the same form as those of the law-abiding, he maintained, and in proof of this theorem he displayed in his consulting room three skulls that he had acquired. They were of Italian origin, and were said to have been removed from the skeletons of a swindler, a violent drunkard and a matricide. All three came into the possession of John Perceval, and are now in room seven. The trio of criminal skulls are placed on a shelf at median adult head-height, so that they may meet the viewer on more or less equal terms.
I showed Imogen the skull of the belligerent drinker; the bumps of the cranium were indicative, supposedly, of a propensity to Combativeness. Having bought this item, John Perceval had shown it to a colleague who, like Samuel Vickery, was an adherent of the pseudoscience of phrenology. The skull, John Perceval explained, was the brain-case of a commedia dell’arte actor from Cremona. From the irregularities of the dome, he proposed, it was clear that this individual had been an exemplar of Wit and Mirthfulness. The colleague, after careful examination of the specimen, concurred with his analysis.
Looking through her reflection at the matricide’s skull, Imogen said: ‘An upholstered skull. That’s what a face is.’ She glanced at me, with a rueful smile. Years later, in her room, she would look at her wasted arm as it lay on the sheet, and say: ‘The bones are just about ready to come out.’
Walking down Union Street I catch sight of Samantha amid the shoppers and strollers, fifty yards off, heading towards me; two seconds later, as if she has sensed that she is under observation, she glances up the road, hitting me immediately, in the instant in which – feigning a sudden distraction – I detach my gaze from her. Having briefly simulated an interest in a display of jackets, I look in her direction, thinking she might have taken the opportunity for evasion. But Samantha would not be party to such pretence; she is approaching; she has prepared herself. So I smile; the smile is intended to let her know that I had seen her immediately, and was simply waiting for her. Her smile tells me that the deception has not been successful.
‘Seen something you like?’ she asks.
I indicate a tweed jacket, the most conservative item on show. ‘What do you think?’
‘A bit too horse and hounds?’ she suggests.
She has a point. ‘How are you?’ I enquire.
Her headmaster has announced that he’ll be leaving in the summer; he’s off to rescue an underachieving school in Liverpool. The topic sustains a one-minute conversation.
‘And what about you?’ Samantha asks.
‘I’m OK,’ I answer.
‘That’s good.’
In parting, I send my best wishes to Val. This is accepted wryly, with no words. Anyone passing within earshot would have mistaken us for ex-colleagues, at best.
Wherever he goes, William tells me, a CCTV camera is pointing at him. It’s like being an animal in a zoo. It’s worse than that, because the cameras make him feel bad about being himself, whereas a monkey cannot feel bad about being a monkey. It is like being accused all the time, says William. He has done nothing wrong, but the cameras make him feel that he has. In every corner of the town he is being judged and found guilty.
A woman of my age, emerging from room seven with the expression of someone who has just been grievously insulted, tells me that the warning notice should be more strongly worded. ‘There are some horrible things in there,’ she says: the dissected baby, for instance; the syphilitic head. Children could be given nightmares, she tells me. Later in the afternoon, shrieks of delighted disgust from a boy and girl in room seven; aged ten and twelve, I estimate. ‘Is that football thing real?’ the boy asks me. He points to the twenty-five pound ovarian cyst. ‘It’s real,’ I answer. ‘What about that?’ asks the girl, indicating the placenta in which repose the fractured bones of a foetus that was killed by its sibling in the womb. ‘That too,’ I tell her. ‘Sick,’ says the boy, and they go back for another close look.
I remember when Samantha first used the word ‘narrative’ in talking about herself. It was a word for which Val had developed a penchant. Val’s mission was to help people to ‘take ownership’ of their ‘personal narratives’. And now Samantha had come to understand her own story with a new clarity. While sorting through some boxes that she had brought away from her mother’s house, she had come upon a wallet of photographs. The photographs were miscellaneous in subject and in age. One made her linger: a picture of herself, at fourteen, with friends in what appeared to be a park. In the middle was Barbara, the beautiful one; to Barbara’s left, madcap Janet; to Barbara’s right, Gillian, the high-flyer, who eventually went to Oxford to study law, and forsook her old friends entirely; and beside Gillian, Samantha. She had forgotten how she had once felt about Gillian; looking at the photo, at the smile and the sidelong glance, it was so obvious, said Samantha. And before Gillian, she now remembered, there had been someone else, a delicate but regal girl, two years above her, whose elegant walk – as though she were following an invisible and extremely narrow path – Samantha had tried to emulate.
Imogen, at the age of fourteen, had been enthralled by an older girl called Hulda, a glorious blonde Amazon who threw the javelin as if intending to kill. Such adorations are commonplace, as Imogen said. Remembering Hulda, she felt no embarrassment at the infatuation; she felt nothing, because the smitten Imogen existed only as a source of memories. But for Samantha, there was a lesson to be learned from the past. She saw that she had allowed herself to be diverted from the right road. The manifold forces of conventionality – overt and covert – had prevailed over her, and consequently she had become someone who was not truly herself. Gillian had been directing her towards a road that she had not taken, and the years of marriage had been a diversion. Not that she regretted those years, I was to understand. But thanks to Val, Samantha’s narrative had at last come to make sense.