The former husband’s story, on the other hand, has yet to achieve a satisfactory form. No sense of a through-road there, as yet.
In her correspondence with Charles, Adeline played the part that was expected of a woman in her position. Again and again she praised her fiancé’s intelligence and denigrated her own. Her husband-to-be was ‘the quintessence of sympathy’, she wrote, quoting the words of her sister, who similarly revered him. In an episode of self-doubt – an episode that to me seems inauthentic, as if she had felt under an obligation to admit to a transient loss of confidence on the brink of matrimony – Adeline wondered if her ‘inferior’ mind and lack of education might not in time prove burdensome to him.
The letters provide ample evidence that Adeline’s mind was far from inferior. I removed from its file the five-page letter of October 5th, 1854. As Imogen started to read it, I told her what she would find there. I can recite much of this letter from memory. Protestantism is anti-scientific, Adeline proposed, because it places unqualified reliance on the word of the Bible. But the Bible is a book composed by men, and is imperfect for that reason. And the Protestant preacher compounds the error in ruling his flock by means of words. He interprets the words of the Bible on their behalf, immersing them in a ‘cloud of speech’. The Godhead is ‘beyond all language’, Adeline proposed. The figure of Christ is the mystery of the divine made visible, and the display of the Host is a truer communication than any sermon. The contemplation of the Cross is ‘a consideration of evidence’. And is not the practice of the medical sciences a consideration of evidence too?
Furthermore, in its attitude towards sin, in its emphasis on confession and forgiveness, the Catholic Church, Adeline argued, is true to the reality of our lives, and in this respect its doctrines are aligned with the medical sciences, which adhere to ‘the facts of what we are’. The Mass is a bond of love, and so is the doctor’s mission. She cited the rule of Saint Benedict: ‘before all things and above all things special care must be taken of the sick or infirm so that they may be served as if they were Christ in person; for He himself had said “I was sick and you visited me,” and “what you have done for the least of mine, you have done for me.”’ Thus Charles’s father was mistaken in talking of the ‘mere superstitions’ of Catholicism. The Roman church is the church of life, Adeline maintained. It is a living thing, a tree; the Protestant sects are ‘dead branches, grown too far from the nourishment of the roots’.
Imogen was looking at me. ‘An obvious question, but I’m going to ask it,’ she said. ‘I take it that you and Adeline are of the same persuasion?’
‘Far from it,’ I answered.
‘Really?’
‘Really. Of no persuasion at all.’
She narrowed her eyes at me, as if I had presented a puzzle.
The museum: an assemblage of objects removed from the flow of time, protected from the depredations of utility. A nest of objects; a nest is a place in which things are born.
We had been talking about La Châtelaine. Imogen asked: ‘If I’d told you that there had been no stand-in, what would you have thought?’
All I could say was: ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Perhaps you would have liked me less.’ She added: ‘This is not an accusation.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’
We had reached the hotel. ‘Let’s go on for a bit longer,’ she said. We were walking a pace apart. With the smile of a friend, she looked at me and said: ‘But it would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?’
‘In some way, I suppose so.’
‘The thing is,’ she said, looking ahead, ‘I might have done it without a stand-in. It was discussed.’
A reaction was required of me. ‘In the interests of realism?’ I proposed.
‘If you like, yes.’
A woman with a terrier was coming towards us; we stopped to let her pass. When she had gone, we were the only people on the street. We were standing outside a large tall-windowed house; in the living room, a woman was watching TV; upstairs, a man sat at a table, looking into a laptop. The scene is as clear as my first sight of Imogen. As we stood in front of the house, she said that she had read a wonderful line somewhere: anyone observing a ‘distinguished woman’ making love would think that she was either ill or mad. As the woman in the living room reached for the remote control, Imogen moved away, and with a single finger hooked my elbow. ‘The Greeks got it right,’ she said. For them, the body was an ‘instrument of joy’. With Christianity, sex became a shameful business, with procreation as its only excuse; the body – or rather, the woman’s body – became a form of property. ‘It’s a long downhill road from Athens to Adeline,’ she said.
We were back at her hotel. ‘Have I surprised you?’ she asked, but not, it seemed, in the hope that she had; it was an enquiry as to the nature of my reaction. ‘Disappointed you?’
‘Neither of the above,’ I said.
She smiled and gave me a studying look. ‘I have never cheated on anybody,’ she said.
At home, I watched La Châtelaine again. Watching Imogen, I found myself experiencing something like jealousy, so soon.
In 1198, before assuming the papacy as Innocent III, Lotario dei Segni wrote in his De contemptu mundi: ‘Man has been conceived in the desire of the flesh, in the heat of sensual lust… Accordingly, he is destined to become the fuel of the everlasting, eternally painful hellfire.’ Even when perpetrated by man and wife, sexual intercourse, Lotario wrote, is infected with ‘the desire of the flesh, with the heat of lust and with the foul stench of wantonness.’ De contemptu mundi gives evidence of its author’s ‘deep piety and knowledge of men’, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us.
When she was eight years old, Imogen told me, there was a party at her house. The word ‘party’ was perhaps too festive in its connotations. It was a gathering of many adults, on a summer afternoon, with quantities of champagne. The reason for this gathering could no longer be remembered. What she could remember was an incident that she witnessed, towards the end of the afternoon.
The sun was setting; she was playing on the lawn. Among the children was a local girl of whom Imogen was not fond: an aggressive and clumsy child, and a whiner too. Neither was Imogen fond of the girl’s parents: they were as humourless as their daughter. The father’s hair was silver, though his face was not old, and the mother had legs that were as thin as a stork’s. They appeared to dislike each other – to find either of them, said Imogen, all one had to do was go to the corner of the garden that was farthest from where the other was standing.
The game had become boring, and the whining child was getting on Imogen’s nerves. She decided to go indoors. The whiner’s father was ahead of her, on the terrace steps. At the threshold of the house he missed his footing and stumbled; this, Imogen would later understand, was the first time she had seen a severely inebriated man. She followed. In the hall he turned left, towards the dining room, but before Imogen had entered the house she saw him come out of the dining room and cross the hall to the library. She saw him smile, as if an opportunity for mischief had presented itself. The situation was intriguing. On tip-toe she advanced to the centre of the hall, and from there she could see the silver-haired man creeping across the carpet in the direction of the big window that overlooked the garden; he was creeping in the same way that Imogen was. She moved to the doorway and peered in. At the big window stood her mother, looking out at the gathering; she was holding a cigarette in her left hand, at a distance from her face, as though passing it to someone else. It was very strange, Imogen thought, that her mother did not seem to be aware that she was no longer alone; the intruder was almost within touching distance. Then the amazing thing happened. It all happened in the space of two seconds.