Imogen’s mother was wearing a beautiful dress; it was the colour of young cherries, and reached the back of her knees. The girl saw the man crouch down, take hold of the hem of the dress and quickly lift it, as if whisking a dust sheet from a chair to see what was underneath. He raised it so high that Imogen could see her mother’s knickers. The knickers were pink and startlingly large. Only for an instant were they visible. At the touch of the air on her thighs, her mother swivelled and smacked the man across his face. It was not a lady-like slap. It was a full-force whack with a rigid hand and a long swing of the arm, as if she were smashing a tennis ball back. The noise was tremendous. The man staggered; he put a hand to his jaw as if he feared that something had been broken. That was when he saw Imogen at the doorway. Her mother saw her too, but turned back to the window, and calmly brought the cigarette to her lips. The man pushed past the child, glaring at the floor; one side of his face was now a different colour from the other.
In all the years that followed, her mother never mentioned this outrage. The man and his wife were never seen at the house again.
But one evening, near the end, Imogen fell asleep in the afternoon and when she woke up her mother was there, sitting in the window, turning the pages of a book of wildlife photos. As Imogen looked across the room, at her mother, a question spontaneously came out of her mouth: she asked about the incident with the silver-haired man. Her mother could not remember it; she could not even remember the man in question, she said. Imogen described him in as much detail as was available; she described the scrawny wife and blundering daughter. Her mother now thought she could dimly picture the girl, and her parents, but of an encounter with the father she professed to have no recollection. Episodes that seem important to a child often have no importance for their parents, she explained. Imogen did not believe that she had forgotten it, and knew that her mother knew that she was not believed. It was almost certain, Imogen thought, that the encounter had been what it had seemed to be: the stupid prank of a man who was drunk. Her mother wished it to be forgotten simply because it had been unseemly, and had involved a loss of temper. There was, however, at least one other possibility, the improbability of which did nothing to diminish its persistence. On the contrary: it was so unlikely that the thought of it was impossible to dismiss, like a malicious and uncorrected rumour. But nothing more was said about it.
In another of her letters, Adeline tells Charles that his father misunderstands the function of images. ‘He mistakes signs for idols,’ she writes. ‘We pray through them, not to them,’ she says. In Devotion, Beatrice makes the same comparison; the line was a late addition, made after I had shown Imogen this letter. Catholics are polytheists, John Perceval countered, and their saints are ‘subaltern gods’.
For the past couple of days William has been washing cars. You can get away with paying people so little nowadays, he informs me, that a hand-wash is cheaper than a drive-through car wash. He’s making more than he’s been managing to get on the streets recently, but only a bit more. There are better jobs around, he knows. ‘Better, but still rubbish.’ There’s a vacancy he knows about, in the kitchen of a care home. He could do the work, but they want someone with experience, and a proper address. ‘And you’ve got to be confident, friendly and enthusiastic,’ he says. ‘I could do friendly. At a push.’ He’s sleeping on a different sofa this week, in Shaws Way, in the flat of a friend of the friend whose sofa he was using last week. This lad’s girlfriend works as a cleaner, and she suggested to William that he should check out the company’s website, because they were always looking for new people. ‘So I checked it out,’ he tells me, and he starts to laugh. ‘“We are seeking enthusiastic and reliable candidates. You will need to be able to demonstrate how you have delivered great customer service and how you meet our excellent standards,”’ he recites. ‘They always want enthusiasm. For fuck’s sake – enthusiasm. Has anyone in the entire history of the universe ever been enthusiastic about shoving a mop around? And references, on headed paper. Where am I supposed to get references from?’
I commiserate, and give him money. I could afford to give him more, of course; much more. But I allow myself to accede to arguments opposed to generosity. William would squander it. Thus I excuse myself.
In Adeline’s letter of September 15th, the one in which she wrote ‘I love you’ for the first time, she informs her beloved that her father wonders if Charles’s willingness to abandon the Church of England might not be an expression of his love for Adeline rather than of a newly awakened acceptance of the doctrines of Rome. He holds Charles Perceval’s intelligence in the highest esteem, but is of the opinion that knowledge does not ‘form the mind’ – it only ‘occupies’ it. ‘Apprehension of the unseen is our foundation,’ her father maintained, as I quoted, while Imogen scanned the letter. The Church of England, he argued, was a church of no doctrine; it was a ministry of the state, and its theology was an accident of history. For his part, Charles’s father was for some time of the view that his son had been bewitched by this young woman; how else could one explain his sudden conversion to the ‘bogus mysteries’ and ‘perfumed ceremonials’ of the Roman church?
Following Francesca’s lead, I come upon the story of Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. Though he served as secretary to no fewer than seven popes, Bracciolini seems to have had a highly developed taste for earthly pleasures. In the spring of 1416 he visited the spa at Baden, and was much taken by what he found there. In a letter from Baden, he wrote of his delight at having discovered a place where men and women bathed together, in a state of undress. A ‘school of Epicureans’ had been established there, he wrote. ‘I think this must be the place where the first man was created.’ In January of the following year, at an unspecified German monastery, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini made an even more significant discovery: a manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a work of the highest reputation, but lost for centuries. In a monastery; the only known copy.
Full-price visitors to the Sanderson-Perceval museum today: seventeen. Revenue: £85. Reduction of visitor numbers since the introduction of the £5 charge: sixty percent.
First evening in Rome. In the park of the Villa Borghese for the approach of dusk. Air warm and motionless; the pine trees standing in shadow, but their branches full of light; grass turned briefly to the colour of coral. To accompany this scene of urban pastoral, the soft drone of traffic, with now and then the call of a horn. A large and handsome dog, such as a shepherd might have employed. A good-looking young woman and a good-looking young man pause at a statue. The climate, the light, the shadows, the trees, the beautiful lovers, arm in arm – from these elements arises a melancholic well-being, a nostalgia with no object, a mood of all-accepting surrender that is nothing but a mood, but sufficient.