I apologised for not having seen The Harbour; in truth, I had not heard of it.
‘You didn’t miss much,’ she said, then she told me about the audition for Devotion. I already knew about this project: several months earlier, Marcus Colhoun had contacted me; he had visited the museum when he was a student, and had been ‘inspired’ by it. We had exchanged emails.
The audition was a week away. I wished her good luck.
On the Sunday of the week in which the filming started, I met Samantha for coffee. Val was present, as was often the case at that time. She seemed to lack trust, though her victory was secure; the ostensible reason for her attendance would have been that she felt it was important for there to be no negativity between us. She was strongly opposed to negativity in all its forms, and still is.
‘How are you, David?’ Val enquired. She tended to employ my name at the outset; a boundary was thereby established.
‘I am well,’ I answered.
‘You look well,’ she said; et cetera. An exchange of niceties was all that was expected. I would have no news, she knew. In my world, every week was like every other. Val was then a student counsellor; her week, as usual, had been stressful.
I told her, not for the first time, that I could not do her job; this was sincere.
When Val excused herself and went indoors, Samantha eased back in her seat and levelled a diagnostic look at me. She stated: ‘Something has happened.’
‘Things are always happening,’ I said. ‘My life is a maelstrom.’
‘Come on,’ she said, rapping the back of my hand with a finger, as if it were an electronic device with a dodgy connection. ‘Something good, I mean. Tell me – quickly. We’ve got three minutes.’
I supplied the essential information. ‘Good-looking, is she?’ she asked.
‘She’s interesting,’ I answered.
‘I’ll take that as a Yes. Young?’
‘Younger than me. Not young young.’
Stirring the spoon in her coffee, she looked at me askance. ‘Is she interested in you?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘That’s the stuff – embrace defeat.’
‘Just answering honestly.’
‘You’ve talked to her?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you like her.’
‘I do.’
‘And she’ll soon be gone.’
‘Yes.’ Samantha leaned forward, as if to reveal a secret. ‘Take the initiative, David. What’s to be lost?’
Nothing was to be lost, I agreed.
‘It would be good for you,’ she said. ‘An adventure.’
We were at a café near the Pompidou. An advertisement at a bus stop, for an exhibition at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, caught Imogen’s attention; it showed a close-up of a mechanism of incomprehensible complication, a thicket of golden cogs. In all the time she had been living in Paris, she had never been to the Arts et Métiers. Half an hour later, we were there. Three thousand items are on show at any time, from a collection of nearly one hundred thousand. We saw clocks, bicycles, phonographs and phones; steam engines, calculating machines, cars, aeroplanes, cameras; chronometers, gasometers, manometers, lathes and looms. Everything well displayed and informatively annotated.
The effects of the chemotherapy persisted. But the Arts et Métiers would have been fatiguing in any circumstances, she said. The scale of the Sanderson-Perceval museum was one of the things she liked about it; the incoherence was another. Many of the items in the Sanderson-Perceval – the porcelain, the musical instruments, the crystals, the velvet mushrooms, the glass jellyfish – belonged together only because they had been collected. There was no insistence that the visitor be instructed, but instruction might proceed from pleasure and confusion. ‘A bit of a mess – but a nice mess,’ someone once wrote in the visitors’ book.
Museums are places of contemplation; they are places of poetry; they create constellations of images in the mind. We behold a spectacular artefact or relic – an Aztec mask, the skull of an immense prehistoric carnivore, an Athenian goddess – and we marvel. Various means are employed to enhance the effect: jewellery and glass might be displayed under spotlights in a darkened room; sculpture arrayed in a white-walled hall of church-like ambience. Not every museum possesses items that are marvellous, but all objects in a museum emit some sort of charge; they have a resonant presence. Isolated for our inspection, they have an aura of significance. Having been collected, they now belong to themselves; they are untouchable.
Amateur dramatics at university had been the full extent of her acting experience until Antoine Vermeiren had cast her in Les tendres plaintes, Imogen told me, in answer to my question. Marc Vermeiren, Antoine’s brother, had been a colleague of her boyfriend, at the University of Tours. In my teens, I had gone cycling in France with a friend, I told her. We had stopped overnight in Tours. Imogen and I talked about the city – the giant cedar; Fritz the stuffed elephant. I learned the name of the boyfriend – Benoît – and that the relationship was over. Imogen’s manner did not suggest that the ground was being prepared for a new relationship; or rather, I saw nothing from which to take encouragement. But Imogen would say that this conversation was the start; something about my description of the silent lightning storm, watched from the little square in front of the cathedral, with the barely remembered friend, apparently.
The local paper sent a reporter to talk to the director and cast of Devotion. He interviewed Imogen in the garden, and was duly charmed. She was unpretentious, approachable; her gestures were expansive and urgent; ‘vivacious’ is the obvious adjective. I could see that she was telling the reporter a story. Tumbling from head to midriff, her hands conjured a costume in precise quick movements – a wide-brimmed hat; a cravat at the throat; a jacket, fastidiously buttoned; a flower in the lapel. With her fingertips she smoothed a moustache of air; her hands came together, one cupped over the other, on the handle of an imagined walking stick. She was being Mr Dobrý, as I later learned.
Asked if she could remember when she had realised that she would become an actress, Imogen would sometimes answer that her career could be traced to a story that a schoolfriend had told her, about an elderly man from Czechoslovakia. This friend’s family had moved to London when she was twelve years old, and she and her brother had soon come to know Mr Dobrý. Near their new house there was a small park, and Mr Dobrý could be seen there almost every afternoon, feeding the birds and the squirrels. He was an old man, but smartly dressed, always, with a white scarf around his neck on all but the warmest days, and a black three-piece suit that was never unbuttoned. In winter he wore a thick black coat that gleamed. Mr Dobrý had a hat that made him look like a character from a black-and-white film, Imogen’s friend had said. His walking stick had a lion’s head for a handle, in real silver. His hair was white, and cut in an old-fashioned way; he had a lovely white moustache.
Local shopkeepers knew a few things about this refined old gentleman, but not much. He had come to England from Czechoslovakia a couple of years before the war, with a wife, who was no longer living. Mr Dobrý’s home town was a place called Karlovy Vary, where he had worked in a hotel that was owned by his family. It was an expensive hotel. His parents had remained in Karlovy Vary, but a sister was believed to have emigrated with him. It was not known what had become of her; the inference was that she, like the parents and the wife, had died. Nobody was ever seen with Mr Dobrý. He did not seem unhappy, however, and he had money, as one could tell from his clothes. Someone had heard that Mr Dobrý owned a hotel in London.