It was not known where Mr Dobrý lived. ‘Not far from here,’ he told anyone who asked. He would let the children help him to feed the animals. But there was nothing creepy about Mr Dobrý, Imogen’s friend insisted. The parents all liked him. He was friendly to everyone, and he had wonderful tales about his life in Czechoslovakia. Sometimes he would show the children photographs: of hotels that looked like castles; of churches with shining domes that were onion-shaped; of ladies with parasols standing in front of colonnades and fountains. The photographs were the colour of tea. He brought coins and letters and postcards that were covered with unreadable handwriting. In the Dobrý family’s hotel there was a piano on which Chopin had played; he explained how famous Chopin was, and showed them a picture of the piano, which stood between palm trees in a room with a glass ceiling. Mr Dobrý would point to the faces in the photographs and recite all the names. Though he had left Czechoslovakia so many years before, his accent was strong.
Then came a month when Mr Dobrý was missing from the park. Nobody knew where he had gone. Occasionally he had been absent for a week or two; he never gave warning of his departure, and never said where he had been when he returned. He had never been missing for a whole month. The absence continued, until one evening the friend’s father announced that Mr Dobrý had died. The story was in the newspaper.
It turned out that Mr Dobrý had lived in a tiny flat at the end of a bus route that passed the park. A birth certificate had been found and a sister traced: her name was Edith and she had been born in Sheffield, as had Mr Dobrý, whose name in fact was Kenneth Tate. Edith had not seen or heard from her brother for forty years; she had not known where he had been living, and knew nothing about his life. The newspaper carried an appeal for information, but nobody ever came forward to say that they had known Mr Dobrý, under this or any other name.
How wonderful to have been Mr Dobrý, Imogen had thought, when her friend told her the story. To have invented such a life and lived it out seemed an enterprise of genius.
The filming of Devotion began on a July evening. From the dining room I looked out onto the garden, where Julius Preston and the father of Beatrice Moore were in earnest discussion, on the bench by the sundial. Searching for the answer to the conundrum of his daughter, Mr Moore gazed into the leaves of the beech tree that rose behind the cameraman, who stood a few yards in front of the actors, aiming the lens into their faces. Two paces to the right of the bench stood Marcus Colhoun, nodding approval. At the high point of the garden, in the crook of the wall where the irises grow, Imogen turned the pages of the script. Her skirt was a voluminous thing, with three tiers of flounces, and the pattern was a bold check, in lime green and salmon pink and violet. A paisley shawl covered her shoulders.
She was splendidly demure. Her neck and wrists were unadorned; her lips pale as paper; her hair, parted strictly down the centre, was gathered into a small tight bun. Imogen closed her eyes as a young woman applied a make-up brush to her cheeks, and when she opened them she noticed that I was at the window. She closed her eyes again and smiled into the sunlight.
Marcus took her down to the bench, talking urgently, like a coach with an athlete before the start of the race. While cameraman Joe waved a light meter around, the assistant fussed at the folds of the dress. Marcus Colhoun said a few words, then stepped back. Abruptly Imogen became Beatrice Moore. The angles of her head and neck and shoulders changed a little; it was enough for a different character to be delineated. One hand held the ends of the shawl like a clasp; the other lay on the arm of the bench, and was equally still. Not once did she look at Julius Preston; her eyes were directed past him, towards the pool at the foot of the garden. Dr Preston’s gaze never left Beatrice’s face. Suddenly she stood up, distressed; she walked away, and Julius Preston followed her, up the slope of the lawn, into the sunlight. The camera stalked them and the microphone hovered above their heads, but equipment and crew seemed to be invisible to the actors. The expertise was remarkable. For some reason, this sequence was omitted from the film.
In Imogen’s exchanges with Marcus Colhoun there was rarely much evidence of the sort of bantering camaraderie one often sees in behind-the-scenes extras. Their conversations – or the ones that I observed – were brief, almost brusque: a few gestures, a few words, as if discussing tactics. Imogen said to me: ‘He gets straight to the point. And we understand each other.’ Later, she told me that she had known immediately that Marcus Colhoun had attended a boarding school. ‘We’re like Freemasons or ex-cons – we recognise the signs,’ she said. It had been like serving a novitiate. Her mother and father had endured the same childhood confinement, and therefore she’d been required to endure it too. ‘It makes you strong,’ her mother had pronounced. Imogen had felt that she was being taught how to stand guard over herself, she told me; few people were to be permitted to pass into the heart of the fortress.
Sometimes, she told me, it felt necessary to play the part of being an actor. ‘There are certain expectations,’ she said. For example, on occasion she had been prompted to employ the trope of the actor as compulsive observer, always taking note of gestures, idiosyncrasies of speech, behavioural tics. ‘It’s not wholly untrue,’ she said. And people liked to hear about the moment at which one became aware of one’s vocation. ‘“For my thirteenth birthday my parents took me to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I was mesmerised. I knew right away that I was going to be an actor.” That kind of thing.’ Mr Dobrý was a recital piece, she said; like an encore. There were days on which she could believe that Mr Dobrý had indeed been the start of it.
Nothing from Samantha since the afternoon on which she gave me the news about Val’s big initiative. Confidentiality is of paramount importance in the world of heavyweight commerce, so the company in question could not be named, but I was to understand that it was a top-tier organisation, and that a considerable fee was involved. Once a week, Val was to travel to the London HQ, there to conduct a two-hour ‘workshop’ and then make herself available for individual consultations. The remit was broad. She would advise on issues relating to relaxation, diet, organisation of the workspace, et cetera, et cetera. Thus comprehensive wellness, a sense of empowerment, would be brought to the open-plan environment. The drones would be convinced of their happiness, and thereby become more effective drones. I commended Val’s enterprise, in a manner that caused irritation. I used the phrase ‘monetising the wisdom’, I believe.
‘And what have you done recently?’ Samantha wanted to know. ‘You’re stagnating,’ she told me. It seemed that I had chosen to go down with the sinking ship. Val’s ‘positivity’ evidently offended me. Did I think that passivity was a virtue in itself? ‘I think you’re happier living in the past,’ Samantha informed me.