Said the exquisite Guillaume to Imogen: ‘It is only with you that I know who I am.’ He was offering himself to Imogen ‘without condition’, he announced. Such self-repudiation was ‘what love demanded’. The declaration took place in a location he had chosen with care: a superb restaurant, deeply rural, recently opened and thus known only to the few, for now. As befitted the occasion, he ordered an extravagant bottle, a Clos Saint-Jacques. Everything was at Guillaume’s expense: the meal and the room at the idyllic hotel, which he had reserved as a surprise. A deep wound was being inflicted on his bank account; the symbolic significance of the gesture was understood. Just as he was renouncing his cash, he would renounce his freedom. In the expectation, of course, that Imogen would renounce hers.
Surveying the orgiasts from the gallery of the maison de maître, a man of my age, of louche demeanour, turned to me and remarked, as if addressing a fellow connoisseur in the presence of some stupendous but troubling work of art: ‘C’est sublime.’ Perhaps there was some truth here, despite the posturing. The beautiful is purely pleasurable, according to Schopenhauer, whereas the sublime gives rise to a mingling of pleasure and pain. The sublime is resistant to contemplation. In Schopenhauer, there are gradations of the sublime. At the weaker end of the spectrum might be the sight of sunlight on a barren mass of boulders; there is no danger, but the scene establishes a hostile relationship to the will of the observer. Sublimity increases with the threat of destruction. A vast desert, in which the observer would certainly die, is more sublime than the boulders, but to be exposed to a storm in the mountains, amid lightning and torrents and rockfalls, is more sublime still. Only the infinite extent of the universe exceeds it.
For a moment, at the maison de maître, I could imagine seeing myself from across the room: a bogus anthropologist, making observations. I imagined how it would be if my employers were to learn of this: the disgrace, the shame, though I did not feel ashamed at that moment. What would I say? ‘An error of judgement. A lapse. That is not who I am.’ But a photograph would prove the contrary. If that’s not you, who else might it be?
Imogen wished that she had been able to make films of the kind that Robert Bresson had made: films that had the sadness one finds in a town, in a landscape or a house, rather than the beauty or sadness one finds in a photo of a town, a landscape or a house, as Bresson himself had put it.
An ancestor of Adeline’s had been clerk of the kitchen in a bishop’s household, and the blood-red roses in the bishop’s garden had thrived, it was said, because they had been planted in soil that had been mixed with earth from the grave of a saint; a portion of that soil had later been carried to the Hewitt house – hence the splendour of its rose garden. Imogen was standing beside me when I showed the group the pastel portrait of Adeline with her blood-red roses. I would have talked about the church commissioner who called on the Hewitts, demanding proof that they had destroyed their ‘images’. The commissioner was shown a garden wall into which the fragments of a broken sculpture of Saint Margaret of Antioch had been incorporated. What the commissioner didn’t know was that the head of Saint Margaret was in effect a door – in the cavity behind it, the family had stowed a reliquary and other forbidden items. This, I might have suggested, could serve as metaphor for the family’s resistance to the new church: outwardly, they observed the new rite; in private, they remained faithful to the old ways. For five years, they had given sanctuary to a relative who had been expelled from her convent; she had lived in the space beneath the roof, the solitary occupant of the Hewitts’ clandestine nunnery. The Hewitt house was in the vicinity of Redruth, which I will pass on my way to William and Jenna; but not a stone of the house remains.
The screaming of foxes wakes me, and what comes to mind is another night, with Imogen, in the garden of her house. ‘Listen,’ she said, pressing my arm to make me stop. We heard foxes, and a conversation of tawny owls, far off. ‘Male’, she said, pointing left, after the first call and reply; ‘female’, pointing right, like a conductor. Leaves hissed in the breeze. I can picture the scene: the moon cross-hatched in the branches; the low dust-coloured clouds. ‘The concert of the night,’ she murmured, as we listened. Walking back to the house, slowly, she told me about Arianne, who had left Paris, and almost everything of her former life, to live alone in the Pyrenees. Few were invited to her mountain cottage. Imogen visited her, after the first operation. The retreat was embedded in huge silence; the whistle of a marmot might be the only sound for an hour. Griffon vultures patrolled the air. Imogen talked to Arianne about sky burials. The idea of being ‘strewn about the mountains’ appealed to her, but only for as long as she was with Arianne, she said. The tranquillity of the mountains had taken possession of her for a while. She imagined that people had once gained a comparable benefit from hermits; they caught contentment off them, which may or may not have lasted. ‘But this is where I have to end,’ she said, and pressed my arm again.
The door is opened by William. As on the day of his departure from my house, an embrace rather than a handshake is what the situation demands. With a hand on my shoulder, he guides me to the living room, where Jenna and Tilly await. Jenna stands as I enter the room. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she says, giving me a hand that is cool and small; it’s as though I were William’s employer and she needs to make a good impression. Tilly, sitting on the floor, regards me uncertainly, but her smile, when her mother introduces me as William’s friend, is bold and delightful, as William had said.
And Jenna is indeed pale, but not unusually so; her hair is dark and long, her mouth small, certainly; and her nose could be described as narrow and straight. For some reason William has omitted to mention her voice: it’s deep, with a throaty and grainy quality, and lovely.
Jenna had thought she would cook stargazy pie in my honour. People use all sorts of fish for it, but Jenna’s family always observes the classic recipe. The heads of the pilchards are left sticking out through the crust, he warns me. ‘Like they’re gazing at the stars. It’s kind of grim.’
‘It’s so the oil can flow back in,’ Jenna explains. She tells me the tale of the pie’s creation, in celebration of the courage of Tom Bawcock, the fisherman who went out in a terrible December storm and came back with enough fish to feed the entire village.
‘And who never existed,’ William interrupts, teasing.
‘Maybe, or maybe not,’ she says, with loving disdain.
The fish are local. William tells me about the revival of pilchard fishing in Newlyn, thanks to Nutty Noah. They catch them the old way, using ring nets, at night, when the fish come up to feed. ‘It’s madness,’ he says. ‘They can pull in four tonnes in an hour.’
‘You’d think he’d been at sea all his life,’ says Jenna. ‘Instead of two days.’
‘More than that,’ William corrects her. ‘Four at least, my lover,’ he says. The sudden Cornish accent gets a laugh from Tilly; it is soon apparent that William can get a laugh from Tilly whenever he chooses.
At the table, at William’s urging, Jenna tells me stories of her family. She ranges through the generations: the great-aunt who’d had six sons in a row, then six daughters, then three more boys; the great-uncle whose voice was the loudest anyone had ever heard; the relative who had come through many years of deep-sea fishing unscathed, give or take a fracture or two, only to drown, drunk, in the bath. While she talks, William looks at her with admiration, as if the stories were of her own invention, and mostly new to him. She is persuaded by William to produce her phone, on which the course of their relationship is charted in a hundred pictures.