The creator of the portrait, Imogen’s mother explained, had been a long-standing friend of her mother’s gardener, who had one day asked if his friend Gaston, a ‘successful painter’, might be permitted to work for a few hours amid the wonderful flowerbeds. Permission was granted, subject to stringent conditions, and Gaston duly arrived one August afternoon. The garden delighted him, as did the dogs: he confessed to being ‘enamoured’ of the Bichon Frise. Further ingratiation was achieved by presenting Éloïse with a sketch of her pets. ‘My mother was unaccountably charmed,’ said Imogen’s mother. The dogs were brought to Gaston, for more thorough scrutiny. A double dog portrait was the upshot. ‘A frightful thing,’ she told me. But Éloise, when she looked at this painting, seemed not to see the maladroit brushwork – she saw only the images of her beloved dogs. Then came the portrait of Éloise herself. ‘My father had died, bear in mind,’ Imogen’s mother confided. ‘For some unfathomable reason, it was only when the portrait was finished that it occurred to my mother that this man might have something else in mind.’ She laughed. ‘What’s so amusing,’ she said, ‘is that he was not merely a mediocre painter: he was a comprehensively unattractive specimen. A tiny man, with green teeth and puny legs. And absurd hair. Like a bird’s nest soaked in oil. Whereas my mother was a fine-looking woman. Not that one would know it,’ she said, waving her cigarette at the picture. ‘Imogen was rather like her, in some ways,’ she remarked, in a tone of conclusion.
‘Oh yes?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, and that was all.
A strange dream, in which I confessed everything to Val. We were at her house. Val and I had withdrawn to the bathroom, because every guest was obliged to confess to her in the bathroom; it was a condition of the invitation. Val held my head between her hands, as if it were a pot that was filled to the brim with water. Her hands shook with the effort of holding it. The explanation was obvious, she said: I took pleasure in my humiliation. Waking, I gave some thought to the proposition. Dreams, however ridiculous, often have the power of truth, if only for a moment. But no humiliation was intended by Imogen, and none experienced. Some anguish, yes; but no humiliation.
Queuing in the post office, I noticed, at the counter, the pretty white dog – Bianca. I recognised the dog first; her owner’s hair was hidden under a soft woollen hat, midnight blue. The coat, of matching colour, was somewhat longer than the red coat; its length directed attention towards the elegant shoes. Turning from the counter, she noticed that I was in the queue, and smiled. As she exited, we both mimed ‘Hello’.
Imogen had fallen asleep, I thought, but then she spoke: she had just seen, with wonderful precision, a downpour in Cornwall. The rain had been so heavy that we’d had to stop the car, by a phone box. The red of the phone box was the only colour within the rain. Then, in the direction we were facing, the sun came out, and for a minute we were in the midst of brightly glowing water, through which we could see nothing. The deluge did not fade out: it ceased in a matter of seconds, like a badly executed special effect. A boy in a blue anorak was revealed, standing on the other side of the road, looking up at the sky, laughing, incredulous; his shoes disappeared into water as he stepped off the kerb.
‘But where was that?’ Imogen asked.
I recalled a downpour that had made the car tremble. I remembered the sudden sunlight before the rain had stopped, but no phone box nor any boy. ‘Near Zennor,’ I answered.
In the last weeks, drowsing, she often experienced scenes of similar intensity. Sometimes, I think, they were more dream than memory, though they had an aura of recollection. Without opening her eyes, she described an evening that had returned to her: a long walk after a meal, in a small town; a river; a busker by a spotlit building. We had strolled along a street of shops in which none of the streetlights were working. ‘Do you remember? Where was that?’ she asked, looking at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Am I definitely there?’
She closed her eyes again; she clenched her eyelids. ‘I’m not even sure I’m there,’ she said.
In the park, passing the bench where I sometimes sat with William, where Imogen and I sometimes sat with him, I remember the day he talked about the sound that a mass of small leaves made in the wind. It gave him a ‘great contentment’, he said. He told me that for a couple of years, when he was at primary school, he had lived near a canal, and on the edge of this canal there was a tree that he used to climb. In the wind, this tree made a sound ‘like an avalanche of sand’, he said. On blustery days he would often lie below the tree, relishing the sound it made. He was happier then than he had ever been since, he thought. What was it that happened in our heads when we remembered a sound, he wondered. ‘The memory of a sound isn’t really a sound, is it?’ he said. ‘You’re not actually hearing anything.’
On a Sunday morning, hearing bells from over the hill, Imogen said to me that the best of her childhood was in that sound. On Sundays at home, in this room, reading, she had been happy, and her happiness was at its fullest when the bells were ringing. If she were allowed only one recording on her desert island, it would be the sound of those Sunday mornings. Many times she had walked with her father to the crest of the hill, just to listen to the bells, she told me. Once she had seen tears in his eyes. She had tried to believe that this was because he too was moved deeply by the wonderful sound.