‘Thank you for escorting me to the edge,’ Imogen said one morning. She looked at our hands, and smiled. ‘One body fewer. It doesn’t matter. I can say that. It seems to be what I feel.’ But she was not sure that she was prepared. Rather, a mood had settled on her, like black snow, she said. Her laugh was a retching cough.
The sunlight drenched the blossom of the apple trees. It was so beautiful, it was like dying, said William. Imogen asked him what he meant. ‘Everything is energy,’ he answered, as if this were something that many people knew. ‘Everything is frequencies. That’s what all of this is,’ he said, circling a hand above his head. The hand went round and round; he had been drinking. The whiteness of the blossom was frequency made visible. The blossom would not last long, but its energy would last forever, he said. Some of the energy of the tree had penetrated his brain; it was so powerful that it had wiped out all of his thoughts. That is why it was like dying. ‘I see,’ I said; he sensed that I was uneasy with him, whereas Imogen was not.
Some Roman tombstones have holes drilled into them; to honour the occupant of the tomb, and to provide nourishment in the afterlife, relatives would pour water, wine and honey into the hole, so that the liquid could flow through the stone and onto the ashes. But we should be wary of attributing to all Romans a set belief on the subject of the afterlife, Francesca warned. Some believed in ghosts and spirits, and others did not. Among the latter, there would have been many who nonetheless maintained the traditions by which the dead were kept alive. She told us about a Roman tombstone that is inscribed with a text addressed to the person who has stopped to read it. There is no life beyond the tomb, the text tells the reader; the dead are dust and ashes, and wine poured into the grave will make mud of the remains, nothing more.
‘Inspirational stuff,’ said Imogen, reading of the last hours of the life of Cato the Younger, as recounted by Plutarch. Then the sword being brought in by a little boy, Cato took it, drew it out, and looked at it; and when he saw the point was good, ‘Now,’ said he, ‘I am master of myself’; and laying down the sword, he took his book again, which, it is related, he read twice over. Later that night, he took his sword, and stabbed it into his breast.
Imogen discovered, in a box of miscellaneous old photographs, a small picture of a young woman sitting at the library table, on which a chess board had been set. From the young woman’s dress, and certain details of the room, it seemed that the picture dated from around 1920. She was smiling, apparently at something that was happening to her left. Her expression suggested an attractive and clever character. Most of the chess pieces had been removed from the board. Imogen liked to think that a male opponent had just conceded defeat. The fairness of the young woman’s hair and the clarity of her eyes gave young Imogen the idea that she was German. Matilde, she named her, because neither her mother nor her father had any idea who the young woman might really have been. Nobody knew who she was. For some time, this was wonderful. Matilde was a woman of mystery. Her name was Matilde in the way that a painting of a beautiful unknown woman might be given a name: Flora, Venus, The Veiled Woman. When she was sent to school, Imogen took the photograph of Matilde with her. The meaning of the image began to change. Matilde had been brilliant and beautiful; she had visited the house, and sat at the table at which Imogen had so often sat. Now nobody at home knew anything about her. Somewhere her body was lying in the earth. Her gravestone was perhaps no longer meaningful to anybody. Only this image remained, an image to which any woman’s name could be attached.
When the dead were believed to be in Purgatory, they received the charity of the living, and they cared for the living in return. The dead were close. But with the revision of The Book of Common Prayer in 1552, the dead were banished to an infinite distance. The burial service would now take place at the graveside, not in the church; in place of prayers of commendation and committal, there was to be just one reference to the deceased, who had been delivered, thanks be to God, from the ‘myseryes of this sinneful world’. Now the dead were in a world that had no contact with our own; even prayers could not reach them.
Beatrice at the piano, playing a Chopin prelude for her husband. The music is not dubbed – this is Imogen playing. Inaccuracies and hesitations have been left uncorrected; they impart authenticity. She played the same prelude for me, on the family’s old Broadwood. ‘If she had studied harder,’ her mother confided, ‘she would have been better than me. Much better.’ Imogen persuaded her to play for us. I was to take it as a sign of her approval that she consented to be persuaded, Imogen told me. The little waltz that her mother played was by someone whose name I did not know – a trivial piece, she said, opening the score. No notes were fluffed; the tempo was perfectly even; the movement of her hands was economical, undemonstrative. It was almost as though playing the piano were an exercise in comportment. One would not have been inclined to dance to the waltz that Imogen’s mother played, error-free though it was. ‘I am not truly musical,’ she said, as though admitting that the colour of her hair was not natural. Imogen, on the other hand, was ‘deeply musical’. This was an opinion with which her daughter disagreed: she liked to play, but had reached the limit of her competence at the age of fourteen, she insisted. But there was a pulse in her playing, and there is a pulse in the music that Beatrice makes; it has spontaneity; life. I watch Beatrice at the piano: this is Imogen, as she was. She is lovely, and there is a terrible pathos in this lovely image. In adoration Julius Preston watches his wife. Candlelight glows on her face; it glows on her hands, which are raised in mid-bar, as Beatrice stops and scowls at the page of music.
Inevitably, the thought is present: the character will always be this age, but the actress is no longer young. Some might know that this actress, who is young in this film, is no longer living. Imogen could not watch any of her films with me. ‘It would be like reading my own obituary,’ she said.
William’s mother has informed him that it is completely out of the question for her to attend the wedding without her husband, as William had suggested she might; therefore she will not be present. His father has sent his best wishes, by text; he hopes his son has ‘better luck’ than he had. So I will be in loco parentis too. The speech is proving to be difficult – how to balance best-man jocularity and quasi-parental pride? Some explanation of how we had come to know each other might be expected, but the specifics of our case do not seem appropriate to the occasion. He was my lodger – that will suffice, with vague references to our prior acquaintance. As an anecdote: watching the trawlermen on TV. William heckling the clueless first-timer: ‘I could do better than that,’ he shouted. And he did do better: he managed more than one trip, and was even more seasick than the lad on TV. Pause for laughter, or mild amusement. Some might like the slapstick of William failing to take the wind direction into account before vomiting. Were I of William’s age, I would be expected to provide at least one such item. Light embarrassment of the groom is conventional. The coda is the easy part – the joy of Tilly.