True, untrue. What did it mean? Typically enough, Sarah circled round the topic, unpicking its ambiguities. It could mean accurate: whether or not you’d measured it right, cut the fabric right. It could mean faithful: whether or not you’d kept your word, plighted your troth, all that. It could mean accurately recorded: whether or not you’d recounted what really happened. 

And there was the rub.  Who was to know? On whose authority was it? Sarah thought about her hero Marcel Proust, wheezing and fearful, writing away in his cork-lined room. He knew about the frailty of truth: how a plate of little cakes could usher you into a labyrinth of memories, each one as true as the one before, each one as vivid or evocative as the real thing. Whatever that was. 

Sarah opened a door into a past moment. She was looking at a little room in an hotel in Auvers-sur-L’Oise. This was where Van Gogh had lived. It was roped off from the tourists, so that they could look but not enter. From this bed, he had risen to wash and dress, picked up his painting gear, made his last picture in a field and then shot himself.  He had died here. Sarah recalled how she had seen the room through the frame of the picture Van Gogh had painted: the bright coverlet, the scrubbed floorboards, the plain rush-bottomed chair. It was very difficult, once having seen the picture, to perceive the place afresh with her own eyes. Had the room been manufactured to imitate the picture? Was the reality itself a facsimile? Which image was true? Which was untrue?

Drill down. How had Sarah felt the day she stood there? Slightly drunk, as she and her companion had lunched in the hotel, hoping that they were consuming the same homely fare and rough wine that Van Gogh had lived from. So she was making an effort to appear more steady and more sensible than she felt. In addition, she had fallen in love, and the relationship was at that awkward stage where things were past their best but no-one knew why. As she stood by her companion, she realised that he no longer trusted her, and that the faint smell of acrimony seeped from his pores. What had she done wrong this time? The little room took on the aroma of anguish. Or had the room caused the anguish in the first place? The complexity of her memory was determined by their mutual past (on the cusp between desire and disillusion), by her place in historical time (late 20th-century turmoil), by her personal trajectory (48-year-old neurotic), by the weather (spring rain), by her clothes (new shoes, causing a blister on her heel), by her health (menopausal), by her aesthetic tastes (a preference for disorder). And there she stood, amid the swirling sensations and thoughts, aware that there was nothing - absolutely nothing - that was “true”.

Drill down. From the perspective of the here and now, she felt utterly cast adrift by the uncertainty of her recall. Gradually, other pieces of the past swam through the ether and attached themselves to the memory of the little room: the smell of the faded plush of the train carriage that had delivered them there, the cawing of the rooks in the suicide field (perhaps the kin of the ones who provided Van Gogh with his last sound), the texture of her companion’s overcoat, the smudginess of the print of the newspaper in her pocket, making her fingers grubby. And she was assailed anew by the complexity of her feelings at that moment: did he ever love me, was I too needy, wouldn’t it be better to hide my cleverness? There was indeed a bridge between the past and the present, but it was mired in ambiguity. The road between there and here was like an alleyway, with its cobblestones shining in the rain. It was difficult to traverse with speed. And then Sarah was struck afresh by the acuity of Proust’s insights. He knew, none better, that there was no right or wrong, no true or untrue, in the landscape of memory: In Search of Lost Time, indeed.