The Impressionist (50 page)

‘Yes, sir?’

‘A congenial companion on a long voyage. Bridgeman, the time has come for me to make another journey to Fotseland. I intend to set off next summer, at the end of the Trinity term. It will be a long expedition, lasting into the following year. I would like you to be my assistant.’

‘Your assistant, sir?’

‘Yes, that’s right. If Astarte can spare you, that is.’

The Professor laughs. Jonathan laughs too, covering a wave of apprehension. Fotseland? He remembers the red-eyed men squatting in the compound at the Empire Exhibition. Suddenly the room seems damp and cold.

‘Well, my boy, what do you say?’

What does he say? He cannot think of anything.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Well, then, that’s settled. Now you can go back to whatever you were doing. Surely the two of you weren’t thinking of going boating, were you? Not now? I mean, it’s the middle of the night.’

Jonathan leaves the study in a daze. Fotseland? It is as if the earth is tilting, sending him sliding towards a place where he feels he must not go. He looks for Star to tell her what has happened, but she has gone to bed. For an hour or more he sits on his own in the boathouse, listening to the sound of the river running into the blackness.

On New Year’s Eve, they are sitting on a bench in the Barabbas gardens, guests at a party held by the Warden. A string quartet plays Haydn. Jonathan smiles and Star taps her foot, the music communicating its clockwork self-assurance to them both. Around them people hold champagne glasses and make optimistic conversation. The Professor is somewhere inside, within range of the buffet table. They wait impatiently for the clock to strike midnight, when the college servants will light the first rockets of the firework display. Nineteen twenty-five is less than a minute away.

‘Oh Star.’ says Jonathan.

‘Oh Johnny.’ says Star.

‘I’m so happy.’

‘Are you?’

‘Why, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I am. Listen – here it comes.’

People take up the chant: ‘
Thirty seconds to go… Twenty seconds…
The sound swells as guests spill into the garden from the Hall. Stiffy, the head porter sinks down on one knee, shielding a match. As the count reaches zero he lights a fuse, and a rocket shoots upwards, exploding in a big white burst over the chapel. There are cheers and applause. Jonathan takes Star in his arms. All around them, backs are slapped and hands vigorously shaken. She has never looked more beautiful.

‘I love you,’ he says, and kisses her.

‘Darling,’ she murmurs. ‘How wonderful of you.’

‘Is it? Do you really mean that?’

‘Of course I do, Johnny. I think it’s absolutely wonderful.’

‘So – you will?’

‘Will what?’

‘How silly of me. I’m getting all mixed up. Marry me, I mean. Will you marry me?’

‘Oh Johnny, you dear dear thing.’

‘So you will?’

Star looks up at the fireworks, which are patriotically studding the sky with rosettes of red, white and blue.

‘It does seem rather perfect, doesn’t it? Us here in this garden, with all of the fireworks and the party and everything.’

‘Say yes, Star. Just say yes.’

‘Well, the thing is, Johnny, I’m going away again.’

He is stunned

‘Going away?’

‘Don’t look like that. I’m going back to Paris. There’s a wonderful American lady there, Mrs Amelia DeForrest of Chicago. She and I are going into business. She has lots of money, and she positively adores my designs. I said I’d let her do the fabrics, and I’ll do everything else.’

‘Business?’

‘Yes, that’s right, business. Really, Johnny, I do wish you wouldn’t say it as if it were something obscene. Lots of girls do it.’

‘Sorry. That is – when are you going?’

‘Quite soon, I should think. A month or two. You and Daddy can come and see me on your way to the Fotse.’

‘But how can you – after we’ve – I mean, I thought – you said…’

‘Oh you are so sweet, all pouty and disappointed. Just because I’m over there doesn’t mean I’ll forget about you. After all, you’re awfully pretty. And attentive too.’

‘But I want to be with you.’

‘You can still be with me, when you come back from Africa. When you’ve finished looking after Daddy, I think you should come and stay in Paris. It’s far better than London. People have exquisite taste, and there are wonderful nightclubs. You don’t have to go to bed at all if you don’t want to.’

‘So – you’ll think about it?’

‘Of course I will, Johnny. I’m so touched. Now come on, we should go and find Daddy.’

In the morning his head is so fuzzy and his memories of the party such a blur that he cannot remember whether to be pleased or not. She said she loved him, didn’t she? At any rate, they have an understanding. He and Astarte Chapel are practically engaged. It is a secret, probably. With understandings, secrecy is a sort of tradition. Still, that does not mean he cannot not tell a friend. A few days after New Year he has lunch with Levine.

By the beginning of term the news is all round the university: Bridgeman is engaged to Miss Chapel, and not only that, he has been picked to accompany her eminent father on his next expedition. A mere undergraduate! Among Chapel’s coterie of young scholars it is hard to say which inspires more jealousy, the job or the girl. Acid remarks are passed in the library, and more than once Jonathan is snubbed by people he thought were his friends. ‘It’s the price of success, old man,’ says Levine. ‘You can’t expect everyone to be happy when something like this happens.’ He speaks with the voice of experience. His play is to be produced in London, and the envy sweeping the university dramatic society is violent and consuming.

When a student magazine prints a cartoon of him in a cooking pot, surrounded by grinning cannibals, Jonathan’s misgivings disappear. He is a celebrity: ‘Beau’ Bridgeman of Africa, lover and explorer. He cuts the cartoon out and sends it to Star, who writes back to say they have made his nose too big. Too soon the day comes when he has to see her off at Victoria. They kiss chastely, and he promises to see her in June, when he and her father pass through Paris on their way to meet their ship at Marseilles. He stands on the platform long after her train has departed, feeling windswept and self-important. Surely other people can see that he is in the throes of a grand passion, a great and literary romance? Disappointingly, the passengers looking for their coaches appear oblivious to his emotions.

Once Star has gone, it is time to turn his attention to work. Revising for his finals competes for time with studying Hausa, the trading tongue of the Fotse region. Jonathan picks up some useful basic phrases
(Where is the consulate? I would like the lamb for dinner),
and spends some evenings poring over the only known glossary of the Fotse language, owned by Professor Chapel and compiled by Père Antoine Bertrand, a nineteenth-century French Jesuit who was later beheaded by one of the local emirs. From the look of the manuscript, Bertrand was already preoccupied by his personal safety when he compiled it. His handwriting is almost illegible, and his choice of examples so eccentric that as a way of learning the language the text seems entirely useless. Again and again, phrases occur that refer to chance and possibility. There is also an entire page of terms relating to witchcraft:
I am possessed by a bad spirit / a good spirit / the spirit of an unborn calf / a horsefly / an acacia tree…
There is something unnerving about the idea of a country where a person can be taken over by a shrub. Jonathan copies the phrases down in a notebook, the same kind he once used for his observations about the English.

He and Professor Chapel will not be the only members of the expedition. One evening he is invited to dine at Jesus College High Table with his new colleagues, Doctors Morgan and Gittens. His short undergraduate gown makes a poor show among the flowing robes of the senior scholars, their heads bowed as they hear grace. As he dines with the two young dons, Jonathan is nervous, looking down the long refectory tables and catching the eyes of students, who whisper and point him out to each other.

Morgan is affable enough, a big lantern-jawed Welshman who looks more like a farmer than a scholar. This is only natural, his speciality being agriculture. He pours Jonathan glasses of college claret and tells him about the beauties of the Herefordshire cattle he grew up with: their hardiness, their gentle white faces, their marvellous ability to convert grass into lean red meat. This will be his first journey to Africa, where he hopes to see the West African shorthorn up close, and study the practices of the Fotse farmers. Gittens, though also making his first visit, is less pleasant company. A specialist in initiation rituals, he obviously disapproves of Bridgeman’s presence on the expedition. ‘How old are you?’ he asks. ‘What have you published?’ When Jonathan replies that he has published nothing, Gittens snorts. ‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ he says tartly, ‘what will you actually be
doing
in Fotseland?’ Jonathan has no ready answer.

Professor Chapel, on the other hand, has a clear idea of his assistant’s role. Expeditions serve a valuable function, which is to provide an escape from Oxford. However, their organization is a pain, and should be delegated. It is up to Jonathan to arrange travel and procure equipment and supplies. The Professor sends him to Walters & Co. on the Turl, where he negotiates for hurricane lamps, tents, wicker baskets and X-brand folding wash-stands. He buys green canvas cots and tin basins, axes and camp stools, laundry soap, a canteen of cutlery, sheath knives and a set of cooking equipment which takes up four steel boxes. There is an open-flap tent for the cooking to take place in, and a waterproof medicine chest full of little glass bottles to treat its after-effects. For himself he buys khaki shirts, shorts and puttees, a pair of mosquito boots, two suits of Jaeger wool underwear of the lightest sort, a cork helmet for wearing in camp and a double-terai hat for hunting. The pile on the counter grows to a mound. Juniors are dispatched to find more brown wrapping paper. The assistant suggests that he has not paid enough attention to questions of personal health, so he buys a flannel cholera belt to protect his abdomen from excessive dampness, and a spine pad which fits inside his shirt and is designed to ward off the sun’s harmful actinic rays. Crêpe bandages and a thermometer are added to the medicine chest. Finally he selects a pair of metal-rimmed spectacles with smoked-glass lenses. In the mirror they make him look sinister and inscrutable, like a fly.

On the day before his finals begin, he is down in London, buying sporting guns and ammunition from a dealer in St James’s. Watching the shop assistant count out cartridges on to the teak counter, he realizes for the first time what he is undertaking. All he wanted was to come to England and settle into a comfortable life, the life depicted in the postcards pinned above his washstand in Bombay. Now he is leaving it behind. For what? He tells himself again
– for Astarte Chapel.
When he has arranged delivery of the guns, he takes a cab to Regent Street and buys an engagement ring. If he is to go into Africa, at least he will have a reason to come back.

The examinations pass by in a blur. It is impossible to concentrate on the Reconquista or the sack of Rome when Star is only a few days away from him. He scribbles answers on the papers, hardly caring what he argues, whether the dates he attaches to events are real or have migrated from the part of his brain that deals with ticket prices and steamer timetables. Sometimes he drifts away completely, the high ceilings of the examination schools pulling him upwards, dissolving him in imagery he thought he had completely suppressed: murky palace corridors, the smell of gin and lime juice. Oxford seems temporary and fragile. After the last exam, he is carried along in a crowd of undergraduates throwing flour at each other and drinking champagne from the bottle. He clutches his mortarboard in one hand, and runs down cobbled streets, past buildings as insubstantial as a stage set.

The train slides through Kent countryside that is as green and bright as a hymn. The Professor sits with an unopened newspaper on his lap, a schoolboyish grin on his face.

‘On our way, eh, Bridgeman? On our way at last!’

Between Victoria and Dover this is all he says, repeating it at intervals throughout the journey. ‘On our way, Bridgeman. On our way.’ Each time he says it, he rubs his hands together. Eventually, Jonathan feels he should say something. ‘You seem very pleased to be leaving, sir.’ Chapel gives him a shocked look, mouthing, ‘Pleased?’ as if the idea is a little indecent.

At Dover they meet Gittens and Morgan, and spend a couple of hours supervising the packing of the expedition equipment into large crates. Morgan has volunteered to accompany it as far as Marseilles, but Gittens is coming with them to Paris. Jonathan is not happy about this. As he runs about the warehouse with inventories and bills of lading, the man’s eyes follow him, a patronizing smile playing around the corners of his mouth. On the ferry Gittens makes conversation with Professor Chapel, deliberately cutting through Jonathan whenever he tries to join in. By the time they reach Calais, he has made it clear that he considers him an inferior, more the Professor’s batman than an academic colleague.