The Impressionist (43 page)

Harold says he’s gorgeous. Yes, in a kind of Italianate way. Sort of marmoreal. Mmmm. Where? Oh, Christ Church meadow. He was leaning out of the window of his set and the fellow came past – sort of floated – practically oneiric, says Harold…

Sound? Sound enough, but he comes from nowhere. Who told you that? Beaumont’s people are from that part of the world. Your country’s near Lechlade, isn’t it, Boomer? If he was anyone at all Boomer would know him. And you don’t, do you? So I vote no. just on – on prophylactic grounds. I think that’s fair. Speaking honestly, I don’t think he’s the Satyricon type. After all the dinners do get rather – yes exactly. When one is in one’s cups, one doesn’t want just anyone
– I mean, if things were repeated…

If you was to ask me I would have to say as how he was a rather sinful young gentleman – although, and fair’s fair – clean enough in his habits. Not like some of them on that staircase – you would have thought they was brought up in a pigsty the way they behave. Couldn’t lift a finger by their selves, nor to put a jacket on a hanger nor a cup and saucer on a tray. The mess which that young Honourable makes – not as I’m saying he’s not polite, mind you – manners of an angel – but I went in once and – sinful? Well, you don’t do for the young gents for as long nor I have without getting to know the signs. I think as you should be asking that little red-haired baggage that helps Mrs Parker in the kitchens – how? You can smell it on the sheets. And once…

A good-enough historian. So yes, I think he’ll do for Honours. Although I would say rather inclined to romanticize. He has some odd ideas about civilization. Well, Willoughby, racial ideas since you ask – now are you going to pass the Madeira or am I going to have to mount some sort of assault on that decanter? Well, am I?

Actually, FG says he didn’t even make the college third eleven. Nor the fifteen. So I can’t see that there would be any reason for Jock to bring him into Vincent’s. Doesn’t even row. Yes, precisely. What would one talk about?

It was too. This big. Shut up, Ethel. It was. Enormous. You don’t think I saw it, Ethel Smith, but I did…

Yes, dear heart, je vous jure. Cyril and Harold sat up all night writing sestets or something
–
perhaps it was ottava rima – all about his profile. Yes I have – and I have to say I agree entirely. Delightful. Cyril is going to have him for tea. Mmmm? Oh very droll. And then there’s the matter of Harold’s new trousers. La-la says they look ridiculous but Harold swears they’ll be all the rage by Trinity. Had them run up by the little tailor on the Turl…

Sir? Sir?

Shut your eyes. Warm. Try to sink down further.

Sir?

Sunlight on yellow stone. Watery light filtering through glass. Green angles of a monkey-puzzle tree framed in the window.

‘Sir? Five and twenty minutes past seven, sir.’

‘Oh go away, Willis.’

Musty self-smell rising up from the covers. Faint metallic taste in the mouth. Red wine. Sitting upright will not be pleasant. Willis’s disapproval seeps underneath the blanket like a dribble of cold water.

‘Might I beg to remind that sir is giving a breakfast this morning? The other young gents will be arriving before long.’

Breakfast?

Hell.

Though it is early summer, Oxford mornings are damp and Mr Bridgeman’s tropical upbringing means that he feels the cold. Willis has lit a small fire in the study grate and his charge shuffles over to stand beside it, arms folded bad-temperedly over his dressing gown. The scout makes rattling noises with jugs and bowls of water, and gradually Mr Bridgeman is induced to shave and dress. By five to eight he is seated blearily at the head of a scarred round table that has been covered with a white linen cloth and arrayed with toast racks, teacups and a tall silver pot of coffee.

Ten minutes later the air is blue with pipe smoke and Willis is forking bacon, eggs, breaded lamb chops, sausage and grilled tomatoes on to the plates of a gaggle of young gentlemen, who are engaged in a heated debate about the comparative merits of Middleton and Marlowe as tragedians. These gentlemen are all dressed alike in grey flannel trousers, pale shirts, waistcoats and jackets of light Scottish tweed. Their legs are elegantly crossed. They suck intermittently on their heavy briar pipes, and use them to underscore important points of argument. A casual observer would have some difficulty telling them apart.

The expert, on the other hand, would note certain tell-tale features that distinguish this group’s niche in the ecology of the university. There is the predominance of suede shoes. There is the brightness of the ties, some of which are made of silk. There is also the unusual length of hair, which, in several cases approaches (scandalously, perilously) the collar. Such are the unmistakable marks of the Aesthete. These specimens are not fully fledged, being only first-year students, but later some of the more committed will come into their full plumage, sporting broad-brimmed hats, flowing trousers and jackets of unusual cut and provenance. Statistically at least one is likely to start wearing scent.

Most will, if they persist, have their rooms trashed and their flowing trousers forcibly removed by Athletes. The Athlete is the Aesthete’s natural predator. Aestheticism is seen by him as a kind of illness, sign of moral and mental degeneracy. Debagging and room-trashing is a reasonable response to such evidence of decline, a sort of social shot across the bows intended to warn the Aesthete to spend more time on the rugger pitch and less reading Huysmans. Of Bridgeman’s friends, only Levine has so far suffered this fate (sketchpad and provocatively yellow socks in Hall), although the crew of the first eight have indicated their willingness to do the same for any Barabbas man who goes too far down the artistic road. It is generally accepted that Extreme Aestheticism, which is to say anything involving black masses, Japanese textiles, pornographic engravings or the bits of Catullus left out of school editions, will inevitably lead to violence. This attitude is covertly encouraged by the senior common room.

Bridgeman knows all this, and is almost paranoid in his care not to lay himself open to trouser-removal. Though his shoes are suede, his hair is short and his silk tie is an acceptably discreet shade of burgundy. These friends, his Aesthete friends, are only one of several groups he cultivates, in a large but highly compartmentalized range of acquaintance. Today he is giving breakfast to Levine and the other committee members of the Barabbas College Players, who have cast him to play lago in their forthcoming
Othello
– opposite Levine himself, who in black-face will play the Moor. Tonight, however, he is due to dine at the Union and tomorrow with some Tory hacks at the Carlton Club. Yesterday he attended a demonstration of wireless telegraphy, and last week went along both to Monsieur Émile Coué’s lecture on autosuggestion and Captain McLaglan’s ju-jitsu class (as recommended by the Chief Constable of Oxfordshire) in the town hall.

Throughout all his varied activities Bridgeman’s watchword is convention. In a place where everyone is clamouring to be noticed, he is careful to clamour just enough to fit in, but no more. In this latest version of himself he has been sure to emphasize everything that is honest, true and English. He is seen to frown upon novelty, and to deplore the current decline in social standards. In literature he is a Georgian, and in politics a Tory. He speaks little of his family, but lets it be known that he comes of old Gloucestershire farming stock. He is, in every possible way, the average undergraduate.

Despite this some doors remain closed. Since birth, most of his peers have been entangled in a web of symbols and relations so dense and pervasive that they barely notice them. Bridgeman, on the other hand, knows nobody – and nobody knows him. This is unusual, even culpable. As the opposite of Being-known, which (at least in Gloucestershire) is recognized as a kind of a priori existential condition, Not-being-known implies deceit, distance and a troubled relationship between self and social world. There is always the possibility that such a state of Not-being-known is not necessarily accidental. County folk and their sons intuitively feel this state as a deep well of trouble, something obscure and potentially dangerous which exists before language, and instils in them a kind of primordial dread. So, on the whole, they prefer to avoid a chap that makes them feel that way. Thus the hunting set of the Bullingdon Club find Bridgeman shifty. He will never wear the pink tails of the Bollinger or the pale blue ones of the Satyricon. His lack of association, his appearance in the world of Oxford so startlingly devoid of connection or anchor, makes a lot of people think twice. Even those who share his colonial background, and understand about India and distance and loneliness, sometimes sense a hidden layer. Worse still, despite a painful summer trying to learn tennis (as well as French, the New Testament, pipe smoking and the names of English birds) Bridgeman arrived at Oxford no Athlete, and has done little about becoming one.

It is a serious omission. Though the university is commonly perceived as an institution dedicated to academic excellence, it is in fact a machine for the formation of character. The difference is subtle. Character is not cleverness. Sports are almost always more effective at forming it than books, and sportsmen (who can do such things as sit a horse, walk slowly towards a machine gun and show a firm hand with natives) have higher status than mere quoters of poetry or enumerators of factors of x. Crumpled behind Bridgeman’s sideboard is the current edition of the university magazine,
The Isis,
whose ‘Isis Idol’ is, as always, a sportsman. ‘After spending his formative years climbing trees and rousting poachers in the rolling hills of Shropshire, the irrepressible Gerald Fender-Greene, OUCC, OURFC, OUBC… came up from the academic hothouse of Chopham Hall school… known to all simply as FG… His stylish turn-out… prowess instantly recognized… plucky innings’ etc., etc. This is character writ large. The same issue has a short report of the previous week’s Union debate on the motion: This House Believes Americans are Human, which records (passim) the first contribution of J.P. Bridgeman (Barab.) who,’in responding to Mr Barker’s mention of the importance of the League of Nations, treated the House to a long and somewhat otiose statement of the White Man’s mission to “farm the world”. He should avoid appearing hysterical in the future, and should take care to remain relevant.’

Yes, there is something shrill about Jonathan Bridgeman. Something strained. At the Union, his mouth dry, his fingers unconsciously fluttering around his tight collar, he stood up and began to speak about America, a speech which soon became about the West and then slid into the clash of colour and the tide of racial movement on the shores of humanity and whiteness whiteness whiteness until he realized what he was doing and sat down. Sometimes it just comes out, the guilt. He has to watch for it.

The conversation round his breakfast table slips from drama to the proctor’s proposal to ban gramophones on the river, then to the perennial ‘Turkish or Virginian?’ and the latest rag perpetrated on the undergraduettes, something to do with tying a pig to the back gate of one of the women’s colleges. Bridgeman, the host, is included, valued, a part of all these concerns. Yet when the breakfasters drift off, he sits looking at the wreckage of smeared plates and empty cups with a hollow, expressionless face. In the brief minutes before Willis comes in and starts clearing up there is a blankness, a suggestion that Bridgeman, like a forest tree, exists only when being observed. Behind his face, beneath it, there might be something else, but it is inaccessible.

It only lasts a moment.

The figure who appears in the front quad is jaunty and unconcerned. His hands dug deep in his pockets, pipe raffishly slung out of the left-hand corner of his mouth, he saunters over to the Porter’s Lodge and leafs through his mail. Nothing important. A reminder of an unpaid battels bill, a notice advertising the formation of a mountaineering society. The only interesting item is a note from the Duce of the Oxford Fascisti, who heard the Union speech and would like to invite the orator to tea. The orator is flattered, and, as he walks down Broad Street on his way to a lecture, he tries to work out whether Fascism is conventional. Some evenings one can see the Oxford group on their way to meetings, showing off their sleek black uniforms. Levine says it is all a conspiracy against laundry. One could make the same collar last for days.

‘Look where you’re bloody going!’

He has barged into a haggard young man limping out of Trinity, leaning on a walking stick. He mutters an apology and hastens on. Ghost. Oxford has a lot of these characters, the ones who fought the war and came back again. They tend to live as far away from the town centre as the rules allow, and have little to do with the other students, forming a sort of parallel university, brooding and sombre. The two planes intersect, occupy the same space without ever quite touching. Rags and jazz and cocktails. Mud and decayed flesh. Incommensurable.

‘Beaver!’

The ghost is dispelled. A fat man with a bushy beard looks round, annoyed. Ragged gowns disappear round the corner, with a faint sound of undergraduate laughter.

He crosses St Giles, smiling. Then, all of a sudden, something rare and significant happens. Like one of those minor celestial bodies whose trajectory requires slide rules and conversion tables to calculate, Jonathan, homeless particle, undergoes a collision. It is an event which changes everything, for ever.

It begins with a bell, and the sound of a chain in need of oil. Turning the corner outside the Ashmolean Museum is a bicycle, and on the bicycle is a girl. Bridgeman steps out of her way, and for a moment she looks him straight in the eye. Blue eyes. His world turns syrupy and slow-flowing. She is wearing a white summer dress, and over it an academic gown. On her head is a wide-brimmed straw hat, with yellow silk flowers around the crown. As she wobbles towards Cornmarket, he confirms that she is beautiful, and a string section materializes in his forebrain, drenching him in grand and stylized emotion. Beneath the hat her cheeks are flushed with the effort of cycling, and as her feet work the pedals the white cotton of her dress stretches with the line of her thighs, taut and slack, taut and slack. Her face is like a doll’s face, fine and oval, the features painted on it with immense delicacy. A tress of fine blonde hair tumbles over one eye. Bridgeman stops walking, stares openly. She is Elgar and tea roses. She is rolling green fields with drystone boundary walls, she is willow trees, fruit cup, sunset over – the torrent of metaphor overwhelms him, and he finds himself sucking furiously on his pipe, quite brimming with the aestheticism of it all. The pattern, the type, the very essence of the English girl.