The Impressionist (47 page)

The thing that struck him was not Gofo, which he thought rather a waste of time, but the fact that the Fotse were aware of the waterborne transmission of disease. His subsequent
Magic and Medicine among the Fotse
was to become an early anthropological classic. By the time of his next trip he had become an academic legend, courted by his peers, flocked to by students, awarded the Pargetter Medal for Progress in the Study of Backward Peoples…

Thoughts of his glorious career, slightly embroidered, always coincide with the final paragraph of the Social Organization lecture, reminding the Professor that it is time to wind up. He finishes with his usual rhetorical flourish (rising tone, a few daringly southern European hand gestures) and receives polite but enthusiastic applause – what passes for rapture in an audience of anthropologists. Then, as usual, he is surrounded by eager questioning faces, and hugged by his daughter, who specially wants him to meet some young fellow of hers. The fellow in question is reasonably presentable, and at least does not appear to be a Jew or wearing rouge, like most of the highly unsuitable types Astarte trails round after her.

‘Daddy,’ she gushes. ‘This is Jonathan Bridgeman, and he’s terribly terribly interested in your work.’

‘I am?’ says the young fellow, who like most of Astarte’s young fellows, appears a little light-headed. ‘Yes, absolutely. I am.’

Chapel extends a hand, which receives a firm shake. Taken by a fit of bonhomie, he invites his daughter and her friend to lunch.

Jonathan cannot remember ever being so happy. Star and her father talk to each other, or rather
at
each other, following separate but oddly parallel trains of thought. The restaurant revolves around their conversation, the other tables describing slow arcs about its centre like minor satellites in an orrery. It is full of names: names of cities; names of people she has met and books he has read; a huge apparatus of name-conjuring and name-arranging which awes him with its scope and variety. So much done and visited and known. So much to pass across the table.

The waiter darts forward with rolls and cutlery, and is sent away again without breaking the flow. Jonathan feels he has stumbled into the inner sanctum of things, where the patterns are rational and serene and the inhabitants live far from their acted upon, blown-about neighbours. With the Chapels, everything is simple. A wine list is produced. A party is produced. When one wants to go to France a path opens up, equipped with a mechanical moving walkway.

Anthropology, he decides, is the very highest mark of civilization. Professor Chapel’s lecture, with its effortless comparisons between Fotse customs and those of the Trobriand Islanders, the Hopi Indians, the Inuit and the Karen hill tribes of Burma, represents the end of a long journey, a hard climb up to a giddy elevation from which it is finally possible to survey the world and the people in it. All the earth is available. Everything and everyone has a place. What could be better than to stand and look down over these valleys of the past? What better proof of your own place, of having reached the end of your own journey?

As he listens to the Chapels, he fits his body into their confident postures, tastes their ease plum-sweet in his mouth. He hears his English voice ask Star for some horseradish sauce, and with a sort of wonder watches her fingers close on the little bowl and lift it towards him.

Too soon it is over; the plates cleared, a litter of coffee cups and napkins. He says a formal goodbye to Star’s father, and a long, lingering one to Star, who kisses him on the cheek and promises to see him in a day or two. He walks back to Barabbas like a conquering prince and celebrates by making Levine drunk in the buttery. Some time in the evening they are asked to leave, on penalty of a fine.

In the morning he settles down with his hangover to wait for the next instalment of his new life. But Star does not call on him. She does not call the next day. She does not call for the rest of the week. Finally he walks over to her college, only to be told that Miss Chapel is no longer in residence. She has decided to discontinue her studies and start an interior design firm in London.

He is aghast. She has done it to him again. Interior design? She said nothing about it over lunch. Such an important decision, to leave university, to leave
him –
a complete change of life. Yet she said nothing. In vain he sifts through his memories of the restaurant for a mention of rugs or heated towel rails, anything which might have foreshadowed this news. She said a lot about smoking, which she had just given up, and about a kind of vibrating slimming belt which a friend wanted her to buy, but about interior design – nothing. He wonders whether the closeness he felt over lunch was an illusion.

He does not see Star again for almost five months. During this time his life feels empty. It follows its usual course, a cycle of lectures, drinking, Union meetings and dinners, but it is weightless, insubstantial. Then one afternoon, as casually as if it had indeed been a day or two, she turns up at his rooms, proffers a cheek for him to kiss, and asks if he is going to stand there all day or put his hat on and take her to tea.

He puts his hat on.

London obviously suits her. She is wearing an ensemble that looks more milled than tailored, all flat planes and acute angles, a piece of precision machinery in stiff grey fabric. Her face hovers bored and exquisite over its collar, wearing a characteristically London expression made entirely with the mouth. It is an expression attempted by most fashionable undergraduates (Jonathan included) but rarely executed as perfectly. He knows instantly that she has been moving in the best circles.

As he feared, the tearoom fails to meet her standards. Though it is the same one she took him to last year and is completely unaltered, it is now seen to be cluttered with vulgar and unnecessary decoration and crammed oppressively full of ‘the herd’. The herd is much in Star’s conversation, contrasted with ‘people’, a word standing only for those in her immediate set. People are always mentioned by their first names, especially if they are famous. Jonathan listens appreciatively, marking off David the up-and-coming playwright, John the witty young politician and Pamela the gorgeous musical theatre actress. He does not ask Star why she left Oxford. That much is obvious.

Abruptly she breaks the flow of names. With a peculiar fake casualness, she asks how he is getting on with Daddy. Jonathan wonders if she has paid more attention to his life than it appears, and the thought makes him happy. Deprived of her, he has done the next best thing and attached himself to Professor Chapel. He is a fixture at the Professor’s lectures, sitting at the front, asking lengthy questions, materializing afterwards in front of the lectern to check a spelling or query an item in a bibliography. Gradually he has been rewarded with a little conversation, the occasional hands-in-pockets walk along Parks Road.

He has also been spending much of his spare time in the Pitt-Rivers annexe of the university museum, a treasure-house of artefacts collected by previous anthropologists, archaeologists and explorers. Its mahogany cases are crammed with the detritus of world culture, a dizzying array of objects formed for every kind of social use. He has filled a notebook with a single long meandering list, itemizing
magic seed capsules, surgical instruments, Chinese gambling chips, Naga horned skulls, a bull roarer, a jade pendant, a helmet made from the skin of a porcupine fish by natives of the Gilbert Islands, a witch in a bottle from Gloucestershire, an Arapaho bone whistle, a set of steel Sikh chakras, Moroccan tiles, a Norwegian wolf-hunter’s spring gun, a seal club carved from the penis bone of a walrus, trade ornaments, weights, bangles, boomerangs, torques, quipos, bismars, bone dice, palm leaf cards, earrings, canoes, a Beninese war flag, an Ashanti stool, a caduceus, a penis gourd, snuff bottles, smudge feathers, teapots, censers, lace bobbins, chopsticks, spoons, fans, mats, masks, mandolins, zithers and axeheads, Azeri kilims, Persian gabbehs, Turkmen boxes, Daghestani samovars, Anatolian pots, Astrakhan hats, a Georgian cross, a Lao Buddha, a lingam, a rosary, thimbles, rings, musket balls and snowshoes, totem poles and astrolabes, a Maori war club and a Siberian shaman’s rattle.
To allow comparison, all these things are arranged with others of their kinds, the eye soaring high above the world it surveys, able to view waves of influence, family traits, trade routes and lines of descent. All the earth packed into a single room. All waiting for him to order it, and order himself within it.

‘Your father and I are getting on very well,’ he says to Star. ‘Anthropology is a fascinating subject.’

‘I’m glad. You should keep it up. It suits you.’

‘Thank you. What do you mean, suits me?’

‘Well, Daddy says you’re like him, very serious about races and origins and things.’

‘He does?’

‘Well, you are, aren’t you?’

Yes
, I suppose so. I don’t have to be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If – I mean, if you don’t like it.’

‘Of course I like it. Daddy brought me up to like it. Customs and so on – I adore them.’

Jonathan smiles with relief. Something in the exchange leads Star on to the topic of the Empire Exhibition, which is being put on in a part of London called Wembley. She is going to visit it at the weekend, with a poet friend of hers. The herd will be there, and he wants to observe them. Jonathan tries to disguise his jealousy of the poet by talking impressively about the morphology of culture, and the importance of primitive practices in understanding modern civilization. Star describes a flat in Mayfair which she has decorated like an East African game lodge, with bamboo and zebra hides. He describes the importance of heredity in forming national character, then wonders aloud if the Empire Exhibition might be a good opportunity to study the subject further. Which day is she going? She frowns and says she does not know. It is up to Selwyn, the poet. The flat belongs to his mother. That is how she met him. Wembley, she thinks, is an odd place to have something. She has never been there. Nor has anyone she knows. Again he mentions his interest in the Exhibition. Again she does not invite him, and he is reduced to outlining the debate over the evolution of cultural characteristics, whether independently originated or diffused from a single primary source. He has only defined a few initial terms when she remembers an appointment at the dressmaker, and gets up to leave. Seeing his downcast expression, she sighs.

‘Oh Jonathan, I do wish you wouldn’t be quite so boring. It spoils your prettiness.’

Outside she hails a cab and directs it to the station.

‘I’ll see you in a day or two,’ she says. He nods morosely, conceding his abject failure. Then, quickly, almost absent-mindedly, she kisses him on the mouth. Before he can say anything or even respond, she is gone. As the cab pulls away he does not know whether to be elated or crushed. She kissed him. That night he cannot sleep. Is he boring, or pretty, or both? Is it a problem? Should he change? On Saturday, still confused, he takes the early-morning train to Paddington, planning, by accident, to bump into her.

Wembley, when he finally reaches it, turns out to be a quiet suburb of low brick houses, strung out along the track of the Metropolitan Railway. A line of visitors trickles out of the station towards the new stadium, a sort of modern Roman arena ready for motorized chariot racing or machine-pistol gladiatorial contests. Around it has been laid out a fantasy land of poured concrete. Families drink tea at concrete refreshment kiosks and sit on concrete benches, while their dogs urinate against concrete lamp-posts arranged along the margins of a wide concrete walkway. The crowd seems cowed by the expanse of rough, featureless grey, uneasy at taking its leisure in such an alien space. Signs point the way to the Palace of Engineering, the Palaces of Arts and Industry and the HM Government Building, vast hangars which dominate the smaller pavilions, one for each colony of the Empire. Jonathan spends the morning wandering through the displays, stopping at roped-off enclosures to look at Chinese women making fans and Canadian Inuit pretending to gut a stuffed deer. Eventually he finds himself leaning over a fence looking at a group of Negroes in khaki shorts, sitting glumly round a fire in front of a conical hut. Their label reads:

Fotse Village
Fotseland
British West Africa

He looks uneasily at the squatting men, with their blank faces and government-issue shorts. These are the subjects of Professor Chapel’s study? He has always thought of the Fotse in a very vague way: as a collection of attributes, a set of practices and artefacts only dimly attached to real bodies. Like that they had seemed rather noble; keepers of the past, possessors of ancient wisdom. Yet here, in all its horror, is blackness. One of the men makes – surely against regulations – a sign at him, and the others look round. Their red eyeballs and dull sooty skin, their whispering mouths full of yellow-white teeth, every feature low and disgusting – he spins on his heel and marches off, glad of the tightness of the collar round his neck and the flash-flash of his polished shoes ahead of him on the pavement. He feels angry at Star for making him come here. Tribes and origins? It is like a bad joke. Why, to please her, should he have to spend so much time thinking about savages? It is like staring into the toilet bowl, looking at what he has expelled from himself.